Today we’re leaving behind the alluvial fields and the swamps of the Pearl River, and hitting up Weird History.

The “Long 19th Century” is where we begin. The Long 19th Century is the idea that the era from the French Revolution (1789) to World War I (1914) was much more of a contiguous era than the artificial 100 year century of 1800 to 1900.

Without understanding this era, a lot of Weird Things of the present seem more important, more unique and more significant, than they are in reality. Many of the things we worry about today are just old beliefs and stories recast, and some of them barely so.

The Long 19th Century was the first time massive numbers of people began to engage with fiction, narrative, and media. And as we know from this, the long first fifth of the 21st Century, it Got Weird.

In the Long 19th Century, the printing and paper industries grew rapidly, creating a climbing literacy rate that increased the demand for words on paper. Bookbinding, printing, paper production and typesetting technology caused a flood of books, magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets. Many of these books were penny dreadfuls, about crime and sensational subjects, or dime novels that featured manly adventures and quite a bit of buttery, colonial style racism. Fantastical and lurid prose depicted occult adventures and magic in foreign lands, it recast archeology as fantasy.

There were many religious movements, cults, and charlatans in the Long 19th. But to understand today we look at a group of three; Spiritualists, Theosophists, and Occultists.

Spiritualism, the belief in a physical manifestation of the soul or spirit, involves magical forces acting on the “real” world. Communication with the dead is crucial. The most prolific popularizers of Spiritualism were magazine and fiction writers. Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the best selling writers of his day, heavily promoted mysticism, spiritualism, and fairies. He also almost single-handedly turned the mostly normal case of the “Mary Celeste” into a paranormal sensation.

The prototypical modern mediums, the Fox Sisters, were promoted by the famous editor and publisher Horace Greeley. Spiritualists wrote in newly developed magazines, newspapers, and paperbacks, where they gave harrowing and vivid accounts of ghosts, fairies, and souls that survived after death. They used the how-to formats of magazines for instructions on communication with the afterlife, complete with sketches of seance layouts, and diagrams of scientific-seeming devices that could speak with the dead.

These accounts, most of which were quickly discovered to be fraudulent, were, nevertheless, wildly popular. Therefore, newspapers loved to report on their weird and outrageous activities, and doctors and scientists clamored to publicly debunk them.

Yet the mockery and debunking was a positive force for Spiritualists and their ilk, a sort of unintended consequence of publicity that is no doubt familiar to the modern reader.

The second group in this particular lineage of weirdness is Theosophy. Theosophy grew out of Spiritualism, it combined esoteric European beliefs with newly printed accounts of religious practices in India and China. The driving character behind Theosophy, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, used these accounts to build up a reputation as someone who had visited these places and learned these practices from gurus. She had not. In fact, many of these beliefs were wrong, as they had been filtered through titillating travelogues and novels shot through with colonial attitudes about natives with dark and unchristian magic powers.

This Russian aristocrat and mystic (never a trustworthy combination) took to calling herself “Madame Blavatsky.” Though she had been a Spiritualist, she took the aforementioned beliefs and added a new ingredient: secret Ascended Masters, powerful meditating mystics who were immortal, who had been the true movers of all historic religions.

The Ascended Master idea was lifted from the works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the english author who originally penned the opening line “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Bulwer-Lytton would also go on to write the novels “Zanoni,” “The Last Days of Pompeii,” and “Vril: The Power of the Coming Race.” They would outline many esoteric beliefs that would become Theosophy, though the concept of the Hollow Earth dwelling “Vril” would later become almost exclusively aligned with post war Neo-Nazi mysticism.

The Occultists, who grew in popularity in England before spreading to America, were part of a long chain of men who had believed in fiction. Colonialism had created new fortunes, and the new upper class clamored for a way to join secret societies and knightly orders. There were plenty of fantastical characters waiting to part them from their pounds.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author from earlier, was also claimed by English Rosicrucians, a sect of Freemasons who had claimed that they had real ritual magic, that they had tapped into a line of secret society knowledge from hundreds of years ago.

Or at least, they read “Zanoni.” They said that Bulwer-Lytton must have been a member, because he revealed so many of their ideas in his novel.

History buffs may recall that the original Rosicrucians were probably organizing their occult activities around fictional works that they did not realize were intended as fiction.

The English Rosicrucians split into a ton of different groups, but the relevant one here is The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which, while it ended officially in 1902, would go on to create several offshoots that would ensnare future generations of fiction readers, including Jack Parsons, Aleister Crowley, and L. Ron Hubbard.

Hubbard in particular had marinated in the occult, he flitted between these societies as much as he wrote science fiction. The occult was popular at the time, Crowley’s sexually charged lodges particularly so, especially in California. Hubbard had been a hanger-on in the mystic lodges founded by the fans and followers of Aleister Crowley and his assorted Thelemite orders. These lodges were part of a broader Orientalism trend that Theosophy was part of, and there was a considerable overlap with Theosophy, but for Hubbard, the most important thing he learned from these lodges, was how to make someone pay to learn a secret, and how to make them pay to reveal it.

We technically leave the long 19th here, and enter firmly in the 20th Century, where we can put Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the Occult together, to create the I AM Movement, known as the “I AM Activity” by adherents, and with no relation to Will.

I saved “I AM” for last, because it is an evolution of Theosophy, and because the origin story involves a single individual climbing a mountain in California to find an Ascended Master, thanks to a book he read.

The Ascended Masters, you recall, are central to Theosophy, they are the meditating brain geniuses who guide mankind to our next evolution. The idea that there would be one on Mount Shasta comes from a book called “A Dweller on Two Planets,” which took the Ascended Masters idea of Theosophy and Occult lodges, and added a touch of Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis.

As yet another aside, Ignatius L. Donnelly was a Minnesota Senator who wrote extensive, fiction-fueled musings on Atlantis and pseudoscientific catastrophes. He is an illustrative figure who looms large in the Atlantis and Ancient Astronaut world of today. He was also a populist Minnesota congressman who wrote the science fiction book “Caesar's Column” in 1890.

Anyway, this guy, Guy Ballard, goes to the top of Mount Shasta, looking for the Ascended Masters, and meets The Comte de Saint Germain, a popular figure in Theosophy and Occult teachings. Germain guides him to form the I AM Activity.

The basic I AM Activity is bog standard Theosophic Cult stuff: you meditate and get access to occult powers given by the secret brotherhood of powerful ascended masters who are guiding mankind. It bears a striking resemblance to many more mainstream religious activities, which use prayer and ritual instead of meditation, and Saints and God instead of ascended masters, though I am unaware at the moment of superpowers that can be bestowed by the Pope.

I AM would later splinter off into various flavors, including a number of New Age and UFO Religions, and frightening Christian sects that have direct lineages into the modern Apostolic-Prophet Movement. That movement seeks to dominate the entire world and has a disturbing amount of influence in modern right wing politics.

So why am I telling you this?

First, I think it’s important to remember that this remixing and ripping off in our current moment, is not unique. Now, much like the Long 19th, has seen a not-unprecedented explosion of media technology that people are not particularly well prepared for. Propaganda, misinformation, and stolen fiction masquerade as fact, confidence poses as veracity, paranoia and conspiracy run rampant. But, these are not new problems.

The scale may be new, the particulars may be new, but one thing we do know is that things will get weird, they will be mixed around and someone will believe whatever is said confidently enough. For all we know, someone somewhere is coming up with a cult based on the works of Philip K. Dick RIGHT NOW.

Second, each of these movements had an aesthetic link to the technology that spread them. Spiritualism was magazines and newspapers, it was broadsheets for traveling mediums, long interviews about the new, misunderstood discoveries in physics and geology. Theosophy was information-dense, ripped from novels and pulp pages, a remix of data that pretended to be global. Occultism was obscure sources, old books made available through reproduction and transcription.

That is why I chose these three. Not because I feel like the Next Big Thing will be related to them, though there’s a chance. Obviously, the weird cult that is going to be the most important and dangerous, the one with the highest chance of killing you, directly or indirectly, will be some evolution of Christian theocracy, using the power of the panopticon and artificial intelligence to ferret out heretics.

A more comprehensive look at the era would have talked about how the various Christian groups in America splintered into dozens and hundreds of sects that were similarly flavored, taking in science, egalitarian ideas, and more, and bastardizing most of them as the creators read the texts and created something appealing to the masses, but did not comprehend the deeper lessons of the world-shifting discoveries and technologies of the era.

It doesn’t matter if it’s Mormonism or Thelema, you can see how this scenario keeps playing itself out: A work of fiction, in many cases influenced by “real” beliefs, is released. People either take it seriously, or they pretend to, and they start up a real cult. The cult becomes big enough that it influences another generation of fiction and lore, and the cycle repeats.

Finally, the reason I bring up I AM, despite it not quite being a product of the Long 19th, is that I AM is a direct predecessor to the world of Silicon Valley and the future we now live in. The story of how THAT came to be involves the CIA, psychics, and Project Stargate, and alas, it is a story for another time.

But before I go, let’s take a look at Silicon Valley, where the Ascended Masters of the day are dutifully teaching machines to write. The current crop of Chat Bots are prolific remixers. Confident remixers. They have the entire internet to draw from, they pull, unthinking, from myriad sources, with no thought as to the source material, to the connections and meaning. They have a shallow understanding that is held up as a golden standard of objectivity. Their only design is to please the reader, to seem confidently correct, and to earn their masters money.

The chance that one of these modern Madame Blavatskys creates a cult is not zero. After all, it’s California.