Unexplained

00:00 This is an iHeart Podcast. 00:02 Guaranteed human. 00:04 Hey, Portlandia fans. 00:05 Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. 00:07 The dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. 00:10 We're launching Podlandia AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. 00:22 And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. 00:34 Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. 00:39 Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. 00:41 I remember you thinking that. 00:43 Listen to Podlandia, AAO Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 00:51 What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and iHeart Women's Sports. We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka showing out. Shout-outs to you, Naomi. The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kashawn Rock's boxing journey. She looks good. Her combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. 01:14 Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to Everyone Watches Women's Sports on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 01:21 This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible you're the problem. 01:31 Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika, and I'm out. Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 01:51 I'm Nick Turturro. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, The Longest Yard, or Spike Lee's Black Klansman. And on my new podcast, Delivering Happiness with Nick Turturro, I deliver pizza to a new guest. 02:02 I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins. What are you doing with my belt? To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. 02:12 And now we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Turturro. 02:17 It's called happiness. Delivering happiness. 02:19 And many, many more. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Delivering Happiness with Nick Turturro, and listen now. 02:26 Hello, and welcome to Unexplained, with me, your host, Richard McLean Smith, where each week we explore another true tale of high strangeness, If you're new here and you're a fan of expertly told, atmospheric stories about the strange and unexplained, then you've come to the right place. And please subscribe to the show if you haven't already done so. 02:46 I'm very excited to be taking Unexplained to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. I'll be performing at the Space's Surgeon's Hall venue at 10.05pm every night from August 7th to the 29th, except for the 16th and 23rd. You can get tickets at thespaceuk.com forward slash shows forward slash 2026 forward slash unexplained hyphen live. For those watching on YouTube, you can find the link below. 03:13 With all that out of the way, this is Unexplained, Season 9, Episode 28, Laughter Cracking Through the Walls. 03:32 It's late in the evening of November 8th, 1895. 03:36 Down at the Physics Institute of the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg, 50-year-old physicist Wilhelm Wroetgen is hard at work. 03:46 For the past few weeks, he's been tinkering with a cathode tube. 03:50 The tube itself is simple enough to describe. 03:53 a sealed glass cylinder, with almost all the air sucked out of it, and a metal plate fixed at each end. 03:59 Roentgen connects one plate to the negative element of a rudimentary battery, and the other to the positive, and completes the circuit through an induction coil. 04:09 Then, after turning off the lights, he throws the switch. 04:14 Inside the tube, with nothing left to get in its way, an invisible stream leaps across the near vacuum from the negative plate toward the positive one, what physicists have taken to calling a cathode ray, though what it actually consists of is still as yet unknown. 04:32 The glass starts to glow faintly, as if it had suddenly decided to come alive. 04:37 Then something even stranger begins to happen. 04:42 Roentgen catches it out of the corner of his eye. 04:45 Some distance away, much further than a cathode ray could possibly reach. A small screen coated in barium platinum cyanide is glowing a luminescent green. 04:56 Confused, Roentgen covers the cathode tube with sheets of black cardboard, but the screen still glows. 05:04 He wraps another, and then another around it, but still nothing reduces that strange, eerie glow. 05:12 He moves the screen further away, but nothing changes. 05:16 He puts a thick book between the tube and the screen, a thousand pages of paper, more than enough to stop any light that he knows of, but still the screen keeps glowing. Then Wröntgen holds up his own hand in front of the cathode tube and stares in utter amazement at what has just appeared on the screen. 05:37 the inner architecture of himself, the bones of his fingers, moving when he moves them. 05:44 Wilhelm Roentgen has just discovered the X-ray. 05:54 For the next six weeks, Roentgen tells no one about his discovery. 05:59 Not his colleagues, not even his wife. 06:02 When she finally presses him to tell her what he's become so preoccupied with, he gives her the only honest answer he has, that if he told people what he'd discovered, they would say he'd gone completely mad. 06:15 So he stays in the dark, alone, running the same tests again and again, checking and rechecking a result that he can barely bring himself to believe when at last he writes the phenomenon up he doesn't even dare give it a proper name it is so strange and incomprehensible he names it simply x the mathematic symbol for a quantity that has yet to be solved in truth what he's discovered though he doesn't yet have the language for it constitutes a hole being punched clean through the Victorian idea of a solid, visible universe. 06:51 Within months, the rest of the world will be forced through that same hole, forced to accept that the air carries invisible waves, that matter gives off energy that nobody can see, and that even the human body is not quite the solid, determinate thing that most might have it be. 07:10 It would be almost two decades before anyone proved what the X-ray actually was, a radioactive wave of light, too short for any human eye to see. But Rutgen's discovery had set in motion an earth-shattering paradigm shift in our understanding of the universe, which would ultimately lead to the birth of quantum mechanics. 07:32 Meanwhile, in London, at almost exactly this same moment, a rather different set of investigators were embarking on a set of experiments of their own. 07:42 A loose brotherhood and sisterhood of poets, actors, doctors and mystics, who'd never once doubted that the true architecture of the universe lay hidden behind the visible one. 07:54 Much like Roentgen, they too believed that all they needed was the right instrument, or the right ritual, to bring it into view. 08:03 They had no cathode tube, and no barium platinum cyanide coated screen. 08:09 What they had instead was a mysterious magical cipher, a stranger's letters, and an unshakable conviction, that if he could just speak the right words into the dark, in the right order, something would eventually answer. 08:25 This is the story of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. 08:31 You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith. 08:42 One afternoon in the summer of 1886, down at the strange and imposing Freemason Hall in central London, the British headquarters of the Freemason movement, the Reverend Adolphus Woodford was busy collating the papers of his close friend and fellow Mason, Kenneth Mackenzie. 09:01 Mackenzie had just recently died, and Woodford was keen to get his papers in order. 09:06 Both men were also members of another secret society. the Society Rosicruciana in Anglia, or the Rosicrucian Society of England, which was founded by a man named Robert Little in 1867. 09:21 For many, despite its mystical connotations and promises of divine enlightenment, the Freemason movement was really little more than an elaborate old boys club for networking and pulling favours. To that end, Little established the Society Rosicruciana, or SRIA, in the hope of drawing together like-minded fellow Masons to work on a genuine pursuit for divine knowledge. 09:47 The Rosicrucian name that Little borrowed wasn't his own invention. 09:51 It reached back over two and a half centuries to a set of anonymous German pamphlets that appeared in the early 1600s, describing a secret brotherhood founded by a mysterious figure called Christian Rosenkrauts. 10:06 According to the legend, Rosenkrauts had travelled through the Middle East as a young man, gathering secret wisdom from Arab and Sufi scholars, before returning to Europe to fuse it with Gabala, alchemy and Christian mysticism, and founding a hidden order to guard and pass on what he'd learned. When his tomb was supposedly discovered, a full 120 years after his death, his body inside was said to be perfectly preserved, untouched by decay, surrounded by symbols and hidden knowledge meant only for the initiated. 10:42 Like many searches of divine knowledge before him, Robert Little was inspired by the legend and hoped that his own Rosicrucian society, the SRIA, could serve as a kind of British outpost to continue the same search that the original Rosicrucians had supposedly embarked on to unlock the secrets of the universe. 11:04 but it wasn't long before the SRIA had its critics too. 11:09 Sure, they were learning more, but for some members it was all too academic. 11:14 Members like Reverend Adolphus Woodford wanted to go further. 11:19 So when he was gathering Kenneth McKenzie's papers from his office, he couldn't help but be intrigued by the strange manuscript that he discovered tucked away at the back of one of his cupboards. 11:36 What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. 11:45 Because let's be real, women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. 11:50 So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is just like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. 12:06 and the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. 12:13 Naomi Osaka showing out. She beat Sabalenka. Shout out to you, Naomi. 12:18 You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened, we're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to Everyone Watches Women's Sports on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 12:36 Hey, Portlandia fans. 12:37 Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. 12:39 You know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken. 12:45 We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast today. 12:54 Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. 13:07 How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. 13:12 And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. 13:24 Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. 13:29 Well, I thought he was going to write, I thought you were all going to write a song. 13:32 I remember you thinking that. 13:34 Listen to Podlandia Ayo Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 13:44 I'm Nick Turturro. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, The Longest Yard, or Spike Lee's Black Klansman. But I'm also from Queens, which means I know pizza. And on my new podcast, Delivering Happiness with Nick Turturro, I deliver pizza from Prince Street Pizza to a new guest. Are you delivering pizza now? Then we sit down for a real conversation. I've shared a slice with everyone, from Seth Rollins. What are you doing with my belt? To Alex Rodriguez. 14:08 Just to let you people know, we're talking to one of the goats here. 14:11 To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. 14:17 And now, we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Turturro. 14:22 It's called happiness. Delivering happiness. 14:24 Mariano Rivera. And many, many more. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Delivering Happiness with Nick Turturro, and listen now. 14:33 This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. 14:43 If you come over here to play games, I'ma check you, okay? If you do some in the news that don't sound good, I'ma play you. 14:53 Join Yamanika Saunders as she breaks down the week's most problematic stories on her new podcast, You're the Problem with Yamanika. 15:00 Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? 15:03 New episodes weekly every Wednesday as part of my new network, the Dear Chelsea Network. 15:08 If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. 15:16 So join Yamanika each episode as she answers one question. Who's the problem? 15:21 I'm Yamanika and I'm out. 15:24 Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 15:38 Leather-bound and written on cloth paper, with its jumble of occult symbols and strange combination of letters and diagrams, it was quite clearly some kind of magic text. 15:50 But Woodford couldn't understand a word of it. 15:53 And so, as the story goes, he passed it on to his friend and fellow Rosicrucian society member, William Wynne Westcott, a 40-year-old coroner, Westcott was also desperate to get his teeth into something a little more practical. 16:10 Westcott had apparently never seen anything like it before. 16:15 The strange runes on the pages before him seemed closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs or some alien language than anything he'd encountered in his casual study of ancient Oam, Arabic or Chinese. 16:29 Even Russian Cyrillic and the Greek alphabet seemed closer to Latin script than the unusual series of circles and arrows, triangles and squares, which confronted him now. 16:40 But the more he read, the more he began to understand that what the manuscript most closely resembled was a form of Hebrew, perhaps rendered with a trithemius cipher in which ordinary numerals were swapped out for letters. 16:54 The last page of the manuscript seemed to have a partial key that was written in a mixture of French and Latin, and Westcott's mind couldn't help but drift to the burnished black granite of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. 17:16 William Westcott had stood before the Rosetta Stone on many occasions as a young man and absorbed the almost magical quality of its power. 17:25 It seemed to breathe through the glass of its holding display case and left everyone who viewed it feeling as though they had been in the presence of a portal to another world. 17:36 He felt like Jean-Francois Champollion, the famous French philologist who'd first deciphered the meaning of the ancient Egyptian symbols adorned on the rock some 65 years prior in 1822. 17:50 Westcott is said to have spent long evenings with his newly acquired document, pouring into his books and trying to uncover their extraordinary secrets. 17:59 Having hit a dead end, he is said to have turned to his closest confidants from the Rosicrucian Society, the older William Woodman, who was a doctor like Westcott, and the younger, more eccentric Samuel Mathers. 18:13 Like Westcott, Mathers was also multilingual, with a deep knowledge of mystical texts. 18:20 By September 1887, Westcott finally had a serviceable translation of the document, which became known as the Cipher Manuscripts. 18:30 What it apparently revealed, once decoded, was something closer to an instruction manual than a text. 18:37 Outlines for a set of graded initiatory rituals, combining Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, and Hermetic magic, and instructions for the correct ways to engage in a whole host of mystic practices, including astrology, tarot, alchemy, and even necromancy. 18:58 Communicating with the dead... 19:01 It was an entire architecture for a magical order that as far as William Woodman, Samuel Mathers and William Westcott could establish did not yet exist anywhere in the world. 19:13 But it wasn't necessarily the cipher that mattered most to what came next. 19:18 It was something that was said to have been scrawled almost as an afterthought on the manuscript's endpapers in a hand noticeably different from the rest of the document. 19:30 An address. 19:31 The name attached to it was Fraulein Anna Sprengel. The address? Nuremberg, Bavaria. 19:39 Nobody in Westcott, Woodman's or Mathers' circle had ever heard of her. 19:45 And so, in the hope of understanding more about where the manuscript had truly come from, it is said that Westcott decided to write her a letter. 19:55 A reply is said to have come late on a cold November evening in 1887, and it would change the shape of not only his life, but many occult luminaries for years to come. 20:07 Members of such organizations often take a new name for themselves, or a motto as it was called. Sprengel's reply to Westcott is said to have begun with the words, Herr Westcott, you may sign my motto on any paper if the need arise. 20:24 Sapiens, Dominobiter, Asteris. The wise man will rule the stars. 20:36 Fraulein Anna Sprengel, as it supposedly transpired over the letters that followed, was no ordinary correspondent. 20:44 She claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of King Ludwig I of Bavaria and the Irish dancer and adventurer Lola Montes, whose affair had caused a great scandal at the time. 20:57 She claimed also to have broken away from the Rosacrucian order some decades earlier, once its teaching struck her as too closely tethered to Christian orthodoxy for her taste. She wanted to venture somewhere other. 21:12 She didn't just want to worship gods, she wanted to meet them. 21:17 To that end, she supposedly claimed to have established an entire magic order of her own, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, to help make this a reality. 21:29 But Sprengel, as she apparently said, didn't answer to herself alone. 21:35 Above her stood a higher authority, a body of enigmatic individuals called the Secret Chiefs, who she was apparently in constant communication with. 21:46 They were the true source of all genuine occult wisdom. 21:51 According to Westcott, Sprengel then revealed to him that the cipher manuscripts constituted the movement's founding charter, and as a reward for their brilliance in deciphering them, William Westcott, William Woodman, and Samuel Mathers were invited to establish a British branch of the order. 22:11 Since there had apparently already been an aborted effort to set up a lodge, as they are called, under the tutelage of Kenneth McKenzie, in whose papers the cipher had apparently been found, and with Sprengles Lodge being number one, Westcott, Woodford and Mathers called their lodge number three. 22:30 It became known as the Isis Urania Temple. 22:34 And so, in 1888, in a set of rented rooms at Tavies Inn in Hoburn, London, the Isis Urania Temple opened its doors. 22:45 Such was the fascination with the occult in London's social circles at the time. Membership grew quickly. 22:52 Unlike the Masonic lodges which this new order had sprung from, women were admitted here as full equals, with permission to examine candidates. 23:01 One evening in 1890, during a gathering for potential new initiates, Samuel Mathers was introduced to a young William Butler Yeats, who was already making a name for himself as a poet and playwright. 23:14 Mathers handed Yeats a small card with a symbol painted on it and told him simply to close his eyes and try to envision the symbol in his mind. 23:24 Yeats, a little amused, took the card as asked and then placed it on his forehead and closed his eyes. 23:33 Just then, something in his face darkened, and the smile dropped from his lips. 23:39 With a start, he opened his eyes again. 23:42 Apparently completely stunned, Yeats claimed to have suddenly found himself in a desert, scattered with ancient ruins. 23:51 Then, from out of nowhere, a great black shape had appeared. hauling itself upright out of the ruins on two enormous hands. 24:01 Mathers smiled wryly. 24:03 It was a being of the Order of the Salamanders, he said, one of the elemental spirits the card was supposed to correspond to, a detail that Yeats had no way of knowing. 24:21 William Butler Yeats joined the Golden Dawn in March 1890, taking the name Damon Est Deus Inversus. 24:30 The devil is God inverted. 24:33 He quickly became an enthusiastic recruiter for the order, bringing in famed actor Florence Farr, among many others. 24:41 But then, in the autumn of 1890, came a problem. 24:45 According to William Westcott, Anna Sprengel had stopped writing to him. 24:51 What came instead, some accounts say, was a strange anonymously written letter stating that she had died. 24:59 Others say it was something stranger still, that the letter instead claimed that Sprengel had acted against the wishes of the secret chiefs in telling Westcott and the others that they could open a lodge in England. 25:12 From this point on, according to the author of the letter, there would be no further contact with Sprengel or anyone above her. 25:21 Either way, the result was the same. 25:24 If Westcott, Woodman and Mathers wanted to keep going, they would have to somehow plead their case directly to the secret chiefs, whoever and wherever they were. 25:35 By now, the eccentric Samuel Mathers, a far more charismatic and outgoing figure compared to Woodman and Westcott, had become the organisation's de facto leader. 25:47 This position was further solidified when Woodman died suddenly in December 1891. 25:54 At this point, Mathers wasn't employed and had been relying on the generosity of wealthy benefactor Annie Horniman to keep him and his wife Moiner afloat. 26:04 Moiner and Horniman had become friends while studying together at the prestigious Slade School of Art in London. 26:11 It was Moiner who encouraged Horniman to join the Golden Dawn, which she did in 1890. 26:17 Not long after, Horniman came into a significant inheritance and thanks to no little encouragement from Mathers, she became the order's most important financial backer. But even her wealth had its limitations. And so, running low on money, Mathers and Moyner decided to relocate to Paris. 26:38 Perhaps feeling his grip on the order beginning to weaken from such a distance, it seemed Mathers would have to do something drastic to reassert his authority. 26:47 That something came with a startling announcement sometime in early 1892. 26:53 According to the man himself, Mathers had apparently done what no one had managed since Sprengel's silence. 27:00 He had made contact with the secret chiefs. 27:04 Late one evening, in a darkened room of his apartment... Mathers had apparently channeled some kind of connection to the mysterious group, which, it turned out, weren't a shadowy group of powerful men, as some had assumed, but supernatural beings whose knowledge of esotericism stretched back thousands of years. 27:30 What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. 27:40 Because let's be real, women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. 27:45 So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is just like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. 28:00 and the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. 28:08 Naomi Osaka showing out. She beat Sabalenka. Shout out to you, Naomi. 28:13 You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened, we're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to Everyone Watches Women's Sports on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 28:31 Hey, Portlandia fans. 28:32 Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. 28:34 You know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken. 28:40 We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast. 28:48 Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. 29:02 How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. 29:07 And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. 29:19 Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. 29:24 Well, I thought he was going to write, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. 29:29 Listen to Podlandia Ayo Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 29:39 This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. 29:48 If you come over here to play games, I'ma check you, okay? If you do some in the news that don't sound good, I'ma play you. 29:58 Join Yamanika Saunders as she breaks down the week's most problematic stories on her new podcast, You're the Problem with Yamanika. 30:05 Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? 30:08 New episodes weekly every Wednesday as part of my new network, the Dear Chelsea Network. 30:14 If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. 30:21 So join Yamanika each episode as she answers one question. Who's the problem? 30:26 I'm Yamanika and I'm out. 30:29 Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 30:39 I'm Nick Turturro. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, The Longest Yard, or Spike Lee's Black Plansman. But I'm also from Queens, which means I know pizza. And on my new podcast, Delivering Happiness with Nick Turturro, I deliver pizza from Prince Street Pizza to a new guest. Are you delivering pizza now? Then we sit down for a real conversation. I've shared a slice with everyone, from Seth Rollins. What are you doing with my belt? To Alex Rodriguez. 31:03 Just to let you people know, we're talking to one of the goats here. 31:06 To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. 31:12 And now, we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Turturro. 31:17 It's called happiness. Delivering happiness. 31:19 Mariano Rivera. And many, many more. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Delivering Happiness with Nick Turturro, and listen now. 31:33 Having apparently made contact with the so-called Secret Chiefs, which incidentally sound not too dissimilar to Terence McKenna's Clockwork Elves, if you're familiar with them, Mathers gave one of them a name, Lux Tenebris, Light Out of Darkness. 31:50 He claimed to have communicated with this member directly on an astral plane. What exactly passed between them, he would never fully explain. But it was enough, it seemed, to convince the rest of the Order that from now on, he, operating with the full support of the Chiefs, was the Order's rightful leader. 32:11 Mathers then claimed that the secret chiefs had revealed instructions for an entirely new tier within the order, known as the Second Order, built around a ceremony called the Adeptus Minor ritual. 32:25 Up to this point, for its first four years, the Golden Dawn's teachings, despite its original intentions to be a more practical approach to the occult, were almost entirely theory-based. Nobody had actually been taught to practice magic. The second order changed all of that entirely. 32:44 Now, members were, for the first time, instructed in the real mechanics of the craft, how to scry with mirrors and crystals, how to evoke spirits and demons, and how to send your own consciousness travelling out of your body into some other place entirely. 33:03 A physical vault was constructed at the Order's Temple in Hoban, where initiates could complete their ascension into the Second Order. 33:11 a small windowless chamber built to exact specifications. It contained a raised bed known as the Pastos, an altar, four painted tablets representing fire, water, air and earth, and an oversized crucifix known as the Cross of Obligation. 33:30 Initiates in full ceremonial regalia would lie down on the Pastos in near total darkness, with a Rosicrucian cross placed over the chest, while others, already initiated into the second order, stood around them chanting in low, overlapping voices. 33:47 Many, including W.B. Yeats, claimed to have strange visions while participating in the ceremony. 33:55 But perhaps this was all utter bunkum. 33:58 Perhaps, as many suspect, Mathis' story about making contact with the so-called secret chiefs was just a cynical and egotistical invention to exploit the good faith of the Order's members and take charge of the organization. 34:14 So how, we might ask, did so many undeniably intelligent people fail to see through this and continue to stay committed to the Order and Well, the simple truth is, if the accounts are to be believed, all those rituals and magic teachings that Mathas had apparently learned over the years, and later, under the guidance of the secret chiefs, actually worked. 34:48 It has just gone past eight o'clock on the evening of May 13th, 1896, in a hot and stuffy rented room in central London. 34:59 A cauldron sits at the centre of the floor, what one witness later simply called the hellbroth, its contents given over to a low simmer. the air above it growing thicker by the minute. 35:12 Around it stands four robed figures, deep in concentration. 35:18 At the centre of them is a woman dressed in white, a yellow sash at her waist, an indigo nemes cloth, the striped headdress of a pharaoh covering her hair. 35:30 Outside these four walls, Florence Farr is one of the most celebrated actors on the London stage, a woman whose voice, according to those fortunate enough to see her perform, could make an entire house fall silent in awe. 35:46 But in here, she is something else. 35:50 Around her neck hangs the seal of the spirit they have come here to raise, Taft Arthureth, spirit of Mercury, a figure that some might call malevolent. 36:03 Beside her stands the pale and willowy Alan Bennett, fellow Golden Dawn member, and one of the most learned and respected occultists in London, famed for his especially deep knowledge of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. 36:18 Those who knew him call him simply the White Knight. 36:22 Bennett has written the ritual himself, a precise sequence of invocations designed to draw something up out of whatever plane it inhabits and hold it briefly inside the boundary of this room. 36:36 They are joined by Charles Rosher and Frederick Lee Gardner and together the four of them have spent weeks preparing for this moment. 36:45 Bennett begins as the order always began, by making the mark of the Karbalistic Cross. 36:51 Imagining a blinding column of light, he touches the crown of his head, then traces it down to his chest, before drawing a second column of light from one shoulder to the other. 37:03 Next come the words, intoned repeatedly and so deeply that they vibrate in a rhythmic hum through each of the participants' chests, until the air itself seems to hang heavy with them. 37:17 Then Farr traces the signal of Taftathareth into the steam above the cauldron, as the four of them repeat the spirit's name over and over again into the dark, At 16 minutes past nine, it works. 37:34 As the participants will all later attest, first an arm appeared, then a leg. 37:40 Then, appearing to gather itself out of nothing into something, a grey human shape appears, standing where a moment before there had only been steam and candlelight. 37:53 and with it, an unmistakable sense of power fills the room, pressing on all four of them at once. 38:01 The participants stare wide-eyed at it, as it holds for a few brief seconds, and then suddenly disappears. 38:16 We don't know what any of them actually saw that night. 38:19 What we do know, according to Alan Bennett's own words, is that within days, three of them became severely unwell, with grim and horrible diseases, as he put it. 38:31 It was called the Taft Arthurath Evocation. 38:36 Later that year, William Westcott, still a chief adept in the organisation, ceased all public engagement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. 38:46 Some said it was because of his role as the Crown Coroner that his association with magic was starting to be questioned as a trusted man of science and reason. 38:57 Whatever it was, Samuel Mathers wasted no time in replacing him with Florence Farr. 39:04 Though many members in time, like benefactor Annie Horniman, came to distrust Samuel Mathes' validity by 1898, the order that he, William Westcott and William Woodman, had built out of a strange manuscript and an enigmatic woman, who many claim might never even have existed in the first place, had grown into something with well over a hundred members, drawn from every level of late Victorian society, including poets, actors, doctors and clergymen. 39:37 None of the Order's underlying uncertainties seemed to slow anyone down. If anything, the not knowing was the engine that kept the whole thing turning. 39:47 On November 18, 1898, at the Isis-Urania Temple, a 23-year-old young initiate knelt before Samuel Mathers to be inducted into the order. 39:59 He had a hefty private income, an appetite for ceremony, and a hunger for exactly the kind of secrets that the Golden Dawn professed to have. 40:10 He took the name Freta Perderabo, Brother, I Shall Endure, And over the next six years, his presence inside the Golden Dawn would do more to tear the order apart than any secret chief, real or invented, had ever managed on their own, and perhaps took his teachings further than anyone else did too. 40:33 His name was Aleister Crowley. 40:36 But that's another story. 40:42 This episode is written by me, with additional material provided by James Connor Patterson. Please remember to like and subscribe if you've enjoyed the show. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by me, Richard McLean Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook at Unexplained Podcast and on X and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod. 41:19 Until next time, stay strange and dissonant. 41:29 Hey, Portlandia fans. 41:30 Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. 41:32 The dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. 41:35 We're launching Podlandia AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. 41:47 And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. 41:59 Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised not just words, but a song. 42:04 Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. 42:06 I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia, AAO Rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 42:16 What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the hosts of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and iHeart Women's Sports. We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka showing out. Shout-outs to you, Naomi. The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kashawn Rock's boxing journey. She looks good. Her combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. 42:39 Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to Everyone Watches Women's Sports on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 42:46 I'm Nick Turturro. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, The Longest Yard, or Spike Lee's Black Klansman. And on my new podcast, Delivering Happiness with Nick Turturro, I deliver pizza to a new guest. I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins. 43:00 What are you doing with my belt? To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. 43:07 And now we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Turturro. 43:12 It's called happiness. Delivering happiness. 43:14 And many, many more. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Delivering Happiness with Nick Turturro, and listen now. 43:21 This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. 43:30 Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika and I'm out. Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 43:51 This is an iHeart Podcast. 43:53 Guaranteed human.