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Mormon Occult Secrets EXPOSED: Heretic, Gnosticism & the Temple Mystery w/ Ryan Springer!

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On today’s episode of the Occult Symbolism and Pop Culture with Isaac Weishaupt podcast we are joined by a special guest- a friend of mine named Ryan Springer who’s studied the esoteric side of LDS Mormonism and he’s here to explain how it fits into the film Heretic! We’ll discuss his soon-to-be-published article on the subject which goes into topics we’ll discuss on the show today: Ryan’s journey from LDS to the Occult and back, Heretic themes of Western Esotericism, Gnosticism and Joseph Smith’s transformative journey embedded into the LDS Temple Endowment Ceremonies. We’ll discuss Sacred Spaces, human power structures, hidden knowledge, Veils, Divine Feminine, Heretic’s ANTI-Endowment Ceremony with comparisons to Freemasonry, Rosicrucians, Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, Magic Underwear, Hecate and more!

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Isaac Weishaupt has been researching occult belief systems since 2011 and revealing symbolism used in the entertainment industry. Using examples of pop culture to discuss occult perspectives; Isaac has been an independent one-man army with no ZERO HANDLERS to answer to. He’s written nine books and produced hundreds of hours of podcasts since 2014 with over 15 million downloads. Isaac’s contribution to the truther world is one that comes from an honest, unique perspective that seeks to understand the big agenda while helping others along the way to go towards the light instead of dark divisiveness.

Isaac hosts the Occult Symbolism and Pop Culture podcast (supported by the supporter feeds like Patreon) and “Breaking Social Norms” podcast. He has been a featured guest on Coast to Coast AM, Tin Foil Hat podcast (honorary member of Mount Crushmore), Eddie Bravo’s “Look Into It,” Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis, Chris Jericho’s “Talk is Jericho,” Richard Syrett’s “Strange Planet,” House Inhabit’s Substack, “Those Conspiracy Guys,” Dave Navarro’s “Dark Matter Radio,” Richard C. Hoagland’s “Other Side of Midnight”, SIRIUS/XM’s The All Out Show, The HigherSide Chats, VICE, COMPLEX magazine, Esquire, Newsweek, The Atlantic and many more radio shows and podcasts. His fresh perspective and openly admitted imperfections promotes the rational approach to exploring these taboo subjects and theories.

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Full Transcript (Courtesy of all show Supporters):

*Note that this is pretty accurate- not 100% though. It’s run through software that is generally very accurate and then I give it a quick once over but there are most likely some errors.

[00:00:00] Speaker A: What if the rituals inside Mormon temples were hiding ancient esoteric secrets? On today’s episode of occult symbolism and pop culture, we’re diving into the wild overlap between LDS traditions and the dark symbolism in the film Heretic. I’m joined by Ryan Springer, a researcher with deep roots into Mormonism and the occult. And we’re going to unpack Freemasonry, Gnosticism, sacred spaces, and even Aleister Crowley. You won’t believe what the magic underwear might actually represent. Stay tuned.

That’s right, we got a special guest today, one of many, one of many special guests that we bring onto this show. And he’s got the background to justify all of the interests that we’re going to discuss today. It’s going to be packed full of information you’re going to love. We’re going to talk about Ryan’s journey, going from LDS Mormon to the occult and then back themes of the Western esotericism and Gnosticism you can find embedded into the film Heretic, as well as Joseph Smith’s transformative journey, which is found baked into the LDS temple endowment ceremonies. We’re gonna talk about sacred spaces, the human power structures, what goes on behind the veil. You’re gonna find out today here on a call symbolism of pop culture. So without further ado, we’re gonna get into this interview. And also, while I’m talking to you, there’s a video version of this show, and as you know, massive drama with the video version of the show. And as of for this particular episode, I’m going to release the video version of the show at the same time that I released the audio version on the free feed. So by all means, please follow along because he’s going to bring up a couple images as we discuss.

You can find. I’m putting links in the show notes. I’ve got three options for free feed videos. All right, I’m on YouTube at occult symbolism is the channel name. I’m on Rumble at Occult Symbolism and then also on Spotify. Just on my podcast, you’ll be able to find the video version of the show.

When you’re watching the audio version, it’s hard to explain, but if you’re on Spotify, you already know. So there’s three options there. Whichever one you prefer, check them out. Okay, Today we’ve got a very special guest. He’s a friend of mine, makes up half of my beloved Utah Twin Peaks crew, the iconic Team Double R diner. But more importantly, he’s a man who studied the history of the LDS faith as well as the Occult. So who would be a more perfect guest to break down the symbolism of this Hugh Grant film Heretic than today’s very special guest, Ryan Springer. Welcome to Occult Symbolism and Pop Culture. Ryan.

[00:02:26] Speaker B: Thank you Isaac. Great to be here.

[00:02:28] Speaker A: Yeah man, this is great. I’m, I’m, I’m super excited to have you break down because I think, I think that this film Heretic, it is a genius way of embedding a lot of gnostic and occult ideas into a movie. And you’ve got this explanation that I think people need to hear because basically you, you wrote up a piece that’s going to be published later on this year in Dialogue, a journal of Mormon studies. But I think where we should start is letting people know your background because you’re not, you know, I’m just a guy who, from the outside looking in at the occult and LDS and this and that and the other.

But you’ve got first hand experience with these topics and life experiences. So if you don’t mind, maybe take 5, 10 minutes and kind of walk the audience through who you are in your journey of spirituality and how you kind of got to the point where you are today.

[00:03:23] Speaker B: Sure man, that’s a, it’s a, it’s a funny journey.

Yeah. I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. So you’re at a Utah transplant but as everybody knows the LDS Church, the Mormon religion is pretty big here. So I was born into a Mormon family and raised and I went on a mission. I went to the west indies in the 90s and what a mission is for people that don’t know is what a 19 or 20 year old goes out for two years and proselytizes for the church and spreads the gospel and you know, spreads the good news of the restoration.

So I did that for two years, came home, went to school at the University of Utah and then went to grad school at byu.

BYU is a Mormon owned university and I loved all of these experience all this time I was you know, a faithful attending churchgoer and I, I started reading some, you know, history and studying church and I was a temple prep teacher and getting into the symbolism of the, the LDS temple and kind of had what is known is a, is a faith crisis or called a faith crisis. Just stuff started didn’t adding up and some of the historical claims of the church. I just thought Jesus doesn’t really make sense. And it was a hard thing for me because I had grown up with that being, you know, the scaffolding of my reality. And so as I became Disillusioned that that scaffolding fell apart and I, I really wandered and didn’t know what to do. I Interestingly, I picked up, you know, if I decided if the Mormon church wasn’t true, then nothing was, and kind of approached a secular philosophy. I, I got into Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. This is a pretty common archetype for a lot of Mormons, I think.

Got disillusioned, became an atheist, but was missing a spiritual component to my life. And so I started trying to get into Buddhism and studying that, and that opened my mind up to a lot of things, most importantly meditation practice.

I, that’s a big part of Buddhism, I found out, is sitting and meditating. And I wasn’t very good at stealing my monkey mind, so that was a good discipline for me to learn.

Through some other things, some ups and downs.

Became acquainted with a meditation technique called Mind Body Bridging by Stanley Block. He kind of advocates for it and started doing a little bit of that coupled with other things and, but, but was still, you know, pretty spiritually dark and didn’t have what I would call a religious belief or a faith. Was still fairly militantly atheist and would. Would tell you that I was, at a certain point along the way I had what I can only describe as a spiritual experience. And it’s, it kind of, I’ll spare you the details of all of that, but it was significant enough that I thought, okay, wait a minute, maybe this secular materialist worldview that I’ve been clinging to isn’t quite right. Maybe there is something else out there. And if there is, what is that? And so I started up this. I, I’m just kind of an obsessive dork. And I started this timeline and I started, you know, tracing world religions and philosophies, kind of trying to figure out where things came from. And along the way I got introduced to a lot of ideas and one of which was Kabbalah.

And I was like, what do you do with this? Sounds really cool, but what do you do with this? Or do I need to go become Jewish and a rabbi or something, or what do I do with it? And you know, through studying that, that got me into Western esotericism and just kind of a broad, expansive term for just about anything, you know, syncretic. I that’s. This, that’s.

That became kind of part of my life.

And interestingly enough, the more that I got into, you know, what we would call the occult or esotericism or something like that, I started noticing a Lot of correspondences. And I was like, this is, this is familiar. It’s, it’s kind of funny. I had, I had boxed up all of my Mormon books and really kind of closed the chapter on my, on that part of my life. And it was reading Aleister Crowley, of all things. I was reading the Book of the.

[00:07:49] Speaker A: Law.

[00:07:51] Speaker B: Not because I’m a Thelemite or anything like that, but I was studying Kabbalah and you can’t, as you study Western Kabbalah. I would keep bumping up against this Aleister Crowley dude. And I’m like, you know, I knew the Ozzy Osbourne song, I knew the Great Beast stuff, but not much more of that. And I was a little bit scared of him, so I was unwilling to read it. And finally I broke down and I popped open the Book of the Law and I started reading it and it was almost like this familiar voice and I thought, this sound really familiar.

And so I went and I’ve got it around here. I pulled out my.

It’s called the Pearl of Great Price. It’s a Mormon scripture.

There’s a book of Abraham in it. And I started reading some of the verses in that and reading some of the verses in the Book of Allah. And I actually read some of them out loud to my wife. And I was like, can you tell which one’s which?

And she couldn’t. They were very familiar. And like I said that weird voice in the back of my head kind of, it rang with familiarity.

So I ran down that rabbit hole a little bit. And the deeper I got, the more and more correspondences I would find. Now a lot of these, admittedly completely speculative. And I don’t know if there’s a basis to them or not, but there started to be enough things that would, you know, as I followed this strand through the rabbit hole, I thought there’s, there’s a connection here. And.

[00:09:07] Speaker A: Yeah, because Crowley, he admired Joseph Smith, right? I mean, so maybe that makes sense.

[00:09:13] Speaker B: If there’s a little similarity, like game recognizes game. That’s kind of what I thought. Now, I don’t know. So Crowley, there’s a couple of blurbs that he has in his essays where he talks about Joseph Smith being an admirable character for rising from grossest stock or something like that. I’m paraphrasing. And the really interesting one is in Moonchild, which is his novella, you know, it’s Cyril Gray, who’s kind of a, a stand in for Crowley himself, belongs to this White Lodge of magicians. And they’re Fighting a black lodge of magicians, which is sweet Twin Peaks origins.

But in the. The story of it is, is the creation of this spell through a sex magic ritual. You create this moon child or a homunculus, an emanation of. Of divine origin. That’s something more than just the magic of creation.

And to get into this state to produce the moon child, the partner, her name is Eliel in the book. And she has this vision and I might have a slide in here that quotes it, but she has this, this very distinct vision about Joseph Smith. And so there have been some articles written Massimo Yatravi, Jean I’m going to screw that name up. Lance Owens the connections are out there. So it wasn’t too spacey. But yeah, Crowley definitely was aware of Joseph. Joseph Smith.

HP Blavatsky came over when she was going through the U.S. she tried to track him down in Nauvoo.

So there’s ended up coming to Salt Lake. There’s a whole little story there. But yeah, there was enough chords. I was like, okay, I’m not completely crazy. I’m not off the right track. Other people have noticed these correspondences and so I just, you know, I started writing them down and putting them all together and it, it really has, in a weird circular way it’s, you know, I love Joseph Smith, I’ll study this stuff all day long. And you know, I have a real fondness for Mormonism. I’m not real active, but if I were to go to church on Sunday, I’d go to my local ward and so that’s kind of where I’m at.

[00:11:20] Speaker A: Interesting. So when you watch and, and let me clarify for the audience. We’re going to talk about this film Heretic today. It came out in 2024. Hugh Grant and it. We’re gonna plot spoil today. So if you haven’t seen it, highly recommend seeing it. It’s kind of a horror thriller kind of thing. Very good movie. But we’re gonna assume that the audience has heard it. And I’m gonna give you the plot spoiler warning right now. I’m gonna walk you. I’m gonna, I’m gonna give this sort of like 30 second version of what this movie is for. People who are like, I’m not gonna ever watch this movie. I don’t care. What’s it about?

Two Mormon missionaries, they go to Boulder, Colorado and they’re going door to door. They go to Mr. Reed, which is the guy played by Hugh Grant, they go to his door and he sort of lures them in Does a bunch of manipulative deception, slash initiatory rights with these two. And some of it gets really dark, some of it gets kind of scary and spooky, but he goes on this sort of journey with them where he’s trying to indoctrinate them into his world view, or it’s a deception manipulation that he’s doing to these girls for other reasons. And that’s kind of what we’re going to talk about is what he was, what Mr. Reed was talking about, what his ideas were and what was the real point of this movie.

Because it, you know, ends in total chaos, of course, as you would expect of a movie like this.

But it, it laid out a lot of interesting connections with the LDS faith, obviously, because these are LDS missionaries.

And it talks about a variety of things in the movie, such as magic underwear.

[00:13:00] Speaker B: And.

[00:13:03] Speaker A: We got a lot of Gnostic themes. But I’m like, I’m gonna let Ryan explain what’s going on with this movie. But the.

I, I read part of your.

I don’t know what you would call essay or journal entry, perhaps, whatever.

[00:13:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Article, something.

[00:13:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I read part of your article. And is it fair to say that the point you’re trying to make here is that heretic as well as LDS ceremonies like the endowment ceremony done at the temple, which, full disclosure, I’m not LDS audience. I’m not lds. I don’t, I’ve never been in the temple. I don’t know what the ceremonies are. But is it fair to say you’re comparing heretic with LDs various ceremonies or rituals and saying like, hey, there’s these common themes that we find in Western esotericism, Gnosticism, and, and those kinds of things like. That was kind of my takeaway from your, from your article.

[00:14:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that was what I really liked about the movie is it’s, it’s syncretic. It brings together all of these things. And on, on one level, you think you understand it and then you. It’s got symbolic representations and, and geometric forms and things like that that really do evoke what I think the essence of symbols are supposed to do and what characters are supposed to do is unlock hidden meaning.

And that’s one of the things that’s a, you know, very common within, you know, it’s secret societies and the occult. It’s all hidden. There are layers and layers and layers of meaning.

And the more you understand the, what the different symbols represent and what those correspondences are, then you’re able to unlock or to translate the meaning of and that’s, I think that’s the point of it, is that all of these strands, whether you’re talking about Freemason temple ceremonies or you’re talking about, you know, Oto golden dawn temple ceremonies, or you’re talking about Mormon temple ceremonies, or you’re talking about the experience of these two missionaries as they go through Mr. Reed’s house.

There’s this. There’s this progression. There’s this ritualistic component to it, and there are a lot of parallels, and we’ll go into it a little bit more, but the, the film Heretic, because as the sister missionaries progress through these series of rooms, that struck a chord with me, because in the LDS temple, that’s what you do is you. You go in and you progress through a series of rooms. And in the LDS temple, it mirrors a, an ascent journey. Well, actually a descent and then an ascent journey. And that has a lot of parallels in Gnostic literature and, you know, some of the texts that we’ll talk about.

So the inversion of, of the missionaries, you know, going in, leaving the world, coming in and descending into this abyss, and then at least one of them finding an escape, that’s the inversion of the LDS progression through these rooms where we fall from a state of grace and then we’re able to return and progress to divinity.

So the, the parallels were there, and then there are so many kind of key symbolic cues that are. That are sort of specific.

So it’s a, It’s a really cool movie that blends and draws together a lot of these different strands. And, and for me, I love it because it pulls in various aspects of philosophy and the occult and, and particularly in a, In a Mormon setting. You know, these aren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses or somebody knocking on the door. I think it’s a deliberate choice for, for these two to be sister missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

[00:16:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And with, with my conversations with you on some of the, I don’t know, dare I say, more esoteric angles of LDS history, me being an outsider, orthodox Christian, you know, everything I’m told from my world is, oh, this LDS is like a, it’s a cult. And it’s got all these sort of, you know, they’re just illuminate, confirmed type people. You know, don’t, don’t. Don’t give them any time of day. And, and I, and I really bought into that pretty hard when I moved here. And to hear your, your. And we don’t have to go through the whole history, obviously, we don’t have time. Today we’re gonna get, we’re gonna get into heretic. But to hear the perspective of Joseph Smith being. And, and correct me if I’m wrong in saying this, but my interpretation is Joseph Smith was practicing some occult things which had some real effects, kind of no different than believing Aleister Crowley was channeling the spirit Lamb using John D. Enochian rituals, say, no different than saying John D. And Edward Kelly were able to talk to these angels and stuff. Joseph Smith just used that same lineage and that same practice. And, and he had a real experience. This isn’t just some con man who necessarily came up with a control system. This is a, a guy who used some of these occult practices to make contact with something, and he believed that this was a real divine experience that he had. Is that fair?

[00:18:16] Speaker B: I think that’s, I think that that’s fair.

Like, I take a pretty heterodox perspective on it now, but yeah, and we’ll go through some of the slides and the specifics. And, you know, he definitely was not just dabbling, but, but pretty deeply involved with some, some occult rituals and practices, not only at the beginning of his life, but throughout his life in the end. And, and that’s kind of what I think it illustrates is if you, if you take someone like Aleister Crowley or if you take someone like John Dee, I mean, here it is, hundreds of years later, we’re still talking about them.

They’ve attained some sort of immortality. And if that’s the goal of the Philosopher’s Stone, then they got it.

[00:18:57] Speaker A: Oh, interesting.

[00:18:59] Speaker B: So, you know, and I don’t know, you know, I’ve got my own personal convictions and who. Nobody cares about those.

But I think it’s a valid point to say, yeah, hey, look, some. Joseph Smith was a pretty remarkable person just in, in terms of history and influence. And that’s what’s crazy to me about it, is like, I know how nutty it is. I’ve, I’ve lived it, I’ve believed it, I’ve studied it, I’ve scrutinized it, I’ve attacked it.

And I’m not the only one. I, it, it somehow it’s, you know, 200 years later, this, this religion now claims millions of adherents and it’s a real, it’s a real testament to the, the power of current, to the power of energy. Some of these things that talk about, you know, all sorts of esoteric schools and traditions talk about this concept of energy and progression and prana and spirit and light and all of that.

And it’s. It’s hard to argue with the fact that Joseph Smith certainly was up to something and he accomplished something.

And, you know, as we go through this stuff today, I. I think there’s some, you know, I’ll betray my own take on it. Certainly think he was up to something spiritual and he achieved something.

That’s. That’s pretty remarkable.

[00:20:20] Speaker A: Yeah, that’s. It’s interesting. In your, in your article, you lay out Joseph Smith’s journey as an initiate in Palmyra, an adept in Kirtland, Ohio, and then a magus in Navu. Navu. Am I saying that right?

[00:20:37] Speaker B: That’s how I say it. Anyway. It’s almost Utah. Say it. I don’t know what the Hebrew pronunciation was. Yeah, navu.

[00:20:43] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. And. And, and my interpretation of what you’re saying is that the LDS endowment ceremony, which is basically getting sealed in the temple. Right. Is another term for that, is just a.

A reenactment, a dramatization of Joseph Smith journey ascending into, you know, ascending in closer to a divine status. I don’t. I don’t really know. Like, what’s the. What’s the. What’s the sort of.

What’s the sort of trajectory of Joseph Smith? What was he trying to do? Is he trying to become God? Was he trying to just become a. I don’t know, a magic practitioner?

[00:21:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Do I. Let me. If you want to jump ahead, if you want to just dive in and start there.

So Joseph Smith. Let’s see where to start.

You know, people have heard about him, and these are some of the books that I’ve. I’ve read. And most of what I’m going to go through you can find in these books. The really important one is Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview by Michael Quinn.

You can see the titles there. I won’t go through all of them, but one of the ones that’s really interesting to me is. Is from Peter Lavender, and we were talking, you know, with Crowley. Game recognizing game. Peter Lavenda has a book about Joseph Smith and early Mormonism in the occult.

And his quote is, Mormonism in order to be understood, must be viewed through the lens of occultism and particularly the hermetic form that Joseph Smith embraced throughout his life. And especially in the last five years or so, when he incorporated Masonic and other ideas, such as differing levels of the priesthood, into the temple. It was as if he had seen something ineffable and had to surround it with a fortress of secrets, passwords, arcane rituals and silence in order to Protect it from misuse or profanation.

And I think that as we, and let’s go, we can go back and start over with heretic. But as we go through the progression of Joseph Smith’s life, yeah, I really do think that you see this evolution of, you know, a young kid who’s rebellious and dabbling in the occult and just like teenagers play Dungeons and Dragons, you know, he’s one of those kinds of people and he gets deeper and deeper into it.

And there are more and more manifestations of what you might call the magician’s will that he is defying all odds to, to come from abject poverty to rise to the level where he, you know, ran for the President of the United States. And like I said, 200 years later, we’re talking about, and there’s millions of people who believe he’s a prophet.

It’s like, it’s pretty significant. And when viewed through what Peter Lavenda is talking about here, through the lens of occultism, I think a pretty compelling argument can be made that Joseph Smith was experiencing this great work, this metaphysical journey of, of being initiated and learning skills through adept and then, and then becoming a master, a magister of the temple, which is, you know, divinity, apotheosis, becoming a God.

Their different traditions call it different things, but squint your eyes and they’re all pretty close.

[00:24:04] Speaker A: What is your take on so not. Okay, so Gnosticism, right?

That is an occult, I don’t know, an occult based belief system, religion, whatever you want to call it. And the simple version, like my simple brain interprets all school of thought of Gnosticism as being this idea that we are trapped in a prison planet by this evil God who’s not a real God, he’s a false God. And he created this, this, this existence, this realm. And he did it deceptively to try to force us to worship him with the fear of going to hell and all these things. And that’s why religion is all wrong. And Gnosticism is the true faith that once you become awakened or enlightened, you can finally escape this prison planet and escape reincarnation and all these kinds of things.

Is that, is that baked into. I mean, I mean, I want to, I want to transition into heretic, but one, one sort of segue into heretic. Is this idea of Gnosticism, is that baked anywhere into the LDS faith or is that way off base?

[00:25:18] Speaker B: Well, it’s not explicitly baked into the faith, no.

But I do think that when you look at the influences that Joseph Smith was taking on Gnosticism very much influenced the traditions that developed into kind of the Renaissance magic and the grimoires and those types of things that became then the foundation for the cunning folk practices that Joseph Smith was definitely engaged in. So again, it’s not like Joseph Smith was reading, you know, Gnostic texts that hadn’t been published or discovered or anything like that.

But there are enough themes within this. And Gnosticism, I think you do a pretty good job of describing it, and it’s incredibly complex field. And so you’re kind of lumping things into Gnosticism.

You’re, you’re combining a lot of opposites and a lot of things that quite frankly, we, we still don’t completely understand because we’re reconstructing text and, and, you know, putting together history. But to the extent that we can understand it, yes, the, the, the, the Gnostic sect was, apart from what became orthodox Christianity, lowercase O, you know, as well as uppercase oh, I guess.

But there are a lot then we, things like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi Library, other bits and pieces and fragments from history. People have tried to kind of reconstruct what the Gnostics were, and there’s no one single definition for them. There’s the Sethian and the Valentinian and there’s, you know, just like anything else, if you examined under a microscope deep enough, the differences start to align. But when you come out a little bit more, that’s basically what it is, is this idea that there you could have this mystical experience.

And it’s more than just that we are trapped in this prison world, but that there is a way out. And, and that way out is through gnosis, through knowledge, through having these divine experiences, through prayer, through meditation, through ritual, and through divine communion that we, we can break free and that we can at least experience an afterlife. And if it’s as simple as, you know, going to heaven versus going to hell, or if it’s, if it’s progressing through, you know, these stages or kingdoms or palaces, it really depends on which, which flavor you’re drinking from.

[00:27:45] Speaker A: Oh, okay. All right. That makes sense. That’s actually a great way of describing it. That, that makes way more sense than, you know, I, I just, all I ever picture is people killing themselves so that they can return their light back to the moon. And I’m like, well, this is getting kind of wild.

[00:28:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And, and that’s one of the, the things that Gnosticism has going against it is most of what was commonly accepted and understood was what was preserved by its critics and its detractors and people that were arguing for more orthodoxy. So it’s just the antagonistic polemics that the Gnostics are bad, a lot of their writings, and because they were persecuted, they were murdered, all their books were burned. Their stuff is harder to get to. And again, we’ve had discoveries that have brought some of these texts into light and kind of help.

You know, it makes the, the picture of, of the early Christian era, I think, really fascinating and interesting. You know, whether you believe it or not, it, it does inform a lot of what was going on in the time.

[00:28:49] Speaker A: Okay, now how does this, how do we, how do we move into Heretic?

Where do you want to start with? Because like, you’re, you’re kind of drawing the comparison of Gnosticism with the film Heretic, right?

[00:29:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that one’s pretty clear.

[00:29:08] Speaker A: Should we start with that as being the sort of main theme? And then as we see how much time we’ve got left, we can kind of pick apart some of the individual little ideas?

[00:29:16] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.

So there’s a couple of texts in Gnosticism that are important, I think, to the analysis of Heretic. One is Pistis Sophia. And Pistis Sophia is. It’s kind of a scripture that, that talks about. Pistis means faith, Sophia means wisdom. And she’s a feminine character. And she descends, she gets through a series of unfortunate events. She falls from the heavens and the pleroma, and she has to come down into this lousy world and, and find her way back again. And the way she does that is through unification with Christ and actually realizing her divine feminine. I’m completely oversimplifying it, but, but you have this, this feminine journey, who, who finds salvation to escape.

And then the other books are the books of Jew. And I think these are fascinating. These are texts that were picked up by a Scottish philosopher, Scottish explorer named James Bruce.

And so on the same expedition, this is the guy who goes and pulls the Book of Enoch out of Ethiopian obscurity. It’s the only reason we have the Book of Enoch today.

But he also gets these books of Jew. And the books. This is a little bit about James Bruce. We’ll scroll through it. But the books of Jew over here on the right, it has maps and it has rituals. And what, what, what it does is it tells you how to progress through these heavens and through these, these realms of dimensions, through divine names, through divine tokens, through the, you know, through the exchange of words and signals, you’re able to progress through these geographic spaces or rooms.

[00:31:04] Speaker A: Is that, is that kind of like the, the scrying, the aethers, the 38 years that John D. Is that, or is that totally different? I don’t.

[00:31:12] Speaker B: It’s pretty different. But I mean it. I don’t have experience with it. It might be the same, but it’s the same concept. So the, the John D. Scrying of the ethers is a ritual that’s done in Enochian to go through these 30 levels or spheres, and some of them are up and some of them are down. So I do think that there is a, at least a loose correspondence to this concept of, of dimensional transportation. And, and the books of Jew map it out and they, they prescribe rituals. And so in Impista Sophia, there’s a, an underlying philosophy of this descent and ascent.

You see parallels from this. Not only the, the, you know, the palaces in the books of Jew, but you see this in, in Hecalat and Merkaba mysticism, which were forms of Judaic mysticism that were palaces and chariots that you would be moving, you would be having an experience where you, you, you traveled through different spheres, dimensions, rooms, whatever you want to call them.

That’s similar to what you see in, in Egyptian cosmology. That’s why the pyramids have, you know, why death rituals are so important to.

[00:32:24] Speaker A: The Egyptians kind of practice for the afterlife.

[00:32:28] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly.

[00:32:30] Speaker A: Father, Father Seraphim rose in Orthodoxy. He also, he got in trouble because he advocated for this belief in toll houses after you die, where you.

[00:32:37] Speaker B: Oh, totally.

[00:32:38] Speaker A: Through different things. Sounds similar, right?

[00:32:40] Speaker B: Yeah, totally.

[00:32:42] Speaker A: Go ahead. Sorry, I don’t mean to. I didn’t mean to.

[00:32:43] Speaker B: No, that’s right. I remember you talking about that a while ago. And I went. And I was like, oh, that’s. That’s the toll house concept is, Is very much the same idea. Yeah.

So anyway, in, in Gnosticism, this is the bad guy. Well, he’s, you know, you guys have little sympathy for the devil, but the demiurge is, is one of these deities. And that’s one thing to understand about Gnosticism. A lot of esotericism is that this is a poly. Theistic. There’s not just a God and a devil with a, you know, a right and a wrong. It’s. It’s complicated. And there are different entities and different deities.

One of those is Yalda, both or the demiurge. And what happens is again, through a series of unfortunate events, y’ all, the both is created. And he’s pissed off because things didn’t work out the way he wanted to. And so he manufactures this artificial world and says, I’ll become the God and I’ll just create this realm and I’ll, I’ll be in control and I’ll control everything.

And that way, you know, I, I don’t have to worry about what’s going on in all of the other spheres and dimensions and palaces of the cosmos. I’ve just, I’m just confined to this, this one little sphere, this fake world that I’ve made and I’ll, you know, take droplets of souls and put them in there and let them recycle through, through journeys and, and within certain strands of Gnosticism, this, this idea is that Jesus Christ or Christ who Jesus of the New Testament embodies and, or is depending on how you read this stuff, that, that through this redeemer, through this unification with Christ and through accepting that, that, that then allows for the, to learn the lessons, to unlock the mysteries that are needed to progress not only out of this Malkuthian sphere of the demiurge’s creation, but the, you know, to progress through the different palaces of, of the heavens, of, through the cosmos and, and eternally progress.

[00:34:44] Speaker A: So are you saying that, that the idea, and I, I, I’m with you, that we’re probably grossly oversimplifying a million things because I actually bought these great courses as a course on Gnosticism and it’s like 25 hours and I’m like, bro, what are we talking about? And are you saying that there’s a, there’s a interpretation of Gnosticism where Christ descends down to our realm of Malkuth and liberates Sophia who is down here and sort of provides a mapping of how Sophia and all of us can follow Christ to ascend back out of the prison planet.

[00:35:27] Speaker B: Is that kind of sort of close? Pistis Sophia. So it’s the resurrected Christ, he’s already gone to the other side and it’s Pistis Sophia. He does. It’s, I’d have to get it in order, you know, who was ascending and who was descending. But this was an ascended Christ, Savior Redeemer, who ends up being the source of life. And there’s Barbelo and some other characters, but yes, definitely Christ is the way out of the demiurges.

False.

[00:35:58] Speaker A: So. Oh, so maybe, maybe is that where the beef came in? Because I remember, I know you’re saying how I think it was like Iapetus was the name of the guy that the modern day Christian church, they had him doing disinformation campaign against the Gnostics to like shut that movement down. Because there was a competing philosophy on who Christ was and what the purpose of Christ being here was. And it sounds to me like there’s. The Gnostics also believe in the divinity of Christ, but their interpretation was. Yeah, and Christ is, is of leading us out of the prison planet, whereas the Christians are like, quit it with all this prison planet nonsense.

Is that kind of a.

Yeah, I think that’s fair.

[00:36:40] Speaker B: Again, taking grace in the fact that we’re covering some huge topics. But yeah, I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. And you can certainly find literature to support it. You can find, you know, you can find interpretations that will twist it and turn it. But, but definitely Christ as a redemptive figure that can be. State that. That can be found within Gnosticism.

[00:37:00] Speaker A: Oh, sure. Okay. All right, go ahead. Sorry.

[00:37:02] Speaker B: No, no, that’s good.

So anyway, that, that kind of sets up the, the idea for my idea on, or sets up the concepts behind my ideas about Heretic that, you know, from these, from this, these Gnostic scripts and teachings we get this metaphor of the, the divine feminine having this journey where they have to descend into darkness, but then they find redemption, they find their way out.

That there are dimensions, that there are spatial dimensions. Sacred geometry comes from this concept that through, through experiences, through ritual, through going through things, there is a dimensional change. And you know, whether it’s a physical dimension or a spiritual or psychological dimension, you know, that’s up to you. But those concepts are certainly at play in Heretic.

The other one, the other character that features in Pistis Sophia and elsewhere in Greek mythology and esoteric traditions is Hecate. And this is the, the triune headed goddess of magic. And she’s, she’s considered a malevolent entity in Pistis Sophia, but just in the sense that she’s adversarial and she presents challenges, but they’re usually challenges designed to make you grow and progress. And as hard as that might be, and why that might keep slamming back down into the artificial world and, and, and inhibit your ascension, she, she certainly plays a role.

She features in, in other esoteric traditions. She’s in the Chaldean oracles and there’s whole, whole sects and magical practices devoted to her.

And she shows up in the movie and that’s where I was like, okay, there’s something to this because there’s a scene in the movie at the beginning. So just to jump in, it starts off with these missionaries sitting on a bench with a condom ad. And they’re talking about pornographic movies. And you have this contrast of the sacred and the profane. You have these virginal Sister missionaries talking about dirty sex and, and setting up that sacred and profane contrast at the outset is very, I think that’s important. And you see them walking their bikes up the stairs and walking their bikes down the stairs again, symbolic of this.

And they’ve done it before. It’s a routine to them. They’re going up and they’re going down and they depart from that path. And they go to an intersection, a literal crossroads. And at the intersection they meet these three sorority sisters.

And the three sorority sisters come up to Sister the, the missionaries and ask for a picture.

And they say to Sister Paxton, is it true?

And she’s all delighted. She says, she, she approaches the intersection with complete Agape Christian charity. She says, I love these girls. She gets to the intersection and they ask her if it’s true. And she says, is what true? Do you wear magic underwear? And then the yanker skirt down, revealing magic underwear, what the Mormons, the, the LDS refer to as the garment which is sacred underwear. It’s, it’s underwear that you are given in the temple after you’ve been initiated. And you’re supposed to wear it every day, your whole life. And it, it, I mean, it’s weird, right? Who we get made fun of for it all the time. And that’s what is encountered by Sister Paxton.

But if you look at those three sorority sisters as Hecate, it, it’s a revelatory act. It’s revealing what is magic underwear. And it begins this process of introspection for Sister Paxton, who’s kind of the faith character. She’s on the lesson. You know, Sister Barnes probably has done this before and has learned a thing or two, but that’s kind of where dives into heretic, if that makes sense.

[00:40:51] Speaker A: That’s fascinating because I look, I am, I’m a self admitted ignoramus. And Shakespeare.

[00:41:00] Speaker B: Yep, there you go.

[00:41:01] Speaker A: Macbeth, which I’ve never seen. I, I tried to watch the movie version with Denzel Washington. I was like, oh, I don’t even know what they’re saying because they’re using that sort of language. Right.

[00:41:10] Speaker B: And weird sisters.

[00:41:12] Speaker A: Yeah, that’s. So the three sisters, Hecate appears in the story Shakespeare’s Macbeth. And the only reason I know that or even think about it is because of Jane Shelby Downard who brings it up in king kill 33, which I’m gonna do a whole show about king kill 33, because it’s, it’s super interesting. And so he, he lays out this, this idea that you’ve got the Three Sisters and then along the, the Hornada del Muerte, the journey of death.

And this is all like JFK assassination crypto, cryptocracies talk, that he basically connects the Three Sisters mountain range. And then when I interviewed Dr. Jacques Valet, he made reference to this important area, which is actually the Three Sisters Buttes, that they had this experience with UFOs. Anyway, it’s just interesting. This keeps coming up in my little journey the last couple months, this, this Hecate ordeal. So that’s, that is interesting because you said Hakate is this sort of adversary at the crossroads. And that’s, that’s very much because in the movie Heretic, it’s, it. It almost feels out of place the way, the way they get harassed by these three girls just kind of out of nowhere. It’s not like, it’s not like that’s been their, their journey. They don’t set it up as this long, like, oh, these, these two Mormon missionaries are in Colorado and they’re, they’re getting harassed here and they’re getting harassed there. You didn’t get that at all. Just out of nowhere, these three, these three adversarial type archetypes here show up and they, they harass them for the, the magic underwear, which comes up later in the movie as well. And it becomes a sort of redemptive thing in a way.

[00:42:48] Speaker B: It’s the code word.

[00:42:50] Speaker A: Yeah, it’s the code word. So, okay, so. So interesting layout there with Hakate. What’s the.

Where do you want to go next? You want to go with more of the how Mr. Reed initiates these two into his worldview, which you presume has some gnostic flair to it.

[00:43:07] Speaker B: Yeah, so I don’t have good slides for this, but this is. So the, the missionaries go out. It starts out, it’s a nice sunny day. By the time they show up to Mr. Reed’s house, the clouds are rolling in, it’s starting to storm. There’s an interesting exchange where Sister Barnes puts a key in a lock. Locks it. Puts a key in her pocket because the transmission of keys and locks is a big deal. Then they go up to his house and they approach the doorway and the, the. He mentions that he’s got a wife, but she’s absent. So there’s this, this notion of a. There. There’s an acknowledgement of a. Of a feminine counterpart, but she’s not present. There’s there’s clues. She’s got a knitting basket on and he says that she’s baking a of piece pie. So we have this, this acknowledgment of this divine feminine. But she’s out there, she’s not seen.

The girls, the sister missionaries go through an arched doorway, enter into a rectangular framed doorway into the living room space.

And so that’s the first geographic transformation. They’re leaving from the world into this confined space that has the appearance of home.

But hide something else on the, on the shelf there’s a, there’s a statue of one bird flying, one bird flying up, one bird flying down. And in between them is a statue of an owl, which is the symbol of Minerva, which is wisdom, which is Sophia, which is wisdom. So there’s a couple of cues in that scene as well. And then the, the hexagon window on the wall with the two hexagon end tables beside the table.

Yeah, there you go.

[00:44:50] Speaker A: Yeah. I’ve got some of these images that I’m throwing up on the screen for people watching the video version. That’s, that’s the hexagon window with the butterfly.

[00:44:58] Speaker B: Yeah. And so you’ve got this, you’ve got this transition into dimensional space marked by the hexagon. And if we, you know, the hexagon, the six sided square that becomes a cube, that becomes symbolic, call it for Saturn. And that opens up a whole host of, of, you know, occult topics. But you definitely see that in the right at the very beginning in Heretic.

Then the deception, the deception comes across. He, you know, they find out that there’s a, there’s no blueberry pie being baked, it’s simply a candle. Oddly enough, as the, the missionaries enter the room, he tells them, oh, I hope you don’t mind, my whole house is encased in metal, which is, you know, a little bit odd. And they, you know, they don’t think anything of it, but this concept of you’ve got this outer world, but now you’ve got this metallic enclosed lead space these girls are confined in. Again, that’s a Saturnian influence. There’s two clocks in the living room. Saturn is Kronos, the measurement of time.

[00:46:03] Speaker A: Oh, there’s two, there’s two clocks inside of his living room.

[00:46:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. If you, if you’re watching on the mantle. And then there’s like a grandfather clock.

[00:46:11] Speaker A: Fascinating.

[00:46:12] Speaker B: Okay, so, and then they, and then he invites them deeper into his lair. That goes into the, the chapel. They pass all these scriptural books. And the chapel scene is that was the One that totally got me because it’s. Yeah, there you go. It’s this weird distorted shape. And at the top of the doors, you’ve got what would be the arch to a hexagon, but then it expands into this again, this space. And then you can see at this. I call it the chapel, but at the, at the head of the. What would be the chapel? The altar. So this is what would be the apps in a church.

There are scenes in it where he’s, where, when Mr. Reed stands at the center of his altar, it really appears as though as he’s standing in the center of a cube. And again, these girls have entered the transformative space. This veil that’s represented by the windows, the hexagon window that the butterfly, another symbol of Sophia is, is batting against, can’t get through that veil. The butterfly actually flitters up to the single light bulb. And Sister Barnes looks up and kind of appreciates it. But these, these girls have passed through a veil. These girls have, have entered into a realm that is distorted but still has a geometry. And, and the geometry of Mr. Reed being at the center is, is indicative of control.

[00:47:32] Speaker A: Interesting.

[00:47:33] Speaker B: And there’s the demiurge. You’ve got, you know, this, this fake world creator that’s manipulating the environment to steer you where he wants you.

[00:47:43] Speaker A: So if we, if we move past the, the sort of journey of Joseph Smith, but talk about the endowment ceremony in the LDS Church, are you, you were saying that when Mr. Reed, he. So, so where we’re at in the story here, the, the two missionaries, they go to his house and he. And they realize sort of something’s a little off, something’s a little different. He takes them into this chapel room and they’re like, hey, can we get out of here? And he’s like, oh, sure, you can get out of here. You got to go through the back door. You guys choose one of these two doors. So they’re given this sort of choice. And then they go, they end up going downstairs underground. Right. And they go into another. It’s. It’s a hexagon shaped room underground, another Saturnian type room.

How does this compare and contrast to the LDS endowment ceremony, which is the LDS endowment ceremony limited to strictly the. Is that the same thing when people say they’re sealed in the temple or they’re getting married in the temple? Is that the same exact thing or are there multiple endowments?

[00:48:49] Speaker B: No, it’s pretty close.

Let me jump up here and I can kind of explain that. So the temple is a number of Ordinances are performed in the temple. The temple is something that was instituted by Joseph Smith originally. Very early on, he started talking about building temples. He built a temple in Kirtland, Ohio, that has some interesting geography and some interesting architectural aspects to it, but it wasn’t really used the same way the temples are now. It was more of kind of a meeting house.

When he progresses to the Nauvoo stage, he builds a second temple or at least begins a second temple. And this is where the ordinance actually begins. And it’s. There is no temple built. So they did it on top of. He had a. A store that he ran. And on top of the store was kind of a meeting room. And they would set up curtains and they would progress from. And then these curtains would make divisions or dividers and they would progress from one curtained room to the next and enact these rituals and, and hand off tokens. And what it really is, it’s a progression of rooms and different rooms have different ordinances.

So a lot of people have heard of baptisms for the dead, perhaps associated with Mormons. And that’s a. Something that Mormons do is they. They have baptismal fonts and for people that died before they could receive the message of Jesus Christ, they can be baptized by proxy. Someone standing in their stead. They. Because that ordinance is important. It’s not a meaningless, you know, it’s a. It has to be done. It’s a necessary ritual. And so if you can’t do it yourself, it can be done vicariously or it can be done by proxy. So baptisms for the dead are done in temples.

But that the, the. The ordinances are.

You’re like you said, the endowment, that’s one ordinance and that begin. And then the ceiling. The ceiling is kind of the high pinnacle. That’s where families can be together forever. Is that as. As above? So below what God. What is written in the books of heaven is written down here. And that if you have a family relationship here, that. That family relationship can continue beyond through the execution of certain seals. A sealing power. Keys of the priesthood seal these families together. Their souls are sealed together eternally, which is just like what the pharaohs used to do.

The sinecure of Amun is you would develop these chains of your family and that would lead to your exaltation. The more people, the more posterity, the more followers, whatever you want to call it, that would exalt you even further in the next realm.

So the, the endowment is actually a. It’s. It’s like a mystery school Almost like you’ve talked about the Masonic temples and skull and bones and this idea that you die and come back and you learn great new light and truth as you come out the other side.

The temple has an initiatory room. So that’s the first step is the initiation or washings and anointing. Anointings. You’re being Claire. Cleaned, purified, ritualistically.

Once you’ve, once you’ve been washed and cleaned, you put on the white garment that’s the magic underwear. It’s a, it’s a, you know, that’s what it is. It’s a holy garment that you wear because you’ve been cleaned and washed before God and you wear it as, and there’s tokens, you know, symbols I’ll talk about a little bit.

But you wear this garment and then you put on temple clothes, temple regalia, and you enter into what’s the, called the Creation Room. And in the Creation Room you’re basically imagining or reenacting what things were like before we came down here. In LDS theology, there’s this notion of a pre existence that we lived as spirits before we came down here.

And we came down here as a probationary estate. If we do things right, then we can get back and live happily ever after.

But. So that’s what the Creation Room embodies is. Oh, we’re here with God, figuring everything out as God is making the world and it’s goes through the seven days of, of creation.

And then you would move into the next room, which is the garden room, and it’s representative of Adam and Eve. And you know, you’re in the garden having this weight awakening experience in this new world and you get confronted by temptation. The, the devil shows up and tempts Adam and Eve and, and they, you know, as the story goes, they fall and they’re expelled from the garden room and then they go into the world room, which is again, it’s a geographic room. And nowadays you sit in there and they watch a movie, they play a movie and you don’t, you stand up and sit down. But there’s not really the progression as much. But in the original days when Joseph Smith instituted it, you had the curtains and then the Nauvoo Temple, you were actually progressing from room to room. And that’s what you see in Heretic is these girls progress from room to room. Just as in the Mormon Temple, you progress from the Garden Room to the world Room to eventually you get to the point of the veil and then if you give the right passwords and the right tokens in exchange, and you show that you know what you’re doing, then you can go through the veil into the presence of God. That’s the celestial room.

And then. And that’s called the endowment, because you go through and you make covenants. And, you know, you say, I promise to do this if you’ll promise to this. And you exchange covenants in the temple with God, and then God endows you with certain blessings and says, okay, I’ll watch you. If you stay true to these covenants and wear your garments on the outside and, you know, be an upstanding. Endure to the end.

You’ll get to heaven, basically. And so you wear those garments out into the real world, but you’re. It’s a reminder that you have made sacred covenants and that you are endowed with power from on high. That’s what the endowment is, is you’re being. Giving something from God in exchange for making covenants and promises to. To him.

[00:54:45] Speaker A: Is that bail. Is that the. Because I’ve seen a video, an undercover video on YouTube, of someone who claims they’re going through the temple ceremony and they go up to a curtain and a hand pops out and they. They shake the hand and get like, a secret name. Is that the veil? Do they literally, like, then walk through this curtain and now you’re in this new, let’s see, celestial room? Is that how it works?

[00:55:06] Speaker B: Okay, that’s exactly how it works.

[00:55:09] Speaker A: Secret stuff or like, are you allowed to talk about. About this?

[00:55:11] Speaker B: Well, I mean, I won’t.

A lot of it’s. It’s sacred and people take it seriously. It’s on the Internet if people really want to find out about it.

[00:55:20] Speaker A: Okay.

[00:55:21] Speaker B: But yeah, that’s what, that’s what you’re doing as you go, as you progress through the rooms, you get taught a little bit of a lesson or a morality tale based on the life of Christ and Peter, James and John and Adam and Eve.

[00:55:32] Speaker A: And this is public knowledge. Like, this isn’t because you can find it on the Internet. And, And I watch a YouTube video.

[00:55:38] Speaker B: It’s. It’s. It’s not supposed to be. And again, this is. We were talking about the sacred and the profane.

The. The belief is that what happens in the temple is so sacred that literally God can dwell there that. That you don’t profane it by bringing it out into the world. It’s. So that’s. You’ll hear that distinction with Mormons sometimes is. It’s not secret, but it’s sacred.

[00:55:59] Speaker A: Okay.

[00:55:59] Speaker B: It’s a subtle distinction. And, but it’s just like any, you know, secret society like the Freemasons or the oto. Everybody has their handshakes, but that’s what you do is you, you go through the room, you get a lesson. You say, okay, I understand this lesson. I’m willing to make a deal with you, make a covenant with God, and in exchange for that, you’ll give me a token or a sign that I can then use to get through the next life, to get through the journey, to get to where I want to go. And so you memorize lines, you memorize names, you learn, you know, secret sacred tokens which are, you know, hand gestures and exchanges of, you know, some kind of a symbolic exchange with somebody else to show that you have been initiated, that you have made the covenants, that you are willing to uphold those.

It’s kind of like that’s where the, the story of the Freemason handshakes came from, is that you, you have these Masonic guilds, people who were actually trained stone masons. And in order to ensure the, the quality of the guild, you would be able to go and say, hey, I can press this hand into your hand in a certain way, and you know that you’ll get a certain quality of stonecraft from me. It’s a similar idea that you’re learning covenants, you’re learning promises, you’re making covenants, and then you’re exchanging these tokens. But that very. Is literally what happens is there’s a veil on one side of the room. There’s a, what’s called the temple worker and officiant who is on the other side of the room.

And you go up to the veil and if you’ve remembered the passwords and can explain what you’re doing and exchange the tokens, then you are allowed to pass through that veil into the divine presence. And that’s not dissimilar to, you know, Solomon’s Temple. What we understand about its rights, certainly the Egyptian rights, this, this passing through the veil into the, the holy of Holies or the realm of God, the celestial room and the Holy of Holies. And Mormons or temples are different.

[00:57:51] Speaker A: Now you, you compare the endowment ceremony of LDS to. You call it sort of the, the. I think you use the term Black Lodge in your article.

The heretic has a sort of anti. Endowment ceremony.

How does, how does, how does that work? Is it the invert? An exact inversion of what you would find in an LDS endowment ceremony. Is that why you said that?

[00:58:12] Speaker B: Boy, it’s a Pretty. I mean, not a direct word for word inversion, but you have them progress. The. The sister missionaries progress to this chapel, to this educational room where. Where Mr. Reed tells them how smart he is and talks all about Monopoly and. And, you know, give some valid critiques of religion and Mormonism in particular.

And what’s so cool is like, the cinematography of the shot keeps going back and forth and the girls enter the room. I keep calling them girls. The young women, the. The sister missionaries enter the room and eventually there’s a black veil behind them. It’s a. Or the. The script. The screenplace calls it a red veil, but it looks black to me, as opposed to the white veil that you see in. In. In the Mormon Temple ceremony. And they literally have to pass through that veil to get, you know, to. To the next phase of their journey.

And so, you know, the. The descent is. Instead of going. Instead of, you know, falling out of the Garden of Eden and then going through the terrestrial world experience and eventually being able to come back to the celestial kingdom, the missionaries in this case leave what is, you know, at least a decent sunshiny world, despite the persecutions of Hecate. And they enter into this nightmarish abyss where it gets worse and worse and worse and worse, until finally at the end when Sister Pax and has this transcendent moment at the expense of Sister Barnes’s sacrifice, where she figures out how to get out of the wheel, she gets out of the. The loop of cr. Of crawling, you know, through the. The.

The. The repetition mirror of the rooms and. And finds an escape back to the outside world.

[00:59:55] Speaker A: Yeah, there. There was one during that portion of the movie. She.

After she kind of goes through this. These various doors. Doors and stuff, she walks by a.

An image of the Dante’s Inferno, Right. Which. Which I think is similar to this idea of deception and then the. The doors and the chambers that she kind of walks through.

[01:00:17] Speaker B: You.

[01:00:18] Speaker A: You rightfully. So point out a connection to Aleister Crowley with that star of Babylon on there. Right, right.

You think that’s related to the divine feminine? Perhaps Another reference to that, maybe.

[01:00:31] Speaker B: You know, perhaps that scene that walking through. I’ve looked at that a few times and I. Yeah, I mean, there are so many symbols in that scene that it’s really tough to decode and you could kind of Rorschach those.

But certainly the. The. The mystical components of Babylon and what she represents as part of the archetypal feminine.

Yeah, let’s see. There you’ve got.

Which is a transcendent symbol there’s Wait, what do you.

[01:01:02] Speaker A: So I just. I just pulled up a different image of this is because she goes through a series of doors at the end. And these are like what you’re comparing to the ideas of going through different rooms in the endowment ceremony. And one of these doors has I. I believe to be an inverted pentagram. But it all flashes very fast.

[01:01:15] Speaker B: Right.

[01:01:16] Speaker A: And is you seeing on here.

[01:01:18] Speaker B: Well, this. That little symbol kind of down in the lower right hand corner. Corner of the door.

[01:01:23] Speaker A: Huh.

[01:01:25] Speaker B: There’s a. I’ve go.

I’ve got a book it there. There’s a.

Hang on, let me grab something.

[01:01:32] Speaker A: Oh, okay. I’ll kind of chat.

[01:01:34] Speaker B: There’s a. So if you look on like the Abrasax shield.

[01:01:41] Speaker A: Have I been saying that name wrong? I call it Abraxas. So I’ve been saying that wrong this whole time?

[01:01:45] Speaker B: No. Well, that does. It depends.

I think it’s. I think it’s. I think it’s Abra Sachs, but a lot of people say Abraxas.

[01:01:53] Speaker A: Okay. Okay.

[01:01:54] Speaker B: Gets pretty conflated.

[01:01:56] Speaker A: Okay.

[01:01:58] Speaker B: But yeah, this. And. And that’s this Eao chance that or that is. It’s a.

There’s a core thing when you speak and there are. That. This.

Not to detract too much, but the vocalizations of Goetia and saying things out loud so that gods can hear you having to vocalize and use the timber of your voice to get through. That’s part of a lot of these esoteric rituals that. That the Sephir Yatsira teaches that creation was saying into being that there are sounds that will unlock certain doors.

The sounds are key. And so I don’t know. There’s. There’s.

[01:02:40] Speaker A: You think maybe that has something to do with these doors that have these images on it is. Maybe it’s. You’re supposed to, I don’t know, verbalize something to unlock the door. Symbolically.

[01:02:51] Speaker B: It could be. And I thought about. Because when the. When the missionaries at the beginning are talking about when they’re going up and down the stairs, one of the things they talk about is they’re pretty singing voices, you know, it’s not a big component, I think of the story, but I thought that that was one of the kind of little things I thought. I wonder if that was intentional.

[01:03:11] Speaker A: Wow. Interesting. Okay, so I’m looking at the time. We’re already out of time, but could you maybe take a couple minutes and is there any other big points in the film Heretic that you want to draw attention to that we haven’t talked about yet. I mean, I know there’s your, your article goes through so many different ideas about it, but is there anything that you want to kind of also bring out that we haven’t covered?

[01:03:32] Speaker B: The, the one thing that I think is significant, and if there’s any Mormons listening to this, when, when you get to that black veil and the Saturnian concepts of the being the black sun, that’s, that’s a very interesting inversion of what the passwords and the tokens represent and are spoken at the veil in the Mormon Temple ceremony. So the article goes much deeper into some of the Saturnian aspects and, and how that relates to alchemy and the soul Negrito.

But I think those are some, some very interesting symbolic and thematic subjects that get brought up in the movie.

[01:04:11] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I think the, this attorney and idea and the Demiurge is Gnosticism is all sort of baked into that. And to be full disclosure for the listeners, I actually, I talked to Ryan about doing this show and as life would prove to me too busy, I, I wanted to get my, my interpretation of what I saw in the film Heretic out so that Ryan could review it and kind of know if there was, I don’t know, maybe something he could riff on or whatever, you know, however you want to look at that. And I didn’t get it out in time. And it’s fascinating because what you got here today is a. Two completely unique takes on this movie. And we both found, as Ryan will hear, when I do release my show, which is going to be chronologically, people listening to this right now, my version is out already.

Ryan’s is going to show up the week later. So Ryan, he hasn’t caught mine yet. But what, what he’ll hear is a lot of similar themes of the, the Saturnian gnostic elements of this movie. But I think it’s fascinating that you can, you can pull in a lot of these, these interesting, I would call it esoteric LDS ideas is what I would say. So, yeah, fascinating stuff. Ryan. Thanks for spending your time to go through it and I really appreciate you. Now, usually when I’ve got guests on their, their plug and stuff, right, like they got books or podcasts or whatever, do you have any calls to action for the audience? Any ideas of where you want them to go from here?

[01:05:40] Speaker B: Oh, no, my, my only thing would be, yeah, donate. Donate to the Humane Society, go take care of animals. Span of your pets.

[01:05:47] Speaker A: I love that. Yes. Excellent. You know, I met Bob Barker once back in the day talking about spaying and neutering pets. So anyway, yeah, thanks again, Ryan. Appreciate you.

Well, there you go. Now you know all the secrets, all the esoteric secrets to lds, Mormon Church, and we’re gonna actually dive into this topic a little bit more this year. I’ve got a couple other guests that I’m gonna try to get on here to break down some of these ideas.

And as I mentioned before in the show notes, I’m going to put links to the video version of the show if you want to check that out. I’ll also throw a link to the heretic full film analysis that I conducted, which was only on the supporter feeds. It’s the May supporter feed bonus show. And we went deep into the film and unpacked all the Saturnian elements and all of these gnostic sort of points of view. So you can check that out. If you want to support the show, go at free early access. Hundreds of bonus episodes. My goodness, why wouldn’t you want to do it? So lots of options for you. Till next time, stay positive.