Monday, 1 May 2017
Friday, 17 March 2017
Supernatural Philosophy II: Variations on Themes
In the last post we discussed the idea of three major branches of conspiracism and some of the differences between them. Now I want to move back to talking more about similarities, by discussing some of the recurrent literary themes of Conspiracism, and relating them to Lovecraftian horror and weird fiction in general. There are four I particularly want to highlight at this stage. Others will emerge during the course of this project and some more general concepts, such as the importance of orientalism within both conspiracism and weird fiction, deserve particular separate discussion. Those four themes are: The Theme of Deep Time, The Promethean Theme, The Theme of Blood and The Theme of Harmful Sensation.
The Theme of Deep Time
One of the most obvious connections between Conspiracism and weird horror, and one that particularly shines through when it comes to the literary borrowings of the former from the latter, is the obsession with deep time; the idea of events that happened before recorded history that somehow still resonate down and affect the events of today. Some conspiracists attribute the power of the Cabal to arcane scientific or magical knowledge passed down from advanced civilisations that existed before some historical catastrophe. The common theme in both weird horror and conspiracy lore is that these ancient survivals are generally malignant in character. Particularly of interest in the early development of this concept is the borrowing of themes from Victorian sensation writers (particularly Edward Bulwer-Lytton) by Theosophists such as Blavatsky, which then went on to influence Lovecraft, who was also certainly aware of the original material, having an extremely broad knowledge of the history of supernatural fiction, as demonstrated in his remarkable long essay on the subject. Also of note is the Atlantis obsession sparked by Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World in 1882. Deep Time gives a cosmic weight to both weird tales and conspiracy discourse, tying events in the present day to grander cycles of events.The Promethean Theme
The promethean theme has its popular origin at least, perhaps, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; the recurrent tragedy of humans 'playing god' and being destroyed in the process. For some conspiracists, this involves specific faustian bargians, made with supernatural or extraterrestrial powers, but plenty of examples of the pure 'mad scientist' type character, in the vein of Fritz Lang's Rotwang, can be found in conspiracist lore. The more general theme is one of a particular sort of anti-intellectualism or anti-scientism, often wrapped up in a particular sort of Christian ideology; since the original temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden was 'to have knowledge of good and evil and become like God' any attempt to extend humanities capabilities too far carries echoes of this hubris. The chief difference between weird horror and conspiracism is that conspiracism tends to contrast 'evil' systems of knowledge with a 'good' system of knowledge related to the process of conspiracist research.The Theme of Blood
The importance of monstrous genetic inheritance to both conspiracists and to writers like Lovecraft and those who follow him too closely probably says something about the common influence of long-debunked racial theories as much as direct borrowing. Well developed branches of conspiracist lore deal with the idea of 'Illuminati bloodlines', ancient powerful families that may or may not have some sort of supernatural component and who are the power behind the cabal, themes which are echoes in Lovecraftian tales of people who find some sort of diabolical pact or miscagenation with inhuman entities hidden in their family past. The Theme of Blood in conspiracism is a deep one, tied in particularly strongly to historical anti-Semitism; it plays on the idea of the 'enemy within', superficially the same as 'normal' people but actually part of an ancient heritage working against the established order.The Theme of Harmful Sensation
The 'motif of harmful sensation' is a common enough literary device in which the sight or sound or touch of some apparently innocuous object causes physical or psychological damage to the person experiencing it. One particular subset of this motif that is of interest is the one whereby this sensation can be used by one person to gain influence or control over another. This supernatural concept is rife within conspiracism, sometimes addressed directly and sometimes indirectly. It is one of the explanations for what would seem to be the inexplicable habit of the cabal whereby they leave symbolic clues embedded in events they have orchestrated; these symbolic clues are in fact designed to work on the human subconscious, operating as part of a system of mind control that is more or less magical, even if dressed up in scientific garb.Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Supernatural Philosophy I: Three Flavours Conspiracy
Recently, Alex Jones did an 'Ask Me Anything' question-and-answer session (archive link) on a reddit subforum dedicated to Donald Trump. Though there is nothing particulary novel in this interview, one answer particularly struck me as illustrative of the way that more 'grounded' conspiracists like Jones integrate esoteric lore into their worldview, which will lead us into the question of classifying conspiracists and understanding how such broad agreement can be reached between people who might be expected to have radically differing worldviews. In part II of this post we shall look at some of the broad 'themes' of contemporary conspiracism and start linking those back to some of the themes of Lovecraftian horror, starting to tie our two subjects together.
The particular quote from Alex Jones that struck me as being particularly useful in illustrating this concept was this:
The Theistic conspiracist operates from within the context of Christianity, or more rarely from the context of Islam or Mormonism, or very rarely indeed from Judaism, or some variation or fusion of one or more of these beliefs. Their particular flavour of religiosity can vary wildly, but tends towards abrahamic monotheism generally, and particularly the more idiosyncratic end of Protestantism, with a tendency towards highly literal, yet fanciful, interpretations of the bible and a strong anti-Catholic streak. The main thing that unites Theists, and an aspect of their thought which tends to resonate throughout the rest of conspiracism1, is a cosmology of personified Good and Evil (God and Satan), actively engaged in spiritual conflict, which for them provides the backdrop to the machinations of the cabal. In this view, the Cabal are the willing or unwilling dupes of Satan, working to prepare the world for the End of Days under the guise of a global Satanic state. The weaker versions of this found in other forms of conspiracism give us the least obvious, but most permeating supernatural aspects of the cabal; their superhuman malice, which drives them forward to carry out the most immoral schemes in the most unethical ways, and their superhuman corruption, which ensures not a single one of them ever feels a pang of guilt, remorse or shame about the whole thing.
The final variant is the Esoteric conspiracist. These are the conspiracists who retain a belief in the supernatural in some way (often understood through the lens of new-age pseudoscience) but reject the organising manichean framework of the Theists. Esotericists may well believe in a god, but it tends to be the deistic, platonic or gnostic sort of God, remote and unknowable. An important way to distinguish between them is that in the Theistic view, in line with various religious prophecies, the ultimate ascendancy and specific power of Good to triumph over Evil is assured; God will ultimately triumph, and he can empower individuals to triumph over the forces of Evil via their faith to call on his intercession. In the esoteric view this ultimate triumph is not so assured; good (or 'positive energy') can still overcome evil (or 'negative energy') but this energy is an abstract force, employed directly by conscious individuals using learnable techniques under the guidance of wise masters. The great drama of the Cabal thus becomes a reflection of a cosmic conflict between various groups, driven by ideology and the desire for resources. These groups may include various secret societies (including survivals of ancient civilisations), public national or religious groups, supernatural beings ('ascended masters', 'macrobes'), races or factions of interstellar or interdimensional aliens and so on. This is the wing of conspiracism in which many of the most recognisable 'nutty' aspects of conspiracism tend to reside: UFOs, shapeshifters, channelling and so on.
These three tendencies are not necessarily exclusionary, though they tend to be. Conspiracists can practice various sorts of syncretism, either deliberately, or through a lack of philosophical sophistication or rigour when it comes to their overall framing. Ultimately the three tendencies remain united within the intellectual structure of conspiracism. This is represented in the diagram below:
Ultimately, all these tendencies share the common features of conspiracism we have discussed before and it is this common framework which allows the easy transfer of ideas. It is important at this stage to understand how conspiracists conceptualise themselves and their participation within the conspiracist movement. One common, less pejoratively loaded term conspiracists use for themselves is 'Researcher'. A Researcher produces 'Information'; Information can be thought of as the molecular unit of conspiracist thought, consisting of an assortment of factoids, associations, ideas, notions, quotes, opinions, names, places and other tidbits of lore, as well as images, video and audio2 that might be associated with them. Researchers produce and synthesise Information, and they perform judgements about the relative weight to be given to each unit, based on their own personal criteria, and they present their Research to others via various media. Individual units of Information can be taken from any source, most commonly other conspiracists, and it does not generally matter to a conspiracist what the beliefs of an originator of that Information might have been. Imagine a piece of Information that consists of the account of a sleep paralysis sufferer; to the Mundane, this might suggest some sort of program of government experimentation. To the Theist, it is evidence of the earthly activity of demons, and to the Esoteric it might suggest alien abductions or visitations from higher-dimensional beings. Conspiracists have at their disposal a variety of strategies that allow them to incorporate and develop Information, even if their personal philosophy is violently opposed to that of the originator. If the originator is part of an organisation they believe to be involved in the Cabal, then this might be an example of 'revelation of the method', an idea that deserves particular dissection in the future. If they believe the originator is a 'shill' or disinformation agent, then any part they like can be what conspiracists call a 'limited hangout', related to the idea that propaganda must mix some truth in with the lie. A rival conspiracist with different beliefs may have accidentally stumbled on some gold, but has of course misinterpreted it, and so on.
Thus, we come back to Jones' quote. Jones does not profess to believe in the occult, at least in the sense that he believes that black magicians can wield genuine supernatural powers. But he believes that the Cabal believes in the occult, and aliens, and thus anything that is to do with the occult or aliens can very neatly be folded into his worldview. Each major branch has a version of this sort of master strategy. Thus, we cannot easily isolate any part of Conspiracist lore from any other; just because someone does not believe in demons or aliens does not meant that ideas about demons or aliens cannot work their way into their thinking. Once you accept the premise of a grand conspiracy, the whole notion of a 'fringe' idea recedes, and the extremes become very much in reach.
1 Perhaps unsurprisingly given the dominant role of Christianity in Western thought.
2 This granular structure will become important in the future as we move on to the topic of conspiracist aesthetics.
The Three Flavours of Conspiracism
It is my personal belief that Conspiracists can be drawn into three broad camps. Apart from intractable arguments over the details of various conspiracies, the main schismatic element of conspiracism comes down to how the conspiracist approaches the concept of the supernatural and its relationship to their worldview and ideas.The particular quote from Alex Jones that struck me as being particularly useful in illustrating this concept was this:
Jones is what I like to call a Mundane conspiracy theorist. He never explicitly invokes magic or too obviously advanced technology (such as holograms or anti-gravity devices) in his discourse; yet, as this quote shows, he can integrate many of the theories of, for example, David Icke ('the elite are really child-eating vampire lizards') simply by re-casting them as 'mere beliefs' of the Cabal. The Mundane conspiracist can be thought of as being similiar in approach to a techno-thriller or a James Bond style spy movie; they generally operate (at least in terms of physical events) in the realm of the highly implausible but seemingly possible, though there are various ideas (such as 'Manchurian Candidate' style mind control) common among these sorts that are fairly firmly in the realm of science fiction. It is worth noting however that even these sorts of conspiracists tend to incorporate less overt supernatural elements, which we may understand in the context of our next sort of conspiracist.
The elite believe that they are communicating with interdemensional creatures and they believe that they have to kill everyone to get to the super-technology. The psychopath cosmology is not to have kids and live on through them but that you must kill and enslave people to get ahead. Prove you're evil, prove you're hateful - you're just this God killing everyone.
The Theistic conspiracist operates from within the context of Christianity, or more rarely from the context of Islam or Mormonism, or very rarely indeed from Judaism, or some variation or fusion of one or more of these beliefs. Their particular flavour of religiosity can vary wildly, but tends towards abrahamic monotheism generally, and particularly the more idiosyncratic end of Protestantism, with a tendency towards highly literal, yet fanciful, interpretations of the bible and a strong anti-Catholic streak. The main thing that unites Theists, and an aspect of their thought which tends to resonate throughout the rest of conspiracism1, is a cosmology of personified Good and Evil (God and Satan), actively engaged in spiritual conflict, which for them provides the backdrop to the machinations of the cabal. In this view, the Cabal are the willing or unwilling dupes of Satan, working to prepare the world for the End of Days under the guise of a global Satanic state. The weaker versions of this found in other forms of conspiracism give us the least obvious, but most permeating supernatural aspects of the cabal; their superhuman malice, which drives them forward to carry out the most immoral schemes in the most unethical ways, and their superhuman corruption, which ensures not a single one of them ever feels a pang of guilt, remorse or shame about the whole thing.
The final variant is the Esoteric conspiracist. These are the conspiracists who retain a belief in the supernatural in some way (often understood through the lens of new-age pseudoscience) but reject the organising manichean framework of the Theists. Esotericists may well believe in a god, but it tends to be the deistic, platonic or gnostic sort of God, remote and unknowable. An important way to distinguish between them is that in the Theistic view, in line with various religious prophecies, the ultimate ascendancy and specific power of Good to triumph over Evil is assured; God will ultimately triumph, and he can empower individuals to triumph over the forces of Evil via their faith to call on his intercession. In the esoteric view this ultimate triumph is not so assured; good (or 'positive energy') can still overcome evil (or 'negative energy') but this energy is an abstract force, employed directly by conscious individuals using learnable techniques under the guidance of wise masters. The great drama of the Cabal thus becomes a reflection of a cosmic conflict between various groups, driven by ideology and the desire for resources. These groups may include various secret societies (including survivals of ancient civilisations), public national or religious groups, supernatural beings ('ascended masters', 'macrobes'), races or factions of interstellar or interdimensional aliens and so on. This is the wing of conspiracism in which many of the most recognisable 'nutty' aspects of conspiracism tend to reside: UFOs, shapeshifters, channelling and so on.
These three tendencies are not necessarily exclusionary, though they tend to be. Conspiracists can practice various sorts of syncretism, either deliberately, or through a lack of philosophical sophistication or rigour when it comes to their overall framing. Ultimately the three tendencies remain united within the intellectual structure of conspiracism. This is represented in the diagram below:
Thus, we come back to Jones' quote. Jones does not profess to believe in the occult, at least in the sense that he believes that black magicians can wield genuine supernatural powers. But he believes that the Cabal believes in the occult, and aliens, and thus anything that is to do with the occult or aliens can very neatly be folded into his worldview. Each major branch has a version of this sort of master strategy. Thus, we cannot easily isolate any part of Conspiracist lore from any other; just because someone does not believe in demons or aliens does not meant that ideas about demons or aliens cannot work their way into their thinking. Once you accept the premise of a grand conspiracy, the whole notion of a 'fringe' idea recedes, and the extremes become very much in reach.
1 Perhaps unsurprisingly given the dominant role of Christianity in Western thought.
2 This granular structure will become important in the future as we move on to the topic of conspiracist aesthetics.
Tuesday, 7 February 2017
Defining 'Conspiracism'
Before moving into more specific strands of research and considering the artistic aspects of the book it makes some sense to try and define terms. What is meant by 'Conspiracism', in the sense that I am talking about here?
First, it is important to distinguish Conspiracism (with a capital C) from the more general phenomenon of paranoid thought and indeed from 'mere' conspiracy theory. When I talk about Conspiracism, I mean a specific political phenomenon, an international ideological current with multiple roots, sources and strands which are nevertheless connected by a shared culture and general set of beliefs about the world. Most specifically, due to the nature of my particular political concerns and the limits of my research, I am talking about Conspiracism as it exists within the Western world (where I believe its origins lie) and particularly the anglophone West.
At its most essential, Conspiracism can be defined as the belief that the course of history and the development of culture and the intellectual and political landscape is controlled primarily by the secret actions of one or more groups of persons who are acting towards selfish, perhaps even explicitly malign, ends. Conspiracism rejects all forms of historical materialism and all other open historical narratives; all 'great men' are puppets, bit-players or charlatans, and progress is a deliberately crafted illusion. At its core, therefore, Conspiracism, despite its calls for the overthrow of the political establishment is a conservative, reactionary and parochial current of thought.1 When the historical roots of Conspiracism are studied it can be seen that it has always flourished in times where radical political upheavals have threatened an entrenched class. This can be extended back to the witch panics, pogroms and religious wars of the late middle ages, but is perhaps most obvious in the European reaction to the French revolution and the Revolutions of 1848, in the general reaction to the October Revolution of 1917 and to the spread of Communism after the Second World War.
The general term I like to use for the idea of this controlling group within Conspiracism generally is 'the Cabal'.2 It is important to note that the 'Cabal' is not simply the government and other established authorities, though these may well be subsumed within it. Conspiracists are not simply right-libertarians, though there is some significant crossover with that political persuasion. The important thing to bear in mind here is the crucial importance of secrecy to the Conspiracist worldview. One recurring theme in Conspiracist writings is Plato's allegory of the cave, and interpreting this allegory from the Conspiracist worldview is a good way of understanding how Conspiracists conceptualise the Cabal and their relationship to it.
The allegory of the cave centres around the idea of prisoners who are kept chained in a dark cave, and who come to believe that shadows projected on a wall in front of them constitute reality; only by freeing themselves can the prisoners actually grasp something of the true nature of things. Plato meant this to say something about the difference between the world that is intelligible to our senses and the 'perfect' world of pure thought where Ideal Forms exist, which can be accessed by philosophy. The Conspiracist interpretation is broadly along the same lines, though often (but by no means always) less metaphysical. To the Conspiracist, the prisoners are the vast majority of people, the 'sheep', who do not share their worldview, and are instead content to consume a false reality created by the Cabal; the 'propaganda' of mass culture and the 'indoctrination' of the academy. The Conspiracist on the other hand is the Philosopher, who can break their own chains and 'awaken', turning round to see the machinery of projection and its operators, and beyond them the Truth that has been obscured.
Thus we have the general structure of Conspiracism at its broadest level; a secretive Cabal who play with the perceptions of the populace in order to control them for their own ends. Within this structure exists a multiplicity of thought, some of it diametrically opposed in its choices of how to populate the Cabal, which is akin to the doctrinal squabbling inherent in any ideological movement. These can be organised into broad strands or schools, which I shall explore at a later date. It should be noted however that there exists significant cross-pollination among every strand of Conspiracism; there is a common literature of theories, facts, quasi-facts, myths, misconceptions and errata which they all draw from in common. This will be important when it comes time to more clearly explore how the seemingly 'mundane' conspiracism that revolves around more mainstream Conspiracist figures like Donald Trump and Alex Jones, with its modern thriller landscape of backroom politics, secret deals, spies and hackers and so forth is intimately connected to the more esoteric, David Icke world of aliens, holograms and parallel dimensions suggested by the impetus for this project.
1 It has not been at all surprising to me to see many more mainstream Conspiracist thinkers in the US, after spending years fulminating over the imminent arrival of a fascist police state under Bush, Obama or Clinton, jump straight into bed with an overt authoritarian like Trump.
2 The occult flavour of this term seems appropriate given the deep parallels and connections that exist between Conspiracism and various branches of esoteric thought, which is such a broad topic that it will require much separate later discussion.
First, it is important to distinguish Conspiracism (with a capital C) from the more general phenomenon of paranoid thought and indeed from 'mere' conspiracy theory. When I talk about Conspiracism, I mean a specific political phenomenon, an international ideological current with multiple roots, sources and strands which are nevertheless connected by a shared culture and general set of beliefs about the world. Most specifically, due to the nature of my particular political concerns and the limits of my research, I am talking about Conspiracism as it exists within the Western world (where I believe its origins lie) and particularly the anglophone West.
At its most essential, Conspiracism can be defined as the belief that the course of history and the development of culture and the intellectual and political landscape is controlled primarily by the secret actions of one or more groups of persons who are acting towards selfish, perhaps even explicitly malign, ends. Conspiracism rejects all forms of historical materialism and all other open historical narratives; all 'great men' are puppets, bit-players or charlatans, and progress is a deliberately crafted illusion. At its core, therefore, Conspiracism, despite its calls for the overthrow of the political establishment is a conservative, reactionary and parochial current of thought.1 When the historical roots of Conspiracism are studied it can be seen that it has always flourished in times where radical political upheavals have threatened an entrenched class. This can be extended back to the witch panics, pogroms and religious wars of the late middle ages, but is perhaps most obvious in the European reaction to the French revolution and the Revolutions of 1848, in the general reaction to the October Revolution of 1917 and to the spread of Communism after the Second World War.
The general term I like to use for the idea of this controlling group within Conspiracism generally is 'the Cabal'.2 It is important to note that the 'Cabal' is not simply the government and other established authorities, though these may well be subsumed within it. Conspiracists are not simply right-libertarians, though there is some significant crossover with that political persuasion. The important thing to bear in mind here is the crucial importance of secrecy to the Conspiracist worldview. One recurring theme in Conspiracist writings is Plato's allegory of the cave, and interpreting this allegory from the Conspiracist worldview is a good way of understanding how Conspiracists conceptualise the Cabal and their relationship to it.
The allegory of the cave centres around the idea of prisoners who are kept chained in a dark cave, and who come to believe that shadows projected on a wall in front of them constitute reality; only by freeing themselves can the prisoners actually grasp something of the true nature of things. Plato meant this to say something about the difference between the world that is intelligible to our senses and the 'perfect' world of pure thought where Ideal Forms exist, which can be accessed by philosophy. The Conspiracist interpretation is broadly along the same lines, though often (but by no means always) less metaphysical. To the Conspiracist, the prisoners are the vast majority of people, the 'sheep', who do not share their worldview, and are instead content to consume a false reality created by the Cabal; the 'propaganda' of mass culture and the 'indoctrination' of the academy. The Conspiracist on the other hand is the Philosopher, who can break their own chains and 'awaken', turning round to see the machinery of projection and its operators, and beyond them the Truth that has been obscured.
Thus we have the general structure of Conspiracism at its broadest level; a secretive Cabal who play with the perceptions of the populace in order to control them for their own ends. Within this structure exists a multiplicity of thought, some of it diametrically opposed in its choices of how to populate the Cabal, which is akin to the doctrinal squabbling inherent in any ideological movement. These can be organised into broad strands or schools, which I shall explore at a later date. It should be noted however that there exists significant cross-pollination among every strand of Conspiracism; there is a common literature of theories, facts, quasi-facts, myths, misconceptions and errata which they all draw from in common. This will be important when it comes time to more clearly explore how the seemingly 'mundane' conspiracism that revolves around more mainstream Conspiracist figures like Donald Trump and Alex Jones, with its modern thriller landscape of backroom politics, secret deals, spies and hackers and so forth is intimately connected to the more esoteric, David Icke world of aliens, holograms and parallel dimensions suggested by the impetus for this project.
1 It has not been at all surprising to me to see many more mainstream Conspiracist thinkers in the US, after spending years fulminating over the imminent arrival of a fascist police state under Bush, Obama or Clinton, jump straight into bed with an overt authoritarian like Trump.
2 The occult flavour of this term seems appropriate given the deep parallels and connections that exist between Conspiracism and various branches of esoteric thought, which is such a broad topic that it will require much separate later discussion.
Wednesday, 25 January 2017
The purpose of this project and personal background
This blog is designed to document my ongoing research and process of artistic development in creating what will hopefully become a substantial Artist's Book exploring the strange confluence between two of my interests; classic weird fiction and the more esoteric fringes of the conspiracy movement, and through this confluence trying to understand the role of conspiracist thinking in contemporary life.
My interest in both these topics stretches back to my teenage years. My fiction reading, which was mostly in older genre material, lead me to the classic weird by a number of routes; I remember coming across things like Terry Pratchett's pastiches of HP Lovecraft such as 'Tshup-Aklathep', the Infernal Star Toad with a Million Young1 and other references at a young age, such references being rife in certain facets of 'nerd' culture even in the 1990's, before the more recent elevation of tentacle-faced Cthulhu to the status of a bona fide pop icon. I probably first stumbled across it properly when my interest in Ursula K. LeGuin bought me to a book called A Treasury of Fantasy (Cary Wilkins ed.) which contained, along with her classic short story The Rule of Names, pieces by Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard and most crucially, Lovecraft's The Doom That Came to Sarnath. Later a teenage obsession with Poe bought me back to a different part of the ouevre, and over time I expanded my taste from Lovecraft to other 'classic' writers in the field such as Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson and so on, a taste that fitted easily in with many of my other passions (Vincent Price films, doom metal and so on).
At the same time as I was seeking 'weird' literature, I was also seeking more real-world examples of the weird. My interest in the topic of conspiracy theories was first properly ignited by the presence on the Isle of Wight (where I grew up) of the (in)famous British conspiracist David Icke, who believes (at his grandest scope) that the world we perceive is a carefully constructed illusion operated by a dynasty of vampiric reptiles from another dimension who masquerade as prominent political and cultural figures. A school friend of mine had an (ironic) interest in Icke, and there was an unsuccessful attempt to lobby for him to speak at our school, for more-or-less absurdist reasons. I encountered other fragments of conspiracist lore in my reading, particularly as I started to get on to the internet, but my interest was properly ignited by three rather dissimilar things which I came across about the same time, in about late 2004 or early 2005. The first was an album by the band Ewikgeit, 2004's Radio Ixtlan, which had a reading list in the back of it's lyrics booklet (!) which included a work by Icke, and lyrics which introduced me to the work of Carlos Castaneda and clued me into the subsequent '2012 Mayan Prophecy' lore. At roughly the same time, I finished reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and moved on to Foucault's Pendulum, possibly the finest work of fiction about conspiracism ever produced3 . The final thing was, for no particular reason related to its contents4, picking up a copy of Jon Ronsons's 2001 book Them: Adventures With Extremists, the companion piece to the documentary series The Secret Rulers of the World, which gave me more perspective on Icke, and introduced me to Alex Jones and the background of the US militia movement, as well as conspiracist staples like Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg Group.
This was a very appropriate cultural moment to become interested in the topic. Dan Brown's muddled thriller The Da Vinci Code had been a runaway success the year before and was still very much in the public eye; feeling against the Bush administration was running high, and Fahrenheit 9/11 had recently been released. Rumblings from the conspiracist underground were already difficult to escape on the internet, and would explode with the imminent rise of video sharing sites (seemingly the natural home of accessible conspiracist propaganda) and particularly the blockbuster success of conspiracy films like Loose Change and later Zeitgeist. These made conspiracism practically inescapable for anyone who spent any amount of time on internet discussion forums, even for unrelated topics. As an outsider, I took an interest in watching how the theories developed over time, and as a teenage keyboard warrior I came to grips with how difficult conspiracism was to engage on an intellectual and rhetorical level. For a while I immersed myself in the minutiae of the colour of burning jet fuel, the ballistic properties of Carcano rifles, and other such topics, before coming to the inevitable realisation that such discussions are, for the most part, hopeless.
Still, the topic of conspiracism has continued to fascinate me, continuing to come up and take on new aspects as I explored different fields as diverse as the philosophy of art and the history of socialism. I became particular interested in the question of what causes people to believe in conspiracy theories. As someone who is generally skeptical towards political authority, I would seem a natural fit for a conspiracy theorist in the minds of some, yet in all the years that I have watched conspiracist videos and lectures, read conspiracist websites and books and so on, a process which should, in the mind of conspiracists, have 'awoken' me to some sort of truth, I have never seen one fact or idea advanced which would make me accept the conspiracist worldview. I will probably elaborate some of my thoughts on this topic in later posts; in thinking on it, I have for several years been considering how to develop my ideas into some sort of artistic and intellectual response, which this project is intended to fulfill. However, I lacked some sort of key idea or image around which to start building the work.
This changed recently as I was listening, whilst working on a print, to someone reading the 'Emerald Tablets of Thoth'5. I have been aware of the importance this document has in some more esoteric conspiracist circles, and of its exceptionally dubious status, for some time. However, I had not actually bothered to read it, and when the reading came up on youtube I thought it might be fun to give a listen to. Serendipitously, I had recently read, for the first time, the tales that Lovecraft had ghostwritten for Zealia Bishop, which are not included in most anthologies of his work; The Curse of Yig, Medusa's Coil and The Mound. Whilst reading The Mound, I had been struck by some of the similarities between the work and aspects of conspiracy lore, particularly some of the more esoteric ideas about Atlantis and the Annunaki, so when the Emerald Tablets began to tread on the same tendency, I was primed in the right direction. However, I don't think I would have needed this priming to be floored as I heard the following passage:
In an era where, for many, the news is indistinguishable from dystopian fiction, exploring the roots of an increasingly dominant strain of political thought in fiction seems extremely apposite.
1 Which tortures its victims by forcing them to look at pictures of its children until they go insane.
2 The subsequent album Conspiritus (2005) is a full concept album based around the idea of the 'New World Order' conspiracy theory.
3 The only things coming even close in my mind being Wilson and Shae's Illuminatus! and Eco's own The Prague Cemetery.
4 My local Ottakar's happened to have a few signed copies left over, presumably from Ronson's book tour to support The Men Who Stare At Goats.
5 Completely unrelated to the more famous Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus that forms part of the literature of medieval alchemy.
My interest in both these topics stretches back to my teenage years. My fiction reading, which was mostly in older genre material, lead me to the classic weird by a number of routes; I remember coming across things like Terry Pratchett's pastiches of HP Lovecraft such as 'Tshup-Aklathep', the Infernal Star Toad with a Million Young1 and other references at a young age, such references being rife in certain facets of 'nerd' culture even in the 1990's, before the more recent elevation of tentacle-faced Cthulhu to the status of a bona fide pop icon. I probably first stumbled across it properly when my interest in Ursula K. LeGuin bought me to a book called A Treasury of Fantasy (Cary Wilkins ed.) which contained, along with her classic short story The Rule of Names, pieces by Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard and most crucially, Lovecraft's The Doom That Came to Sarnath. Later a teenage obsession with Poe bought me back to a different part of the ouevre, and over time I expanded my taste from Lovecraft to other 'classic' writers in the field such as Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson and so on, a taste that fitted easily in with many of my other passions (Vincent Price films, doom metal and so on).
At the same time as I was seeking 'weird' literature, I was also seeking more real-world examples of the weird. My interest in the topic of conspiracy theories was first properly ignited by the presence on the Isle of Wight (where I grew up) of the (in)famous British conspiracist David Icke, who believes (at his grandest scope) that the world we perceive is a carefully constructed illusion operated by a dynasty of vampiric reptiles from another dimension who masquerade as prominent political and cultural figures. A school friend of mine had an (ironic) interest in Icke, and there was an unsuccessful attempt to lobby for him to speak at our school, for more-or-less absurdist reasons. I encountered other fragments of conspiracist lore in my reading, particularly as I started to get on to the internet, but my interest was properly ignited by three rather dissimilar things which I came across about the same time, in about late 2004 or early 2005. The first was an album by the band Ewikgeit, 2004's Radio Ixtlan, which had a reading list in the back of it's lyrics booklet (!) which included a work by Icke, and lyrics which introduced me to the work of Carlos Castaneda and clued me into the subsequent '2012 Mayan Prophecy' lore. At roughly the same time, I finished reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and moved on to Foucault's Pendulum, possibly the finest work of fiction about conspiracism ever produced3 . The final thing was, for no particular reason related to its contents4, picking up a copy of Jon Ronsons's 2001 book Them: Adventures With Extremists, the companion piece to the documentary series The Secret Rulers of the World, which gave me more perspective on Icke, and introduced me to Alex Jones and the background of the US militia movement, as well as conspiracist staples like Bohemian Grove and the Bilderberg Group.
This was a very appropriate cultural moment to become interested in the topic. Dan Brown's muddled thriller The Da Vinci Code had been a runaway success the year before and was still very much in the public eye; feeling against the Bush administration was running high, and Fahrenheit 9/11 had recently been released. Rumblings from the conspiracist underground were already difficult to escape on the internet, and would explode with the imminent rise of video sharing sites (seemingly the natural home of accessible conspiracist propaganda) and particularly the blockbuster success of conspiracy films like Loose Change and later Zeitgeist. These made conspiracism practically inescapable for anyone who spent any amount of time on internet discussion forums, even for unrelated topics. As an outsider, I took an interest in watching how the theories developed over time, and as a teenage keyboard warrior I came to grips with how difficult conspiracism was to engage on an intellectual and rhetorical level. For a while I immersed myself in the minutiae of the colour of burning jet fuel, the ballistic properties of Carcano rifles, and other such topics, before coming to the inevitable realisation that such discussions are, for the most part, hopeless.
Still, the topic of conspiracism has continued to fascinate me, continuing to come up and take on new aspects as I explored different fields as diverse as the philosophy of art and the history of socialism. I became particular interested in the question of what causes people to believe in conspiracy theories. As someone who is generally skeptical towards political authority, I would seem a natural fit for a conspiracy theorist in the minds of some, yet in all the years that I have watched conspiracist videos and lectures, read conspiracist websites and books and so on, a process which should, in the mind of conspiracists, have 'awoken' me to some sort of truth, I have never seen one fact or idea advanced which would make me accept the conspiracist worldview. I will probably elaborate some of my thoughts on this topic in later posts; in thinking on it, I have for several years been considering how to develop my ideas into some sort of artistic and intellectual response, which this project is intended to fulfill. However, I lacked some sort of key idea or image around which to start building the work.
This changed recently as I was listening, whilst working on a print, to someone reading the 'Emerald Tablets of Thoth'5. I have been aware of the importance this document has in some more esoteric conspiracist circles, and of its exceptionally dubious status, for some time. However, I had not actually bothered to read it, and when the reading came up on youtube I thought it might be fun to give a listen to. Serendipitously, I had recently read, for the first time, the tales that Lovecraft had ghostwritten for Zealia Bishop, which are not included in most anthologies of his work; The Curse of Yig, Medusa's Coil and The Mound. Whilst reading The Mound, I had been struck by some of the similarities between the work and aspects of conspiracy lore, particularly some of the more esoteric ideas about Atlantis and the Annunaki, so when the Emerald Tablets began to tread on the same tendency, I was primed in the right direction. However, I don't think I would have needed this priming to be floored as I heard the following passage:
Yet, beware, the serpent still livethAny Lovecraft afficionado will instantly recognise the peculiar wording of the last two lines of these stanza as being lifted, somewhat artlessly, from the fictitious grimoire to end them all, the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred :
in a place that is open at times to the world.
Unseen they walk among thee
in places where the rites have been said.
Again as time passes onward
shall they take the semblance of men.
but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons.The plagiarism was so distinct that I had to pause, allowing me to fully absorb as, only a few lines later the tablets continue:
Which is, quite patently, a plagiarism of Frank Belknap Long's The Hounds of Tindalos, to an almost ridiculous degree:
List ye, O man,
to the depth of my wisdom.
Speak I of knowledge hidden from man.
Far have I been
on my journey through SPACE-TIME,
even to the end of space of this cycle.
Aye, glimpsed the HOUNDS of the Barrier,
lying in wait for he who would pass them.
In that space where time exists not,
faintly I sensed the guardians of cycles.
Move they only through angles.
Free are they not of the curved dimensions.
"By simply straining I can see farther and farther back. Now I am going back through strange curves and angles. Angles and curves multiply about me. I perceive great segments of time through curves. There is curved time, and angular time. The beings that exist in angular time cannot enter curved time. It is very strange...Beyond life there are"—his face grew ashen with terror—"things that I cannot distinguish. They move slowly through angles. They have no bodies, and they move slowly through outrageous angles...The Hounds of Tindalos!...They can only reach us through angles."The bold-faced nature of this plagiarism astonished me. Actually, it is much more extensive, as this article lays out. I was aware that there was a certain similarity of ideas between esoteric conspiracism and weird fiction, and that there were certain influences from proto-sci-fi on occult traditions (compare for example Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, an acknowledged influence on theosophical thought, and d'Alveydre's writings on 'Agartha') and that there was some influence from genre fiction on conspiracy thinking is obvious, but I hadn't realised quite how blatant the borrowing of one of the ultimate sources for the 'reptilian' mythos of Icke et al. was. This immediately presented me with the idea of how to proceed with an artistic project on conspiracism, the central image of science fiction being recycled as paranoid fact, which takes on incredible potency when considered through the lens of 'hyper-reality' and the recent emergent concept of a 'post-truth' world. As I have been writing this introductory post slowly over the last month, the extent to which conspiracist thinking has captured the political discourse has never been more evident. A few days ago, I saw a sign carried at one of what will doubtless be the first of many, many protests against Donald Trump's presidency:
In an era where, for many, the news is indistinguishable from dystopian fiction, exploring the roots of an increasingly dominant strain of political thought in fiction seems extremely apposite.
1 Which tortures its victims by forcing them to look at pictures of its children until they go insane.
2 The subsequent album Conspiritus (2005) is a full concept album based around the idea of the 'New World Order' conspiracy theory.
3 The only things coming even close in my mind being Wilson and Shae's Illuminatus! and Eco's own The Prague Cemetery.
4 My local Ottakar's happened to have a few signed copies left over, presumably from Ronson's book tour to support The Men Who Stare At Goats.
5 Completely unrelated to the more famous Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus that forms part of the literature of medieval alchemy.
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