The Nonsense Bazaar

74 - John Murray Spear & The New Motive Power Part II: Heaven’s Last, Best, Most Perfect Gift

This week we’re concluding the story of John Murray Spear and the New Motive Power. What’s a New Motive Power, you ask? It’s a big ol’ pile of gizmos and gadgets meant to contain the life-animating power of God, a mechanical messiah to lead humanity into the golden age,  complete with wires and knobs and pulsing balls. We pick up our tale as John Murray Spear has left his activist life behind for good and is now taking directions from the disembodied voice of Benjamin Franklin and the other members of the Association of Beneficients, a sort of spirit non-profit group that lives in John’s head. Taking the direction of these spirits, John constructs a mechanical messiah and then builds a commune of circle houses and starts giving away miracle spring water. It’s a tale as old as time and it’s absolutely ridiculous. 

73 - John Murray Spear & The New Motive Power Part I: Big John

This week we begin our look at a man named John Murray Spear, a 19th century Universalist preacher, abolitionist, prison reformer, and rabble rouser who worked himself into madness and left all that to build a mechanical golem to house the spirit of God with the help of the ghost of Ben Franklin. And many other dead founding fathers. But all that is next week. This week we learn about John Murray Spear's ceaseless efforts first on behalf of the abolition movement in the 1840's in which he personally gamed the legal system to secure the freedom of enslaved people and made a bunch of enemies, and then on behalf of the prison reform movement in which he personally paid the bail for prisoners who had no other options to fall back on, made sure the stories and names of the condemned were remembered, and subjected himself to the conditions of 19th century American prisons. We also learn about the backdrop of the growing spiritualist movement, which provided the warm embrace of love & light & madness that John Murray Spear fall into once he worked himself into burnout.

72 - CCRU, Hyperstition, Nick Land, Accelerationism, and the Lemurian Time War

This week we're taking a look and what happens when you mix theosophy with postmodernism, and philosophy with a diet of dried ramen noodles and amphetamine. CCRU was an experimental counter-culture literature club turned full occultist who discovered "hyperstitions", fictions that create a feedback loop which results in the actualization of the fictions into reality. They lose their minds in a firestorm of amphetamine psychosis and the absolute nonsense that is academic philosophy. The head of CCRU was a dude named Nick Land, the so-called father of accelerationism, a philosophy which advocates taking the breaks off capitalism and letting it spin itself into the sweet annihilation and absorption of humanity into a hyper-intelligent grey goo of Capital itself. We also talk about the Lemurian Time War. It's a lot. This one almost broke us. 
 
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71 - The Benadryl Episode: A Trip to Eiriel

Would it alarm you to learn that in every medicine cabinet in America there lurks a powerful hallucinogenic drug? A drug in the same class of chemicals as datura and amanita muscaria mushrooms which not only sends the user into a bizarre and terrifying nightmare realm of shadow people and time loops, but causes a severe over reaction of the fight-or-flight response and removes your ability to calm yourself, and can cause kidney failure and early onset dementia? Would it further alarm you to know that this incredibly powerful and dangerous anticholinergic has seen recent popularity among the nation's youth through the "Benadryl challenge" on TikTok? It should. It should definitely alarm you. This is sheer madness. This week we're looking at some trip reports from people who have eaten far too much Benadryl for incredibly stupid reasons. We find out what happens when you're tripping balls on a deliriant at high school, how to get to a realm of the dead named "Eiriel", and learn about one bright young scientist who mixed Benadryl with datura in his shamanic journey to have sex with a shadow person. More than anything, we ask the question "what has gone so wrong in our world that the kids don't even do real drugs any more?" 
 
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70 - C.W. Leadbeater Part III: The Star in the East

It's the conclusion to the all-too-long life of C.W. Leadbeater. But somehow, the older Leadbeater and Annie Besant get the more ridiculous their lives become. In part III we meet young Jiddu Krishnamurti, who Leadbeater spied one day and decided was going to become the "World Teacher", a thing he and Besant had recently made up. There's so much nonsense in this episode. We've got Besant and Leadbeater stealing custody of Krishna and his brother from their father, Leadbeater faking hundreds of past lives for their followers (including some as monkeys on the moon),  joining forces with a sex-magic obsessed catholic bishop, starting a church, and a cocaine fueled trip to Saint Germain's house. We also see the rise of Jiddu Krishnamurti from theosophical puppet to his assumption of the role of world teacher and his subversion of everything Leadbeater stood for. 
 
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69 -C.W. Leadbeater Part II: A Few Good Theosophists

On part II of our Leadbeater series, it's the most anticlimactic courtroom drama there's ever been! We pick up the story of Leadbeater's rise to become one of the most influential occultists of all time right after the death of HPB and we see how Leadbeater ingratiates himself with the new president of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant. We cover Leadbeater and Besant's "investigations" of "occult chemistry" and thought forms, Leadbeater's ridiculous travelogue of the astral plane (and what he found there), and how Leadbeater's relentless and constant speaking tours catapulted him to the theosophical spotlight and worldwide superstardom. And then a letter shows up accusing Leadbeater of all sorts of truly awful things from which Leadbeater has to defend himself in court. But not just any court, no no no. This is Theosophical court. Which means it's real stupid. 
 
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68 - C.W. Leadbeater Part I: The Man Who Sold the World

Well, we're doing it. This week we're starting a monster of a series on a real piece of work named C.W. Leadbeater, who is, unfortunately, one of the absolute most influential and important people in Western occultism and spirituality. Leadbeater was a theosophist, and after Helena Blavatsky's death became the most important theosophists and a global superstar.  He invented aura reading, the color scheme for the chakras, turned the literary device of the "masters of ancient wisdom" into the superheroes that would become the "Ascended Masters". He completely upended Blavatsky's teachings, was one of the most manipulative, cold, and calculating spiritual gurus we have ever read about, and was, actually and for real, a child molester. But, being that it's theosophy we're talking about here, the saga of C.W. Leadbeater's life is also incredibly silly, larger than life, and more fun than it has any right to be. Enjoy.
 
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67 - The Ummo Affair

This week we're looking at one of the stranger UFO hoaxes in history: the space people from the planet Ummo. Beginning in 1960s Spain, upwards to 6,700 people started receiving letters from entities alleging to be from a star system 14.6 lightyears from Earth. The aliens wrote of a history with more than a little resemblance to the history of Spain in the 20th century and told a familiar tale of a looming nuclear apocalypse. They even showed up in Spanish skies just long enough for one intrepid photographer to get some shots of their flying saucers, and they left behind strange cylinders containing products manufactured by DuPont Chemical. Decades later, a shady science teacher/hypnotist named José Luis Jordán Peña said that he had hoaxed the whole thing to show how gullible everyone was. He also said the CIA provided him with buckets of radioactive sand to help with his hoaxing. And that is far from the only confusing part of Peña's confession.

66 - Holiday in Ukraine with Cody

About a week after the war in Ukraine broke out, our good friend Cody dropped everything, booked a flight to eastern Europe to volunteer as a paramedic, and spent the next four months as a medic in a special forces reconnaissance unit in eastern Ukraine. His qualifications were that he used to be a paramedic, is currently certified EMT Basic, and is one of the smartest and most truly insane people we have ever known. He did not, however, have prior military experience. We sat down three days after he got back so he could unload as much of this story as he's able to. It's the darkest comedy there's ever been, weirdly inspiring, and definitely not a perspective you're going to hear in many other places. 
 
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65 - Fae Encounters in the Modern World

This week we're taking a look at some modern fae folklore. And by modern folklore we mean bizarre and disturbing stories from the worst corners of the internet. But that's where you find the real gems. We take a look at a few encounters with something eerily similar to the gancanagh, the Irish "love-talking fairy," who takes on the appearance of whatever his victims will find most attractive, gets said victims to fall in love with him, and then leaves them in despair and madness when he goes to the store for a pack of smokes and never comes home. We also look at tiny men, dancing goblins, and we take a detour to see how our favorite punching bag, Theosophy, contributed to modernizing the myth of the fairies.