Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that records the A and B segments out of order, so only patrons will get the call forwards… sorry.

Hosting this week is Madam Jenn but she can’t raise listener spirits alone, for that we’ll need Sir Steve the Serious, and Shea the Buttery. I’m Aaron, and this week….

Show Story- The Flim Flam Femme Fatales

* https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/madame-blavatsky-and-theosophy/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky

* http://blavatskyarchives.com/index.htm (Aaron, please don’t click as your brain will angrily rebel.)

* https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Theosophy

* https://daily.jstor.org/spiritualism-science-and-the-mysterious-madame-blavatsky/

* https://cdn.website-editor.net/e4d6563c50794969b714ab70457d9761/files/uploaded/IncidentsInTheLifeOfMadameBlavatsky_APSinnett.pdf

This week I have decided to share with you all the story of someone that, perhaps surprisingly, I find very fascinating and in many ways inspiring. It would require too much unpacking to get into the why’s now, but I’m sure you may see them unfold as we go along.

So again, welcome to a story of weird...history...eee...eee

The tradition of charlatans, chicanery and snake oiling (ewwww….) is often thought of as a man’s game. (I mean, the term wasn’t Flim Flam Female.) But, as unlike so many professions (except for the original, seems like we get to keep the banner for that one), the ladies could totally get in on this game throughout the ages. Sometimes whether they wanted to or not, as I think some of the Oracles at Delphi weren’t there of their own free will for the free tripping.

Also, depending on the time period, these kinds of pursuits could dramatically backfire. As in, during several points throughout history it was found that ‘wise women’, healers, seers and anything other than a spirit-broken housewife were highly flammable and/or hangable.

So with that in mind, and the fact that I can never get enough of Aaron’s Russian accent, I would like to introduce the Ukranian-born Helena Petrova Blavatsky. Or perhaps you might recognize her by the more common nomenclature, Madame Blavatsky.

The Cambridge-based Society for Psychical Research had this 1885 respect-tinged quote about the eerily Jake Gyllenhall-resembling Madame B:

“For our part, we regard her as neither the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history.”

(Now, before I continue, a quick bit of housekeeping bc of my rant last week and my constant fear of plagiarism: I’d been aware of and interested in Mdm. B for quite some time, but didn’t know exactly how absolutely riveting her story was until I listened to the amazing 3 part podcast series on her by Our Fake History, which started in May 2018. Full disclosure, I haven’t listened since it originally ‘aired(?)’ but I will go ahead and tell you right now that it was more complete and historically-contextual than what I’m going to provide. Please do check it out, but for my sake wait until after I’m done with my take bc that’s just polite and you would never hear the reactions of the boys in Sebastian’s episodes.)