The Anatomy of the Soul: Where Science Meets Spirituality

0:50

Welcome to Haunted History Chronicles, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of the past, one ghostly tale at a time.

I'm your host, Michelle, and I'm thrilled to be your guide on this Erie journey through the pages of history.

1:06

Picture this, a realm where the supernatural intertwines with the annals of time, where the echoes of the past reverberate through haunted corridors and forgotten landscapes.

That's the realm we invite you to explore with us.

Each episode will unearth stories, long buried secrets, dark folklore, tales of the macabre, and discuss parapsychology topics from ancient legends to more recent enigmas.

1:36

We're delving deep into locations and accounts all around the globe, with guests joining me along the way.

But this podcast is also about building a community of curious minds like you.

Join the podcast on social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to share your own ghostly encounters, theories, and historical curiosities.

2:00

Feel free to share with friends and family.

The links are conveniently placed in the description for easy access.

So whether you're a history buff with a taste for the supernatural or a paranormal enthusiast with a thirst for knowledge, Haunted History Chronicles is your passport to the other side.

2:20

Get ready for a ride through the corridors of time where history and the supernatural converge.

Because every ghost has a story, and every story has a history.

And now let's introduce today's podcast or guest welcome seekers of the strange and the mysterious.

2:46

I'm your guide, Michelle.

And today we're embarking on a journey that will venture into the hidden corners of the past to uncover the secrets that have shaped our world, that will take us deep into the very essence of what it means to be human, into the very heart of a mystery that has perplexed the greatest minds for over 1000 years.

3:09

Tonight we're stepping into the smoke filled air of ancient graveyards, anatomy theatres, and the shadowy world of heretics to explore one of the most intriguing and controversial topics in history, the soul.

3:26

What was it, where did it reside in the human body, and how did it leave us at the moment of death?

These questions and the fierce debates they sparked have shaped the spiritual and intellectual landscape of Western civilization.

3:43

Joining us for this profound exploration is Richard Sugg, a distinguished author whose work has brought the macabre and the mystical to the forefront of historical inquiry.

Richard's book, The Smoke of the Soul, takes us on a journey through time, from the blood stained fields of medieval Europe to the rise of modern consciousness and the uncharted territories of life after death.

4:11

In today's episode, we'll delve into the souls ancient secrets, the fierce debates over its nature, the bizarre rituals and beliefs surrounding its existence, and the grim fate of those who dared to question its sanctity.

4:28

We'll travel with Richard through the darkened halls of history where the soul was not just a concept, but the very battleground of faith and reason.

Was there truly an organ of the soul hidden within the brain?

Did women possess souls at all?

4:46

And what became of the soul when the body met its end?

These questions, which haunted the minds of philosophers, theologians, and heretics alike, will guide our journey.

As we peel back the layers of this ancient enigma.

5:04

Prepare to step into a world where the soul was both the most vital and the most mysterious aspect of human existence were to question its nature was to risk eternal damnation.

With Richard Sugg as our guide, we'll explore how these age-old beliefs have transformed, leading us from the smoke of the soul to the dawn of the modern self.

5:30

So light a candle, settle in, and join us as we uncover the hidden history of the soul, a story that will take us from the dark recesses of the past to the edge of the unknown.

5:51

Hi, Richard, Thank you so much for joining me this evening.

Thanks for the invitation.

This is one of my favourite subjects and goes back.

I pretty much want undergraduate days, I think.

Actually, yeah.

So do you want to just take a moment or two to introduce yourself to, to the listeners maybe who haven't heard from you for a while and, and maybe update them as to things that you've been up to and putting out there in terms of your writing and so on?

6:16

Yeah, thank you.

It's been a, it's been a great year of dogs, really managed a piece for the Guardian on homing dogs in January, which is popular, a little bit on some BBC Radio shortly after that.

And yeah, it's been a year of true life dog stories, some terrific more famous characters of bumps of the naval World War Two dog just nuisance, another naval dog from South Africa, Paddy the Wanderer from New Zealand.

6:45

But some forgotten, completely forgotten cases which are wonderful as well.

And that came out in May in Doxygen, which is something that was inspired just by being around Cardiff in the park as a huge extensive acres of park.

7:02

We see loads of dogs romping, diving in the water, chasing after sticks, etcetera.

And I was thinking, you get this kind of lovely free, special wild energy of dogs, dogs plus oxygen is Doxygen.

And it's it's something that's wonderfully renewable and green and, yeah, connects people back to the roarer sides of nature.

7:24

And I suppose childhood actually, I think the loveliest kind of thing with oxygen is a kid and a dog or children and, and, and dogs.

You see this little fox face dog in the green where I go quite often and you'll be barking and leaping up, stretching the end of his lead to say hello to this little boy.

7:42

That's about two.

And yeah, the sight of them together just kind of, this is a dog.

Fascinating.

What is it?

I haven't seen this thing before.

And it's small like me and excitable like me.

This is the kind of purest form of that, I think.

So yeah, Doxygen was was great.

Great adventure to do and is out now with one of my dog friends on the cover, George George of Clandaf.

8:05

So what we're going to be talking about tonight is something completely removed from dogs.

We're going to be focusing on another one of your books, which is The Smoke of the Soul.

Do you want to just start by maybe sharing what inspired you to explore the concept of the soul and it's evolution in Christian thought as the the kind of the central theme of your book?

8:27

Yeah, thank you.

It goes way, way back and thinking about this today, I was thinking really well, it goes back to 1990, early 1991 when I and a few other students at Leeds, I did my BA in English, had a terrific veteran Professor Park Honan.

8:48

He was a real old school character and he did the Renaissance, he did Shakespeare, but he he had this wonderful reach and did biographies of not just Marlow and Shakespeare, but Austin and Browning.

And yeah, it was an unforgettable character and presence.

9:04

Really.

He's one of the few academics I think of who who got his obituary in the papers when he died a few years ago.

And he was a great inspiration in studying Done particularly, and Done weaves his way in and out of this.

9:19

This book, my first book was on John Donne, actually.

And I think that kind of firmed up my sense that there's something very particular about the relationship of body and soul in the Renaissance.

They're addressing it all the time from Augustine through to Aquinas.

9:38

But it's when you get this explosion of research, probing, cutting into the body that things, things get really interesting.

So yeah, right.

Back then I think I was, you know, that sentence, this peculiar kind of density, angels having bodies of condensed air, for example, in Don's famous poem Air and Angels and done dealing with the soul, dealing with anatomy over and over again in his poetry, but also the sermons and letters which I delved into for my PhD back up to 2001 in in Southampton.

10:15

So yeah, it was I think something I've always liked in a lot of different books and right down to present research on dogs and cats is, is just pushing things that further, that bit further pushing things into strange spaces and tricky zones that make you think, wow.

10:33

So yeah, it was, it was something that smoldered on through the PhD and I kind of knew that was going to be a book on the soul some way into the PhD.

And the one on done came out and the one on the soul took a bit longer.

And I ended up rewriting it actually for a popular audience because the academic version costs over 100 lbs.

10:54

So it's not much used to most people.

So that's the, that's the background.

Given the the complex intersection of theology and medicine and philosophy in your book, what would you say drew you to that specific period, then of 1500 to 1700, and that debate about the soul?

11:15

Yeah, It it's, I think something that if you don't study it, we take for granted the fact that there is body and there is soul.

We have this very heavily enshrined, enshrined duelism.

That's if people believe in the soul at all.

But if they do, they are defined as opposites.

11:33

They are, you know, kind of the most radical opposites, day, night, black, white, body, soul.

And this was absolutely not the case.

This will fascinate me about period 1500 to 1700, is that it's a kind of fertile disorder.

11:49

As someone I think once described the Renaissance in general, once you start getting medicine, trying to assert itself against theology, you didn't have anything under the name of science as we would know it, your natural philosophy.

And it will very much be seen, the hierarchy with theology on the top telling you what you could and couldn't do.

12:08

But just the fact that the body was so fiercely and sold, and that in many ways the soul was so physical, it was a force, it was essential to all of Physiology.

Pretty much everything in the body depended on the soul and its agents, which were hot spirits of blood firing around the body in this very dynamic way.

12:29

The eyes, vision, thought, sensation, pleasure, pain, fear, anger, sex, everything, and in fact even medicinal cannibalism because I think they were trying to eat the soul when they human bodies comes back to the soul.

And I think if you want to sum up one kind of absolutely focal central point of fascination, it is the idea that there was an organ of the soul.

12:53

And as we'll see, Andreas Azaleas in his Seminole career as a an anatomist and promoter of a newly envisioned body was was hard put to find this hawken of the soul in the in the human brain in these often raucous dissections before rowdy Italian Italian young medical students.

13:19

So for, you know, readers and listeners who are new to the subject, how would you describe the central themes then of the book in, in terms of what you cover and, you know, maybe what you would say you're hoping the book seeks to address?

13:35

Yeah, it it actually took two different forms, this book from the 1st edition, the academic one in 2011 to the sorry, 2013 to the more recent one a few years ago.

There's still a lot of continuity.

13:51

But the the first book was about really this very fertile, fascinating period where, if you like, the soul gets kind of more real.

I mean, we have this wonderful character, Bola Zahizela.

He's a medical student at Fazalius first public dissection, and he more or less thinks that he touches the organ of the soul after the anatomy is finished.

14:13

You know, the, the students certainly go pretty crazy when Fazalius gets to this part of the dissection.

And he has to say to them, look, if you behave like you did yesterday, I'm not going to do this dissection of the brain and the, the wonderful net, this complex mesh of veins and arteries.

And that that fascination of kind of the physical dimensions of the soul, You know, was it in the heart?

14:35

Was it in the brain where the spirits of the soul, which were very numinous in their way, darting out of the eyes at times, could you catch plague from them?

That fascinated me.

And then it progresses through increasing levels of uncertainty and doubt about finding anything in the human body.

14:55

Because of course, they're doing lots of dissections of animals, unfortunately, vivisections as well, finding something that shows that this is the immortal human soul in a human body and the the increasing uncertainty that this is the case.

And then pretty much kind of giving up and keeping quiet about this rather embarrassing failure because the body was championed for so long as the masterpiece of God's creation.

15:19

You know, the human body was the absolute pinnacle of his, of his creation.

And the second version, I had been doing research on ghosts and poltergeists for some time by the time I put the second one out.

15:34

I started on that in about 2012.

And I also got into research on reincarnation stories from very young children with knowledge that they simply could not have had unless they'd actually lived that knowledge in a previous life.

And I do end up talking about that at the end of the book and about how my beliefs have changed since since I kicked off this research.

15:59

I think we're still looking at, you know, a, a kind of losing ground, if you like, for Christianity there.

But once you get beyond Christianity and you lose a lot of the mistakes that it's made and a lot of the dead ends and the the repellent qualities, because we'll be coming to how foully misogynistic Christianity was.

16:19

Of course, in any modern corporation nowadays, if you're in private business, you'd be shut down for behaving as the Catholic Church does towards women.

So it's still going.

But yeah, I think, you know, there are things within Christianity that you can carry over into more fertile and more accurate religions, such as Buddhism, where they really seem to have the the answers better than anybody else.

16:44

So, yeah.

Where was the soul in the body?

Was it in the heart?

The brain?

People did go for the stomach at times and various other places.

And what was the history of trying to find it?

What was the the history of anatomizing it, the controversies that it caused, the dangers you were in from the Protestant or Catholic churches?

17:08

And who were the big characters who had the courage to actually talk about this center of view?

I mean, whether it was the soul or the self or a strange mixture of both.

As time moved on, the self was very problematic for someone like Dunn.

17:24

But things changed as the 17th century wore on.

But the fact was that what I realized writing this book was that it it was forbidden pretty much.

It was taboo, it was dangerous, it was rash.

It was frowned on to talk about yourself because although we're transposing a modern self back into a soul that was subordinate to God and religion and theologians, nonetheless, the most important thing about you was your soul, and you were not allowed to debate about it.

17:53

And if you were clever enough, like Raleigh, like Dunn, like Milton, like Hobbs and some more obscure characters, then you realize that theologians didn't know what they were talking about.

There was a load of fudge.

There was a load of nonsense, There was a load of misused language.

18:10

Rather as languages misused by corporations, now it was misused by theologians because they were the ones with the most power.

So they're talking about an incorporeal substance.

And Hobbes will say flatly, you can take 2 words that are complete opposites and put them together and they still don't mean anything.

So yeah, what were they looking for?

18:30

What were the dangers of this?

And when did they quietly give up?

I suppose of the the broad themes, but another one that I've just touched on I think was the sense of the soul slowly turning into the self.

We'll also see that women had a very vexed relationship with their souls, according to many male thinkers of the time.

18:54

So your.

Book covers, you know, a really wide array of different historical figures from theologians to anatomists.

Do you want to just give a kind of a brief overview of some of the key key characters and events that you would say shape the narrative?

19:10

Yeah, early on you have Vesalius, who I think now is, is fairly famous.

And if people don't know his images, I'd recommend looking them up because there's only so much I can say to describe these amazingly powerful anatomical images, these living corpses, as it were, these amazing filigrees, networks of veins, nerves, arteries that should cut onto wood blocks.

19:35

Unbelievable labor to produce his book.

So Andrew Salalius is, is one of the more famous people in the field of anatomy.

And I spent quite a lot of time talking about his 1540 first public anatomy, which is very instructive in so far as he's subordinate technically to an older, very Galenist physician who's treats Galen like the Bible, really very tellingly.

20:01

And Mazelius will not put up with this.

You know, he, he rebels.

He's supposed to be just sort of cutting the body open and showing people what this idiot Curtius is talking about that's in Galen but is not actually in the potty.

And there's a wonderful moment, I often think of a film version of this where Curtius is played by Michael Gambon, or would have been.

20:19

Sadly, he's not with us anymore.

And.

Vesalius is played by Clive Owen.

And you have them there over this single open body with radically different views of it and Vesalius saying, look, Galen got this wrong, you know, show me where these supposed veins are here.

20:38

Show me them.

And he he, he just keeps referring back to Galen.

They won't.

And you, you have Vesalius kind of.

I show you here in this body and this wonderful just cleaving to raw matter, you know, which seems to a so obvious scientific method, but was nothing of the sort in about 1500 or in this case 1540.

20:59

So if azaleas is a big character in it in terms of anatomy, fascinating character.

Michael Savitas is less well known.

For a long time there wasn't a huge amount of research on him, but Spanish anatomist, extremely pious, credited with discovering the circulation of the blood through the lungs.

21:19

And at the time Savitas was considered a radical disgusting heretic for his views on the Trinity, that Christ was literally, physically, biologically the the son of God.

But he I think unnerved the theological authorities all the more because he knew his Hebrew so he could go back to particular things about the soul coming into the body in Genesis.

21:44

And he knew of he knew his anatomy.

He was highly respected as an anatomist, obviously made this big discovery about the lungs.

And he he was unrepentantly, intensely religious with with something that verges on pantheism, the sense that God's breath this, he would have got this at the Old Testament in Hebrew Ruah, God's breath was everywhere.

22:03

You could breathe in all the time.

And you think this would be a very pious, lovely thing to say.

But no, this didn't go down well.

And he would be talking about how the Spirit of God goes through this vein and that nerve and that artery.

And when God breathed it in, in Genesis, it went down through these veins directly into the heart.

22:22

And, you know, you might again think this makes Christianity and faith more tangible, more real, more intricate, more beautiful.

But no, for his pains, he was burned on a hill outside Geneva by Calvin.

One of the craziest Christians, I think, unfortunately of all time, probably in 1552.

22:42

So this is the extreme limit of the kind of dangers you could be facing and which Vesalius, as we'll see, was, was highly conscious of.

In Anatomy, again, we get there's a lot more obscure characters in Anatomy and a few opportunists.

Helkrye Crooks, an interesting one in the Time of Shakespeare.

22:59

Flood in an after the time of Shakespeare is an intriguing 1 colleague of William Harvey and later on in the period interesting character.

Thomas Willis, father of neuroscience in the Restoration, had his own interesting views on the precise seat of the soul.

23:17

He kind of championed and if you like Morris kind of invented the brain, which was very neglected at the time.

And on the way there, we'll also be touching on Rene Descartes and his his own very thorough anatomical exploits and his switch from one organ of the soul, the wonderful net, to an alternative in, in terms of other characters we've got Christopher Marlowe did some very daring, interesting, curious things with the soul in the realm of drama.

23:48

I mean, Faustus is a remarkable play.

Doctor Faustus seemed to be something like the exorcist of its day.

I mean, the hysteria, the terror, the nightmares that this play generated were beyond our comprehension, I think.

And Marlow, who was considered famously doubtful in his religion, plays very powerful games with the fact that the soul is in the blood, The soul is in the breath, the soul is in the body.

24:14

So you have Faustus signing away his soul in blood.

He's signing away his soul with his soul, if you like, for this fatal contract.

And suddenly the blood begins to coagulate.

So here you have a sort of nest of conflicting forces.

24:32

He's trying to wait, sign away his soul with his soul.

His soul is trying to stop him.

Behind that presumably is God.

And then just to cap things off and really outrage a lot of the audit.

So they you have Mephistopheles who's obviously want to get his mucky hands on his contract, getting some coals and a little chafer in a dish and heating up the blood so that it flows again so that he can finish the contract.

24:56

So he's a very clear, basic but very clear battle between God and science.

You know, he will liquefy blood.

So hey, let's get this, get this over with.

And then, yeah, I won't get into it in huge detail, but he plays very clever games with Helen of Troy.

25:11

So if you know anyone knows one line from Marlow is this the face that launched thousand ships and toppled the towers of idiom and so forth.

And of course, it wasn't anything that was saw.

It was a young boy playing, playing Helen.

But with a lot of people already enraged that you've got this classical beauty in a Christian context, Faustus kisses her, or this apparition of Helen anyway, kisses her.

25:37

And then, you know, see her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies.

And then Helen give me my soul again.

So he's playing around with the audience.

She's got his soul.

Is she going to give it back if she gives it back what she's done to it?

Because she's always certainly a demonic apparition around the time of Marlow.

25:55

But living much longer than Marlow, of course, faithfully died young.

Is Dunn, I think, as I said already, is the biggest figure in this.

Dunn really was, I think, the greatest thinker of his age across pretty much every kind of field, theology, literature, languages, science, geography, medicine, anatomy, and to some extent philosophy, although what we understand is philosophy, you know, was, was theology to a large extent.

26:26

But yeah, Dunn was restless.

He never stopped thinking.

He never stopped pushing himself into uncomfortable areas.

So he's a vital character, I think for for this subject because he takes in the troubles, the fault lines, the conflicts and so on.

26:42

And yeah, you've got Milton who will come to hopefully on the subject of the soul dying, a radical heresy which I've not come across till I started researching this book.

Hobbs again, this belief that the soul actually died.

26:57

Fascinating character called Richard Overton, now forgotten, but he was a radical thinker in his day who asserted fiercely the belief that the soul died.

He was a Christian like most mortalists, but he wasn't having this immortality of the soul.

And character who bears a lot of comparison with Dunn is second L Digby.

27:18

Wonderful courtly Renaissance man in every sense, although kind of lived a bit outside of the Renaissance.

Died in the 60s I think it was.

He was born in 1603 into a Catholic family, became Protestant, became Catholic again.

And it's Digby who, whilst he was probing about in animal and reptile bodies, in Embryology and fascinated with science and anatomy, was also fascinated with the soul and advances his quite radical, quite dangerous belief that the more brilliant you are and the longer you live, the better your soul is.

27:54

I mean, generally, you know, the longer you live, the more sinful your soul gets is the idea.

So any kind of differentiation is at the level of sin or virtue.

But for Digby, there's this kind of very romantic, very virtuosic sense that brilliant people, talented people, and again, people just live longer, have more experience, have a different kind of soul.

28:15

So it's this wonderful moment where you can see in this one person, his one writings, his fascinating life, you can see the soul turning into the self there in in Digby's hands.

And yeah, well, we'll come to Rick Strassman as a kind of an extra bit later, but these are some of the main stars of the of the book.

28:37

So do you want to just take us back and maybe explore how Constantine's, you know, that conversion to Christianity altered the the conception and importance of the soul within the the Christian doctrine?

Yeah.

And just briefly, there are these moments in history where if it had gone the other way, wow, you know, the world could have been a recognizably different.

29:00

It's been emphasized by quite a few more interesting historians of Christianity that the whole business of Christ's crucifixion, Christ failing to come back for decades and decades after he'd been ignoble crucified in the early part of what we now consider the Christian era.

29:19

This was all intensely shameful.

You know, it's probably the most iconic image of all time, the crucifix, the crucifixion, not just in religion, but anywhere, basically.

And nobody wanted to represent this for a very long time after Christ died.

29:36

It was unspeakably shameful.

Crucifixion of all things.

So Constantine has obviously a figure of tremendous power.

Whether whatever his motivations were might have been a sense that this is going to be politically useful and pragmatically useful, who knows.

29:54

But in 312 AD he converts.

And then obviously a huge weight of influence is spread out across the Roman Empire and, and the rest is history, I suppose, in lots of ways.

I mean, they certainly keep arguing ferociously.

30:11

And the amount of violence and the amount of wasted ink doesn't really bear thinking about in the centuries through the medieval period.

But I think, yeah, by the time you get down to Aquinas, you've, you've got a fairly kind of stable, controlled view of the soul and, and what it is and what its job is and so forth.

30:32

And then, as I was saying, it all pretty much explodes wonderfully in this brilliantly colourful, fertile and deep bloody disorder in the in the Renaissance.

So in what ways does the Church's concept of purgatory and the sale of indulgences exploit that concept of the soul for political gain?

30:52

For economic gain.

Well.

Yeah, they've been doing this for quite a long time.

Before the 16th century kicked in, as I said, broadly, kind of start 1500 onwards.

They'd been obviously if you look at Chaucer, you've got the Pardoners tale.

31:13

You know, a partner was a professional partner who could pardon you some time out of purgatory, where in between life and afterlife you were.

You were, you know, you knew, pretty virtuous.

You're stuck in purgatory for a while.

Who knew who knows how long?

31:29

It wasn't going to be good.

And you could by indulgences which were mainly granted by the Pope, but then dispensed down the chain of the corporation to the the partners.

And this got particularly out of control once Julius the second decided to build Saint Peter's.

31:48

So this absolutely monumental project, I mean, the most grandiose church in all of Christendom, 100 foot long, longer than even its nearest rival, which is Saint Paul's, with this tremendous sense of space of the numinous When you stand under that Dome, and I suppose especially when you stood anywhere near it and listen to the music of these heavenly choirs.

32:11

I think one of the best things about Christianity is the Renaissance polyphony that that still survives and it's terrific to hear, especially live.

So to build this mega made here project which took over a century to complete and had some of the great artists and architects of the time involved, you needed lots of money.

32:33

So the the whole pardoning indulgence thing got particularly out of hand.

And there's a little rhyme, whether it's accurate exactly or not, but it captures the whole business particularly well.

Luther was supposedly hearing this rhyme from particularly shameful or shameless Pardoner called Tetzel in Germany.

32:51

And it goes something like another penny in the coffer drops another soul to heaven pops.

Easy one to remember for even small children, I suppose.

So Luther couldn't stomach this any longer. 1517 bangs up his theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, and the Reformation has begun.

33:09

People don't know it at the time, but it's going to be very long, very fierce and very bloody.

And this is the context in which the whole thing takes takes place.

So do you.

Want to just elaborate then on that next step, how of how the the Reformation intensified the role of the soul in, you know, the religious conflicts, you know, particularly the in the wars between the Protestants and the Catholics?

33:38

Yeah, I, you know, everything came back curiously to this little intangible, gaseous, uncertain force, steam smoke thing.

Was it, you know, was it a, a kind of a force as in Numa, as in spirit in the Bible, in the New Testament?

33:59

Was it a thing that you could pretty much clasp your fist around somewhere in the heart, somewhere in the brain?

We'll get to those locations in a while.

But whatever the case, the irony is that this tiny little uncertain thing, highly debatable, was the the pivot and the force that drove incredible levels of violence.

34:21

Absolutely astonishing.

And it's astonishing that they've been so badly forgotten.

I think Christianity has whitewashed a lot of things, including the behavior of the the popes in the period.

But it's estimated by serious historians that the wars of religion from 1517 onwards, and they stopped briefly, but you know, they went, if you just listen to the titles, the 80 Years War, the 30 Years War, the 100 years War, think of this.

34:47

Think of this is, you know, 100 years is longer than anyone was going to live at that time.

So odds were you spend much of your life, especially on the European continent in the midst of wars, horrible sieges, starvation, bloodshed, slaughter of men, women and children by the Catholics usually on the continent.

35:08

And it's been estimated by historians that perhaps 1/4, perhaps 1/3 of the population of Europe were killed in these wars in the 16th and 17th centuries.

And I think if you just get down to individual battles of faith, you know, things like the Reformation going backwards and forwards in, in Britain, you just, I mean, people quite literally whitewashed the dodgy Saints of their churches when the Protestant monarch came in.

35:38

But they whitewashed them carefully.

So it's reversible.

We're going to get another monarch, be a Catholic.

You know, we just get this whitewashed off and we've got the nice Saints back again.

The stripping of the altars of the book that's shown that this was people's pragmatic attitude.

So yeah, very whimsical, very random.

35:54

The, you know, the conversion of Henry the Eighth because he's fed up with the Pope and can't get his divorce.

But when you look at people like the famous, I mean, you know where you are, the famous Oxford martyrs, Latimer, Crammer and Ridley, the, you know, the ability to put yourself in the flames and be burned to death for your particular version of the soul, your particular version of reality is how they would have seen it of everything, the cosmos.

36:22

So I think, yeah, it sharpened up your sense of who you were intensely.

We get lots of can't quite call them side issues, but other issues with the split.

Because of course, if you want to do something about purgatory and the sale of indulgences, this is no good turning the Pope.

36:39

This is naughty.

Don't do it because these are some most corrupt, worldly, greedy and disgusting men that ever lived.

And you can quote me on that.

What you have to do is come up with a a solution that makes indulgences pointless.

So Calvin comes up with this idea of predestination.

36:56

Again, it's forgotten to a remarkable degree, but this must have dominated people's lives and mainly in terms of absolute terror for most of them if they were Protestants, that you were predestined before the creation of the world, before the creation of Eden, abdomen and Eve, never mind the rest of humanity to either heaven or hell.

37:16

It was a done deal, you know, before God had even got the earth going.

And of course, that made purgatory and indulgences and, you know, buying your way into a better state pointless, absolutely pointless.

It also, I think, traumatized people into probably madness in many cases, but this was Calvin's solution.

37:34

So you had a very, very different version of the soul, which I think someone like Digby especially would rebel against.

Hence probably the fact that he you know, he swung Catholic prostate back to Catholic again in in later life.

So how did that that religious turmoil of the 16th and 17th century contribute then to the development or the decline of the concept of the soul?

37:58

Yeah, I think there was a lot of one of the fascinating things, first of all, I think, is how much we don't know about what you get, these little kind of glimmers into the minds of ordinary people who could not read, could not write if they could, they couldn't manage to leave any records of what they believed because of the insecurity of their lives.

38:21

And you, you will find somebody who's been to church, you know, three times a week at least, every day of his life.

He dies a good old age at 70 or 80, and they come and confess him and ask him a few questions, and he says to them that the soul is a big bone in your body, and when you die, if you've done well, it will be put into a pleasant Meadow.

38:40

To live there ever more.

You get people In the time of rally.

There was a big inquest or tyrannical theological inquiry into heretical beliefs in Raleigh's in Raleigh's Dorset, when one of the questions was, who have you heard to say that when you die your soul should be put on the top of a pole and run?

39:02

God run, devil have it, who will?

So there's a kind of sport of, you know, grabbing the soul for yourself for the crucial moment of death.

These kind of anonymous theoretical beliefs.

I think there were huge versions and varieties of them, but we still have a general kind of view of it in terms of, you know, when somebody dies, open the windows, make a hole in the roof, open the doors, the soul's got to get out.

39:25

You know, it's a thing.

And however much the educated theologians denounced and despised this, they couldn't stop these beliefs.

But I think the the more mainstream and influential and named kind of characters, there was a lot of heresy simmering.

39:40

So for example, in the field of mortalism, the belief that the soul died, either it died and was resurrected at the final judgment and so forth, or it just died completely.

And that was it.

This, this belief in mortalism sent to the stake to be burned, a character called Edmund Edward Whiteman in I think it was Litchfield in 1612.

40:03

He was the last person to be burned, executed for heresy in in Britain.

And one of his beliefs was mortalism.

So that's well before the, the Civil War, the English Revolution.

But I think really once that kicks off, obviously you've got the breakdown of censorship, the general breakdown of control and order.

40:23

And yeah, you get a wonderful kind of explosion.

Of divinely colourful characters, the most obvious being the Ranters, who were great fun and games full of sex and drink and drugs if you count tobacco and yeah they're in the swinging 50s.

40:43

Anything went.

And a lot of pantheism as well.

You know the the the soul of God was everywhere that God was everywhere that he'd flowed through everything.

So yeah, I think in Britain, which is a key focus of, of what I'm studying, then the Civil War, not only did it allow all these beliefs to kind of burst out for those brief 2 decades before the Restoration, but things were never the same again, I think.

41:09

And actually the role of the monarch as this divinely appointed figurehead, that was never taken as seriously ever again, especially when you got an idiot like Charles the 2nd.

I'll take him seriously at all after, after the English Revolution and the, you know, the beheading of Charles the 1st.

So how did key figures then, like Thomas Hobbes or John Milton, reconcile the emerging, you know, scientific ideas with traditional Christian beliefs about the soul?

41:37

So these these figures are united.

Oddly, Hobbes was demonized, of course, as an atheist.

Whether it was or not, nobody agrees in kind of universities still today whether it was Christian or not, or he just kind of, you know, kept a bit quiet about what was a delicate matter.

41:55

But they united in both being mortalist, that they believed the soul died.

And Hobbs, as I've said, was ferociously impatient with what he saw as an abuse of language by an awful lot of traditional theologians, saying that you've got an incorporeal substance here, and incorporeal means one thing.

42:17

Substance means the opposite.

You can't just put them together and say that's the soul.

It's just nonsense that you're talking.

Milt was also rigorous with language in his own way.

I don't know how much he was influenced by anatomy.

There's not a huge amount of evidence for that that I've seen.

I think Hobbs probably would have been more so.

42:34

But Milton was a Hebraist, which not all Christians were, so he could go back to the Old Testament, which of course is not a Christian set of books.

It's a set of books belonging to the Jewish people stolen by Christianity to fatten up their religion.

42:53

And then the nice little conclusion to that.

There's nothing like having stolen someone's religion to make you hate them.

And all the centuries of unbelievable anti-Semitism that that come from about the 12th century onwards in in Britain.

But Milton really took seriously the fact that if you read the Bible in the original, the old so-called Old Testament, which obviously we've got Genesis and the soul being breathed into Adam.

43:21

What it says is that you God breathes in this special spirit force Rua, and it it this, this makes man nephesh.

And what this means in English, more or less, is that when God does this, man becomes a living soul.

43:40

And I'll just repeat this because this is crucial detail.

Man becomes a living soul.

He doesn't have a living soul.

He becomes a living soul.

So the fusion of the spirit force and the body is man and is the soul, which means that when you die, you can't simply have the soul whip off somewhere nicely and, you know, lie on fluffy pillows in heaven.

44:04

It means the soul goes back to God, is swallowed back to God.

This kind of nice ecological fashion or like a a drop in the the ocean.

So, yeah, Milton I think was, was, you know, keen to be rigorous, basically he was, he was a fiercely intellectual character and was not going to tolerate this, this kind of willingness.

44:28

And he quotes Ecclesiastes also where it says, look, man is like the beasts, They have the same breath.

They they both perish and that's that's it.

So, yeah, an interesting group of people.

Just one other that's that's not so well known about.

I think we mentioned him earlier, Richard Overton, a leveller radical political left wing figure now forgotten but fascinating in his time.

44:50

And I'll just give you one example of how he takes the whole scientific mentality and rather than reconciling it, he uses it to whack the hell out of traditional Christians.

He he says, look, the soul is something, it's something, it's a force, it's a vapor, it's a breath, whatever, but it's something.

45:10

So if you were to seal a man up in a completely impermeable glass case and suffocate him, how would his soul get out?

You know, And there's something of the, the vacuum chambers, the early science of the Royal Society and the the restoration in that it's a kind of scientific thought experiment and a really radical one, which forces the the questions very hard.

45:35

So how?

Did then the, the concept of the soul, would you say differ from differ between those mainstream Christian beliefs and those of heretical groups, you know, the Anabaptist, the followers of Sevitus, those that were considered to be heretical, such as, you know, those that practice, practice witchcraft or were believed to be witches.

45:54

Do you want to explain some of that about?

Yeah.

There's a lot in in in that area.

It's tricky about the followers of Sevitus because only three copies of his theoretical book survived.

The books were burned along with Civitas on this pyre in 1552.

46:11

But certainly, although we have to be a bit careful in terms of all these heretics, there's a book by a guy called Edwards called Gangrena, which is a ferocious attack on heretics.

So we're not getting their first person version, we're getting the opponent's version of them.

46:27

But as I say, there was proliferation of different sects, the family of love, the Ranters, the Anabaptist, they turn up fleetingly in drama in the Jacobean period as well.

But yeah, in terms of heresy, what fascinated me when I started studying this was when you look at the Greek root of the word heresy or heretical, it simply means to choose.

46:55

So you're back again to this whole extraordinary paradox that highly thinking people and the soul, if it was nothing else, it was most emphatically the seat of reason.

You know, the idea that the soul is kind of an emotional thing is a modern concept.

47:13

But no, it was the seat of reason.

And yet you, the fiercely rational thinker, Don Milton Hobbs, whoever it was Digby, you weren't really allowed to think and to talk about the most important aspect of yourself, despite the fact that mainstream concepts of it were very woolly, very flawed, very vague, very contradictory.

47:33

Witchcraft is a is a great subject here because the whole kind of dynamic Physiology of the soul and most of all, I think the spirits of blood, the the organ of the soul, the wonderful net was this fantastically complex set of veins and arteries interwoven in such a way that it looked as though only God could have done it.

47:59

And the the point about this was it looked sufficiently complex to process these hot spirits of blood which was darting around the whole of the body into the spirits of the immortal soul somewhere in the in the brain.

48:15

And these spirits did everything serious.

Thinkers like Francis Bacon saw them everywhere in every aspect of the body Physiology, medicine summed up quite neatly, just to give one example, in Shakespeare's famous sonnet where he talks about the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

48:36

And this is an ambivalent reaction to sex, sort of male come down after orgasm.

And it means literally expense in the sense of, you know, something shooting out.

This is about ejaculation.

And when he talks about the expense of spirit, you get the typical presence of the spirits in sexual Physiology, you know, in erection, in ejaculation, heat being a crucial thing here as well.

49:04

We'll see when we come to women and the the soul.

But just two other examples of what the spirits could do and how dangerous they could be.

They could give you plague.

Plague could be contracted through the eyes of a sick by a sick person giving the plague through their spirits into somebody else's eyes or perhaps mouth.

49:26

But there's a terrific novel about the plague called to Calais in ordinary time.

And he points out twice I think in this story of the plague medieval plague that when somebody's dead of the plague, they immediately bind up their eyes.

49:43

They blindfold them that you know any lingering dodgy spirits can't get out of the eyes and cause you any any danger.

The the area of witchcraft, huge and fascinating one, but just to give a sense of the dangers of, I suppose, you know, there's a tricky kind of sense of empirical reality in the eyes of the supposed witch.

50:07

These were people who were marginalized by Christian misogyny, by superstitious societies, by local gossip and so forth for seeming a bit different often.

Actually, they were probably healers.

They were people who were midwives, had herbal skills and so forth, and so they were powerful.

50:24

But when something went wrong, that kind of positive power tilted into negative power.

And I suspect that after a good deal of persecution, these kind of interesting, already quite charismatic individuals, when they looked at you, they were frightening if they did look frightening.

50:40

And eyes can have that quality, the eyes of somebody powerful, it is tricky to hold their gaze for, you know, a timid person, a child, etcetera, etcetera.

Somebody who's superstitious obviously.

And certainly people actually died of terror, of supposed witchcraft, actually just died of nothing more than sheer terror.

50:59

In the Jacobean period, the belief of many people, educated people, was that a witch could dart her evil spirits from her eyes into the eyes of a victim, particularly a woman or a child that are considered more vulnerable to this.

51:14

These spirits would dart down into the person's blood and then following, you know, contemporary whatever, they go straight to the heart and then bang, you're dead.

So yeah, a quite rigorously medical, physiological, anatomical view of what they would call fascination, witchcraft, bewitchment, hinging on on the soul and the spirits.

51:39

As with everything else, So what?

Were the the primary arguments then used by those who believed that the soul died with the body?

And how did how were those received by their contemporaries?

Yeah, it's difficult to narrow down one set of arguments.

51:58

I think really it was it was a shadowy set of figures involved and some of them completely anonymous and ordinary people whose whose names have got lost as Edward Whiteman, who was we know his name, unfortunately, because he was burned for these beliefs.

52:14

But one of the figures he was most fascinating again is done.

Don flirted with mortalism.

Now bear in mind that he was not only chaplain to James the 1st, but he was the Dean of Saint Paul's before he died.

And yet, you know this right at the top of the tree in Britain, the most influential preacher of his day in the 1620s, a very influential thinker, flirted with the idea of mortalism, not only in youthful poems, pious poems called the Holy Sonnets, where he talks in more than one of these poems about about dying, his soul dying.

52:51

And, you know, OK, it's going to be resurrected at the general resurrection.

So it's a sort of soul sleep as as they categorized it.

There were three versions of mortalism.

So your soul slept unconsciously or your soul died and was resurrected or your soul died and that was it.

Bang.

53:07

It was all over.

Don seemed to go for this second one at times in these holy sonnets and then in some of his sermons in the 1620s, by which time he's, you know, extremely famous, extremely influential, died in 1631.

53:25

He, he's talking more than once in certain sermons about his soul when he died or the soul when you die, being swallowed up into the general body of God.

So he's giving up his individuality.

53:41

It's a crucial, I think, differentiation between various Christians, whether you're happy to have your soul swallowed up into the bosom or the sort of cloud like vapours of God, or whether you insist on this fiercely individual soul and done.

53:57

You know, he swung back and forwards all the time.

He I think he liked mortalism at times, perhaps more in his youth, because he was such a fiercely independent, individualistic, distinctive, sharp cut thinker.

54:13

And he didn't like the idea of being a disembodied, voiceless soul in the grave waiting to be made whole again with body and soul together in in heaven, at the general resurrection.

He didn't like this formlessness.

54:28

He didn't like this limbo he was always messing about with the grave.

Constant references in his poems.

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

He says at one point I shall have no looking glass in my grave to see my body in the dissolution.

54:43

But he clearly wants to have one.

He's trying to get control of this all the time by talking about it over and over again.

So yeah, Don is a fascinatingly kind of slippery character who covers almost every bit of ground in his lifetime in different areas.

55:01

As we've said, Hobbes really pulled no punches over to likewise.

And Milton, I think must have made a lot of people uncomfortable.

He was a, you know, he was a very powerful figure.

The power of Paradise Lost you can't really underestimate.

55:17

And he was going for the original roots, you know, in Genesis, in the Hebrew and in Ecclesiastes and saying, look, this is not what you say it is, which is certainly wasn't It was, it was a very different view of forces.

55:34

Really.

The even in the Bible, in the Greek, you know, they're talking about Numa.

Numa is a force.

It's smoke, it's a steam, it's a breath, but it's not a thing.

You know, Psyche tends to be the thing.

And they talk about Psyche far less than they talk about Numa.

55:50

Numa does things.

Numa is the ghost that Christ gives up on the cross when he when he dies.

And it it's got all sorts of power as a force and is is quite like Rua, I think in in lots of ways.

56:07

So what role then did the anatomists and you know, the advancement in medical anatomy play during this?

During.

This period, then of the 16th and the 17th century, then in, you know, reinforcing the traditional views or challenging the views of the soul.

56:25

Yeah, I'll, I'll talk a little bit about Vesalius when you talk about him a bit more down the down the line, but probably the 16th and 17th centuries are very distinct.

You're you're really struggling to keep on the right track in say 1540 as a young anatomist trying to assert yourself.

56:44

This is Vesalius who we've seen there arguing with the the old school Galenist courteous in this tumultuous public dissection in Bologna in 1540, where one of the witnesses he's I thinks that he touches the organ of the soul.

So to give you an example of how careful Faisalius was at this point in this dissection and and in various others for some time before he publishes his landmark work on the fabric of the human body in 1543, Faisalius is put to show the organ of the soul.

57:18

So on the back of the smoke of the soul, I've given a reproduction of it.

And I'll just emphasize here a little bit how much this plexus of veins and arteries, when it was represented in an iconic drawing, which was reproduced over and over again after Vaselius printed it in 1543, This I think, was probably the most recognizable organ in the human body.

57:44

I've I've given lectures where I have shown people anatomical modern versions of the dissected heart or liver and the audience cannot tell the difference.

You can play games with them.

They don't know what it is.

You know, we've got this iconic version of the heart proliferated everywhere more and more on social media.

58:05

And as Cliveau had memorably put it when he was playing a top three in one film, Do you know what the heart looks like?

It looks like a fist covered in blood.

So it's not that beautifully kind of symmetrical thing that any kid can recognise at age 2.

I think the Rete Mirabili, the wonderful net of these veins and arteries all woven together like lots of fisherman's Nets, was the most recognizable organ in the human body.

58:32

The small problem was it wasn't really there.

Galen had dissected sheep, oxen, apes, and found something quite impressive, looking at the base of their brains in the skull, and this had become the supposed wonderful net.

58:49

Vesalius is trying to find this thing in dark churches by candlelight.

And what he does is say, well, here it is in the human body.

Now, you can't see it terribly well, but let me show you it properly in a lamb's head.

So he gets this lamb's head to show you supposedly the absolute pinnacle of human Physiology in a bloody animal that's not supposed to have a soul or any organ of the soul.

59:14

And to us, it's sort of like the most crazy conjuring trick, you know, radically letting yourself down in terms of the scientific method and so forth.

And funnily enough, Azaleas himself soon feels the same way in De Fabrica Fabric, the human body, he says.

59:32

I myself cannot wonder enough at my own stupidity.

Who never failed to dissect a lamb's head to show what cannot be seen in the human body.

It's not there.

It is.

It's so small it hardly matters.

So yeah, this was the the speedy progress that Vesalius made early on.

59:52

But what happened then through the late 16th and the early 17th century was that there was a kind of ironical curse of the fact that in De Fabrica Vesalius, he gives this wonderful iconic image of the wonderful net.

1:00:10

Just briefly trying to describe it in in words, It looks roughly like a heart with an eye in the middle.

So it is wonderfully kind of iconic, actually.

He gives this image just to say, look, this is not in the human body.

I'm just going to show you that I know what the body looks like and what the human brain looks like.

1:00:25

But the problem is that everyone then opportunistically plagiarizes all these illustrations, reproduces them.

A great prophet including huge kind of coffee table folio book by a guy called Hellcry Crook in Britain in 1611 and various other issues come out later and they they put this in rather ambiguous contexts in 1623 Robert Flood very interesting character, a mystical but very scientific as well.

1:00:56

Big colleague of William Harvey and a big volunteer for anatomist which a lot of physicians didn't want to do.

He really got his hands dirty.

Flood has it redrawn by a very popular skilled artist, Theodore Debris, who did lots of images of America and the new newly discovered Americans.

1:01:14

So he kind of defiantly asserts this, you know, as this iconic image by having it redone.

And in words, the battle just goes backwards and forwards.

It never stops for decades that people say, yeah, I've seen this loads of times.

1:01:30

It looks great.

It looks terrific.

It would easily process your body into yourself and other and actors say I've never seen it.

You could hardly see it.

I think it's summed up quite nicely in the 1670s and 1680s when 1 character, John Brown, an activist of that period in 1677, says he's he can still see it in 1680.

1:01:53

He says no, he can't.

You know.

So a modern perspective on it would be my own little investigations in Edinburgh when I was first doing my PhD, lovely character called James Shaw was very helpful to me.

He was from the medical school and he would look at my drawings.

1:02:09

I actually just had to draw what I'd seen in the National Library because she couldn't make copies and so on in those days.

So my rather, you know, amateurish pencil drawings, James Shaw would pour over and he would say, right, look, it's here, this is what it is.

But what you're looking at is the cavernous sinus that when I dissect this to show people this, I need a halogen lamp, you know, So imagine trying to have fun and games with this in a public anatomy in in the dark or the shadows with candles.

1:02:37

And they were doing this and aspects in winter mainly for the preservative value.

So, yeah, things exploded, I think more and more in the 16th and 17th centuries.

But for a long time, it kind of depended who you asked actually.

You know, they could see it.

They couldn't see it.

They'd see it many times.

1:02:52

They'd never seen it.

And this must have troubled, I think, people that, you know, these are big medical estimates with big textbooks with big reputations as physicians.

They have a big professional practice and they do not agree.

1:03:08

They they, they will not get their story straight.

So how did anatomists like Vesalius and philosophers like Descartes, How did they attempt to then locate the soul within the body?

What were their main hypotheses?

Vesalius, as I say, we've seen playing this little game, you know, with the, the Lamb's head and he, he decides that it's in certain ventricles of the brain as a kind of compromise.

1:03:34

He, he goes for the brain.

And certainly there's a big, big ongoing argument between the heart and the brain and that's never really resolved.

You'll get one person who's not quite sure about the heart of the brain like done.

But Vasilius kind of covered his tracks, you know, and he died in his bed, not on a, on a bonfire.

1:03:50

And then you've got various figures now forgotten, who were doing a lot of anatomy and saying, yes, they could saw it now.

They couldn't see it.

They can't.

He's known now as a philosopher.

But you know, if you'd sort of checked his diary between 1628 and 1640, he was spending a hell of a lot of time anatomizing humans and animals, spent a lot of time at the shambles with his hands deep in the guts of oxen and so forth in Amsterdam.

1:04:22

And he talks about this in his letters to various friends.

He says I'm too busy making deceptions to do much writing lately.

So yeah, I think his, you know, his empirical side, his medical anatomical side has been surprisingly forgotten.

1:04:38

But it was because of this that he decided on in 1640, decided on the seat of the soul being the pineal gland.

And this was a huge switch.

When you think about this wonderful net of veins and arteries, it looks like it will do the job in real time.

1:04:58

You can imagine the kind of tortuous pressure of spirits of the blood being forced up from the heart through this plexus and then into the brain, becoming this finest numinous vapor of the soul kind of alchemical process, I think is the way I, I ended up thinking about it.

1:05:18

Then you've got the pineal glands, you've got this single little nut of matter central in the brain.

And the only thing Descartes stresses that is single in the brain, everything else is doubled, of course, as we know.

And so he thinks, well, this is the one central juncture where everything can come together in one single node.

1:05:42

It seemed to me when I saw this kind of movement that it typifies Descartes very mechanistic side, that he became the father of a, a more mechanistic Physiology which spread out into much of, of science.

So you've got this animated numinous, if you like, sometimes for people like Spita's pantheistic body, we know the breath of God firing through it through their heart.

1:06:05

And they certainly talk about the spirits of the heart, religious epiphanies as though they can feel the heat of God's breath inside them.

I, I don't want to lose sight of that kind of positive side of, of the anatomical experience because for many people it was very powerful positive spiritual experience.

1:06:24

But they can't move you into that clockwork mechanistic everything just kind of, you know, switching, chiming, piping.

There was a lot of kind of water mechanics if you like.

So it was a bit more of a bridge between the two rather than sort of dry clockwork mechanics we think about perhaps.

1:06:40

But certainly that switch point, it seems to me, which you can't really probe and find anything more in it.

It's a very convenient place for just switch body, soul switch.

It is very neat and it suits that emerging mechanistic philosophy that that comes out of Descartes.

1:06:59

And yeah, we'll come back to the pineal and it doesn't go away.

I didn't really know anything about the pineal research and DMT and all the fascinating modern scientific stuff at the time.

But but Descartes might well have been on to much more than he guessed, actually, when he came up with this little nut of of matter.

1:07:17

You know how?

Were his theories then at the time received by, you know, the scientific community, you know other communities around him?

How did they respond to his theory of the seat of the soul?

It's funny that, you know, you look back and he's a highly respected figure, although his anatom has been forgotten.

1:07:34

But actually, at the time, he was in this kind of comical tennis match of letters with a character called Henry Moore.

Now, a lot of listeners probably haven't heard of more.

I mean, if you're into theology and so forth, OK.

But.

But he's largely forgotten.

1:07:50

And when you read him, he looks a bit of a comic character.

Now.

He was absolutely furious about the idea that the pineal gland could be the seat of the soul.

It was undignified.

It was.

It was slimy.

1:08:07

It was insufficient.

It was, it was not that, you know, the pinnacle of God's creation and so forth.

And yeah, he talks about this little sprunt, bulbous lump of matter.

Should we not laugh at this rather than bother to confute it?

And he's constantly writing to poor old Descartes.

1:08:23

He's very polite and kind of courteous, but he's probably thinking, oh, Christ, not this idiot again.

But the fact is that although it now looks that way to us, Moore was hugely influential in Britain.

You know, it's very easy to kind of see when history has been written by the winning side, someone like that fall into obscurity.

1:08:44

But how things actually felt and seemed on the ground when you were arguing theology, philosophy, medicine in in the 17th century, it was different.

Moore was was powerful and influential.

So yeah, I'm sure he swayed lots of people.

1:08:59

They would be reading him far more and talking about him far more than Descartes in, in the 17th century.

So, yeah, it, it, it didn't, it didn't look like it could do the job.

And I suppose it brings us back to that, you know, lost or eroding organ of the soul, the wonderful net, which which looked like it could do the job, except it only looked like that, ironically enough.

1:09:27

As the.

Days grow shorter, and the winter nights draw near.

The chill in the air invites us to gather closer to the fire, where the flickering flames dance like spectors in the dark.

It's during these colder months that our spectral journey deepens, revealing even more chilling tales and unsolved enigmas.

1:09:49

And now, dear listeners, it's the perfect time to become an integral part of our ghostly congregation.

With the night's lengthening and the shadows growing, we need your support more than ever to keep our supernatural flames burning bright.

1:10:06

But fear not, for there are a myriad of ways you can help sustain our haunted explorations.

Firstly, have you ever considered Treated our podcast to a virtual coffee?

Imagine it.

A humble offering to fuel our relentless pursuit of haunted histories.

1:10:25

As we delve into the unknown, simply head over to ko-fi.com/haunted History Chronicles and join us for a caffeine infused seance.

Your support helps keep the fire burning, allowing us to continue unearthing the darkest corners of history.

1:10:44

But that's merely the beginning of our spectral soiree.

For those intrepid souls yearning for deeper communion with the paranormal, consider joining our exclusive Patreon family.

And here's some truly exciting news from the beginning of October through to the end of December, as the winter winds howl and the nights grow long.

1:11:07

All.

Patreon.

Supporters on any tier will be gifted with bonus daily podcasts.

Yes, you heard that right.

Daily doses of the supernatural to accompany you through the shorter days and colder nights.

1:11:23

It's a veritable paranormal advent calendar for your soul, making this the perfect time to join the Patreon community.

So why hesitate?

Journey forth to Patreon.

The links to the Haunted History Chronicles Patreon site is found in the podcast description notes or via the website.

1:11:43

Become a Patreon today and let our tales of the eerie and unexplained be your nightly companions.

But the spirit of generosity lingers still, if you seek to flaunt your allegiance to the podcast in more tangible ways, why not venture into our newly unearthed merchandise crypt?

1:12:05

From mugs.

That whisper their secrets to clothing that echoes with ghostly laughter.

The shop is a sanctuary for the discerning paranormal aficionado.

Again, you can find links to the Tea Public Shop via the website or podcast description notes so that you can traverse the Haunted History Chronicle Shop to adorn yourself with our spectral regalia.

1:12:30

Whether it's bestowing a virtual coffee, joining our Spectral Society on Patreon, or donning Haunted History Chronicles apparel, your support keeps the ethereal flames alight.

Every spectral contribution fuels the pursuit of unearthly truths.

1:12:48

So heed the call de listeners.

The links to our spectral sanctuaries await in the shadows of the podcast description notes or via the website or social media platforms.

Dare to embrace the unknown, to journey deeper into the veiled corridors of history.

1:13:06

For only together can we keep the ghostly embers glowing, illuminating the darkness with tales untold.

Now, as the fire crackles and the wind howls outside, let us return to the mysteries that beckon from beyond the veil.

1:13:25

What spectres await?

What secrets lie dormant, waiting to be unearthed?

Let us venture forth, for the journey into the unknown has only just begun.

So what were some of the risks then that, you know, these early scientists and thinkers who were attempting to explore the this connection between the body and the soul?

1:13:52

What kinds of risks did they face?

Well, I suppose you know, most extremely to be to be executed to to be tortured before that perhaps.

But yes, Avitus was burned apparently with Greenwood.

You know, the burning of witches and heretics was often kind of softened or cut short by them hanging gunpowder around their necks.

1:14:16

So they would basically blow up before they they've been in the fire very long.

But it was said that Calvin used Greenwood to prolong the whole experience for Civitas in in 1552.

You you have a thinker like Pomponazzi in the early 16th century.

1:14:35

I think it's about 1518 coming up with ideas that again, really just draw on the the realities of the Old Testament Bible and yeah, you know, seeing the soul as as a substance, as a thing touching on these dangerous areas.

1:14:55

You have a a French and sorry, he gets prescribed heavily by the by the church.

So in the early 16th century, this furious clamp down on what you can say about the soul, what you can't say, what you can't talk about, what you can't write about.

There was a character called Sharon, now completely forgotten in France in the early 17th century, but again, very heretical ideas about.

1:15:18

Well, you know, if you say the soul is a substance, then it is a substance.

It's a thing.

You can say it's very rarefied, it's very vaporous, it's very gaseous, but it is still a thing.

And if it's that, then it is matter.

So you've got that very tricky interface.

1:15:34

Then what's fascinated me most about this is zone where matter and spirit fight, wriggle, blur, blend, melt into each other or or refuse to do so at times.

And Sharon again was was hugely dangerous figure.

1:15:53

And yeah, other people now forgotten.

Sir John Davies was busy debating the soul.

You know, if the soul was a seat of reason, why were old people sometimes senile?

Why were some people always mentally impaired?

What was the status of their soul and so forth?

1:16:11

So, yeah, I mean, you had the risk of your books being burned, yourself being burned, your books being banned and so forth.

I mean, obviously, you know, the church was by a very, very long way the biggest employer in in Christendom.

1:16:28

So it had all sorts of powers to make your life miserable if it wasn't going to actually kill you.

So just coming back to something that you kind of lightly touched upon earlier, do you want to just explain how, you know, contemporary views on gender, particularly, you know, concerning women, how that was influenced then by the perceived nature of the soul?

1:16:50

You know, how was it considered compared to, you know, men's capacity, for example?

Yeah.

So to to re emphasize, because I think this is not a quality of the soul, which which is remembered so much now are considered synonymous with the soul, but the soul was the sea of reason.

1:17:09

So I suppose the most sort of bold way to capture this is that in conception, the the man and the woman, both of them sexually were required for conception of a fetus and actually mutual orgasm was supposedly required cosmopolitan with this, I suppose.

1:17:27

But yeah, it's it was the case for almost anybody who commented on it that the male in sex provided reason and the female provided matter.

So you've got this forming soul that's the rational principle, but also forms the whole body through heat largely it's an important factor will come to and the woman provides the the matter.

1:17:53

And this went right down the food chain into farming that it was believed that the right testicle produced boys and the left testicle produced girls and farmers were said to tie up one or the other to get a male or female, you know, sheep cow, what have you.

1:18:11

So this was, you know, quite hard headed medical staff.

If we go right back to the beginning of the story in terms of medicine, science and loosely religion.

Aristotle, as was so much else, was the culprit.

And Aristotle's views, and he was kind of the first scientist, arguably his views on all of organic matter, plants, animals, humans, were that everything was an ascending continuum of heat, so that the higher up you've got, the more complex, the more heat.

1:18:45

Now, that would apply for him between humans and animals, as animals and humans going up the scale, but he would also differentiate, and so did his followers in the relations with a vengeance between women and men.

And there's a kind of insidious appeal, I think, for misogynists in the period to this idea of heat as the central feature of organized biological systems.

1:19:15

The actual phrase half baked, we don't know.

We'll probably never know exactly where it came from, but that pretty much captures Aristotle's view of women.

Women were men that hadn't.

Yeah, women were men that hadn't quite made it that far.

1:19:31

So they had insufficient heat to, for example, drive their genitals out of their bodies, as men's were, and they were generally colder.

So, you know the the idea that women tolerate cold slightly less well than men.

1:19:47

Perhaps it's true, perhaps not.

But there's a certain possible empirical little germ there around which they built these fiercely misogynistic beliefs that women didn't have souls.

This was said by educated Christians at the time.

1:20:03

Raleigh quotes this, Johnson quotes.

It's quoted in plays in the early 17th century.

There was a whole dissertation, a whole book published in Germany in 1595, which boldly asserted that women were not actually human.

1:20:19

And this will be based on the soul.

The other angle of attack for misogynist, of course, came from Genesis.

So there you've got in.

I think it's 1.27 God breathing a soul into Adam, but not clearly breathing a soul into Eve.

1:20:40

So this leaves all sorts of room for argument, derision, doubt.

Possibly, you know, he makes an extra soul out of Adam's soul or out of Adam for Eve, who knows?

But, but it's all rather murky as far as that goes.

1:20:55

So that's the other kind of textual authority.

And then you get into the whole kind of business of heat conception and it's hard to really get across how powerful it was, almost as powerful, I think, as the the whole kind of metaphors of evolution, metaphors of DNA, to say that in conception, the the male seed was reason was the soul, the female seed was raw matter, that this was, you know, very powerful as a metaphor as well as a theory.

1:21:33

It was used over and over again in simile metaphor.

Dunn used it over and over in his poems and his letters.

It was kind of taken for granted basically.

So, yeah, people would doubt that women had souls at all.

Or more insidiously, I think Dunn in his poems, in his letters and in his sermons.

1:21:53

So quite late on, you know, from 1615 to his last sermons in 1631, Dunn was playing around with the idea that women's souls didn't really fire infuse fill galvanized their bodies in the way that men's didn't.

1:22:11

And I suppose if you want to be sort of blunt about this in a way, he's drawing just on the, we would now say rather, you know, positive quality of women that on the whole, they're less violent and they're less physically aggressive than men.

You know, we put this down to differences in hormones, testosterone and so on.

1:22:31

But Dunn, I think he's drawing on that idea of heat again, you know, that the soul really should fire, should spark, that the hottest kind of soul is, is the most powerful.

And so, yeah, he he has this kind of Gray area which is, is more insidious in some ways because he's highly respected thinker.

1:22:50

And it, it, it doesn't sound so kind of stupid and comically just saying women don't have souls at all.

But yeah, kind of cast doubt on them and on the power of them.

And I suppose once he's doing that in terms of the Physiology of the soul, he is also calling into question female reason, which, you know, that was taken for granted.

1:23:10

Women didn't go to school.

Women didn't really need to, you know, be educated.

Obviously they didn't have any educational roles in the church or in schools or universities.

And someone like Margaret Cavendish was was quite an anomaly in the in the late 17th century for daring to try and educate herself.

1:23:28

You know, I don't know if you want to elaborate any, any further on something that you've you've touched upon already.

But, you know, you were talking about the concept of the soul in relation to those deemed mentally ill or those elderly.

And I don't know if you want to say anything further from what you said before on, on that topic in terms of how that reflected, you know, the broader societal attitudes towards the thinking around reason and intellect.

1:23:53

I don't know if you have anything else that you wanted to add.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Now, just briefly on that, because it is a fascinating area.

People who were mentally handicapped or who were senile through age, they were a problem.

You know, Sir John Davis was bothered about this.

1:24:10

He's got this long poem on the soul where he tackles this at great length and he he clearly isn't comfortable with it.

That if the soul is a sea of reason and the soul is supposed to be, how would you put it?

It's supposed to be impervious to all the changes of matter that afflict the body, Then what's going on here?

1:24:29

This, this shouldn't be happening.

They're a little bit bothered about children as well.

That didn't seem very reasonable at a certain age.

They talked about that.

But they used a fascinating phrase about the mentally handicapped.

They talked about half souls.

This is this is literally the phrase they use over and over again.

1:24:46

I mean, Locke, John Locke, who's an interesting, you know, philosopher and thinker, but was also a medical doctor and worked with Robert Boyle quite a lot.

He really wondered at times at least kind of debated the question if mentally handicapped people were a different species.

And then you've got just quickly to touch on this, the whole kind of question about reason and intellect.

1:25:08

And the soul is the seat of of reason done over and over again.

And I think this counts for Digby as well, given what we've said about him.

They really didn't like the idea that they had the same soul or the same level of soul, the same Physiology of soul, you know, the heat, the fire, the the fiery hot spirits of blood as somebody they consider damn stupid.

1:25:31

And they were obviously, you know, dumb generated a lot of imitators.

So it's quite embarrassing to think this person is trying to be me, you know, And he was highly fashionable and he was, you know, he was the one that led all the others.

And he clearly in a lot of his writings makes it clear he despises these kind of courtly fobs, these fashionable people who think they're thinkers and are nothing of the sort.

1:25:58

So yeah, he he, he talks about them again, as not having sufficient heat, not having sufficient fire that their soul smokes through their body.

This is partly where the title comes from.

He talks about these kind of dullards, you know, they're not considered mentally handicapped.

1:26:14

They're just considered rather stupid and their soul smoking rather than firing through the body.

So it's a kind of continuum, if you like, you know, from radical incapacity to people are just not very bright.

How did the discovery then in the study of DMT in the in the 20th and the 21st centuries, you know, reignite this debate about the connection between the the body, the brain and the soul?

1:26:41

Yeah.

So there were various kind of forays into the area of what are differently called hallucinogens, psychedelics, various other names, you know, these mind altering chemicals where people really think that they're in another dimension and something real is going on.

1:27:02

You know, it isn't just a hallucination in terms of some purely subjective stuff with no objective reality.

And LSD has been a big contender for this.

Mescaline ayahuasca in the South American tribal traditions and DMTA big one.

1:27:25

And the main sort of periods of interest it seems were the 50s and 60s.

They were using working with DMT because they they thought this could treat schizophrenia and they believed at times that actually schizophrenics were over producing DMT.

1:27:46

This being, you know, an endogenous natural chemical in the body.

But if you've got too much of it, you start seeing crazy things and doing crazy things.

So I think they actually gave DMT to some of the mental health nurses to kind of put them on the other side, you know, to help them empathize.

1:28:04

Obviously, these are fairly radical times.

Once you get into the 60s, they're doing a lot of interesting things in all sorts of areas.

And unfortunately, once you've had this Hungarian Zai guy, Zara SZARA exploring quite heavily with DMT in the east and then the West, you get this moral panic breaking out.

1:28:30

I mean, obviously, you know, we know about all the moral panics around just stuff like cannabis seems comical now when if you smell smoke out in the streets or parks, it's much more likely to be cannabis than tobacco.

And a lot of people are more disgusted by tobacco than by cannabis.

But yeah, these moral panics were absolutely crazy.

1:28:48

Almost sent The Rolling Stones to jail.

And once you got into the hallucinogens, I think, you know, very conservative mentalities, particularly perhaps in America, were very unnerved by these different visions, these different views of the lack of control, I think in all sorts of levels.

1:29:06

So you've got this panic going on in the media and negative sides of things like DMT and LSD coming out much more than the positive sides.

It certainly seems that people can have very bad experiences and very, very powerfully good ones.

1:29:25

They're powerful always, but but powerful in different directions depending on factors like the person, the setting, and the people who are working with them.

So the bad stuff really flourished in the media.

And next thing you know, I think it's around 1970, the American government is putting these under controlled substances, schedule one, the most restricted drugs.

1:29:48

And yeah, it it Strassmann makes a very powerful case.

Rick Strassmann, his book on DMT for the fact that this is absolutely crazy.

This is one of the biggest kind of discontinuities in medical science in the 20th century or 20th across 21st, that you've got all this revolutionary stuff happening, all these new possibilities opening up.

1:30:13

What's the role of DMT, What's the role of the pineal gland and so forth.

And then suddenly, bang, shut, silence, you know, all this huge.

It's a bit like, you know, you're sort of halfway through the theory of evolution and then bang, that's the end of it.

You can't talk about it anymore.

So yeah, Strassmann very boldly takes it up in a long career beginning in I think the late 60s, early 70s, where he starts off just generally interested in the brain, interested in the pineal, quite interested in melatonin.

1:30:42

But he starts, you know, narrowing down the melatonin is not that interesting.

And he gets to DMT and they're very courageous and and just patient.

You know, you've got to go through this labyrinth of bureaucratic legal tangles to, to get the permission to do studies at all.

But he's been doing them and really powerful, powerful, suggestive research, so.

1:31:05

Just to kind of help make it explicitly clear then for for those that aren't familiar, do you want to just explain exactly what DMT is?

Because I think for many, they may not know, they may not know, and they may not understand exactly what it is.

It's the only psychedelic that the body actually produces itself.

1:31:25

So it's dimethyltryptamine.

I think it is has various different tryptamines.

Serotonin.

It's in the kind of category of serotonin in the brain.

And what Strassmann makes a very strong case for is the curious way that the brain looks after or favours DMT, that you've got this blood brain barrier, which acts as a kind of security system to protect the brain and the psyche, if you like, from stressful chemicals.

1:32:03

But DMT crosses the blood brain barrier and it seems to use the pineal cland as its agent of Physiology, if you like, in ways that that nothing else in the body does.

1:32:21

That it seems to have particularly powerful role in the fetus not long after conception.

A powerful role he thinks is A rush of it probably in birth, which is is fascinating for all sorts of reasons.

1:32:37

I mean, he makes a interesting case that if you're not born through the canal, if you're born by caesarean, which I think apparently it's the majority of births in, oh Lord, either Scandinavia or at least one of the Scandinavian countries.

1:32:54

It might be Sweden.

But I was studying this for the reasons lately and yeah, you know, it's a very different business being born through the vaginal canal with all the kind of the chemical makeup that you get in that messy process that becomes you and the DMT.

Or if you're born being cut out of the the womb, which sometimes has to be done.

1:33:14

You know, it's an essential procedure for some women.

So he thinks that this, you know, might determine your psyche later on in life.

And remember, but and then of course the whole thing with very powerful near death experiences that many people have had when they've been clinically dead, come back, had these very powerful, often usually positive experiences of the other side of relatives reaching out to them from the other side.

1:33:39

A tunnel of light, a sort of epiphany, the, the holism of of all of creation, sense of love, a sense of a powerful kind of knowing, loving presence and so forth.

And he thinks DMT is involved with this as well.

He he makes fascinating suggestive arguments about the fact that you've got this very long standing Buddhist, I think particularly Tibetan Buddhist belief in the 49 first 49 days after conception because they are talking about reincarnation.

1:34:12

So you know, it's the 49th day that the soul comes from the bardo or wherever you know, and is reincarnated into the fetus.

He makes the point that the pineal forms itself separately from the roof of the mouth.

1:34:29

It's not actually made of brain tissue.

It's is made of mouth tissue, I think on the 49th day and the 49th day is when you get clear gender in a fetus.

So there's a lot of stuff going on, you know, from very different directions, different traditions and disciplines.

1:34:45

Around this 49th day is certainly the very least needs a lot more a lot more research I think.

So in what ways then has has it contributed then to this renewed interest in, you know, what the soul might be?

1:35:03

Well, yeah, I mean, put it more basically than that.

I think is is kind of fought back against the very, very powerful general belief that there is no soul, that there is just consciousness as a kind of steam of a factory process through the chimney.

1:35:20

You know that feeling radically that you know who you are and it feels like this to be that person.

You know, that's consciousness that that this is it is purely the brain.

You know, it's purely organic and it will die with the brain.

1:35:37

And there's so much evidence more and more every week, every month.

I think particularly Seminole is even Alexander's book on his near death experience and when he should have been completely flatlined cerebrally, but was having all sorts of amazing epiphanies on the other side before he came out of this coma.

1:35:56

And you look at the reactions to his book from some of the mainstream.

I mean, these are pretty much libelous or slanderous.

And I think it shows you the rigidity of thoughts about consciousness that that has come to dominate.

1:36:12

You know, it's just it's basically become its own religion as this is very narrow scientistic view of consciousness.

And, you know, even Alexander is the modern heretic.

And you don't burn the modern heritage, but you embarrass them, which in modern terms is about as bad as it can get.

1:36:28

Or you try to.

I think he's he's kind of won the case because he's sold millions and millions of books and changed millions of people's lives.

But yeah, I think DMT has has made this case that that that there is a soul and that, you know, DMT and the pineal are like those older organs of the soul in a very different way, in lots of ways.

1:36:47

But there's a broad similarity.

They are the gateway into other realities.

But what's very different about DMT and the pineal is that they seem to be the gateway into realities that you can enter and come back from, you know, during your life.

That's the point of people who personally just smoke DMT, take LSDI mean, Chris Batch has been a courageous researcher in the field of DMT, sorry, LSD research, and seems to have really gone to other dimensions and very numerous strange places in about, I think, 20 years of taking high doses of LSD.

1:37:25

And yeah, I think as I've been saying throughout Christianity has got a lot of things wrong.

And As for afterlives, there isn't simply a heaven, a hell, maybe a purgatory.

There are many, many dimensions.

1:37:41

There are many, many levels.

And once more, the Buddhists seem to have this best.

You keep slowly ascending up the levels and eventually, when you've kind of really won out and done everything right, you just dissolve into, you know, the general being of, of the highest levels of reality.

1:37:58

And you don't bother reincarnating.

You don't need to reincarnate anymore.

So if you haven't got to learn anything else, but yeah, over and over again in Strassmann's volunteers who are taking these high levels injections of DMT is very, very powerful sense that they are somewhere real.

1:38:18

They are with highly superior, highly evolved intelligences who have got vastly better levels of technology and living than than human beings have.

And yeah, strange range of beings that that they see.

1:38:35

We'll probably come to that in in a moment.

But certainly they really seem to be somewhere else.

So the use of the word psychedelic rather than hallucinogen is one that Strassen, I think rightly favors.

Psychedelic, you know, revealing the soul is is, I think, a key label here.

1:38:53

How?

Do the experiences then reported by these clinical volunteers under the influence of of DMT?

How does it compare, then, with these historical accounts of spiritual or mystical experiences?

I think people on the fringe of Christian, what's the word on the fringe of the the mainstream church in say the 16th or 17th century, and people like Teresa Avila, you know, having these involuntary levitation experiences, people who, yeah, their mystical experiences, which were viewed with ambivalence by the mainstream church, people like Jacob, Burma, for example, you know, they seem absolutely convinced that they have been to heaven, the other side, some higher reality.

1:39:40

And they're troublesome, you know, because they believe too intensely.

They're not the money makers, the bureaucrats, the time servers.

They're people like Sevitus or the Quakers and so forth.

They have that sense of overwhelming reality.

They have that sense of overwhelming epiphany.

I suppose you could take it right back to the Saint Paul and his, you know, soul of Damascus conversion that just one moment you suddenly your life changes completely, radically, unimaginably, ineffably, in so far as you can't really convey this in words to people forever.

1:40:11

Everything is different and.

It varies.

With DMT you can have in a pretty threatening experience an interesting character called Graham Hancock who's written some really well changing books and I think some of it's been done as documentaries.

He's talking in a series of dialogues about DMTA conference that was held with people like McKenna Strassman and Hancock a while ago.

1:40:36

He's saying last time he smoked DMT, he got some really threatening beings, entities on the other side that he didn't want to get back with again.

So there can be quite a lot of menace.

It should be.

So I'm sure no one's going to go out and stop smoking DMT immediately after listening to this.

1:40:53

But apparently trying to smoke DMT is extremely difficult.

It's very effective, but it stinks like burning plastic.

So it's it's not practically a very easy thing to do.

This is one reason why Strassman's doing all clinically with with injections in two into the blood and they slowly increases the level to higher doses.

1:41:14

But yeah, they they seem to be in other dimensions.

There's a range of different beings.

I know it seems comical given their status in sort of modern Disney or if you like, but elves are reported over and over again, not necessarily titchy ones, quite quite big ones.

1:41:30

There's scenarios rather like alien abduction experiences, people being probed, examined, used for scientific knowledge, sometimes having stuff implanted in them.

There's oddly kind of insectoid creatures, mantises, I think spiders, reptilian figures, snake like figures have been described weirdly a gay morally perhaps cacti like figures and perhaps sort of close to that stick stick figures.

1:42:01

But yeah, the positive experiences are incredibly positive.

There seem to be more of those so far that I've come across and they they are very powerful.

They, they have actually powerful psychological benefit for people who've suffered abuse early in their lives, perhaps, you know, as children.

1:42:21

And they've been kind of forcing this away and actually suffering physical symptoms because of what what happens in very long time ago.

I've not really resolved that.

And they, they find, you know, very rapid, very powerful progress in a few DMT sessions compared to perhaps, you know, week after week after week sitting with some ordinary psychiatrist.

1:42:43

So yeah, it's very much a sense of there are other dimensions.

These people, these things, these entities are real and over and over again, they're very far above us.

They're very far above us.

It's it's often said that, you know, the volunteer, when they get into those others I mentioned, they feel like a child, they feel like a child.

1:43:04

They're not sort of derided or despised.

They're just treated as, you know, having a radically lower status intrinsically so.

What are some of the, you know, the key findings then from these recent studies on consciousness, you know, especially the the the exploring of out of body experiences and near death experiences.

1:43:22

How do those studies relate to, you know, historical notions of the soul's existence and its relationship with the body one?

One fascinating thing that I think unites Strassmann's volunteers and DMT experiences with one of the most important characters in other dimensional research.

1:43:43

And this is Robert Monroe, who I think we've talked about before.

But for other listeners, I'd strongly recommend reading the first of Monroe's three books on his out of body experiences.

I think that one's journey's out of the body, but it's it's the first one where he is having perfectly ordinary life.

1:44:00

He's a successful businessman, radio producer, what have you in America with a wife and family.

I think this is the 50s.

And suddenly at night, he's having these awful kind of weird vibrations go through.

He, he thinks he's dying.

He sees something very wrong with him.

1:44:16

He goes to the doctor, doesn't seem anything wrong with him.

This keeps happening.

And then presently he, he kind of breaks through this transitional phase and he goes out of his body.

He's looking down at himself in the bed.

He's presently going through the walls, the doors, the windows, as though they're kind of made of Jelly.

1:44:33

And he's flying over the city.

He's entering the houses of people, sometimes ones that he knows, sometimes ones that he doesn't, and he's getting verification from friends that, Yep, you were there in the house.

I don't know how the hell you got there the other day.

1:44:49

The point I'm interested in here is that in Strassman studies, repeatedly, I'm not sure how universally, but very generally, people are having this transitional buzz, hum, vibration, noise, and then they pop through.

1:45:04

So it's it's kind of intriguingly empirical.

There is an actual empirical process.

I mean, when they talk about the near death experiences with the tunnel of light, people have plausibly hypothesized this as a kind of membrane that you're going through into another dimension.

1:45:20

You can't just simply do that easily.

So this kind of passage opens for you to go through.

And certainly there seems to be this empirical process with these consistent buzzings, hummings, vibrations and a sort of rush as well.

1:45:36

It's a rush that, again, people struggle to describe the experience happens quite fast in a lot of cases.

I suppose the oldest kind of, you know, religious traditions, medieval and early modern, you've got this, this concept of the ecstasy.

1:45:54

You know, ecstasy is a famous poem by done called the ecstasy.

And it means out of the body.

It means to, you know, have the soul pop out of the body as as we've said, I I think people who who did this kind of thing seems to this kind of they levitated in front of large crowds of people.

1:46:11

They seem to go into weird trances.

They bilocated, they Tri located they they were not trusted.

You know, they were they were dangerous for whatever reasons.

So mainstream religion didn't really like them.

But surely you are having some kind of out of body experience if you try locate or even just bilocate and you're, you know, you're supposedly there in Italy in your nunnery or monastery and then you're off in America giving comfort to the heathen, you know, with witnesses backing, backing this up.

1:46:43

So I, I think clearly there is, you know, a, a, a real centre of objective consciousness that is independent of the body that can crossover and come back sometimes.

And yeah, the Pineal DMT seemed to be gateways for this to happen outside of the the fairly minority near the experiences which don't happen too often, but we've certainly got a big a big literature of those.

1:47:12

And again.

Just kind of coming back to you, something that you briefly talked about earlier, you've spoken about how, you know, Strassmann suggests that DMT plays this this role in these naturally occurring mystical experiences, you know, birth, death.

How does that idea then kind of intersect with, you know, again, the historical views of the soul's journey in the at the beginning and the end of life?

1:47:37

Well.

They, they did, they were very concerned in Dunn's time, Shakespeare's time, about how the soul got into the body.

They talked a little bit about the soul leaving the body.

And I think there's evidence that people in modern clinical settings or just, you know, people watching a dying relative have actually seen something pretty definite leave the body, leave the the head.

1:47:58

Actually, in certain kind of extreme Tibetan Mystics and monks can allegedly just meditate themselves to death by getting to a certain state where the soul just pops out at the top of the skull.

But they were most troubled, actually, in Dunn's time.

And Raleigh was a big figure in this debate about how the soul got into the body.

1:48:18

I mean, taking us back here a little bit, it was, it was a tricky question because obviously what mattered about the soul for most people was sin.

You know, there was no question that you inherited this sin of Adam and Eve and it was carried right down to the present day.

1:48:34

So was the soul transmitted from the first souls of Adam and Eve all the way down the line in a very, very long way, even though they were pretty faulty concept of time and and history in in those days?

Or was it infused separately by God?

1:48:51

So there were problems with both of these.

Some people just thought the soul should sort of wear out if it had been transmitted, you know, like wax from 1 candle light from another candle to another over and over again.

And it just, it was substance and it was going to wear out by however many generations.

The problem with infusion was that, OK, they kind of thought that a fetus got sort of formation and identity and distinctness again, probably around that 49 day period.

1:49:17

So they could kind of believe that the soul was organizing and informing the fetus at point and therefore God had popped one in.

But they didn't really like the idea of God having to do this all the time.

You know, it was undignified, it was unseemly, not least because you've got some people, let us whisper this, but having it away on a Sabbath when they should have been in the church, so that God was at the bidding of the gracious and wanton idolaters, you know, who were busy lying in bed on a Sunday morning enjoying themselves and having to perform this servile labor.

1:49:52

There was another theory to get around this, whereby God had created all the souls that would ever be needed at the beginning of time and stored them up in some big warehouse.

Raleigh didn't like this idea because he said that souls could not lie around there sleeping like door mice.

I think he offended his very sort of vigorous masculine persona probably.

1:50:11

But yeah, the other problem with infusing the soul, if God did that kind of, you know, every time 1 was needed and it kept him very busy, I would have thought was that he was infusing sin.

And that couldn't be right because sin was humanity's fault, wasn't it?

How would?

You say then that you know, Strassman's work has really influenced the the scientific community's approach to to studying consciousness, I think.

1:50:34

It's early days, yeah.

I mean, I'll be honest and say, I, I, I don't know enough about how much his work spread out.

He seems to be the pioneering figure after all this was first shut down in the, in the late 60s, early 70s.

He seems to be the, the daring pioneer here.

1:50:52

And it's interesting that he's, you know, he's Jewish and I think he's got an interest in trying to map some of this research back onto epiphanies and spiritual visions in the, in the Old Testament.

I'm not really qualified to talk about that, but I know he's written a book about it.

I've, I've noticed that whereby you get someone like even Alexander, frankly, so many very serious, educated, respectable figures in the paranormal community being just libeled, slandered, lied about pretty much on Wikipedia.

1:51:24

Strassman doesn't get that treatment.

So whether it's just that they're frightened that he's a bit heavyweight and he would, you know, bring in the lawyers, I don't know.

But he's given a fairly neutral treatment there, which, you know, everything about Wikipedia is people's first point of contact for so many subjects, for better or or worse.

1:51:41

At the moment, I think he's he's in the company of fellow pioneers.

I mean, people like McKenna, who's been involved in, you know, psychedelic research.

And his brother before he died, was very heavily involved in pioneering LSD.

And it's suggesting that, you know, mushrooms and psilocybin have been big factors in history.

1:52:01

Back to the The Cave days.

Who else?

Hancock is is a figure that plays a big part in the DMT dialogues along with Strassmann and and others.

But it's an interestingly kind of mixed bag, you know, from all sorts of different disciplines, medicine, philosophy, consciousness studies, and someone like Hancock who's who's wonderful but quite difficult to to categorize perhaps.

1:52:30

I think a lot of these people are just people are quite brave in that they they force themselves through into these other dimensions if that's where they're really going by taking LSD, taking DMT, taking Alehuaska, which is the, you know, traditional way of doing it and haven't touched on as much.

1:52:48

But these, you know, these tribes in the Amazon and elsewhere very comfortable with this, you know, going into the other dimension coming back, it's, it's fairly ordinary part of life.

And I think these people without the grand churches, the nice velvet robes, the big salaries, they've got the juice much better than than Christianity yet again.

1:53:10

So would you say that you, you, you see a, you know, direct lineage between the, the historical search for the soul and then today scientific efforts to understand consciousness?

I think there's a lot of discontinuities, to be honest there because, you know, I, I really, I, I think you can always find somebody or something in Christianity that will give you an element of what really is reality, what really is on the other side, what really is happening after death with reincarnation and so forth.

1:53:43

But, but Christianity just completely hopeless of reincarnation.

There was a bit of a vogue for it in the time of Shakespeare's 12th night.

And John Dunn wrote a poem called Metal Psychosis, and it kind of came and went very quickly in a, in a short space of time either side of Elizabeth.

1:53:58

But yeah, I mean, Christianity is just obsessed with sin, you know, And what's really disturbing about this is apart from all the misogyny, just everybody just gets whacked with this stick of sin.

And it's a very convenient, powerful tool for ministers, popes, bishops, etcetera, to either make a lot of money or just enjoy feeling superior.

1:54:24

And when we look at, you know, how badly the Christian Church has been exposed as just festering nest of hypocrisy.

I mean, perhaps more Catholics than Protestants, but there's been foul abuse scandals, you know, on either side exposed now for, what, 30 odd years?

1:54:43

And yeah, I think just the ordinary stuff about sin really is just such a, a miserable core of your theology philosophy.

I suppose you've got the stuff early on about love.

You know, there it is in in Christ's sermons and in various letters in the New Testament that there is this feeling of love.

1:55:06

But it seems to get forced out by the bad stuff as time goes on.

I mean, you know, people have made the point that if someone as passionate and powerful and charismatic and serious as Christ would have come back, they just crucify him straight off today.

No swear.

I mean, how much of, you know, Christ's love can you see?

1:55:22

And Donald Trump, Because if Donald Trump wins the election again, it will be down to American Christianity largely.

So, yeah, I think, I mean, Christianity is full of fault lines.

They don't really get ghosts.

1:55:37

They don't really get poltergeist.

They're very unlikely to be very helpful to you if you've got that kind of a problem.

And they certainly do not get reincarnation.

And basically they've they've, you know, reified into solid stone a set of beliefs which I believe and with very good reason, and having studied this very thoroughly for a long time, are wrong if they've got it wrong about heaven, about hell, and about just being there forever and ever.

1:56:03

Reincarnation is almost certainly the the reality of what happens to to souls after death.

I think what's what's fascinating about one of the areas I covered in the book and didn't quite understand so well the first time around is that they talked about the, the heart an awful lot.

1:56:24

The heart turns up a lot in the Bible, a hell of a lot.

The brain turns up hardly ever, or I think perhaps not at all.

But anyway, the heart has won out no sweat.

And they talk about the thinking heart.

So if the soul is in the heart, this makes sense.

You know, the soul's a sea of reason.

1:56:40

The heart thinks and they, they take this very seriously and they've got the Bible as an authority for this.

The thinking heart is in the is in the Bible a lot.

And the question with reincarnation is you've got these few kids and a very, very small number of adults who remember their past life.

1:56:58

The kids tend to forget it or not care about after about age 8 or so, very tiny handful of adults.

And I did actually have a colleague of this character remember these past lives all their life for some reason.

But on the whole, most people got no idea.

So you can't really blame people think what the hell you are about reincarnation.

1:57:15

You know, I'm May, I was born, I'm going to die, That's it.

And this is how it feels.

And there is almost no indication.

And yet, you know, time and again we meet people, two brothers, two sisters, two members of the same family brought up apparently and exactly, almost exactly the same circumstances.

1:57:32

They might actually be twins, in fact.

And they are radically different in their character and behaviour.

They're extremely kind of comically different.

You know, they don't look alike, they don't behave alike.

And I do suspect actually that the stuff that you learn in one incarnation on various previous incarnations, I think it goes into the right brain.

1:57:53

I think it's there in that kind of intuitive, ineffable, non analytic side of the brain of consciousness of if you like the soul.

And when they were talking about the heart and thinking heart, I think perhaps that's what they were talking about.

1:58:09

You know, that is not so much a location.

It's, it's a mode of being.

It's a mode of knowing the world, which, yeah, you've got a kind of a hunch about something.

And perhaps actually that comes from what you learned.

And that's where you've carried over and where you've actually got some continuity of self from, from one life to the next.

1:58:29

So I think that, you know, the new version of the book, which is what, if anyone wants to read it, they'll be buying unless they've got a big fat research library to borrow it from.

That book changed a lot from the the first version.

And I think the whole kind of explosion of fascination of the embodied soul of having these epiphanies of spirit, you know, God breathing himself into your heart and so forth, that that story still stands very well.

1:58:59

And I tried to bring out some more of the positive sides of those physiological epiphanies, if you like.

I mean, people actually talk about Christ's passion and the fact that obviously, you know, dying on the cross there and terrible kind of physiological trauma.

1:59:14

He is then bestowing grace on the sinners of generations from Adam and Eve and onwards to to save them.

And you you'll get people talking very medically.

I think this guy called Robert Rollock, Scottish Christian, who talks about the fact that only because Christ felt so passionate and his blood and his spirits were so fiercely heated, did he actually come to a state of Physiology sufficient to catalyze grace.

1:59:42

That's quite a big deal.

You know, those, those few moments of fiery agony in his heart.

For Christians, I don't believe this nonsense, but you know, if you do believe it is a big deal for all generations onwards, that that could only happen because of his particular Physiology on the cross.

So I tried to bring out all that kind of fascinating side of it, but then you get the slow sort of erosion.

2:00:01

And giving up trying to find this distinct organ of the soul.

Soul is really a difficult word.

We can't keep coming up with new words and inventing neologisms that that don't stick.

So I think we're stuck with soul.

But we we've got to get away from this idea of sin.

2:00:17

We've got to get away from this idea of, you know, it's simply going to heaven and hell, heaven or hell and that being the end of it.

And I think it's something independent of the body that does seem to have these intriguing relationships with DMT, with the pineal glands.

2:00:35

And we didn't quite touch on this, but the fact that people in out people who've had near death experiences and out of body experiences, blind people have seen things that that is worth looking into more so to speak.

And in, in some, I need to get into this more, but in some of Strassman's studies already, he seems to indicate that people have got their eyes shut a lot of the time and they're having these visions, experiences and other dimensions, but when they open their eyes, they're often still seeing much of the same thing.

2:01:08

So it's as though there is something there that does transcend the limitations of the body.

It's able to go out of it.

And I, I try to touch more.

If I do a third version of the book, I don't think I'll have time, but I love to put stress and stuff in a third version.

2:01:25

But I really wanted to get in the reincarnation.

And I think I tried to make it also something of a personal journey because the book ends talking about the the deaths of my mother and father.

And, you know, when my father died, it was very sudden.

2:01:43

It was very traumatic.

I was, I was barely, I was not quite 20 and it seemed impossible.

And I simply believed for a very long time that he'd just gone.

There was, you know, nothing of him except what was in the memories of his friends and family and nobody who convinced me otherwise for a long time.

2:02:04

And the book picks up the journey as it catalyzed from 2012, studying ghosts and polygons pretty much by accident, actually, it picks up that journey.

And I, I tried to bring in concisely the research that I've been doing for it was 12 years now on Ghosts and Poltergeists.

2:02:25

And I'm still trying to put out a book called We Need to Talk About Ghosts.

And I've been fascinated by the fact that often without trying, sometimes I'll go around the park and say to people, do you believe in ghosts or any experience of ghosts?

2:02:41

But often simply without trying to get talking to someone.

And the conversation winds this way and that and you, you get a ghost story off them.

And these stories are out there.

They're not acceptable, they're embarrassing, they're taboo.

And this is very odd in a culture which is big on transparency, which is big on not gaslighting people, but this is embarrassing.

2:03:01

You don't talk about this.

And I think people have got the courage to talk about it.

They'll kind of come together in a critical momentum, critical mass and, and actually say, good God, I'm not nuts, I'm not crazy, I'm not embarrassing.

You know, all these people, including friends who never told me about it because they're too embarrassed, have had these experiences.

2:03:23

I, I think about 30 or 40% of people have had such experiences or, or, or very close to them.

You know, very, very close to them.

So what?

Can people look forward from from you next?

What what are you working on at the moment in terms of research?

So I'm quite deeply into at least two books on dogs and cats.

2:03:45

And they would have told you that they didn't have any souls.

And they don't go to the after World for a long time in the Christian tradition.

I think there's another very bad thing about Christianity.

I mean, you know, look at these archbishops, look at these popes, look at these ministers.

And we have to ask that very piercing, very rigorous, very unflinching question which I often ask of people on films, Would you let them have a doggie?

2:04:07

And the answer is no, they cannot have a doggie.

They're not worthy to have this dog, which actually probably does survive into an afterlife, has 2 cats.

And sometimes they come back to look after their owners.

They actually come back to make rescues in burning buildings.

That's a way down the line.

But what I'm interested in now, something that really challenges scientific ideas of reality, is the fact that dogs and cats can find their way home with no map, no speech, no ability to read, no way to ask anybody.

2:04:38

They can find their way home thousands of miles.

In some cases, the whole of America have been crossed, has been crossed by a dog trying to find its way home West to east, east to West.

And more weirdly still, and there are many, many cases of this, more of them concerned dogs, but there's a few with cats.

2:04:58

They can find the owner.

If the animal is lost for some reason, they can find the owner in a completely unknown place.

There is nothing that they have to go on but their owner and in the end their love for that owner.

2:05:13

So that actually the secret map of realities, I've come to call it in one chapter of the book on dogs, the secret map of reality is founded on love.

Hence, when people have these other dimensional experiences and they breakthrough into the sense of a kind of loving unity and very powerful reality, which I have to say, if you just read even Alexander's book and nobody else's, there is nothing of all the rubbish about sin in there.

2:05:39

Very, very opposite to that.

And yeah, there does seem to be a level of reality at which the emotional bond between a dog and a person will be powerful enough for that animal to find that person, possibly anywhere on the planet.

2:05:56

I mean, in some cases they have used ships to travel thousands of miles to find that person in a place they have never been.

So yeah, you need to stretch yourself a little bit here.

But there is common ground there or, or very strange uncommon crowd perhaps between these two subjects.

2:06:15

And Doxygen is, is out already.

And there's a few of these homing cases, but the the big one on dogs is is being pitched to lucky agents.

This has.

Been really, really fascinating, an eye opening.

2:06:31

So thank you for for giving up your time to to come and talk with me so that people can listen to this and and hopefully discover more about the soul and and start asking some of these questions that we have been asking today.

Ask that for themselves.

Yeah.

Like likewise, I mean, this is always my favorite podcast, but I think it's particularly rich.

2:06:50

Couple of hours today tonight.

And yeah, I think, you know, don't be embarrassed about these subjects and don't be certain.

You know, I think The thing is to be probing, but never to be too soon because then you get stuck with something that somebody said 2000 years ago and it might just not hold anymore when you've got all the technology that Strassman and Co have have got.

2:07:14

But yeah, I hope this gives something to people and makes them want to read on.

But if you don't read, just ask people just the amazing what you get just talking to people.

And of course.

I'll make sure to include in the in the links and on the the podcast website all the links to yourself, your social media pages, your books, et cetera, so that people can follow up if they haven't listened to previous episodes featuring you before or if they don't follow you on the social media pages, they can easily do so we'll make I'll make sure to include all of those for easy access.

2:07:47

That's great.

No, it'd be great to get the word out.

There's, there's lots and lots of stuff there to to read and to to listen to.

And I'll say.

Goodbye to everybody listening.

Bye everyone.

Thank you for joining us on this journey into the unknown.

2:08:03

If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform.

You can follow us on social media for updates and more intriguing stories.

Until next time, keep your eyes open and your mind curious.