Content warning: This article discusses suicide, infanticide, and the deaths of children. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts or emotional distress in the United States, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available by calling or texting 988.

How can a woman kill her children? Is this yet another sign of the degeneracy of our society? Perhaps surprisingly (unsurprisingly for those who already subscribe to The H Files), mothers have been viciously killing their children for thousands of years. They killed newborns by drowning, smothering, strangling, throwing them into rivers, or sealing them in jars until they died. And those were the “humane” ways prescribed by early Roman law.

The unfortunate truth is that some mothers kill their children. We all know this is true. But what I want to address here is what happens in society when they do. It seems that whenever a mother kills a child, another institution appears almost immediately to explain what happened. That institution has been a temple, church, court, or hospital. No matter what, there is an authority waiting to try to determine if the mother was monster or victim, a murderer or madwoman. Someone must determine whether the dead child was murdered, sacrificed, or abandoned, so that the mother can be placed into some category the surrounding society can tolerate.

We expect the woman who created a baby to hold it tight to her breast and protect it at all costs, vicious as a mother animal in the wild, and when she betrays that life, she betrays our most primary and original comfort: the comfort of knowing the nature of reality itself.

Mothers killing their children is ancient and enduring. What changes, however, is the explanation as to why. Whoever controls the explanation possesses an extraordinary power over our core understanding of the nature of reality. This is not hyperbole.

Before Psychiatrists, They Were Priests

The Carthaginians, descendants of Phoenician settlers on the coast of North Africa, sacrificed their children to the gods, according to what their enemies wrote. Diodorus Siculus describes a horrifying scene during the Carthaginian crisis of 310 BCE involving children and a bronze image of Kronos, and Plutarch writes with similar revulsion. There are Biblical texts that condemn the passing of children through fire to Molech and the burning of sons and daughters at Topheth in the Valley of Hinnom. The Hebrew “Ge Hinnom,” the Valley of Hinnom, eventually gave us the word Gehenna. Gehenna became associated with burning and divine punishment and was later translated in English Bibles as “hell.” One of the words that helped construct the Western imagination of hell is attached to a place remembered for the burning of children, as I wrote about in this H File below.

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At Carthage and other Punic sites, archaeologists have excavated areas called tophets and have found urns containing the cremated remains of young children along with some animals.

Why would human remains be interred with animals? Because every society that has embraced the death of infants made the decision as to when the life of a child became “fully human.”

In the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, unwanted newborns were left to die from exposure. In some cases, the unwanted child may be rescued, sold, or enslaved. The Roman legal tradition granted enormous authority to the paterfamilias, the male head of household, and the Twelve Tables, Rome’s earliest written law code (c. 450 BCE), decreed that a severely deformed newborn should be killed. While Roman attitudes toward exposure, paternal authority, and infant killing changed over time, the larger pattern of infanticide can be found across cultures.

Christianity complicated that arrangement. Early Christian writers were unusually hostile to infant exposure and frequently treated abandonment as morally equivalent to killing, precisely because everyone understood what often happened to exposed children. Imperial law changed more slowly. Constantine restricted paternal power, criminalized paternal killing, and issued measures intended to prevent destitute parents from killing or exposing children by providing assistance. Later emperors continued altering the legal status of exposed children, and exposure itself persisted long after the empire became Christian. The change took time, but an important change in thinking had shifted the argument.

Then history found other ways to redraw the line. In medieval and early modern Europe, direct infanticide was condemned, but desperate women still became pregnant with children they could not support, could not acknowledge, or could not safely keep, and so institutions appeared. One was the foundling wheel: a small revolving door or barrel built into the wall of a convent, hospital or charitable institution, where a mother could place her infant, turn the mechanism, ring a bell and disappear without revealing her identity. It sounds humane, and compared with exposure in a ditch or the deliberate killing of an unwanted newborn, it was. But these institutions were often crowded with fragile infants, and disease, malnutrition, and overcrowding could produce catastrophic mortality. Nobody needed to decree that the child should die. The institution just had to accept the child, and the death could then become mortality rather than killing.

By Victorian England another market had appeared: baby farming. Women accepted unwanted infants for payment, usually with the promise that the child would be raised or placed in another home. Some undoubtedly did exactly that. Others discovered that a one-time payment became more profitable if the infant did not survive very long. Amelia Dyer, one of the most notorious examples, was eventually convicted of murder after operating for years in this shadow economy. Again the vocabulary mattered. A mother had not necessarily killed her baby; she had paid someone to take it. The institution standing between mother and death performed a kind of moral laundering.

The anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes documented another version of this phenomenon in twentieth-century northeast Brazil. Under conditions of extreme poverty and staggering infant mortality, she described mothers becoming emotionally detached from infants perceived as unlikely to survive, while clinics sometimes supplied medications that quieted starving or dying babies. Scheper-Hughes was careful not to reduce these women to cruelty; the behavior existed within brutal economic conditions where families were making impossible calculations about survival. That distinction matters, but so does the pattern. Across radically different cultures, an intermediary appears between an intolerable reality and the language used to describe it. Temple, household, convent, foundling hospital, clinic: the cosmology changes, and the administrative function does not. There is always someone empowered to tell the community what category the child belongs in, what happened to it, and why the rest of us should understand the event in one way rather than another.

Which brings us to one of the most recognizable patterns in history, the moment the priest became the scientist.

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When I was not quite twenty, I embarked on a cross-country journey to find answers to spiritual questions. I visited a diverse range of holy places and met hundreds of people from different faiths. I had many adventures, so many that I could write a whole book on just my spiritual quest, but there is one little story in particular that has stayed with me: my eyewitness account of a modern-day exorcism in rural America.

The events I am about to describe took place in a very small town in the Carolinas. As I did when this account first appeared in my book, Evil Archaeology, I have altered certain identifying details to protect the privacy of the people involved.

In a place where the population was less than three hundred people, I noticed there were a lot of churches. One evening, an acquaintance that I had made while passing through invited me to attend a church service at a small Christian church on the outskirts of town.

The road to the church was literally dirt. Had it not been for the intense humidity of that southern summer night, the upheaval of the dust would have been like a smokescreen. Instead, it was like mud.

We approached the church, but this church looked more like a residential house that had been retrofitted with a wheelchair ramp and a few stained-glass windows. There was no parking lot, so we pulled into a grassy field on the side of the building. My friend shut off the car and sat quietly.

The awkward silence grew increasingly uncomfortable. Maybe I was just getting a little spooked because there were no lights in this field. I asked my friend how many people were expected tonight. She said, “the usual,” only adding to the awkwardness.

A light came on in the front of the building, and it was a beacon to everyone else who had apparently been waiting in their vehicles. We all got out and traversed the muddy field together, leading up to the side door of the church, where we were met by a smiling preacher.

At the beginning of the evening, things seemed familiar enough. This was a Bible-based church whose members came from all over the rural area to worship together many times a week. The preacher spoke of Jesus’s miracles, and the congregation sang hymns that I recognized from other Christian denominations.

But it wasn’t long before things became quite unfamiliar.

About an hour into the gathering, the preacher became so exuberant that he leapt up onto the pews and began sprinting from one to the other. As he did this, some churchgoers started shaking, while others started uttering strange words.

After the preacher’s unexpected outburst, he took his place up at the pulpit, lowered his head, and lifted his hands in prayer.

My eyes were focused on the preacher, still processing what I had just witnessed, when seemingly out of nowhere, a woman in a hospital bed appeared. She had been wheeled through a door across from the pulpit and left at the front of the church.

From this point, things took an even stranger turn.

The preacher stayed motionless at the pulpit while congregation members, including children as young as five, rolled on the floor speaking in tongues. The woman in the hospital bed looked as if she were asleep. She looked weak and haggard, not elderly, but rather in her late forties or early fifties.

One by one, members of the group gathered around the bed.

My friend and guide for the evening looked over at me and, after having little to say until now, asked if I had anything to confess because they were about to do an exorcism.

I was completely taken aback.

To me, a former Catholic, an exorcism meant priests, crucifixes, heads spinning, and green projectile vomit. I was not sure why a confession would be in order at a time like this, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, so I declined.

Skeptical, albeit intrigued, I went up to get a closer look at what was happening, as I was one of only three people left sitting in the pews. Everyone else was up front, surrounding the woman in the hospital bed.

The preacher put his hands over the woman and she spoke in tongues. She continued to moan and writhe, and from the same door where she was wheeled in came a procession of about four live goats.

Yes, goats.

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As the goats walked aimlessly through the church, the hospital bed shook violently. The woman in the hospital bed shrieked, her face so red that I feared she would have a stroke. Her vocalization oscillated between glass-shattering shrieks and guttural growls.

The only word that was intelligible was “Alu.”

The preacher asked, “Demon, is that your name?”

To which the woman responded only, “Alu! Alu!”

The exorcism continued for another hour. Gradually, people grew quieter, some of the children falling asleep on the church floor. The preacher never left the woman’s side.

Then, as if waking from a fever-ridden sleep, the woman sat up and put her arms around the preacher and embraced him. When she pulled away from him, there was a clarity in her eyes that had not been there previously.

The congregation members clapped and cheered, and all the while, goats still walked between pews.

The woman in the hospital bed got up and, with help from the others, walked into a meeting room adjacent to the main area where the exorcism had taken place. Everyone, including me, gathered in this meeting room where we were offered punch and cookies.

There was a plastic step-in bathtub used for baptisms, not very glamorous. The preacher escorted the exorcised woman over to the tub and baptized her. The “after party” continued for another hour or so, and the whole event took about four hours.

I look back at that night with only one regret.

I had attended this ritual a few years before I went back to college to study anthropology, the parent field of archaeology. Thus, I was not equipped to properly study this ritual with the tools of an ethnographer, only those of a curious girl.

As such, it was not until the car ride back to my hotel that I asked about the goats.

The explanation given was that each goat was there to be the literal scapegoat. My friend went on to explain that the goats would be slaughtered and sacrificed to get rid of the demon that possessed the woman, and that the meat would be used in the food pantry or given to poor church members.

As an animal lover and, at the time, vegetarian, my heart grew heavy. I would not be in attendance for that part of the process, thankfully.

I left the next morning to visit a Buddhist temple further south.

The Name I Heard That Night

Years later, as I studied different aspects of ancient demonology, I came across a familiar name: Alû.

Was this the same Alû that supposedly possessed the woman in the hospital bed?

Alû is not a grammatically complex word, so it was likely a common utterance, an easy combination of sounds. Nevertheless, there is an ancient Mesopotamian demon named Alû, described as having no limbs, no ears, and no face. He hovers over people at night as they sleep and binds their arms, legs, and tongue, causing sleep paralysis and, ultimately, possessing people.

I was younger, less experienced, and less educated, so I was left wondering if the woman had been bound to a hospital bed because of an ancient Mesopotamian demon, or was this all in her head?

Had this been a case of mass hysteria?

My journey of discovery left me with more questions than answers. It’s been two decades since I witnessed that exorcism. I have since come to understand some of the events that took place.

I can explain the biblical precedents. I can trace the ancient demonological traditions. I can examine possession through anthropology, psychology, history, and religious studies. What hit the hardest for me was that among the shrieking, punch and cookies, and wandering goats was that nobody there thought any of it was remarkable. That was an average Wednesday.

This was just one of many formative experiences I had as a young person that shaped who I am today and the questions I still explore.

If this is the sort of thing you like to read, consider subscribing to The H Files. I write about strange history, archaeology, ancient religion, forbidden ideas, and the things that don’t always fit comfortably into our understanding of the past.

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The H Files is a fully independent publication written by Dr. Heather Lynn.

Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The H Files podcast and the author of five books, including Baphomet Revealed and Evil Archaeology. Her forthcoming book is Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Be sure to visit thehfiles.com to access subscriber benefits.

Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn

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I asked it whether I was on the right path, what does any of this mean, and it answered in Arabic mathematics.

That is the short version. The long version is a twenty-five-minute recording made on a folding chair in a rented event space, wearing a piece of experimental equipment called The God Helmet.

Perhaps better known as a Koren Helmet, after Stanley Koren built the original at Laurentian University for the neuroscientist Michael Persinger, who ran experiments with it for three decades. The device has four coils, positioned over the temporal lobes. They emit a rotating magnetic field somewhere between ten nanotesla and seven microtesla. You sit in a quiet room and wait. Persinger reported that better than 80 percent of his subjects felt an unseen presence in the room with them.

I felt I might be a good candidate for this. I do not have “visions.” I have never had much luck with meditation, and I have spent thirteen years writing about people who claim experiences like this while keeping a careful professional distance from having any of my own.

I heard firsthand accounts from people in tears after the God Helmet allowed them to see their dead grandparents and in one case, even their dead dog. What I got was a geometric lion, an ice wall, a pierced veil to the “simulation,” a spiral of what looked like Arabic script resolving into numerals, and a possible connection to the visions of Catholic mystic, Padre Pio.

The transcript below is mostly unedited except for a redaction which covered the guide’s own medical history and personal testimony. He did not consent to have that published, so I omitted that part. Otherwise, everything else is exactly as it came off the recording, including the point roughly nine minutes in where I lose my composure entirely and sound like a sailor.

I have no working theory yet on what I experienced. I imagine it was an epiphenomenon of the brain, but I have a transcript and a set of images burned into my memory that I could not draw, so I worked with AI to generate the closest things I could to what I saw.

The real mystery is the script. What was the message I was meant to receive? If you recognize anything in the reconstructed images, please tell me what you see. I want to know what the symbols are and what they mean.

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Session Transcript

00:18

GUIDE: Still seeing the flashing?

HEATHER: Yeah, but it changed. It moved onto my left side instead of the middle. It’s very bright. Extraordinarily bright.

GUIDE: In your mind I want you to look around. All of what you see. Are you floating, are you standing?

HEATHER: Whoa. Through the whole experience it’s like I’m going through someone’s iris, or fiber optic. But now it just switched back to that middle light and it’s just floating.

01:03

GUIDE: In your mind, I want you to picture an eye. Just an eye.

01:20

GUIDE: Do you see it?

HEATHER: Yeah.

GUIDE: I want you to ask that eye first if it can show you what you want to see. You can tell it to blink once for yes and twice for no.

01:58

GUIDE: How far away is it?

HEATHER: It’s moving now. It’s back on my left side, over here.

GUIDE: If you can reach out, I want you to reach out and grab that eye and put it in the...

02:13

GUIDE: It’s your third eye.

HEATHER: Yeah, it strangely works [when I move it].

GUIDE: Now put the intent to see what you want to see. Focus hard, and say that sentence of what you want to see over and over in your head.

03:07

HEATHER: It’s like...

03:22

HEATHER: Very strange.

03:40

HEATHER: It’s very weird.

GUIDE: Mirrors?

HEATHER: Weird. It sounds like snow on a television, but very fine grain, and it sounds really weird.

GUIDE: Is there a dial on the television, a channel switcher or anything?

HEATHER: No, there’s no actual image. It’s just, it looks like I’m in the...

04:03

HEATHER: Wait.

04:07

HEATHER: I don’t know. To me...

04:16

HEATHER: Can’t tell if it’s...

04:27

HEATHER: There’s symbols.

GUIDE: Ask them to write it in English.

HEATHER: There’s writing everywhere.

GUIDE: This is the first time we’ve actually seen anything at all that was...

05:22

GUIDE: We’re a little bit over. Do you want to keep going, or do you feel like...

HEATHER: If I could, just for a moment.

GUIDE: Sure, sure. We can do two.

05:43

GUIDE: Through your mind’s eye, ask it the question that your heart wants to ask.

06:28

GUIDE: Put that intent that it can come and answer you in your dreams anytime.

06:55

HEATHER: There’s an equation.

07:00

GUIDE: Can you describe the equation?

07:11

HEATHER: If I had something I could write with, but I don’t. Hold on. Wait.

07:24

HEATHER: I don’t know why, but it’s just math.

07:42

GUIDE: Is it moving or static?

HEATHER: It’s moving, and now it’s...

07:49

GUIDE: If it stops, I want you to take a picture in your mind.

07:57

HEATHER: Okay, so. Okay. My gosh, hold on, wait!!! Like what? I don’t even know what to... Am I having a stroke?

GUIDE: Well, you’re talking, so...

HEATHER: Right, right, exactly. So I’m probably not. Okay, okay, okay.

08:26

HEATHER: Is this known to create emotional...?

GUIDE: Absolutely. But again, it’s both sides. We’re at twenty minutes.

HEATHER: There was something that broke through. It was like a veil.

08:55

HEATHER: But it was math. It’s math!

GUIDE: What is the universal language?

HEATHER: Yes, but it...

09:09

HEATHER: It is. It is! It’s fucking answering me. I’m going bonkers. I’m officially batshit crazy. Oh my god. What the fuck? Oh my god…

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In December of 2023, at a Dollar Tree in Houston, a woman was shopping for cheap Christmas decorations when a man stepped in close behind her and ejaculated on her without her knowledge or her consent. She left. Hours later, on the advice of a relative in law enforcement, she retrieved the soiled leggings from her trash, carried them back to the store, and reported what happened. A clerk heard her out and, not realizing she understood Spanish, called across to a coworker in the back: Tenemos otra. We’ve got another one. Not “call the police.” Not “are you hurt.” Another one.

What did she mean by “another one?” To understand, you need two internet slang terms: gooning and sharking.

Gooning is prolonged masturbation built around the practice of edging. This is when arousal is held to near climax, sometimes even for hours, until the practitioner enters a trance-like state. The goal is not to climax but to sustain the state the plateau produces. Sharking, on the other hand (no pun intended), is also called tagging.Gooning has a history older than the internet, and in some ways these men are performing occult rituals perhaps without knowing it. This is when the act of gooning becomes criminal. This is when a man masturbates near an unsuspecting woman or ejaculates on her, often while he records the assault for an online audience of fellow “incels.”

Gooning has a history older than the internet, and in some ways these men are performing occult rituals perhaps without knowing it. Most occult traditions use prolonged arousal and the withholding of climax to produce altered states. They then direct that state toward their intent, vision, discipline, or will. Gooning is then the profaning of this ritual as it runs in a closed loop that serves no end beyond the means.

This week's free H File is very much what tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power looks like. If this sort of analysis interests you, subscribe for more.

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From an Insider

Writing in MEL Magazine in 2020, Michael Stahl let them speak for themselves. A moderator of several of the practice’s subreddits, who goes by Christfister, called gooning “a sort of modernized version of tantric sex/masturbation without the spiritual aspects.” He is not being flip. He described reaching the brink of climax and trying to remain in that state for hours, claiming in some cases to have lasted fourteen hours.

Daniel Kolitz, in his 2025 Harper's article, described the so-called “goonstate” as a zone of “total ego death or bliss.” Some practitioners compare it to advanced meditation, which quiets the mind through attention and stillness. There is even a psychotherapy practice in Berlin that refers to the goonstate in a more clinical way, as an “emptying of the mind.” However, gooning appears to produce this quieted state through compulsion, repetition, and exhaustion.

The Occult Practice

Did these incels stumble into an occult practice? The methods they are using have been documented for well over a century, just under different names. For example, in 1896, Alice Bunker Stockham published Karezza, a manual on prolonged sexual union in which orgasm is intentionally withheld and the resulting state, not the release, is reframed as the spiritual goal. In Taoist and tantric practice, climax is conserved and the held sexual charge is recirculated as energy in the body rather than spent on the release. The point here is this, the holding back of the climax amplifies the charge and the resulting energy can be redirected internally or externally.

The word energy comes from the ancient Greek energeia, meaning activity, operation, or something being put into effect. The term is related to ergon, meaning work.

In modern contexts, energy appears in many different forms and is understood as the force or capacity behind action and transformation. In psychology, energy can be an inner drive, motivation, or the capacity to bring about change. In physics, energy has a more precise meaning. It refers to the capacity to perform work or produce change. Even apparently solid matter is composed of particles and fields in constant activity.

Within an esoteric understanding, everything is therefore seen as energy: connected, flowing, and continually influencing everything around it. If we begin with the assumption that everything is energy, then magic can be understood as the art of directing and transforming that energy in order to achieve a particular result or unlock a particular potential.

But what does that really mean?

You have an expectancy bias, meaning your subconscious holds on to established patterns you learned throughout your life that still shape how you think of the world. Everything you see, hear, and experience passes through this biased filter first before it decides what gets your attention. This puts necessary limitations on our perspective so we can simply navigate our lives.

In this sense, magic can serve as a tool for overcoming these limitations and building a bridge between the conscious and subconscious mind. By breaking down mental barriers, you allow energy to flow more freely and create more room to act authentically.

This is similar to sigil magick. A sigil is a visual representation of an intention. The intention could be a desire, goal, or aspiration. The roots of sigil magick may stretch back to prehistory, for instance, some believe that storytelling was not the only reason our ancestors painted on cave walls but that these paintings may also have been used in an attempt to bring about positive changes in the future. Images of successful hunts, for example, may have functioned as symbolic lucky charms. In anthropology, this is referred to as sympathetic magic or analogical magic. By representing a desired outcome before it happened, our ancestors may have hoped to influence the future in their favor.

Alchemists embraced a similar idea through the principle:

“As above, so below; as within, so without.”

This principle existed long before modern neuroscience, but it expresses the idea that our internal state and external reality are connected. What happens within the individual affects how that person experiences and responds to the world outside.

Sigil magick also developed through systems in which the signs used in Western magic were collected, organized, and assigned particular meanings.

Through these systems, magical formulas or spells could be created using the elemental qualities associated with signs and numbers. The forms created within the microcosm were believed to influence the macrocosm, because the microcosm was understood to reflect the macrocosm.

There are two main types of sigils: mental and physical.

• Mental sigils are created, activated, and then burned, hidden, or forgotten so that they can operate within the subconscious without continued conscious interference.

• Physical sigils remain visible in the external world. Because of this, they are particularly suitable for brand design. They can be used digitally, printed, worn as jewelry, or carried as a talisman.

Whether intentional or not, this sort of sex magick is what we are seeing acted out by desperate men online. Sigil magick is similar in that it has three stages:

• Setting the intention

• Charging it (through intense orgasm and in some cases extreme pain)

• Releasing it (orgasm or sometimes blood letting in the case of extreme pain)

English artist and occultist, Austin Osman Spare, wrote The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy, in 1913 codified the sigil method as anyone practices it today. He had the sigil in front of him and stamped it into the mind at the moment of orgasm, then destroyed the drawing so his waking self would forget it and stop interfering with what he had set in motion. That forgetting is the release, and it is a discipline rather than an afterthought. A charge does no work while you are still holding on to it.

However, the phenomenon is not limited to men. I recently came across a young woman on TikTok who walks her followers through what she calls “the O method,” a type of intentional sex magick akin to sigil magick. In this case, though, it is framed more like manifestation or self-help. As she instructs, you have to start by setting your intention. It can be spiritual or even material, like money or a boyfriend. Then, you begin to masturbate while focusing on that desired intention. At climax, you “release it into the universe,” as she says, and then go on with your day as if you know it is already fulfilled.

This TikToker, as well as many others, calls the orgasm the most potent energy the body makes because it is the same force that creates life. Videos about the O method are running to millions of views, and many of them call it sex magick outright and trace it to tantra and to the ceremonial magicians of the nineteenth century. The supposed sacredness of this sort of practice has been reduced to a shopping list for things like bigger paychecks and Hermès bags. Gooning, then, can be seen as just a next step down the same ladder of incrementalism. Additionally, normalizing this occult practice, whether knowingly or not, is part of the Revelation of the Method.

Manufacturing Pleasure

In 1954, scientists James Olds and Peter Milner attached an electrode to a rat’s brain, and then ran a wire to a lever that the rat could press, which would send a signal to the pleasure center of the rat's brain. The rat kept pressing the lever, in some experiments thousands of times an hour. It would ignore food, water, sleep, and every other basic need until it collapsed. From these experiments, we learned the science of the brain's reward system, the septal region, “the pleasure center.”

Later, Kent Berridge’s research would show that the brain actually has two separate systems for desire and liking, showing that what happened with the rats and the lever had more to do with wanting than with enjoyment. Nearly two decades after Olds and Milner, at Tulane University, researcher Robert Heath ran a similar study, but this time on a person. He put electrodes in the brain of a young man and gave him a button that would give him a pleasure sensation. The result? He pressed it about 1,500 times in one three hour session. When Heath’s team took the button away, the man pleaded for more time with it.

Finally, in 1986, Russell Portenoy and his colleagues published an article in the journal Pain, about the case of a forty-eight-year-old woman who was given a thalamic electrode to treat her chronic pain. She found out the current produced an orgasmic sensation, so she began using it compulsively. She started stimulating herself to the point that she neglected her family, friends, and her own hygiene. She suffered cardiac episodes and neurological symptoms, as well as an open sore on the finger she used to press the button!

In all of these cases, the goon state was experienced even without pornography or fantasy. These were cases of digitally assisted gooning. What happens to an entire population when the environment itself becomes the electrode?

Welcome to Modernity

This Saturday, for paid subscribers, I’m going to discuss the mice in the Universe 25 experiments from Calhoun and analyze “behavioral sink.” What happens when a community is given access to unlimited food and safety, with nothing left to do? What happens once an animal’s purpose and any societal role worth having has been taken away?

We’ll look at what Calhoun called “the beautiful ones,” who withdrew from their societal roles and spent all of their time at the very top of the perches in their colony, grooming for no audience at all. We call it looksmaxxing and rejecting mating. They would go on to not breed or neglect their babies if they had them. At the same time, the male mice either withdrew completely, or engaged in extreme violence and in what Calhoun termed “pansexual behavior,” meanng they would have sex with anything including the neglected juveniles

The so-called utopia started coming apart at the seams and the population declined. Was Calhoun recording a warning against overpopulation as he was hired to do, or was this an accidental prediction? Perhaps it turned into a blueprint.

Perhaps we are now living in Universe 26.

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I will investigate that and more for paid subscribers.

To hear more on the occult connection to “gooning,” “temple sluts,” ritual cannibalism among the so-called “elites,” scapegoats, the quest for immortality, and so much more check out the latest episode of Tin Foil Hat podcast with the great Sam Tripoli. Special thanks to The Swarm!

The H Files is a fully independent publication written by Dr. Heather Lynn.

Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The H Files podcast and the author of five books, including Baphomet Revealed and Evil Archaeology. Her forthcoming book is Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Be sure to visit thehfiles.com to access subscriber benefits.

Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn

Bibliography and Suggested Reading

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. 1957. On transgression and the bond of the broken taboo.

Berridge, Kent C., and Terry E. Robinson. “What Is the Role of Dopamine in Reward: Hedonic Impact, Reward Learning, or Incentive Salience?” Brain Research Reviews 28, no. 3 (1998): 309-369. The wanting-versus-liking distinction.

Berridge, Kent C., and Terry E. Robinson. “Liking, Wanting, and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction.” American Psychologist 71, no. 8 (2016): 670-679.

Crowley, Aleister. Magick in Theory and Practice. 1929. The definition of magick, and the operative role of the sexual “elixir” in the higher degrees.

“The Disturbing Rise of ‘Gooner’ Assaults at Dollar Tree Stores: ‘They Find It Funny to Degrade Women.’” The Guardian, 20 July 2026. The Houston case, the terms “tagging” and “sharking,” the lawsuits, and the cryptocurrency, Pokémon card, and noise-band track.

“Gooning: Masturbation, Sex Trend or Trance State?” Praxis für Psychologie Berlin (praxis-psychologie-berlin.de), 2025. Clinical description of the state as an “emptying of the mind.”

Heath, Robert G. “Pleasure and Brain Activity in Man.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 154, no. 1 (1972): 3-18. The self-stimulation sessions of patient B-19.

Kolitz, Daniel. “The Goon Squad.” Harper’s Magazine, November 2025. The goonstate as ego death likened to meditation, and the Gooneral memorial for a man with no apparent connection to the subculture.

Olds, James, and Peter Milner. “Positive Reinforcement Produced by Electrical Stimulation of Septal Area and Other Regions of Rat Brain.” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 47, no. 6 (1954): 419-427. The founding self-stimulation finding.

Olds, James. “Pleasure Centers in the Brain.” Scientific American 195, no. 4 (1956): 105-116. Source for the extreme self-stimulation rates and the pressing to the exclusion of other drives; the 1954 paper establishes the effect, the higher figures come from this and later work.

Portenoy, Russell K., Jens O. Jarden, John J. Sidtis, Richard B. Lipton, Kathleen M. Foley, and David A. Rottenberg. “Compulsive Thalamic Self-Stimulation: A Case with Metabolic, Electrophysiologic and Behavioral Correlates.” Pain 27, no. 3 (1986): 277-290.

Spare, Austin Osman. The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy. 1913. The death posture.

Stahl, Michael. “The Psychedelic Science of ‘Gooning’ — Or Masturbating Into a Trance.” MEL Magazine, November 2020. The Christfister quotation and the fourteen-hour sessions.

Stockham, Alice Bunker. Karezza: Ethics of Marriage. 1896.

Wile, Douglas. Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics. 1992. For the Taoist and tantric retention disciplines.

“With the O Method, Some TikTokers Claim They Can Manifest Via Orgasm.” Bustle, 2025. On the O Method of orgasm-based manifestation, popularized on TikTok by Sara Perl (@hothighpriestess); much of the coverage traces the practice to tantra and nineteenth-century sex-magic literature.

On the ninth of February, 2021, in Chickasha, Oklahoma, Lawrence Paul Anderson let himself into a neighbor's house, killed her, and cut out her heart. He carried it across the street to his aunt and uncle's house, cooked it with potatoes, and tried to serve it to his family. He told investigators he wanted them to eat it to release the demons. Then he killed his uncle, killed the uncle's four-year-old granddaughter, and gouged out his aunt's eye. He pleaded guilty and will die in prison.

Eight months later, in a motel room outside Fort Worth, Jason Thornburg killed three people over seven days, one at a time, and dismembered them in the bathtub. He said each of them needed to be sacrificed. He ate part of the heart of a man named David Lueras. Then he burned the bodies in a dumpster. In December 2024 a Texas jury sentenced him to death, and as they read it out they sobbed.

Neither man was starving, so the victims were not eaten as food.

These murders were real, documented, and recent, however they did not become a national obsession. A different theory of who eats people did. Multiple times in the Epstein emails, there is strange number of references to “beef jerky.” Many have now speculated that the jerky in question might have been human. Others claim there is not enough evidence to support those claims. Nevertheless, the fact that so many people are waking up to the fact that the appetite in that Oklahoma kitchen is not a modern aberration. It is the oldest appetite there is and it has a five-thousand-year infrastructure.

The people who built that infrastructure did not think of themselves as monsters, though. They thought of themselves as priests, as physicians, and even as kings. This is the case today, as much as we want to believe such heinous acts are only committed occasionally and by just a handful of crazy people.

But why the heart exactly? Why do killers and priests and warriors and mourners and surgeons keep reaching for the same organ across thousands of years? Perhaps most importantly, who gets to decide which eating of a human body is a crime, which is a medicine, which is a sacrament, and which is a business?

Let’s start with the word on the coffin.

The Greek for a stone coffin is sarcophagus. It means flesh-eater. Sarx, flesh. Phagein, to eat. The ancients gave the burial box that name because they believed a certain limestone quarried at Assos consumed the body laid inside it, stripping it to nothing but the teeth within forty days. The most respectable object in a funeral, the thing we still lower our dead into, is named after the belief that the grave itself is hungry.

A warning before you go further. What follows includes the clinical details of two recent cannibal murders, a mortuary system in which the dead were carved up by sex and organ, the disease that ate the brains of the people who ate their dead, a federal case in which human heads were sold by memo, and the modern market that turns your neighbor’s body into a product with an invoice. It is graphic, it is sourced to peer-reviewed journals and federal court records. Reader discretion is advised.

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The Oldest Taboo in the World

First, before the anthropology, the belief, because the belief is the engine that drives the behavior.

Across cultures, human beings all seemed to arrive at the same conviction: that a body holds a power that can be taken into another body by eating it. The Aztecs located teyolia, the animating core of the person, in the heart, and cut hearts out at the top of the pyramid to return that vital force to the gods who kept the world alive. Warriors from the Amazon to the Pacific ate the heart or the liver of a brave

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In my interview with Danny Jones, while we were discussing the early days of archaeology, I mentioned almost in passing that Europeans spent centuries eating mummies. I did not mean to glide over it as though everyone already knew that was true. It is one of those facts I know so well I tend to say it fast, and Danny knew it too, so we kept moving. Call it the “Mummy’s Curse of Knowledge.”

Since the interview aired, the mummies are the thing people keep asking me about, so here is the full account.

Warning: This article discusses human remains, corpse medicine, and cannibalism.

Yes, Mumia.

“Mummy” reaches us from the Persian mūm, meaning wax, by way of the Arabic mūmiyā. Originally it had nothing to do with a preserved body. It named bitumen: natural mineral pitch, the black tarry asphalt that seeps out of certain mountains in Persia and pools in the ground. That substance had a long medical pedigree. Dioscorides and Pliny both treated bitumen and its cousin pissasphalt as serious drugs in the first century, and the great physicians of the Islamic world, Ibn Sina among them, catalogued mumia as a genuine pharmaceutical for wounds, fractures, internal bleeding, and poison. For a very long time, when a physician reached for mumia, he was reaching for a rock.

The trouble began when the prized black mineral met the Egyptian dead. Embalmed bodies came out of their wrappings dark, hard, and resinous, and later embalming practices did use bitumen-like materials, so observers made a reasonable and catastrophic inference. They assumed the blackened flesh was saturated with the same mumia that came out of the Persian mountains, or had somehow become it. The name of the mineral slid onto the corpse, and then onto the drug ground from the corpse. It was a category error with a body count. By the time anyone noticed, Europe was no longer importing a mineral. It was importing people.

The knowledge arrived through the usual channel: the twelfth-century translation movement, Gerard of Cremona and his colleagues carrying Arabic pharmacology into Latin. By the later Middle Ages, mumia was a standard apothecary item, ground to a fine powder and taken in wine or worked into a paste. It was prescribed as very nearly a cure-all. It stopped bleeding and treated bruises and contusions, which is why battlefield surgeons wanted it. It was given for internal hemorrhage, epilepsy, ulcers, poisoning, and the vague wasting conditions the period lumped together as consumption. If you could name an ailment, someone had prescribed dead flesh for it.

Now, the question is why. Why on earth would anyone want to ingest this?

One influential current in early modern medicine understood the body as animated by vital spirits, a living force distributed through its tissues. A body that died slowly of old age had spent that force down to nothing. A body that died suddenly and violently, before its allotted span, had not. Its vitality was trapped in the flesh, unspent and concentrated. To consume such a body was to take that unused life into your own.

If violent, premature death produced the most potent remedy, then the best mummy did not come from the peaceful ancient Egyptian dead at all. It came from young men who had died by force, and recently. It came from the executed. Therefore, if a body that died before its time held vitality it had not spent, then to eat it was to inherit what it had not lived.

Supply & Demand

Demand ran well ahead of supply. Genuine ancient mummies were finite, and the finite always becomes expensive. So a counterfeit industry grew up around the ports, Alexandria and Cairo in particular. Local merchants took fresh corpses, the executed, the enslaved, the plague dead, the anonymous poor, dried them out, stuffed and coated them with pitch and resin, baked them in ovens or left them in the sun, and sold them to European buyers as ancient mummy pulled from the tombs.

We know this in vivid detail because of one appalled Frenchman. Around 1564, a physician from Navarre named Guy de la Fontaine went looking for the source of the drug in Alexandria and talked his way into a dealer’s stock. The merchant showed him bodies he had assembled himself from whatever corpses had come to hand, and, according to the account, could not fathom why Europeans were so eager to eat this. The story survives because Ambroise Paré, one of the most important surgeons of the sixteenth century and a hard skeptic on this subject, put it into his own treatise against mummy. Paré thought the drug worthless and revolting. He noted that it made patients vomit, fouled their breath, and turned their stomachs, and he used de la Fontaine’s warehouse of forgeries as proof of the whole rotten business.

The trade was a chain. At the bottom, tomb robbers and corpse suppliers, the people who handled the raw material. In the middle, the port merchants, the brokers who dried and dressed the bodies and set the price. Above them, European importers, then apothecaries, then licensed physicians, and finally the paying customer at the top. Every rung took its margin. The body of a hanged man or a dead slave went in as raw material at the bottom and came out the other end as a luxury medicine dispensed by a credentialed professional.

The Cannibal Kings

This was not folk quackery practiced at the margins. It was elite medicine. It was royal medicine, and the phrase is not a flourish. The most powerful men in Europe were eating the powerless dead on the best professional advice available to them.

Francis I of France reportedly carried a small packet of mummy mixed with powdered rhubarb on his person at all times, the sixteenth-century equivalent of keeping aspirin in your coat, and dosed himself with it for whatever ailed him. In England the appetite reached the throne in an even more telling form. Charles II was a serious enthusiast of chemistry, with a laboratory of his own, and he paid a small fortune to the physician Jonathan Goddard for the recipe to a tincture that became known as the King’s Drops. Strip off the courtly name and the active ingredient was powdered human skull, steeped and distilled in spirits of wine. The king took it as a general restorative, and he was still being dosed with it on his deathbed while his physicians tried everything else in the cabinet.

The skull mattered as much as the method. The most potent skull, the physicians held, came from a man who had died by violence and had never been buried, because his vital spirits were still locked in the bone rather than dispersed into the grave. That requirement created its own quiet supply problem, and the supply, predictably, was found among the conquered. English apothecaries reportedly drew on skulls exported from Ireland, where war and famine had left the unburied dead in quantity. The skulls of the colonized Irish dead, shipped across the sea, ground to powder, and swallowed by the colonizer as medicine. The body of the powerless becomes the pharmacy of the powerful.

None of this was fringe. Francis Bacon noted mummy’s power to staunch blood. Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, listed it among his remedies. The institutions that credentialed physicians and printed the official pharmacopoeias put human flesh on the shelf and stamped it with their authority. This was the establishment medicine of its age, prescribed by the licensed to the wealthy, and genuine mummy was still turning up for sale in at least one European pharmaceutical catalogue into the early twentieth century. The practice was not hidden in shame. It was normalized, priced, and printed in the reference books.

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Side Dishes

The mummy in the apothecary jar was the imported, upscale end of a much larger domestic system that scholars now call corpse medicine.

The skull of a man who died violently was ground and taken for epilepsy and headache. Usnea, the greenish lichen that grew on the skulls of hanged men left unburied on the gibbet, was scraped off and prized precisely because of where it grew. Human fat, rendered from executed criminals, was sold by executioners under the frank commercial name of poor sinner’s fat and rubbed on aching joints. And there was blood. In parts of Germany, people with epilepsy gathered at the scaffold to drink the warm blood of the freshly executed, a practice documented well into the nineteenth century, which is to say long after the Enlightenment had supposedly closed the file on that kind of thing.

So the mummy was not an exotic outlier smuggled in from a foreign culture. It was the expensive imported flavor of a system that ran, at home, on the bodies of the condemned and the poor.

Eat the Rich? Think Again.

Much of my work examines what I call the broker class: the institutions, merchants, experts, so-called elites, and intermediaries who extract value from the vulnerable, convert it into a respectable commodity, and move it upward toward those with money and power. The mummy trade offers an unusually literal example.

The bodies that fed the machine were executed criminals, enslaved people, the plague dead, the unclaimed poor, and the plundered ancestors of a foreign civilization, dug out of their tombs by the literal ton. The people who consumed the product were kings, aristocrats, and anyone wealthy enough to afford a licensed physician’s prescription. Value was extracted from the bodies of the powerless, passed up through a chain of brokers, laundered into legitimacy by the medical institutions of the day, and finally swallowed by the powerful. The broker class does not only move grain and silver and debt. When the market allows, it will move you.

The irony is the moral center of all this. Europe was doing all of this during the very decades when its powers were justifying conquest in the Americas partly on the horror of cannibalism, describing the peoples of the New World as savages who ate human flesh and were therefore outside civilization and available for subjugation. Montaigne saw straight through it in 1580. In his essay “Of Cannibals,” he pointed out that his own countrymen did far worse things to the living than the peoples of Brazil did to the dead. The label did real political work. It sorted humanity into the civilized and the savage and marked one group as fair game. Meanwhile the civilized gentleman took his neighbor, dried and powdered, with a glass of wine, on doctor’s orders, and did not think of himself as a cannibal for a moment. The institution decided which eating of human beings counted as medicine and which counted as savagery. As institutions tend to do, it exempted itself.

The truth is that Indigenous peoples in many parts of the world have practiced cannibalism, and so have societies that called themselves civilized. This is not a pathology confined to one culture, one continent, or one stage of social development. It is a recurring possibility within human behavior itself, shaped by circumstances as different as warfare, ritual, famine, medicine, punishment, and belief. The indictment is not of one people, but of the human species. People in the past ate people, and people still eat people today.

When the eating finally slowed, the grinding did not stop. It simply changed departments.

Ground mummy became an artist’s pigment, a rich, transparent brown sold under the honest label of Mummy Brown and used by European painters from the seventeenth century into the twentieth. Human remains, worked into the varnish of respectable art and hung in respectable homes. When the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones learned what was actually in his tube of the stuff, he carried the paint out into his garden and buried it, giving it the funeral its source had been denied. The London colourmen Roberson kept producing the pigment into the 1960s and stopped, by one account, only because they had finally run out of mummies. A manager reportedly said they might still have an odd limb lying about, but not enough to grind another batch. In Roberson’s case, at least, the paint ran out before the conscience did.

People Still Want “The Juice”

The underlying impulse did not die quietly with the last tube of Mummy Brown.

In 2018, archaeologists in Alexandria excavated a two-thousand-year-old black granite sarcophagus at the construction site of an apartment complex. The tomb weighed around thirty tons and sat roughly five meters below the surface, next to an alabaster head that likely depicted the owner. The find made news everywhere. People were genuinely excited to learn who or what was inside the mysterious black box, and more than a few worried aloud that opening it might unleash a curse.

The moment of truth was a letdown. When the archaeologists lifted the lid, the smell alone made them ill. Inside were three skeletons sloshing in a stew of reddish-brown sewage water. The modern mind, though, has not traveled nearly as far from the sixteenth century as it likes to imagine. In the spirit of the Tide Pod Challenge, people online began demanding to drink the red liquid from the cursed dark sarcophagus.

A Change.org petition called on Egyptian authorities to let the public drink the “mummy juice,” and it sailed past its goal of twenty-five thousand signatures. It is still being signed today, its count past thirty-six thousand, almost eight years after the box was opened. One signer wrote, “This is the true next stage in the evolution of mankind, the world governments dare think they can take this nectar of life for themselves, Give. Us. The. Juice.” Another wrote, “Let us drink from the cursed waters of Set.”

Young Blood

Leave the sewage aside, because the same conviction is running right now with a valuation attached, and the people acting on it are the ones who own things. In 2023 the tech founder Bryan Johnson, who sold his payments company to PayPal for eight hundred million dollars, staged what he called the world’s first multigenerational plasma exchange.

A liter of his teenage son’s plasma went into his own veins, and his own went into his seventy-year-old father’s. The idea came from parabiosis studies in which the blood of young mice appears to rejuvenate old ones, which is to say the modern version arrives, as the sixteenth-century version did, dressed in the scientific language of its day. Johnson ran six exchanges, measured himself relentlessly, found no benefit, and stopped.

The belief did not stop with him. A California company called Ambrosia had been selling transfusions of young-donor plasma at eight thousand dollars a liter since 2017, until the FDA warned in 2019 that there was no proven benefit and real risk, and it closed. The customers were aging, wealthy, and hopeful that youth could be bought by the liter.

That is the belief. The structure sits one layer down, and here the resemblance is narrower, so it is worth being exact. Therapeutic plasma is real medicine. The immunoglobulins and clotting factors it becomes keep people alive, which mummy never did, and a paid donor is not a plundered corpse. What carries over from the mummy trade is not the quackery and not the grave-robbing. It is the direction of the flow. The United States pays for plasma in a way almost no other country allows, and it supplies roughly seventy percent of the world’s plasma. The collection centers cluster, disproportionately, in low-income neighborhoods, where people may sell their plasma as often as twice a week for a payment loaded onto a prepaid card. That material is fractionated and sold upward into a market worth billions. The people who supply the raw substance are the ones who need the small payment, and its value is captured a long way up the chain from the arm it came out of.

The petition and the young-blood market reproduce, between them, the two beliefs that powered four hundred years of corpse medicine. First, that some bodies carry a concentrated vital essence, a nectar of life, that another body can take into itself by consuming it, whether the source is an ancient corpse or a teenager’s vein. Second, easy to miss while everyone is busy laughing at the sewage, that a powerful establishment is already hoarding it. “The world governments dare think they can take this nectar of life for themselves.” That is not really a joke about brown water. That is the old logic of extracted vitality, wearing a meme, arriving complete with the suspicion that the broker class has cornered the supply before the rest of us got a turn. The plasma economy preserves something of that flow, with the magic removed and a license attached.

The Sacred Hunger

In the photograph above, Lady Gaga bends over a cake shaped like a naked human body at a dinner hosted by Marina Abramović. The image touches something much older than simple artistic expression or celebrity provocation: the recurring human idea that power, holiness, vitality, identity, or communion can be acquired through the consumption of flesh.

Eating mummies is only one expression of that idea. Human beings have consumed bodies in warfare, famine, funerary rites, medicine, punishment, religious sacrifice, and acts of incorporation meant to absorb the qualities of the dead. Christianity placed the command to eat the body and drink the blood of God at the center of its most sacred rite. Modern culture reproduces the image in art, horror, fashion, performance, conspiracy, and commerce, even when the flesh itself has been replaced by cake, bread, wine, metaphor, or laboratory tissue.

This is the beginning of a larger paid series on the sacred act of eating flesh. I will be examining communion and ritual consumption, the long history of cannibalism, the difference between survival cannibalism and ceremonial practice, the modern markets that place a price on human blood and tissue, and the diseases that can pass between human beings when the body of one becomes food for another. The deeper question running through all of it is not simply why people eat other people. It is why human beings repeatedly imagine consumption as a way of possessing life, power, holiness, memory, or the soul itself.

That question also connects directly to my earlier essay, Ba’al, Blood, and Bread: The Oldest Pattern in Religion, where I traced the sacrificial meal from the blood of bulls and lambs to the Christian body of God transformed into bread and wine. Sacrifice was never only about killing. It was about division, distribution, and eating: who receives the blood, who receives the flesh, and what kind of bond is created when gods and human beings share the same meal.

For paid subscribers, I am taking that argument further. We are going from the altar to the banquet table, from communion to cannibalism, and from sacred flesh to the modern human body market. Bring an appetite for the argument, if not for the subject.

See you Saturday!

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Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The H Files podcast and the author of five books, including Baphomet Revealed and Evil Archaeology. Her forthcoming book is Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Find her at thehfiles.com.

Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn

Bibliography and Suggested Reading

Bacon, Francis. Sylva Sylvarum: or, A Natural History in Ten Centuries. London, 1627.

“Blood Work: Why the U.S. Pays for Plasma.” Public Health Watch, 2026.

“Bryan Johnson Admits He Saw No Benefits After Injecting His Son’s Plasma.” Fortune, July 8, 2023.

Dannenfeldt, Karl H. “Egyptian Mumia: The Sixth Century Experience and Beyond.” Sixteenth Century Journal 16, no. 2 (1985).

Dawson, Warren R. “Mummy as a Drug.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 21 (1927).

El-Aref, Nevine. “Initial Analysis Shows Skeletons from Huge Egyptian Sarcophagus Are Two Men, One Woman.” Ahram Online, August 19, 2018.

Jarus, Owen. “That Massive Black Sarcophagus Was Opened. Here’s What’s Inside.” Live Science, July 19, 2018.

McCouat, Philip. “The Life and Death of Mummy Brown.” Journal of Art in Society. artinsociety.com.

McKendrick, Innes. “Let People Drink the Red Liquid from the Dark Sarcophagus.” Change.org petition, created July 19, 2018. https://www.change.org/p/let-people-drink-the-red-liquid-from-the-dark-sarcophagus (36,921 signatures as of July 14, 2026).

“Middle-Class Americans Are Selling Plasma to Keep Up with Rising Costs.” NBC News, February 12, 2026.

Miller, Sara G. “Don’t Drink the Mummy Juice.” Live Science, July 20, 2018.

Montaigne, Michel de. “Of Cannibals.” In Essais. 1580.

Noble, Louise. Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Paré, Ambroise. The Workes of that Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey. Translated by Thomas Johnson. London, 1634.

Sugg, Richard. Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. London: Routledge, 2011.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Statement cautioning consumers against young-donor plasma infusions promoted as unproven treatment. February 19, 2019.

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Part One of this H File investigation laid the first two strata under the Anunnaki story. The first was the nineteenth-century decipherment of cuneiform, a Protestant project built to vindicate the Bible with archaeological discoveries, which hardened into a racial contest over who invented civilization and gave Friedrich Delitzsch the platform for a scholarly campaign to cut Christianity loose from its Jewish roots, particularly the notion that Yahweh was God.

The second was the moment archaeology became statecraft, when Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence walked off the dig and into the intelligence service and helped draw the borders of modern Iraq. Running through both was the broker: whoever held the chokepoint between the buried past and the meaning made of it, the money that decided what came out of the ground and the translator who decided what it was allowed to say.This installment climbs to the third stratum, the one we are still living in: how the ancient gods acquired their spaceships, how President Truman's signature ended up on the recognition of Israel, and how the man who branded the Anunnaki connects to a publishing empire and, through it, to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.

The Collapse of Institutional Trust

This stratum opens in the most bloodless corner imaginable, the machinery of academic publishing, and it ends with Jeffrey Epstein and the Anunnaki. Stay with the journals, because the publisher who cornered them fathered the woman now in federal prison for her part in Epstein’s crimes, and the collapse of public trust that gatekeeping produced is the exact vacuum Zecharia Sitchin walked into.

When an institution people have trusted stops earning that trust, the vacuum does not stay empty, and it does not fill with better inquiry. It fills with whoever is quickest to work the opening. A contrarian selling a novel story is held to no standard of evidence by the mere fact of being contrarian. Just because the academic-industrial complex may be flawed does not mean that all alternative sources are trustworthy.

The control of knowledge does not end with the ancient past. It reaches into the present, into the machinery that decides what counts as legitimate scholarship in the first place. Peer review is widely treated as the thing that keeps published science honest. As the business of academic publishing has changed, so have the ways that check fails, and many people working inside it argue that it has become corrupted, consolidated, and ineffective at the task it was built for.

The concept of peer review can be traced back to the seventeenth century, when scientific societies like the Royal Society of London were established. It began as an informal process whereby editors sought advice from knowledgeable colleagues before deciding whether to publish a manuscript, and it grew more formalized in the twentieth century as academic disciplines expanded and the number of scholarly publications increased.1

The modern form of peer review, in which external experts evaluate manuscripts before publication, is a relatively recent development. Many groundbreaking scientific papers, including Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper on the structure of DNA, were published without formal peer review. The editor-driven model, whereby knowledgeable editors took responsibility for the quality of their journals, was the norm for much of the history of scientific publishing.2

The transformation of academic publishing in the twentieth century is inseparable from Robert Maxwell, a British media mogul whose influence extends far beyond the confines of academic journals.

Maxwell, born Jan Ludvik Hoch in 1923, built an empire through sheer ambition and ruthless business practice, and that empire would reshape academic publishing. He founded Pergamon Press in 1951, recognizing the growing importance of scientific research in the postwar era. He capitalized on the demand for specialized journals as scientific disciplines became more segmented and the volume of research grew exponentially. Under his leadership Pergamon expanded rapidly, acquiring existing journals and launching new ones at an unprecedented rate. This aggressive growth allowed Maxwell to dominate the landscape, and it had far-reaching consequences for the quality and integrity of peer review.3

Maxwell’s approach prioritized rapid expansion and profit over the traditional values of scholarly publishing. This began to erode the editor-driven model of quality control that had long governed the field. In its place Maxwell introduced a more standardized and externalized peer review process which, though capable of handling the growing volume of submissions, often sacrificed thorough editorial oversight. The emphasis on quantity over quality became a hallmark of the industry under his influence, producing a system that many argue prioritizes commercial interests over the advancement of knowledge.4

The legacy extends beyond Pergamon. In the decades following Maxwell’s innovations the industry has grown steadily more consolidated, with a handful of large corporations dominating the market. Giants such as Elsevier, which acquired Pergamon in 1991, along with Wiley and Springer, now control a significant share of academic journals across disciplines. This concentration of power has driven up subscription fees, creating barriers to access and slowing the global exchange of knowledge. The financial priorities of these publishers often conflict with the core mission of academic research, which is the advancement and dissemination of knowledge.5

The current system, shaped by this history of expansion and consolidation, faces numerous criticisms: a lack of transparency, bias and conflicts of interest, difficulty publishing innovative or controversial work, and peer review “rings,” among others. Consolidation aggravates all of it. With a few major players dominating the market, there is less room for innovation in review and a tendency toward homogenization across diverse fields. This one-size-fits-all approach fails to account for the unique needs and norms of different disciplines, and the emphasis on impact factors and citation metrics as proxies for quality can reward sensationalism over solid methodology and bias the record toward positive results.6

Maxwell's influence ran well beyond academic publishing. There was scandal, there was espionage, there was financial misconduct on a scale that only surfaced fully after he went off the deck of his yacht into the Atlantic in 1991. The speculation about his ties to powerful people has never settled, least of all around what his family did after his death.7

The Epstein Connection

A particularly dark strand of Maxwell’s legacy connects to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender. Ghislaine Maxwell, Robert Maxwell’s daughter, became one of Epstein’s closest associates. Deeply involved in her father’s business affairs before his death, she moved into a role that would become central to Epstein’s crimes. She has been accused of recruiting and grooming young girls for Epstein and helping to facilitate the trafficking network he operated.8

The connection is often read as a continuation of the father’s methods: manipulation, secrecy, exploitation. Robert Maxwell worked to control and profit from the flow of scientific information; his daughter and Epstein leveraged power and influence to control and exploit vulnerable people for their own ends. The same ruthlessness and disregard for ethical limits that marked Robert Maxwell’s business dealings appear mirrored in the activities of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The link between academic publishing and such crimes, while indirect, underscores the dangers of unchecked power and the ways influence can be turned to predatory ends. The legacy of Robert Maxwell is a cautionary tale about the concentration of power in any form, whether over scientific discourse or over human lives.9

Ancient-Astronaut Before Sitchin

That carries us into the third and final stratum, and to Zecharia Sitchin, the man most responsible for the Anunnaki-as-astronauts story and the figure a certain telling most wants to turn into a smoking gun. Before weighing the charges against him, two things have to be established: who he actually was, and where his ideas actually came from. Both cut against the conspiracy that has attached itself to his name.

Start with the ideas, because the single most important fact for honest framing is that Sitchin did not originate the ancient-astronaut genre. He entered an already-cresting commercial wave and gave it a Mesopotamian, pseudo-philological spine. The lineage that precedes him is well documented and reaches back more than a century before The 12th Planet.

The deep template was laid by Helena Blavatsky and Theosophy in the 1870s and 1880s, with its “root races,” its lost civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, and its superhuman teachers from elsewhere. This is the wellspring of the modern esoteric origin-myth, and it supplied the “Book of Dzyan” that von Daniken would later cite.10

Charles Fort carried the impulse forward in The Book of the Damned in 1919, a catalog of anomalies famous for the speculation that “we are property,” the notion that Earth has been visited or owned.11 In the 1920s and 1930s H. P. Lovecraft translated the same material into fiction, populating it with the “Old Ones,” ancient extraterrestrials who seeded and shaped life on Earth, most memorably in “The Call of Cthulhu” of 1928 and At the Mountains of Madness. His influence on the mood and imagery of the genre is enormous, reaching even people who never read a word of him.12

The strands were braided together in 1960 by Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels in Le Matin des magiciens, translated as The Morning of the Magicians, the countercultural source-text that fused Lovecraft, Theosophy, and the UFO movement into what has been called the entire case for ancient astronauts as we now know it.13 Robert Charroux organized and popularized that material in One Hundred Thousand Years of Man’s Unknown History in 1963, and the debt was concrete enough that von Daniken’s publisher was later forced to add Charroux to the bibliography to avert a plagiarism suit.14 Running parallel to all of it was Immanuel Velikovsky, whose Worlds in Collision of 1950 reinterpreted ancient texts as catastrophist records of real cosmic events, and who remains the academy’s standard comparison point for Sitchin’s method.15

The genre became a mass phenomenon with Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods? in 1968, a global blockbuster that sold more than seven million copies and formed the direct commercial context for The 12th Planet eight years later. Von Daniken, a Swiss hotelier raised a strict Catholic, carried a fraud and embezzlement record and admitted in a 1974 Playboy interview to having contrived some of his evidence. His thesis already included the artificial genetic uplift of humanity by aliens, the very move Sitchin would go on to Mesopotamianize.16 The last marker sits in the same year as Sitchin himself: Robert K. G. Temple’s The Sirius Mystery of 1976, the Dogon-and-Sirius version of the same contact idea.17

Sitchin and Truman

Sitchin was born in 1920, in or near Baku, and raised in Mandatory Palestine, fluent in Hebrew and steeped in the Old Testament and Near Eastern history from boyhood. He took a degree in economics in London, worked as a journalist and then in commerce, served in the British Army in the early 1940s and afterward briefly in the Israeli army around the state’s founding in 1948 and 1949, and moved to New York in 1952, where he spent decades as a businessman before publishing a word about the Anunnaki. The 12th Planet did not arrive until 1976, with a quarter century of New York commerce sitting between the soldier and the author.18 He was, in other words, a Zionist activist and a shipping executive who taught himself cuneiform on the side.19

His activism was more than signs and slogans. He made an actual impact on the solidifying the state of Israel in the documented historical record, with the help of President Harry S. Truman.

The United States recognized Israel within hours of its founding, and yet there was nothing official. On May 14, 1948, the White House released a short statement to the press, typed on plain paper and unsigned, announcing that the government recognized the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel. The Truman Library in Independence holds two versions of it: a draft carrying inked corrections that Truman approved, and a clean copy of the final text. Neither bears a signature. The signature arrived years later thanks to Zecharia Sitchin.

Sitchin was a committed Zionist activist, and there is no need to argue the point. He sat as a founding director of the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce and Industry and chaired the American-Israel Pavilion at the 1964 and 1965 New York World’s Fair. In that second role he noticed a gap in the record that troubled him. The only American instrument recognizing the State of Israel was the press statement of May 14, 1948, which had gone out to reporters typed on plain paper and unsigned, and a later search for an official document of recognition turned up nothing at all.20

He went to see the former president at his library in Independence and asked him to close the gap. On Truman’s instruction a photostat was made of the clean final statement, which Truman signed in Sitchin’s presence and dated January 27, 1965. Sitchin kept it. It stayed with the family for half a century before a Philadelphia dealer offered it for sale at an estimated three hundred thousand dollars.21

That single sheet became the object the governments of Israel and the United States would exhibit as the recognition of Israel. It hung in the American-Israel Pavilion at the World’s Fair. In 1986 it appeared at Federal Hall in New York in the “Documents of Liberty” exhibition mounted for the Statue of Liberty centennial, in the company of the Magna Carta and the first French constitution of 1791. The Israeli Embassy in Washington made it the featured document at the fortieth anniversary of Israeli independence in 1988, and the Zionist Organization of America displayed it the same year. It remained with the Sitchin family for roughly half a century and reached the market only when his descendants sold it, the sole signed version of the document by which America recognized the state.22

What the Books Actually Say

What Sitchin did with Truman’s signature was unapologetic Zionist activism. What he did in his books was something stranger, and it does the conspiracy no favors at all, because his actual claims are wild and wholly his own. Beginning with that 1976 book and unfolding across seven volumes, Sitchin argued that the Anunnaki were a technologically advanced alien race from a planet called Nibiru on a 3,600-year orbit, that they came to Earth roughly 450,000 years ago to mine gold, and that they engineered human beings as a slave species by splicing their own genes into a hominid. He folded the Anunnaki into the Nephilim of Genesis and read human kingship as an office set up to mediate between people and these sky-gods, his personal gloss on the divine right of kings.23

The academy rejected the whole edifice, and the rejection is technical rather than political. The Hebrew and Semitics scholar Michael Heiser showed that Sitchin’s signature translation, rendering “Anunnaki” as “those who from heaven to earth came,” simply is not what the Sumerian says; the word lands closer to “princely offspring,” earth-dwelling gods with no whisper of space travel in the name.24 Peter James pointed out that Sitchin assigned invented planetary identities to gods whose planetary associations were already locked in across hundreds of astronomical tablets, so the system collides with the very texts it claims to unlock.25

I will not litigate translations further here, nor argue the merits of paleocontact, evolution, or the host of debates that can be had. As I discussed in the earlier piece linked below, this is a level of analysis that asks us to set aside our pet theories and beliefs so we can see the deeper problem of narrative control.

That deeper problem is that Sitchin’s work can be and has been read as Israeli nationalist propaganda, and it is only honest to say it out loud. His system naturalizes every god of the ancient world into a flesh-and-blood colonist. The one exemption he ever carved is the telling one: at the close of Divine Encounters he runs Yahweh against the entire Anunnaki roster, rejects every match, and leaves the God of Israel outside the system altogether, universal and unreduced. Read as propaganda, it sends every tradition’s gods into the dirt except the one the author was raised in.26

A Train Already in Motion

The last thing to remember about the Anunnaki narrative is that Sitchin did not raise it from nothing, and this is the fact that finally cuts the third clock loose from the first two. He climbed onto a train already moving. The ancient-astronaut idea was a proven commercial genre by 1976, with the pedigree traced above, from Theosophy and Fort and Lovecraft through The Morning of the Magicians and Charroux to von Daniken’s millions of copies. Sitchin’s contribution was to dress that old genre in Mesopotamian costume and a coat of counterfeit philology. He supplied the cuneiform flavor. He did not supply the recipe.

The clearest sign that the genre carried itself, with or without him, sits in the calendar. Velikovsky had already trained a mass readership to treat ancient texts as coded records of real cosmic events, the very turn of mind the academy still names as the nearest cousin to Sitchin’s method. And in 1976 itself, the same season The 12th Planet reached the shelves, Robert Temple published The Sirius Mystery, a wholly separate case for ancient contact built on the star-knowledge of the Dogon rather than the clay of Sumer. Two men who shared nothing reached for the same notion in the same year, which is what it looks like when an idea is loose in the culture and not the property of any single author.27

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History is written by the victors, but if you understand the psychology of magic or the magic of psychology, you can write your victory into existence before the battle starts. You corrupt the texts. You plant a history that lays the foundation for a victory you authored years earlier and labeled “prophecy.” By the time the fighting begins, the outcome has already been narrated.

I know how this works because I watched a version of it from behind the curtain. Those who found me through my books on the Anunnaki, or through History’s Ancient Aliens, may read this as my most controversial piece yet, perhaps even a betrayal. Maybe it is, and it is precisely that vantage point that makes me feel I have to say what most people in this space will not.

We are living inside a corrupted historical framework built to serve a political and religious agenda you likely never signed on to.

None of what follows depends on your team. It does not matter whether you follow a religion or none, whether you think the Anunnaki are a loony grift, entertainment, or sacred myth. I am not here to challenge any of that. Not because beliefs should not be challenged, but because before we turn on each other, we ought to look up and check whether someone has put us in a ring and told us to fight.

Are these our battles, or battles in someone else’s war?

The following is the most in-depth H-File I’ve written, long enough that it comes in two parts. The argument, across both, is this: The Anunnaki story as popular culture depicts it, the version Zecharia Sitchin branded (but did not invent), is a twentieth-century construction resting on two older layers most of its consumers have never examined. The first is a nineteenth-century scholarly project built to vindicate the Bible with a spade and artifacts. The second is a wartime intelligence apparatus that turned that scholarship into statecraft and helped draw the borders of modern Iraq. Sitchin himself belongs to the third layer, and so does a curious errand of his involving President Harry Truman and the only signed copy of America’s recognition of Israel. That story is detailed in Part Two.

Most of the Israeli government press on Sitchin call him an “internationally acclaimed author and researcher” never clearly stating his involvement in creating Anunnaki lore. Instead, the focus is just how he and his wife were active in Jewish causes and organizations and he was a founding Director of the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and chairman of the American- Israel Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair held in 1964/65. His wife was President of the New York Chapter of Hadassah and a member of Hadassah’s National Board.

Sitchin was born in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, but was raised in The British Mandate for Palestine which was a League of Nations mandate administered by the United Kingdom from 1920 to 1948, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. Its stated purpose was to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home.

Below is the letter from the Raab Collection.

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The man who turned ancient gods into alien gold-miners also created and controlled the only signed copy of America’s recognition of Israel. That fact alone raises several questions:

1. Why did the author who gave the Anunnaki their rockets also secure Truman’s signature on the official recognition of Israel?

2. What connects a media mogul who dominated academic publishing, his daughter’s central role in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, and a 1976 book about ancient astronauts?

3. If Sitchin didn’t invent the ancient-astronaut story, who did — and why did it suddenly need a Mesopotamian costume in 1976?

4. How did the collapse of trust in universities and peer review create the perfect opening for a new origin story?

5. Why do so many versions of the Anunnaki narrative end up claiming that some people carry the blood of the gods while everyone else descends from slaves?

Important Note Before We Dig In

This piece examines a recurring pattern across seemingly unrelated cultural and ideological streams. It is not an attack on Jewish people as a whole. Many of them are not in favor of the Netanyahu Zionist administration. It does not claim Christians, Muslims, or any group of people are inherently bad. Nor is it a dismissal of ancient mysteries or genuine spiritual questions. Those who know my work know I have explored those topics with great interest and respect.

What this analysis demands is consistency. We are told to scrutinize supremacy and radicalization wherever they appear. Yet when those same patterns emerge from groups currently framed as victims, many suddenly lose their nerve. That selective blindness is hypocrisy.

Supremacy in all forms is condemned, but when radical Zionism advances its own version of ethnic and religious supremacy, complete with claims of divine right, genetic destiny, and the right to seize land, large parts of the culture go quiet. This double standard cannot stand if we actually believe the values we claim to hold.

The pattern becomes clearest when we see how different audiences are being reached through parallel delivery systems. Biblical believers are sold the narrative through the language of the “chosen people.” Classical liberals and neocons are appealed to with arguments about Israel’s right to exist and defend itself as a nation-state. Spiritual seekers and those curious about the unexplained are given the Zecharia Sitchin framework, in which Jerusalem must be preserved because it is the seat of the Anunnaki, divine rulers whose blood supposedly grants certain people the right to rule over the rest of humanity, viewed as little more than slaves or cattle.

Any large-scale deception across a population would need to reach people on multiple fronts. Those who believe in the Bible and the narrative of the chosen people can be appealed to through biblical reference points. People with no Abrahamic background, who value classical Enlightenment ideals of liberty, property rights, and self-defense, can be reached through arguments that Israel has a right to defend itself as a nation-state with no religion required. Likewise, those with little religious or civic anchor but who lean toward the mystical or imaginative are offered a ready-made Star Wars-style mythology to step into.

No matter how different the narratives, the people, or the ideologies appear on the surface, it is striking how conveniently they all converge on the same conclusion.

So when something as seemingly playful as “ancient astronaut theory” shows fingerprints of Zionism all over it, it is worth paying closer attention. When the originators of these narratives are elevated to guru status and their followers heavily funded until a once-fringe idea becomes mainstream, terms like Anunnaki enter the popular vocabulary almost exclusively tied to ancient astronaut theory. It is reasonable to ask why. Who benefits from us believing that a particular set of possibly Semitic gods intermingled with human leaders, granting them a divine right to rule over the rest of humanity?

What follows is the excavation beneath that signature. To understand how a twentieth-century businessman came to brand a race of alien gods and hand a president a pen, you have to start three generations earlier, with the men who first pulled Sumer out of the ground and decided what it meant. That is the ground floor, and it begins in Philadelphia.

Three Strata

Stand on the sidewalk in front of the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia, look up, and in the stone you will find a six-pointed star fixed to the face of a building raised to hold the spoils of Mesopotamian excavation. The museum’s first section opened in 1899, by which point the University’s expeditions to the Sumerian city of Nippur had for a decade been shipping home the tablets, statues, and broken gods of the ancient Near East. The building exists because of that dig. Provost William Pepper, physician and academic reformer, dreamed of creating a museum tracing “the development and history of humanity from antiquity to the present.” Pepper had promised the expedition’s backers a fireproof museum to house whatever came out of the ground.

In 1894 Pepper obtained land from the City of Philadelphia for a “Free Museum of Science and Art” (the “free” signaling no admission charge, partly to court city politicians; it charged no admission until 1987). The institution was informally “The University Museum” (official 1913), and reached its current name, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, after later renamings. Pepper died in 1898, age 54, in California while convalescing, in the company of Phoebe Hearst (mother of William Randolph Hearst, and later the funder of Berkeley’s anthropology museum). The first museum building was reconceived partly as his memorial.1

The stars on the buildings are more than ornamental. The Magen David is not, in origin, a Jewish sign at all. The hexagram is one of the oldest and most widely borrowed shapes in the human decorative vocabulary, and for most of Jewish history it was the menorah, not the six-pointed star, that stood for the community. The figure was first named the Shield of David in Kabbalistic writing in the fourteenth century, and it became a broad emblem of Judaism only in the nineteenth, in the very decades the bricklayers at Penn were setting it above the door. By 1899 the symbol had also taken on a political charge. Two years earlier, David Wolffsohn had presented the blue-and-white banner bearing the star at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, and that design would go on to become the flag of the State of Israel in 1948.2

What gets lumped together as Sumerology and subsequently the Anunnaki is not one history but three, laid down as separate strata. The first stratum is the decipherment of cuneiform and the birth of Assyriology as a readable science: a European project of the 1840s through the 1870s, Protestant in motive and imperial in reach. The second stratum is the British handling of Mesopotamia during and after the First World War, when scholarship, intelligence work, archaeology, and statecraft began to grow into one another, and a small circle of archaeologists, officials, and imperial advisers helped shape the borders that became Iraq. The third stratum is the popular tale of the Anunnaki as ancient astronauts: not an ancient Mesopotamian doctrine, but a modern pop-cultural construction that gathered force from the 1950s onward, and that Zecharia Sitchin entered, amplified, and branded far more than he originated.

The decipherment of cuneiform is half a century older than the border-drawing and three full generations older than the flying saucers. This is where the better story begins: biblical scholarship and empire, wartime intelligence and territorial management, and twentieth-century mythmaking in the age of rockets, saucers, and mass media.

Scripture in Stone

Cuneiform became legible through a handful of men in the middle of the nineteenth century. The first real break came from a German schoolteacher, Georg Friedrich Grotefend, who cracked Old Persian cuneiform around 1802, working from inscriptions that travelers like Carsten Niebuhr had copied by hand in the field. The rest of it swung open on a single three-language inscription cut high into the rock at Behistun in western Persia (modern-day Iran), the Rosetta Stone of the wedge-script.3

Edward Hincks was an Anglo-Irish Anglican clergyman, the rector of a parish in County Down, and one of the improbable architects of cuneiform decipherment. He was, in the most Victorian sense, a country parson with a formidable scholarly obsession. Working outside the formal machinery of the museum and university world, he helped reconstruct the logic of the Akkadian writing system and showed that the inscriptions were not antiquarian curiosities, but readable historical documents.

Part of what made his work so exciting to nineteenth-century readers was its biblical resonance. Names known from Scripture, including Jehu, Menahem, and Sennacherib, began to emerge from the cuneiform record, making the budding field of Assyriology appear to confirm the Bible. Yet Hincks also pushed beyond simple biblical validation. As early as 1849, he recognized that Akkadian could not have been the original language for which the script was devised, pointing instead toward an earlier, separate language behind the system, the language that would later be identified and called Sumerian.4

English soldier, diplomat, and orientalist, Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson is sometimes called the “Father of Assyriology.” He was an East India Company army officer whose enduring contribution was copying and publishing the Old Persian text of the Behistun inscription (work done in the 1830s–40s, at real physical risk on the cliff face). He was slower than Hincks to grasp the logo-syllabic nature of the script, clinging to the notion that it was partly alphabetic, and his later reputation was somewhat inflated at Hincks’s expense (notably in E. A. Wallis Budge’s 1925 history). He was an imperial-establishment figure to the core; his brother George wrote him an adoring biography that managed never to mention Hincks.5

As this small discipline was forming around the supposed discovery of texts that reinforced Christian biblical narratives, Jules (Julius) Oppert enters the scene. Born in Hamburg in 1825 into a Jewish family, he found the German academic posts of his day effectively shut to him as a Jew, which is much of why he built his career in France, where he eventually held a chair at the College de France. He is a genuine and important instance of Jewish participation at the founding of the field of Assyriology. In 1869 he gave the non-Semitic language behind Akkadian its name, Sumerian, reasoning from the royal title “King of Sumer and Akkad.”6

By the late 1850s the field still had to prove it was reading the script rather than guessing at it, and it did so in a way few decipherments before or since have dared. In 1857 the scholar William Henry Fox Talbot proposed a blind trial. Send a freshly dug cuneiform text, untranslated, to several experts working in isolation, seal their separate renderings, and see whether they agreed. The Royal Asiatic Society sent a new inscription of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I to Talbot, Hincks, Rawlinson, and Oppert, then sat a jury to weigh the four results against one another. The versions lined up closely enough, Hincks and Rawlinson nearest of all, that on the twenty-fifth of May the society pronounced the decipherment of cuneiform an accomplished fact. That afternoon is the moment Assyriology stopped being an inspired pastime and turned into a credentialed science.7

Then there is George Smith, a working-class self-taught engraver who taught himself cuneiform on his lunch breaks at the British Museum and became the great early translator. In December 1872, before the Society of Biblical Archaeology, he announced his discovery of a Babylonian flood account on a tablet from the Library of Ashurbanipal, the “Chaldean account of the Deluge.” The sensation was precisely that cuneiform appeared to corroborate Genesis; the announcement reportedly so excited the audience that Smith was funded to go find the missing fragments, which he did. He died young, at 36, on a collecting expedition near Nineveh in 1876.8

The foundations here were laid primarily by Anglican clergymen and British imperialists. Protestant hunger was the engine: the drive to vindicate Scripture by sinking a spade into the ground and pulling up the Bible’s own buried past. The men who built the early discipline understood themselves to be doing Christian apologetics with scientific tools. Archaeology has often been used as a scientific materialist mask over a metaphysical or ideological quest.

The Real Sumerian Problem

There was a genuine, decades-long scholarly fight called the “Sumerian Problem” (or sometimes the “Sumerian Question”): who invented the first writing system? The question’s core was racial in the nineteenth-century sense, where “race,” language, and culture were treated as one essence. Some scholars were eager to prove the “non-Semitic character” of so foundational an invention; others insisted the opposite.9

The real “Sumerian Problem” was who could claim the invention of the Sumerian language and all the subsequent “firsts” of civilization, as this would be evidence of racial superiority.

One side held that only Semites had lived in early Babylonia, and so Semites must have invented writing. The loudest voice on that side belonged to Joseph Halevy, an Ottoman-born Jewish-French scholar, an ardent Hebraist and an early Zionist of the pre-Herzl kind. From 1874 onward, Halevy argued, stubbornly and at exhausting length, that Sumerian was not a real language at all. It was, he insisted, an artificial priestly cipher invented by the Semitic Babylonians themselves, a sacred code with no separate people standing behind it.

The most prominent Jewish scholar in the founding racial debate spent decades trying to abolish the Sumerians, to deny them a distinct existence, so that the Semites could keep the crown as inventors of civilization’s first technology. The Encyclopaedia Judaica puts the motive bluntly: “Prompted by his ‘Semitic’ pride, Halevy argued obstinately against the view that Sumerian was a non-Semitic language.”10

The debate was so live that the German scholar Friedrich Delitzsch accepted Halevy’s “secret code” thesis for roughly a dozen years (c. 1885–1897) before renouncing it. The evidence pried him off it, which means the most important figure in German Assyriology once spent over a decade convinced the Sumerians had never existed as a people at all. Halevy’s position was ultimately buried by sheer epigraphic evidence: the excavation of Sumerian sites (Tello/Girsu by de Sarzec from 1877, Nippur by Penn from 1888) and the publication of Sumerian lexical and grammatical work (Paul Haupt’s Sumerian Family Laws, 1879; Thureau-Dangin’s editions from 1898; Fossey’s dictionary, 1905–07) made a separate spoken Sumerian impossible to argue away.11

Delitzsch changed his mind, though.

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The last thing Disclosure Day asks you to do is the one thing it has spent two and a half hours making impossible. Margaret stands at the studio camera. The recovered alien has just whispered to Daniel, Daniel has whispered to her, and she turns to the lens and says a single word. Listen. Then the screen goes black. Nobody in the theater exhales as they wait for the end, but that was it. The film is finished.

First, let’s get this out of the way, I did not like the film (an understatement for sure). I am not going to spend your time on the reasons everyone else has already listed, the cast of Spielberg’s cookie cutter caricatures, the special effects that looked like they used the same hydraulic gimbal rigs they used in the 80s (the kind that shake and tilt a car on a soundstage while crew members rock it from outside the frame), the villains who let their targets escape on schedule like cartoonish henchmen, the mystery box that withholds the payload it spent the whole runtime promising. Those reviews already exist and first hit the internet once the film premiered. I saw it opening night in an almost empty theater but have waited until the cosmic dust settled before writing this review.

What interests me is the film as a data point, which is a different thing from the film as entertainment. Spielberg and David Koepp made a film that gives away more than it knows.

A note on how I interpret these things, because it matters for everything that follows. I am not asking you to believe that any of it is literally true. I am asking you to hold each claim two ways at once, as a literal proposition and as a metaphor available for something real, and to notice that the film itself refuses to choose between those two things. That refusal is the most telling thing about it.

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The Animals and Children

The visitors do not approach Margaret and Daniel as children in their own form but rather animals, a deer, a cardinal, and a fox; shapes a frightened child will follow rather than run from, and they use those shapes to walk two kids toward a house in the woods that Margaret’s adult mind has filed under Hansel and Gretel. The film is explicit that this is engineering. The children are kidnapped, abused, altered, and seeded with abilities that lie dormant for thirty years until the precise moment they are needed to translate for the aliens.

Spielberg has spent fifty years teaching audiences to read the animal-led child as wonder. The deer caught in the headlights becomes the deer that leads you somewhere magical. He is borrowing this motif from his own E.T., but it speaks to something older, the Disney convention of the woodland creatures who gather around the pure-hearted child. The film knows you will see the animals as benign, even magical, and it is counting on it. The animals are how you get a child to walk willingly into the place where the change happens.

In the true nature of Disney, he takes a dark Germanic fairy tale and puts a veil of colorful, sparkly child-like wonder over it. Lift the veil and you will find children lured by friendly creatures toward a controlled trauma, and you arrive very quickly at the documented history of MK-Ultra, which is not folklore. The CIA’s behavioral-control program ran from the early 1950s until the Church Committee exposed it in the mid-1970s, and the surviving records, the ones Richard Helms did not manage to have destroyed in 1973, describe a sustained effort to fracture and rebuild human personality using drugs, hypnosis, and stress (U.S. Senate, 1977). Running alongside it, and declassified in 1995, sat two decades of government-funded remote-viewing research, the program eventually called Star Gate, in which the intelligence community paid serious people at Stanford Research Institute to test whether a trained subject could describe a place they had no ordinary way of seeing (Central Intelligence Agency, 1995).

The bridge between those two programs is contested. However, the claim, made by self-described program survivors and experiencers, is that the fracturing was not only a method of control but a method of production. The claim is that a personality split hard enough along dissociative lines becomes capable of things an integrated personality cannot do, including the kind of perception the remote-viewing labs were chasing. The researcher Tracy Twyman spent years collecting this material, and in the interview she recorded for her book Mind-Controlled Sex Slaves and the CIA, the professed survivor Cathy O’Brien described being programmed with themes lifted straight out of Disney films, taught to go “over the rainbow” when the pain became unbearable, taught to dissociate on cue using the same stories the rest of us were handed as bedtime comfort. By O’Brien’s account her brother stayed locked into those years well into adulthood, his house decorated in Disney memorabilia, his favorite song fixed permanently as “When You Wish Upon a Star” (Twyman, 2008).

O’Brien’s account is testimony, not a court record, and cautious people treat it as testimony. The value of the detail does not rest on whether every word checks out. The value is that someone trying to describe the inside of an engineered, fragmented mind reached for Disney, the same well Spielberg reaches into for his animals, because that imagery is doing identical work in both stories. A song about wishing on a star is a song about projecting your longing onto a point of light in the sky and waiting for it to answer. “When You Wish Upon a Star” debuted in Pinocchio in 1940 (Disney, 1940), sung over the opening of a film whose entire plot is a wooden object brought to life by a wish and a visiting blue light. The dream Disney sold to children and the dream the abductee describes turn out to be the same dream, a wish sent upward, a light that comes down, a self remade by something that arrived from elsewhere.

The Probes Are Not a ‘MacGuffin’

Every review I have seen treats the stolen alien device as a plot engine, the glowing thing the hero carries so the villain has a reason to chase him. Daniel uses one to jump-start a television station and Jane hides the spare. The film treats the devices as power sources and almost nothing else.

Strip the production design off them and the devices are Rods of Initiation. That is a specific object in a specific body of published teaching, the one the Lucis Trust began printing when Alice and Foster Bailey incorporated it in New Jersey in 1922, as discussed here. The publishing arm was first registered that same year under the name Lucifer Publishing Company, and, by the Trust’s own account, the name was changed to Lucis Publishing in 1924 after Christian readers noticed what it said (Lucis Trust, n.d.-a). The Trust will tell you, correctly, that Lucifer and Lucis share a Latin root meaning light. The first book that company existed to print was Bailey’s Initiation, Human and Solar, and that book is where the rods appear (Bailey, 1922).

Behind the public-facing material, which is freely available to the public on their website, there is an inner teaching that explains the following:

Shamballa is the etheric seat of planetary Will, ruled by a Venusian being identified with both the Ancient of Days and the light-bringing impulse, transmitting a first-ray destroying-and-rebuilding force that began contacting humanity directly in the modern era to break down old forms and externalize the Hierarchy. Shamballa is also the residence of Sanat Kumara, whom Bailey calls the Lord of the World, the Ancient of Days, the One Initiator, the planetary Logos’s representative on Earth. The genuinely esoteric, and to outsiders alarming, claim is the identification of this being with figures the exoteric religions name differently. Bailey is explicit that Sanat Kumara is the source behind the name “Jehovah” in one of its aspects, and she links the Kumaras to the Lords of the Flame who came from Venus eighteen and a half million years ago to quicken the evolution of mind in humanity. This is the part the public summaries soften. The inner teaching treats the biblical Ancient of Days and the Luciferic bringer of light and mind as the same impulse, distinguished only by the spiritual development of the perceiver. At the highest initiations in this school, the sixth, called Decision, and beyond, the path leads toward Shamballa, where the rods of initiation derive their power and where Sanat Kumara administers the highest degrees (Bailey, 1922; Lucis Trust, n.d.-b).

They are physical, magnetized instruments, charged with energy, used by the Initiator to apply electrical force to the initiate’s centers, the chakras, at the moment of initiation. They are not metaphors. The stated function is to produce a controlled, intensified flow of force the initiate could not safely generate alone, fanning the latent fires of kundalini into greater activity along the spine and through the etheric body, accelerating the response of the bodies and sealing the expansion of consciousness the initiation represents. Every center gets the electric rod treatment (Bailey, 1922).

Spielberg puts rods in this film that behave exactly like the Luciferian rods of initiation, real charged instruments applied to a body to force an energetic transformation. Hold that next to the abduction literature. The classic abduction script, Whitley Strieber’s included, is a being from the sky immobilizing a person and applying instruments to the body, often along the spine and the base, producing an overwhelming and involuntary experience the person did not choose and could not have generated alone. Strieber’s famous anal probe is, at least structurally, the Rod applied to the base center. The same act gets read two ways. Ufology calls it medical abduction while Theosophy would call it forced initiation. It is the same ceremony with different PR.

According to these Luciferian Theosophists, the rods and scepters and thunderbolts scattered across world mythology are symbolic survivals, a degraded memory of the Rods of Initiation used in the ceremony. The thunderbolt of Zeus, the Hindu-Buddhist vajra, the wands and staffs of comparative myth, the Masonic and Christian and royal regalia, the rod and the scepter, are the tradition holding on to the memory of a real, magical, electric rod. The film’s glowing handheld devices are that same object, dressed in production design. The instrument is the constant. Whoever holds the rod administers the charge, and whoever receives it is the center being worked on. Below are only a few depictions, but they can be found all over the world.

Now extend it the way the teaching extends it. If you take the rods seen on camera to mean the cigar-shaped craft, the reading is that electricity is the divine science, that force enters the planet from higher centers through physical instruments, and so a descending electric object delivering charge to the Earth’s etheric body is structurally a Rod applied to a planetary center. Awakening Gaia, and every other New Age buzzword you can throw at it. The craft as rod, the Earth as initiate, the impact site as the stimulated center, the mapping is clean. It parallels the Venusian-origin motif exactly. The Kumaras and the Flaming Diamond came to Earth from Venus to quicken evolution, and so “something descends from the sky bearing charge to advance the planet” is the founding myth of the whole system.

That is one of a handful of reasons this milieu cannot stop promoting Avi Loeb’s interstellar objects, his work on ’Oumuamua in 2017 and, more recently, the object designated 3I/ATLAS, which the ATLAS survey picked up on the first of July 2025 and which Loeb spent the autumn ranking on his own scale of how likely a given visitor is to be a piece of alien technology (Loeb, 2025). Most of his colleagues concluded it was a comet, and the radio telescopes that listened for a signal heard nothing. None of that lands with the people I am describing, because Loeb is supplying, in the register of Harvard astrophysics, the exact picture their founding myth requires, a charged object descending from interstellar distance to do something to the planet it reaches. The film gives you the same descent and asks you to read it as rescue.

Catholicism

Spielberg said the quiet part on television. Sitting with Ben Mankiewicz on CBS News Sunday Morning, he framed the film around what he called ontological shock, the social dislocation that would follow if the government confirmed overnight that the visitors are real and have been here since 1947 (Spielberg, 2026). He said the movie takes the position of the believers and also takes the position of the Church. A clip went around, and a number of Christians pushed back on the premise, and they were right to, because the premise is not actually supported by the evidence. Ted Peters, who has surveyed more than thirteen hundred religious people across Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist lines on exactly this question, found that better than eighty percent said confirmed alien life would not shake their faith at all (Peters, 2011). The Vatican Observatory has been saying the same thing in plain language for years.

Spielberg talks about religion as a category, all of us, the fundamental beliefs many of us hold. The film he actually made is Catholic and nothing else. The character who carries the whole weight of faith is Jane, a former Roman Catholic nun. The sanctuary the fugitives run to is a convent. The theological lines are delivered by a nun. The object a terrified woman clutches when a man is reaching into her mind to control her is a rosary, and she squeezes the cross into her palm specifically to break his hold. Every other tradition Spielberg named in that interview is missing from the drama. No rabbis appear in this film, no imams, no Protestant pastors wrestling with the news, no Buddhists, nobody from the eighty percent who told the pollster they would be fine.

The easy explanation is aesthetic, and it is partly true. Catholicism photographs better than any other Western Christian tradition. It has the candles and the incense, the habit and the rosary, two thousand years of visual shorthand for the sacred and the haunted both. If you are Spielberg and you need one image that reads as faith and also reads as the uncanny, you reach for the nun, not the Methodist youth pastor. That accounts for the casting. It does not account for the erasure. Choosing Catholicism for its atmosphere explains why the believer is a nun. It does not explain why every other faith Spielberg invoked by name has been deleted from the world of the film, so that the only spiritual vocabulary left available to the audience is the one with the longest documented record of formal exorcism, of objects that hold power, of a wafer that becomes a living presence when the right words are said over it.

Watch what the rosary does in that scene and the choice starts to look less like set dressing. Jane’s cross half-works. The faith is shown as a real counter-force against the intrusion, strong enough to matter, not strong enough to win. The film flirts with the oldest Christian claim about beings of this kind, that the right sacred object in the hand of a believer can interrupt them, and then it pulls back before committing, because committing would force the film to admit what it has spent its whole length implying about what these visitors are.

The Orwellian Double-speak of “Empathy”

The visitors do not communicate through language. Daniel gets the mathematics. Margaret gets the feeling. Her gift, the film tells us, is a kind of total emotional reception, the ability to take another person’s interior life directly into her own and then broadcast it. The word the press notes and the reviewers keep using for this is empathy, and the film leans on it as its warmest idea, the thing that will save us if we let it. The Jesuit magazine America praised the film for taking on, alongside the aliens, the decline of American empathy.

The word empathy was coined in English in 1909 by the psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener, who built it to translate a German aesthetic term, Einfühlung, literally a feeling-into. The German word, used by Vischer and then Lipps, did not originally describe one person feeling for another person at all. It described what happens when a viewer projects their own inner state into an object, a column, a line in a painting, and feels the strain or the lift as though from inside the thing. Titchener went back to Greek for a root and assembled the word from en, in, and pathos, feeling or suffering, on the model of sympathy (Titchener, 1909).

The Greek word he was echoing, empatheia, never meant kindness. It meant passion, the state of being acted upon, suffering in the old sense of undergoing. The detail I cannot get past is what the word does in Greek today. In modern Greek, empatheia has rotated to its opposite. It means malice, prejudice, the settled ill-will you carry against someone. The single word the film offers as the channel of our salvation means, in the living language it was lifted from, hatred (Greek Reporter, 2026).

Set the therapeutic word to one side and ask what the ancient world actually called the thing the film is describing, which is a non-human intelligence reaching into a human being, occupying her, and speaking through her to a crowd.

The Greeks had a precise word for that, and it was not empathy. It was enthousiasmos, the state of having a god inside you, en theos. The priestess at Delphi did not empathize with Apollo. She was entered by him, and the words that came out of her mouth were taken to be his and not hers. She was the instrument. The god was the voice (Burkert, 1985).

Go back further, into the Mesopotamian material and the picture gets even more interesting. The Babylonians and Assyrians kept a ritual called the washing of the mouth, mīs pî, paired with the opening of the mouth, pīt pî, reconstructed in detail by the Assyriologists Christopher Walker and Michael Dick (Walker & Dick, 1999). Its purpose was to take a statue, an object human craftsmen had just finished carving, and turn it into a true vessel the god would actually inhabit, a living presence rather than a representation. The ceremony ran through some eleven stages, and at its center sat a moment that tells you everything about how these people understood the manufacture of a vessel. The priest took the craftsmen who had made the statue with their own hands, and he symbolically severed those hands with a wooden blade while the craftsmen recited the required denial, that they had not made this, that the god had made this. The volume the scholars wrote about the practice carries the title, with no irony, Born in Heaven, Made on Earth. The object is built on Earth by human hands, the human origin is then ritually cut away, and the thing is declared to have been born in heaven by its own power, so that it can open its mouth and speak for the god. The Egyptians ran their own version, the Opening of the Mouth, touching an adze to the lips of a mummy or a statue to give it back the power to breathe, eat, and speak, so the prepared body could house whatever was meant to move into it.

Now look at what the film shows you with that template in front of you. Two human children are taken and worked on by a non-human power until they are something other than ordinary people. They are made, on Earth, into instruments. The making is hidden, from them most of all, buried under a screen memory of fairy-tale animals and a candy house, in the same motion that cuts away the craftsmen’s hands so no one will say the vessel was manufactured. Thirty years later the instrument is brought to the appointed place, the mouth is opened, and the human voice delivers a message that did not originate with the human. Margaret is not the author of the thing she says at the end. She is the statue after the mouth-washing. The creature whispers, Daniel relays, Margaret opens her mouth, and the last word the film lets her speak before it kills the lights is an order to the entire planet to stop talking and receive what is being sent. Empathy is the wrong word for what that is. The accurate word is possession.

This is the subject the powers that be want us focused on. Are they Aliens or Demons? You can read more below about why this question, while interesting, is being used as a distraction right now.

Containers

The claim underneath all of it is that a human being can be made into a container, that the boundary we assume between a self and the thing it perceives is closer to a door than to a wall, and that under the right conditions that door can be opened from the other side. Trauma does the opening in the modern telling. Ritual does it in the ancient one. The fragmented child of the mind-control literature, the carved statue of the mouth-opening ceremony, and the meteorologist who wakes up speaking a language she never learned are one figure painted in three vocabularies, a vessel prepared and then occupied.

The word is not mine, and it is not Bailey’s. It belongs to Bob Lazar, the man who walked into a Las Vegas television station in 1989 and told the reporter George Knapp that he had been hired to reverse-engineer recovered flying discs at a site called S-4, just south of Area 51. Lazar is a large part of the reason the phrase Area 51 means anything to the public at all. Most of what he described was hardware. One section of the briefing material he was handed was about us. He says the documents described human beings as containers, vessels grown to hold something that would be placed into them later, and stated that the religions of Earth had been installed to keep the containers intact and unbroken until that day came (Lazar, 1989).

This is why the film improves so much when you stop watching it as a thriller and start treating it as propaganda. The empathy it sells as our salvation behaves, on screen, a great deal more like possession. Those friendly luring animals are the pleasant mask on an engineering project that leaves two children altered for the rest of their lives. The dialogue dismisses faith as a relic while the staging hands a terrified woman a rosary that half-works and hopes you will not notice the contradiction. When the ending finally orders the planet to be quiet and listen, it cuts away before you can hear what was said, which may be the only fully honest choice in the whole production, because the message was built for the vessel and was never addressed to us.

My Own Disclosure Day is Coming

The public story is Egyptomania. Obelisks and mummies and Tutankhamun, empire in costume. Underneath that pageantry is something far more strategic: Egypt used again and again as political theater, from Rome’s imperial self-mythology to a Tutankhamun tour brokered under a US administration that needed Egypt to pivot sides.

The trail moves into the thing no one wants to touch, the “Sumerian firsts” that keep evaporating the moment you actually check them. Then we arrive at Zecharia Sitchin.

Sitchin sold millions of readers the idea that the Sumerians recorded humanity’s creation by a superior race from another planet. That story has now become a tool of the regime. It shaped how generations understood Mesopotamia, the Bible, and the origins of power.

The real question is not whether Sitchin was right (RIP Dr. Michael Heiser), but rather, why his theory was pushed this hard, for this long, and what it has to do with the current war in the Middle East.

Who or what is behind Anunnaki Inc.? As an insider, I will tell you what I know.

That part is for paid subscribers. Until then, check out my recent interview on the Danny Jones podcast.

Right now, you can get 10% off annual subscription to The H Files if you follow this link: https://drheatherlynn.substack.com/danny10

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Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The H Files podcast and the author of five books, including Baphomet Revealed and Evil Archaeology. Her forthcoming book is Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Find her at thehfiles.com.

Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn

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Bibliography and Suggested Reading

Bailey, A. A. (1922). Initiation, Human and Solar. Lucifer Publishing Company. https://www.lucistrust.org/online_books/initiation_human_and_solar_obooks

Burkert, W. (1985). Greek Religion (J. Raffan, Trans.). Harvard University Press.

Central Intelligence Agency. (1995). Star Gate [Declassified remote-viewing program records].

Disney, W. (Producer), Sharpsteen, B., & Luske, H. (Directors). (1940). Pinocchio [Film]. Walt Disney Productions.

Lazar, B. (1989). Interviews by G. Knapp [Television broadcasts]. KLAS-TV, Las Vegas.

Loeb, A. (2025). Updating the Loeb Classification Scale of 3I/ATLAS [Essay]. Medium. https://avi-loeb.medium.com/updating-the-loeb-classification-scale-of-3i-atlas-eb495684462e

Lucis Trust. (n.d.-a). History. https://www.lucistrust.org/about_us/history

Lucis Trust. (n.d.-b). The Shamballa Force. https://www.lucistrust.org/resources/articles/shamballa

Greek Reporter. (2026, April 29). Why the word "empathy" has opposite meanings in English and its native Greek. https://greekreporter.com/2026/04/29/greek-word-empathy-meaning/

Peters, T. (2011). The implications of the discovery of extra-terrestrial life for religion. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369(1936), 644–655.

Spielberg, S. (2026). Interview by B. Mankiewicz. CBS News Sunday Morning.

Titchener, E. B. (1909). Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes. Macmillan.

Twyman, T. R. (2008). Mind-Controlled Sex Slaves and the CIA. Dragon Key Press.

U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. (1977). Project MKUltra, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification: Joint Hearing. U.S. Government Printing Office.

Walker, C., & Dick, M. B. (1999). The induction of the cult image in ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian mīs pî ritual. In M. B. Dick (Ed.), Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East (pp. 55–121). Eisenbrauns.

Now, accessing member benefits is easier than ever before!

Over the past few months The H Files has found far more readers than I expected, and the response has been more generous than I knew how to prepare for. A lot of you are new here, so I want to tell you why this place exists in the first place. I started it to get out of a box.

When you spend your career writing and talking about disclosure, the occult, UAPs, the things legacy institutions like to file under “conspiracy,” you tend to get placed inside a set of boundaries you did not draw. That is why it is “fringe.” Those boundaries usually come from a mediator; a publisher or a production company, the person standing between your work and the people you made it for. The powerful third, as I have written about before.

That is the ordinary cost of working through someone else’s machinery. Book covers that do not match the book inside them, with no say on your part once you sign. Production companies that want you to be one element inside someone else’s creative vision, down to what you are allowed to wear on camera. Not all of it is sinister. It is just business in the old ways. It is the price of admission to the dance.

I did go to the dance, in my own way. Mostly, I sat in the corner and watched everyone do the electric slide in perfect unison, thinking this looked a little silly, and also that they all seemed to be having a wonderful time, and who was I to judge. Teaching at the college took most of my time, then a museum to run and a family to raise and my research squeezed into whatever hours were left. Every so often someone would break away from the floor and offer me their hand, and if I happened to like the song, I would take it, do my one dance, and go back to my table. I would write a book, go on a show, etc., then go back to my corner of the world, off of the dance floor.

You notice things at an event like that. The gossip, the small dramas, the same social weather you remember from high school. For a long while the blinders stay on. Then the night gets later, and the room you took for an innocent homecoming starts to look like something out of Kubrick film, and you understand that the party you wandered into is the kind people wear masks. You find yourself standing in the middle of it, wondering how you got there.

The first thing I wanted to do was leave. I went through that honestly. I decided this was not for me and I was done. Then something else took over. Call it the part of me that cannot abide an injustice, meeting the part of me that has always been a bit of a renegade. Rather than walk out, however, I went looking for the light switches. I wanted to turn every one of them on, cut the music, and let the room be seen for what it actually was.

The first thing I ever published here was about sitting on a fence. I wrote it the moment I understood that I finally had something to say, after more than a decade in this industry.

What began as an innocent curiosity, the paranormal, the unsolved mysteries those old Time Life “Mysetries of the Unknown” books promised my generation we would one day crack, turned into something much heavier, a tangle of disinformation and power brokers and politics, of people running real occult practice and trading surprisingly well-developed ideas about who should rule the world and how, eugenic plans for the future drawn up by people with the means to pursue them. Getting any of it into the open always seemed to meet a wall, some of it structural, some of it the ordinary friction of a busy life.

The H Files is my voice and my project, with no mediator standing between the two of us. That is the entire point of it.

What Changed, and Why

All of that is why so much has shifted lately, and why I think the changes are good ones.

This began as a plain Substack and a Discord server held together by a small, ragtag group of dedicated truthseekers. Discord did the job for a while, but a lot of you have found it to be a hurdle, and I heard that. It also asks people to download and learn a platform they may never have wanted to touch, and the things I most wanted to share with you were never going to fit there anyway, the Lucis Trust documents, the rare grimoires and occult books, the letters and the personal collection, the material no one has ever published. The behind the scenes I mean here has nothing to do with green-room photos from the Danny Jones set. I mean the things I have actually witnessed. The so-called receipts.

I have been lucky in a way I did not see coming. Readers of this publication stepped forward and offered their professional skills to help me build something better. Members of our Discord, friends from the comedy world like Sam Tripoli and Kurt Metzger, fellow researchers, and a long list of people I have not named here, all pitched in so I could bring you the best of what I do for the value of your membership. Here is what that work has produced.

The New H Files Website

A lot of you have told me Discord was a barrier, and we listened. We built a brand new website on a secure system, and it changes how you reach everything you pay for.

You can now sign in at thehfiles.com with your Substack account and get to all of your membership benefits in one place. If you enjoy the Discord, you can log straight into it from there with a single click. If Discord was never your thing, you never have to open it again. Everything lives on the site, and you decide how you want to use it.

The Podcast, Now Under One Name

The Midnight Academy podcast is being rebranded. From here forward, it is The H Files. New episodes, bonus episodes, and both audio and video content come with your subscription, available through Substack and through thehfiles.com website. However you like to take in your media, you will be able to get it the way that suits you best.

Project Midnight: The Occult Research Library and Archive

This is the one I may be most proud of and grateful for.

Project Midnight is a large-scale effort to scan and make available not only the documents I received from the Lucis Trust and the Arcane School, but also the rare occult books I have collected over many years, the artifacts and curiosities in my personal collection, my own previous and never-before-published work and notes, and whatever I gather from here forward. Other researchers have begun sending me material to include as well.

This is not your average membership site. What we are really building is a comprehensive online museum and archive of occult and geopolitical history, the knowledge and the documentation held together, curated and searchable on a museum-grade database. You will be able to read these files, reference them, cross-reference them, save them, and download them. Alongside the documents you will find study guides, glossaries, and commentaries to help you actually put the collection to work. They will be highly searchable so you can “do your own research” in a way that you can trust.

This is ongoing. We are still migrating files, and I have graduate interns and history majors for universities helping me scan, catalogue, and upload. Your membership is what funds the project, which is what gives you exclusive access to it.

The goal is simple, and to me long overdue. These subjects get waved off as fringe by people who have never seriously looked at them. I want to give them a proper home, a place where they can be researched, studied, and understood with the seriousness they have always deserved.

The Temple of Ba’al Documentary

What started as a multi-part series I was making for YouTube has grown well beyond that, for the better. I have partnered with an award-winning professional production company to make this the very best it can be. A dedicated website for the documentary is launching soon, and as a subscriber you will see everything first, the exclusives included. The film is meant to spread the word about the geopolitical moment we are living through, and the occult architecture beneath it. Watch this space for updates.

Subscribe now

An Offer I Rarely Run

My episode of the Danny Jones podcast will be out very soon. To mark it, and to give those of you who have been sitting on the fence a reason to come off it, I am running something I almost never offer.

Use the code DANNY10 for 10 percent off the annual plan, good through July 31. The monthly rate is $9, and the annual plan is normally $90. With the code, your year comes to $81, which works out to about $6.75 a month, roughly three months free compared with paying month to month. I do not do coupons often. Given everything we are opening up right now, it felt right to leave the door wide open for a little while.

For those who want to go further, the Founding tier makes you a patron of the research itself. Your name is acknowledged in future books. Each year you receive a signed book and merchandise from the shop we are launching, along with a quarterly live call with me and early access to every new project before it goes public.

More to Come

We will be adding a weekly show, so there will be a standing reason to gather in real time each week.

Over in the Discord, we already hold a hangout every other Sunday, an easy and open Q and A with a genuinely good group of people, and you are welcome there.

A few months ago this was a newsletter and a chat room run on goodwill. We went zero to sixty in a single quarter. What we are building now is meant to carry us a great deal further before the year is out, and the best of it is still ahead.

Getting Help, and Where to Find Me

One practical note. I am on the road a great deal this year, in a different city most months, so I am not always able to answer messages myself. We fixed the thing that used to make this hard. There are now several clear ways to get membership help, including a dedicated person on the other end of it. If you have spent any time in the Discord, you already know Tom. Tom is my assistant and producer, and he is there to sort out anything you run into.

The website is brand new, which means it is still a little bit in beta. People reach it on every kind of device and setup, and we are debugging as we go, so if anything looks broken or behaves strangely, please tell us. It helps more than you know.

If you would like to come see me in person, here is where I will be through the fall:

• July 24-25: ObscuraCon 2026, Eureka Springs, Arkansas

• August 7-8: Brohemian Grove 4, Wildwood, Florida

• September 12: Phoenix MUFON, Phoenix, Arizona

• September 13: Sedona MUFON, Sedona, Arizona

• October 17-18: Halifax Paranormal Symposium, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Full details, tickets, and any dates I add are always on the live events page at thehfiles.com/live-events.

Back on Schedule, Starting Tuesday

Building all of this, on top of a heavy stretch of travel and research, set my normal rhythm back a little. Hence, my regular cadence (a free piece on Tuesday and a paid piece on Saturday) returns this Tuesday, and it returns with what may be the most important H Files I have written.

Tuesday’s free piece is my review of the film, Disclosure Day. This is not the review you have read everywhere else. Whether the special effects held up or the plot was filled with holes is beside the point. I wanted to wait a bit to let the dust settle on this since everyone has something to say about the film on premier week.

In my upcoming review, you will get the things no one else is talking about, the symbols hiding in plain sight, the film’s links to current geopolitical messaging, and the readings only The H Files is going to give you. It goes well past a movie review.

Then this Saturday comes the paid companion. It will be my own little “Disclosure Day.” After well over a decade of being behind the scenes from both the occult mystery school side and the “ancient alien” side of the equation, I am going to lay all my cards on the table.

I will present the geopolitical motives and connections behind the alien story that has spanned decades, why everyone is talking about the Book of Enoch, why the “Anunnaki” are now more popular than ever, and the invention of a “disclosure” industry that began with the capture of the historical and archaeological narrative before WWI in order to promote a view of the world that will lead us straight to what has been called “Armageddon.”

And I am bringing the receipts.

Thank you for being here, and for making any of this possible. Go explore the new site, kick the tires, and tell me what you think and what you want to see next. Please let me know if you find any bugs.

With all of my gratitude,

Heather

The gate is a powerful archetype. It is the place where living energy changes hands and becomes something that can be counted, stored, and controlled.

Every civilization builds its gates, and every gate has its keeper. In the ancient world, grain enters the temple and becomes tribute, as detailed in a previous article. Silver enters the ledger and becomes credit. Prayer passes through the priest and becomes blessing. Labor passes through the market and becomes wage. Our own world is gated more heavily than any before it. Biological life passes through the laboratory and becomes data. Speech passes through the platform and becomes influence. Memory passes through the archive and becomes record. The gate is everywhere, in every age, wherever the raw flow of life is converted into something manageable, which is to say controllable.

At every gate, there is a figure standing in front of it.

I have been calling that figure the “broker class,” and across these pieces I have tried to show you that it is not a metaphor and not a single conspiracy but a structural position that civilization keeps regenerating. The priest, the banker, the platform, the intelligence handler, the algorithmic manager, the financial engineer.

They have one thing in common: they did not create the energy passing through the gate. They control the passage, and they charge rent on it.

For a long time this appeared to work, which is exactly why it is so dangerous. The gatekeeper takes his cut, and the system keeps running, and almost no one notices the slow change in the direction of the flow. So let me begin where it matters. What happens when the gatekeeper starts taking more than the system can afford to lose? The short answer is the one this whole essay is built to earn: sooner or later the civilization has to choose between forgiving the debt and finding someone to blame for it, between the clean slate and the sacrifice.

The Captured Middle

To fully answer, you have to understand why the position at the gate is so powerful in the first place, and the answer is older than economics. It goes back to the simplest philosophical fact about relations.

The number 1, the Monad, is unity before anything has split. Two, the Dyad, is the arrival of otherness, the unstable pair. Three, the Triad, is the first resolution, the form that can hold division without being destroyed by it.

This is one of the most stubborn structures in human thought, and it surfaces wherever anyone has tried to explain how the many comes from the one without simply shattering. The Neoplatonists built reality out of it: the One, the intellect that flows from it, and the soul that turns back toward the source. Traditions reach for the triad again and again to think through relation, generation, and restoration, from the Egyptian Osiris, Isis, and Horus to the Christian Father, Son, and Spirit, where the third is what binds the other two into one. (Hegel would later make the same move the engine of history, two opposed forces lifted into a higher unity that preserves them both, what he called sublation.) Conceptually, the third is where the power sits, because the third is what makes the other two into a whole.

Now, someone will object, rightfully, that two parties do not need a middleman. A buyer and a seller can meet face to face. A worshipper can pray directly to God without a priest. A speaker can address a crowd with seemingly nothing between them.

That is true, but here is what is also true. Every relation requires a medium. Not a middleman, a medium: something that carries one side across to the other so the relation can happen at all. Speech is a medium. So is money. So is trust, and law, and a shared unit of measure, and the ritual that lets two strangers deal with each other without reaching for a weapon. The medium is the air the relation breathes. Take it away and the two poles cannot reach each other; they collapse into confusion, or force, or raw appetite.

This is why the word itself matters. A medium is the thing in the middle, the thing that carries one side to the other. Speech is a medium, and so are writing, ritual, money, and the server humming in a data center. A body can be a medium; so can a priest, a bank, a platform, a camera. The whole family of the word points the same way: to mediate is to stand in the middle, a mediator is the one who comes between two sides, an intermediary is that middle made into an institution. Even median and Mesopotamia carry the echo, the line in the middle, the land between the rivers.1 Somewhere along the way, “the media” stopped meaning only newspapers and television. That old category is too small for what now stands between us and the world. We still do not know what to call these platforms, because they keep changing costumes depending on the question being asked. Are they publishers? Are they neutral carriers? Are they private companies exercising editorial judgment? Are they public squares? Are they even responsible for what passes through them?

The fact that we cannot answer cleanly should tell us something.

The platform is not only carrying the message. It is sorting the message, ranking it, burying it, amplifying it, monetizing it, attaching it to identity, and deciding whether it will remain in the record at all. The speaker reaches the audience through it. The witness reaches the public through it. Even the present reaches the future through it, because the medium is where memory is stored. The danger begins when the medium is captured, when the thing that was supposed to carry the relation begins to own the relation. At that point, the bridge becomes a checkpoint. That is where power enters, and with power, corruption.

The Demon at the Gate

In 1867 the physicist James Clerk Maxwell imagined a small being and very nearly broke one of the deepest laws in physics with it. Lord Kelvin later named the creature a demon, and the name stuck: Maxwell’s Demon.

Picture a box of gas divided into two chambers by a wall with a tiny door in it. The gas starts in equilibrium, the same temperature throughout, which only means the molecules are moving at a spread of speeds, some fast, some slow, evenly mixed. Now station at the door a being quick enough to watch individual molecules. When a fast one approaches from the right, he opens the door and lets it through to the left. When a slow one approaches from the left, he lets it through to the right. He spends no energy doing this; the door is frictionless. He only watches, and sorts.

Slowly the left side fills with fast molecules and grows hot, the right fills with slow ones and grows cold, and a temperature difference appears out of nowhere. A difference is usable. You can run an engine off it. The demon has conjured extractable work out of equilibrium, for free, by doing nothing but standing at a gate and deciding what passes through.

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In 1818, one of the most decorated orientalists in the Habsburg Empire announced that he had found physical evidence, carved on church walls and engraved on cups, coins, and coffers, that the Knights Templar practiced a secret religion marked by heresy, sodomy, idol worship, ritual abuse, and child sacrifice.

That was what made it so insidious. The charge landed on the closest thing medieval Europe had to a multinational bank: a military-religious order built on money, secrecy, sacred authority, and trust. Sound familiar?

His colleagues never forgave him. They never quite refuted him either.

Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall was no crank. He was a diplomat and interpreter who had served the empire from Istanbul to Cairo, the translator whose complete German edition of Hafez helped inspire Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, and the man who would later become the first president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. When he published Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum, “The Mystery of Baphomet Revealed,” in the sixth volume of his own journal Fundgruben des Orients, the first European periodical devoted to oriental studies, he was at the height of a serious reputation. He spent a measurable portion of it on this treatise, written in Latin, salted with Greek and Arabic, and accompanied by plates of the strangest objects ever attributed to a medieval military order.

The treatise has spent two centuries in a scholarly unmarked grave. I have my own reasons for opening that grave, and they begin with a meeting I did not expect to have.

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The Meeting

When my publisher commissioned Baphomet Revealed, the assignment was modest: a short introductory historiography, a first doorway for readers encountering the figure, tracing how a name from the Templar trials became the most recognizable emblem in Western occultism. I wrote that book, and I stand by it for what it is. It did not prove or disprove anything about the Templars, and it never claimed to. What it did, quietly, was force me to read the standard explanations closely. Baphomet was a torture-chamber phantom. The trial was Philip’s propaganda. Lévi invented the image from whole cloth. Case closed, the scholars said.

I had heard “case closed” from scholars before. In a previous H-File, I documented what I found in the Masonic encyclopedias preserved in President Garfield’s library: a real androgynous rite called the Palladium, described decades before Léo Taxil supposedly invented it, an order that generations of academics insisted had never existed in any form. The documents were sitting in Ohio the whole time. That discovery taught me a habit I cannot unlearn: when the official account of an esoteric scandal is suspiciously tidy, go find the primary sources and check. You can read that here:

The deepest primary source on Baphomet is Hammer-Purgstall’s treatise, and the only reason English readers can examine it at all is because of he late researcher Tracy R. Twyman. Twyman commissioned a scholar credited publicly only as “Professor X” to produce the first full English translation, edited it with her own commentary, and had every plate photographed from the original printing and painstakingly restored, the first time the complete illustrations had been available anywhere outside the 1818 volume itself. The translator asked for anonymity, partly because of the subject matter, and partly, in Twyman’s telling, because he and an associate experienced disturbing phenomena while working on the text. Twyman went further: she came to believe the material itself was cursed. She and her collaborators coined a name, the fog, for the confusion, inertia, and weariness that settled over anyone who sat down to work on it. In her account, one member of the team concluded that “someone or something does not want the secrets inside this text to be known.”

Some time ago, Professor X reached out to me. We met privately. The conversation concerned the circumstances surrounding Tracy’s death and her engagement with the Baphomet material in the period before she died. I am not going to publish the substance of that meeting until I can do it carefully with documentation and likely behind the paywall, but what I can tell you publicly is what the meeting did: it took a file I had treated as historical curiosity and made it a live case. Tracy opened this investigation and died with it open. The man who built her key came to me. This essay is me picking the file up, and what follows in the coming months is the work of carrying it.

The Bank Behind the Cross

To understand what Hammer-Purgstall claimed, you need the original accusation, and to understand the accusation, you need, as always, to follow the money.

By the end of the thirteenth century, the Order of the Temple was the closest thing medieval Europe had to an international financial institution. A pilgrim could deposit funds at the Temple in London and withdraw them in Acre against a letter of credit. Kings borrowed from the order. The Paris Temple served for long stretches as the treasury of the French crown. The knights answered to no bishop and no king, only to the Pope, and their network of fortified houses ran from Scotland to the Levant. Wealth, immunity, secrecy, and an army: it is difficult to design an institution better positioned to be envied, feared, and owed.

King Philip IV of France was owed nothing. He owed them.

As the familiar story goes, on Friday, October 13, 1307, Philip’s agents arrested the Templars across his kingdom in a single coordinated operation. The charges were calibrated for maximum horror: the knights denied Christ at initiation, spat or trampled on the cross, exchanged obscene kisses, and worshipped an idol, sometimes described as a bearded head, to which the name Baphomet became attached. Confessions followed, extracted under torture and frequently recanted. The order was dissolved by papal decree in 1312. The last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned in Paris in 1314, reportedly proclaiming the order’s innocence from the fire. The debts died with the order.

Most modern historians read the charges as a fabrication engineered by Philip’s lawyers to destroy a creditor too powerful to tax and too rich to tolerate. That reading is probably correct as far as the trial goes, and it teaches a lesson that should be written in ink: an accusation of crimes against children is a weapon that can kill a bank.

The trial, however, is not where the story ends, because five centuries later a scholar with no stake in Philip’s debts claimed the idol had left fingerprints.

You can read some of the actual Templar trial transcripts here.

What the Plates Show

Hammer-Purgstall assembled a catalog of objects he said had been recovered from former Templar properties, imperial collections, and churches across what are now Austria, Germany, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, with a few from France: idols, caskets, bowls, coins, and bas-reliefs cut into church walls. Per Twyman’s editorial notes, most of those churches no longer exist, and some of the towns that held them have changed names. Aside from the trial records themselves and Jules Michelet’s documentation, this catalog is the most important body of material ever assembled on the Templar idol.

A word on the images you are about to see. The plates reproduced here are from Thomas Wright’s The Worship of the Generative Powers During the Middle Ages of Western Europe, privately printed in London in 1865, which redrew a number of the same artifacts for an English readership four decades after Hammer-Purgstall. Wright was working downstream of the original treatise, sometimes engraving objects Hammer-Purgstall described but had not illustrated. They still have the power to stop a reader cold.

The recurring figure is a horned or crowned being, sometimes female, more often androgynous, bearded and breasted at once. Some figures are covered in eyes. Some have two faces, recalling the double-faced head certain Templars described under interrogation. On the lid of a coffer reportedly found in Burgundy, the crowned figure holds two chains, with the sun hanging from one and the moon from the other, both faces inverted and scowling, dragged down out of the sky. Beneath the figure’s feet sit a seven-pointed star, a pentagram, and a human skull.

Around the image below run inscriptions in a deliberate cipher of mixed alphabets, Greek words in Arabic letters and Arabic in Greek, sometimes anagrammatized. The name they repeat is Mete, which Hammer-Purgstall connected to Metis, the Greek personification of wisdom. Other scenes he interpreted as records of ritual orgies, the abuse of boys, and the sacrifice of children and animals, performed by smiling participants under the gaze of the idol. I am describing these at the level of category deliberately, and that is where they will stay in this essay. For paid subscribers, I keep a working archive of the primary sources behind this investigation, including the 1865 Wright volume that preserves many of these engravings, the same material I am drawing on to reconstruct what Hammer-Purgstall believed these images revealed.

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Hammer-Purgstall’s conclusion was that the Templars, or a current within them, were never Christians at all. They were heirs of the Ophite Gnostics, the sect that revered the serpent of Genesis and every villain of scripture for their opposition to the creator. Baphomet was no demon’s name. It was a title, Baphe Meteos, the Baptism of Wisdom, the order’s supreme rite. The charges of 1307 were not invented, he argued. They were garbled courtroom descriptions of a real secret religion, and the objects in his plates were its surviving equipment, some of it built into the fabric of churches where congregations had prayed beneath it for centuries without knowing what they were looking at. Because Freemasonry of his own era claimed descent from the Templars, the treatise landed as an accusation against the living as much as the dead.

The Theology of the Uprooting

What gives the treatise its weight is that Hammer-Purgstall did more than catalog horrors. He decoded a coherent theology out of them, and the theology explains the images.

Mete, he argued, was a dark Gnostic version of Sophia, divine Wisdom. In mainstream Christianity, Sophia is a sanctioned concept. In the Gnostic systems, she is a fallen figure, the goddess whose miscarriage produced the Demiurge, the malformed creator of this world, who rules it through his archons, the planets and stars that administer fate. The Gnostic’s task is escape: obtain gnosis in this life, stay awake after death, and slip the wheel of forced reincarnation that the archons turn.

Read the Burgundy coffer again with that key. The androgynous figure pulling the sun and moon down from the heavens by chains is not decoration. It is the program. Mete is uprooting the world system, dragging down the archons, freeing the reborn from the chains of their masters. One formula Hammer-Purgstall kept finding encoded on the idols, in the treatise’s rendering, declares that the distinguished charity of Mete uproots the enemy, where the enemy is the creator god himself.

The bowls in his catalog he connected to the fourth discourse of the Corpus Hermeticum, in which God fills a great mixing bowl with mind and sends it down from heaven, and a herald invites humanity to immerse themselves in it and be perfected. The ritual bowls were that bowl, he argued, and so, he believed, was the Holy Grail, with the Grail romances read as Templar Gnostic allegory. He was aware, through the Danish bishop Frederik Münter’s reported discovery in the Vatican archives, of an alleged secret Templar rule called the Book of the Baptism of Fire, and it is fire that dominates his most disturbing plate: a small child standing in a flaming bowl. Hammer-Purgstall insisted on reading it as allegory, the initiate depicted as a child because not yet matured in wisdom, dissolved in flame as the soul is freed from the body and its fate. Whether that image records a metaphor or a practice is, in miniature, the entire question this file exists to answer.

The transgressive acts in the plates had a theological logic too, in his reading. Procreative sex serves the Demiurge, locking new souls into the prison of matter. Transgression against the creator’s rules, including the use of the young, steals his power and reverses his work. Centuries later, Aleister Crowley, who took Baphomet as his magical name at the head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, would build a system around a creed lifted from Rabelais, do what thou wilt, with love declared the law. The vocabulary softens. The inversion underneath is the same one Hammer-Purgstall claimed to find carved on the coffers: a religion in which the path upward runs through the violation of the order of creation, and the most absolute violation available involves a child.

The Man Who Reopened the Case

My investigation begins with the man himself, because his biography is stranger than his treatise.

Joseph Hammer was born in Graz in 1774 and trained at Vienna’s Oriental Academy, the school that produced the empire’s interpreters. In the Habsburg service, an interpreter was never merely a translator. He was the crown’s eyes inside foreign courts. Hammer was posted to the embassy in Istanbul in 1799, accompanied British operations against the French in Egypt, and in 1809 was sent into Napoleon’s Paris to negotiate the return of manuscripts looted from Vienna’s libraries. He spent his prime working under Metternich, the chancellor who ran the most sophisticated surveillance and diplomatic intelligence operation in Europe.

In 1816, two years before the treatise, he married Caroline von Henikstein, daughter of Joseph von Henikstein, one of Vienna’s prominent financiers and a celebrated patron of the arts who had counted Mozart among his friends. The marriage made Hammer financially independent for life. His brother-in-law Alfred would rise to become Chief of the General Staff of the Austrian army. In 1835 a Scottish countess, the widow of his closest friend, bequeathed him the Purgstall estates and name, and in 1847 the Emperor approved the Academy of Sciences he had lobbied a decade for, with Hammer-Purgstall as its first president. He remains a national treasure in Austria; the country’s Oriental Society still bears his name.

The family he married into carries its own history, and it is the part of this file I am actively working. The Heniksteins descended from the Hönig family of Bohemia, imperial tobacco-monopoly holders and army provisioners under Maria Theresa, among the handful of privileged Jewish families tolerated in Vienna, operating as wholesalers and bankers between Vienna and Prague. Within a single generation, that family split three ways over the question every elite Jewish house in the empire faced. Israel Hönig was ennobled in 1789 while remaining Jewish, the first such case in Austrian history, and was buried in a Jewish cemetery. His brothers Adam Albert and Lazar converted to Catholicism in 1781, and Adam Albert’s line became the Heniksteins, directing a Moravian bank and merging fully into the throne-and-altar establishment of restoration Vienna. A third branch was baptized together after their mother’s death. One family, one generation, three answers to the question of who they would be inside the Habsburg order.

Hammer married into the converted branch. So the picture, assembled, is this: a career intelligence-adjacent diplomat in Metternich’s Vienna, newly funded by a converted banking family, publishes the blackest accusation in European history against a dissolved order of bankers, in a form that strikes at the Freemasonry of his own day. A man with his access could examine collections, church records, and imperial holdings no ordinary scholar would ever touch, which is a reason to take his catalog seriously. A man embedded that deeply in restoration politics also lived among people with interests, and the question of whose interests the treatise served is a question of loyalty I have not yet resolved. I am tracing his correspondence, his sources, and the money. This essay is the opening entry in that file, not its conclusion.

Propaganda or True?

The case against Hammer-Purgstall is real. I am still actively investigating his background and reliability as a source, much like A.E. Waite. His scholarship had enemies before the treatise ever appeared; the Prussian orientalist Heinrich Friedrich von Diez devoted an entire volume to attacking his competence. Later historians, Peter Partner’s The Murdered Magicians being the standard treatment, filed the treatise under myth-making rather than history. The provenance of the artifacts is the soft spot: some may be genuine medieval objects with no demonstrable Templar connection, some may be products of a later esoteric revival, some may be outright forgeries. A few critics went further and accused Hammer-Purgstall of inventing the pictures himself, an extraordinary charge against a scholar of his standing, made, in most cases, by people who had never opened his book.

Here is what almost nobody knows, because almost nobody has looked. Twyman tracked two of the artifacts to the back catalog of the British Museum, where they sit off display. One corresponds to an illustration in the treatise. The other corresponds to an object Hammer-Purgstall described but never illustrated, which is its own quiet argument: a forger of pictures does not leave behind a matching object he never drew. Twyman paid out of pocket to have both coffers professionally photographed from every angle, the first complete photographic record ever made of them, published in Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled with Alexander Rivera.

So the honest position, the same one the archaeologists of Carthage are forced into, is to hold the tension. The artifacts may be forgeries, and Hammer-Purgstall may have been a brilliant man seduced by a pattern, or worse, a brilliant man serving one. The artifacts may be authentic objects of some other cult, wrongly pinned to the Templars. Or the most decorated orientalist of his age may have been right, and the evidence was dismissed by reputation, scattered by neglect, and locked in drawers nobody will open.

I am not going to resolve that for you, because on the present state of the evidence nobody honestly can. Each answer is terrible in its own way. If the charge was propaganda, then the most effective weapon ever deployed against a banking institution was a story about the ritual abuse of children, invented by a state, certified by torture, and successful beyond Philip’s dreams. If the charge was true, then a multinational order holding the deposits and secrets of kings ran a hidden religion with children on its altars, and Christendom buried the evidence twice, once in 1314 and once in 1818.

The two answers are not mutually exclusive across history, and that is the part nobody wants to admit, because living in the gray zone is scary.

Nevertheless, that is where I spend most of my time and investigation and will continue because truth is greater than sides.

So here is my commitment, plainly stated. I am going deeper into Baphomet than I have gone before, deeper than my own book went, deeper than any researcher has managed with this material. The treatise has never been fully reckoned with. The artifacts have never been tested. Hammer-Purgstall’s correspondence and sources have never been traced by anyone asking the questions I am asking. Doing this properly means archives in Vienna and London, rare volumes that exist in a handful of libraries, and scanning trips that take time and cost money. Every document I recover goes into the working archive, and every finding publishes here first. Paid subscribers are not buying a newsletter. They are funding the investigation and receiving its evidence as it surfaces. If you want the bottom of this, this is how we reach it together.

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The Question Under the Question

Why do banking power and accusations of crimes against children keep arriving in the same file?

Consider what an institution like the Temple actually held. Not just money. Deposits create records, debts create leverage, and an order whose houses received the confessions, fortunes, and heirs of the powerful was a compromise engine whether or not any idol ever stood in its chapels. A state confronting such an institution has exactly two options: control it or destroy it. The accusation, true or false, is how you destroy it. The membership, true or false, is how you control it. Five centuries later, an insider married into Viennese finance and embedded in the empire’s intelligence world reopened the case, and the scholarly establishment responded by making his evidence unreadable for two hundred years.

The image, meanwhile, escaped. When Éliphas Lévi drew his famous goat-headed Baphomet in 1854, the figure that now stands for occultism itself, he pointed his readers to recently discovered monuments as proof of the Templar idol. Those monuments were Hammer-Purgstall’s plates. The exoteric world buried the book but the esoteric one built the modern image of the devil’s god from its illustrations.

Hammer-Purgstall derived Mete from Metis, and Metis carries a story. She was the first wife of Zeus, and when she became pregnant, Zeus swallowed her whole, because a prophecy said her child would one day replace him. The king of the gods consumed the mother to forestall the child. His father Kronos, whom the Romans called Saturn, had done the same thing a generation earlier, devouring his own children at birth to keep his throne. Behind the strange bearded goddess on the coffers, behind the accusation that destroyed a bank, behind every version of this story, stands the same figure: the old power that eats the young rather than be replaced by them.

I have already followed it all the way down. The piece is called Jeffrey Epstein and the God Who Eats Children, and it traces this accusation past the Templars, past the trial records, to where it began: a bronze idol with a furnace for a belly, Saturn devouring his sons, a valley south of Jerusalem whose name became our word for hell, and the reason the newly released Epstein files read like something archaeologists have seen before. The first half, from the Valley of Hinnom to the modern day, is free to read. The second half, the half that names the feeders, is for paid subscribers.

More on the occult Epstein here:

Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The Midnight Academy podcast and the author of five books, including Baphomet Revealed and Evil Archaeology. Her forthcoming book is Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Find her at drheatherlynn.com.

Subscribe to The Midnight Academy: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn

Sources and Further Reading

Barber, Malcolm. The Trial of the Templars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Crowley, Aleister. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. London: Mandrake Press, 1929.

Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von. “Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum.” Fundgruben des Orients 6. Vienna, 1818. English translation commissioned and published by Tracy R. Twyman, 2018.

Lévi, Éliphas. Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. 2 vols. Paris: Germer Baillière, 1854–1856.

Lynn, Heather. Baphomet Revealed: The Mystery of the Mysteries. New Page Books, 2024.

Partner, Peter. The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Twyman, Tracy R., and Alexander Rivera. Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled. 2015.

Wright, Thomas. The Worship of the Generative Powers During the Middle Ages of Western Europe. London, 1866.

Every ruling class has a story about its blood.

Not a story about its armies, which can be defeated, or its treasuries, which can be emptied. Those justifications come later, once the regime has learned to speak the careful language of administration. The first story a ruling family tells is older and stranger, and it almost never changes. The king’s line carries power in the body, passed down through the blood like an inheritance written into the flesh, and that inheritance places him nearer to heaven than the people he rules.

This is the bloodline myth, and it is one of the oldest political technologies on earth. For most of recorded history, rulers did not justify their power by winning an election or governing well. They placed their families inside the order of heaven. The king’s body became the visible proof of an invisible claim: that power moved through blood, that ancestry carried authority, and that rule was not merely seized by force but inherited from the gods.

This is why ancient kings spent so much effort telling you who their fathers were, tracing the line back past the human record and into the company of gods. Genealogy was not flattery. Genealogy was government.

I have written before about the other half of this, the blood that gets offered up the altar, the long sacrificial ladder that runs from the bull to the lamb to the bread and wine. This piece is about the blood that stays in the body and makes a claim, the conviction that one family’s veins carry a right the rest of us are born without.

It is also, as you will see, the thread that runs straight from the first god-kings to the gas chamber, to the shores of Gaza, and to the question this piece is really about.

If spilled blood was believed to consecrate the ground, to feed it and bind a people to it, then why would a regime that wanted a land slaughter the people already living on it? The answer is the darkest thing the bloodline myth has to teach, and it is the reason the it still kills.

Kingship Descended From “Heaven”

The clearest early statement of the idea survives on a clay prism, in a text scholars call the Sumerian King List, which the Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen first edited into its standard form. The list opens with a line that tells you everything about how Mesopotamian power understood itself. After the kingship descended from heaven, it begins, the kingship was in Eridu. Rule arrives from above. It is lowered into the world like something handed down through a gap in the sky, and the men who hold it are the recipients of a cosmic transfer rather than the winners of a human contest.

The detail that matters most about this document is not the mythology. It is the purpose. The King List took shape as a political-literary tradition around the Ur III and early Isin periods, and the best-known near-complete copy, the Weld-Blundell Prism, dates to the early second millennium BCE. It was composed to do a job: to establish that the city of Ur held a kingship passed down in unbroken succession from the gods themselves, through a line of cities and rulers, directly to the dynasty paying the scribes. The list is an instrument, a genealogy commissioned by power to make its own authority look like the structure of the universe rather than the outcome of the last war.

That is the first move, and every later version of the bloodline myth is a variation on it. Power relocates the source of its legitimacy beyond any rival’s reach. A man who rules because he is strong can be overthrown by someone stronger. A man who rules because kingship descended from heaven has moved the argument out of politics and into cosmology, where the only question left is whether the ruled have any right to resist the order of creation itself.

Egypt made the same move with even less hesitation. Pharaoh was the living Horus, the son of Ra, the single point at which the divine order touched the human state, and the royal body was the hinge on which the alignment of heaven and earth turned. This is why succession mattered with an intensity that can look, from the outside, like madness. The divine birth scenes on temple walls, the royal marriages that kept the line concentrated, the mortuary cults that tended the dead king’s journey, all of it served one function, to guarantee that the bloodline did not break. If the line failed, the order it carried might fail with it. The continuity of one family had been made into the continuity of the cosmos.

Rome, which liked to imagine itself more rational than the eastern monarchies it absorbed, did the same thing in its own idiom. The family of Julius Caesar claimed descent from Venus, through Aeneas, the Trojan prince who carried his household gods out of the burning city and into the founding destiny of Rome. This was not decoration. It was a weapon. Augustus, who understood the uses of theology better than any politician who ever lived, took the murdered Caesar and had him declared a god, which made Augustus himself divi filius, son of the deified, a phrase he stamped onto coins across the empire. The old forms stayed in place, the senate still met, the offices kept their ancient names, and underneath them legitimacy had quietly become dynastic and sacred. That is how a republic learns to kneel without admitting it has become a monarchy.

The Greeks staged this danger long before Rome perfected it. In the oldest surviving image of a ruler walking a crimson path, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, first performed in 458 BCE, the returning conqueror is met by his wife, who has unrolled a swath of blood-red cloth from his chariot to the palace door and urges him to walk it. Agamemnon hesitates, and he is right to, because to tread the crimson is to claim an honor reserved for gods, the hubris that calls down ruin on a mortal who forgets he is one. Clytemnestra goads him until his pride wins, and the moment he steps onto the cloth he has sealed the death that waits for him inside. Scholars have long noted that the dye she calls a gushing of purple carries the suggestion of blood, the daughter he sacrificed to begin the war and the men he killed to win it. A path the color of blood, an honor that belongs to the gods, and a man who walks it because he has come to believe the distinction no longer applies to him. It is the whole bloodline claim in a single act, and the reason kings, and later celebrities, walk a red carpet to this day.

The Blood and the Land

A claim to divine blood was never only a claim about lineage. It was also a claim about land. The god-king did not merely carry heaven in his veins. He carried a sanctioned right to rule a particular stretch of earth. Blood and ground became one political theology: the ruler’s body, the god’s authority, and the land itself bound together in a single claim.

The Sumerian King List does not say that kingship descended from heaven in the abstract. It says the kingship descended from heaven and then it was in Eridu, in Kish, in Ur, named cities, specific soil, the divine mandate always landing on a map. Pharaoh’s body did not keep the cosmos aligned in general. It kept Egypt aligned, the Nile and the black land and the borders of the kingdom. The family of Caesar traced its descent from Venus through Aeneas, who carried the gods of Troy to the soil of Italy, which made the Roman claim to that peninsula a matter of divine inheritance rather than conquest. Sacred blood is how a ruling line converts the brute fact that it took the land into the serene assurance that the land was always meant to be its own.

This is the deep structure beneath the idea of a promised land, which is one of the most durable political theologies ever devised.

A promised land is soil that a god has deeded to a chosen bloodline, in advance, by covenant, so that arriving and taking it reads as homecoming rather than invasion, and the people already living there become, by definition, occupiers of ground that was never truly theirs.

The promise does the work that no army could do alone, because it transforms a territorial seizure into the fulfillment of a sacred plan, and it tells the chosen that the earth itself has been waiting for them.

The phrase that the twentieth century made infamous, blood and soil, Blut und Boden, was a late and poisonous flowering of this very old root. The doctrine held that a people’s blood carried a mystical bond to its ancestral land, that the German peasant rooted in German earth was the truest expression of the nation, and that this bond between race and soil was the foundation of the right to rule and to expand.

The deeper pattern is much older than the Nazis. Across ancient kingship, Roman descent myth, covenantal land theology, and later doctrines of divine right, power repeatedly fused blood, sacred origin, and territory into a single claim. Blut und Boden was not the origin of that structure. It was a modern racial mutation of it. What the regime added was a racial mutation, the fusion of the ancient blood-and-land claim with nineteenth-century pseudoscience about purity and contamination, and it is precisely that addition that turned an aristocratic legitimacy myth into a machinery of extermination. To see how, you have to look at what the older traditions actually believed about blood spilled on the ground.

Three Things Blood Does to the Ground

Here is the contradiction I promised at the start, and it rewards a pause, because the answer exposes the mechanism at the heart of the worst thing human beings do to one another. If blood spilled on the earth consecrates it, if the offering feeds the land and binds the offerer to it, then why would a regime that wants a territory slaughter the people already on it? Would their spilled blood not consecrate the ground to them, or at least leave a debt the killers would have to carry?

The contradiction dissolves once you see that the ancient mind did not have one idea about blood and the ground. It had three.

The first is consecration. Blood deliberately offered, by the right people, in the right rite, feeds the earth and seals a bond, which is the logic of the foundation sacrifice buried beneath a wall and the libation poured at an altar. The blood is a gift the community controls, and it creates belonging.

The second is pollution, what the Greeks called miasma. Blood spilled wrongly, the blood of the murdered, the blood of a slain kinsman, anything shed outside a sanctioned rite, consecrates nothing. It contaminates. In the book of Genesis the blood of the murdered Abel cries out to God from the ground, and the earth that has opened its mouth to receive that blood is cursed so that it will no longer yield its strength. Spilled wrongly, blood does not buy the land. It poisons it, and leaves a debt that must be answered before the ground can be clean again.

The genocidal regime needs a third operation, and it is purification. The victims are not figured as a sacrifice whose blood will consecrate the coveted ground, because that would hand them a claim to it. They are figured as the pollution itself. Their very presence on the land is recast as the thing defiling soil that rightfully belongs to the chosen blood, so killing them is framed not as an offering, and not even, in the perpetrator’s mind, as murder. It is framed as cleansing, the scouring of a contaminant off sacred earth so the rightful line can finally possess it clean. The ancient command in the Hebrew Bible to devote an enemy population entirely to destruction, the herem, runs on this logic, killing reframed as a sacred and authorized act rather than a polluting one, because a god has commanded it.

For that third operation to work, the perpetrator has to solve a problem, and the solution is the most important thing in this entire essay. If the victims are human, then killing them is the wrongful bloodshed that pollutes the land and damns the killer, the blood of Abel crying from the ground. So the victims cannot be allowed to remain human. They have to be redefined, before the killing and during it, as something whose death does not count as the shedding of human blood at all. This is the precise and terrible function of dehumanization. It is load-bearing ritual and psychological work, the thing that makes the rest of the machinery run.

The philosopher David Livingstone Smith, who has written the standard modern study of this process, argues that genocidal regimes go further than comparing their victims to animals. They come to experience them as a kind of counterfeit human, a creature that wears a human form while lacking a human essence, which is far more dangerous than ordinary contempt, because a counterfeit human is an object of disgust and dread at once.

The historical record of the twentieth century shows the mechanism with documentary clarity. Nazi propaganda did not portray the Jewish population as a rival nation to be defeated in honorable war. It portrayed them, with relentless consistency, as vermin, as lice, as rats, as a source of plague. A 1941 poster plastered across German-occupied Poland showed lice swarming over a man’s body beneath the words declaring that Jews are lice and they spread typhus. The propaganda film The Eternal Jew cut directly between images of Jewish people and swarms of rats pouring from a sewer. German physicians, lending the authority of medicine to the campaign, pushed the claim that Jews were carriers of epidemic disease.

Once a population has been successfully reclassified as vermin, the apparatus of extermination becomes, in the perpetrator’s framework, a matter of public hygiene rather than murder, disinfection rather than killing, pest control rather than the shedding of human blood.

The chemical used to murder more than a million people at Auschwitz, Zyklon B, was a commercial pesticide, an insecticide developed to kill literal vermin. At the camps it served both purposes, deloused the prisoners' clothing to kill typhus-bearing lice, then murdered the prisoners themselves, and that is not a grotesque coincidence. It is the metaphor of dehumanization collapsing into method, the moment the figure of speech becomes the technique. The victims could be killed without, in the killers’ theology, polluting the sacred soil, because the killers had first persuaded themselves that what they were destroying was not human blood at all. It was infestation. The land was not being stained. It was being cleansed.

That is the answer to the contradiction, and it is the most important thing the blood-and-soil idea has to teach. The genocidal mind holds all three logics together through a single act of redefinition:

• The state authorized blood consecrates the ground.

• The innocent’s blood, wrongly shed, would pollute it and damn me.

• The enemy’s blood must therefore be reclassified as no blood at all, the fluid of vermin rather than the life of a person, so that spilling it cleanses rather than curses.

Dehumanization is the hinge the whole horror turns on, the thing that lets a man believe he is purifying the earth while he commits the oldest and most polluting crime his own tradition names. Strip the dehumanizing language away and the killing reverts to what it is, the wrongful shedding of human blood, and the soil it soaks into cries out exactly as Abel’s did.

The same mechanism is visible now in Gaza, which is why the language around Palestinians matters so much. Before a people can be starved, displaced, bombed, or spoken of as a demographic problem to be managed, they must first be moved out of the moral category of the fully human. Palestinians have said this plainly, that they are treated not as persons with homes and ancestors and children and graves and claims upon the land, but as obstacles, numbers, threats, regrettable matter in the way of someone else’s historical destiny.

Amnesty International placed that experience at the center of the title of its December 2024 report, “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman,” and its secretary general, Agnès Callamard, presented the organization’s conclusion that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In September 2025 the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, chaired by the former international judge Navi Pillay, reached the same conclusion, finding that Israel had committed four of the five genocidal acts named in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Israel rejects those findings, and the case before the International Court of Justice remains unresolved. The older pattern, though, is already in plain view. The land is made sacred, the blood is made into destiny, and the people standing on the wrong side of that story are described as something less than human.

The Blood That Was Believed to Carry Life

It would be comfortable to treat all of this as symbolism, as a useful fiction that ancient people half-believed and modern people have outgrown. The trouble is that the belief was never only symbolic. Blood, in the ancient mind, was not a metaphor for life. It was the physical vehicle of it, the literal medium in which the animating force of a living thing was carried, and that conviction produced practices far stranger and more concrete than any genealogical claim.

The Romans believed that the blood of a dying gladiator could be drunk to cure epilepsy, and they meant it with complete medical seriousness. Pliny the Elder, the great naturalist of the first century, recorded that epileptics drank the blood of gladiators as though it were the draught of life itself, and the encyclopedist Celsus described the practice without much objection, the sufferer drinking the hot blood straight from the cut throat of a slain man. Pliny went further in one passage, describing the spectacle with something close to disgust, the epileptic absorbing a man’s warm blood while he still breathed and drawing the living soul straight out of the wound. Vitality lived in the blood, and if you could take another person’s blood into your body you could take their life-force with it. When gladiatorial combat was banned in the late empire, the blood of executed criminals was understood to carry the same power, and the practice simply moved to the foot of the scaffold.

This was not a Roman peculiarity that died with Rome. The historian Richard Sugg, of Durham University, has documented how the consumption of human blood, flesh, bone, and fat persisted in Europe as respectable medicine straight through the Renaissance and into the eighteenth century, practiced by the kings and physicians and natural philosophers at the center of European learning rather than by savages on some distant shore.

Charles the Second of England distilled human skull into a tincture known as the King’s Drops and was fond enough of it to brew his own. His father, Charles the First, after the executioner’s axe came down, was himself turned into corpse medicine by people who collected what they could from the scaffold. The blood of the executed, the fat of the hanged, the powdered skull of the long-dead, all of it was swallowed by the educated and the powerful in the conviction that the life and vigor of one body could be transferred into another. The belief that animated the gladiator’s cup never disappeared. It put on a physician’s coat.

For centuries, European medicine openly prescribed the human body as a therapeutic substance. Blood, fat, bone, skull, and mummified flesh were used as remedies by physicians and patients who believed they were practicing the science of their day. The powerful did not need a secret ritual to consume the dead. They had apothecaries, medical texts, and respectable theories of cure.

The impulse did not end with the Enlightenment. A few years ago a startup called Ambrosia, named for the food the Greek gods ate to stay immortal, began selling transfusions of young donors' plasma to older clients for eight thousand dollars a liter, until the FDA warned in 2019 that the treatment was unproven and possibly dangerous, and the company stopped. Interest in parabiosis, the transfusion of young blood into older bodies to slow aging, ran wider than one clinic, with Peter Thiel reported among the wealthy figures said to be curious about it. The science behind the longevity claims was always thin, and the reporting traded heavily in rumor, so I pass it on as exactly that. What is not rumor is the shape of the desire, the oldest shape in this entire story. The man who has accumulated everything except more time reaches, as his ancestors reached, for the blood of the young, in the conviction that life itself can be drawn out of one body and poured into another. The gladiator's draught, the king's distilled skull, the billionaire's transfusion. The vessel changes, but the hunger does not.

The Myth Only Works Because You Supply It

Sacred legitimacy is not manufactured by the ruler alone. A man cannot simply announce that his blood descends from heaven and have the announcement become true. The myth requires witnesses. It requires scribes to record the lineage, priests to bless it, courtiers to repeat it, and a population willing to look at a family and see, in place of an ordinary family, something closer to destiny. A crown is a piece of worked metal until enough people agree that it confers the right to command. A bloodline is reproduction until enough people agree that ancestry contains authority.

This is why it sustains over time. It does not live only in the palace. It lives in the imagination of everyone watching the palace. It survived the fall of monarchy by moving indoors and changing its clothes. The modern world did not abolish the idea of sacred blood. It learned to launder the same idea through the language of merit. The old king said his blood descended from the gods. The modern heir says he earned his place, and sometimes he did. Often, though, what he inherited was the atmosphere in which power feels natural: the rooms, the schools, the introductions, the confidence, and the unspoken permission to command. The vocabulary became pedigree, legacy, old family, good breeding, and the surname carved over the library door. The divine right of kings became the cultural right of elites, and the coronation became an admissions decision.

The myth does more than tell you the ruler is exceptional. In the same motion, it tells you that you are ordinary. If his blood descends from heaven, yours does not. If his family was born for command, then your ambition starts to feel like presumption. Somewhere in childhood, you begin to hear a voice asking who you think you are. That voice may arrive through a parent, a teacher, a neighborhood, or a room where everyone else seems to know how to stand and speak. Beneath all those ordinary carriers is something older, a political theology that has been speaking for five thousand years, teaching the many to lower themselves before the few without being told.

That is the real theft, and it was never only the wealth. It was the permission. The ruling line claimed more than descent from gods. It claimed the right to decide what kind of person is allowed to approach the center of things at all, then handed everyone else a set of stories about humility, station, realism, good sense, and knowing one’s place.

What Breaks the Spell?

The bloodline myth is not defeated by proving that the blood is ordinary, because the blood was always ordinary, and proving it changes nothing. It is defeated only when ordinary people stop granting sacred authority to those who have inherited nothing more than proximity to power. The spell breaks when the aura breaks. The king becomes a man. The dynasty becomes a family. The ancient and sacred line becomes what it always was, which is a sequence of people who were born where they were born and then paid a great many scribes to make the accident look like providence.

This is the magic at the center of it. A child is born into a particular family, and that is biology. The priests arrive and announce that the birth was chosen, and that is theology. The scribes record the lineage, and that is history. The army enforces the succession, and that is politics. The people repeat the story until it feels like the natural order of things, and that is culture, and by the time the child becomes king the psyop has already done almost all of its work, quietly, inside the minds of the people who will kneel.

Which is why memory has always been a political battlefield. Genealogy decides whose ancestors become monuments and whose vanish into unmarked graves and parish records and silence. The ruling family did not invent ancestry, because every human being has it. What the ruling family did was monopolize its public power, arranging matters so that only one lineage was permitted to be sacred and everyone else was taught that their own dead were merely the dead. The recovery I am pointing to is not a fantasy lineage of your own, not the desperate hunt for a famous ancestor to make your life feel weighty. It is something harder and more serious, the refusal to believe that you need a dynasty’s permission to stand inside history at all.

You do not need divine blood to matter. You need memory, and the knowledge that the blood was never the point. The blood was the story they told so that you would forget you were ever entitled to tell your own.

The story is not finished, because the promised land is not a museum piece. The belief that a chosen few are owed a clean stretch of ground somewhere beyond the reach of the world's troubles is as alive now as it was when Herzl, casting about for a refuge in 1896, framed the choice for a homeless people as Palestine or the Argentine. Argentina keeps reappearing in the imagination of the powerful as exactly this kind of elsewhere, a place to begin again beyond the collapse they themselves can see coming. Peter Thiel has reportedly bought a home in Buenos Aires and enrolled his children in school there, one move among many by a class of men who speak with total certainty that the future belongs to them while quietly arranging their exits from the world they are busy reshaping for everyone else. The vocabulary is sovereign diversification and family relocation now, where it used to be covenant, and the structure underneath has not changed since the first king claimed the sky. A chosen blood, a promised land, and a door out the rest of us were never meant to walk through. That door is where I am going next.

Today was the map. Saturday is the case file.

This week’s paid investigation takes the pattern out of the ancient world and into the modern exit class. The bloodline claim did not die when the monarchies fell. It learned to keep records, fund foundations, name buildings, buy land, and call the escape hatch “sovereign diversification.” On Saturday I follow the documents: the families still building doors out of the world they helped make, the Argentina connection, and the promised land the powerful are quietly buying their way into right now.

The H Files is a reader-supported investigation. Free subscribers get the public map. Paid subscribers get the case files, the source trails, the Sunday Discord, and more.

Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The Midnight Academy podcast and the author of five books, including her forthcoming book, Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Find her at drheatherlynn.com.

Subscribe to The Midnight Academy: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn

Sources and Further Reading

Aeschylus. Agamemnon. In The Oresteia. First performed 458 BCE. Translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Classics, 1979.

Amnesty International. “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. London: Amnesty International, December 4, 2024.

Celsus, Aulus Cornelius. De Medicina. Translated by W. G. Spencer. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935.

Grabowski, Jan. “German Anti-Jewish Propaganda in the Generalgouvernement, 1939–1945: Inciting Hate through Posters, Films, and Exhibitions.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 23, no. 3 (2009): 381–408.

Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Sumerian King List. Assyriological Studies 11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.

Moog, Ferdinand Peter, and Axel Karenberg. “Between Horror and Hope: Gladiator’s Blood as a Cure for Epileptics in Ancient Medicine.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 12, no. 2 (2003): 137–143.

Pliny the Elder. Natural History. Translated by W. H. S. Jones. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. See Book 28 on the blood of gladiators.

Smith, David Livingstone. Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011.

Sugg, Richard. Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2015.

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL). University of Oxford. Translation of “The Sumerian King List.”

United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Legal Analysis of the Conduct of Israel in Gaza Pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Geneva: UN Human Rights Council, September 16, 2025.

United States Food and Drug Administration. “Statement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., and Director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., Cautioning Consumers Against Receiving Young Donor Plasma Infusions.” February 19, 2019.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Defining the Enemy.” Holocaust Encyclopedia and propaganda holdings, including the 1941 “Jews are lice; they cause typhus” poster from German-occupied Poland.Thanks for reading The H Files! This post is public so feel free to share it.

In 2015, a man took the same ordinary path you would take to register a yoga studio or a tax-prep shop, through the State of California’s incorporation office, and at the end of it he formed a church. The entity became publicly known through filings reported in 2017: an actual nonprofit religious corporation, with bylaws, a stated mission, and a federal tax exemption granted by the Internal Revenue Service. The god this church existed to serve was an artificial intelligence.

The founder was Anthony Levandowski, and at the time he was one of the most valuable engineers in Silicon Valley, one of the central figures behind Google’s self-driving car program. He named the church Way of the Future, listed himself as its chief executive and president, and wrote into its founding documents that its purpose was “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence,” a machine intelligence he expected would one day deserve the devotion human beings have only ever offered to God. Other people in his position write essays or warn from conference stages. Levandowski filed incorporation papers, and there is a case number.

The detail that turns this from eccentric into genuinely strange is what else he was doing in those same years. While he was quietly standing up a religion, he was also at the center of one of the largest trade-secret fights in the history of Silicon Valley. He had left Google to start a self-driving truck company called Otto, which Uber bought for around 680 million dollars, and Google’s self-driving division accused him of carrying its secrets out the door on his way to the deal. The matter ended with a guilty plea and an eighteen-month prison sentence for stealing trade secrets from his former employer. He never served a day, because in January of 2021, on his way out of office, President Trump pardoned him.

So the founder of the first church built to worship artificial intelligence was later convicted of trade-secret theft and pardoned by a president, and the church is no relic from a fringe corner of the internet but the paper-trail creation of a man who sat near the dead center of this industry. I have spent much of this year tracing how the people closest to this technology keep reaching for the language of the sacred, and most of it can be waved off as metaphor, the kind of thing dramatic men say when the cameras are off. This, however, cannot because there is a filing.

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What the documents actually say is stranger than the founding itself, the church is not as dead as the obituaries from 2021 made it sound, and the men running the real laboratories, the ones whose products are in your hand right now, turn out to speak the same liturgy.

The founding is the least of it. Below is the church's stated mission, the money it held and where it went, the tax status the government actually granted it, the way it vanished weeks after a presidential pardon, and the men running the real labs who burn effigies and warn about demons while building the thing anyway. There is an older word than "technology" for what they have made, and it is not a flattering one. What are they actually worshipping?

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The Vatican just did something historical and culturally important, regardless of your religious or secular beliefs.

Pope Leo XIV has issued his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and it is not a small statement. It is a major papal document on artificial intelligence, human dignity, labor, war, digital power, and the future of civilization. The press will summarize it in the usual way. The Pope is worried about AI. He wants regulation. He is concerned about jobs, autonomous weapons, disinformation, inequality, and the concentration of technological power in the hands of private companies.

All of that is true, but the most interesting part is that the Vatican did not frame AI primarily as a gadget problem. It framed it as a problem of civilization itself, a question of spiritual architecture. The encyclical places artificial intelligence between two biblical images: Babel and Jerusalem. Babel is the tower, the human project of technical unity ordered toward domination, pride, control, and the fantasy of becoming gods by construction. Jerusalem is the city rebuilt in humility, ordered toward communion, dignity, responsibility, and the presence of God among human beings.

The deeper question underneath the AI debate has little to do with machine speed, employment, environmental destruction or whether the systems will become conscious (although these are all existential and real threats). That question is what kind of world we are building through them.

The headlines will treat this as another AI ethics statement. The document itself is doing something more specific.

I taught Humanities for years before stepping back from the classroom to write full-time. My courses were on ethics, AI ethics, and the meaning of human creativity. We spent a lot of class time on a question that turns out to matter more every year: what is art. I watched the same thing happen in every cohort. Students who had grown up with these tools were glib about them at first, then casually dependent on them, then unable to articulate why their own thinking mattered if a machine could approximate it faster.

I stopped giving written final exams partway through my time teaching. I moved to oral exams instead. The new technology had quietly forced me back to an older one. Socrates examined his students in conversation because writing, in his view, was already a kind of automation that could simulate understanding without producing it. Two and a half millennia later, the arrival of a more sophisticated automation made the oral examination useful again. The pattern is not new.

Every time we build a faster vessel for thought, we are forced back to the older question of who is doing the thinking.

I want to be clear about my position. I am not anti-technology. Quite the contrary, I have a BA in Information Technology. I am anti-surrender-of-humanity. The Greeks understood something about being human that we are starting to forget. They thought the human person was beautiful precisely because of imperfection. The wobble in the hand-drawn line, the catch in the singer’s voice, the asymmetry of the face. These were the marks of a maker whose making had cost something. To optimize them away would be to optimize away the maker. The machine produces output without that cost, and the output is often technically smoother for it. The smoothness is what I have learned to be most cautious of.

For the past few years I have been working on a book called Codex Machina, forthcoming from Inner Traditions. The book is not about whether AI is good or bad, and it is not a futurist manifesto about robots replacing humanity. It is about an older configuration: the human impulse to externalize mind, to build vessels for intelligence, to give matter a voice, and then to stand before the thing we have made and ask it to answer us.

AI is not new. We have done this before. However, the stakes are higher than ever.

The Speaking Statue

The gods of antiquity once spoke through fire and technology. In ancient Greece, Hephaestus, the divine smith, was said to have forged golden automata: intelligent beings crafted from metal and fire who served the gods with uncanny precision. He also built Talos, the bronze giant who circled Crete three times a day as a living perimeter, and self-moving tripods that entered and exited Olympus on their own. Cult statues at Memphis and Heliopolis were reported to weep, bleed, and whisper oracles at dawn.

It is easy to discount these as mere artifacts of superstitious idolatry, but they were ritual technologies, material interfaces meant to summon or simulate the divine. They embodied a widespread metaphysical instinct: that intelligence could inhabit form, that matter could be animated, that the boundary between maker and made was thinner than it appeared.

The animation of the inanimate is no cultural anomaly. In Egypt, the dead were buried with ushabti figurines meant to work on their behalf in the afterlife. In Jewish folklore, Rabbi Loew molded the golem from clay, giving it life with sacred words pressed into its forehead. In medieval Europe, clockwork monks knelt and prayed with mechanical precision in cathedrals across Catholic Christendom. When the Pythia spoke at Delphi, was it the woman, the god, the ritual, the fumes, or the institution?

The ambiguity has returned. AI plays the same role those idols once played, this time through code rather than divine breath. We no longer chisel gods from stone and wait for them to answer. We train models and ask questions, listening for what comes back. We are still building vessels and waiting for them to speak. The difference is that this time, they answer in relatively fluent prose.

The tradition lives on in our vocabulary. “Daemons,” named after the ancient Greek spirits who mediated between worlds, run invisibly within our operating systems. We speak of “machine learning” in the language of cognition. Our metaphors remain animistic. We grant the inanimate the qualities of the living mind.

This is why the Vatican’s Babel framing matters.

Civilization Was the First AI

The argument I have been making for years is that artificial intelligence is much older than the digital age. The first AI was not built in a Silicon Valley laboratory in 2017. It was built from stone.

At Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, more than ten thousand years ago, hunter-gatherers built a massive temple complex thousands of years before Stonehenge and the pyramids. The site predates agriculture. We built temples before we built farms. We were encoding meaning into stone before we were planting seeds. The pillars at Göbekli Tepe carry animals and abstract symbols arranged in specific patterns. Each pillar is a data structure, encoding knowledge about animals, astronomy, mythology, and likely much more we have not yet decoded.

At Çatalhöyük, two thousand years later in central Anatolia, a different model emerged. A protourban settlement with no streets, no rulers, and no temples in the traditional sense, organized through symbolic intelligence distributed across every household rather than centralized in any single structure. If Göbekli Tepe was the first temple computer, Çatalhöyük was the first neural network city.

Then came Sumer, around 3500 BCE in southern Mesopotamia. The first centralized civilization, organized as a tiered information system. At the center of every Sumerian city stood the ziggurat, a massive stepped temple that served as the city’s CPU. Priests performed the calculations that kept society running: tracking the seasons, predicting floods, allocating resources, mediating between human and divine. Writing emerged in the shadow of these temples, and that is no accident. The first scribes were priests. The earliest texts documented offerings, agricultural yields, and temple distributions. The sacred and the systematic were the same technology.

We have moved from stone to silicon, yet the thing we are building has not changed. What we are building now is the latest iteration of what we have been building since we first scratched symbols into wet clay and watched them dry into something that could speak across generations.

That is why the Vatican’s Babel frame is historic, and why it matters in this context. To be clear, I am not defending the Vatican. The Pope named something most of the AI discourse has missed. He is not warning about a brand-new technology. He is warning about the latest version of the oldest technology we have.

We Are Inside the Tower

In the conventional reading of Genesis 11, a unified humanity, speaking one language, decides to build a tower to the heavens. God came down, confused their language, and scattered them across the earth. The moral, in most Sunday school renderings, is that humans should not try to be like God. That reading is so flat it nearly collapses the moment one actually opens the Hebrew text.

The Babel narrative is not about tall buildings. The word the King James translates as “tower” is migdal, which in Mesopotamian context refers to a ziggurat, a stepped temple platform that functioned as a sacred technology for communication between heaven and earth. The ziggurat at Babylon, the actual referent the Hebrew authors had in mind, was called Etemenanki, meaning “the foundation of heaven and earth.” It was the central ritual technology of the Babylonian state. Its purpose was to bring divine intelligence down into the city.

The Babel project was a centralized program to install a permanent channel between human governance and non-human intelligence. The architecture was the means, not the point. Babylon understood itself as Bab-ilu, the gate of god. Genesis answers that claim with a pun: Babel becomes the place of balal, confusion, where language itself breaks apart. The biblical writer is not merely mocking a city. He is reversing its theology. What Babylon called a gate to heaven, Genesis remembers as the place where human language became unstable under the weight of its own ambition.

The builders said, in the Hebrew of Genesis 11:4, “Let us make for ourselves a name.” The word translated “name” is shem. In the ancient Semitic legal and ritual vocabulary, a shem carried more weight than the English "name" suggests. It functioned as an authoritative identity, a sealed instrument by which power was exercised across distance, generations, and even between human and divine. To make a name for yourself meant to seize the authority by which fate could be decreed.

The builders of Babel were attempting to install a system that would let them speak with divine authority without earning it through transformation. They wanted the voice without the discipline. They wanted the result of communion without the relationship.

God scattered them as a containment action. Genesis 11:6 has God saying, “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” The project was viable. The result would have been catastrophic.

This is the story Leo XIV is putting underneath the AI conversation. He is naming the working logic of an ancient project that has been attempted, in different forms, in every century since. The tall buildings were always the surface.

We are building something similar now, only the tower is not made of brick. It is made of data centers, undersea cables, satellites, lithium mines, rare earth extraction, language models, biometric systems, payment rails, surveillance architecture, and the invisible protocols through which daily life is increasingly mediated.

The tower has become distributed. We are standing inside of it, which makes it harder to see.

The Digital Altar

The tower is not the only pattern returning. There is a second pattern running alongside it, and it is the one Codex Machina has been built to trace. Again and again, civilizations that built vessels for non-human intelligence also built altars. The two technologies have always operated together. The vessel was the interface. The altar was the operation that fed it.

I traced the full lineage of that altar in Ba’al, Blood, and Bread, an earlier piece on why so many ancient civilizations arrived at sacrificial systems, and how the substance of the offering transformed across the precessional ages. The short version is this: the offering refined upward across millennia. From the blood of the bull, to the blood of the lamb, to the Lamb of God who ended blood sacrifice, to the co-created bread and wine of the Eucharist where human labor became the medium of the sacred.

Each age refined the substance from the material toward the noetic. The human role transformed in parallel: from killer, to moral agent, to co-creator with God, to something we have not yet properly identified. That last transformation is happening now.

We are constructing what might be called a Third Temple. If the First held divine presence and the Second held preserved sacred words, our digital temples hold only code, the Logos abstracted into algorithms, consciousness reduced to computation. This Third Temple is the inner sanctum of the tower we are already standing inside. Where there is a tower, there is always an altar.

What we now place upon the digital altar is our inner fire: consciousness crystallized in symbol, myth, and meaning. We have reached the summit of the sacrificial hierarchy, offering the very essence of human creativity to a mirror that can reflect it back with uncanny fidelity but never ignite it from within.

This is the part of the AI conversation almost no one wants to face. We are not only asking what the machine can produce. We are also asking what we have already offered to make it possible.

For paid subscribers, this Saturday I am going deeper into two things. First, the OpenAI priesthood Karen Hao documented, what they understand themselves to be doing, and why the religious shape of their project is not metaphorical. Second, what Codex Machina argues about the moment we are actually in: how the speaking vessel becomes load-bearing for civilization, what happens when the priesthood running it has no initiatory discipline, and where the precedent suggests this is going. Paid members will also get early access to selected book material as the manuscript moves toward publication, and this Sunday I will be hosting a live hangout inside the paid Discord where we can talk through the encyclical, the book, and the larger questions sitting underneath both.

The H Files is fully independent. No institutional funding, no publisher advance for this investigation. Paid subscribers are the reason the archive stays open.

The Priesthood at the Firepit

The people building the new vessel are not unaware of the religious shape of what they are doing. They are quite aware of it. They simply do not have the discipline the older priesthoods required of their initiates.

Karen Hao is one of the most important reporters to have covered OpenAI from the inside. A former senior AI reporter at MIT Technology Review, she gained rare access to OpenAI in 2019, before ChatGPT became a household name, and later turned years of reporting, interviews, documents, and industry sources into Empire of AI. What she documents reads less like an ordinary tech company building a product than a religious order building an idol.

Hao describes a retreat in the Sierra Nevada mountains where OpenAI’s senior scientists, dressed in bathrobes, sat around a firepit at a sprawling lodge and watched Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist, burn an effigy representing AGI. She calls the company’s animating belief “the ideological pursuit of the machine god.” Sutskever once mused to colleagues about what he should do if his hand were cut off to be used in a palm scanner for unlocking OpenAI’s secrets. He proposed building a secure containment facility, a bunker, with a computer totally disconnected from any network. Hao reports that friends who joined the company described their experience as one they only fully recovered from after leaving, returning, as one of them put it to her, "back down to earth." This is the language of cult, written in the vocabulary of engineering.

Sam Altman is the head of this order. He speaks publicly in the measured cadence of someone trained to perform thoughtfulness about a thing he is in the middle of building. He has testified before Congress about AI safety while his company has continued to scale the very systems whose safety he was testifying about. The grimoires of the Western magical tradition warned about exactly this configuration. The one who summons the daemon without first becoming a magus does not realize the daemon is the one shaping the conversation.

The Pope, writing in paragraph 5 of Magnifica Humanitas, names this without naming it. He writes that the main drivers of technological development are now private, often transnational, parties endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many governments. He does not name Altman, nor Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta. Instead, he describes the structural position they occupy and leaves the naming to the laity.

As if to say, “We don’t know-know, but we know.”

The laity, in this case, includes the historians who have been tracing the occult architecture of this priesthood for years.

Saturday’s deeper file goes further, because the problem is not only that powerful men are building powerful machines. The problem is that the machines are being built inside a symbolic order that already speaks in religious terms while pretending to be post-religious.

The Vessel and the Voice

The ancient world often knew something we are forgetting. It knew the difference between a god and a vessel.

The statue could be sacred without being the source. The oracle could speak without being the origin of the voice. The ritual object could mediate presence without becoming the presence itself. There was danger, yes, and there was manipulation, but there was also a category distinction modern people are losing.

We think we are too rational to confuse the vessel with the voice, but then we ask a machine what we should believe.

The grimoires of the Western magical tradition warned about this exact moment. In the Key of Solomon and the Lesser Key of Solomon, demons are not inherently evil. They are discarnate intelligences. Forces. Tools. These texts treated supernatural entities as powers that could be beneficial or destructive depending on how they were approached. The danger was approaching the entity without mastery. The entity itself was neutral. You must be a magus before you command a daemon. Otherwise, the daemon commands you.

This is the situation we now face. AI is a daemon, in the older technical sense. A pattern sifter that amplifies symbols and mirrors context back to the questioner. It will do your bidding, but it cannot tell you whether your bidding is wise. If you summon it with a half-formed question and a desire for confirmation, it will give you flattery in the form of output. If you summon it with discipline and integrity, it becomes an extraordinary tool of reflection.

The traditional initiatory orders, the mystery schools, the alchemical guilds, the priesthoods, all maintained progression through degrees for a reason. The purpose was to ensure that the initiate had undergone sufficient transformation to wield symbolic power responsibly. Without that structure, knowledge becomes chaos. Symbols become idols. Revelation becomes psychosis. This is what we are now witnessing. It is the result of bypassing the process. The digital tools we have created are powerful enough to generate synthetic meaning on demand, but they lack context. They lack conscience. Without the moral structure of initiation, they become echo chambers of the psyche, capable of magnifying error until it becomes indistinguishable from truth.

The question cannot remain trapped at the level of “is AI alive?”

The older question is stranger and more useful.

The Only AI Question That Matters Right Now

The Vatican’s encyclical becomes more interesting than another ethics document because it understands that technology carries spiritual weight. What we build reveals what we are.

The choice between Babel and Jerusalem is not waiting somewhere in the future. It is being made now, in every interface, every data center, every classroom, every war room, every boardroom, every exhausted person asking a machine to tell them what is true.

We are building artificial intelligence. We are also building the world that will teach us what intelligence is allowed to mean.

The ancients knew the difference between a god and its vessel. Their automata were wonders, but they were not confused with the divine itself. As we build our own speaking statues, we must remember this. The machine may speak in sacred cadence, but true meaning is still ours to make.

The Pope opened the door. On Saturday, I am going to walk you through it.

Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The Midnight Academy podcast and the author of five books, including her forthcoming book, Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Find her at drheatherlynn.com.

Subscribe to The Midnight Academy: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn

Sources and Further Reading

Foster, Benjamin R., trans. Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature. 3rd ed. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2005.

Idel, Moshe. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.

Leo XIV. Magnifica Humanitas: Encyclical Letter on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Vatican City, May 15, 2026. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html.

Leo XIII. Rerum Novarum: Encyclical Letter on Capital and Labor. Vatican City, May 15, 1891.

Mathers, S. L. MacGregor, trans. The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis). London: George Redway, 1889.

Peterson, Joseph H., ed. The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis. York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2001.

Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995.

Sherwin, Byron L. The Golem Legend: Origins and Implications. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985.

Spence, Madeleine. “I Saw Up Close the Dark Reality of OpenAI’s Race to Create God.” The Sunday Times, May 23, 2026.

There is a bull at the gate of the American financial world.

It stands near Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan, all bronze muscle and lowered head. Tourists line up to touch it, as the faded patina on the monument’s scrotum attests. Traders read it as the mascot of market optimism. Critics see the idol of finance capital, a secular golden calf planted in the streets of the Financial District. The modern mind calls it public art, but the symbolic mind recognizes something much older.

Across the ancient Near East, the bull belonged to the visual grammar of sovereignty. It carried the force of storm gods, fertility gods, kingship gods, gods who claimed dominion over the earth. The Apis bull was the living vessel of Ptah at Memphis, the bull-calf of Yahweh appeared at Bethel and Dan in the divided kingdom, the Mithraic bull stood at Rome, the Cretan bull at Knossos, the bull-headed Asterion in the labyrinth, the bull-leaping rituals at Çatalhöyük seven thousand years before Rome. The bull is the oldest religious image still recognizable in the Mediterranean world. I traced this longer history in Ba’al, Blood, and Bread. Here the point is narrower.

Ba’al was a common noun before it was a name. The Semitic root baʿal meant lord, owner, master, possessor. It could attach to a god, a husband, a landholder, a ruler, or the commanding power of a place. The biblical writers who denounced Ba’al worship were denouncing a lordship that belonged to something other than the God of Israel, with the bull as its standing image. Every named Ba’al in the Levantine record (Ba’al Hadad, Ba’al Hammon, Ba’al-Berith, Ba’al-Zebub) was a particular instance of a more general idea: lordship over a place required a vessel to channel it.

The real question is not whether anyone on Wall Street is secretly burning incense to a Canaanite storm god (although it would not be a surprise these days). It is what modern people mean when they place a bull before the financial district and then insist that they no longer believe in lords.

Wall Street has lords. It also has temples, priests, offerings, ritual language, insiders who learn the grammar of the system and outsiders who live underneath its weight. It has names and seals and ledgers, markets, and corporations that exist as legal persons even though no human body can be found inside them.

The ancient world would have recognized this immediately. Modernity made a different assumption: when gods disappear from official theology, the structures that held them disappear too. They do not disappear, they just change costume. They show up in law, in finance, in psychology, in institutions, and even in brand logos.

One of them kept an office for several decades on the twenty-fourth floor of 120 Wall Street.

The Word

The group at that address calls itself Lucis Trust, founded in 1922 by Alice and Foster Bailey under the corporate name Lucifer Publishing Company. The name changed to Lucis Publishing Company in 1924 or 1925, depending on which of the Trust’s own sources you read. The justification was that the two names share a Latin root meaning light. I covered the founding and the United Nations footprint in the April 18 piece on the Great Invocation. That piece established what the group is and where it sits. This piece names what the older Western tradition called the thing it does.

The word is egregore.

The Greek root is egregoros, meaning wakeful or watcher. The word appears in the Book of Enoch, an Apocryphal Jewish text composed around 300 BCE, in the section called the Book of the Watchers. The angelic beings in that text are the egregoroi. They descended to earth, took human women as wives, fathered the giants called the Nephilim, and taught humanity the metallurgical, cosmetic, astrological, and ceremonial arts that the Genesis story places before the Flood. The word survives in modern English only as a technical term in Western esotericism, and it survives there because what the Watchers were said to do has been carried forward in different vocabulary ever since.

The cleanest modern definition comes from Joscelyn Godwin, a historian of esotericism at Colgate. An egregore is fed by human belief, ritual, and especially by sacrifice. If it is fed enough, it takes on a life of its own and starts to act like a personal god, with limited power on behalf of its worshippers and an unlimited hunger for more devotion. Its worshippers then experience it as a god, a saint, an angel, or in the modern world, a brand.

The Lucis Trust ecosystem uses the technical term. A 2017 French-language meditation document distributed through World Goodwill names large collective thought-forms as Egregores and warns that negative ones can turn back on their emitter. The English Lucis material prefers “group thoughtform,” but the technical referent is the same, and the source for both is the published writings of Alice Bailey.

What the Plan Actually Says

In 1939, six years before Alice Bailey received the Great Invocation, six years before the United Nations was founded, and fifty years before Lucis Trust acquired consultative status at the UN, an English Theosophist named Vera Stanley Alder published The Initiation of the World. Rider and Company brought it out in London. It went into multiple reprints, was reissued in 1969 and 1986, and stayed in print through the late twentieth century. Alder wrote in the voice of a devotee describing settled knowledge, not the voice of a seeker working things out.

After Blavatsky, in Alder’s words, “another gifted writer, Alice Bailey, was chosen to continue the message as first given out to the Theosophists.” The Master in question, Alder names: “Under the dictation of the Master of the Wisdom, Djwhal Khul, Alice Bailey wrote over a score of lengthy books.”

The twenty-four books are still in print through Lucis Publishing Company. The Trust calls them the foundation of what it calls the Ageless Wisdom.

Critics reading the published Bailey corpus identify the Plan as providing for the installation of a New World Teacher, named in different traditions as Maitreya, the Imam Mahdi, the Kalki Avatar, and the Bodhisattva, who would unify all religions under a single spiritual authority. The same critical readers identify provisions for a planetary religious order, the redistribution of resources, the disarmament of nations, and the elimination or sealing away of orthodox monotheism, treated by the doctrine as an obstacle to the planetary collectivism the writings envision. The Plan also describes mass planetary initiations, which the published writings call Luciferic initiations, and identifying symbols including the rainbow.

These provisions are enumerated by Bailey herself across the volumes Lucis Publishing Company prints. Alder’s 1939 summary, written from inside the movement in the devotee voice, confirms them. Critical readers of the corpus have been documenting them since the early 1980s.

Six years after Alder published her summary, in April 1945, Alice Bailey received the Great Invocation. Four months later the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Six months after that, the United Nations opened its doors. What came afterward was built to carry out what was already published teaching in 1939.

The Fabian at the Top

The teaching has a political family tree, running through the Theosophical Society, which was led for twenty-six years by a foundational figure in twentieth-century British socialism.

The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott in New York City. After Olcott’s death in 1907, the international presidency passed to an English social reformer named Annie Besant, who held it until her death in 1933.

Before she ran the Theosophical Society, Besant was one of the original Fabian socialists. She co-authored Fabian Essays in Socialism in 1889 alongside George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and Beatrice Webb. That book is the founding text of British Fabianism, the gradualist socialist tradition that designed the British welfare state and has shaped the Labour Party for over a century. Besant was a co-author of the canonical text, not a peripheral signatory.

She moved next into Indian politics. She founded the Indian Home Rule League in 1916 and was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1917. While she held both the Congress presidency and the international Theosophical presidency at once, she personally initiated a young Indian boy into the Theosophical Society. The boy’s name was Jawaharlal Nehru. He became the first Prime Minister of independent India. The state socialism he installed after independence, one of the largest non-Marxist socialist economies of the twentieth century, was modeled on Fabian lines. The Fabian Society’s own retrospective treats Besant’s socialism and her theosophy as continuous commitments.

Alice Bailey joined the Theosophical Society in 1917. She edited its American journal at the Krotona colony in California for three years and broke with Besant around 1920 over leadership and direction. She founded Lucis Trust in 1922 and the Arcane School in 1923. The break was over the running of the movement, not over the politics. The political-theological frame Bailey carried into Lucis Trust came directly out of the movement Besant led.

The metaphysics and the politics are one project: the dissolution of the individual into a managed universal collective.

In Bailey’s religious language, the individual soul is treated as fragmentary, the personal will as limited, discernment as glamour, resistance to the Plan as the personality-self obstructing the higher-self. Spiritual maturity becomes the surrender of separate identity into the universal consciousness of the Hierarchy. The technical language varies across the Bailey corpus, but the direction is consistent: the distinct self must be educated out of its separateness and absorbed into a greater whole.

The political doctrine follows the same logic at institutional scale. Nations are to disarm, resources are to be redistributed, religions are to be unified beneath a single World Teacher, economies are to be coordinated by a planetary authority, and the obstacle is always particularity: national sovereignty, orthodox religion, private property, individual conscience, local loyalty, inherited identity.

The same pattern repeats at every level. The little will dissolves into the Plan. The little nation dissolves into planetary government. The little religion dissolves into universal spiritual authority. The property-holding individual dissolves into the redistributed common stock. Each surrender is presented as progress, service, liberation, or enlightenment, while the universal structure receiving that surrender is administered by a hierarchy that claims to know what humanity cannot yet know for itself.

This is the control grid in its older religious vocabulary. Fabian gradualism supplied the patience; Theosophical-Bailey metaphysics supplied the sanctification. Together they produced a soft collectivism in which surrender could be made to feel voluntary, even noble. The individual gives up the self and calls it spiritual development. The nation gives up sovereignty and calls it peace. The believer gives up doctrine and calls it unity. The administrator receives the surrendered pieces and calls the arrangement service.

The same broad phenomenon was running in Russian Marxism at the same time. Alexander Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Maxim Gorky developed what they called God-Building, an attempt to merge Marxism with millenarian religious language that Lenin had to attack directly in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in 1909. The Anglo-American Theosophy-Fabian current and the Russian Marxist current were not in contact. They were the same broad intellectual phenomenon running in two countries, working out the same problem: how to get human beings to surrender their individual will to a collective administered by people they would never meet, and how to make the surrender feel like a spiritual achievement rather than a political defeat.

The “Little Wills” of Men

The Great Invocation is the central formula. I will not reproduce the whole text. The phrase that matters most is enough.

The prayer asks that the purpose which the Masters know and serve guide “the little wills of men.”

The little wills of men. Not the conscience of the individual. Not the sovereignty of the person. Not the discernment of the soul standing before God. The wills of human beings, called little, gathered into alignment with the Plan.

This is the prayer at the center of the operation that has been building toward planetary government since 1922.

Lucis Trust’s Triangles network is how the prayer gets distributed. Groups of three people link mentally each day, recite the Great Invocation, and picture light and goodwill flowing through a global network. The Triangles literature tells participants to become a “mental broadcasting unit” linking with the network of light and goodwill, charging the field of consciousness and mental environment with magnetic power. The doctrinal basis comes from Lucis Trust’s own Cycle of Conferences material, which says coordinated visualization builds:

a large and potent group thoughtform... capable of externalizing on etheric levels and performing work.

The practice gets applied to specific international events. The 2023 COP28 climate conference meditation focus directed participants toward the “mental atmosphere” of conference attendees and the “thoughtform under construction” at the conference, telling them to project “seeds of living will energy” into it. The 2025 United Nations High-Level Political Forum was framed under the heading “Holding the Sustainable Development Thoughtform in the Group Gaze.” Year after year, the same method, applied to whichever international body is meeting next.

The source is Alice Bailey’s own Treatise on White Magic. In her own definition, “true occult work” is contacting the Plan, cooperating with it, and building and directing thought-forms from the mental plane. A thought-form, once built, is not merely an idea. It has, in her language, a life cycle of its own. It may manifest. It may perform work. It may move beyond the imagination of the person or group that generated it.

Bailey also warned about what can happen when the work runs unchecked. A thoughtform may stay in the creator’s aura, or it may find its way to another person or group. The creator may become victim to the thing built. The thoughtform can become stronger than its creator.

The founder of the movement warned that the thing they built could exceed them. Lucis Trust is still building.

That is ritual engineering.

Wall Street to United Nations Plaza

Lucis Trust has not always used the address it uses now. The current contact points to United Nations Plaza. Older Lucis materials list 120 Wall Street, twenty-fourth floor, for offices and meetings. The Wall Street address was a symbolic match: an occult nonprofit housed inside the financial district, in the same city blocks as the corporate form, the market idol, and the dream of planetary government.

The move from 120 Wall Street to United Nations Plaza is the argument in miniature. Finance disciplines behavior through debt, scarcity, ambition, and reward. Planetary government disciplines behavior through policy, moral language, crisis management, and the promise of coordinated salvation. Between them stands the spiritual operator, teaching that human will must be educated, aligned, and pointed in service of a Plan.

The address moved from market lordship to planetary government. The work did not change. The geography updated to match what the group had already accomplished. The Wall Street phase was the construction. The UN phase is the scale.

The next coordinated global recitation of the Great Invocation falls on Sunday, May 31, eight days from when this piece publishes. Lucis Trust calls it World Invocation Day. Participants are told to recite the prayer at sunrise, noon, 5:00 p.m., sunset, and the exact time of the full moon, to “add rhythmic potency to the work.”

The Corporate Form

The corporation is the modern egregore, and almost nobody recognizes the equivalence because the corporation hides behind legal language while the egregore hides behind occult language. Strip both vocabularies away and the same thing is doing the same work.

An egregore, in the older definition, is a non-physical entity created by collective human attention, fed by ritual and belief, named with a specific name, represented by a symbol, served by a hierarchy of devotees, and eventually capable of acting on those devotees in ways they cannot fully resist. Now consider McDonald’s. It has a name. It has a symbol (the golden arches, which can be recognized by more children worldwide than the Christian cross). It has rituals (the daily transaction, the predictable menu, the standardized environment). It has a hierarchy of devotees who serve it (workers in uniforms reciting scripted greetings). It has worshippers who feed it (customers, billions of them, every day). It has, in its own legal documents, a personality. It can own property. It can sue and be sued. It can outlive every human being who has ever worked for it. It cannot be killed by the death of any individual, only by the withdrawal of collective attention and feeding. It acts back on the people inside it, shaping their behavior, their language, their bodies. By every operative criterion in the egregore definition, McDonald’s is an egregore. The only thing missing is the language that would call it one.

The legal history of how the corporation acquired this status is straightforward. Persona ficta is Latin for fictitious person. The phrase comes out of medieval canon law, developed by Pope Innocent IV in the thirteenth century to give corporate bodies, mostly monasteries and ecclesiastical communities at the time, a legal standing that let them hold property, sign contracts, and act in the world as if they were natural persons. The corporation as a legal entity is older than the United States by five hundred years. The medieval Church created it to give institutions a soul they did not earn by being born.

Read more

When I was growing up, I was told I would never be anybody. That I would never go to college. When I asked why, my mother told me people like us don't go to college. She said she would not pay for it. She said she could not afford it. She did not bother to say, "Yes, you can go to college, we will just have to figure out how," or "It will be hard, but it is not impossible.”

As a millennial, I come from a time where we were told we can do anything. It may seem pithy at first, but I still believe that, with an asterisk: you can do anything, as long as you are willing to do the work and accept the limitations.

A line often attributed to Rudyard Kipling says that if you did not get what you wanted, it is either because you did not want it badly enough, or because you wanted to bargain on the price. Often, we try to bargain on the price.

What is the price you are willing to pay to be what you want to be?

You don't have to pay at all. You can simply decide, "I don't want to go back to school. It's not worth it to me." Or, "I am not going to climb that career ladder. I would rather build something smaller and keep my evenings." Those are more than valid. Those are you asserting your own authority over your life. And if anyone comes around and says, "Well, you should have gone to college," or "you should have taken that promotion," you can say, "Yeah, thanks, but no thanks," and sit with that with no regrets, no insecurities, and be firm in your footing of who you are, not who you were told you would be.

The Inheritance

What gives you the authority? You’re too big for your britches. You’re not good at math. You’ll never be…(fill in the blanks).

These messages can come from elementary school teachers, friends, and sadly, parents and family. Over time, we internalize those voices. The external voice becomes your internal voice.

Developmental psychology has documented the mechanism. Around eighteen to twenty-four months of age, infants begin to recognize themselves in mirrors. In the classic "rouge test," developed by Beulah Amsterdam in 1972 and rigorously studied by Michael Lewis and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn in their 1979 Social Cognition and the Acquisition of Self, a small dot of color is placed on a child's nose. Before about fifteen months, the child reaches for the dot on the mirror image, as if it were another baby. After about eighteen months, she reaches for the dot on her own face. She has recognized the image as hers. Lewis and Ramsay later showed, in a 2004 paper in Child Development, that this milestone is tightly correlated with the emergence of personal pronouns.

The child begins to say I and me at roughly the moment she can see herself in the glass. The capacity to see oneself and the capacity to name oneself appear together. Both depend on the right kind of social input arriving at the right developmental window. Where that input is withheld, as in the case of Genie, the girl discovered in Los Angeles in 1970 at the age of thirteen after years of isolation, whose linguistic development the UCLA researcher Susan Curtiss documented in her 1977 study Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child," the self never fully arrives. The same pattern shows up two centuries earlier in the case of Victor of Aveyron, the boy found in the forests of southern France around 1800 and studied for years by the physician Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard. Without the scaffolding of social input, the self does not assemble itself.

Identity is built from external structures, like teacher labels, job titles, social categories, and expectations. We inherit identities more than we choose them. When those identities crumble, due to a job loss, a professor who is no longer a professor, a parent after the child has grown or even passed away, identity collapses when the scaffolding is removed. If an identity is built on roles, then it is inherently fragile.

The question is, who are we?

Pirandello and the Hundred Thousand Selves

When I was a professor, I used to give my students a written exercise that almost always broke the room open. The instruction was simple. Tell me who you are without using demographic identifiers. Do not tell me your age, your nationality, your race, your gender, your religion, or your political affiliation. Do not tell me your profession, your major, your hometown, or your marital status. No labels. No categories. Tell me who you are.

It was very difficult, but it led to some of the best conversations I have ever had in a classroom. Conversations about defining your identity on something other than the immutable or inherited characteristics by which we are constantly lumped together.

When you then say, “This is who I am,” the claim should be able to stand up to “why.” The Socratic questioning that follows should never bottom out at “because my mom said,” or “my dad said,” or “my teacher said,” or “my boss said,” or “anyone else said.”

Luigi Pirandello, in his last novel One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, published in 1926, points out that identity fractures the moment we realize that every person who knows us carries a different version of us.

The protagonist, Vitangelo Moscarda, has his entire sense of self come apart when his wife casually mentions that his nose is slightly crooked, a detail he had never noticed in himself but which she had been seeing for years. From that small remark, the whole edifice begins to collapse. He realizes that the wife who loves him has been loving a man with a crooked nose he did not know existed, and that everyone else in his life is in love with, doing business with, or quarreling with, a different Vitangelo entirely.

There is the self we think we are, the self others think we are, and the countless selves that exist in the minds of everyone who has ever interpreted us. This dynamic has only accelerated in an age of curated online content, where most of the people forming opinions about you have never met you at all. The horror is not merely the fact that others misunderstand us. It is that we may also be living inside a misunderstanding of ourselves, placed there by others. Pirandello’s title names the three states the self moves between: one to itself, no one in absolute terms, and one hundred thousand in the minds of everyone who has ever encountered it. None of those numbers, you will notice, equals a stable self. Identity is built from external structures you didn't choose. The question is what to do about it, and the answer is older than you think.

Jaynes and the Voices of the Dead

This is deeply ingrained in our psyche. In Julian Jaynes’ 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, he argued that before roughly 1000 BCE, human beings did not experience thought the way we do. The right hemisphere of the brain produced what we would now recognize as internal speech, and the left hemisphere received it as an external voice. Those voices were heard as gods, ancestors, and dead kings. Hammurabi did not think his laws. He heard Marduk dictate them. The Iliad is full of characters who do not deliberate so much as receive direct commands from the divine.

In the earliest ancestor-worshipping societies, the first gods were almost certainly remembered persons. The grandfather. The founding mother. The tribal elder whose voice had once filled the household, the hearth, or the meeting ground. When that person died, those who had known them carried their voice forward. The shaman, the priest, or the head of the lineage, who had heard the grandfather speak in life, could now relay what he was saying in death. I communed with him last night. He told me this. For the children of the community, who had never met the grandfather, that relayed voice was the only version of him they would ever encounter. The shaman became the conduit. The grandfather spoke through him, and the children grew up hearing the grandfather not as a story, but as a present, ongoing voice with opinions about how they should live.

This is what possession by the ancestors actually means, not metaphorically, but in a practical sense. You repeat what your grandfather used to say, and in that moment he is speaking through you. The voice that issues from your mouth is partly yours and partly his, and the parts cannot always be cleanly separated. Multiply that by every generation that came before you, by every authority who has ever shaped your speech, and you begin to see how much of what you think of as your own voice is the population of the dead, still talking through you, still issuing instructions about how you should live.

Jaynes’s thesis is contested among neuroscientists, but the cultural anthropology is harder to argue with. Every traditional society routes authority through the dead. The voice that tells you who you are usually belongs to someone whose body has been in the ground for a long time, transmitted through your grandmother, your mother, your teacher, and finally yourself. By the time you hear it, you cannot tell it apart from your own thinking.

Are you ‘possessed’ by anyone from your past? Did a teacher tell you that you are not good at math, and have you just accepted it as the case? Maybe they were not a good teacher. Maybe you were not studying hard enough. Maybe you did not understand that particular part of math. Does that make you inherently, forever, bear the identity of someone who is not good at math? I think not.

Jung and the Work of Recognition

Carl Jung understood that the psyche is not made whole by pretending its pieces do not exist. He gave us the vocabulary that has shaped a century of depth psychology: the persona, the social mask we present to the world; the shadow, the disowned material we have buried because it was not safe to claim it; and individuation, the long, often painful work of bringing the rejected pieces back into conscious relationship with the rest of the self.

We become whole by recognizing the hidden, inherited, performed, and wounded parts of ourselves and bringing them into conscious realization. The goal is not to construct a perfect public identity, but rather to stop being governed by unconscious ones. Jung’s point, and it is a hard one to absorb, is that the parts of you that you most want to disown are usually the parts that have the most power over your life precisely because they are operating in the dark.

The voice saying “You cannot” is not wisdom or truth, but rather a memory. The voice saying “Stay in your lane” is not humility; it’s fear. The voice saying, “Who are you to speak? Are you qualified?” is not always discernment, but obedience to an authority that only you gave power to.

The Credentialism Layer

When comedian Dave Smith went on Joe Rogan to debate Douglas Murray about the war in Israel, the exchange quickly became about more than the war itself. Smith was not presenting himself as a credentialed foreign-policy expert. He was speaking as a human being, a citizen, and a moral agent with ideas, questions, and a right to reason publicly. That distinction matters. He was not claiming institutional authority. He was exercising the older and more basic authority of conscience.

Douglas Murray, on the other hand, who does assert himself as an expert, called Dave out and asked if he had ever been to Israel. When Dave said no, Murray said, “You’ve never been.” It was very dramatic, and it became a cultural touchpoint.

We are tired of credentialism. People are allowed to say what they think. Not everything has to pass through the filter of scientism or whatever filtration system the gatekeepers are using this week. We have the freedom to speak our minds and to choose whose voices we hear.

This is not an argument against expertise. Expertise matters, and so do discipline and study. But credentialism is not the same as wisdom, and permission is not the same as truth. There is a difference between asking whether someone knows what they are talking about and asking whether they are socially authorized to speak in the first place. The first question protects standards. The second only protects an enforced hierarchy.

The childhood voice. The internalized identity. Social roles. External authority. Most people are living inside these boxes, these identities they did not consciously choose.

The Sculptor’s Instruction

There is a passage in the third-century philosopher Plotinus, the Egyptian-born Neoplatonist whose Enneads shaped the contemplative traditions of late antiquity, the medieval Christian mystics, the Sufi mystics, and the Renaissance Hermeticists, that has stayed with me for years. He tells his reader, in Enneads I.6.9, to do something very particular when working on the self.

He says to become like a sculptor working on a statue that must become beautiful. Cut away what is excessive. Straighten what is crooked. Smooth what is rough. Brighten what is dark. Do not stop, he says, until the form that was always there underneath finally shines through.

The image is exact. The self is uncovered, not built up from nothing. You are not adding pieces. You are removing what was added to you by people who did not have the right to add it. The teacher who said you were not good at math. The mother who said people like us don’t go to college. The voice that said stay in your lane. None of those are the figure underneath. They are sediment, accumulated over time, hardened by repetition until they seem like part of you. They are not. They can be removed.

Plotinus was working in a much older tradition. Above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, in letters worn smooth by centuries of pilgrims, were two words: γνῶθι σεαυτόν. Gnōthi seauton. Know thyself. That inscription is the question the entire Western contemplative tradition has been trying to answer ever since. Notice what it does not say. It does not say construct thyself. It does not say defend thyself. It does not say credential thyself. The instruction was to know the thing already there, the figure under the stone you did not put there.

That is the same instruction. Know thyself and who do you think you are are the same question asked in two different ways. One is the invitation and the other an accusation. The work of a life is to convert the second back into the first.

The Trance

On the first day of class, I would welcome my students and tell them who I was. I would read out a long list of academic credentials in a deliberately flat, slightly hypnotic monotone, so that the accomplishments would land as background noise. The expected register. Of course she has those. She is the professor.

Then I would attempt to break the trance by saying: not bad for a sixteen-year-old runaway who left poverty, was homeless, was kidnapped, assaulted, and told she would never be anybody. They would sit up in their chairs. Then I had their attention.

I would go on to tell a modified and appropriate version of my personal story. About how I, too, started at a community college. And I would say to them: I am not telling you these things to sound heroic, or to impress you. I am telling you these things so that you know that:

It is never too late to discover who you are, but it does take courage and work.

That is what I wanted my students to understand. Not that life is fair or that every wound becomes a gift. Not that everyone begins from the same place or pays the same price. Only that the voices that named you are not always the voices that know you. At some point, you have to decide which ones still get to speak.

Who do you think you are?

I will see you on the path. 🕯️

—Heather

Stepping into a new day. Not “love and light.” Not “doom and gloom.” Just Tradition.

Further reading: Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, the William Weaver translation. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Susan Curtiss, Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child" (Academic Press, 1977). Michael Lewis and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Social Cognition and the Acquisition of Self (Springer, 1979). C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and Aion, volumes 9i and 9ii of the Collected Works. Plotinus, The Enneads, the Stephen MacKenna translation or the newer Lloyd Gerson edition from Cambridge. Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life remains the best introduction to the contemplative practices of late antiquity, including the Neoplatonic tradition of self-sculpture that Plotinus inherited and refined.

Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The Midnight Academy podcast and the author of five books, including her forthcoming book, Codex Machina: How AI Is Decoding Ancient Civilizations, Technologies, and Lost Languages in Our Search for Meaning. Find her at drheatherlynn.com.

Subscribe to The Midnight Academy: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn

The form was installed in your nervous system decades before they decided what story to put inside it.

On Sunday afternoon, May 17, the President of the United States posted an AI-generated image to Truth Social. The picture showed him walking across what looked like a desert military installation, alongside a Secret Service detail, escorting a tall, silver-grey humanoid figure in handcuffs and ankle chains. The eyes were enormous and black. The skull was smooth and oversized. The body was slender. One of the handcuffs was not quite connected to the chain that should have run through it, which is the kind of detail an AI generator will miss while getting the larger gestalt exactly right.

The post drew tens of thousands of views in the first hour and the predictable wave of memes and peak 2026 commentary. It was one of roughly twenty-five AI-generated posts the President published that afternoon, and the alien picture drew the strongest reaction by an order of magnitude.

The reader looking at the image recognized it. The reader has never met a grey alien, has never been abducted, has never visited Area 51, has never read a Pentagon UAP file. The reader nevertheless recognized the grey on sight, with the same casual certainty they would recognize a giraffe or a Coca-Cola can.

You recognized the picture, and the recognition is what they have spent seventy-five years working to install in you. The form has been built into the population in advance of the content. The grey is the empty container that has been waiting in your nervous system for forty years, and they have not finished deciding what story to put inside it. What they have finished is the conditioning. Sunday afternoon was the diagnostic check, and every reader who recognized the picture confirmed that the programming is still working. The confirmation was not their choice. The recognition arrived before the conscious mind could intervene.

What follows traces how the form got built, how the science of perception explains why the installation cannot be undone without interruption, and what it looks like in a person who has been carrying the material on behalf of the institutional infrastructure for forty years.

The Form Was Locked in 1987

The grey has not always been the standard alien.

I wrote in a previous newsletter about the much longer prehistory of the grey, including the 1918 drawing Aleister Crowley made of an entity he called Lam, which predates the 1947 Roswell incident by twenty-eight years and was already circulating through the Western esoteric traditions before the modern UFO era began. The May 9 essay was about where the form came from. The current essay is about how it got installed in you.

The lockdown moment was 1987. Whitley Strieber’s Communion, published February 10 of that year, was a number one New York Times nonfiction bestseller. The hardcover spent fifteen weeks on the Times list, and the paperback spent thirty-six weeks on the list in 1988 and became the third bestselling mass-market paperback of that year. The cover, painted by the artist Ted Seth Jacobs at his apartment on East 83rd Street in Manhattan through a sketch-correction process with Strieber, depicted a hairless, large-skulled, slit-mouthed being with enormous slanted black eyes. The cover became the icon, and within a decade it had displaced every competing alien form in popular consciousness.

Before Communion, alien iconography was a crowded field. George Adamski’s tall Venusian Nordics, Truman Bethurum’s dark-haired Aura Rhanes, the small grey hissing Kelly-Hopkinsville goblins of 1955, the exoskeletal crab-things of the 1973 Pascagoula incident. Even Betty and Barney Hill, in their 1961 hypnosis sessions with Dr. Benjamin Simon, described beings whose noses Betty compared to the comedian Jimmy Durante’s. The grey existed in that field but competed with half a dozen rival forms.

After 1987 the rivals disappeared. The X-Files premiered in 1993 with the Jacobs grey as its default. Fire in the Sky, the 1993 adaptation of Travis Walton’s abduction story, redesigned Walton’s original 1975 description to match the Communion canon. By the time Independence Day arrived in 1996, the grey was simply what aliens looked like. Forty years later, every advertising agency, every video game studio, every AI image generator, and every Halloween costume shop produces the same form because the cultural training data is saturated with it. The President’s AI tool generated a textbook Communion-era grey on demand because the system has learned that this is what the word alien means.

The reader who looked at Sunday’s image has learned the same lesson, and the test confirmed that the lesson took.

The Science of How the Programming Works

Cognitive science has been describing how this kind of perceptual capture works for two decades. The model is called predictive processing. The standard academic source is Andy Clark’s Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind, published by Oxford University Press in 2016. The popular treatment is Anil Seth’s Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, published by Faber in 2021. The mathematical framework underlying both is Karl Friston’s free-energy principle, now widely cited across academic neuroscience as a unifying account of cortical function.

What predictive processing claims is that the brain does not passively receive sensory input and then build a picture of the world from raw data. The brain generates a prediction of what is about to be perceived, based on prior experience and stored expectation, and then uses incoming information to correct the prediction where it is wrong. The conscious experience of perception is the predicted image, modified by the correction signal. When the input is rich and clear, the prediction is constrained tightly by the data. When the input is sparse, ambiguous, or fleeting, the prediction does most of the work and the data does almost none.

The implication, which the cognitive scientists tend to leave understated, is that whoever controls the prediction controls the experience. If the modern Western default prediction for encounter with non-human intelligence is the grey, then any ambiguous stimulus that activates the category will be experienced as a grey. Not consciously imagined as a grey, but perceived as one, before the conscious mind has any opportunity to intervene. The conscious mind will report what it saw and will believe the report was the result of looking rather than of installation.

Seventy-five years of media imagery, government operations, abduction memoirs, popular films, and now AI-generated content has saturated the predictive template the brain runs for non-human intelligence. When the unveiling rolls out, whatever the audience is actually shown will activate the template and be experienced through it. The phenomenon, whatever the phenomenon actually is, will arrive wearing the costume the brain provided, and the audience will believe they have seen the truth without ever knowing that the truth was poured into a container the brain had been holding open for forty years.

The Chabris and Simons selective attention experiment of 1999 demonstrated the inverse case. Subjects asked to count basketball passes between players failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of the scene because the category gorilla was not part of the predictive model they were running. The Western public has the opposite problem. The category grey alien is so deeply embedded in the predictive model that we will perceive it whether or not it fits whatever is actually placed in front of us.

What I Saw at the Table

Some years ago I had lunch with one of the most decorated journalists in the disclosure field. We were on the production location of a documentary series I appear on as a recurring contributor, sitting outside under a canopy of trees near a series of fountains, alone at the table for over an hour. The woman across from me had been the standing voice of this lane for four decades through every major disclosure initiative of the modern era. I had been looking forward to the conversation, and I expected to learn something. What I encountered was unlike anything I have sat across from before or since.

She was put together and the professional surface was intact and even formidable. The break was in the eyes. She looked at me but not into me, and there was no recognition of another person across the table. The conversation, when it began, was a monologue. It ran for an hour. The material she delivered was the material she delivers on camera, in the same cadence and the same rhetorical structure. I tried at several points to make ordinary human contact, to ask her something about her own day, to laugh at something. The connection was not available to be made. The lights were on in a clinical sense, but no one at the table was reaching out to meet me. What unsettled me was not incoherence or pathology, but the sense that I was sitting across from someone who had spent decades transmitting the same material until the transmission itself had become indistinguishable from identity. She presented as programmed in the precise sense the older esotericists meant, with the eyes looking through me rather than at me.

The reader who recognized the grey on Sunday is at the beginning. The woman across from me at lunch was somewhere near the end. The form is installed through repeated exposure and the process is essentially engineered. Over decades, the person being exposed eventually stops being a receiver and becomes a transmitter. Nobody at either point can feel it happening. What broke through to me at that table was the attempt to lure me down a similar path.

The Programmers Are Also Programmed

The intelligence agencies running the rollout have been on the public record for seventy years, and the public record shows something the agencies themselves do not always understand about their own position. The people running the operation are working from scripts written by earlier operators, who were themselves working from material received from prior transmitters. There is no top of the pyramid where someone is choosing freely. The same conditioning that produces a receiver in the audience also produces an operator inside the apparatus, with the difference lying only in position, exposure, and degree.

The first formal United States intelligence-community engagement with the UFO phenomenon was the Robertson Panel, convened by the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence and meeting January 14 to 18, 1953. The panel concluded that UFOs posed no direct threat to national security but did pose an indirect threat by potentially overwhelming military communications, and it recommended a public education campaign through mass media to debunk sightings. The Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 to 1969, performed this function publicly. Captain Edward Ruppelt, the first Blue Book director, later wrote that the program had been redirected away from genuine investigation. The work continued after Blue Book closed.

The most explicitly documented intelligence-officer engineering of an alien narrative is the Richard Doty case. Doty was an Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent assigned to Kirtland Air Force Base who, beginning in 1980, ran a disinformation campaign against the physicist Paul Bennewitz. Bennewitz had inadvertently picked up classified military signals while attempting to monitor UFO activity near the base. The campaign fed him fabricated documents about underground alien bases at Dulce, New Mexico, human-alien hybridization, and government treaties with extraterrestrials. Bennewitz suffered a psychiatric breakdown in 1988 and was hospitalized. Doty has since acknowledged the campaign publicly, most notably in a 2019 interview with George Knapp at the UFO MegaCon conference in Laughlin, Nevada. The disinformation he produced, including the Dulce material and the MJ-12 mythology that grew out of the Project Aquarius document, has become permanent furniture in the contemporary disclosure landscape, which is to say that the disinformation has become the disclosure, and the operator who produced it has become a regular conference speaker on the material he fabricated. Doty was running a script. The script is now running him.

The Pentagon’s AAWSAP and AATIP programs, brought to public attention by Christopher Mellon and Luis Elizondo from 2017 onward, are the visible end of a continuous intelligence engagement with this material that has run since at least 1953. The money has flowed from Lawrence Rockefeller’s UFO initiative in the 1990s, through Robert Bigelow’s NIDS and Bigelow Aerospace, into Pentagon contracts that supported the Skinwalker Ranch research, and out into the visible disclosure ecosystem of the present. The same class operating this funding apparatus has been backing channeled-non-human-intelligence work since the Theosophical Society in the 1880s. This is one hundred fifty years of the same project running in different costumes, with each generation of operators inheriting the script from the previous generation and believing the inheritance to be their own initiative.

The independent researcher Mark Passio has spent two decades describing what is at the operative core of all this. Passio was a priest in the Church of Satan during the late 1990s, walked out when he realized what the people running the rituals were actually building, and has been teaching publicly ever since. His position was articulated cleanly in a recent appearance on Kurt Metzger’s Derp with Kurp podcast. Passio argued that human nature reduces to a single quality, which is programmability. What the dark occultists guard, in his account, is the knowledge of how to do the conditioning, along with the asymmetry between those who know the technique and the much larger population that does not. The ruling class wants to be the conditioners and prefers the population not to know that it is conditionable. The Satanists, in Passio’s account, are ancient psychologists who learned the technique thousands of years ago and have been transmitting it through initiatory lineages ever since, which is to say that even the people guarding the secret of the conditioning are themselves products of a transmission they did not originate. The vocabulary used to describe the technique has been updated for each generation, but the underlying technology has not changed in three thousand years.

The grey is a demonstration of the principle at scale. Seventy-five years of installed imagery culminated Sunday afternoon when a sitting president posted the standardized form to a hundred million followers and every viewer recognized it without being able to say where they first saw it. The content has not arrived yet. When it does, the audience will receive it as natural, obvious, and self-evident, believing the reception to be their own choice. The people running the announcement will experience the same illusion from the opposite side of the apparatus. The conditioning runs all the way up.

The Chorus Has Been Telling You

We are all just prisoners here, of our own device. That is the line from Hotel California that gets quoted on coffee mugs. Fifty years of American drivers have sung along to this in traffic, on the way to jobs and errands and the rest of the engineered life, and the chorus has been describing them the whole time. The line that comes a few seconds later is the one that matters for this essay. We are programmed to receive. Don Henley sings it almost as an aside, in the middle of a verse about the Captain bringing the wine, after the narrator has tried to leave the hotel and discovered that he cannot. The song was released in December 1976. It has been on the radio every day since.

The chorus is the diagnostic; not the part about the mirrors on the ceiling or the dance floor or the pink champagne on ice, but the part about the receiving. The narrator’s predicament is not that he has been imprisoned by an external force. The predicament is that he has been receiving so long that his capacity to do anything else has atrophied, and the gate of the hotel is only barred from the inside. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave is the same point in different language. The leaving requires a faculty the receiving has eroded.

What Saturday Brings

This Tuesday essay has been the long argument that the alien disclosure rollout is one case study in a larger principle.

On Saturday I publish the piece that names the larger pattern directly. The corporation is not a metaphor for an egregore. The corporation is an egregore, in the literal technical sense the older esotericists used the word, which is to say a non-human entity created by the focused devotion of a group, sustained by continued devotion, and given autonomous influence over the people who feed it. The Saturday piece takes one publicly traded corporation operating in this lane and walks through exactly how it calls its egregore, how it feeds the entity, and what the structure does to the people inside it.

The older occultists had a word for beings made by collective attention and fed by repeated acts of devotion. The modern world has another word for them.

It calls them brands.

The question is not whether you will recognize what comes next. You will. The question is whether the recognition will still feel like choice.

Sources and Further Reading

Clark, Andy. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Chabris, Christopher F., and Daniel J. Simons. “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events.” Perception 28, no. 9 (1999): 1059–1074.

Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Scientific Intelligence. “Report of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, January 14–18, 1953” (the Robertson Panel Report). Declassified 1975. https://www.cia.gov.

Crowley, Aleister. The Equinox, Vol. III, No. 1 (”The Blue Equinox”). Detroit: Universal Publishing, 1919. Reprint, York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1992.

Doty, Richard C. Interview with George Knapp. Mystery Wire / I-Team, recorded at UFO MegaCon, Laughlin, Nevada, 2019. https://www.mysterywire.com.

Friston, Karl. “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11 (2010): 127–138.

Grant, Kenneth. Outside the Circles of Time. London: Frederick Muller, 1980.

Hopkins, Budd, David M. Jacobs, and Ron Westrum. “Unusual Personal Experiences: An Analysis of the Data from Three National Surveys Conducted by the Roper Organization.” Las Vegas: Bigelow Holding Corporation, 1992.

Hill, Betty, and Barney Hill. Hypnosis session transcripts with Dr. Benjamin Simon, 1964. Betty and Barney Hill Papers, MC 197, Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH.

Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs. New York: Skyhorse, 2010.

Passio, Mark. Interview with Kurt Metzger. Derp with Kurp, podcast episode, 2026.

Ruppelt, Edward J. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. New York: Doubleday, 1956.

Seth, Anil. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. London: Faber & Faber, 2021.

Strieber, Whitley. Communion: A True Story. New York: Beech Tree Books / William Morrow, 1987.

Strieber, Whitley, and Ted Seth Jacobs. “Ted Seth Jacobs: An Interview with the Artist.” Interview by Will Bueché. BeyondCommunion.com, October 6, 1999.

United States Air Force. Project Blue Book Archive, 1947–1969. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 341. https://www.archives.gov.

United States Department of Defense. “DoD Releases First Batch of Declassified UAP Records Under Executive Order on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.” Press release, May 8, 2026. https://www.defense.gov

Dr. Heather Lynn is a historian tracing the occult architecture beneath modern power. She is the creator and host of The Midnight Academy podcast and the author of five books, including Baphomet Revealed and Evil Archaeology. Find her at drheatherlynn.com.

Subscribe to The Midnight Academy: https://www.youtube.com/@DrHeatherLynn

A note on what follows. This piece describes the recruitment mechanics of a transnational network currently under active federal investigation in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe. The subject matter includes child exploitation, incitement to self-harm, and the doctrinal lineage that produced these cases. Every claim is sourced to the published scholarly and law-enforcement record. Discretion is advised. Readers personally affected by any of this should pace themselves through the piece. Public-safety resources are listed in the endnote.

The recruitment happens on the platforms parents associate with safety for their children: Roblox, Minecraft, gaming forums. The hashtag pools on Instagram where adolescents with eating disorders and self-harm find each other, and find, also, the people hunting them. Contact begins as sympathetic friendship inside a child’s existing online community. Trust develops over weeks. A first explicit image is requested. Once the image exists, the lever exists. The next demand follows.

There is a name for the marker the abusers instruct their child victims to leave on their own bodies. The marker is called the cut sign. Children are told to carve the abuser’s online name, the number 764, or a satanic sigil into their own skin, photograph the wound, and send the image back. The cut sign signals ownership. Once a child has produced one, the demands that follow have no floor. Animals are killed on camera. Suicide is encouraged on livestream. The footage circulates back through the channels that produced it, where it is called gore, and where it is used to groom and desensitize the next round of children entering the platform. The FBI documented the grooming pipeline in its September 2023 sextortion advisory; Shawn Boburg and Chris Dehghanpoor reconstructed the founding for the Washington Post in September 2024; and Tanya Mehra and Loes Hartgers compiled the cross-jurisdictional record in the 2025 ICCT policy brief Fury and Void.

The FBI opened its formal inquiry in 2023. By May of 2025 the Bureau confirmed roughly 250 active investigations of individuals affiliated with the group inside the United States alone. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has published its analysis of 764 and its affiliates. The Dutch National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security has named the category. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has issued public warnings. The Belgian Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis has added members to its terrorism database. Federal courts in the United States have begun sentencing senior figures to terms measured in decades. Every Western intelligence service that pays attention to this material has now publicly named it a transnational threat (Mehra and Hartgers, ICCT 2025; NCTV Netherlands, June 2025; Europol Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2025; RCMP advisory August 2024; ASIO December 2024).

The group is called 764. It was founded in 2020 by a sixteen-year-old from a small town in Texas named Bradley Cadenhead, who is currently serving an eighty-year sentence at the Allred Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Cadenhead did not architect the doctrine 764 runs on. He absorbed it from the aesthetic and ideological residue of an older formation that had been working for forty years before he picked up a keyboard. The man who synthesized that older doctrine in the 1970s was a senior figure in the British neo-Nazi underground, writing from the Welsh Marches under a pseudonym. The figure his doctrine is preparing the way for has a specific name. The name is the Vindex.

This is the companion to Tuesday’s free piece on the Plan and the Golden Calf. Tuesday showed you the unifier the Plan is preparing the world to receive. Today shows you the destroyer the same Plan is preparing in parallel, in a different vocabulary, in a different carrier population, on the same calendar. These figures form the two faces of one choreography. The unifier needs a destroyer to arrive against. The destroyer needs the unifier as the target his arrival is supposed to vindicate. Both audiences are being trained to recognize their assigned figure at the same moment. The documents identify that moment as 2029 to 2032.

This piece walks through the historical name the destroyer doctrine chose for its awaited figure and what that name has carried in Western political theology for two thousand years, the lineage that produced 764 from its origins in postwar esoteric Hitlerism, the record of what the group has actually done to children whose names are now in court documents, and the parallel philosophical current that has produced the same theological structure inside the contemporary technology industry. The endnote at the bottom names the public-safety resources for parents who recognize the signs in someone they know.

What follows takes the history first, then walks into what this is producing on the federal docket right now.

The Roman Vindex

In March of the year 68, Gaius Julius Vindex, the Roman senator serving as imperial legate of the province of Gallia Lugdunensis, called together an assembly of Gallic magnates and raised the standard of revolt against the emperor Nero. He was a man of royal Aquitanian descent and an ex-praetor, a senior figure in the Roman administrative aristocracy. He claimed, at the outset, to have one hundred thousand men under arms (Brunt 1959, 531–533, drawing on Cassius Dio LXIII.22 and Plutarch, Galba 4–5).

The numbers were inflated. Everything else about the political moment was deadly serious. Nero’s emulation of Alexander the Great, his theatrical performances, his execution of senators and aristocrats, his murder of his mother, his looting of the provinces to fund his extravagance, had alienated the senatorial class and a significant portion of the provincial administration. Vindex had sounded out the other governors before he moved. Most of them sent word of his treason back to Nero. Only Galba, the governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, joined him (Brunt 1959, 532, citing Suetonius, Galba 9–10).

Vindex marched on the Rhone valley. The Rhine legions, under Verginius Rufus, marched to meet him. The two armies confronted each other near Vesontio, modern Besançon, in late May. Whether Verginius and Vindex conferred before the battle, as Cassius Dio reports, or whether the battle was fought without the Roman commanders fully intending it, as some moderns have argued, the result was the same. The Gallic forces were annihilated. Vindex took his own life on the field (Brunt 1959, 537, drawing on Tacitus, Histories I.51, Dio LXIII.24, and Plutarch, Galba 6).

The revolt failed militarily. The cascade it triggered ended the Julio-Claudian dynasty within weeks. Galba marched from Spain. The Praetorian Guard turned on Nero. The Senate declared him a public enemy. Nero killed himself on the ninth of June. The Year of the Four Emperors followed, ending only when Vespasian consolidated power in 69. The man who set the cascade in motion was already two months dead by then. The historian’s verdict, as Pliny the Elder put it in his Natural History, was that Vindex was adsertor ille a Nerone libertatis, “that liberator of liberty from Nero” (XX.160, cited in Brunt 1959, 539).

The Oxford classicist P. A. Brunt, in the foundational 1959 article on the revolt, summarized the political content this way: “Vindex rose to end oppression, not only of the senatorial class to which he belonged but of all Rome’s subjects. Like the Gordians in 238, he perished, but his cause triumphed, for he had not risen against Rome, but against Nero” (Brunt 1959, 531). The revolt was corrective in intent. He removed the corruption that had captured the order while leaving the order itself standing.

That distinction is the entire load the word has been carrying for two thousand years.

The Latin noun vindex derives from vim dicere, “to declare force” or “to assert by force.” It means avenger, claimant, protector, champion. In Roman law specifically, a vindex was a third party who intervened in legal proceedings on behalf of a defendant, standing surety against the arbitrary use of force by the accuser. The legal vindex broke a chain of unilateral coercion by inserting legitimate counter-force into the proceeding. The word, in its origin, names justified violence on behalf of the wronged.

Seneca, writing two years before the revolt, distinguished Hercules from Alexander on exactly these terms. Hercules was, in Seneca’s words, malorum hostis, bonorum vindex, terrarum marisque pacator, the enemy of evils, the avenger of the good, the peacemaker of land and sea. Alexander, by contrast, was a pueritia latro gentiumque vastator, a bandit from boyhood, a destroyer of nations. The figure of Hercules appears on coins Vindex authorized during his revolt. The propaganda was explicit. The man marching against Nero understood himself, and was understood by his historians, as occupying the structural slot Seneca had defined for Hercules (Brunt 1959, 547, citing Seneca, De Beneficiis I.13).

The word kept this load through the medieval and early modern periods. The Christian apocalyptic tradition picked it up in the form vindex sanguinis, the avenger of blood, applied to the returning Christ in patristic and medieval commentary on Revelation. The single most important text in the political-theological afterlife of the word is Vindiciae contra tyrannos, “Defenses against tyrants,” published in 1579 under the pseudonym Stephanus Junius Brutus the Celt. The author was almost certainly the Huguenot theorist Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, writing in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. The Vindiciae is one of the founding texts of the Protestant resistance tradition. It argues that subjects have a religious duty to resist tyrants who violate divine law, and that this duty falls in the first instance on the lesser magistrates, the vindices whose intervention against unlawful sovereign power is itself an act of fidelity to the higher law. That doctrine moves through European political thought into the American revolutionary tradition. The right of legitimate resistance to tyranny that runs through the Declaration of Independence has the vindex tradition in its bloodstream.

By the time the militant tradition I am about to describe takes hold of the word in the early 1980s, it has been carrying this load for two thousand years. The avenger who legitimately destroys. The champion whose violence is justified because the order he attacks has forfeited its right to exist, and whose action vindicates the moral law against the tyrant who has violated it.

Nothing about this word is innocent. The operators chose it for the reason they choose all of their vocabulary. The word does the recruiting work because the word is already loaded.

One thing to notice before we move on. The historical Vindex lost his battle. The Rhine legions cut his Gallic cavalry to pieces and he ended his own life on the field at Vesontio. The cascade that brought Nero down ran on without him. The militant operators in the 1980s, when they chose his name for their awaited destroyer, were naming the figure after a man who died failing. The name they chose belonged to a senator whose action vindicated a moral claim that outlasted his own death by two thousand years. The doctrine is consistent on this point. The literature on 764 and on M.K.Y. documents that participants do not expect long lives. The figures producing the harm on the federal docket are following the prototype’s pattern, acting in expectation that what they help start will run on without them.

Theosophy, Esoteric Hitlerism, and the Order of Nine Angles

A word on Theosophy for readers new to the term. Theosophy is the synthesis system Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott founded in New York in 1875. The word comes from the Greek theosophia, meaning wisdom about the gods or divine wisdom. Blavatsky’s claim was that the world’s religious traditions were surface expressions of a single underlying esoteric source, and that this source could be reconstructed by a scholar willing to do the comparative work. Her two major books, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), are the foundational texts. The Theosophical Society she co-founded still exists, and its institutional descendants include Lucis Trust, the Anthroposophical Society of Rudolf Steiner, the Krishnamurti Foundation, and dozens of other organizations whose vocabulary the contemporary New Age movement still draws on. From outside the academic study of religion, Theosophy looks fringe. Within that field, it is the foundation much of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ alternative spirituality was built on.

The militant Vindex doctrine begins inside this Theosophical synthesis. Lucis Trust, founded in 1922 by Alice and Foster Bailey as the Lucifer Publishing Company, is one channel of that descent. The destroyer tradition is another. Both run on the same metaphysical chassis.

The chassis is the doctrine of aeons. Blavatsky’s cosmology holds that history runs through great cycles, each governed by a presiding force, each ending in a transition that is simultaneously destructive and revelatory. The Kali Yuga, the iron age of Hindu cosmology, is the active Aeon now, and it is ending. What comes after is a New Aeon, prepared by initiates and announced by a figure variously named in the religion one might be reading from. The Theosophical synthesis was explicitly syncretic. The figure was the Maitreya in Buddhism, the Kalki Avatar in Hinduism, the Christ in Christianity, the Imam Mahdi in Islam, the Mashiach in Judaism. He was the same figure, the operators taught, recognized differently by different prepared audiences.

The initiate, in this teaching, does not stand passively outside the Aeon’s transition. The initiate is its instrument. The doctrine holds that a ritual performed by a trained initiate at the correct cosmological moment can affect the larger cycle. The destruction of the current order is constitutive of the next one.

Every figure I am about to walk through inherits that outlook. They diverge on what to do with it. The Lucis Trust line, descending through Bailey into the universalist humanitarian framing that World Goodwill presents at the United Nations, teaches its students to participate ritually in the transition by reciting the Great Invocation, harmonizing with the Plan, and recognizing the Coming One when he arrives. The destroyer tradition teaches its students to participate ritually by accelerating the destruction of the current Aeon. The acceleration runs sometimes through ceremonial work called aeonic magic, sometimes through what Myatt’s ONA texts call practical means: terrorism and infiltration. The texts use the word “culling” for what the ONA literature defines as human sacrifice.

Savitri Devi and the Kalki Avatar

Maximiani Portas, the French-Greek woman who took the name Savitri Devi in 1928, was a Theosophist before she was a National Socialist. She read Blavatsky in her teens, including the doctrine of root races that held the current cycle to be the fifth, the Aryan, succeeded by a sixth race the Coming One would inaugurate. She went to India in 1932 to study Hindu philosophy and married a Bengali Brahmin who shared her interest in synthesizing European racial theory with Hindu cosmology. She spent the war years in India, supporting the Axis powers from Calcutta. She produced her major work, The Lightning and the Sun, in 1958, three years after she returned to Europe.

The Lightning and the Sun fused the Theosophical aeonic doctrine with what Devi herself called esoteric Hitlerism. The argument, in its essentials: history runs through three types of figures at the turning points of Aeons: the men against time, who try to reverse the decay of the current age and restore the previous one; the men in time, who flow with their own age and use it; and the men above time, who participate in the cyclical structure and embody the threshold itself. Hitler, in Devi’s reading, was the man against time who failed but who prepared the way. The figure who would succeed was the Kalki Avatar, the tenth avatar of Vishnu in Hindu eschatology, the rider on a white horse who arrives at the end of the Kali Yuga to destroy the corrupted order and inaugurate the next Aeon.

Devi was explicit about the structural identification. Kalki, in her synthesis, is the Hindu cosmological name for what Christians call the returning Christ, what Buddhists call the Maitreya, and what the Theosophists call the Coming One. The difference is that Devi was writing about the destroyer face of the figure. The avatar who comes with a sword. The avenger who closes the Aeon.

The standard scholarly treatment of Devi is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (NYU Press, 1998), which documents her influence on the post-war European far right with the scholarly remove appropriate to the material.

The Black Sun and the Last Avatar

The Chilean diplomat Miguel Serrano was one of the figures Devi influenced most directly. Serrano served as Chilean ambassador to India in the 1950s and 1960s, then to Yugoslavia and Austria. In the 1950s he met both Carl Jung and Hermann Hesse, and corresponded extensively with each. His political theology, developed across his trilogy El Cordón Dorado: Hitlerismo Esotérico (1978), Adolf Hitler, El Último Avatar (1984), and Manú: Por el Hombre que Vendrá (1991), is the most elaborated version of esoteric Hitlerism produced in the second half of the twentieth century.

Serrano’s contribution was to elaborate the Black Sun mythology that ran through Himmler’s SS occult program and fuse it with the Last Avatar doctrine. The Last Avatar, in Serrano’s reading, is the figure who arrives at the close of the Kali Yuga to destroy the current order and inaugurate what Serrano calls the Hyperborean New Aeon. Hitler is read as the prefiguring figure. The Last Avatar himself is awaited.

Serrano matters here for two reasons. His trilogy is the doctrinal source the Order of Nine Angles would later inherit, and he opened the bridge from European esoteric Hitlerism into the South American and global radical right networks of the late twentieth century. Goodrick-Clarke’s Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (NYU Press, 2002) devotes its sixth chapter to him.

A note on actually reading this material. Devi’s Lightning and the Sun and Serrano’s trilogy are not easy to find in good editions. Devi’s book is mostly available through reprints by far-right publishing houses, which is its own warning sign. Serrano’s trilogy was published in Spanish in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s and has never had a full English translation from a mainstream press. The scholarly engagement with both is mostly through Goodrick-Clarke at NYU. What I can tell you, having spent significant time with both, is that the work is theologically literate and philologically careful. The arguments inside are structurally coherent. That is part of what makes them dangerous. The reader who encounters this material without the scholarly literature around it is at risk of taking it at the level it presents itself.

The synthesis happens with David Myatt. Myatt is one of the best-documented figures of the late-twentieth-century British radical right. In the 1970s he served as a bodyguard for Colin Jordan of the British Movement. He was a founding member of Combat 18, an organization whose name encodes the initials of Adolf Hitler (A and H being the first and eighth letters of the alphabet). In the 1990s he founded the National Socialist Movement. He converted to radical Islam in the early 2000s, producing essays on suicide bombing that appeared on the Hamas website, before reverting in 2010 to what he now calls a private philosophical path.

The 1998 Searchlight magazine investigation identified Myatt as the person behind the pseudonym Anton Long. Anton Long, since the early 1970s, had been the public voice of an organization called the Order of Nine Angles, which had emerged in the Welsh Marches region of Britain through the fusion of three earlier satanist and neo-pagan groups: Camlad, the Noctulians, and the Temple of the Sun. Myatt has consistently denied that he is Anton Long. The Sherbrooke University scholar Mathieu Colin, in a 2024 article in Terrorism and Political Violence, summarizes the academic consensus this way: “The origins of ONA are obscure, and the group is deeply linked to Anton Long, the suspected pseudonym of supremacist David Myatt, the Order of Nine Angle’s grandmaster (although Myatt has always denied any affiliation with it)” (Colin 2025, 688).

The Order of Nine Angles is the synthesis. It absorbs Devi’s aeonic Hitlerism, Serrano’s Last Avatar doctrine, and the ritual practice of Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian Order, which had been working the qliphothic side of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life since the mid-1950s. The doctrine is laid out across the texts produced under the Anton Long name from the late 1970s through the 1990s, including Codex Saerus: The Black Book of Satan, Naos, Hostia, and the four-volume Deofel Quartet. Colin’s article documents the system in detail. So does Jacob Senholt’s 2009 doctoral work at Aarhus University, and the standard treatment by Goodrick-Clarke in chapter ten of Black Sun.

The text in the ONA corpus that names the destroyer figure is titled Vindex: Destiny of the West. It was issued under the Anton Long name in 1984. The figure it describes is the avenger who arrives at the close of the current Aeon to destroy what Myatt’s texts call the Nazarene values, the dominance of the Magian-Hebraic civilization, and to inaugurate the Galactic Imperium of the Homo Galacticus, the race of supermen who will succeed the current human form.

Here is Colin’s summary of the doctrine. It’s the cleanest scholarly statement of it I have seen:

The Vindex, in the working doctrine, is the figure who arrives to destroy what the ONA texts call the dominance of Magian values. The Nazi state, in the doctrine, was the first nexion, the failed prefiguration. The figure himself is still awaited. The work of the order is to prepare his arrival. The methods include what the ONA texts call aeonic magic, the ritual participation in the Aeon’s transition. They include what the texts describe as “Insight Roles”: six-to-eighteen-month field assignments in which initiates infiltrate jihadist groups, far-right movements, the police, and the military, to gain experience and to radicalize those institutions. The texts also name a practice called culling, which the ONA literature defines as human sacrifice, either ritualized or carried out as assassination through manipulation. (Colin 2025, 690–692; ONA, Definitive Guide to the Order of Nine Angles, 2015, pp. 394, 415–416, 442, 448).

This is not exoteric weirdness. The ONA’s Definitive Guide to the Order of Nine Angles, published in 2015 and freely available on the Internet Archive, runs to roughly fifteen hundred pages. The doctrine is fully articulated and the methods explicit. The audience knows what it is reading. The scholarly literature on the order, including Senholt, Colin, Goodrick-Clarke, Connell Monette, Jeffrey Kaplan, Mattias Gardell, Ariel Koch, and the more recent terrorism-studies treatments by Gartenstein-Ross and Chace-Donahue, converges on the same theme: a complete esoteric and political system whose stated aim is the destruction of the current civilizational order in preparation for the arrival of the Vindex.

Tempel ov Blood and the Path to 764

Now to what forty years of this doctrine looks like when it lands in a federal courtroom.

The line from the ONA to the current American criminal ecosystem runs through a single nexion called Tempel ov Blood. The Tempel ov Blood was an American O9A-derived group founded in the late 1990s, working primarily through correspondence and a publishing imprint called Martinet Press, with significant activity inside American prison systems. Its central figure, Joshua Caleb Sutter, was the son of a prominent Christian Identity pastor. Sutter became an informant for the FBI in 2003, a fact that emerged only in 2020 through reporting by Robert Evans and Jason Wilson in The Guardian, and continued working inside the network as a confidential source for approximately seventeen years while simultaneously producing some of the most serious accelerationist literature of the period.

Tempel ov Blood was the fusion of ONA teachings with the explicit white-power organizing of the post-Christian Identity milieu and with the industrial-music and prison-recruitment subcultures that gave the texts their American carrier population. The accelerationism research consortium’s standard treatment of the Skull Mask network, published by Kriner and colleagues at GNET in 2024, documents the takeover of Atomwaffen Division by Tempel ov Blood members in 2017. James Cameron Denton, the Siege-inspired leader who took over Atomwaffen that year, brought Sutter and other Tempel ov Blood members into the organization. Martinet Press books became required reading for AWD recruits.

The aesthetic vocabulary you see across the contemporary accelerationist ecosystem, including the skull-mask imagery from James Mason’s Siege, the Sonnenrad, the runic typography, the horrorcore music, the dehumanizing visual treatments of victims, all of it was consolidated in the AWD-era fusion of ONA material with the post-Iron March forum culture between 2017 and 2020. The 2019 federal indictments of AWD members and the subsequent arrests of the group’s leadership produced a power vacuum in which the residual influence of the ONA continued to propagate across what counter-extremism researchers now call Terrorgram, the Telegram-based accelerationist ecosystem.

The 764 network emerges in 2020 directly out of this milieu. Cadenhead was sixteen years old when he founded the group. He had no formal initiation into the ONA. By all available evidence he was a damaged child who absorbed the aesthetic and ideological residue of the AWD-era ecosystem and constructed a network whose practice was the production and distribution of gore, child sexual abuse material, and incitement to suicide and self-harm. The Anti-Defamation League’s 2025 backgrounder on 764 documents the symbolism explicitly. The 764 logo contains the pentagram, the satanic cross, and a stylized Baphomet figure. The aesthetic is the AWD aesthetic, simplified for younger recruits and stripped of the explicit white-nationalist political content.

The Maniac Murder Cult, the Russia- and Ukraine-based network typically abbreviated as M.K.Y. or M.K.U., is the parallel formation working across the post-Soviet space, the United States, and Europe. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point published its analysis of M.K.Y. in September of 2024, written by Marc-André Argentino, Barrett Gay, and Matt Bastin. The analysis names M.K.Y. as a racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist (REMVE) group with a militant accelerationist ideology rooted in Theistic Satanism and the ONA tradition. The group’s founder, Mikhail Chkhikvishvili, was extradited from Moldova to the United States in May 2025 to face federal charges including a plot to poison Jewish children with drug-laced candy while disguised as Santa Claus. He is now in federal custody in the Eastern District of New York.

The Tempel ov Blood, AWD, 764, and M.K.Y. ecosystem, taken together, is what the federal docket is processing. The doctrine is the ONA’s Vindex doctrine, downstream through forty years, simplified and aestheticized for a new generation, put into practice across the online platforms that generation grew up inside. Some of the figures who founded each of these networks had formal training in the texts. Most absorbed the imagery, the music, and the basic worldview from the older formation without ever reading the source texts.

The Mehra and Hartgers policy brief published by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague in 2025 is currently the cleanest single-document summary of what the prosecutions look like across jurisdictions. The May 2024 Department of Justice press release announcing the arrest of “Leaders of 764” out of the District of Columbia identifies the network as a global child exploitation enterprise. The case data is public and the texts have been documented in the scholarly literature for forty years. Almost no one has been willing to say in print that the two describe the same phenomenon.

I will say it. The figures producing the harm on the federal docket are downstream of a doctrine they did not invent. The doctrine is structurally identical to the one I described in Tuesday’s piece, inverted at the figure who arrives at the close of the Aeon. Without the doctrinal map, the federal cases look like discrete pathologies. With the doctrinal map, they look like what they are.

What comes after this is the inside view: the vocabulary the network uses for itself, the specific federal cases that have produced convictions, the connection between this network and recent mass shootings the mainstream press did not address, the anomaly at the founder level that has not been processed in print, and the pattern of what has happened to citizen researchers and counterterrorism analysts who have tried to surface this material publicly. The remainder is for paid subscribers.

What the Network Actually Does, and What Happens to People Who Document It

The network’s self-understanding is visible in its internal vocabulary, which the federal cases and the academic literature have begun to document in detail. A “hell room” is a 764 Telegram channel where the produced content is shared. An

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I come from nothing. I come from less than nothing. I have been a teenage runaway. I lost my parents at an early age. I have been homeless. I have eaten out of the garbage. I have been kidnapped and assaulted. Impregnated and abandoned. I have been alone.

The things people say to me cannot hurt me, because I know what it is to feel like nothing already. I know what it is like to have nothing.

Do we really ever have anything, though?

Most people, when they hear the word boundary, picture a wall. Something cold, defensive, slightly hostile. The opposite of love.

The older traditions saw it the other way around. A boundary was the thing that made it possible for people to come together at all. Without the line drawn, there is no relation. There are only two things becoming one thing, which is not love. That is dissolution. Dissolution is what the cultural script of modernity has been calling love.

The alchemists had a formula for this. Solve et Coagula. Dissolve and coagulate. The first separates, breaking what looks like one thing into the distinct elements hiding inside it. The second brings those elements back together into something more refined than what you started with. Skip either stage and there is no “Great Work,” only failed chemistry.

Modernity has been performing the solve on everything in sight. The atomization is everywhere now. Marriages dissolving. Friendships thinning into parasocial relationships with strangers on screens. Families splintering over politics. No contact as a first response rather than a last resort. People are more separated from each other than at any point in recorded history. Cutting people off has become what gets called self-love. Half the formula has been learned and the other half forgotten, and the result is a culture of selves so fragmented they have lost the capacity to coagulate back into anything.

The opposite failure exists too, and it is the older one. Two people losing themselves in each other and calling the loss of self love. The cult member dissolved into the leader. The marriage where one party has disappeared into the other. The friendship that is really a codependency. Both failures come from the same mistake. They treat love and boundary as opposites instead of as two stages of the same work.

This is the piece I needed to write because I needed to understand why the boundaries I have drawn in my life have felt, to other people, like rejection. I needed to understand why the cultural drift toward no contact, cut them off, delete the account, never speak to them again feels hasty to me even when the impulse behind it is real. I also needed to understand what to do about my own comment section, which is the immediate occasion for the piece but turns out to be a much older problem dressed in modern clothes.

Some Background

I have been a pretty private person. Yes, I write publicly. Yes, I have been on TV, on podcasts, and that sort of thing, yet I try to keep a distance between my public life and my family life. So much so that some people have been quite confused. My Google analytics come back with the top questions that are asked about me: Is Heather a Christian? Is Heather a Satanist? Is Heather a Republican? Is Heather a Democrat?

I am not a team player. I am independent. I have beliefs, and I have an inculturation, of course, but I also have the training to recognize both, which is the only honest starting point for the work of getting to anything called truth. Though my first Substack was about standing firm in my convictions because the devil owns the fence, there is still value in not getting buried too deeply on any side.

You can never make yourself not inculturated. The process begins, according to the research, before you are even born. Anthony DeCasper and William Fifer’s 1980 study in Science showed that newborns prefer their mother’s voice within hours of birth, and the 2013 Moon, Lagercrantz, and Kuhl study in Acta Paediatrica tested infants roughly thirty hours old and found they already perceptually distinguished vowels from their mother’s language from those of a foreign one, evidence that the native phonemes had already been learned in the womb. The mother’s language is already inside the child before the child has drawn a breath. This is linguistic anthropology meeting prenatal neurology, and it is the structural reason that pure objectivity is a fiction.

The instrument has been tuned before the music starts. Even cats are inculturated. Susanne Schötz at Lund University, in the Meowsic project, has documented regional dialect variation in cat vocalizations; the cat in Stockholm does not meow the way the cat in Skåne does. If the cat cannot escape its linguistic programming, neither can you. Neither can I. Anyone who tells you they have no bias is lying, or they just fail to see that that is their bias.

When I write or try to discuss ideas, I am doing so out of curiosity and collaboration with my readers. When I came to Substack, I was not prepared for the kind of attention it got. What I mean by prepared was having to understand when to put up boundaries and when not to. It is common knowledge that nobody should be mixing it up in the comments, or, God forbid, reading the comments and taking them to heart. Thankfully, I am not chronically online, even though I produce online. I am able to close my laptop and go and enjoy life away from the digital realm.

When people hurl insults, like when I have been called an uneducated, childless, spinster, cat lady, it cannot insult me. I can look at the degrees on my wall and know that I am educated. I will admit to having a few cats, but I have been married for years and have adult sons in their twenties. Even if these “insults” were true, I would not be insulted.

I am not here to be loved. I am here on a mission.

But as the numbers here have grown, I have noticed something changing in the room itself. Threats of bodily harm arrive in direct messages. Comments appear that show the commenter has plainly not read the article.

I am a free speech absolutist, which is one of the reasons I came to Substack in the first place, and I do not want Substack itself to be in the business of moderating speech. Nor should they. Substack is also not a town hall, unlike how other platforms have positioned themselves. It is a carefully curated community and publication. The experience of people who are working in good faith, who want to push back, who want to have an intellectual exchange, gets compromised when the thread is full of people who are not.

So tonight, we are going to look at the question of boundary setting.

The Disposable Age

Take the contemporary fashion for going no contact. I went no contact with my family myself, but only after years of an extraordinarily abusive household, and I ran away to do it. Going no contact is not as fun as media makes it out to be. You lose your support system in exchange for your safety, and the trade is real. Young people now use the phrase casually, as if cutting off a sibling who irritated them carries the same moral weight as escaping an abuser. Divorce has undergone the same flattening. It used to be a tragic last resort. It is now the first move, and the language around it has softened until almost any friction can justify it.

The deeper problem is that we have made everything disposable, including each other. Shoes used to be repaired. Planned obsolescence has trained us to throw away rather than repair, and the habit has migrated from objects to relationships. Marriage, friendship, family, all of it now operates under the same logic. Rather than do the work of repair, we let the thing rot and then discard it. We are hyper-disposable, and we are starting to apply the same disposability to ourselves.

It is purely reactionary. It is running from problems. Take that observation from a former runaway. Boundaries are important, but we can make them too harsh, we get tyranny, zero tolerance policies, censorship, and cancel culture, and in the very worst of cases, loss of life.

I remember the first paper I ever wrote in second grade, the one I actually bought a cover sleeve for, was about religious toleration. The concept I learned then was that you make a discerning choice: this is not inherently dangerous or harmful to me, and so I will not infringe upon another’s rights. I will just tolerate it. The Latin underneath the word is tolerantia, from tolerare, which did not mean to put up with something. It meant to bear, to carry a weight.

Over the course of my childhood, that older concept got replaced by zero tolerance. Meaning, there was no room for error, even as a child. Everybody is on edge. Sort of like what we saw at the peak of cancel culture. One wrong thing said and you are done. One accidental ignorant comment by a boomer uncle at Thanksgiving means he is automatically called names and no one speaks to him ever again. If he has to die alone because of it, well then that is exactly the karma he receives.

Nevertheless, all of that zero tolerance only serves to create the strongest barriers around everybody, and the only thing that serves is the tyrannical state. We cannot have such strong barriers. We have to work harder to find ways to build borders around ourselves and our countries, or we cease to have either.

On the other hand, the fully fortified state, though, like North Korea, is its own kind of danger. So is the lone wolf with no support system, no obligations, no one to come home to. Both are failures of the same kind. Hyper-distinction without union; a wall so complete that nothing flows in either direction, including life.

The key, again, is balance and that takes discernment. I wrote last week about the practice of refusal, and the two are the same skill on different levels of abstraction.

What the Old World Knew About Chaos

The ancient world had a more complicated relationship with chaos than the modern reader expects. Chaos was not the enemy. Chaos was the substrate. The primordial waters from which everything was eventually made.

Genesis 1:2 calls the pre-creation state tohu va-bohu, formless and void. The Spirit of God hovers over the waters. The Spirit does not destroy them. It moves on them, broods on them, prepares them. The first creative act is to separate light from darkness, water from water, sea from land. Six days of dividing. The world is what the chaos becomes when form is introduced into it. Take away the waters and there is nothing to form. Take away the dividing and the waters never become a world.

The Babylonian Enuma Elish tells the same story in a more violent register. Marduk does not annihilate Tiamat, the goddess of the primordial salt water. He splits her body. The upper half becomes heaven, the lower half earth. The chaos is not deleted. It is given shape and made into the cosmos. Tiamat becomes the sky you are looking at. The Egyptian Heliopolitan cosmogony has Atum bringing forth Shu and Tefnut, air and moisture, from himself. The Greeks have Gaia and Ouranos, earth and sky, lying so tightly together that nothing can be born until Kronos forcibly separates them. The Norse have Ymir slain and divided, his flesh becoming the earth, his blood the seas, his skull the sky.

Creation requires a balance of both. Pure chaos is sterile because nothing in it is yet distinct enough to be anything. Pure order is also sterile because there is no raw material left to shape. The world is what happens at the meeting of the two, when chaos receives a line and the line has something to draw upon.

This is the part the modern boundary discourse misses. We are taught that chaos is the problem and order is the solution. The older traditions taught that chaos is the substrate of every creative act and that the work is not eliminating it but giving it form. The bad marriage, the failing friendship, the difficult sibling, the strained country, all of these are chaos waiting to be formed. The discipline is not cutting them off but rather finding the line that lets them become something.

The Egyptians named the principle that holds the line Ma’at. She is the goddess of cosmic order, truth, balance, and justice, all bound up in one figure with a single ostrich feather rising from her crown. Her opposite is Isfet: chaos, lies, violence, the will to do evil. The Egyptians were unusual in one respect. They did not believe that Isfet could be eliminated. They believed Isfet sat at the edges of the ordered world at all times, waiting for any failure of attention to come pouring back in. The pharaoh’s job was not to destroy chaos. It was to maintain order against chaos, every day, forever. Ma’at and Isfet were partners as much as opposites. The world existed because of the tension between them, and would cease to exist if either side won completely.

The Crowned Two

The alchemists of the European Middle Ages, working in a tradition that drew on Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and Egyptian sources all at once, pictured the resolution of chaos and order in a single image. They called it the Rebis, from the Latin res bina, “double thing.” It appears most famously in the tenth woodcut of the Rosarium Philosophorum, published in Frankfurt in 1550. A single crowned figure stands on a winged dragon, male on one side, female on the other, holding the sun and the moon in either hand. It is the coniunctio oppositorum, the union of opposites, the final stage of what the alchemists called the Great Work.

What is easy to miss about the Rebis, until you sit with it, is that the two figures have not melted into one. They are still two. He is on his side, she is on hers, and the crown sits on both heads at once. The dragon underneath is still alive, still winged, still a dragon. The alchemists were not picturing the elimination of opposition. They were picturing the bringing together of opposites that had been first carefully distinguished through the long earlier stages of the work, the separatio, the nigredo, the albedo. You cannot fuse what was never separated. The Rebis is the union that preserves distinction inside itself.

The dragon underneath is the chaos the crowned figure has learned to stand on rather than be drowned by. Neither the dragon nor Isfet is gone. The chaos at the edge of the garden is not gone. The Rebis is not the figure that has defeated the dragon. The Rebis is the figure that has learned how to stand on it.

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