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.
