Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for joining us.
Welcome to Live Free, Ride Free.
I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of
The Horseboy and The Long Ride Home.
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So now let's jump in.
Welcome back to Live Free.
Ride Free Self-Actualization comes in many forms um, following your
passions, following your interests, following your obsessions.
Nerding out and being able to eventually make that one's profession is I think
something that we all regard been
following this man just in Sledge for quite a while on YouTube.
And I urge you, in fact, I could make a little pun and
I could say I demy urge you.
Which he will explain what that pun is.
To follow him too.
He, he has a, a YouTube channel called Esoterica, the esoteric,
the arcane, the mythological, the occult, but looked at through the lens of a
scholar while being pretty entertaining.
I can't resist that stuff.
Ex adjunct professor of philosophy and religion at Wayne State University.
Now full-time sharer of the esoteric muse with the rest of us.
Dr.
Sledge, what an honor to have you on.
Please, can you give us a bit of an idea about who you are and
what you do and why you do it?
Justin Sledge: Thank you.
Thank you for having me on.
Yeah.
My name is Justin Sledge.
I'm full-time public educator on topics in the study of Western as Aism.
So I study as Aism, which as you mentioned, those things like the, the
occult and alchemy and Kabbalah and magic.
But studying those through an academic lens not that the academic lens is the
only, or even maybe even the best way of studying them, but it's certainly
one of them and it has its own set of rigors, which are, are useful.
But yeah, I, I study this material and I do public education on my YouTube channel.
I also teach in the university here locally in the philosophy and religion
department, but mostly transitioned to being a full-time public educator.
You know, I think any educator, if you could say, look, if you
could reach a, an audience of 30 students, that's pretty impressive.
What if you can reach an audience of 30,000 students?
And so I think most educators want to do something like that.
And so I've been very blessed and very lucky to have a built
up a pretty substantial audience on my YouTube channel and.
That's basically what I focus most of my time on though.
I've done some publishing and recently returned from Egypt where
I did some tours and seminars there.
And so really building out kind of a educational system one might say, for
really making this information, which historically is quite difficult to
access and even difficult to access now, but making that much easier for
people to access for for whatever reasons they, they choose to study it,
Rupert Isaacson: right?
History and philosophy.
Most people like, oh, I was just gonna leave the room immediately.
And that I never understood because I always loved it.
'cause I'm a massive nerd until I actually had to study it at school.
And then I thought, Jesus, these guys suck all the life out of it.
I absolutely understand now why everybody hates it.
Because it's presented not as it should be, which is a, as a sort of a game of
throne zest, sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the past, allowing us to understand the
states, which never did anyone any good.
You managed to present history and philosophy and make it feel.
Like you are sort of in the room with the guys.
So for the listeners I want you to imagine things like questions you
might have had about witchcraft, questions you might have had about
the Salem Witch trials, questions you might have had about Kabbalah.
These words that you hear, questions that you might have had about,
about Angels and Demonology and the seal of Solomon and all.
Justin Sledge gonna tell you all about 'em.
What,
Justin Sledge: something about them
Rupert Isaacson: a lot more than a lot of others.
Perhaps, yeah.
What prompted you to do this?
Take us back to when you were a boy, you, you grew up in Mississippi, which
is not known necessarily as, as the, one of the great seats of Western ESO Terra.
Well, maybe it is because of Ole Miss and you know, the Greek
revival thing of the old South.
I dunno.
But, you know, we tend to think of Miss Zippy as a state sort of defined
by racism and things like that.
So you are down there and somehow you get interested in all this and
you now make your career in it.
Tell us the story.
How did it, how did it all happen?
Justin Sledge: Yeah, I've gotten asked this question a lot, and the
more that I think about it, the more the, the question, the, the more I
think about it, the more the answer becomes more and more complex.
Because I think more and more about my own, my own childhood, it, it must
have been several redundant things.
Mississippi as a place is kind of a pressure cooker.
And which is to say that if you're not going to conform, you
have to not conform all the way.
'Cause the social pressures are so severe that you have to really achieve
an enormous escape velocity if you're going to be unique in any specific way.
And you can see this in the kind of writers that we produce.
You know, we think people like Udo Welty are are William Faulkner.
Yeah.
Justin Sledge: You know, so it produces people like that not to compare myself
in any way to, to those great titans.
But I think that I, I grew up watching a lot of the shows that I think a lot of
people in my generation watch with sort of author c Clark's Mysterious World
and in search of with Leonard Nemoy.
And these are shows that are, are unsolved mysteries Robert
Stack walking out of the fog.
And you know, and it would be these sort of shows that highlight
unusual aspects about history.
You know, things like Atlantis or Ghosts or Sasquatch or the Bermuda
Triangle or something like that.
Those kinds of shows just fascinated me because they basically told
me that the world was much weirder than I thought it was.
And I just, you know, it was the kind of thing where I couldn't let it go.
It was just interesting whether or not they really were ghosts or they
really were UFOs or, or what have you.
And I think what what ended up happening was that I maintained a
deep interest in that material, but I also became pretty skeptical of it.
I, I began to think to myself, alright, if there is a lochness monster and
that Lochness monster doesn't have magical properties and it's just an
animal, then it has to be able to eat.
So how much fish would need to be in the lochness for a family of lochness
monsters to be able to survive?
And you start doing some math.
They eat haggis, they eat haggis, they eat haggis.
Yes, of course.
They, you know, they, they come up a common shore and they drink scotch too.
They do la fig and lulin or the lochness monster that's on the
Rupert Isaacson: western end of the lock on the eastern end.
They, they drink the space sides.
Yeah,
Justin Sledge: exactly right.
Yeah.
It all depends on where they are.
And so these kind of questions is, you know, vampires, right?
Like, if we're interested in vampires, and I'm like, all right, well if
there is a vampire and they bite one person and they don't turn them into
a, that person becomes a vampire.
How long until the world becomes all vampires.
And at these, the questions just like.
Vexed me.
Right.
And it became the case where the skepticism, how old you at this
Rupert Isaacson: point getting vexed by vampires?
Justin Sledge: Oh, I must have been in middle school.
Okay.
In fact, I must maybe even earlier than that.
'cause I distinctly remember being in fifth grade and thinking that a girl in
the sixth grade was in fact a vampire and becoming very terrified of her to
this very bright, vibrant red hair.
And, you know, for whatever reason I was convinced.
And I remember the moment where I was like talking to a friend in hushed tones,
and I'm like, I think she's a vampire.
And she looked over at me with like these glaring eyes and smiled at me.
And of course, fifth grade me didn't think, oh, that's a girl smiling at you.
That's the beginning of like flirting fifth grade me was
like, oh god, she's a vampire.
And she can read my thoughts and she knows that I know it's over.
Like, I'm dead.
But what
Rupert Isaacson: could be more compellingly attractive?
I hope you immediately became her loyal slave.
Justin Sledge: I wouldn't one would hope.
But I don't know if you know what happened with her.
I would, I should look her up and, you know, see if she's still a vampire.
She looks exactly the same.
She's still 12 years old.
But yeah, so these kinds of things just fascinated me, Uhhuh.
And I think that typically people go one of two ways.
They sort of grow up and become a skeptic in the most boring sense of that word.
They, their world becomes completely disenchanted and they live a life
of of, slavish adherence to a fundamentally disenchanted world.
Joylessness
Yeah.
Justin Sledge: Joylessness, but also kind of like very boring,
incorrect version of like 18th century mechanical or something like that.
Yeah.
Or they become sort of the other side of it where you become convinced that
basically every unusual thing is real.
Yeah.
Is sort of what I refer to as like conspiracy comorbidity.
You don't really meet the person who believes just in Atlantis.
They typically are part of a nexus of all kinds of other in my opinion,
unwarranted and unfounded beliefs.
And what happened to me was that I maintained both positions.
I maintained a deep interest in those kind of topics, and I developed a kind
of pretty rigorous skepticism about them.
And this led me eventually to discovering people like Dr.
John D and his conversations with angels.
I was learning Latin at the time, and that's who John,
Rupert Isaacson: not everyone knows who John D was.
I know who John D was, but please tell the listeners quickly who John D was.
Justin Sledge: John D was a 16th century scientist.
He was a hermetic philosopher.
He was a mathematician.
He was court astrologer to Elizabeth.
I he was a spy.
I mean, he was sort of everything.
He was just a really strange in interesting guy.
A renaissance
Rupert Isaacson: man with an occult twist.
Justin Sledge: Yes.
I mean, not that there weren't any Renaissance men without occult twists.
That was kind of what made Renaissance men renaissance men.
And one of the things we've carefully excised from, from history we don't
like that occult part of them.
And so we have.
Promptly forgotten that Newton wrote far more on Bible interpretation and alchemy
than he ever did on physics or chemistry.
Physics or, or optics.
It's an inconvenient fact about Newton.
But but yeah, I sort of became interested in, in Dr.
John d and folks may know that he worked through a medium and had these
long conversations with angels, which eventually revealed the language
of the angels, what is called the celestial speech or the Ian language.
And I think I was learning Latin at the time in high school, and it was a moment
where I was looking at this and I could see the fact that this angelic language
had conjugations that had decension.
It was deriving nouns from verbs or verbs from nouns.
We're reading
Rupert Isaacson: original 16th century sources at this point.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
Oh yeah.
I was reading, yeah, reading the, the, the text at age
Rupert Isaacson: 12.
Justin Sledge: No, no, no.
I was in high school by then.
I must have been 15, 14 at the time.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
But not your average 14-year-old is not running around reading original
16th century sources in Latin.
Justin Sledge: No, no, no.
Probably not.
I mean, my, my Latin, my Latin teacher, God bless her, really put up with a lot.
She let me translate a, an alchemical text from the 16th
century as my Latin two project.
Far more interesting than reading Cicero.
But but yeah, so I got interested in that stuff and, and there was a
moment where I was looking at this and I was like, it can't be random.
You, if you're just generating random gibberish, you don't
get conjugations into clin.
Something's going on here.
Like, this is really weird.
And it became obvious to me as I ultimately transitioned into,
into college, which was a very accidental and slow transition.
I never intended to go to college.
My dad was a working class guy from Mississippi who was a, a pipe fitter,
and I worked with him and I thought basically that my life would more
or less be some version of that.
And yeah, and it was a moment where these questions just didn't let go of me and I
had to, you know, settle my earth while philosophical conscious to quote marks.
And eventually when I got into college, I just turned my full
attention to these kinds of questions.
Like, what, what is the, the upside down of the history of philosophy, the history
of science, the history of spirituality.
The history of history what is the upside down of that world?
And it turns out there's an enormous upside down and it it's still collectively
forgotten, still collectively repressed.
I could tell you shocking stories about graduate school when I was
in graduate school for philosophy, where I was literally told
that things just didn't happen.
Things just didn't go that way.
Not because they gimme a shocking
Rupert Isaacson: example.
Please shock me.
Justin Sledge: So, one of the things that I'm pretty interested in is the
foundations of what is we now call rationalism, the philosophical school that
is associated with the en enlightenment.
It comes roaring out of people like Descartes en Leni
Rupert Isaacson: and Spinoza.
Right.
And a and a reaction to the church.
Repression of the Middle Ages.
To some degree.
Yeah.
Justin Sledge: To some degree, yeah.
And, you know, and it's, that's, you know, it's a complicated story, but at
the heart of the story, at least one of the important aspects of the story
is that insofar as Descartes is at the lynchpin of the rise of modernity and
the rise of rationalism, and I think that he is, is that it's not often talked
about that the fact that he started his entire philosophical program because
he had a bunch of mystical dreams and these mystical dreams involved a divine
being, coming to him in his dream and revealing to him this new philosophy.
Okay.
If you read his philosophical works, beginning with the regular and going
all the way through the discourse on method, the meditations and the principles
he's writing and rewriting the exact same book over and over and over again.
It's like a Beethoven, dun, dun.
It's obsessive.
And it's because he's working out what was revealed to him in a dream years ago.
And I wanted to really focus in on the fact that, and one of the things I really
wanted to focus in on was like that the origins of modernity and rationalism
have their fundamental building block in a series of mystical dreams.
Why?
And I was told that that didn't happen.
You can't talk that way.
You can't focus on that.
Please repeat that.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm gonna write that down.
The, the foundation, I'm paraphrasing, so correct me.
The foundation of western empiricism.
Rationalism.
Not empiricism, rationalism.
Rationalism.
Right.
I believe it when I see it type stuff.
Sure.
Rationalism has its foundation.
What is roots in a series of mystical dreams.
Right.
Experienced by a man called Dick Art.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
Yeah.
Leman was reading Kabbalah.
Newton was, was reading Kabbalah.
Leitz, the guy invented calculus co-invented calculus.
As I mentioned, Newton was knee deep in alchemy and biblical numerology.
And so, and, and again, I'm not saying that that all of modernity
is downstream of this stuff that I study called Western as a terrorism.
What I'm saying is, is that it, it's there, it played a role, it played
an important role, and yet there's something about it that, that we can't
term, we can't come to grips with.
We don't want to admit.
It's there again, I was, I was told in graduate school, it
just didn't happen that way.
And if you say that it happened that way, they're, they're, you're going to, like,
you're gonna scuttle your entire career.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Yeah.
My, my step-grandfather was a professor of philosophy at Boston University, and
he was the first to say you that, that you just have to tow a line, and if you
don't tow that line, you won't get a job.
Yep.
Rupert Isaacson: And I, I think that's true of actually most of academia.
It's true of all of academia.
Yeah.
Justin Sledge: But it's, especially somehow, and again, I came up through
the philosophical ranks, you know, I was, you know, I, I remember finding
Aristotle when I was in middle school and really, like, remember
reading an a, you know, an Aristotle.
That philosophy begins in awe.
And I didn't come from a middle class family.
I came from a working class family.
And
Rupert Isaacson: I, philosophy begins in, or you can't just say these
things, Justin, and not like pause for like a power cord, but hold on.
Philosophy begins, it
Justin Sledge: begins in awe.
A bewilderment is even a better, a better translation.
I,
Rupert Isaacson: all right.
Okay.
Philosophy began
Justin Sledge: and, and that stuff stuck with me.
And when I got into the academic side of, of philosophy, I found that
it, it, it in some way, in some ways had betrayed so much of the things
that led me to it to begin with.
Mm-hmm.
And I, I really gristle with it.
I did.
I never, I, I found that my philosophical training in graduate
school was very unpleasant.
I often bucked against things.
I, I asked questions that were apparently inappropriate.
I was told, yeah, tell the line, tell the story.
You know, modernity begins with Descartes and it begins with doubt.
And we doubt our way to the truth.
And therefore, what really matters is doubt.
And the most important things you doubt is God and religion.
Right.
And, and then I was like, that's not what de Hart's arguing.
And that's not why ta hart's arguing that like Descartes structures the meditations
in order to prove God, to get certainty.
And he structured them around a, a cycle of meditations that are religious
in character and for six days, because that's how long God made the world.
And you rest on the seventh,
the story you're telling is just ipso facto like you, like
you, you, you have, you have a mythology that you want to tell.
Right about modernity.
And I'm not saying that one earth is better than the other, but I'm saying
you can't pretend to be the purveyors of truth and philosophical wisdom and
also be part of this semi-conscious myth building that that you're contributing to
at this at one level, but telling yourself that it's really true on the other.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
I think what you're putting your finger on is that one can't say,
given that everything is myth, we create mythologies about everything.
Right?
So as you said, your, your professors there we're creating mythologies about
which were dogmas, which, which is just another word for mythology, right?
Just means a mythology that I, I might punish you for not believing, but doing
that in reaction to another mythology, IEA religion or something, and saying,
well, our mythology is the mythology that mythology is not the mythology.
Right.
You know?
But it's all actually a mythology, you know?
And at some point it's got to be all right to say if it's all mythology,
what isn't that kind of interesting.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
And I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say it's all mythology.
I would say that, that I.
And I'm, I'm, I'm a child of the Enlightenment.
I'm pretty convinced that there is a, there is a, a, a better way of
telling the, the history of philosophy.
And that's part of why I'm committed to doing what I'm doing.
It's not because I believe in any of the things I talk about.
I'm not a believer in, as a tism, I'm a believer in OC Cultism.
I don't believe, you know, metaphysically I'm not committed to any of it.
But what I'm committed to is telling the history, telling our history better
so that we can live in a better future.
Because the more that we live in this sort of the semi formed semi-conscious
mythology, I don't think that's good, a good predictor for building
a good future because we haven't come to terms with our own past yet.
And so,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
Justin Sledge: And so for me, it's just holding up a, a mirror to say
this is part of the, the past and it's part of the present and it's
gonna be part of the future, frankly.
And until we come to terms with it and stop telling ourselves that rationalism
was born out of a hatred of the church and a hatred of religion, and we
rejected superstition for the clarity of science, that just didn't happen.
It just simply did not happen that way.
And the more we continued, the more we continued to tell that story and not
admit to us that it is in fact a story.
We need to have a more nuanced view of this stuff.
And I, that's my goal is to say, it doesn't matter whether you believe in.
Whether Descartes doesn't really matter whether or not you believe that
there a divine being came to Descartes and really told him the truth about
history, philosophy, science, or whatever, what matters is that happened.
He believed it happened,
Rupert Isaacson: right?
So, and I've got questions and we need to
Justin Sledge: wrestle with that, come to terms with it, right?
Rupert Isaacson: So I've got some questions about that.
But quickly before we go there, one of the things I love about what you've done
is you've then traced those mythologies.
So in your YouTube series, which I just can't recommend listeners to you
to listen enough, just while you're driving around, just listen to them.
They're brilliant.
But you, you more or less start it, you know, as far early as
you can in Mesopotamia more, I, I haven't found one earlier than that.
If you have done one about earlier than that, then I dunno.
And then you, you, you trace through all of the different Mesopotamian,
historical belief, philosophical systems.
'cause there were many.
And then so Sumaria, Acadia, Babylonian, I'm missing one, you know,
hit heights, medians, blah, blah.
And then you get to, you, you take us through Egypt in many,
it's many, many permutations.
You take us through Greece in its many, many permutations.
You take us through Hellenic Greek, Egypt in its many permutations.
You take us through Roman into early Christian stuff, and then
you take us through pretty much up to, well, the enlightenment.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
Basically the, my, the minute of the channel ends sometime in
the 18th century, 1750, which is
Rupert Isaacson: about a 6,000 year timeline.
Right.
It's, it's, it's, it's a solid chunk of, and it's where we all come from.
You were the son of a pipe fitter in Mississippi, but Mississippi,
as we also know, is actually quite a deeply spiritual place.
Mm-hmm.
Both from the black point of view, African American point of view,
and from the white point of view.
Were, was your family a religious family?
Were, were you Southern Baptist, were you taking up rattlesnakes and things, or were
you, you know, going to ecstatic services?
Or were you actually born into a pretty secular household?
Justin Sledge: I was born into sort of a, my, my father is a, a a bit of a
pessimistic man, so I think that his view of religion was always relatively gloomy.
So I don't think he was terribly ever religious.
And I think that my family, I wouldn't describe them as being very religious
Rupert Isaacson: because there's pressure on you to be religious in, in the south.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: South is strange.
I lived in the south.
There's some pressure.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
The south is a weird place where there's a pressure to conform and there's a pressure
to be religious, but deep into the south, there's also a cynicism about things.
Okay.
Southern attitudes, you know, yeah.
There, there's sort of a credulity to cynicism, you know, circuit that,
that runs around a pendulum almost.
Yeah.
And and you can see this and you know, again, I mentioned Faulkner, you read the
sound on the Fury and they're religious, but also they're like, no, there's no God.
Come on.
Yeah.
And so, but it was a strange journey because my biological
father died when I was quite young.
And my mother was kind of held on to some aspects of, of him and was like, look,
you know, just so you know, like your, your dad was Jewish and if that's a thing
you're interested in, you know, I called the local rabbi and he set up a meeting
and he's happy to talk to you about it.
They allowed you in Mississippi.
Sorry, I didn't have, sorry.
I'm kidding.
Yeah.
There, there, there are 200 families.
And in fact, you know, the Jew Southern Jews are a strange breed.
All, all their own, you know, they, they, the, they were one of the largest chunks
of people to fight for the Confederacy.
And interesting.
And happily will, some of them will happily tell you that the only Jewish
person to ever occur on Amer on, on money in this hemisphere where
we are was Judah p Benjamin, the Secretary of State for the Confederacy.
Interesting.
Rupert Isaacson: I myself am half Ashkenazi.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wrong.
The wrong kind.
That's why I can make all the Jewish jokes.
So it's my dad which means I get all the anxiety, neurosis, and guilt.
But no cigar?
No, no.
For the club.
Justin Sledge: I mean, you could, you could, you could fix that.
You could have both.
But I guess if, if you were inclined, but but no, it was, you know, I was like 12.
My mom was like, you're gonna go meet with the synagogue.
I remember it was like a rainy cold Tuesday night.
Mm-hmm.
And met with the, you know, Jimmy golfer, rabbi by Jimmy
Golfer was a big imposing guy.
And he was, was sort of stare at you until you said something.
And he was like, why are you here?
And I'm like, I have no idea why I'm here.
Like, you know, good answer.
And it was and he was like, well, what do you want from being here?
And I'm like, I don't know.
What is this?
And it, it was a sort of an interesting journey.
How old are you at that point?
Like 12.
Okay.
And yeah, that resulted in, you know, learning Hebrew, going,
starting going to synagogue.
And I think much of my parents' horror I became religious, although
in a, a strange way and remain religious in a very strange way.
I'm married to a rabbi.
I would consider myself pretty religious.
In, in, in many ways.
But well,
Rupert Isaacson: given that you just said that you don't necessarily buy
all of the philosophical occult, mythological and religious things that
you cover in your, episodes, and I think people could sometimes be misled into
feeling that you do, because I think you, you, one of your great traits
is that you can empathize with the people who are presenting these things.
So it can sound sometimes like, oh, well, Dr.
Sledge must be a, you know, a capitalist, or he must be a believer in witchcraft,
or he must be because the way you present it, it's very immediate and real.
So as skeptical then as, or as, as dispassionate as you are with ghosts
and demons and things how does that marry up to being religious, not just
spiritual, but actually religious?
How does religiosity come into that?
Justin Sledge: For me, religion is how we navigate the world through
the, in the way that we produce, meaning through systems of symbols.
And I think that those systems of symbols they, they make
the world make sense to us.
They provide meaning, they provide structures like community.
They provide rituals and, and these kinds of mechanisms that I think
basically everyone has or everyone needs whether, whether they know it or not.
And to me, I am
what's the right way of putting it?
I can take my mythology very seriously without taking any of it literally.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
So what you're, am I right in saying that what you are saying is that
this is a mythology that has a.
Way of making sense of the world that you find helpful.
Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: But you are not necessarily saying that every
word of, as you point out, that library of books, which we've come
to call the Torah or the Bible is necessarily a sacred text by which
you must live your life or be damned.
Justin Sledge: Or that it even contains historical facts.
Yeah.
That I don't know that the exodus happened.
I don't know that Moses was really a real person.
I don't think Abraham was really a real person.
You know, I, these are the kind of questions where someone's like, well,
do you, if you don't believe that Moses really was a real person and
really went up on mountain and really got rules, then why follow the rules?
I'm like, because it's the following of the rules that builds
the meaning, not the not well.
Why
Rupert Isaacson: those rules and why not other rules,
Justin Sledge: I guess.
'cause I, those other rules don't make any sense to me and they're foreign to me.
Mm-hmm.
And that doesn't make them bad.
It just makes 'em not the rules that are compelling to me, but, right.
Rupert Isaacson: For example, Buddhism, you know, classic common sense.
You know, don't be a dick basically.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Why not that?
Justin Sledge: Yeah, I guess I, I find that I don't like sitting
around a lot, a lot being quiet.
Like I don't find enlightenment to be, you know.
Yeah, it just seems like a lot of work for something I'm not very interested in.
I know that sounds very flippant, but if, if someone, if I had to, if
I have to sit down for an hour a day being quiet but the Buddhism doesn't
Rupert Isaacson: tell you you have to do that.
I mean Yeah.
Or just, or, or the Don't be a dick.
And don't be a dick in the way that suits you best.
Yeah.
If you want to meditate, then by all means meditate, but you don't have to.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
I mean, in that sense that I'm like, yeah, I guess I don't speak poly.
I don't live in a culture that operates in poly.
I don't believe in reincarnation.
Reincarnation strike me as a terribly inter karma does, strikes
me as a horrifying belief system.
Right.
Yeah.
So it's, it's the system of rules that makes the most sense to me.
Got it.
And also it's because they're, they're diaphanous.
I don't even notice them as rules.
They're just the way that I live my life.
Right.
Rupert Isaacson: And I think you also, you know, pointed out that culturally, you
know, what you are looking at is western.
Right.
Esotericism, we can include Judaism in that, you know, because even though it's
confusing, because Judaism and Mesopotamia and all that places, we think of it as
the Middle East, but really it's what engenders Western are, Western culture
comes outta that because the Greeks and the Romans borrow it, basically Nick it.
Right.
Basically.
Or our products of it.
So in a funny way, we're all Middle Eastern without knowing it.
Yeah.
To some degree.
But
Justin Sledge: yeah, it's a thing where, you know, I, I, I.
Same with, you know, Christianity seems like a, a often a very, for like, in
many ways I was just in Egypt and Islam seems like a much closer religion to me,
for instance, I could easily imagine.
And I have like, I could pray in a mosque.
That is, that's the kind of thing that makes them very easy sense to me.
It's a very like, transparent how that would work.
Churches seem very foreign places to me when I go inside of a, a
Coptic Orthodox church or you know, a know sort of Catholic church.
I'm like, it was funny 'cause I had a friend of mine who she switched from being
Catholic to being pagan sort of spirit.
Nah, same thing.
Yeah, yeah.
Spirit sort of, you know, so you kind, and that was my opinion.
I was like, oh, that's, there's, they're basically the same.
I, I tend to look at Catholicism and Paganism as being very similar,
like, and with all their saints and all these rituals and all these like
lighting candles and you know, the, these like, it's the incense and stuff.
I'm like, those look very similar to me.
And she was horrified, but because for her, she had abandoned something
as a rebellion against it and transferred to something else that she
thought was completely the opposite.
And it was something very shocking to her dear.
Someone say, you know, and for, and it's funny 'cause I was talking to my, one
of my Muslim tour guides when we were in Egypt and we also were, we shared
in common the fact that, that we didn't understand, you know, it was like a very.
It was a very that the, that the, that the churches were very foreign to us.
And it's funny that we couldn't be more different in terms of our geographical
history, our language history, but mythologically we were closer in the way
that we made sense of the world than we were, you know, to the Catholic cathedral
that's literally in my neighborhood.
Rupert Isaacson: And it's interesting to me when you say that, because I had this
weird upbringing where I was listening this morning while I was picking my
horse's poo to your one of your and I was actually a coer at the temple in London.
So that's the second oldest building in London.
It's now the seat of law, you know, the judges and the barristers.
It's their church.
And the school I went to provided the choir boys either for that church
or the Chapel Royal, which was the, at that point, the Queen's chapel.
Now the kings.
And you would be drafted into one or the other.
And interestingly, you know, you, you are there.
I, I'm not baptized, I'm not circumcised.
I'm neither Jewish nor Christian.
And some of the other boys in the choir were like Muslims and Hindus.
We were just picked for our voices.
But it was very, very clear that you were in this kind of seat of power.
And there are the effigies of all the Marshall family or the
English Knights Temple lying there.
There's a copy of Magna Carta, but they don't talk to you about any of that.
But the ritual of it, the high Anglican ritual, which is effectively Catholic,
you know, while being Protestant, I don't see much difference between
that and a synagogue, honestly.
And perhaps that's because I had this perspective of being Colonial
African, even though we grew.
So I worked a lot with these people behind me in their systems of the
hunter gatherer shamanic traditions, and which is effectively very similar
to mysticism within any religion really.
So I don't see a lot of difference in any organized religion.
I, I lived in India for a bit too, and I, I remember going into temples,
but effectively chanting in these particular tones and big resonant stone
buildings and chaps wondering about telling you what to do and what not to do.
And with a sort of slight air of you'll be in trouble if you don't type thing.
And this idea of, you know, punishment and reward.
And that's not, for example, in the hunter gatherer sense,
that's just not even there.
And, but there is divinity.
And there are ancestors and there are,
there is the divine, but not in a sort of an organized way, which not,
and also not in a way that you have to, you don't have to be reverent.
So let's say for example, there is a healing going on.
It usually comes out with healing and the healer is there going into
an alter state of consciousness and you'll see them bleeding and pulling
stuff out of people and it's like, whoa, I'm actually seeing that.
But right next to 'em, there's a bloke smoking a cigarette, like flirting with
a girl and there's kids just running about, and no one is supposed to be
approaching it with a sense of reverence.
Yet at the same time, there is awe this much greater thing that,
and presumably given that we all sort of come from that and then we found
all these ways of expressing it.
But what we're really are or are we not, I shouldn't say what
we're already doing 'cause that's a really misled thing to say,
are we not just all talking about love?
Justin Sledge: I don't know.
I mean, I, I I, I guess there's two things that, that I would think is that I
would be slow to compare hunter gatherer.
Religion today with what we may have come from, because I don't know
that we know, you know, in lieu of texts, we don't really know what
they, what they were doing in, you know, a hundred thousand years ago.
So I'm, I'm, I'm slow to extrapolate from the present too far back into the past.
And then I think that that religion,
when I look at, I'll give an example.
For instance, ancient Israelite religion.
There's not much love there that is a god of, that is a tribal God
who's there we're talking about.
Rupert Isaacson: And lil more or less aren't, we we're talking about a, that's
the first bloke coming along with a big beard who's gonna slap you on the
bottom for being a naughty boy, right?
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
I mean, in Lil Yahweh Indra.
Yeah.
You know, I think that once you get once you get territorial,
once you get city states, yeah.
The gods start to look a lot like the people ruling those city states.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, you know, and I think that underneath it all is
there is no underneath at all.
It, it depends on the material, historical circumstances upon
which rests these religious
Rupert Isaacson: expressions.
Justin Sledge: And I think, but, but there is, is
Rupert Isaacson: is there not a mystical thread that runs through
most religions where people seem to be able to find common ground?
I don't think so.
Or you don't think so?
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
I'm, I'm, I, I am notoriously a, a, a non perennial.
I'm this is a, a notorious fact about me in the religious studies world
is that m many people who come to Western as a tism or as a tism and
mysticism typically come at it from the point of view of perennialism.
What
Rupert Isaacson: does perennialism
Justin Sledge: mean?
And so it says that at the core of religion is sort of a mystical center,
and that at, and then, then that at that mystical center religions grow out
of that mystical center and therefore Judaism is an expression of it.
You know, shamanism, all the different religions are somehow grow out of that
core mystical that core mysticism.
And so this is a position held by people like ETA and Yung and William
James and sort of classic peral list.
I tend to come from the traditionalist camp which is very unpopular
for both the right and the left.
Don't like traditionalism.
Well, if you're
Rupert Isaacson: pissing off both sides, it's usually means
you're onto something good.
Justin Sledge: Maybe, maybe.
Or are you just gonna get yourself in a lot of trouble?
But I'm of the camp traditional typically that says that there, that there
is no core, that when you study the religions closely enough, they're much
more different than they are the same.
And that, that if there is a universal, it can only be known through the
particular and therefore only individual.
Traditions exist.
And those are hyper-local, hyper-specific, and often are more marked by their
discontinuity than by their continuity.
So, I'll, you know, the, for instance, a good example of this is we tend to
think that there's a lot of continuity between Israelite religion and Judaism.
But if you study the two, they couldn't be more discontinuous.
They're extraordinarily different from each other.
Now, of course there's connective tissue, the uniting them, but if you were to drop
a modern orthodox Jew into the temple 2000 years ago, they would be as lost
as anyone else as to what, what would be
Rupert Isaacson: the major difference that they would see?
Justin Sledge: They would be in a giant building, killing
animals and burning things.
And that would be the principle mechanism by which you would
interact with your God is by killing, killing animals and burning stuff.
Typically and you would not be, most of us would not be allowed into that building.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay?
There
Justin Sledge: would be a distinct group of people allowed in, and you would
not be, you would very statistically be unlikely to be one of them.
Rupert Isaacson: So that would be the Jewish temple, right?
About the time that the Romans go in there and destroy it, and the diaspora begins.
Okay, let's go back a thousand years before that, what would the Jewish temple,
what would the temple look like then?
Lot
Justin Sledge: smaller, but similar.
It's still mostly a, a priesthood run by very small, basically a family.
And then there would be a, a, a monarch and that monarch would be in relationship
to that priesthood, somehow often married into it or part of that family.
And yeah, there would be a series of pilgrimage festivals in which people
would be expected to come to that temple.
And it would be, again, mostly slaughtering animals and burning things.
And since
Rupert Isaacson: at that stage, if we're now 3000 years back mm-hmm.
Would that, would that Jewish temple be a monotheistic or a polytheistic
or probably polytheistic, right?
Or that seems to make a big difference, right?
Yeah,
Justin Sledge: henotheistic probably, if you're thinking about sort of 1000
BCE, it probably would've been the case that the Israelites would've
worshiped their God as the best God, sort of like, my dad can beat up
your dad, but your dad still exists.
Okay.
He's just not the dad.
He's just not my dad.
Rupert Isaacson: And in that temple, would we hedge our bets by sacrificing
to your dad as well, just in case?
'cause you never know type thing.
Justin Sledge: Depends on the mon.
Depends on the monarch.
But yeah, in many cases it seems like the monarchs typically I'll give one
example is that if you marry, if you married a woman from a local powerful
nation like the Phoenician, then she's gonna bring along her gods and
there's gonna be an expectation that.
But would they be allowed
Rupert Isaacson: in your temple or would they have to have their own temple?
Justin Sledge: They'd probably be allowed in your temple.
I mean, that's that, you know, we have evidence for that in the Hebrew Bible.
Okay.
And some of that, some, some people did not like that.
So the prophets did not like that 'cause they were really on team, our dad,
and they didn't think anyone else was.
Dad should be in there.
Mm-hmm.
But but no, you, you would go back in time far enough and you would see
that this God, Yahweh had a wife.
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Right.
Well, that's what, that was my next question.
So at what point does my dad become only my dad?
And what about dad and mom and dad, mom, brother and his mates.
Like, yeah.
What point does Yahweh become a single thing?
It's a huge debate.
One of several things.
Justin Sledge: A huge debate.
Some scholars would say not until second and third sec.
Second and third centuries of a common era.
I tend to think it's a bit earlier than that.
Yeah.
They, the evidence to
Rupert Isaacson: support
Justin Sledge: that.
There's evidence to say that, that the, the Israelites continue to believe
in deities, mostly sort of like sub deities in the sense of angels and Okay.
And, and in entities being converted into sub.
Rupert Isaacson: So do you think that those original multi gods, got
subverted just became, okay, well we'll make those guys angels and demons.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
They got demoted into angels and demons.
We certainly know that happened in, in Christianity.
I tend to think that we see the first expressions of monotheism in Deutero
Isaiah, so during the Babylonian exile.
But give
Rupert Isaacson: us a, a timeline
Justin Sledge: on that.
That would be what, so 5 86 is when the Babylonian exile begins.
So I would say it's quite late.
It sixth century, BCEI think we get Right.
So it's
Rupert Isaacson: contemporary with like Mythe and Greece and Homer and stuff.
More or less, give or take a little, a little later
Justin Sledge: actually.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, I think it's late.
I it's much later than people think it is.
Okay.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Right.
It's not how it's presented right at all.
You know?
So when Moses goes up the mountain, is he talking to Yahweh?
Yahweh's brother?
Yahweh's wife or Yahweh's mates?
Justin Sledge: I mean, I think by then the Moses story is pretty late.
And when is the Moses story?
Well, it's set historically around thir 1500, 1300 BCE, but I think it was
probably written closer to five 600 BCE.
Right.
So I think the story is, is a bit's really quite late.
I think that there's memories of something that go back earlier,
but I think the Moses story itself is, is relatively, relatively late
Rupert Isaacson: because that's not much before, you know, your Socrates
and Neo Platos start coming along.
I mean, there's only about a hundred years in it.
Justin Sledge: Yeah, it's, it's a, you know, this is the
so-called axial age, right?
Where Ezekiel and you know, Socrates and Parmenides and, you know,
Confucius and all those guys were around and almost, you know, within
a couple hundred years of each other
Rupert Isaacson: It almost makes you wonder if they were meeting in
some altered state of consciousness place elsewhere and saying, why
don't we just come up with a bunch of stuff that sounds really the same
and just out of everybody later,
Justin Sledge: I think that they, I mean, I, I can't imagine
they would've liked each other.
I, I imagine that that Socrates and Confucius would not have seen eye to eye.
I think his Socrates would've bothered Confucius to the ends of the earth.
Why Ezekiel?
Because I think the Confucius had a very clear idea about how the world should be
structured after the warring state period.
And I think Socrates had a very clear idea that no one had a clear idea of anything.
And I think that Ezekiel would've hated them because he would've he'd
have seen them as idolaters and, and, and he was really all about like
reinstituting the power of his God.
And quickly bringing back a third temple and ushering in some kind of
apocalyptic renovation of the world.
I don't think they'd have gotten along at all.
Rupert Isaacson: Fascinating.
Okay, so, let's go back to your discovery then of, of John d as your are.
You, you we're in your teenage self.
You are reading an Elizabethan, a cultist, who's also, as you say, a courtier, a
spy, an ambassador, an advisor to Good Queen Bess, who is still to this day, one
of our most successful British monarchs.
She lays the foundations for the British Empire and the Bank of England
and everything that followed our great greatest act of piracy that,
you know, we still to some degree.
Justin Sledge: Yeah, I mean, it was John d that found, that
coined the phrase British Empire.
That's his phrase.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
So you have a guy who's fairly practical and savvy and can also navigate the
inter Nissan conflict of a court like that and have some longevity there
because it was easy to fall out of favor.
Particularly if you're pretending to talk to the divine, because any, any mo
Monarch worth their salt's gonna say, all right, well then, you know, gimme
lots of goodies and if you can't come up with the goodies, then you know,
things might not go so well for you.
So what's he talking to Angels?
And if he wasn't talking to Angels, why was he spending
so much time saying he was.
Justin Sledge: So he never talked to the angels directly, right?
He always talked to them indirectly via his reer.
A dude named Edward Kelly, right, who was a convicted conman.
In fact, he had his ears cut off for for previous con jobs.
And he even presented himself to Dee as a, under a false name, an alias.
He called himself Edward, but Dee was not, was
Rupert Isaacson: not a gullible man.
Justin Sledge: He, I think he was a very gullible man.
I think he was very smart.
I've met lots of smart people who are also extremely gullible because the
people tell them what they want to hear.
And I think that Dee Dee had run up basically up against a wall and he
admits as much, and he was on this quest for what he calls radical truths.
And you know, he, he, he, I think he had grown exhausted with trying
to find them the conventional way, which is to say, you know, using
equipment and using reason to do it.
And I think that for him, he wanted to short the circuit.
And the way you shorten the circuit is go straight to the people that designed
the whole world, and you go right back to God and you interact via the people that
built the world, and that's the angels.
Rupert Isaacson: And so, but this was a risky thing to do.
I mean, okay, he wasn't in Spain or Rome, but previous to
Elizabeth, you have Bloody Mary.
She's burning everyone in sight.
After Elizabeth, you've got King James comes in, he burns everyone in sight.
It is dangerous to go around saying.
You're doing this sort of thing.
Justin Sledge: Oh, he didn't go around saying it.
He kept it very quiet.
Yeah.
This was a very quiet thing.
And, you know, he
Rupert Isaacson: was, he was he telling Queen Bess that he was doing
Justin Sledge: it?
I don't know that he communicated to her.
And also remember just a year after he starts this business of talking
to Angels, he's on the continent for the next six years, and he's in the
Holy Roman empire, basically under the protection of Rudolph ii, who himself
was a very mercurial, strange guy.
And so I think that there was a lot more latitude.
Rupert Isaacson: He was an occultist.
It's true.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
Yeah.
And he was able to move around and, and the Inquisition did try
to get him, they did invite him.
Oh, they did.
They did.
And they knew that something was going on.
But I mean, Dee was cautious.
Edward Kelly was not cautious.
He got them in a, a good bit of trouble.
But I think that, I think also that Elizabeth needed Dee
alive because he was useful.
He was a, and I don't think she cared what he, the weird things he got up
to at night, as long as he didn't make a big deal about it, because
there was lots of people doing strange things and don't do it in the street
Rupert Isaacson: and frighten the horses stuff.
Yeah.
Justin Sledge: Right.
And I think even James, James knew that he was doing this stuff, and
Dee publicly told James, well, put me on trial for witchcraft.
I'll prove to you that I'm not doing anything bad.
And James declined it, you know, and this is the days of the witch finder
General and all that, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Killed 200 women.
James knew that killing Dee would be a bad look.
And so basically we gave him a pension and, and let him alone.
So, again, this is the kind of thing where we, we typically think
of the witch, the period of the witch trials as being a no-no time
for any kind of occult shenanigans.
But there were lots of occultists at that time, publishing.
I mean, Cornelius Agrippa published the three books of occult philosophy in 1533.
You know, the Inquisition tried to intervene, but ultimately they were
shut down by the local archbishop.
The local archbishop shut them down.
So the local Archbishop where in cologne in Germany, and, you know, that's the
heart of the trials, which trials were, you know, horrifying in, in, in Germany.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely.
Where I'm sitting is in a village called Eden Hausen, which is next
door to a town called Ich ine.
And Ich INE has a tower called the Witches Tower.
Mm-hmm.
And outside they have a monument to all of the witches that were
kept there before execution.
All of the names, 'cause they're all in the Paris Regi parish Register.
Yeah.
Interestingly, about a third of them are men.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: And the hill, which we pass on the way to Itchin, which
interestingly you also leave the Roman Empire and there's, you go through
what's called the Lemus, which was, you probably know is the line of
embankments that went from the mouth of the Rhine down to the Danube.
You pass over that and there's a reconstructed Roman tower.
And then very quickly on your right there's the hill
where they killed them all.
And then.
Down the road in Bamberg.
Yeah.
They invented a special furnace where, 'cause they cut down so many,
so much forest to, to, to burn so many people that they had to come
up with a more efficient furnace to burn whole families at one time.
That not run outta fire would crazy.
So in that case, why could some people get away with it?
Justin Sledge: Because they were wealthy, educated men and not poor people.
And also because
Rupert Isaacson: typically, but they did put to death wealthy, educated men if
they, if it was politically expedient,
Justin Sledge: often for political reasons and not for reasons of sorcery.
It did happen.
I mean, we do have people that were executed like Czech Oli, who
was executed in the 14th century.
But almost always, when you see an execution for sorcery, it's,
it's, it's a precursor for some other kind of political move.
It's a game of their own thing.
Rupert Isaacson: Like with the temps, they're all Yeah.
The temps, the debt.
Right, right.
Justin Sledge: The temps are, are executed because the, the king, you
know, Philip ViiV is badly in debt.
Yeah.
To them.
And so that's the best way of dealing with your creditors is.
Killing them all.
So, but in the cases, the witch trials, is that the, that the crime that you
were accused of in the witch trials was a very specific crime called Maia.
And this was a, what is now called by scholars, the elaborated theory
of witchcraft, which meant that you signed a pact with the devil
to wage a war against Christianity.
And clearly John d is, is a Christian Agrippa was a Christian Bruno, not so much
that that's what got him ultimately burned alive, although even then it was the case
that he was a a, an ex priest who had, who had said things about the Trinity that
were heretical and refused to recant them.
But you'd be surprised how few educated Occultists were executed.
Paracelsus never persecuted.
I don't wanna say they had good lives, and they certainly had to be careful
and they had to be on the move.
But you know, Kelly also the guy literally talking to the angels, he, you know,
he rats them out on several occasions.
He tells the truth about what's going on.
He ultimately dies jumping out of a prison cell.
He's ultimately arrested for trying to, or ultimately arrested and put under
house arrest so that he could do alchemy and tries to escape and ultimately
breaks his leg badly and, and dies.
So.
Being an OC cultist in the 16th century wasn't the desonance that people thought
that it is, but being a poor woman who curses a lot and on is on the out with her
neighbors, that was probably a sentence
Rupert Isaacson: if you were Kelly.
And so you, you were reading the language of the angels there at and as a teenager
and asking this question, well, hold on.
This seems very, very structured.
This seems very, very, this isn't some random thing.
So was there any truth in it?
What, and what I mean by that, do you think Kelly actually did think, was, was
Kelly in an altered state of consciousness where he was somehow downloading
some sort of information or it was bubbling into his perception somehow?
Or do you think he actually sat down, said, I need to make up something pretty
complex even though I'm not a linguist?
You know, what, what, what was going on?
I think it was
Justin Sledge: both.
I think that we have these sort of binary ways of thinking that either
it was fraud or it was revelation.
And I think that it's the mind can operate in both at once.
Ululation Yeah.
Fraudulent.
I, I, I think it someone like Joseph Smith, right, who channeled
the, the Book of Mormon people are like, oh, he's just a fraud.
And I'm like, I don't think he's just a fraud.
And, and this is the same way I think of Kelly.
I think there's a way of thinking about what they're doing that
is neither fraud nor revelation.
I.
And I do, I do think that Kelly was in an alter state of consciousness.
I, I think there's good reason to believe that from the diaries, but do
I think that he was talking to angels?
I don't know.
I just the data for that is inconclusive to me.
What I will say is that while the language isn't random, it
never betrays non-English syntax.
It seems to derive words from languages that Kelly knew.
The angels that Kelly speaks to make mistakes, both in arithmetic and in Latin.
Dee has to correct their arithmetic and their Latin at times.
The angels to strategically know things and not know things that
Kelly knows and doesn't know.
The angels seemed to plagiarize Agrippa at times.
So when you get to reading them, and again, when I was 14 and 15 reading
them, it was just bewildering because I had never, how good is my Latin?
How much do I know about Cornelius Agrippa?
How much do I know, really know about Alchemy?
Now that I'm a bit older and, and a and a and I have read this
material and I, you know, I know it.
I'm like, hold on.
The angels are making very conspicuous kinds of mistakes.
Hmm.
And they're the kind of mistakes that Kelly makes.
And so again, am I gonna get into the business of saying
they weren't talking to angels?
Well, I can't say they weren't.
'cause you can't prove a negative that's just philosophically not possible.
But is it conspicuous that the Ian language doesn't have.
Any non-English pH names, right?
There are no glottal stops, you know, looking at the, the hunter gatherer
in the background, there's no like, sounds like there's no clicks, right?
And if, and if, if, you know, if I, if they were speaking a language and
all of a sudden there was a sound that you hear only in Ulsa, that would
be weird For an Englishman who had never been to, to the land of Bantu
people to do that, or a glottal stop or a a, a voice pharyngeal fricative.
Rupert Isaacson: W wouldn't, wouldn't somebody like Dee just say, oh, well,
of course divine revelation comes, you know, in the form that the brain
of the person, the mind of the person receiving it can best understand because
God speaks all languages, blah, blah.
Justin Sledge: Yeah, he could.
I mean, then why just not do it in English?
I mean, you know, when the Angel Gabriel tells the prophet Muhammad,
I've given to you a ko, an Arabic Koran, so you can understand it.
Well, that's pretty convenient.
Fair enough.
It been, it'd been, it'd been a thing.
Well, if they'd have given him a Mayan Koran, that would've been impressive.
You know?
If, if, if, if Mohammed would've gotten the Quran and Mayan, I
would convert to Islam immediately.
Right.
That would tell me something really weird had happened.
But the Ian language you know,
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, I, I've, that's something that confuses me.
Why Enoch?
And it's got nothing to do with the book of Enoch, right?
Justin Sledge: So it, it does and it doesn't so to be clear, Dean Kelly
and the Angels never call it Ocion, that's a modern thing that we call it.
They always refer to it as the celestial speech or the Adam iCal speech.
So the reason why it's associated with Enoch is because Enoch wrote it down
and allegedly wrote it down in a series of tablets, and those tablets were
preserved and ultimately destroyed.
And then the angels reve it.
And so the last time anyone had access to it was Enoch.
And so that's why it gets called in Noian.
And do the angels
Rupert Isaacson: say this to Kelly and Dee?
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
I see.
Yeah.
And there, and there, there are, there are at least two Antiochian languages.
In the text, there's the, the se there's a series of 49 by 49 grids that are
filled with letters and numbers, which are said to be the kochia language.
And then there's the system of calls, which are like Psalms.
And those have glosses.
And we, we, we have translations of those.
And so we can know, we can see for instance, that the word earth in that
text is Kas, C-H-A-O-S-G, which seems to be derivative of the Greek cows.
But Okay.
Rupert Isaacson: So let's, let's assume that people like these, these
occultists were somewhere between.
Credulous of their own experiences.
Somewhere between altered state subconsciousness, somewhere between
true seekers after truth, somewhere between con men when it suited
them, and various points in between.
And sort of created a, a cannon, if you like, of AOC cult philosophy that
the Enoch thing talking about Mytho mythologies and canons of mythologies.
So Enoch, the Book of Enoch.
So again, for listeners that dunno about it, super interesting thing.
Why?
'cause it's a bloke going up to heaven and encountering
effectively the celestial throne.
And there's a bunch of, if I get this right, there's a bunch of
angels or celestial beings arguing about whether we monkeys down here
should be allowed to continue.
And then there's, 'cause we're disruptive.
And then there's a, a Satan, a Satan, not the Satan a judge, a prosecutor.
So it seems to be what it means.
And, but it seems that we get a reprieve somehow.
And then Enoch comes back down and says, lads, you know, gotta pull our socks up.
And then after he dies, he somehow he goes back up again and somehow
becomes the angel Metatron later on.
Mythologies.
Now, as you know.
I'm gonna use the Anki word.
So one of, to my mind, one of the great fun mythologies that's come out of the
more modern age is the whole ancient astronauts theory because it's enjoyable.
And it also ties in with the ancient Sumerian old, older stuff that we know
of written downy stuff saying, you know, we had these kings who lived
for, you know, way, way longer than anyone possibly could because they
sort of came from somewhere there.
And that these gods actually were among us because they were
actually from somewhere else.
And they came down and they made us so that, you know, we could in various ways.
And then you, later on you have someone like Zacharia Sitin coming along as,
as Ajani or Armenian can't remember but saying, okay, I have translated
these ancient Kune form things.
And they say that, yes, this happened, and actually these old Gods Anky
and lil and all of these things from Mesopotamia, these are actually aliens.
And then they become mythologized later on.
They bugger off somewhere around a thousand BC or so because they're, somehow
the work here is done, but they leave us with a memory and we keep it going
through the deities and blah, blah, blah.
Well, maybe they're still around or maybe there's lizard people,
or maybe there's, or maybe that.
I'm always interested in this because people get very, have
big emotional reactions to this.
Like they either seem to go for full on credulity.
Yes.
It's ancient aliens.
And part of me goes, well, honestly, why not?
You know, if you've got an Atlantis and Lumia, but you've got Plato
saying, yeah, there's this thing, there's this Atlantis thing.
Is it allegory?
I don't know, but they're talking about it.
Or you know, it's the, the other way.
No, you know, absolutely not.
Blah, blah, blah.
And the timeline is as we know it, and then they find places like
Gobekli Tepi in Anatolia, which seems to be earlier than Sumeria, maybe.
I don't know.
People, people argue about it.
People will continue to argue about it.
Right.
But isn't it in those arguments, in those mythologies that the fund lies
or what do you think of all that?
Justin Sledge: I don't know that, I don't know that the arguing about the
ancient Illian stuff to me is very fun.
I think it's a very I mean, it would be, it would be fun if, like
Zacharia Chen's translations of these texts were at all reliable.
Mm.
And they're just not.
So, I, I'm, I'm all about having academic fun when we're actually, you know, when
we're all playing by the same rules.
And if the rules are, I get to make up stuff and, and call it translations,
and then we're not playing by the same rules anymore in the same way that,
you know you can take the net down, but you can't call that tennis anymore.
But you're doing something.
And it might be fun, but it's not tennis.
And so when the ancient alien folks want to take the net down,
then I can just say, well, we're not playing the same game anymore.
Mm.
Justin Sledge: And therefore, to me it's not, it's not a fun conversation.
Rupert Isaacson: But if we're, if we're looking at mythologies, what
makes one mythology okay to look at and discuss, and another one not,
Justin Sledge: I would say that they don't think that what
they're doing is a mythology.
They think that what they're doing is actually telling the
history of, but I would say that,
Rupert Isaacson: but that's not limited to the ancient alien people.
Right.
I mean, there's lots of people who believe mythologies that are questionable.
Right,
Justin Sledge: right, right.
In the same way that I would, you know, if someone, if a Jewish person came to
me and says, you have to believe that Moses went up on a mountain and got rules,
literally that actually happened, I would say it's fun to play Dungeons and Dragons.
It's another thing to think you're an elf.
Can't I be an elf?
You can think you are one and you, you can coplay and you can dress up as an elf.
Exactly.
But the moment you think that you really are an elf, you've crossed
over into some kind of psychosis.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, sure.
Or state of consciousness.
I mean, it's a fine line between, right, right.
Justin Sledge: Well, I think that an state of consciousness
is, is not a belief system.
I think it's when you, when you, when you concretize, beliefs that are
derivative of bad data and zacharia is a great example of just bad data.
Then the, that becomes you're believing in, in, in a state of affairs that's
contrary to what we know about what those uniform tablets actually say.
And
Rupert Isaacson: what do Thefor tablets actually say about
Justin Sledge: Donna
Rupert Isaacson: and stuff?
Justin Sledge: Nothing that's not, but they do,
Rupert Isaacson: do they, do they not say there was on the king list, for
example, do they not say there were these chaps who lived impossibly long lives
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: In the mythological sort of way.
And it was this king, this king, this king starts with sort of almost
tens of thousands of years and then
Right.
Rupert Isaacson: Whittles down to thousands of years and whittles
down to hundreds of years.
And then there's us lot, you know, living normal lifespans.
Mm-hmm.
And is there not, is there not some stuff in the K form script saying
we got knowledge from the gods or
Justin Sledge: there at all?
Right.
It's there in the sense that, you know, in lil and you know, the, that
these other gods EA and stuff, they communicate with people, but that's
just true of most religion, that the gods show up and teach people stuff.
But this
Rupert Isaacson: is the earliest religion that we know of.
Right.
Justin Sledge: I don't know if it's the early, it's the earliest written text
of a religious religion that we know of.
Right.
It's, but I would say
Rupert Isaacson: it's canon that we have access to.
Right.
Justin Sledge: You're right.
But I would say that Goble, Tepi and Chat Holyoke are.
They had religions.
We don't know.
It's hard to interpret what those sites mean.
'cause they didn't, they didn't write things down.
Sure.
But mean Africans were having religious beliefs for 200,000 years prior to that.
Indeed.
You know, the, whatever the, whatever the strange animals they were
painting in the caves of Las Co.
Fairly confident that something like religion.
So I would say it would be very slow.
I mean, the Sumerians are the first people to write down things, but even the
Sumerians don't agree with each other.
Like from city, state to city state.
They have disagreements about, about which gods are really the best gods and which
ones are why the world got flooded or so if you even look at the, the Sumerian
literature, we're not getting one story.
Yeah.
We're getting rival city states and their stories about why, you know, you know, why
this happened as opposed to that happened.
And because there's no, unlike in Egypt, there's no hegemon binding the city states
of ancient Sumeria together until you get to Sargon and Sargon iss not Sumerian.
He's Acadian.
And so, what's the difference?
The Sumerians were, because they're all people living in
Rupert Isaacson: the same area, right?
More or less.
They're
Justin Sledge: living in, they're living in somewhat the same area.
The Sumerians are primarily living in Southern Mesopotamia.
We don't know where they came from.
They're very, they mean they're admittedly mysterious and their
language isn't related to any other languages that we know of.
The Acadians aliens, sorry.
I mean, I mean that's, if you know that it could be, I mean, there's, but there's
lots of languages, like their languages.
Oh.
You know, we have Basque and caucuses languages that are similar structurally
to, to Sumerian and, and their tivity and, and stuff like that.
Okay.
Being a glu of languages and stuff.
But, but okay.
Rupert Isaacson: You, you've got these different people living in this area
between these two rivers, not, you know, Tigris and Euphrates Right.
Over some thousands of years making these city states and we don't know of anything
before them that was that organized.
Right.
Justin Sledge: Well, we don't know of anything organized
in terms of living in cities.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
And it, writing stuff down that we can recover and translate
Justin Sledge: and read.
I mean, yeah.
We can't, we can't read the industry River valley script.
And we can't, it doesn't seem like the people at Goble Tepi and Chateau
Holyoke in those sites in Turkey wrote.
And, and also we know why writing emerged in Sumer and
the places that it did emerge.
It was because they needed it for bureaucratic reasons.
Rupert Isaacson: They had.
Why did, why did the other people not need it for bureaucratic reasons, do you think?
Why, why do you think Gobekli Tappi people didn't need a bureaucracy?
'cause they were doing massively organized building projects and things.
Justin Sledge: Well, I mean, that site's not that big.
If you look at, you know, you look at it, if you're, you go to it and
look at it and measure it, it's, it's monumental, but it's not very big.
And so, you know, they, that building project would've taken.
Some degree of central planning and organization, but nothing
on the register of, or yeah.
Where you have irrigation and, you know, elaborate agriculture and trade.
You know, so those are orders of magnitude in terms of, of difference.
In fact, to me the most impressive thing about go about Goble Tepi is
not the fact that they build it, but the fact that they buried it.
Why in the world go through all the trouble to build that thing then to
use it for a while, then to bury it burying It must have been just as in
many ways, just as Herculean use of resources and calories and building it.
That to me is the more interesting thing about Go Lucky Tepy.
But there
Rupert Isaacson: is Did they bury it or was it buried?
Justin Sledge: Yeah, I don't think it was, I don't think it was buried on accident.
I think that the, I think the data indicates that it was intentionally
filled in, built, filled in.
That's why it's so well preserved is because some, some people
decide to fill in and that's weird.
Can you just,
Rupert Isaacson: for the people that dunno what Gobekli Tepi
is, just give us a timeline.
What's, what's go Beckley Tepi and why is it older and how much older
is it than the Sumerian stuff?
Justin Sledge: I think that the data on Go Tepi now is 10,000 BCE 12,000 BCE,
Rupert Isaacson: right?
I forget exactly on that.
Basically it's as old behind Sumer as we are in front of it, more or less.
Yeah.
And it's,
Justin Sledge: it's, it's part of the, yeah, it seems to be part of the same
culture that Chateau Holyoke and, and tho Jericho and those neolithic societies
were part of some kind of trade systems.
We don't know what go lucky Tempe was.
It may have been a religious site, it may have been a site for trade.
It may have been both.
They may have come there for pilgrimages and then traded stuff like
seeds and stuff, and then moved on.
Agriculture, it seems like emerged in Anatolio through selective breeding of
grass, and those grasses became grains.
Rupert Isaacson: Did the grass domesticate us or did we domesticate the grass?
That seems to be the,
Justin Sledge: I mean, it seems like, I mean, at least in that area
you know, that's where you get some primitive emmer and stuff like that.
And so I think that it probably goes both ways.
I think there's an accident that's involved.
Also probably women did it.
I mean, that's who's doing the gathering at that time.
So I imagine that that breakthrough was pioneered by some lady
scientist who's will be, whose name will be mysterious forever.
She must have noticed, right, that the, this type of grass produces these
type of seeds, and that if you plant these two together, they grow big and
you have to manually knock them off.
The, the wind doesn't knock them off.
You have to manually knock them off.
But they do fall off just by shaking them, and they kept breeding and breeding and
breeding until eventually they get Yeah.
Things like hammer.
Rupert Isaacson: So, okay, let's, so Gobekli Tepi older
than Sumera gets buried now.
Let's go back to some myths.
Flood myths.
So we know everyone's got one.
And they seem to pop up all in every corner of the planet, more or less.
What's going on there?
And do you believe in the younger dryers stuff?
And again, for the listeners, I just give them a quick background.
Yeah.
Younger dryers being the last ice age, some people believed that there was some
environmental cataclysm perhaps induced by stuff going on around our planet in
one form or another that caused a big flood, big melting of ice caps and so on.
And, but what we do know is there was some sort of flood and everyone
seems to talk about it and it seems to affect everybody's worldview.
What's going on with that do you think?
Justin Sledge: I mean, I'm not, so I have to be, be careful.
I'm not sure that every culture has a flood story.
I mean, let's just
Rupert Isaacson: say a lot of them do.
Justin Sledge: Yeah, some do.
And I, I can say that, I mean, I don't know if the ancient Chinese had
a flood story or, you know, I think there are Chinese flood stories.
Yeah, yeah,
yeah.
Justin Sledge: That I don't know.
I mean, not being an expert in those mythologies, so I have to
see, I'd be careful to say that the like the ancient Egyptians, I'm not
sure had a, an a, a flood story.
But I think the reason why the Mesopotamians had a flood story
is because they had floods and they had very cataclysmic floods.
If you compare the flooding of the Nile to the flooding of the tigers
and the Euphrates, the flooding of the Nile was very predictable.
And, in fact, some anthropologists even linked to the relatively positive
outlook of the Egyptians both on the afterlife and on this life to
the relatively stable society that you had in ancient Egypt where the
floods came, they were predictable.
It was hard to invade Egypt.
Mm-hmm.
That they had relatively, you know, not to say it didn't get invaded.
It did get invaded.
The hick invaded it and stuff, but even when they invaded, it didn't cause
a huge amount of social disruption.
And that's unlike Mesopotamia, which was the Nile, the Euphrates
and the Tigris flood randomly, they flood catastrophically.
Their cities are not built out of stone.
They're built out of mud brick.
And when the tigers and your Freddy flooded, it destroyed whole cities.
I mean, you could wipe an entire city out in a day.
Mm.
And it, I mean, literally wipe them off the face of the earth.
I mean, you take mud brick structures like a zig garrot and you have
a category aro type of pyramid.
Right.
Kind of, kind of pyramid.
Yeah.
Step pyramid that's built a mud brick.
That's nothing compared to, you know, a flood.
And if you look at the literature of the Sumerians and the, the
Acadians it's extremely pessimistic, very pessimistic literature.
They have a very dower point of, you know, Dow or outlook on life.
And I would say that the, the flood myth develops because they dealt
with floods and they dealt with floods that ended their world.
That is to say they had cities that were just wiped out and the, this became sort
of a an archetypal story that they told.
And when the Hebrew Bible, the writers of the Hebrew Bible they tended to
look much more toward the mesopotamians for their cultic information,
mostly because they were under the imperial thumb of those people.
And they tended to copy them.
And I think that's where we get the, the Noah story being copied.
Not word for word by no means, but, you know, there's certainly enough
similarities between the utna num AK story that we get in the Mesopotamia
mythology to the, to the Noah story.
But even the Noah story doesn't internally make sense.
For instance, when, when God tells Noah to go put the animals on the ark one story
has clearly you should take seven of the clean animals and two of the unclean.
Well, how does Noah even know which ones are clean and unclean?
That's not been disclosed since, that won't be disclosed until no Moses' day.
And then a few lines later it says, oh, take two of every kind.
And that's what we see in all the pictures of Noah's Ark is two of every kind.
But the text seems to have two different versions of the story sitting side by
side where there clearly was a, some version of it where Moses was gonna
take a lot more animals with him.
So, so yeah, I'm, I'm reticent to say that it is a, a worldwide.
Ubiquitous flood story.
I think there is a, there are mesopotamian flood stories of which
some variant of that flood story does end up in the Hebrew Bible.
Rupert Isaacson: Right?
I mean, there are definitely flood stories, mythologically,
far East, central America, Africa, that they definitely exist.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: You know, these are open questions that are
just, I think, fun to discuss.
Right.
Justin Sledge: And without me knowing more about those flood stories, it's hard for
Rupert Isaacson: me to, to weigh in.
I think your point about the flooding of the rivers is, is, is a very good one.
Okay, so let's go to another myth, Atlantis.
So you've got Plato saying, my ancestor Solon went to Egypt, and some lads
there in a temple said, listen here, Solon, there was this thing called
Atlantis and it was this and it was that.
And then it disappeared in a great cataclysm.
And then Plato, of course, you know, bequeaths the myth to us.
And it goes on and becomes all the things that it's become.
Justin Sledge: What are your thoughts?
Mostly, mostly because of a, a confederate ex Confederate soldier.
Oh.
Do tell.
Yeah, it's William Donnelly, I think was his name.
Okay.
It, it's Don, I think, I think it was Donnelly.
Donnelly was a ex confederate soldier who wrote the first book that really
popularized the idea that Atlantis might be a real place before that,
I don't think anyone believed that.
I don't think that, or I don't know of any data to indicate that people thought
it was anything other than a myth.
Because Plato often will put myths at the end of his dialogues.
Sure.
Like the myth of ER and other myths at the end of the republic.
The myth of Atlantis, I think occurs at the end of the tus.
I can't remember Crito one of them, but, but
Rupert Isaacson: it's tricky, isn't it?
Because he talks about an actual ancestor of his own.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
I mean,
Rupert Isaacson: in
Justin Sledge: the way that,
Rupert Isaacson: that's also the name of a real place.
So what's going on with that, with that?
Justin Sledge: Yeah, I mean it's, you know, I think that it's creative,
you know, historical fiction, right?
He tells the story of Solon going to Heliopolis and learning all this stuff.
You know, the, the, the, the question for me when it comes to, and then
of course we have the new age Atlan stuff that kicks up with Edward Casey.
So, where he thinks that it's by the Isle of Bimini.
And then people find the called BI and Tell, tell, tell us
Rupert Isaacson: this.
They not everyone's gonna know who Edward ca Edmond.
So,
Justin Sledge: Edward Casey was a trance medium.
Who went to, he was called the sleeping Prophet.
He would go into Ultras of consciousness and
Rupert Isaacson: 1920s or so, right?
Justin Sledge: Yeah, I think so.
Early 20th century.
Yeah.
And he would reveal all kinds of, everything from medical
treatments to mythological history.
And Atlantis played a big role in, in his and he was the
Rupert Isaacson: guy who said he was tapping into something
called the Akashic Record.
I think so.
Justin Sledge: Or, and this is a relationship to Blavatsky and
Theosophy and, and stuff like this.
Yeah.
I think that the Atlantis story is, so for me, the question is historically,
when did people begin to believe that it was a potentially real place?
And I think that that's Dateable to Connolly.
So after
Rupert Isaacson: the American Civil War?
Justin Sledge: Yep.
Yep.
I don't think that prior to that people thought that it was a, a real place.
You sometimes have maps that people sort of guess that it may have been over there.
They'll, they'll be land masses, they think were atlan or so, whatever.
But I think that part of the reason why that story, people like
that story is it's, it's about imperial arrogance being punished.
And I think we like to see bullies get their comeuppance.
And Atlantis was a bully, which is a really interesting story because we
now tell it as if, and again, there's lots of variants of it in the New age
movement and other kinds of things where they think of it as sort of a
utopia that seeded all the world's knowledge and, and this kind of stuff.
But it's pretty clearly a bully country in, in the original telling.
And they were just mean and arrogant, and the gods destroyed them for good reason.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Justin Sledge: I just
Rupert Isaacson: basically,
Justin Sledge: yeah, they, they mean, I mean, I, I, but I like the fact that the,
this story, this mythology has changed that it goes from, this is a story, this
is a cautionary tale of, you know, again, Plato's writing to Athenians who are
themselves known at that time for having just lost, you know, a a, you know, just
the Peloponnesian War in which their heroic navy did not ultimately save them.
And they were under the rule of the, the, the tyranny of the 30 and
all of the stuff that, like this is a moment of, of their own fall.
And they had just murdered Socrates.
And, and, and Playdoh really wants to rub their nose in it.
Right.
And he tells a myth
Rupert Isaacson: the opinions are perfectly capable of being
bullies themselves as we know.
Yeah.
They
Justin Sledge: were, I mean, the deal thing about what they did to
the, the, the Deion League Yeah.
Has massacred those people.
Yeah.
And, and they were bullies.
I mean, they, you know, they, they were bullies to, to in
the, in the Peloponnesian War.
They, they went to neutral parties and told them, we're gonna murder
you all if you don't side with us.
And gladly did it when they didn't.
And I think Plato's rubbing the Athenians nose and the fact
that they, they were bullies.
They just got handed, they just got a black eye by the, the Spartans.
They'd just been ruled by the tyranny of the 30.
And when they finally did get some freedom, the first thing
they do is kill Socrates.
And the, and you know, the Republic and other kinds of texts are, I
think part of what they're doing is Plato's rubbing the Athenians nose and
that, and I think Atlantis is meant to be, this is what you get, right?
It's an all
Rupert Isaacson: right for them gonna get your US handed to you if you
Justin Sledge: Right.
And what to me is interesting is how that mythology has changed.
It went from what I think of as social criticism, thinly veiled, frankly
social criticism of by Plato to this is where all the white people came from.
And they like made all of the great civilizations.
And it becomes this sort of like neo-Nazi.
Mythology that you see in, you know, some ridiculous YouTubers videos and stuff.
So to me that's just, it, it, it's, to me, what's most interesting about Atlantis is
not whether there really was a historical Atlantis that, that I think the data for,
that's pretty clear that there wasn't like islands that size just don't sink.
That's not what islands do.
Like, well, there's the thing, islands aren't
Rupert Isaacson: something tectonic happened in with the younger dryas.
I mean, water coming down from the ice sheets, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so, yeah, I mean,
Justin Sledge: it would have to be, if ice Plato's descriptions of it are accurate.
Right?
It was a size of Libya.
I mean, it would've been massive.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Justin Sledge: I mean, it, it would've been, it would've been
the size of like, Texas, like in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Rupert Isaacson: Ooh.
Is that an cautionary tell for Texas?
Justin Sledge: Texas?
Yeah.
You know, nothing's big as Texas.
But again, to just look at the, if, if Plato is, if we're gonna take Play-Doh as
accurate, we gotta take Plato as accurate.
And he's telling us a story that it's this size and it's
beyond the pillars of Hercules.
It would need to be massive.
And any tectonic event in the Atlantic we have really good maps
of the sea floor or the Atlantic.
It would, we would see remnant, we would see some archeological
evidence of something.
Rupert Isaacson: Why do you think this guy Donnelly, this ex confederate soldier,
was so enamored of it, and how did he manage to get it into the public con.
Justin Sledge: There's a great video if you wanna learn more about this.
A good friend of mine Andy films did a great documentary on, on Donnelley.
I'd love to.
What's, how did he find out
Rupert Isaacson: about, 'cause this, this guy Donnelley is not known about Really.
Justin Sledge: I've never, he's not known about.
No.
This is part of this is, and this is part of how these mythologies
get a life with our own, is that we often don't know that the mythologies
that we're telling have a history.
You mentioned, did he publish a
Rupert Isaacson: bestseller?
19th Century bestseller?
Yeah, it was
Justin Sledge: very popular.
It was
Rupert Isaacson: a very popular book.
Justin Sledge: What was the name of the
Rupert Isaacson: book?
Justin Sledge: Atlantis the something something, let me see.
Okay.
Don Lee Atlantis.
Rupert Isaacson: I'll just google it.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: And do you know what he did in the Civil War?
Bernie Chance?
He was a soldier.
Yeah, but was he an officer?
Was he a grunt?
Was he a cavalryman?
Was he Ignatius
Justin Sledge: Donnelly?
What was he?
He was a congress ignatious man.
Yeah, you can look him up.
Mean.
He was kind of, I mean, but he was a sort of a cultist in,
into, into theosophy and stuff.
But but comes up in 1882.
Okay.
But it's called Atlantis, the anti-dilution world.
And again, as you mentioned earlier about Zechariah ci, right?
That that people don't also link back to Eric Von Danigan, who's really
the, the primordial all father of this sort of ancient alien stuff.
Rupert Isaacson: If you made it this far into the podcast, then I'm
guessing you're somebody that, like me, loves to read books about not
just how people have achieved self actualization, but particularly
about the relationship with nature.
Spirituality, life, the universe, and everything.
And I'd like to draw your attention to my books.
If you would like to read the story of how we even arrived here, perhaps
you'd like to check out the two New York Times bestsellers, The Horseboy
and The Long Ride Home, and come on an adventure with us and see what engendered,
what started Live Free Ride Free.
And before we go back to the podcast, also check out The Healing
Land, which tells the story of.
My years spent in the Kalahari with the Sun, Bushmen, hunter gatherer people
there, and all that they taught me, and mentored me in, and all that I learned.
Come on that adventure with me.
Tell us about him, because again, not, not, not a lot of
people know who's listening.
Maybe he wrote
Justin Sledge: a book, he wrote a book called The Chariots of
the Gods and the Swiss guy,
Rupert Isaacson: right?
Swiss
Justin Sledge: German.
Makes sense?
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah.
And he makes this argument the same kind of argument that the, the, all
the old gods are in fact, aliens.
And, you know, again, very selectively goes and looks at the, I don't
know, the top of the burial shroud and, and, and Mayan territory
and says, that's the spaceship.
And then sees the spaceship and this thing, and sees the
spaceship here and there.
And again, you know, it's the kind of it's the kind of thing that would be fun
if it didn't lead to what I think is like real damage to the field of archeology.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
I mean, as an ex I did archeology and history and I actually switched to
just history because unfortunately the archeology department at York
University where I went to in the uk, they were after bastards.
They really were.
And I got into terrible trouble and was actually threatened with being kicked
out for writing up an essay, just one essay in which I likened the mean river.
Iron Age smelting culture which was a Celtic pre Roman place where they
were doing a lot of metal working along a river in England, which was,
they were busy excavating at the time.
And I said, I likened, I made a an analogy to it being like a, a sort of
ancient world, black country, black country being the area around Birmingham
where the industrial revolution sort of got going and that I got
hauled in and hauled over the coals.
And I remember saying, but guys, it sort of was, I'm not saying it was on
the same scale, but I'm saying that if you walked along that river, you'd
have seen a lot of industrial activity that have been guys dumping shit in
the river, that have been piles of slag there would 'cause you found them.
'cause you are excavating those piles of say that and or if I say that and
you think it's wrong, okay, that's fine.
But why are you threatening with kicking me with being kicked out?
It was really odd and I saw this time and time again among the archeologists.
And the archeologists were also sort of a bit of an old boys club of
certainly the uk It was very much a sort of private boys school thing.
And I come out of that culture myself.
I went to one of those schools, but I also know how protectionist.
They are in the same way that Oxford Dons are very protectionists and
so on, and, and they're often, you know, frankly wrong, you know, about
things or at least not open to.
And so the fact that one could say something as kind of innocent as that
and you know, not be taken to task for like, well, you know, Rupert, we just
want you to qualify this essay with saying by no means on the same scale, which I
would've said, yes, of course, absolutely.
I will happily put that clause in there, silly old, 18-year-old me.
But no, it was aggressive and it was hostile and it
was strange and it was weird.
And then when I transferred to do history, it wasn't much different actually.
And then it got to the point, I'm sure you've had this where I realized I
knew a bit more about certain things than I, some of my professors did.
And then that became very uncomfortable and you just had to keep your mouth shut.
For example, I specialized in the Bo war as well as the medieval stuff
and the, and the French Revolution.
I did two modern things, the Bo war, what My family fought on
Every, every side of the Bo War.
And what I mean by that is the, the English and
sort of non-white mercenaries in that.
So we have a whole record within our family of original texts and
letters and documents and this and that, and blah, blah, blah.
And.
So anyway, it, it didn't make me by any means antis history, but it did
make me wary of academics a bit.
That said, I met some very good ones too and had some
wonderful professors and so on.
But I, I guess that thing of, of when, I guess what, what I was responding
to there is when you said they do the, the people that believe in Atlantis or
ancient aliens do damage to archeology.
Do they, I mean, do they really The people, the
Justin Sledge: people that believe in it don't.
I think the people that popularize it on Netflix do,
Rupert Isaacson: but it comes, that's what I view it as.
Another mythology.
Justin Sledge: If they, if they, if, if at the very beginning they
said, what I'm presenting to you is a myth, that's not what they do.
What they say is archeologists are all involved in a conspiracy of
silence about about a civilization that existed at 10,000 BCE and seeded
all the civilizations in the world.
Right.
Those are very different kinds of claims.
Mm-hmm.
You know, it's the difference between me getting on TV and saying, you
know, a guy named Moses went up a mountain and got rules as opposed
to, this is Israelite mythology.
We don't have any archeological evidence to suggests that the exodus ever happened.
Rupert Isaacson: There is this naughty part of me that likes to see all the
archeologists hopping about jumping up and down and getting upset, but that's.
In that interrogation room at York University.
But I agree.
Yeah,
Justin Sledge: I mean that, that, yeah.
I mean, I, and, and again, I also like the, the, that I
do think that, that there is,
what's the right way of putting it?
I, I do like the idea of hand grenades being thrown into dogma.
And I do think that academia functions with a lot of dogma.
Mm.
Justin Sledge: But I think you combat dogma not with more dogma.
You, you, you combat it with problematizing and showing that the, that
the very stories they're telling don't make sense given their own internal data.
Another way of putting this is the way that I go about doing the work that I
do is I don't do external criticism.
Mm-hmm.
For instance, I don't debunk anybody.
I've never done a debunking video ever.
That's
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, that's true.
You don't.
And, and interestingly, I think that causes some people to mistake
that maybe you are bel espousing or believing it might, even though you
frequently say that you're not yeah.
Or hear what they hear.
And it might,
Justin Sledge: and then that's fine.
I'd rather take that.
I'd rather risk that danger because I don't want to do, I'd rather just tell
the history in its complicatedness and leave it at that, as opposed to say, well,
they, we've told this elaborate story about Descartes and it's false because
that lets the false story lead in the same way that I'm not going to say, well,
the Anki or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'm not gonna like.
I'm gonna say, if I'm gonna do an episode on the Anunnaki, I'm
gonna say, here are the 15 UNIFOR tablets that describe the Anunnaki.
Here's what the Sumerian says.
This is the best data we have.
Have you done?
I'm not
Rupert Isaacson: gonna
Justin Sledge: episode on the Anki.
No, they're not very interesting.
I, I mean, I hate to tell people, but they're just like underworld spirits.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Justin Sledge: They're just, they're the kind, like, they're
like, it's the same reason why some ask me like, you've, you've done
Rupert Isaacson: episodes on other underworld spirits.
I haven't though.
I mean,
Justin Sledge: maybe.
And people, like, I always ask people like, why are you so interested in
the Anki and not the gala demons?
'cause the gala demons actually have an active role and maybe they haven't
Rupert Isaacson: heard of them.
And that's
Justin Sledge: just, that's the funny thing is that yeah, they're just
underworld spirits that that Dezi and other folks have to deal with.
And they're, you know, they're like sort of cathartic beings
that seem to have existed prior to the creation, which is weird.
Okay.
Justin Sledge: They're the standard creation love craft stuff.
Yeah.
Lovecraftian kind of stuff.
Yeah.
And I think that the, the gala demons are far more weird than Anki, but
but yeah, it's like, it's the, I don't do the debunking stuff because
I don't want the, what I take to be a bad history to lead the story.
I'd rather just say, this is the data.
And if someone says, I disagree with it, I can say, you can
disagree with whatever you like.
I don't get to control the data.
I can all, all I can say is like, these are the six tablets
where the stuff is described.
Here are here, here's the, here are the debates among scholars
about how to read those tablets.
'cause that's not even agreed upon.
Mm-hmm.
And that's, to me, the thing that strikes me as the most shockingly egregious
about, you know, someone like Zacharia or something, is that the idea that he
knows what they say when Sumerian scholars are like, we're not clear even how to
read some of this because we don't even totally understand Sumerian as a language.
Rupert Isaacson: That actually is a question.
How did people decode Sumerian?
Justin Sledge: So we have, so we know, and again, to be careful
'cause I'm not a, a ologist, but we know Sumerian through Acadian.
So Acadian is a language that we do know a lot about because it's related to,
it's a Semitic language like Hebrew.
Like in Hebrew, if you wanna say like, I, you could say Nu and in,
in Aca in an Acadians ku Okay.
They're very similar languages.
Okay.
They're not identical, but they're similar.
But we have text, we have bilingual texts in Acadian and Sumerian, and
they were able, scholars were able to decode Sumerian by reading it.
Okay.
You know, it's like Rosetta Stones.
Got it.
Lots of them.
And one of the big texts that the Acadians produced, because Sumerian was a
language, a bit like Latin, it was a dead language, but it was a language they, they
preserved as a kind of academic language.
And so we have lots of basically word lists.
And we have text in both languages.
And so scholars were able to do this, and so they, they can read Sumerian
with a high degree of, of accuracy.
But the, the problem is, is that the older you go back, the less
standardized the language is.
The less the more idio, the more idiosyncratic it becomes, the
more, the more they tend to use a lot more audiograms as opposed
to syllabic spelling, which the syllabic spelling's a lot clearer.
There's a lot less guesswork involved.
And so when I hear people say like, you know, this Sumerian tablet says
this, well, that immediately jumps my hackles up where I'm like, I doubt it.
I bet it, I bet there's debate about what it says.
And, and any, and, and it's almost always when I read text about
Atlantis or the Anunnaki or the ancient aliens, there's no debate.
This is what happened.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
It's I think your point about replacing dogma with dogmas is fair.
I, I'm, I'm still on Team Cat among the pigeons, and at the same time, I'm very
grateful that people like you come along and say, yeah, but listen, lads, actually,
here's what we really know to date.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
We need one means
Rupert Isaacson: both.
Right,
Justin Sledge: right.
And, and again, I, I feel like the, any, the more that I see, I'll
give an example in my field, right.
The, you mentioned earlier the key of Solomon, the Quila Soleimani.
This is the most important book of magic produced in the Western world.
We know of a hundred and different 150 different manuscripts of it.
We know that they exist.
Those are the ones we know of so far.
There is no standard edition of this text, and no one has ever looked at all 150.
It's just, we don't even know what they all look like.
We don't even what they all say.
They're not in private.
Some of them are private hands, some of them in public hands.
It's a mess.
When I make episodes talking about Solomonic Magic, one of the things I have
to remind people is this is so provisional because in 50 years, 30 more manuscripts
will be found, 15 more will be published.
Maybe all of 'em will be published.
And everything I'm saying now is provisional.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
And
Justin Sledge: I think that's
Rupert Isaacson: like, like the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
and then we find a whole bunch not muddy library and, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
Justin Sledge: The more that, the more that I find, you know, one of the things
that makes myth interesting to me is that the mythological texts are almost always
disagreeing with each other internally.
Mm-hmm.
The, the Bible Sumerian text and the text.
I know.
You know, if someone goes to tell you what is North mythology,
which ones the, the have the stories all contradict each other.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Justin Sledge: They're, they're not coherent.
And when I, Christianity
Rupert Isaacson: rather than Christianity.
Christianity,
Justin Sledge: yeah.
Right.
The, the myths are, the myths are internally incoherent.
That doesn't make 'em any more or less right.
Or any more or less valuable, but it makes them authentically human.
'cause that's what human beings do.
Mm.
But when you see these, these new mythologies that emerge, they emerge
from the same point of view and the same mindset as the enlightenment.
We have gotta figured it all out.
It's just totalitarian impulse.
Rupert Isaacson: Totalitarian good word.
Yes.
Justin Sledge: And in that totalitarian impulse in science,
that science has figured it all out.
I'm very skeptical of that.
But also I see the exact same kind of impulse in the mythological
world where like, you know, for instance, the perennials will tell
me, we figured it all out, every religion comes from this mystical
core, and they're all, I'm like, huh.
Like that, that impulse.
As a historian, as a, as a scholar of this material, anyone who beats the drum
of, this is the answer, when I hear that drum, I know which direction to run.
And
Rupert Isaacson: let's go to the biggest, the biggest mythology of all.
Then you study everyone in the Western world's belief in the afterlife.
What conclusions have you drawn?
Justin Sledge: In the afterlife.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Because every, every, every mythology, every religion, every
occult group that you are looking at in the esoterica series, they all
have a position on it, more or less.
Justin Sledge: Yeah, I mean, they're not, I would say they're by no means coherent.
Rupert Isaacson: No.
By for sure.
Yeah.
What's your, what, what have you gleaned?
What, what, what, what do you, what rings true for you out of
all the stuff that you've studied?
Justin Sledge: Oh, I don't know.
I hope there is no afterlife.
That's what I've gleaned.
If I wake up after my death and to anything, I'm going to be pissed.
I'm gonna write a letter if I would, God forbid I wake up and I'm in
heaven and everything is perfect, and I have to be there forever.
That is the most miserable imaginable situation possible.
Watering pot
Rupert Isaacson: plants.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
Yeah.
Just anything, anything.
If, if there is any afterlife at all I'm going to be,
yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm gonna be enraged.
Yeah.
So many of these, of these traditions that you're studying are convinced of it.
Yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: of course.
Where does that come from?
Not the desire for one.
I think we can understand that, but
Justin Sledge: yeah, it just, I think it's the human beings have the worst
case of Megan Character syndrome.
Maybe that is of main character syndrome.
Ooh.
You know, like we, we built a universe that was designed for us,
you know, we're the center of it.
God made us, were they made in the image of God?
But could we not be, be in the image of
Rupert Isaacson: God?
Could there not be?
I mean, could, could not.
Let's say there's life on a billion planets.
Could not, could they not all be images of God?
Justin Sledge: Maybe.
Maybe.
But that's not the way that, that medieval people and other people that formulated
these mythologies thought about it.
They thought they were the center of everything.
Yeah.
Justin Sledge: The earth is right there at the middle of everything.
And, and I, I think that, you know, the hu the human being can
imagine almost anything aside from there not being human beings.
Mm.
Like we can imagine the end of God, we can imagine the death of God.
We can imagine God being a mythology.
We can imagine all being superstition, but we can't imagine us not being around it.
It's the, it's the narcissistic impulse that the human being will endear forever.
That death, is it narcissistic
Rupert Isaacson: or is it just the just a, a a the feature of our biology that
we are, we are in the consciousness that we're in, and that's just that.
So we, we look through the lens.
We look through we have no choice.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
Yeah.
But I think the idea that, like, you know, again, with the, you know, I
always imagine like when I look at different diversions of the afterlife,
that there are no animals there or that ev or that there are no like,
you know, dinosaurs there or you know, what about all the other life?
You know, if you get married twice and your first wife dies,
what, what's gonna happen when you get there with your new wife?
She's gonna get pissed.
You know, the.
The no, because we're with
Rupert Isaacson: God and we're beyond all that.
We're, we've now grown, grown up and we're nice to each other.
Justin Sledge: Right?
And then what's the point of there being an afterlife?
Because if it's so unlike what it is to be a human being that it's
unrecognizable in the next one, then there's no continuity at all.
You know, Decart even says this, like, memory has to persist
through death, because otherwise there's no point in an afterlife,
right?
Because otherwise you're just a different, you're just, it's, you're
just, there's no connection to this world.
The whole point is there's continuity between the two that somehow you survive.
Right?
But if there's no memory, then there is no survival.
If I were to, God forbid, hit someone on the head hard enough and they're
completely erase their memory, they're not the same person in any,
in any meaningful sense of the term.
Right.
Rupert Isaacson: And so let, let's play devil's advocate with that one, just the
other, well, I'm just trying to think what the devil's advocate would say.
What would they say?
They might say, well, yes, Justin, but what if because life comes in infinite
forms of expression, there could be infinite forms of expression of life
in a sort of an of which our idea of a linear
born live die is one expression.
But perhaps is, could it be that.
In fact, there's a much more complex picture there that you could transmute
into other things or, you know, the, the, the end of a physical life.
I mean, you, the, the, the traditions that you study, you know, talk about
being a soul, being embodied, and then when the body dies, the soul is, is
still there, the spirit is still there.
But whether it's still there in terms of the personality of
that person or not, who knows?
Justin Sledge: I think most of them Do you, I
Rupert Isaacson: mean, you, you studied this, so you must
have pondered these questions.
Justin Sledge: Yeah, sure.
I mean, I think that most of them imagine that, at least the Western
traditions, imagine that the soul becomes disentangled from the body,
but the body will come back later.
That's standard view in Christianity, Islamic Judaism that the, you get,
you get a better body later somehow, but you do get put back into a body.
Hopefully you
Rupert Isaacson: get an upgrade.
Yeah,
Justin Sledge: yeah.
It's some glorified body or something like that.
But far be it for me to know exactly what all that means.
Yeah.
Justin Sledge: But if it were the case that the afterlife is somehow
sufficiently unrecognizable from this life, then I simply would have no interest
in it because if it's so different than what I understand of this life.
Then it will be unpredictable.
So unpredictable about it will be on the other side that I
don't have any interest in.
I wouldn't have any, I mean, I wouldn't have any interest in it
because it just, but you, you, you're
Rupert Isaacson: a skeptic.
You, you, you don't necessarily believe in an afterlife or,
Justin Sledge: Yeah, I don't, I, yeah, I don't know that there is an afterlife.
Rupert Isaacson: What does Judaism say?
Because you, you're a practicing Jew, so, I'm a never having practiced Jew.
So what does, given that there have been, as you say, many Judaisms in the same
way that there are many Christianity,
give us like three points historically about what Judaism says about
afterlife from sort of pri Moses, Moses e Jesusy, that millennium
to now, what, what do they say?
Justin Sledge: So the earliest Israelite literature seems to
have believed in a place called Sheol, which is just sort of a dark
underground place where dead people go.
Mm-hmm.
You're, yeah, you're there, but you're not very conscious.
You're not really doing anything.
It's a place of inactivity.
God doesn't know.
Are you,
Rupert Isaacson: are you there as yourself just kind of bored or are you It's
Justin Sledge: not even, it's not clear.
I mean, the references to it are so few and so vague.
Everyone goes there.
It doesn't matter whether you're good or bad, everyone goes there.
Rupert Isaacson: Are you broken down into a sort of primordial soup and
then reconfigured for later use?
No.
Justin Sledge: You've stared forever.
There's no sense of you ever come out of there.
It's just that's where everyone goes.
You sit around, it seems to be similar to Hades, the Greek Hades.
Okay.
You know that it's not great and not bad either.
But you don't want to go there.
Like no one's looking forward to going there.
But de
here is better.
Justin Sledge: Here is better.
Yeah.
I mean, I think of that famous line in the Odyssey where, or
Achilles says to Odysseus better a living dog than a dead Achilles.
You know, that he'd rather be a living dog than a dead Achilles.
So I, I think of that, it's like no one wants to go there, but it's
not You're, but you're have to
Rupert Isaacson: go there.
Justin Sledge: Everyone goes there.
Yeah.
Every, everyone who dies goes to Shaul and we're not even
sure what the word Shaul means.
It's a very strange word,
Rupert Isaacson: but it's not pleasant.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
You don't want to go there.
It's, it's, yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: you don't want to go there, but you're gonna have to go there.
It's kind of like the D dv dv the driving, yeah.
The DMV, yeah.
The DM V.
Yeah.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
Fast forward to Jesus' time.
There's definitely Jews have interacted with Raan and they
picked up heaven and hell.
Rupert Isaacson: Is that where we get heaven and hell
from the Iranians, it seems,
Justin Sledge: yeah.
It seems to be as, as a, a, seems to be a raan influence when the
Jews were in the exile in Babylon.
So that seems to be where that idea comes from.
And there, there's the idea that you go into the sky.
Where the God lives and you live there if you're good, and if you're bad, you
go to some place and you get tortured for some period of time, maybe forever,
but maybe for some period of time.
Rupert Isaacson: Are the Egyptians are not saying something slightly
similar as well at that time.
Justin Sledge: So they, the Egyptians in the New Kingdom have the belief
that if you have a good soul, then you can go into the duo, the afterlife.
But if you have a bad one, then you get your soul gets
eaten by a monster called Amit.
And then after there's no bad afterlife, but there's just,
there's a good one and no bad one.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
You just get destroyed.
You go, it's
Justin Sledge: oblivion.
It's like good or oblivion.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Justin Sledge: Which doesn't seem that bad actually.
No, I just, that's right.
Actually, it's like, yeah.
So that's not, you know.
And then after Heaven and hell, that becomes so associated with Christianity
that Judaism distances itself from heaven and hell and basically
quits contemplating much of it.
Rupert Isaacson: At what point?
Justin Sledge: Sometime third, fourth century.
It seems like Judaism drifts away from talking about the afterlife.
Fine.
You
Rupert Isaacson: guys can have heaven and hell.
We didn't want, in the
Justin Sledge: divorce, they got heaven and hell and exorcism and stuff.
And then in the, in the 16th century you have reincarnation appears in the kabbah.
Rupert Isaacson: Why, why so suddenly?
Justin Sledge: So it seems
Rupert Isaacson: from.
Justin Sledge: So the, well, the Kabbala has a very long, complicated
history going back to the, the 13th century, if not prior, but the, the,
the big idea seems to come from a guy named Isaac Luria and his student Al.
And they developed this idea of Gil Goul, which means something like Ole,
and this is the idea that souls roll.
Where are
Rupert Isaacson: they living?
These two guys, these two Rabbi.
So
Justin Sledge: its like Luria is living in Cairo.
He ultimately immigrates, this is all inside of the Ottoman Empire.
So he immigrates to what is now the Galilee, and k Vita is living in
the Galilee, and ultimately he goes to Damascus and then reincarnation
enters into Judaism as a, as a viable
Rupert Isaacson: and where do you think they picked that up from?
It's not clear talking to Hindus.
Were they talking to
Justin Sledge: No, because the, the hin there's no sense of karma
and there's no sense of you can't, you can't, there's no sense of cat.
You can't go from you, you don't go from if you, if you commit bad
stuff in this life, you don't get sent to be a woman in the next life
or made into an animal or something.
You can't be reincarnated down the food chain, so to speak.
But it seems to be tied up to their theory of redemption and the idea that
there's a finite number of souls and that in order for the redemption to occur,
one has to make reparations for all the sins committed in one's past life.
And how does one kind
Justin Sledge: of.
Yeah.
So you, you undergo a kind of past life regression and there's
a kind of ritual expert that does the past life regression for you.
A kind of Jewish shaman.
This happens before
Rupert Isaacson: you die.
You, you, you say, yeah, you
Justin Sledge: figure this out before you die.
And then they tell you it worked or not.
Who, who, who were your past lives?
What their ma, what the major sins they committed were and how to fix them.
K vial his, and these called soul roots.
The idea that this is the root of your soul.
And for instance, K Vial, who was lu student, his soul route was Cain.
He was the primordial murderer, and they're responsible for all murders.
Which made him, because he was, if he could redeem that sin he
could have been he could have been the Messiah or whatever.
So you get this, and there's still people out there today in the
kabbalistic world that will do this past life regression with you.
But that's similar to,
Rupert Isaacson: to Buddhism.
Hinduism.
Then you sort of get off the karmic wheel, even though you
say there's no karma there.
But isn't that something, a similar idea?
Okay, I've, I've expunged this, these sins, but you could call that karma.
Well, you do it and now I could do something else.
Well, you,
Justin Sledge: you, the, you do it in order to usher in the Messiah, and so
that some point, the, the, the Messianic age will be ushered in once enough sin
has been expunged and then the Messiah mess, the Messianic era will start,
but it's not expected for normal.
Like the
Rupert Isaacson: Rastafarian idea of chant down Babylon sort of thing.
Just we.
Put enough good stuff out there in all these ways and the bad stuff,
Justin Sledge: the battle stuff.
Yeah.
And Judaism has sort of two minds about how the Messiah will come.
Either it'll get so bad that only the Messiah can fix it, or it'll get so good
that the Messiah will be happily welcomed into the world, that there's no medium.
But in general, you know, if you go to a local rabbi and ask them,
what happens to me when I die?
The rabbi will tell you, I'll let you know when I get there.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
That's the, that's the predominant view now.
Right.
And that's the view.
So when you're going in synagogue, they're not threatening you
with hell, fire and brimstone?
No.
Okay.
Justin Sledge: No, there's no, yeah.
Historically saying, be a
Rupert Isaacson: inch.
Justin Sledge: Yeah, be a inch.
And, and the idea is that, you know, the, you know, and if you
look at the Torah, the rewards are always this worldly, follow the
rules and you'll get children, land, agriculture, life will be good for you.
Rupert Isaacson: Your, your bonds will be bursting at the seams
and your cut will runeth over.
Justin Sledge: Eth over.
And so that's the kind of, it's, it's a very, this worldly religion.
Okay.
And there's even a line in the Talman that says that people who do the
right thing with the expectation of reward have that reward.
But that's like a child.
It is like a, it's like a toddler version of religion that if you do
the right thing to get a reward.
God's like pat you on the head.
Good for you.
But like, it's a, it's a, it's an in, it's an ins ultimately insufficient
way of getting people to do the good, because then you only do good, do the good
when you get reward or only do the good when you get public recognition for it.
And the rabbis are very skeptical of the idea that you should be
rewarded in the afterlife for having done the good in this world.
Because it, it's interesting.
It sets up a, a bad idea about why you should do the good.
You shouldn't do the good 'cause you get something you should do
the good because it's a good,
Rupert Isaacson: this feels to me almost like a parallel with Ana Buddhism or
not the sort of, you know, Buddhism of Tibetan, which is sort of like
high Catholic Buddhism or whatever.
But it seems again, very similar to the kind of golden rule thing.
Just, you know, don't be a dick because your life is worse if you are be mentor.
Yeah.
I, because things kind of go better if you are.
Justin Sledge: Yeah, I guess, I mean, I think that, you know, Spinoza
famously said that religion can be boiled down to two things, right?
That, that there's a, that something made all this so there's probably
a God and that whatever is hateful to you don't do to your neighbor.
And he thought basically religion could be boiled down to those two things.
And everything else he thought of was he called superstition.
He said those two things can be logically proved.
The rest of it is just cultural fad and, and superstition.
I'm not sure I go that quickly.
Who
Rupert Isaacson: knows?
It was, 'cause again, not everyone knows.
Justin Sledge: Espinoza was a 17th century rationalist philosopher, famous for being
excommunicated by the Jewish community.
He was living in the Netherlands, right?
The Netherlands, that's right.
Yeah.
I've been to his house on many occasions.
He's kind of a you know, one of the, I don't know if he's one
of my favorite philosophers, but he's certainly a philosopher that
I Why, why should we, why should
Rupert Isaacson: we know about him?
Justin Sledge: I think that he pioneered the idea that one could
believe in a transcendent reality without being part of a religion.
That you could be secular.
I mean, Spinoza was the first secular person.
He was kicked out of a religion, but he never joined another one.
But he didn't give up believing in something like God was Descartes secular.
Mm-hmm.
Justin Sledge: No, he, he continued to be a, a pious Catholic.
I mean, he got in trouble with them, but he, I think if you'd asked him if
he were a Catholic, he would say yes.
He took confession.
But Spinoza was excommunicated.
Rupert Isaacson: And so if, if, if, okay, so sorry.
He, so he said, he's saying, I interrupted you for why we should know about him.
Please go on.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
I think that he's important because if you've ever left a religion and
didn't join another one and you still believe in God, then you, you can
thank him 'cause he did it first.
Rupert Isaacson: That sort of describes to me,
you might have
Justin Sledge: a, you might have a grandfather in Spinoza.
Rupert Isaacson: I might, you know, I mean, hey, I've got Dutch roots as
well as everything else there, you.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
He, you know, he also made the first protest sign that we know of in history.
Really.
He ever held up a, yeah, after the, the mob murdered the Det Brothers
he wanted to hang a protest sign outside of his apartment saying, you
know, this is the worst Barbarity.
And his land Leddy was like, are you crazy?
They'll tear those guys apart.
They'll tear you apart.
Like,
Rupert Isaacson: don't do that.
Who were the Det brothers and why were they murdered?
Justin Sledge: The Det brothers were the head of the of the Dutch
Republic and royalist Mob who wanted to restore the house of Orange
which was eventually restored.
Lynch them.
And if you wanna see a, a nightmare fuel painting, there's a painting
made from life of what they look like after they were lynched.
And it's really horrifying.
They're emasculated faces torn off.
Rupert Isaacson: Where do you, where does one find this painting?
You can Google it, I'm sure if you just Google the murder of the DVI Brothers I'm
gonna make And, and how did that play out?
Because they must have had a whole power structure around them, the Devet brothers.
I mean, how could, how did the mob get hold of them so easily?
Justin Sledge: Yeah, I wonder this too.
And I can say that.
Why were they so
Rupert Isaacson: enraged?
'cause they, you know, they're sort of Dutch people, you know, who Yeah, they're
Justin Sledge: Dutch people.
I don't have any emotions.
I think that the, I think that they, again, the, the politics and inspires,
you know, people to do bizarre, crazy things, including hateful,
murderous things was Nietzsche said that insanity in individuals is rare,
but insanity in crowds is the rule.
Mm-hmm.
And so I, I think Nietzche said that that's the kind of thing Nietzche
would say, but yeah, I think that they, again, it was political tensions
were pretty high, and the royalists and the Republican through h Joe's
throats and ultimately the English were able to reinstall their whatever,
cousins or whatever on the throne
Rupert Isaacson: ah, we were behind it.
That makes sense.
Yes.
The Brits,
Justin Sledge: I mean, they, they were behind in the sense that, you know,
they definitely did not want to continue dealing with the Dutch Republic as a
naval enemy, and they wanted to have, you know, and so they, you know, I
mean that's the reason why the oh, I found the painting, the ulcer royalists
and and Northern Ireland to this day still have orange the same way the Yes.
Of orange.
They're all connected.
It's all part of the one big royal family.
Rupert Isaacson: I have found the painting and trigger alert guys.
Yeah,
Justin Sledge: I don't, I don't recommend it.
Rupert Isaacson: I wouldn't recommend looking at it.
Yep.
Yeah.
Fair warning.
Yep.
Yeah.
I, I, yeah.
Yeah.
Justin Sledge: It's, you know, but it is, you know, that's how Democracy dies.
That is a painting about the death of a republic.
And.
For all of us people who believe in rule by the people, for the people, you know,
that's a, it's a gruesome painting.
Well worth contemplating.
'cause to me it's
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
And of course, you know, rule by the people, for the people can
easily turn into oligarchies and
Sure.
Rupert Isaacson: Mafias as we know.
Yep.
So there's arguments for monarchies, IE the devils, you know, the mafia, you know.
Right.
Stability with that.
It is the office, not the person.
And changing your gangsters up every four, two, however many years.
Yeah,
Justin Sledge: yeah.
No, no.
Who knows?
We, maybe it could be just be the case.
We're all shuffling the deck, the deck chairs in the Titanic.
But indeed, indeed.
But no, I I like Hobbes.
Hobbes says, you know, I don't care if it's a, a king or a republic
or a whatever, it doesn't matter.
What matters is the, the sovereignty of the people that kings sit on their thrones
as long as the people want them to.
Mm.
And then tell us who Hobbes was.
So another 17th century political philosopher and translator.
People often sit on, they really sleep on Hobbes's translation.
So he did street really great translations of like, acidities and stuff.
Did a translation of Homer.
But he was an important political philosopher, especially a political
philosopher of sovereignty.
Rupert Isaacson: Was he in Oxford, Don, like, how, how was he funding
himself to, that's a good question.
I forget exactly where he
Justin Sledge: graduated from.
He was, you know, worked for one of these wealthy, right.
Wealthy got a patron or whatever.
Yeah.
Patron.
That's, I think so.
So,
Rupert Isaacson: and that sort of brings us to YouTube because one of the things
I find really fascinating about channels like yours, it's a big channel now.
I mean, if I look at your views, you know, it's in the hundreds of thousands
which is brilliant because, you know, it, it, it's, for me, it's revenge of
the nerds because it vindicates that people say, oh, history's so boring.
It's like, oh yeah, oh yeah.
Well look at Justin Church's esoterica thing then, and, and look how many,
you know, because it's brilliant.
Frankly.
Your, your channel is brilliant, Justin.
I mean, it's, I appreciate that.
It's, I'd say it's beyond brilliant because it's entertaining,
informative, deeply non-partisan and
fair and humorous.
You know, there's so many chuckles through, through the whole thing, and
you've made a real success of this.
I think there's a lot of people out there who, just switching gears completely
now you lead a very different life now, I should imagine, to when you were an
adjunct professor To explore and study what you want to, to showcase what
you want to, to sort of inform people.
And it's vindicated because people are voting with their feet, with their views.
So you must be making a living from this.
Now.
How did you manage to evolve that?
And I watched videos of yours from four years ago to now sort of thing,
and it's, it's, I find it really interesting that you can present
material that if I was to go to the bank and say, could you give me a loan, please
so that I can do a, a YouTube channel on really, really esoteric stuff that
people might or might not be interested.
I dunno, but I'm interested in it.
And they probably say, Rupert bugger off.
You've made such a go of it.
How,
Justin Sledge: what do you mean?
How, just
Rupert Isaacson: in terms of, yeah, because I mean, like, literally
what, what's, if you were to write a bio, your autobiography and
say, I started here and I got here and these were sort of the steps.
I said, 'cause it must have been a real voyage of discovery for you.
You must have, you didn't come out of your mother's womb knowing how to do YouTube.
I mean,
Justin Sledge: yeah.
No, I still don't know how to do YouTube.
Still have no idea what I'm doing.
You know, I, so maybe the, the easy way to answer it was that
before I was an academic, I was in the entrepreneurial world.
I was in like the tech world.
Okay.
And I knew a good bit about.
How to start a business and like, and how to run a business and
how to, like what did you do in the tech world out of interest?
I, I worked in like security, like tech security.
Okay.
And you know, I, when I, it was my brother that ultimately convinced me to
do the channel and after he convinced me, I spent, I spent five months
planning how I wanted the channel, what I wanted it to look like, what I wanted
to cover, the cadence of the channel, you know, almost all the major things.
Nothing's fundamentally changed.
Mm-hmm.
I've gotten better at it.
Yeah.
I've found my own voice.
You know, apparently people think that the bizarre things I say are funny
and so I, I've, you know, I don't mind, you know, interjecting some
degree of my whatever sense of humor, assuming, you know, that I have that.
But you know, I think that part of why the channel has grown is because
of the vacuum of other reliable data.
I think that when I tell people this book says this, here is the book, here is the
manuscript that the book is based on.
Here is a link to the manuscript.
You can read it yourself.
Here is a thing to help you learn to read Latin so you can read the manuscript.
Right.
You know, I don't and also I don't tell people how history was.
I say, look, this is the debates.
You know, it's, these are, this is the data, these are the debates over the data.
Here's the data for yourself.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
But there's people out there that do that, and they're not you.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
I mean, but I think that maybe they, I mean they don't do do in this field.
I don't know anyone else really doing it, doing that in this field.
There's other people doing that in, I don't know, maybe other fields,
Beowulf or something, I don't know.
Mm-hmm.
But you know what, I think what people like is that they
don't feel sold something.
They don't feel told that this is the way that it is.
Okay.
I think people like saying, you know, people like knowing that these
are my sources, you know, and also the whole channel is engineered
around the idea that I'm empowering people to do the work themselves.
Mm-hmm.
Justin Sledge: You know, people get angry sometimes when I say, well,
I'm not gonna summarize the book.
And they're like, well, that's what I want.
I want to, and I'm like, yeah, you think you want that?
'cause that feels like you're learning, but you're not learning.
Wikipedia feels like learning, but it's not learning.
You need to read these books.
You need to study the material.
And the only way to do that is by feeling like you can, and the way
that you prepare people is to say, look, Sumerian is not magical.
It's a language like any other language.
Latin's not magical.
It's a language.
You can learn it, you can learn to read medieval handwriting
Rupert Isaacson: and you can read in translation too.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
And here's a good translation.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Justin Sledge: And here's why it's a good translation, because the
translator will tell you why they make the decisions they're making.
Mm-hmm.
Justin Sledge: And it's about empowerment.
And I think people want to feel, people often come to education and they come
away from education, feeling disempowered.
And I want people to feel empowered.
And the way you make people feel empowered is you make them feel like
they can join the conversation too.
And I do believe that eter, that esoterica allows people the tools to empower
themselves to enter the conversation.
Now, not at a high level and not at, you know, whatever, but it's certainly more
empowering than, here's some stuff I heard in a dream, or here's some stuff that,
like I read in a book that's not reliable, or Here's my personal beliefs about this.
Very rarely will you ever hear me interject my personal beliefs
into an esoteric episode.
Almost never.
Rupert Isaacson: Did you have any idea, did you plan that it would get this big?
Did you have any idea that it would, or was it more just a question of,
look, I'm surprised by how big it
Justin Sledge: got.
Yeah, no, I had no idea it would get this big.
I'm, I'm, I'm flabbergasted every time I open up the analytics
that it's, that it's this big.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's great and terrible, right?
Because that means I can make a living doing it.
But it also means that the amount of eyes on me are enormous.
And so making mistakes becomes a much bigger deal.
And also it means that, you know, I was talking to my former teacher v Holograph
who at the University of Amsterdam where I was trained, and he was like, it's
great that your channel's gotten this big, but just know that any mistakes
you make, we have to clean up later.
Rupert Isaacson: And
Justin Sledge: that's a lot of responsibility, but it keep
Rupert Isaacson: the conversation going and at least it puts it out
there in the public conscious earth.
Right.
I mean, if one was so afraid of making mistakes, one would never do anything.
You should hear my German, it's terrible, but it's functional.
And I don't mind sounding like a toddler because otherwise
how will I learn, you know?
It, its, but Okay.
Well, you said you were trained at the University of Amsterdam.
What were you trained in there?
'cause you trained in the study out of your, the study of,
Justin Sledge: Of Western as a terrorism.
That's where I received sort of like my how to study Western as a tism.
What Western as a terrorism is.
Did you do that as an ma?
Mm-hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: Or MSC?
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
Or d
Rupert Isaacson: you know, whatever the, whatever the, the Dutch.
And why did you go to the Netherlands?
Justin Sledge: It was the only place.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Did you have to self-fund that?
Justin Sledge: I got a loan.
Yeah, I got a loan and I got a scholarship.
So, but because you must have come
Rupert Isaacson: out of that in some debt.
Justin Sledge: Yeah, I think I, I came out self some debt, but I, I think,
you know, it wasn't, you know, I paid, I since paid it off, thank God.
So, but yeah, it was the, it was just a task.
It was, I remember finishing undergraduate and just being
like, this is what I have to do.
I gotta go.
Rupert Isaacson: Why?
Why is it the only place that teaches the history of Western Esoterism?
Justin Sledge: Because everyone's interested
Rupert Isaacson: in it.
Justin Sledge: I don't know that everyone is, some people are, I mean, I think
it's the only place because there are not many people skilled enough to teach it.
And there's an endowed chair, a very wealthy woman decided that
she was, decided she was really interested in it and decided she
was going to endowed chair and
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Justin Sledge: Threw millions of dollars at an institution and conjure in, in, into
being the way that rich people can do.
Yeah.
Justin Sledge: So I think it has more to do with the accident.
And, you know, V Va GRA is a, a, a Titanic scholar was a really
intellectual hero of mine.
And
Rupert Isaacson: why so tell us about him.
Justin Sledge: Voucher Ner Van DeGraff.
RAF Vata.
Raf, yeah.
He's, you know, he, he's, he's just been able to shepherd the whole field in
many ways by making it respectable, by publishing really great monographs and
articles by, by making the department a collegial place where a range of
opinions are appreciated and diverse.
You know, it's a diverse field, you know, a diverse place with, you
know, lots of different people there.
Yeah, he's just, you know, the Dutch, you know, the, the Dutch are a
practical people and he's a practical person with an obscure interest,
and he's been able to make it work.
And yeah, I've always, you know, the one thing I'll say personally
is that every time I've ever been around him, he listens as a, you
know, to me as a junior scholar, as a.
First day in his classroom when I said something, he listened
and he interacted with me.
And there was never a moment from between then and now when I
interact with him where I never feel like he's like just biting his
time to correct me or something.
He's a real educator.
He's a real scholar.
He he's done Titanic important things for the field and yeah, it's a real, like
I said, an intellectual hero of mine.
So
Rupert Isaacson: if you were to put into a nutshell why we ought to study
Western esotericism, why should we?
Justin Sledge: It's, it's part of our history.
Rupert Isaacson: Go on.
There's more than that.
Justin Sledge: I think it's a part of our history that systems of power
have sought to repress, that modernity has sought to repress that myth, that
modern peddlers and conspiracy theories distort for their own interests.
And it's had a disproportionate impact on the development of modernity.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely.
Justin Sledge: And so why
Rupert Isaacson: think what we think?
Yeah,
Justin Sledge: it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's right there at the heart of it all.
And I think that those are reasons why it should be taken seriously.
I don't think that every religious studies department needs a Western
as Tism scholar, but I do think that there's no reason why, you know, there
are not more of us out there as a, you know, as a, as a, as a, you know,
Rupert Isaacson: it's astonishing really, that there aren't given that.
Western Esotericism is the belief bedrock of all our stuff.
Justin Sledge: Some of it, you know, a lot of it, you know.
Yeah.
It just, you know, but again, I can say in the United States, I, you
have to beg, borrow, and still to get religious, religious studies classes.
Yeah.
Just reli basic religious studies classes.
The idea that you would have a specialization in religious
studies classes is beyond the pale.
Rupert Isaacson: And do you think that just comes from dogmatic
Christianity or dogmatic science?
Science saity or somewhere in between
Justin Sledge: scientism?
Yeah.
I think it's also just uni.
Universities are often skeptical of, they don't wanna be perceived as pushing an
agenda, especially a religious agenda.
And religious studies tends to be academic.
I mean, it's, we're not taking a side, we're just trying to teach religious
studies and somehow that offends people that you're not taking a position, but
also taking a position isn't allowed.
So it's a complete catch 22.
Rupert Isaacson: It's so interesting.
Okay.
So here's the thing.
Somebody needs to understand and begin somewhere.
What are like the five things that.
Somebody should start with to take them from Sumer ish to here to get a
bit of an understanding to get going.
You're talking to a 14-year-old, you say, dude, look at these five things.
What are they?
Justin Sledge: Wow.
Look at these five things.
Well, I think there's no better place in the beginning.
Look at the Keshe and the instructions of ak.
Those are the first two literary documents ever written.
The Keshe.
Yeah.
KeHE.
And the instructions of she ak
Rupert Isaacson: instructions of she ak.
And that's Sumeria.
Justin Sledge: That's Sumeria.
Those are the first two literary documents ever written down that we have.
It's the earliest we have, I dunno if they're the, the
first or the earliest Yeah.
That we've recovered.
Skipping ahead further ahead than that.
Oh God.
This is like an impossible question.
Rupert Isaacson: Are we in Egypt?
Are we in Greece?
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
I, I think that,
I mean, I would from Egypt, I would say that the text that I
would read from ancient Egypt would be the pyramid text of Unes.
That's the first appearance of the soul and the afterlife and the
world that we know of in literature.
Great.
Uns, how do you spell it?
UNAS.
Rupert Isaacson: So that's the first.
What's fun with that name?
Justin Sledge: Hmm.
Rupert Isaacson: You could have all sorts of fun with that name.
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
It's either wanes.
We don't know how it was really pronounced in ancient Egyptian.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Justin Sledge: Greece.
I would say that you could spend a lifetime with Parmenides.
Parmenides.
Rupert Isaacson: Not Plato, not Socrates.
Not everything is a
Justin Sledge: commentary to Parmenides.
Everything is downstream of parities.
Everything's downstream of Plato, but Plato's downstream of Parities.
Okay.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Didn't know that.
Okay.
Parities.
I'm gonna go have a look at Parities.
Okay.
Then I presume we hit Rome or,
Justin Sledge: yeah.
Or the Middle Ages.
I don't know.
Probably the Confessions by Augustine.
That's the first time we get a person, like something like a subject.
The confessions.
Okay.
Everything you need to know about Christianity is Western
Christianity is in the Confessions.
Rupert Isaacson: And that's fifth Century.
Yeah.
Justin Sledge: Twilight of the Roman Empire.
Rupert Isaacson: And he's also, he's been a Pagan, right?
August Augustine.
So he's, he, he's, he, he knows of what he rejected a bit,
Justin Sledge: right?
Yeah, he's a smart guy.
I mean, maybe one of the smartest philosophers ever we've ever produced.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Alright.
And then we're at five.
Is it Spinoza?
Justin Sledge: Oh, wow.
Then we have to go over the Middle Ages.
Nah, it's not, he's important, but I, I can't imagine he's
that, that high on the list.
God, this is like, these lists are just so impossible.
Rupert Isaacson: Do we need to go to,
Justin Sledge: might be Leonard Bernard
Rupert Isaacson: Pvo or do we need to go?
Yeah.
Maister Eckhart Probably.
Maister Eckhart.
Okay.
Why, why him and not Hildegard of Bing or someone.
Justin Sledge: I mean, it's all, you know, Hildegard is doing a very different thing.
I think that Maister Eckhart brings us the closest we ever got to
a kind of radical philosophical spiritual mysticism in the West.
And, and he only didn't get excommunicated.
'cause he died.
Okay.
But he's, you know, Meister Eckhart is, he's so important that I literally copied
out an entire sermon of his by hand in, in calligraphy once the Sermon on Hunger.
I think it's such a brilliant, I copied it out just so I could meditate on it.
Like letter by letter.
I copied the entire thing out in Latin.
Okay.
Took me, took me weeks.
But Okay.
Any, any, anyone who says that I, you know, I, I don't I don't
take this stuff seriously.
I take it so seriously that I, I literally will copy it out by
hand in a 14th century style.
So listen,
Rupert Isaacson: I know you have to run.
Tell us how people can find you.
How can they and lads listeners support this dude?
Go to his Patreon buy his cool black metal merch, which I'm about
to do and listen to his show.
But how do they find you Justin and stuff?
Justin Sledge: Yeah.
And I apologize for the noise down below.
I'm in the process of, you know, you notice my shelves are all
empty in the process of about to renovate this whole study.
I only have YouTube.
You can find me on YouTube.
But esoterica, I have a website where poking can learn a little bit more
about me, but I don't have any other social media 'cause it scares me.
Yeah.
But that's it.
But if people
Rupert Isaacson: want to consult with you, can they, if people have
questions, if people wanted to engage you as some sort of a mentor or tutor
and pay you to do that, can they Or do you keep out completely back?
Yeah,
Justin Sledge: it's so, it, it's the kind of thing where, you know, I've done
a little bit of that, but I've, I've found that to be not a very rewarding
experience because often people, you know, time is expensive for me.
Yeah, sure.
And I don't, and charging people, if I give, if one person could pay me a lot
of money, then that's taking time away that I could be serving lots more people.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely.
Justin Sledge: And so I've done that on, I've done that on a few occasions and I'm
like, yeah, I don't feel good about it.
'cause I feel like it's sort of like a, I feel like I'm medieval person where I'm
bought as opposed to being able to give, and I'd rather give them than, and what,
Rupert Isaacson: what you do is extremely generous and, you know,
when I'm listening to your stuff, I feel like I'm kind of wandering
through the library of Alexandria, you know, somewhere in, you know, I.
The Hellenic Egypt at some point, and the books are just
popping out and talking to me.
Justin Sledge: No, I'm really glad that's so any educator wants to
hear is that, that the, the past is coming to life in a rewarding way.
Because, you know, again, the William William Faulkner
said the the past isn't dead.
It's not even past.
Mm.
Justin Sledge: And I think that that's what I wanna make clear to
people is that the past isn't dead.
You're living in it.
Rupert Isaacson: That's very hunter gatherer of you.
It's the non-linear time thing that Yeah, it passed, I guess.
Yeah.
Having
Justin Sledge: not many hunter gatherers, I can't say, but I can say that.
Yeah.
I don't, I don't, I don't tend to think of the past as being a dead
thing that influenced, influenced us.
Yeah.
It's a living thing that is influencing us.
I so agree.
We should be self-conscious of that influence.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
I can't recommend it enough lads.
Go listen to esoterica.
Drive around P Poo with your horses, whatever you're doing,
go to the toilet, listen to it.
It's brilliant.
Justin, it's been fantastic to have you on.
I I'm, you're a hero.
I'm a fanboy.
It's fantastic.
I, I, I can't thank you enough for coming on.
Justin Sledge: I appreciate it.
Thank you for having me on.
Rupert Isaacson: I hope you enjoyed today's conversation as much as I did.
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