Gordon White | Star.Ships: A Prehistory Of The Spirits, Gobekli Tepe & Our Magical Past

00:00 You have one new message. Hi, my name is Sherry and I'm a part of something...I know it! And something's happening to me and my house in the good way but i'm a part of the ship that I need to ask a couple questions. I am in New Mexico thank you. And until you've thoroughly tested every last course, just did you know the less you really do? That's true Dr. Seuss!

01:14 Alright, Hireside Chatters drinking a little drink smoking a little smoke and diving straight into the deep end of the pool. From sunny San Diego I'm Greg Carlwood and ladies and gentlemen boys and girls i think we've all heard the Orwellian phrase that to control the past is to control the future And that's why we recognize the importance of the big questions about the human story our origins The ancients in the enigmatic structures they left behind and of course these questions form a major tentpole of the THC circus But if there's anything today's guest has taught me through our blossoming bromance, it is the importance of separating data from interpretation. Of looking at the underlying facts that a journalist or geologist or archaeologist might unearth and scraping off residue of their preconceived notions, tainted worldviews or narrow vision that leads to all the far out theories and boring conventional ones we find circling in the toilet bowl of realization

02:04 Should we really be getting our reconstruction of ancient mystery cults from straight-laced academics who've never so much just smoked a joint or made a sigil? Is it really wise to be doubling down on our understanding of mythology and ideas of ancient otherworldly contact from materialist scholars who've never made an offering to the spirits, or communed with multidimensional entities. These are the important threads that bind to the new book conjured up by my main man Gordon White entitled Starships a Prehistory of the Spirits, which takes a crack at reconstructing the lost context of a highly magical past. By looking at it through the lens of a practicing chaos magician and I have to say I can see clearly now The rain is gone You know him you love him one of my favorite people on this island earth Gordon my man welcome back to the party

02:47 Always a pleasure, Greg. Yeah man agreed! Congrats on the new book I really enjoyed it i think you're spot-on when you point out that typically the people studying the ancients and their mythology don't have the context of a magical or spiritual practice and that's a big problem. I mean I see examples of it almost every show with a guest who maybe tries to construct a power pyramid breakdown without the Vatican because they're Catholic or on the flip side a guest who gives the Vatican too much conspiratorial credit because of their own religious bias But talk to us about this problem of context when it comes to interpreting the ancients and our human story. Yeah, sure! Well when you actually look at history or its sort of more defined sort of sub-schools like archaeology they're only a couple hundred years old and many of them

03:37 began in a particular world view quite a christian when i mean archaeology essentially began with biblical archaeology doctor clash made cold holy land syndrome where the city of earliest archaeologist would head out into the near east with a bible and one hand in the other looking for things that match their worldview. Now over the last 150 years, and some of this is good quite frankly. Over the last 150 years some of these sciences and sort of schools of inquiry have dropped that but they think they've dropped it instead up. They just step sideways because they have swapped the Bible in one hand with Darwin on The Origin Of The Species or something similar to that where you end up with

04:20 people going out digging and looking for ancient belief systems. Without a single believing anything beyond materialism and that strikes me as something of the fools errand yeah i mean that makes sense where do you think we see this influence that the materialist lens has had on maybe these alternative realms of thought or how is it got us worried about the wrong things when were looking at this stuff Well, it's sort of had a cascade effect really. From the start you will see interpretations of highly sophisticated and complex ancient cultures in say the hunter-gatherer period of the Paleolithic or the Neolithic at least in the early parts of it where we kind of think… We sort of have in the back of our heads

05:10 progression of complexity to what's something that broadly resembles western civilization now even though you will find modern academics pay lip service to the idea that that's not in fact the case they still do it is still actually haven't. really correlated the idea that people in a paleolithic not only had the same size brains as us, they had slightly larger ones. And however that correlates with our understanding of consciousness in the mind, that means we kind of have this hundred and fifty thousand year old gap of humans who were as smart or potentially smarter than us And we don't credit them with any idea of mythology and this is famous mid 20th century idea that life in the stone age was nasty british short it appears to be complete opposite and the journey of the book. Is

06:02 looking for different data points we can use to attempt to kind of reconstruct, not even reconstruct just elevate and give some dignity back to our ancestors who lived in a world very different to our own. Yeah man, it's a fascinating read. I really do love the difference in perspective but let me ask you kind of conspiratorial question knowing that there are some occult and ritualistic practices among today's elite to some degree Do you think that they've worked out some of this proper context about the ancients for themselves outside of what is presented to us or are they just as in the dark? Uh...I would say a bit of both. I think my speculation as to what sort of super-elite

06:47 Ancient aliens theory view of the past looks like is one that is much more based on a physical extraterrestrial model, which I don't think holds a lot of water when you look at sort of wider data set. So in a funny way, at least some of them have, in the modern age, at least some of them have trapped themselves with will kind of corner themselves with their own materialist belief system. And this is the trouble what we have as this physical ancient aliens, extraterrestrial alternate history we can only have because the last sort of 60 or so years of archaeological research has been exclusively materialist which means when you hit a question mark say in Old Kingdom Egypt or at the beginning of Sumeria

07:38 because you don't have a model that incorporates consciousness or the spirit world as at least an option to explore, you either have – well there's humans or there's aliens. And so at that stage I would actually say at least some kind of parts of the Anglo-American world Probably add a super elite level probably operate to that belief that hasn't always been the case if you look at power centers going back to the renaissance and before all of this return of quote unquote hermetic wisdom into europe. That was grabbed by banking families, that was grabbed by the Vatican. Those kind of ideas of mirroring the stars on earth were used by Haussmann when he reordered Paris. I mean it was one of his sub goals and the other one was obviously to prevent any more revolutions. You had the same thing with the Royal Society architects who are reordering London after The Great Fire you obviously have it with Washington DC so

08:41 It's kind of those versions of. the awareness that people in the distant past probably had some skills that we have since lost manifested in the world views of the time, which were religious. There was God, there was angels and spirits and so on. So that was the model they operated to. In the mid 20th century on basically since the end of World War II I think we've kind of thrown the baby out with the bathwater by leaving these spirit or consciousness interpretation Sort of by the wayside. Yeah, well said man because you mentioned that ancient aliens motif and that is a great example of how That materialist lens kind of distorts what might really be some type of non-human interaction It just puts it in that strictly physical context and it probably wasn't no And I'm not ruling out the possibility In fact, I think it's extremely likely that

09:39 physical extraterrestrials had some sort of interaction with mankind probably at the very beginning a couple of million years ago. We spoke about the pimp theory last time I was on, I believe. But also in recorded history you will find examples that look for all intents and purposes like an account of a physical extraterrestrial experience These ones, however don't tend to change the mythology in which they occur. They sort of incorporated into it and two that I think are probably quite important – well actually where Dr Jacques Vallée got the word Magonia from was considered this realm in the clouds and there was a 13th century bishop, Bishop Agobard of Lyon

10:24 And he was sort of complaining about these peasants around him with their primitive belief systems about these wizards who would come down from Magonia in flying ships to the ground. Except they caught a couple of them and kept them for several days, and that's a very Roswell-esque thing. That was kind of the story that triggered Dr Valete to think well There's a lot going on here. And the other one staying with Catholicism is the Fatima miracle between the wars in Portugal. Now that is some sort of open and shut extraterrestrial account, but you'll notice it was incorporated into the Catholicism at the time and actually remains as a collection of Fatima prophecies from The Blessed Virgin Mary

11:10 which Dr. Vallée sometimes calls the BVM technology, so there are a few dozen of them that you can kind of look at and go well we can't rule out that physical aliens showed up but that doesn't seem to be as suitable method for quote-unquote explaining or interpreting where the sort of sudden emergences of cultural complexity come from, especially when if you actually look at the texts that are associated with this emergence. They don't actually resemble that at all there they're quite explicit that a lot of this technology came from the spirit world and spirits that descended from the stars or were the stars that's clearly there but the trouble is when you read that and

11:58 Even want to put on the table the possibility that spirits are a real ontological category then you immediately jump to aliens and so that's sort of where people get caught in a loop. Yeah man the past seems big enough for both for sure but these psychic or multi-dimensional aspect is grossly underrepresented and i guess thats what we're doing, moving that needle back the other way little bit To quote the book, you say science excels at generating facts but magic has been generating meaning for perhaps 50 000 years. We have been lax to abandon interpretation to sciencism is to shrink natural philosophy's most sacred duty your tribe deserves better and I think that's a great way of saying it but you know a lot of us don't have such a strong magical tradition for ourselves help us to see the ancients through your lens a little bit how does it look different

12:51 Well i guess we have to pick a time I think when if you're looking at the sort of paleolithic this is the kind of cultures that were associated with the building of go back to tepe. You have two picture groups people who basically didn't even have houses they probably had lean twos and they were noticeable tribes head brains slightly larger than ours, They had super abundant food. They're sort of wandering across Eurasia during the Ice Age, which means that the night sky lit up like nothing you can find on Earth as a result of pollution and water particulates and all that now. They could sing songs that lasted for hours but when you're in there we can kind of get a taste – I don't mean to reduce their experience – but we can kind of get a taste

13:43 if you do go camping or trekking the entire world becomes sort of three sixty degrees or seven twenty degrees where your. You're definitively part of the land in the air you hear animal noises and it's this kind of experience of the physical that sort of bleeds into the nonphysical which means they didn't have the same sort of linguistic barriers we do when we talk about what is real and what isn't. If you think about what would have a paleo with the country consider dreams to be it seems reasonable just suggest that they were other world journeys or visitations from spirits until you have that way of looking at

14:28 and experiencing the world that we don't really have much of a model for, but from a magical perspective when you kind of enter into that way of seeing the world. The universe has this sometimes alarming tendency to respond as if that were true so you can call spirits to the quarters, you could do all this stuff and it responds and things happen. People would have that with dreams or telephone telepathy suddenly realize there is something to all these They wouldn't have had the filter that made you think, oh no I'm probably just making it up or it's just a coincidence. It doesn't appear that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers had a particularly strong understanding of probability. So that's the piece we miss in the modern world when we look at something that is clearly important on a psychological and probably spiritual level to these people

15:24 We just don't have the sort of framework for it. And more than that, academia kind of forces you to describe them in very utilitarian ways. And that's probably the key to why Gobekli Tepe is so important because it breaks the idea that spirituality is a story we told ourselves once we brought the grain for the day and had nothing else to do. The reality demonstrated by this site, but other sites that extend back into the Ice Age, is that we were building star temples before we built houses So this stuff is very important. Whether or not you want to go as far as saying the beings that sort of landed at Gobekli Tepe have a specific separate existence, that's up to each person who looks into it to kind of come to their own conclusions – it is unavoidable to conclude that this was hugely important. This

16:20 This is more important than having a permanent structure to live in. And it was, yeah, it's a star temple on the hill that no one could live there. There's no natural water source nearby. The obsidian evidence indicates that people were trading and thus coming from as far afield – it's in Southeast Turkey – from coming as far afield as Greece and Iran so it was important across great swathes of the ancient world And it wasn't fortified, it wasn't any of this stuff. It was just significant in ways that we can kind of half understand and half not. There's much to be gained by taking that step into that level of understanding. Yeah. What do you think about the idea that the placement of Gobekli Tepe has anything to do with certain areas being known for heightened paranormal activity?

17:16 It may very well be. I mean, this is an example what we would call paranormal now would just be called normal and paleolithic so it would not surprise me. That is the case you find with any number of sacred sites or in say Polynesia you have the notion of taboo where there are sites that are holy in particularly animistic traditions because they have a much more sophisticated way of experiencing the physical and non-physical so it would not surprise me in the least given the sort of subsequent history that little corner of turkey, that may well have indeed happened.

17:57 Yeah you can almost say it's like a chicken or the egg thing because, does this certain spot attract quote unquote paranormal activity because it's just a node for that or because humanity has paid conscious attention for centuries to this particular spot, and thus what we experience now could be residue from that or something. Exactly! Did you build a temple to star beings because there are star beings there? Or did you build a temple to bring star beings there? Exactly yeah better said than I Clearly the stars were important and it is really hard to wrap our head around that now because like I'm 30 years old and I've probably spent five nights or less sleeping under the stars and actually, you know thinking about them in an undistracted way. So how can even start to understand what they're going through if that's your paradigm too? I mean, I think that's pretty normal but one area where I think the modern culture has really soiled our understanding is the relationship between

18:57 stars and spirits to these ancient people. Because I got a small glimpse of this once when I was trying to sleep on the floor of a bus parked on the cliff side of the Pacific coast, but the LSD was making it increasingly difficult and I ended up having a very clear and nuanced psychic exchange with a specific note of light in the night sky. And it sounds strange but something clicked that night that became a lot more slippery with a sober mind. But what can you say to shed some light on the connection between stars and spirit? Well, if you told that story to an early Sumerian or even a modern-day Aborigine – if you pick the right part of Australia – that would be completely normal conversation. And in my mind it is normal. These guys probably had other methods of altering their consciousness other than drugs to have that experience if they even needed them but they also certainly used

19:51 drugs and alcohol in these ritual settings, in the kind of drawing down of the spirits of the stars. And this is the pivot point where the ancient aliens you see on television diverges from a more spirit or magic-based interpretation of similar data – although I think my data are better – in that idea, it sort of explicitly says we interpret when a spirit from the stars is speaking to us. We think that means they've come down on their little whirring flying saucer to teach us how to build triangles of rocks and as I said, I think I've said this before but i'm really open to that idea It's just there is no evidence that we found yet that supports it But in the meantime and this again we sorta come back to probabilities

20:40 Physical visitation by extraterrestrials seems like an extremely low probability event. We may guess that it's happened a few times in human history, however these kind of consciousness experiences happen every goddamn day. They happen everyday at the telephone telepathy you pick the right corner of the world this sort of spirit contact drawing down on the stars this kind of thing happens everyday and it And it sort of leads to a real world impact now if that's the one thing that you do which would be in the case of some of these earlier cultures then you gonna get pretty fucking good at it and as a result if you have to ask them like so I'm thinking of building this triangle temple rocks boom ego is that kind of experience contact experience

21:31 I think underpins quite a bit of what happens when we read the story in the old kingdom in egypt he sort of flat out says that god gave him these skills and he was known as a magician before he was an architect so you put these pieces together well, i'm actually going to take him literally and send me says he got the technology or this is plans for how you lay out joseph step pyramid from the spirit world. We can have a model for every hundred and twenty years of paranormal research into things like after death communication and so on we have a model that suggests that these things have some sort of separate reality and then we have this thirty thousand years people saying, this is how they did it doesn't seem to unreasonable to suggest the color.

22:19 I mean that makes sense, but one gray area to me when it comes to mythology is how can we tell what's human imagination projecting personalities onto lights in the sky because it's all they had for storytelling versus some inherent qualities being picked up on by the ancients? Or does it really matter? It probably does matter but you can't really tell without doing. And again, you get into a weird circular loop where you're deciding the things that you hear in your head are not real. There is a different category of reality for the things that are out there now – that probably wasn't quite how things were seen in the ancient world but look at the analysis of mythology as crucial and difficult simple as

23:12 Yeah, it's so... you know every guest I have who talks about it they're like no it's actually you know X is connected to Y rather than X connected to Z and sometimes it seems like everybody's breakdown of mythology is researcher specific. Makes it really hard to get into So you did mention Gobekli Tepe obviously its a big awesome part of the new book but People are used to hearing the broad phrase that it's all connected, but you know it really is because in a way something as seemingly unrelated as like Nixon's war on drugs actually affects the way we understand a new discovery like Gobekli Tepe right? I mean if you consider it to be somewhat in that realm of a ritualistic space.

23:56 I would say so i think that again this is sort of comes back to a to an animation interpretation of the universe which i am a big fan off what we have is, will you do things when you talk about nixon's war on drugs yet the first one which is the kind of closing down all. molecules that the kind of layperson could use to have their own personal methodological spiritual experience done in the right setting but on the other side of it. The trouble with history is that history keeps happening to it, So you have all these sites that end up in war zones, you have sacred areas that land in Muslim countries that are extremely hostile to them. All this kind of stuff is going on at the same time now it's a tragedy and we kinda have self-awareness now to push against that and try to minimize its impact as possible but

24:50 History keeps happening to history and that is essentially always happened. Where one empire sort of collapses the other one and the kind of great treasures in cities have failed empire, fall into dust or their jungle overtakes them so there's no organic process to the story of history and the history that happens to history but i think a lot of people would maybe do well to kind of think about because it really does color, especially in the last 20 or 30 years where history is used as an ideological weapon. It really does color how we... Or it risks sort of sending us down the wrong track there are a couple very good examples of this The worst one is probably Israel. Israel uses

25:38 biblical archaeology as a kind of psyop or subtextual attempt well, at least the Likud party does to kind of redraw the borders of Israel around their sort of fictional biblical boundaries. And so they end up finding things that are interesting because they're quite clearly paleolithic structures or what have you but they're like oh look we found King David's palace and I'm like well that would surprise me because there is no other evidence that he physically existed but it's not even just in this sort of attempt to quote unquote prove using archaeology a dominant worldview. A lot of things seem to have happened in Israel, they're claiming and there's no genetic evidence for this – there is actually a skull cap like the top of the skull of a Denisovan which is another hominin species that was found in a cave and they are like oh so the Denisovans came through here? I'm

26:36 They didn't. It was not just it was found in a cave, it was found on the shelf up in a cave that somebody's spirit fetish someone like literally chopped the top of this poor Denis Irwin head and I was obviously used to some kind of magic component if you actually unpick it look at the genetic data highest levels of like genetic admixture which cannot be faked between normal humans and other hominins happens in island Southeast Asia so you sort of see these press release science journalism and nonsense fly across twitter on a daily basis the two other sort of biggest. What's the weather to add it was not a crime but that you are the biggest perpetrators of this use of history for manipulation india and china

27:24 India can be half forgiven for doing it because there is a strong sort of Hindu nationalist movement that believes everything to do with the Vedas and Eurasia came from India and was exported. And then the reason they do this is not only just sort of bolster this Hindu Indian identity, which in many ways is fine – It's because if you go back 50 years they had about 120 years of Europeans telling them that they invented nothing that everything came in with these aryan invaders which don't show up in the genetic evidence anywhere and china doesn't anymore bold faced israel style way where they just cannot handle the idea of it rice which was first cultivated islands out to east asia and particularly taiwan now that's just not gonna fly invasion so you end up with kind of wholesale lies about where rice was invented we have these stories

28:16 literally fly across Twitter and a bunch of my friends will retweet them, you actually need to click past the press release and see if you can't find the actual archaeological document or findings themselves. And you quickly realize that it's dodgy! Like there are actual data in there but the interpretation lines up perfectly with what the state wants to say we don't have a lot of clean interpretations in especially when it comes to the ancient world because understanding and kind of having control over that narrative is so important to how we see ourselves in the modern world.

28:57 Touche man, those are all great points and you're right that nationalism and racism and ego really does get in the way a lot more than people think it does. And it just supports that overarching theme that context is important You have to account for The messenger you're getting information from and try to pull out those impartial truths I love how that theme comes up multiple times in the book But it is kind of sad that you have to spend so much time dispelling those biases and misconceptions before you can really make some of the bigger points you want to make? Well, I mean the feedback so far...I mean the book's only been out for a week. But the feedback has been that it's quite good and it's my experience talking about this stuff for a few years now that stays with people even if...and it should because even if...this is vanishingly unlikely because they sort of waited 20 years to write the book but even if the entire underlying thesis which is we can sort of track

29:55 using genetic information and linguistic and mythological information, the sort of story of mankind's relationship to the universe. The whole way back to our trip out of Africa even if that falls apart. The bits that will definitely never ever fall apart are the explanations that history is a political football that if you don't realize it will get kicked in your face. Well said! And To hone in on Gobekli Tepe a little bit more, you write in the book that it is probably the most important archaeological discovery of all time. Gobekli Tepe is at least 12 000 years old! That is 7 000 years older than the Giza complex. The Great Pyramid is closer in time to us than it is to the creation of Gobekli Tepe which is pretty

30:44 mind-blowing and I've heard guys like Graham Hancock talk about the site at length but from a chaos magician standpoint why is this so important besides its age? What's different about your magical analysis of the site? Gobekli Tepe is useful if it's a Rosetta Stone, if you're looking for a way to let me just back that up and say it is impossible for me sitting here in twenty sixteen in west london to even begin to conceive of what a hunter gatherer cosmology was like i can probably get my head around an early agricultural lists.

31:23 mentality or natural rhythm because we are you know more less still there i mean we go with terrible gm crops and greenhouses and so on but where were still essentially a farming society. And why Gobekli Tepe is so important is that it was in use for so long, that it actually allows us to... So it was a news across the divide and we're actually intimately involved in it. In all likelihood, it was used across the divide between moving from a hunter-gatherer way of life to a settled agriculture way of life. There are parts of it that we can understand that may hope give us

32:05 a kind of view into the parts that we can't understand. It's literally like Rosetta Stone, which was written in three languages – one of which was hieroglyphics – which at the time we couldn't read but the other two happened to be sort of Greek and hieratic so you could…and it was the same message because it was an imperial message and the whole thing got unpacked from there. Gobekli Tepe does the same thing because there are parts over that match what we understand about agriculturalists And then there are the earlier parts that don't, and you can kind of step and correlate between those back. Now one of the things because I mean, I like this stuff but one of the things that other researchers looking at it maybe want to minimize is its extreme... It's a ritual space. That's what it is. People like it has astronomical implications

33:00 Some of the relief carvings are probably Ice Age versions of Scorpio and so on, because they're clearly there. But it's also a space for taking drugs, getting drunk, playing drums – it was a space that is used for specific ritual purposes. There was a way, there was a magical way they brought these two heavenly beings down. Now, there are number archaeological points that support them. The first one, which I think is quite important is that the main sort of T pillars in the earlier enclosures hum when you slap them with your open hand now

33:37 Now, they probably didn't do that. They probably didn't slap them like a misbehaving Hollywood starlet but what it does mean is that this was a vibratory space and this was the space where they would drum and they would chant. And I mean you know they were growing einkorn wheat or at least gathering it to make beer rather than bread we actually as humans made beer before we made breads. Dr Klaus Schmidt who's dead now said yeah like the sort of carved hits that you see in and around some of the enclosures is like they i would not be surprised at all if they were drug pits we certainly using things like mushrooms which will go quite well on the done off the set of herds that the people with which a single beer you got mushrooms drums and you have exclusively.

34:24 Hunted meat that's what they are thousands and thousands of bones of wild taxa no domesticated animals so this was a hunters temple. where people would come from different tribal, it was barely tribes then. It was sort of family groups presumably at regular times that I would speculate matched the location of different constellations in the sky specifically Orion because he's a hunter and so i look at it and it unpacks as a Rosetta Stone for me because they recognize the ritual pieces Probably, actually it may not have been. I would suspect it was an exclusively male space at least in the kind of earlier levels when I say suspect the reality is when you find existing hunter-gatherer cultures that when they have like a holy site that's sacred to a bunch of different tribes or family groups they kinda perform multiple functions so there are a sacred space but when people show up

35:22 to perform rituals on an annual basis or biannual, or however it works. They also do things like marry off each other's sons and daughters because one of the main concerns of hunter-gatherers was that kind of inbreeding if you're living in a family group so the sacred calendar ran the trading and marrying off and so on. So typically when you look at contemporary hunter gatherer cultures Those particular spaces are exclusively males or the domain of the hunters. So it may have been, it may not have been. It's largely irrelevant because what they did was show up trade obsidian presumably trade husbands and wives called down these star beings that matched Orion in the sky so you know there is a hunter

36:09 who was also headless, and you'll notice the tea pillows are headless. So you have this kind of calling down of the star spirit of The Hunter into a temple whilst drunk off your face – well actually probably not that drunk because they would have only made ale and it's low percentage but what we don't understand about early beer is that they would put mandrake or something in it so even the beer would get you off your face! I don't know, a cult rave party 14 000 years ago. I love it! Yeah me too it sounds like fun right so Graham's new book you know was probably the thing most people are familiar with when talking about Gobekli Tepe and these tea pillars and you mentioned that there does seem to be some astrological component to the animals that are carved on the tea pillars but he takes that pretty far in saying

37:05 this specific one with the vulture on it that most people have seen by now, the vulture with a circle above its wing which looks like... Pillar 43 if people want to look it up. Exactly and he alludes that is a clue that this is about some type of astrological clock and these are unknown constellations It seems like you do think there's components to these pillars that are astrological, but maybe it's not a message to the future. Maybe it's something to draw down spirits? Yeah nothing is a message in the future. It literally never happened. It's some sort of silly idea that I think resulted from misinterpretation around this. If you remember in the early 90s there was controversy around the Sphinx and then people like

37:55 And most of them have moved away from the ideas like Graham Hancock and Dr. Shock were like, no it's a message! It's not a goddamn message there are no messages they don't care about you know fat Americans in fanny packs showing up 12000 years later they didn't care if they live or die They wouldn't if they showed up at a time machine now No one cares...No one has ever cared Well I agree with you and that's kind of what I said to him when I did talk to him It goes back to that idea like my last guest giving too much credit to the Vatican because it is something that's harmful to his faith. I thought it was kind of interesting, you know how convenient that you are decoding this message

38:37 to a future time that just happens to be our exact time and It just happened to be unearthed in that same window. It just seems too convenient it seems like something you would be Kind of looking for, you know Yes, so I think magicians of the gods is his weakest book and i just want to back that up by saying my journey into this kind of world is graham's fault it was fingerprints in the gods in the nineties and i have tremendous affection for him. I still think he's best books in a following order like the order of best is supernatural underworld and then talisman

39:16 Even though my emotional and personal favorite is Fingerprints of the Gods. This book confused me, it could do with a lot more editing and I found it disingenuous in a number of places including him thinking he's been vindicated Because he found an asteroid idea he liked even though as you actually mentions in magicians like the last time i did this i thought it was around flame math idea so what i think the fact that its remained in the book is that. This is an update of Fingerprints of the Gods, and I think it's a messy update. And it was in Fingerprints of the Gods so it kind of needs to be in there but the book doesn't really hang together that well again we come to the data and interpretation thing. It's not…I don't think it's an astronomical clock.

40:06 I really don't i think we can both agree which is like some of these look when he's writing that we don't know what these constellations are but given that they're like five or six and then we can make a reasonable guess of then it's fair to say that these are also consolation almost specifically they are spirits that were important to these tribes, that happened to have a constellation. And that might sound like splitting hairs but from magical perspective it's really not. So that's kind of what I see when I see it. But now the book – this isn't ragging on Graham time! I pre-ordered everything so we've got the big giant hardcover

40:47 But his best books still remain and I think if you want like the real Graham, like if you want how he sees the world. I think supernatural and underworld are it? Yeah, I think he's a great writer and nobody is perfect to know who this good stuff in it. It's a giant goddamn book. I just think it's sort of messily It's not as tight as Fingerprints of the Gods. There is stuff in there that I think, now that he is Graham Hancock, editors are potentially a bit too timid – and I don't suffer from that problem because I'm nobody! So my editors will take slashes through like, that's meandering claptrap, you've said that already moved out… And they're just bits in it that I just think need to be tightened up when he's describing taking a flight from Israel to Turkey. Well we can get rid of that, can't we? This is quite a long book

41:35 That's fair to say. Another thing about Gobekli Tepe I wanted to ask you about is this excarnation, I definitely didn't know much about this practice at all but it seems to have played a role in the site right? Yeah so in amongst the the slaughtered wild taxa from hunting, there's a very strong suggestion that it was a death site. So the hunting…so it was a funerary site although that word doesn't really quite match how speculative hunter-gatherer cosmology would work but the god form involved so this sort of hypothetical Orion hunter spirit is and has always been associated with the dead

42:23 So, famously you have for instance the wild hunt across Celtic countries which would be when Gwynedd Altnod would ride out at night and if he saw him he'd die. And that kind of thing so this appears quite likely to be a much more recent cultural memory of such an idea. So excavation it's speculated and I think Pillar 43 may well point in that direction, that this was a place where at least highborn people or heads of tribes or so on would leave the corpses of dead tribal leaders to be picked out and essentially

43:02 defleshed by buzzards and birds of prey. Birds of prey would show up there now this practice continued into Eurasian shamanism and still appears in Tibetan Buddhism which is pretty much 60% shamanism anyway maybe even more depends who you ask, so you have vultures pillar 43 has a bird of prey, half-bird of prey half human taking a round ball which may well be ahead and at the bottom of the pillar you have a headless corpse. So you put all these pieces together with the archaeological evidence of bones

43:38 Another piece falls into place this wasn't an astronomical clock and those are the things that you can kind of is what i mean about it being a resettled stone that we have these pieces that existed. agricultural life which we have a frame of reference for and some of the match things we don't have a friends for but again they thought the same day at the same brain cells so why would that not if i was carried over to my view is going back to pay is a lot more. People gonna take this in a negative way a little love crafty and i think

44:14 Success of the hunt was like if it was unsuccessful you fucked right so you throw everything at this and if there are star spirits that improve your hunting effectiveness, give them what they want in a fact that he was used for so long suggest to me we can kind of reconstruct. what Dr. Schmidt called the heavenly beings in the middle of these circles, they were spirits from the stars unquestionably associated with successful hunting and as a result that kind of life-and-death component it's important to realize which not a lot of people

44:59 kind of mention that the current, I mean the thing is only nine hectares have been found but it's speculated that the site is 30 hectares. But the hill that is Gobekli Tepe is majority flint so prior to there being a star temple it was speculated that this was a source of flint for spears and other kinds of weapons used in the hunt which would track with the idea that it became holy to a hunting spirit and then something obviously happened that changed the cosmology, that led to this building of repeated star temples. That were deliberately buried in built another one and so on up through it. Yeah man I really like your analysis of it. I do think that sounds like it fits a little more with what's on pillar 43 that vulture? It does seem more

45:49 A cold is your easter terry than a marker on the clock and the whole thing about the vultures taking the flush up to the heavens i mean that, it's interesting and seems like that could be what's being represented there but also you mentioned that there are. Weaving snakes on some of the pillars their woven into a grid yes next to them as regularly depicted animal yeah which Again, so when I say it's a hunting temple. It's important to realize that actually a minority of the animals depicted there were things that you would hunt. There's even a crocodile, which is weird in its own way but they're scary animals! There are spiders and scorpions and snakes everywhere... And the snake component for anyone who has taken any kind of DMT analog will know that the ectopic phenomena when you close your eyes starts with a geometric pattern

46:44 very often then comes snake skin and it becomes a snake. I have a couple of friends who were actually swallowed by the snake, and then that's when their ayahuasca journey began. That hasn't happened to me." And you look at that and go well they were using...I mean it was a drug factory! They were making beer that got you off your face more than alcohol. They were fermenting einkorn with potentially some lysergic acid containing fungi that may or may not be under underlying the Eleusinian mysteries. So, yes its primary purpose and this is where a magician can look at it differently its primary purpose was the primary purpose of the tribes who used it. It was a sacred place for a hunting spirit or hunting god that you would sort

47:39 You wouldn't want to piss off you ignore that your peril if most of your calories come from. Hunting right and that is kind of what's what scene at the end by the way it's interesting like this i'm so glad we started with the magic stuff because i'm gonna be on the show before because when i just when i say these things i mean them literally in a way that an academic wouldn't. Orion has recurred through mythology as a very specific hunting type and kind of king-of-spirits type, right the way through to the beginning of the Western magical period in Alexandria about 300 AD. So that's what I see when I look at it –and I don't mean

48:24 in a debunkey way, in the slightest. I attribute some sort of ontological category to the spirits depicted at Gobekli Tepe. Yeah! I love it man and would be fair to say your interpretation of Gobekli Tepe there's some kind of relationship or maybe its accrued version of the same consciousness altering tech used in the pyramids of Giza? Yeah, well definitely. If we go back to the birds of prey they are the shamanic animal par excellence particularly the vulture which is one of the early depictions of Isis as a vulture now there are very important shamanic animals because they can operate in multiple worlds

49:11 They can kind of walk through water, like mud and so on. But they can fly and they can walk quite well on land. And that between-the-worlds motion is probably one of the reasons why we would initially give our dead to be eaten by them because they're actually taking them off to the other world. So you have this form And as we jump, because everyone wants to do – and I think they're doing an okay job of it. But everyone wants to go Govekli Tepe straight to Giza in their books. I like to think…I take people around the houses to kind of make a case there but you're correct that the same forms because there's a kind of hypothetical

49:56 a mythological narrative called the Laurasian mythology invented by Harvard Indologist called Dr. Witzel, and it has a lot of components that he thinks were sort of put together or this way of seeing the world arose about 30 000 years ago which means it was active in Gobekli Tepe and was active at the very beginning –in a very different form but still active– at the very beginning of the Egyptian dynastic project But some of the parallels, the prominence of Orion obviously. So Gobekli Tepe points at it and Dr Giulio Maruli makes the case – I think it's quite a good one – that the thing that changed actually led to the building of Gobekli Tepe in the first place if you look at the earliest layers was standing on that hill, you kind of see Orion

50:50 Rise in a sort of general suddenly direction but only half rose so he kind of got his waist out of the water. About eleven thousand bc serious which was previously below the horizon rose with him so all of a sudden the hunter has a companion which had been occulted by the actual horizon for quite some time. And it's thus very interesting that there are two heavenly beings pointed at Orion there, so I suspect that you have an Orion-Isis or an Orion-Sirius combination

51:28 add to go back which is obviously everywhere in the old kingdom and specifically you have this sort of belt star match so you have the same basic idea kind of drawing down or matching. Particular stars are asterisks with things on the ground and that's it that appears to be very old form of ritual that we will match or mimic something to gain its power. And one of them is obviously using rocks to match the sky, you have that there at Giza. You have the sort of same general idea that it's a map of the heavens. Isis is well, you don't find any pyramid texts in the Old Kingdom I think or in Giza

52:14 It was a later development. You at least don't have them inside the ritual chambers, so you've got Starshops pointed Isis. These are itself the three main pyramids match the belt stars. Once you get inside it That same sonic emphasis right so if you get inside the king's chamber it's like walking around in a guitar or something is this sound. It's built for sound basically it's as simple as that so it's sort of this stone map of iran thats built for sounds and well I've heard that before yeah That resonance component seems quite common for the ancient world. I mean that's something when i did talk to Graham Hancock in Armenia he talked about the fact that at the Great Pyramids they don't let you walk around barefoot anymore and they don't let you walk around alone, and if they catch you meditating they'll get you out of there but if you pay a fee you can get in their alone but if you're just in there like a regular Joe uh...you're not really allowed too I guess reflect in a way on

53:14 on that. Maybe it's some type of technology that still works, but I am really interested in that you mentioned also the Gobekli Tepe has those pillars that hum when you hit them and it's weird my simple stoner mind thinks there might be a connection between sound or vibration...the out-of-body experience? You get that buzzing when you do some psychedelics and maybe even You could incorporate the off-the-books physics that Joseph Farrell talks about perhaps, but I mean what do you make of this importance and why we don't have it in our current culture? What's the first bit i don't know how all the pieces fit together but i'm telling you we're looking at the pieces of a very specific and very sophisticated form of magic it's immortality technology and i mean the technology in a magical sense drugs the ritual space. The use of residence what we have to remember about the old kingdom is that,

54:10 One the categories invented by a sort of agree to chronicle thousands of years later they didn't think in these terms but it emerged out of nowhere. Seemingly although it kinda didn't like this is the whole point of the book you actually see with the old kingdom that it is the kind of peak of this megalithic Eurasian culture that began with moving little rocks around and you kinda find a midpoint with Gobekli Tepe. So by the time, you get to the building of The Three Great Pyramids... And by the way Giza was used for thousands of years before that so I think it was a sacred site that sort of matched the afterlife because its all these tunnels where the sun sets so I think it was a map

54:57 underworld long before they got the pyramids. But by the time you get to them, these people are playing an absolute A-game. So we will never understand how these pieces work but we know... You may not be able to rebuild the crashed flying saucer but you know a crashed flying saucer when you see it and that's what the magical components that you find particularly at Giza out of anywhere on Earth show you, you have different uses of stone. Stones that have like radiation effects and resonance found all over the place and it's matching the sky and they're using hydro technology to kind of move water around and flood certain things in there are different hidden rooms behind other rooms in some of the valley temples

55:54 And they're made of weird different stones or alabaster and granite and obviously the making stuff out of geopolymer so this is making most of the pyramid concrete we don't know what's going on that way until we get. a time machine and who even knows what date you said when she got it but until you get a time machine we can't actually we have to be extremely humble when we try to reconstruct with a before all weekend say is this isn't like being an impressive magic So we're getting kind of close to the end here. I'm kind of curious, do you see any ways in which understanding the material in this latest book of yours or the history of stories could strengthen someone's modern magical practice? Yeah, I think so for people who

56:48 do practice magic, this is gonna sound weird. It appears to work better if you have the context or the framework for like within which it has evolved and the story of western magic I've got a qualify like you know it's a big world there's plenty of Hogwarts out there The story of Western Magic is fairly well covered between if you start today and you move backwards to say, Alexandria and the fall of Alexandria. But that's only 1800 years 1500 years. So this kind of provides I hope the story of the sort of previous 70,000 years as to how those pieces showed up in Alexandria to be sort of smooshed together to become the Grimoire tradition and Gnosticism and a whole bunch of other stuff that we have. And for

57:39 me anyway, I guess that was the sort of journey because it might be odd for a chaos magician to be so interested in things that are so old when its unashamedly 35-year old kind of magical school of thought. But it appears that at least for me and I know for other people getting the context right makes it taste better, makes the universe taste better. And so there's no... I mean for people who aren't into magic you can still read the book because you're not going to get to the end and say and your god turns out to be a spaceman or it's right it's not that at all It's actually..I think I hope it's I mean the feedback I've got so far is I hope that people are hope the thing they take away is being empowered

58:28 have your own stories and to tell them and to look into them and realize they are yours, you don't have someone else tell them to you. And that's not an invitation to just make shit up I mean is that quite a responsibility to put on someone but it's yours like you can find this information in and until the story of the universe to yourself. That's what a shaman would do for a tribe, and that's something that magic has let fall by the wayside over the last hundred or so years. And the restoration of context appears to be a big part of this 21st century magical revival.

59:06 Well said man, and that does get us to that inevitable finish line. But I do love this new book! I love your approach to these things it really feels like a change into the guard and i know i've told you that with this show i've tried to take the realm of conspiracy paranormal radio which i like a lot and kind of update it for a new age not only in the approach to material but also quite literally in format by broadcasting break free over the internet as opposed to the archaic radio waves. And, it seems like its going really well but the only real slack I get is coming from people who aren't recognizing the change or aren't comfortable with that but... The point is I would like to see folks looking towards people like you for our ancient understanding 2.0 in that similar way and I think

59:49 On a day like today, what we both are trying to do comes together quite well and it's a beautiful thing. But with that said I guess tell the people where to get a copy and keep up with your enlightening insights. Absolutely my that was really nice great now i'm gonna sell my book so the book is available its published by scarlet imprint there Esoteric publisher in the UK which means they only sell through independent bookstores and their own website so if you jumping on amazon now to look for it i do have another book there but that's not the book we're talking about so you need to go to scarlet imprint dot com. And get yourself that one,

1:00:27 The paperback will be out in short order. We have a beautiful fine edition gold hardcover one, but if you've just heard me to be fair... You'll don't have to buy the £50 book when there's a paperback coming! In terms of me findmeatroonsoup.com or the Facebook page RoonSoup If you want to chat I'm way better on Twitter than anything else literally in life So that's Gordon, G-O-R-D-O-N underscore white. W-H-I-T-E Right on, man. And I do love that you have these higher end versions of the book in the digital age because it's kind of a return to artisanship and I just appreciate that but anyway You are always a great calibration tool for when I start to get a little nuts and it's always a pleasure! Thanks again man for treating me to such a great time in London. I owe you a good West Coast weekend when you have the time Until then keep breaking down those walls my man

1:01:26 Nice when you to alright guys there it is i really do love the gaslight gordon or chris knolls are peter lavenda, who look at other worldly contact and things like synchronicity in a way that i think its closer to the core of it and now gordon's book starship supplies that lens to the things we talked about today and thats great cuz. It isn't under represented perspective There's actually a lot more in the book that we didn't even get to and I think we're going to do a part two in just a few weeks because we only got through like half of my notes. And you know i always feel a strong desire to engage with some of these tools of other worldly communication but not strong enough apparently because i never prioritize it the first show i did with gordon. A long time ago at this point he encouraged me to make an ancestral alter if i wanted to have a confirming contact experience

1:02:18 and I've yet to really do that so that's on me but i have done some sigil work that i think has been effective and sigil work is also the subject of some of Gordon's most popular posts on his blog at runesoup.com if you're interested in going down that path definitely some good reading but anyway, I think this mindset is also the direction that ufology needs to go in for sure it kind of is But also probably a couple other alternative fields too. I think maybe some researchers avoid it because it's harder to understand than nuts and bolts aliens, and even I have a hard time with it! Luckily a few psychedelic experiences have opened the door enough for me to peek in a little bit but the guys in this realm still blow my mind they get me thinking about things totally different from contact to consciousness to world events

1:03:06 Again big thanks to Gordon he's so much cooler and smarter than me but he's been kind and some of my favorite memories from my european trip last year were bar hopping in london with him, i'm going to the plow which was an old crowley favorite just being there was so cool many took me out to a very which is a neolithic stone circle that apparently bill hicks had one of his ufo experiences at when it was on mushrooms again that link between psychedelics this type of experience. But that was a lot of fun and a lot of synchronicity kind of corralled that stuff to happen. Also, Adam Gowrightly you might remember him? He also has stories of seeing several different types of craft on LSD so stack the evidence! I don't think these are hallucinations

1:03:51 You know there's definitely a connection and i think that the huge reason why we need to burst open this embargo on our own consciousness and stop accepting, that we can be locked in a cage for going down these roads you can have movies like knocked up and pineapple express where it's all big laugh meanwhile thousands of lives are ruined for doing exact same thing but this is all drug around one oh one stuff that i think were pretty far past by now at least i hope what we need that type of exploration back i think. And this was a fun show and the plus portion we got into why there's such a terrible science problem today we talked about the ice age in the earliest echoes of the western mystery tradition how to measure the success of the egyptians immortality tech, and we talked about how faros. And maybe some tribal kings and queens of antiquity should be thought of as more shamanic leaders in some cases who probably deserved

1:04:48 Some of their reverence for extracting knowledge from the other realms. It is a draining process Anyone who's done psychedelics can tell you but we can't even really fathom to which level they were doing some of that stuff But I like that bit because one THC theme that seems to crop up often Is that as things have sort of devolved We end up with shallow traditions that are weak relics and empty shells of the original purposes and you could say the same thing For this type of figurehead leadership yes there was once a reason for it and the shamanic leaders served useful role. And now we have the empty tradition of a king or queen or singular leader but they don't do anything they are experts in anything they just collect money pander and bullshit that same motif can kind be applied their i thought that was kinda interesting

1:05:38 So much of what we see in today's top down leadership might taint our view of the past as does the imagery that they show us a slaves. Logging around huge blocks to build the pyramids, I mean that definitely affects our view of that culture even though, that way of building the pyramids is pretty much an abandoned idea at this point i think the geopolymer idea. Is much more likely thats not something we really talked about too much in this episode but also you might remember philip coppins i had him on once a long time ago and then he checked into the hospital. The day of our second interview any died of cancer before ever checked out

1:06:18 Very sad. But he was the first one to make the case to me about the geopolymer theory, that the pyramids were built using an advanced concrete poured into molds? I think that explains the perfection of the stones, the lack of space between them, how they could have gotten blocks so heavy up so high... It really does make sense! But yeah, that's it. That's the show. Lots to think about. I hope you liked it. Check out Scarlet Imprint for the book and runesoup.com for the blog Here's another new Lauren Silva song with a THC twist. Again, you can download all of these songs at thehighersidechatsplus.com As long as you're a member they're there to download under extras for free The way I see it the people who have contributed To allow me to put some money into production Of various things including these songs should be able to reap the benefits So that's the way we do it