For millennia, alchemists obsessed over the Philosopher's Stone, throwing untold amounts of money in to trying to turn lead into gold. But in the 19th century, a highly organized network of occultists, bankers, and secret societies finally figured out how to do it using debt, bullets, and global war.In this deep dive, continuing on our timeline of the occult, we look at the first half of the 19th century, where the foundations of the modern world were laid. From Emanuel Swedenborgs conversations with aliens to Franz Mesmer pioneering the psychological science of mass trance states, but most importantly how the Sabbatean-Frankist movement infiltrated European Freemasonry to establish the "Nascent Dawn" lodge and build the capital for a new universal religion.From countless European revolutions, to the British Empire's Christian Zionism and the Opium Wars in China, this occult financial network successfully conquered the world and ensured that the worlds capital now flowed through them.

To the masses, "Black Magic" meant summoning demons. To the elite, it was the earliest form of psychological warfare, espionage, and social engineering.

In this deep-dive (part of our Prisca Theologia series), The Dirt Unit uncovers how a decentralized network of occultists, alchemists, and spies quietly engineered the modern world. From John Dee's Enochian angels demanding radical moral inversion, to the Vatican's Jesuit intelligence network, to the Sabbatean infiltration of European aristocracy, this is the hidden history of statecraft.

Discover how Sir Francis Dashwood’s notorious Hellfire Club used ritualized blackmail to control the British Parliament, how Benjamin Franklin utilized these underground networks to secure the American Republic, and how the Royal Society hijacked Captain Cook’s scientific voyage to claim the Great Southern Land.