The Journey 50. Sarah Whalen: Royal Human Sacrifices

Sarah Whalen, author of “Royal Vengeance: The Assassination of Princess Diana and the Ancient Royal Cult of Human Sacrifice,” discusses her book with publisher RA “Kris” Millegan. Kingship is strong in humanity, summoning all kinds of esoteric elements, and royal sacrifice is an ancient practice, back to the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses and beyond. The Kennedy assassination seems to have been “the killing of the king,” to take his power and traumatize the nation. (Read the first chapters of “Royal Vengeance” for free here.)

K: I’ve done some deep dives, but Sarah had to hold her breath an awful lot to do the depth of diving that she did into the subject. Sarah has made this subject very accessible.

S: I came from an erudite family. My mother was a child psychologist and she read a lot. And I remember reading about Freud and Jung when I was way too young to be reading any of this. And her father was also extremely well educated and had tons of books on ancient history, Biblical studies, and they never stopped me from reading any of these books. I was just mesmerized by all of that [history, anthropology, esotericism]. I grew up in New Orleans, in a Catholic culture that was very strong, and I was also exposed to voodoo at a very young age. And of course I was very interested in kings and queens.

K: Growing up in New Orleans, you were familiar with “Dr. Mary’s Monkey.”

S: We knew the story of Dr. Mary. Everyone in New Orleans loves that book. Because it opened a window on powerful families. Especially on the Ochsner family. A lot of what they did was secretive. But they grew into the biggest hospital in the state. One of the biggest in the region. And it’s tied in, of course, with Lee Harvey Oswald.

K: Another reason I’m intrigued about your book is because of the Kennedy assassination, because I’ve always seen that as a magical act, the killing of the king. You kill the king and you take his power. And it’s part of the ritual sacrifice that has been going on forever. And you really nailed it here in your book. We’re putting it out a little bit at a time and the final book will be out this December. It’s a tour de force. Really an amazing book.

A bunch of our books, they’re all coming together. They’re all about the same thing. These people that  have done dirty to us and a change that is happening here where a bunch of us know that these people are doing dirty to us, and it comes to the question, “Well, we know this. Now what do we do?” Your book not only goes into the assassination of Princess Diana but also into the background of these goddesses and the history of these royal sacrifices.

S: You could say that ancient royalty has made accommodations to what we think is democracy. But there’s very little real democracy in any of these systems. And the temptation to go to kingship is really strong. It’s an ancient practice.

What does it mean when you crown someone a king? When you do that, a whole bunch of esoteric elements come in. And I think that the aim of democracy was to try to wash that out. But of course we know that that’s impossible because then you just have elites that rise up that are equally powerful and adhering to a lot of similar traditions that are very destructive.