What do the following things all have in common?

Q-Anon, con artists who claim to talk to the dead, 9-11 truthers, New Age grifters who channel inter-dimensional entities, and true believers

convinced that Jesus is coming back any day now. Here's another question. How does the strange hybrid that is

conspiratoriality arise in which conspiracy theories and spiritual beliefs merge and amplify one another.

And how does conspiratoriality persist?

Well, one shared element in everything I just mentioned, especially over the last 200 years,

is some version of the thing called pseudoscience.

In today's episode episode we'll talk about the 1800s and something that is at the

root of conspiratoriality called spiritualism with a capital S and spiritualism is largely characterized by the

public performance of mediums this is in the 1800s who found fame by claiming to be in touch with the spirit world.

We'll talk about how this is related to the field of parasycology,

which started trying in that time period to find scientific or let's say

sciency evidence for paranormal phenomena. I'm Julian Walker and this is speak through me. Part of my series on the

pseudoscience connective tissue of the phenomenon that we call

conspiratoriality.

The emergence of the field of parasycology

out of spiritualism comes about at a very eventful time.

Roughly concurrently, we see both what I think of as the primary ancestor of the New Age belief system and the early

strains of apocalyptic evangelical Christianity that have become so politically powerful in the U.S. over the last 40 years. that progenitor of the new age I just referred to is something called Theosophy,

and it is largely the brainchild of someone

named Helena Blavatsky.

Now, as for the ancestry of our burgeoning Christian nationalism and the apocalyptic tone of the

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