I feel like I know a little bit, but I know that I'm probably wrong because I thought the Black Israelites and the Beta Israelites were the same thing, which they are not, which I learned when I had... a black israelite on my show a captain of of a school which is what what they call their institutions um and learn the difference uh and then i was like well maybe it's a little bit like rastafarianism but you in fact talk talk to us about rastafarianism and and it certainly isn't and i guess the only uh thing in common between rastafarianism and the beta israelites is that it's from ethiopia

of sorts we're centered in ethiopia Well, the Beta Israelites, to the best of my knowledge, and I don't claim any...

I've never made a great study of them, are sometimes simply referred to as Ethiopian Jews.

And they are.

They are a self-proclaimed Jewish community in Ethiopia, which has been there for millennia.

They basically claim to be the descendants, I think, of King... solomon and the queen of sheba yes all right and that they then but they they have constituted a and it's not like alpha beta beta is sort of the place it's a toponym that they're connected to um so they're not like the you know beta test version of the israelites um they've claimed a number of things um they're they're sometimes uh I believe that they were the ones who got possession of the Ark of the Covenant, and that's how it supposedly is stashed away in a church in Ethiopia.

And historically, Ethiopia, Abyssinia, the highland areas in East Africa, it's a complicated area, was Christian from a very early era.

it was just the end of the Silk Road, right? I mean, was it just like a placeholder for a different word for like Shangri-La maybe? Well,

On one

side of my family, we're all Freemasons and Eastern Star and Elks.

I remember my grandmother once pointing up at the sign of the Elks Club.

It says BPOE, which stands for Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.

But she goes, you know what that really stands for? And I go, I don't know, Grandma.

She goes, best people on earth.

So that was a joke.

He was one of the first to analyse the mechanisms of secret societies, and he saw them not just as power-hungry, conspiratorial groups, but as tightly-knit circles that provide members with a sense of belonging, exclusivity and identity.