The Necromancy of Joann Georg Schrepfer

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We are officially into Halloween episode. We sure are, I mean, if it were up to me, like we say, we don't. We don't keep any other um history calendar like Black History Month. We don't really heed that too much because we like to cover that kind of history all year round. I feel the same about Halloween. We should just be doing spooky things about bats and ghosts at every every turn we possibly can. But now it is officially October in Halloween time. I know not everyone wants Halloween all the time like I do. UM. The person we're talking about today, Johann George strip For, is a little bit tricky. He's kind of a slippery snake in the historical record, and like some of our other Halloween episodes, uh, the one, we're not quite as fast to historical record because they kind of don't exist, and the ones that do exist have been purposely clouded by Johan and his followers and his detractors. Everyone kind of told a different version of stories involving him, and thus confusion. UM. One thing I'll also mentioned we went with the spelling of Schrepford as sc h r e p f e R. You will also see it in lieu of that first e and oh with an umlund over it. Just if you're going looking for more information now, you might want to do two searches to give the results for both of those. UM guided that this morning looking for artwork, uh to go on our social media, and still the best I could do was artwork of a person who was inspired by him, and not anything directly related to him. Yeah, it's he's like I said, he's difficult to pin down. There are also some um works of art that we're done about him that are clearly fanciful, right, Like they're like someone imagining what it was like to be at one of his spiritual events. UM. The other thing I want to say, even though this is for me a jolly time of Halloween talk, Um, this one is one of those episodes and I feel like we have had to make this particular heads up so many times that I should apologize lately. Uh. This is another episode where we do discuss um death by suicide, So I want to make sure if that's not for somebody that they know to to hop right out of this one. Uh, and it it comes up a good bit towards the end, So I know that. But yes, uh, this is gonna be some necromancy, some Charlatanism and some weirdness and some people who don't want to believe that anything spiritual could be disproved. Right. Yeah, So, as Holly just alluded to, what we know about Johann George Schrepfer's origins is actually pretty slim on details. He is believed to have been born in Nuremberg in seventeen thirty eight, although sometimes you'll see sources claim seventeen thirty nine. He didn't really receive a formal education and was often described as having coarse behavior, so it's generally believed that he grew up poor. We really don't know anything about his parents, though he said to have had siblings who he was not close to. Shrepp for himself was known to also tell wildly differing versions of his origins, and this was also true of his eventual followers. It's just not possible to feel confident about really any of it, even when you're looking at articles written by historical scholars. The details are so different and cases that I'm like, well, I can't go to Germany and dig through the records, and I don't speak German, so that wouldn't help anyway. So I'm just gonna have to point out where there's disparity. At some point, Johan is said to have started working as a cooper, although that doesn't seem to be something he did for long. It's also not something that comes up in every version of his story. The Seven Years War started in seventeen fifty six, although you will sometimes see that extended to seventeen fifty four, as the French and Indian War began that year, and it's one of the many conflicts that overlap in this larger conflict. Additionally, sometimes the start is given uh much earlier, on a much longer timeline of being more than twenty years long, because it's origin points involve other conflicts even before that. So as a crash course, and we're doing this just to give you a sense of what was going on in the world when Schrepfur was alive. Here are the basic basics of the Seven Years War, which had all of Europe's major power bases involved Prussia and Great Britain, got into a fight with France and Austria, and the Austrian Habsburgs were trying to regain Silesia. All of this is tied into the War of the Austrian Succession, which started in seventeen forty. It's one of the reasons that the length of the Seven Years War gets a little stretchy. But this war was also pretty amieble like in its geographical spread. In North America. Most of the conflict was based on this tug of war between England and France regarding each of their claims on territory and their trade potential. It also reached into India and West Africa and the Caribbean, and if you remember our episode on the Black Hole of Calcutta, that was part of the Seven Years War as well. This whole thing has been called the First World War on occasion, most notably by Sir Winston Churchill, and that is probably how it felt from a European perspective. For sure, all of the countries involved were weakened financially by the whole war effort, and they all lost a lot of men, not just to the conflict but to disease, and that of course would have been true of the civilian population as well, especially the disease spread through the warfare. It is unsurprising that in the wake of a massive and lengthy conflict like this, there was a sort of sense in Europe that the world had changed, but there wasn't really a clear vision of what it had changed into or what the future was going to look like. And as a consequence, people were unsettled and seeking refuge or guidance in the ideas of philosophy and religion and mysticism, and Johann George Shreffer found a path in that uncertainty to gaining his own power and wealth, although ultimately that path would lead him to an early death. Shreft first served in the Prussian Army during the Seven Years War, though in seventeen sixty one he appeared in like Szig and he lived and worked there from then on, so it doesn't seem like he stayed in the military all the way until the war ended later in the seventeen sixties. In August of seventeen sixty one, he became a citizen of Leipzig and started operating a wine tavern in the city. Just a month later, he married a tailor's daughter from Leipzig named Johanna Katerina Hair and then after several years in the business, Johan left his first tavern. He started running a coffee shop in the center of town called Vice. Later's coffee were shopped and that was at the corner of cluster Gas and Barfuscassen. If you look at that intersection today you can see it's still pretty much right at the center of Leipzig. That business wasn't when that shrep first started from scratch. It had already been in operation. It was well known when he took it over in seventeen sixty nine that would become the epicenter of his mystical demonstrations. At some point in his life, Schrepfer became involved in free masonry, and as we've covered on the show before, freemasonry grew out of Stonemason guilds of the Middle Ages and then expanded to include members outside of that vocation. Freemason groups, which were organized into lodges, were spread throughout Europe and became numerous enough that they started to organize in groups of lodges under Grand lodges. The first of those Grand lodges was founded in seventeen seventeen in England, and because of the widespread nature of the lodges, some of them began to incorporate different symbolism and rituals into their philosophies and meetings. There's really some debate about whether Strepper really became a member of the Freemasons or if you may have just been part of a group in Nuremberg, but at the time he was showing interest in the group in Leipzig. There were two primary branching ideologies within Freemasonry. One was what's often called the Scottish Lodge or the Templar Lodge, and that was considered the group of rict observance. They sought to attain a full understanding of the world and spiritual matters, was often referred to as highest knowledge, and they were doing that through research. And then the other was a group that was more aligned with Rosicrucianism. This branch sought knowledge and understanding through means that we might describe today as metaphysical or even paranormal, and this could include everything from practicing magic to contacting the spirit realm. Streppord was a lot more interested in the more mystical ideology. Yeah, this is a very simplified version of all of the things going on in freemasonry. I feel like that's one of those topics that every time it comes up we have to caveat that, like partially because it was a secret society and it still exists, but much more secretive at this point. There are a lot of mock nations of it that are we only know through various accounts that again contradict each other. Right, Like that whole Templar thing, there's some that believe that the Knights of tem Plar could somehow be contacted through through various means and like regain power and um, there was a lot going on. There's also the idea that there were rose agrusions that joined the Freemasons to kind of plant those more mystical seeds and like start this division. I did not dig into all of that, just know that there's a lot of stuff like that going on in the backdrop of this story. At this point, though, the main lodge of Leipzig, which was called Minerva zoom Zircle, which is Minerva to the Circle in English. Um, and Minerva was in the strict observance camp, which Shrubber found frustrating, and he came to the conclusion that such a limited approach to gaining knowledge of spiritual matters was a corruption of the goals of Freemasonry, and that Minerva Lodge was inherently unprincipled. So he started his own lodge out of the coffee house, and the member roster of his lodge actually grew pretty rapidly because, in breaking from the mainstream Freemasons, Shrepford took in members who had been denied entry into Minerva. He also admitted women into his lodge, which was absolutely forbidden by Freemasonry at the time. That's a whole other complicated issue. Uh. And because he was quite charismatic, Shrepfer also managed to lure away members of the Minerval Lodge who had been in good standing but also felt like they weren't learning everything they could. He also publicly spoke out against the Minerval Lodge. He claimed that his new group was closer to the ideals of Freemasonry, and he went so far as to write and distribute a pamphlet about freemasonry. He distributed that all over the town. This was considered a really aggressive thing to do because in that pamphlet he disclosed detailed information about the Minerval Lodge initiation rituals. These were considered Freemason secrets. He also accused the Leipsig Lodge of taking money from members as part of promoting them to higher levels of masonry, and of lying to new members by promising them more knowledge and enlightenment than they could actually deliver. I had to say he was sort of a genius of a smear campaign, right, Like he knew exactly how to position this whole thing to be, Like, they are exploiting your desire for knowledge. I will show you knowledge, and I'm not corrupt like them. Uh. That smear campaign was not well received, but Shrefford continued to escalate his accusations until he had gotten so aggressive about it he was finally arrested for disorderly conduct over it. He was also sentenced to what is listed in the historical record as two hundred are sprugle if you speak German. I hope I did not offend you with that, because that translates in the kindest terms two lashes on the behind. The literal translation that I got when running it through an internet translator was a little less appropriate for an all ages show for a clean rated podcast. Yeah. So, in addition to that physical punishment, he also had to sign a document that acknowledged his crime and its consequences to be punished in the papers of the town. And while presses did indeed run that document with shrepford signature, he claimed that the signature was forged and that he had never been punished. He continued to say publicly that the freemasonry of the Minerva Lodge was illegitimate. But though many thought he was being a nuisance and a pain in the neck, he was able to acquire a letter from the Grand Master of Freemasonry in Germany that validated him as a freemason. Not only did this give validation to his sort of separate branch order, but it also meant that he could go to the Manerval Lodge if he wanted to, even as he continued to speak out against it. And yes, it is absolutely valid to wonder if that document was legit. Coming up, we'll talk about the nature of the meetings that shrep Fer's coffee house. First, we will pause for a quick sponsor break. We mentioned Johann Schrepfer's Coffee House Lodge and its policy to admit people that Minerva Lodge would not. That doesn't mean that it was open to anyone. Prospective members had to pass a screening, which was conducted by Schrepfer himself. And this is where we really have to start discussing what the Coffee House Lodge was actually doing at its meetings and initiations. We mentioned already that Schrepfer was interested in the more mystical approach to attaining higher knowledge. So Johan's leadership of these meetings at the coffee House quickly turned into demonstrations of necromancy. For a quick point of clarification here, a lot of times in modern pop culture storytelling, necromancy is associated with things like reanimating the dead, But the real definition of necromancy is conjuring spirits of the dead, are communicating with the dead, often as a divination tool or in a wider sense, using magic or sorcery. So when we say Schrepfer was engaging in necromancy, that's what we're talking about, the sense of conjuring spirits, not reanimating the dead. No, this is not a zombie story. I apologize if you were hoping from these conjurings have been called performances and Shrepfer is usually described as a Charlottean, but his ability to convince people who attended these meetings that they were in the presence of other worldly spirits was pretty impressive. In these ritual Schrepfer would show his followers either what he called numatis or pneumatic necromancy, which he straight up just called directly to spirits, or as an alternate elementary or elementary necromancy, in which he used light to bring forth spirits. Accounts of these ceremonies described seeing apparitions that were clear as day to everybody present, although they had a vapor like quality because Shepford would call up spirits from other time periods. Their clothing was described as having been appropriately period. Although how many of the people giving these accounts were experts on historical clothing. That's certainly worth wondering. I know, I'll see something in a movie and be like, that looks great and it is super wrong. All you need to do to know how not correct people have various time period clothing is do a search for Victorian dress on the Internet and you'll get a million Edwardian things Like this isn't necessarily like a big important problem. Let's you're doing it. I'm just saying it's worth questioning the account of correct period dress in these spirits. Right. So, attendees also marveled at seeing spirits in various emotional states, including just obvious distress. Shrepfer put his conjured spirits into three categories, which were good, medium, and damned. I don't know why that scale tickles me, cracks me up, like you're good, you're damned, Medium, like like is that partially damned? I don't know what I feel like this inspired the good place. I think you're not far off. It's a similar approach. So these ceremonies began late at night, usually midnight, and as the methodologies of set up are examined, things, of course start to seem pretty suspicious. So, for one, Shrepford would insist that no one could stand up from the table where they were seated during these That was, according to Johann, because they would be in sere is danger if they did, and he could not control the spirits if humans were up and moving around. One way Stretford convinced people that he truly was conjuring the spirits of the dead was by bringing spectral versions of famous people to the seance table that includes prior podcast subject Johann Friedrich Struancy and his friend Intervaled Brent, who were executed in seventeen seventy two for manipulating King Christian the seventh of Denmark by exploiting his mental instability. The trial and execution had been widely reported throughout Europe, and so this would have been a really thrilling and sensational duo to appear in spectral form at these seances. Not only did they appear to shred first followers, they also did so while holding their decapitated heads. That would be um, That would be a wower, very dramatic. Yes, Shrepford did not keep these ceremonies confined just to his coffee house. He actually traveled with them. He performed several such necromancy rituals in Dresden in seventeen seventy three and seventy four, and in some instances when he was doing these, he would do tricks like send a spirit away on an errand far away and then have them return with some sort of evidence of their projection elsewhere, like a note that was signed by someone known to be in another town or city, to show his command of the spirit world. Shrepfor once conjured a spirit that appeared to the gather people surrounded by flames and pleading for the necromancer Shrepfor to torture him no more. In that particular instance, Johan said that it had been too dangerous a trick and that he would never repeat it. He also would not take requests. A person attending one of his ceremonies couldn't in the course of the ceremony asked for a specific person to be brought forth from the afterlife. Who was called was generally entirely up to Shrepfor, and he would also perform magic, sometimes out in the open of the countryside, allegedly causing storms to run in or to cause stars to shift their brightness. When a ritual or ceremony was over, Shpford used familiar religious symbols and tools to wrap things up. He brought out a crucifix that he said helped keep attendants safe. He would bless the people who were present. He would also use holy water, although whether this water truly had been blessed is not known. He also used these things to bring himself down from the experience. He was said to have had to fight off demonic energies as he performed his rituals, and the crucifix, he told his followers was a way to help keep himself as well as them safe. He made it clear that he could be killed by this very dangerous work. I feel like he's such a great showman. Uh and Johan's interviews with potential new members. Remember we were talking about who he let in was right in line theatrically with the secret meetings. So these encounters with potential members would begin pretty benignly with a little bit of chat. He would ask the person about their thoughts on spirituality in the afterlife, and he would claim then that the integrity of the applicant was reflected in glasses of water which he had had set out on the table between them. So he would pick up the water and examine it, and if it was cloudy when he looked at it, or it tasted odd, he would proclaim that the person's intentions were not genuine and they should not be admitted. But if the water was clear and tasted correct to Shrepfor, they were accepted and initiated because they were trustworthy. This whole system was of course devised by Shrepfor It's not as though you could point to any written ancient text and see this weird water ritual, so no one could ever claim that he had executed this examination incorrectly. As his group of followers grew, Shrepfort made another bold move in mid seventeen seventy four. He staged a coup at the Minerva Lodge. He literally went into a meeting with a pistol and forced the lodge master out at gunpoint, and then appointed himself as the new master. And this worked. We have talked about Shrepford drawing a lot of followers while also courting legal trouble for harassing the Freemason Lodge of Leipzig, But one of the things we have not talked about a whole lot is his critics, and he had a lot. This is not a case where modern eyes can really look at what he was doing in the seventeen sixties and seventeen seventies and say, oh, clearly he was in Charlottan and people then were fools. You can't have any sort of superiority about that because people at the time we're saying that, and he was deeply controversial, as you might imagine as someone who walks into a private meeting with a weapon and takes over would be and launching a public campaign of criticism against the existing Minerva Freemason Lodge and then creating his own group of followers. Shepherd had also established his own faction of defenders. By the time he took over the Freemason Lodge, his followers were ready to go up against any detractors. It's often played out in writing and the papers of the day as doubters sent spies to his ceremonies and seances to try to get proof that this whole thing was a fraud. There were accounts from some planted attendees that they recognized some of the ghosts as people they knew and their everyday lives. In one instance, a doubter quietly locked the door to the ceremony room as he entered, which resulted in the spirits not being able to get in. Yeah, that was like a clear hey, you know why you can't conjure spirits because I locked the door, dude. Um. But his believers were absolutely not having this when even when they were confronted with these cases where people had obviously thwarted Schrepfer's performances, his believers dug in. They were into hiredly certain that they had seen the veil between the physical world and the spirit realm fall, and that Schrepfer had caused it and was orchestrating these amazing things. And the thing was, no one was able to come up with a solid idea regarding how exactly he had accomplished some of the things that they had seen. Even the skeptics were a little troubled by this. We're going to circle back to this in a moment. One very common theory that's often discussed in all of this, particularly in the case of Schrepfer's hardcore believers, is that he was manipulating their state of mind in various ways. Often the descriptions of the pre seance rituals involved things like fasting. Then the attendees were given some refreshments, which Schrepfer provided. One item that comes up repeatedly in stands out as kind of odd is salad. But there was it was also punched. There was a whole lot of punch. So it's entirely possible that people who had eaten for a while, we're then put into a very dark room and given something intoxicating, they would probably buy into some things that might not pass scrutiny in the light of day with a clear head. They were not drinking a bunch of punch on a mostly empty stomach. Listen, if I don't eat enough protein on a regular basis, I see spirits. I mean coming up, We're going to talk about the claims that started to unravel shrep first public persona, and we will get to all of that after we hear from the sponsors. To keep stuff you missed in history class going in sevent shrep Fer claimed that he was a French nobleman and that his name was Baron stein von Steinbach. When he visited Dresden to perform at court, he was not appearing as himself. He had basically taken on this other persona. This lie caught up to him pretty quickly when a French envoy to Saxony heard of the alleged French noble with connections to the spirit realm and asked shrepp for for documentation of his French lineage. This obviously fell apart, but Schrepfer is said to have performed quite a thrilling and terrifying seance even after his unmasking by all of this, but though he had supporters there, he also had a lot of people that wanted him gone, and this whole like pretending to be someone he wasn't had not helped matters, so he soon left, dresseden and went back to Leipzig. Throughout all of this, and even when money was tight for a lot of people in Saxony and Leipzig specifically, Shrepfer always seemed to be doing okay financially. Most of his money at this point seems to have been coming from high ranking believers who were loaning him money with the understanding that he was using it to further his work of achieving an understanding of the highest knowledge and that he was going to share that knowledge with them. There also appears to have been a promise that he was using his clairvoyant abilities to solve the financial problems of the region, but the debts and the false promises were quickly outpacing his ability to live up to them. Yeah, it's unclear if that weird choice to pretend to be a French noble might have been part of an effort in a money making scheme. We don't really know, but on the night of October seventh, seventeen seventy four, Shrepford is said to have performed a seance at his coffee house, and his ritual had been so powerful as to bring several spirits to the group. So many spirits and in such strong manifestations, it was said that Shrepfer suggested that instead of closing the normal way, that everyone present leave and just allow the spirits to disperse on their own. There are also accounts that he had a dinner with some of his closest friends that night, but some time after midnight, Johan suggested they all go for a walk, and he told those that were with him that they were going to be part of another significant happening and indicated that it was singular and unusual, like basically, we're going to go into the woods and I'm going to show you something very special. They went to a forest known as the Rosenthal and shrep Fur peeled off from the group. Shortly thereafter, a shot was heard and Shrepfer was found dead, apparently of suicide. Most of the accounts of the people who were with Johan in the forest that night indicated that he was, as we just stated, dead when they found him, but there were a few people who claimed he was not dead but injured, and that he had vanished before them as though he was crossing through the veil that he had so frequently skirted, as he had in these seances. For some there were hopes that the death was part of what would be Shrepfer's greatest performance of necromancy, that he would raise his own spirit from the beyond on. Surely that would prove the depth of his enlightened knowledge. But the evidence that Shrepford left behind was void of any mystical promise. Quite the contrary, he had written letters to his closest friends telling them that he intended to end his life. He had also told his wife this. He left behind a heavy parcel. It said it contained, he claimed, the secrets he wanted his followers to know. So imagine holding such a box full of possibility, and then the disappointment of opening it to find underclothes and rocks there was nothing in there. Now, this is another point where we find two very different versions of this story specifically related to this package of rocks and underclothes, although no one seems to have any variation on the fact that it contained those items and nothing mystical, But in one version that parcel is opened before Shrepford's death, and that is the moment at which he realized he had been revealed to fraud and had no way out. We should note too that though his death was ruled a suicide, there have been from the moment it happens, people who ardently believed that someone else was involved, and either that he was murdered or that he was forced to take his own life. Even after his death, Johann George Schrepfer was an issue of debate. In seventeen seventy five, so just a year after he died, theologian Christian August Crucius wrote an opinion article about Schrepfer and his work, in which he cited an account by an observer who remained anonymous. He was basically saying, I talked to a person who said this. Chrusis main concern was not even whether the necromancer was the real deal or not. It was the fact that he had blasphemously combined Catholic and Pagan rituals, something Crutius saw as a harbinger of the Antichrist's coming. But that publication was itself criticized as being extremist and alarmist and lacking in real critical thinking. As discussion of Schrepfer's work and Crusius's take on it continued, there emerged a fairly popular take, particularly among intellectuals, that one Shrepford had been a charlatan, and two his believers were people who were gullible or people who were just playing desperate to find a little hope, or in the case of Freemasons, were people who fully expected some sort of enlightening and mystical phenomena to be shown to them, because that was kind of the promise. One of the great German words that I came across while reading about this whole debate among scholars and theologians was hocus pocus strika, which is hocus pocus pranks. I love that word to some degree. Shred Fer's brief blaze as a mystical leader, remember this only happened over the course of a couple of years, had kind of opened the door to discussing the idea of magic and mysticism among intellectuals in a way that was current and had real world implications. While no historians would agree that Shepford was not actually conjuring spirits, there is some debate about whether he might have thought that he was. Some of his personal writing does, according to historians, seem to suggest that he was trying to truly devise a magical system that explained ways to connect with the spirit realm. Yeah, there are some theories that like, even though he was staging things, he saw those any actors or tools he was using as kind of like ways that he was helping to manifest things that he may have believed. I don't know that I buy into that, but it's an interesting way to look at it. Uh. There are two artifacts associated with Shrepford that are part of the collection of the Museum natural in Cabinet Waldenburg. Through these items we get a little more information about exactly how Shrepford convinced people that he had brought forth spirits with his rituals we mentioned earlier in the epoch, so that even skeptics had difficulty figuring out how Strepford might be achieving some of the visual effects that they saw in his seance performances. And the connection between that mystery and these objects is through one of shred first friends, Johann Heinrich Linked. The younger Link had a father with the exact same name, and sometimes even in places you would think would get it right. It's the elder Link that shrep Fir's name is connected to. That's impossible though. Johann Heinrich Link, the Elder died in seventeen thirty four before Sherepford was even born. Link the Younger, like his father, was a pharmacist. That's part of the problem with those two getting confused. There is also another Johan Link that spells his name slightly differently, that also worked in naturalism and botany. They all three get very, very very mixed up in the historical record. But Link the Younger that we're talking about today was a member of the Minerva Lodge, and Link is said to have met Schrepfer because Shrepford needed the help of a pharmacist to prepare the various things that he gave his followers in preparation for ceremonies. But it turned out that Link was also a hobbyist in the area of things like optics, and that is how we discover two devices that were listed in Link's personal catalog as having been used in spiritual demonstrations that he staged with Schrepfer in the garden of his house. The first of these objects as a magic lantern. This is a sort of proto slide projector, consisting of a metal box with a slit in it. The user would insert a small painted glass plate into that slit. With a light source inside the box a candle. An image would be projected through a simple lens, and there was also a small chimney shaped attachment to the tops of the hot air from the candle could escape. The other item in the museum collection associated with Strepfer and Link working together is a geyster costom or ghost box. This is a variation on lantern of magica. It's made to look like a miniature coffin. It's very cool. Um. So these two items pretty clearly point out that they are using focus focus. Uh. There were though, people who theorized that something like these objects was being used in shrep Fers gathering. Uh, it just had never been proven. And in that back and forth about morality and gullibility that we talked about playing out in the press in the years following Shrepfer's death, writer Frederick Nikolai had gotten pretty close to describing this illusion, writing quote, as for me, I think the whole thing is an artificial scam. If the other circumstances agree, then I would have the suspicion that a magic lantern was primarily used there. The following circumstances also strengthened my suspicion of a magic lantern. The spirits seemed to move without moving their feet, only as if floating. By moving the image in the magic lantern, one can let the operation float away, but not in part any particular movement to the feet. For the same reason, the spirits must have carried their arms and hands on their chests. They also appear in different light. The faces of the spirits looked like formed haze, which can even be accomplished by means of smoke. The two mirrors in which he often used to look give further reason for this suspicion. These objects have given shep for an interesting legacy that's outside of any of his mystical claims or controversies. He's often cited as an inspiration for the phantasmagoria hard theater trend that started in Europe and the decades after his death. Talked about that trend on the show before some promoters even advertised their shows as being shrep foresque and it is an illustration of one of those that will be on our social media, uh when we post about this episode. Yes, yeah, Shreffer is a weird one. It's very interesting to me because he is one where if you do any reading on him, and there isn't a lot in English language, most of it is in German. But it's almost as though every person who has ever written about him takes a very different approach to it and focuses on like a different aspect of his short but very fascinating life. Um. Like, some will focus a lot on that claim that he was a French noble and that he was using that. Some will focus more on like the idea of him as a necromancer. Others will focus more on him kind of waging this war with freemasons. But they're all kind of happening simultaneously in a very very just over the course of a couple of years. So uh, it's a fascinating thing to try to pull apart such a brief period of time of one person that is kind of jam packed with so much weirdness. Um. I have a couple of pieces of listener male. The first one is from our listener Katherine, who writes about Henry the Eight's armor. Sure, it's high. I enjoyed hearing about the field of Cloth of Gold in today's episode. I had never heard of it before. When you mentioned Henry's armor, it made me think of this video I saw years ago. A man in typical Nights armor races through an obstacle course against a firefighter and soldier wearing first light and then full gear armor. It's surprising how nimble all of them are while wearing such cumbersome outfits. Uh, and then attaches a picture of her kitty who thinks nothing is better than completely messing up the table cloth, unless it's maybe playing with an ice cube. That cat is real cute and it looks very autumnal. So I'm very very happy. Uh, Katie, thank you so much for this one. I had mentioned in that episode on field of Cloth of Gold or behind the scenes, I don't remember which, that there is a a museum video. I think I listed it in the show notes for the main episode that you can go see where someone has put on like that, that very very articulated armor of his and they're showing just how much movement it had. So I wanted to mention that because it is fascinating. Yeah, I watched that video when we got that email, and uh I had I don't remember how many minutes long it was, but I was like, what a nice little break to start my day watching this uh um. And I am still talking about butterfly so uh but this is one of such joy and discovery. Several people have written to us to mention that, yes, absolutely still happening, kids visiting uh monarch um, you know science setups. I do want to mention because our listener Anna wrote or Anna, I'm not sure which way she pronounces it, that she gave a shout out to the Detroit Zoo, which has apparently a permanent uh and excellent butterfly exhibits. So if you're in that area, check that one out. But my other listener mail is actually from our listener Christine, who it's hello. I am so happy to finally have something to share with you at the perfect time. A couple of weeks ago, I was traveling in Quebec and stopped at this roadside hotel. I was walking my pup along the parking lot not far from the highway and saw something yellow and black in the milkweed. With a wasp allergy in the family, I am always attuned to yellow and black bugs, but as I look closer, my heart skipped a beat. I have known for years that milkweed is important to monarch butterflies, but I have never seen monarch caterpillars in real life, let alone at a roadside hotel. There were four that I could see, and I didn't look very hard. Check out the photos attached. I've also attached to photo of what I think is a cartoon, but you mentioned they don't tend to do that on the milkweed. After a long long drive, seeing these beauties completely brought me peace. I'm also sharing photos from our travels of Dexter. My beagle puppy, who will be one in mid September, says, by the way, did you ever have T shirts made for people who have listened to the entire stuff you missed in history class catalog? I still have about two D fifty to go, but I feel the will be an achievement I will be very proud of the answer to that question is yes. It's on our T public site and it says I have my PhD in s y um. I think HC. I literally am liked. Am I getting these letters out of order because I will do it to and I'm not looking directly at it. Um, but she shared her beautiful pictures of monarchs. It's not completely unheard of for them to put I don't think um one of their cocoons on milkweed. It's just not as common as as other things. But we have to talk about this beagle puppy because Dexter is extraordinary. Beagles are very much beloved in the fry household. That is my husband's favorite, favorite kind of dog. He grew up with a beagle mix that he absolutely adored named Digby. Um. So this dog is weaponized, cute, It's the cutest thing on the planet and dangerous because beagles are smart and they will take your credit card and buy things, is what I think in my head. Um, they won't. Really, Dexter's an angel, I have no doubt. But Christine, thank you because that is such a joyous little discovery moment and I love the idea that people are are out looking for butterflies more than ever now. Uh, if you would like to share any such moments of discovery or information, you can do that. It's easy as pie. You can just write to us at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History pretty much everywhere, and you can subscribe to the podcast on the iHeart radio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.