Welcome to Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Menki.

He was a peasant, born into a family of peasants.

But soon his fame would spread across the great empires of the modern world.

He would be known for his mysterious power, a power gained in the shadows.

He had studied the butcher's trade.

He had studied medicine, but he abandoned both.

Those would not be the pathway to immortality, and he was after more than earthly things.

Maybe.

You see, what he did gain was the power to heal, a mystical power, born of an invisible

force.

He studied the occult and mysticism, and soon was treating patients with psychic fluids

and astral forces, and he had a potent effect on women.

In writer's cut wind of him, they called him the kegliostro of our age, after the Italian

magician and psychic healer of a century before.

Clearly, he was taking his place in history.

And that was all before he met the Romanovs.

To anyone in the court circles of Imperial Russia in those years, it would have been no surprise

that Militza made the introduction.

She had married into the branching Romanov family tree and brought her dark fascinations

with her.

Now she was taken with this occult healer, and by all accounts, she insisted that her

cousin Nicholas, the czar of Russia, meet the man.

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