Waiting 4 Wrath - Episode 254 - The One Where We Make Jellyfish Borscht for Ancient Lemur Wizards

In This Week’s Show, episode 254, we go full spiritualist on the Nazis and full mythical on Milwaukee.

Now, grab a beer and help us test the god hypothesis — because, while Giant three-eyed Lemurians haven’t struck us down yet, we are trying their patience!

Then protect your damn internet traffic with Private Internet Access!

Shea’s Life Lesson

This week I learned that if you have ten apples in one hand and six apples in the other, you have really big hands.

Jenn’s Actual Lesson

Did you know that Gondwana is the 4th most recent supercontinent? It lasted until the Jurassic Period and broke apart about 180 million years ago.

But before we get to all that, let’s have a beer!

This Week’s Beer

Breck Lager - Breckenridge Brewery

From - RW

* BA Link: https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/2137/182686/

* BA Rating: 3.52

* Style: Lager

* ABV: 4.5%

* Aaron: 5

* Jenn: 2

* Shea: 5 < --Yep thats beer

* Steve: 5

Patreon Story

Modern Spiritualism

Since we talked last week about the origins of spiritualism, and in just a few minutes Jenn will catch us up on the end of that, I thought “why not talk about spiritualism today?”… then I Googled…

Some things you simply shouldn’t Google…

So I’ll Just say upfront that the modern spiritualist landscape could not only fill this show and dozens more like it, but could easily be its own show… and in fact is if you count the gobs of podcasts that cater to spiritualists.

I knew iTunes had a pretty wide distribution, but to the dead!?!

As we talked about last week, modern spiritualism traces itself back to the Fox sisters. Who, upon later needing money, announced that their announcement of fraud was itself fraudulent. Because ghosts!

Following the Fox sisters, some wrap up from the BBC.

In the 1860’s one could sit for spirit photography - a practice “invented” by William H. Mumler when he accidentally took a double exposure and didn’t know what it was. Soon seances were everywhere and perpetually debunked practitioners like Daniel Dunglas Home - who “levitated” out of windows and back - captivated the imaginations of celebrities like Arthur Conan Dole, who in 1918 said the movement offered “infinitely nearer positive proof” than any other religion giving it way too much notoriety.

The first Spiritualist church opened in Keighly, Yorkshire in 1853. They published the Yorkshire Telegraph, the first spiritualist newspaper.

In 1882 the Society for Psychical Research was founded to use science to test spiritualist claims beginning a long tradition of shit going poorly for spiritualists.

In 1890 Keighly hosted the first Spiritualist conference. Later founding the first organization of Spiritualist churches in the UK as the Spiritualists' National Federation, SNF.

This organization was succeeded in 1902 by the Spiritualists' National Union. The SNU had 360 affiliated churches, and 18k members. Their American contemporary, the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, NSAC, was founded as the National Spiritualist Association in 1893, but we’ll catch up with the NSA shortly…

In the 1920’s the Catholic, Anglican, and other major religions admonished spiritualism at the Lembeth Conference. Despite this, by the 1930’s there were about 250,000 practicing spiritualists.

The Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 made it illegal for people to pretend to act as spiritualistic mediums for money or other reward. This act was repealed in April 2008, and fraudulent mediums are now covered by consumer protection legislation,...