Mark Booth: The Secret History of the Universe

Summary

Author Mark Booth returns to Earth Ancients to discuss his new book, The Secret History of the Universe, which argues that many great modern scientists drew on ancient mystical and occult traditions. He describes how pioneers of quantum physics turned to Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and Indian mysticism to make sense of the strange behavior of particles, and how figures like Newton, Tesla, Pauli, and Penrose seemed to receive insights almost fully formed. Booth also suggests that the universe may be filled with non-biological intelligences, linking the ancient Watchers of the Book of Enoch to modern AI and what he calls a 'new polytheism.'

Key takeaways

• 1Host Cliff opens by promoting Dr. David Stewart's book 'The Fore Heavens', claiming Maya stelae record very ancient Preclassic king lists, and says archaeologist Richard Hanson believes El Mirador was ruled by ancient kings.
• 2Economist John Maynard Keynes bought a cache of Isaac Newton's papers, found most concerned the occult and alchemy, and called Newton 'the last magician.'
• 3Booth claims Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger drew on Kabbalah, Indian mysticism, Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, and Sufism. He frames the Manhattan Project as Faustian 'deeper magic,' while Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner allegedly performed rituals to keep Hitler at bay.
• 4Wolfgang Pauli's 'Pauli effect' supposedly caused lab equipment to shatter near him. He worked with Carl Jung on synchronicity, was fascinated by the number 137 (the fine structure constant, which Booth also ties to Kabbalah), and died in hospital room 137.
• 5Booth links the Watchers of the Books of Enoch and Greek myths of gods mating with humans to non-biological intelligences, and speculates these entities may have prompted humans to build AI.
• 6Booth cites Roger Penrose's view that mathematical patterns exist outside time and Stephen Wolfram's suggestion that we may be surrounded by intelligences we cannot perceive. He also describes a 'new polytheism' in which people are more likely to encounter aliens than angels.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

Hey, this is Cliff your host on a happy Saturday. I hope you're all doing well. Some incredible news is coming out of a book written by doctor David Stewart. He is epigrapher. This is somebody who translates writing hieroglyphs, unusual texts into understandable content. And I have been talking about a book that he released called The Fore Heavens. He released it a couple of months ago, and there's a number of chapters where he is reading from standing stone. These are these called stela. They're they're found around the world, but the Maya, especially when it's close to a major city, seem to proliferate, proliferate, uh, these standing markers with all kinds of writing, all kinds of history, most notably regarding the kings. And I've mentioned this before. We had a fair idea that the Maya were dealing with kingships and uh territorial wars. But what Stewart is showing us is that these are in some cases what they call pre classic and that's as far back as two three thousand years And what is amazing. And we see this, and I've mentioned this before, we see this in Sumeria we see this in Egypt, we do see parts of it in China. It's very much vogue in ancient Central America that some of these kings could be very, very very old, and of course they are. They are thrown into mythology in the same manner that we see raw Osiris and Isis become gods. We see this with these earlier Maya and they're thrown in mythology. The reason being is that they're so deep into prehistory that they are Orthodoxy can't conceive of sophisticated societies living one hundred thousand years ago. ...

Excerpt from Earth Ancients, Jul 25, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.