Mythic Politics: Conspiracy, Spirituality, and the Return of Mystery

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Repeating Forms

Political events in the United States over the last few years culminating in a riotous invasion of the Capitol building on 6 January have led to a lot of focus on a certain conspiracy theory. Named “QAnon” on account of its mysterious founder and prophet, the theory positions the former president of the United States as a kind of savior against a global cabal of “satanic pedophiles” who control commerce, governments, and international media.

Immediately in its description of a global evil we see a curious and familiar theme which has recurred many times in the last few decades: Satanic ritual abuse of children. In the 1980’s, for example, conspiracy theories about Satanic beliefs and child abuse resulted in events collectively now named “the Satanic Panic,” with documentaries, investigative reporting, and books and other media being published to denounce and to combat the rise of such hidden, occulted practices.

The recurring trope of pedophilia and ritual child abuse has also been part of a moral panic levied against African and Caribbean immigrants in the United Kingdom in the last few decades. It has also appeared in accusations against Arab and Islamic leaders during US military occupations, against political groups identified with leftist ideas in the United States and Germany, and particularly against homosexual men throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Go even further back in time and we find accusations of witches raping and consuming children throughout and the United States and Europe, as well panics during the medieval period about Jewish elders stealing male children and sucking on, eating, and performing dark magical rituals with their foreskins.

Besides the matter of Satanism and child abuse, a third element in the QAnon conspiracy can also be teased out: that of a global cabal of powerful people controlling the media, politicians, governments, and commerce. Here we are reminded of the countless 20th century ideologies which posited Jews, the Illuminati, Communists, or Bankers as a clandestine, occulted class pulling the strings of politicians and media like puppeteers. For instance, both the Red Scare (which posited that Communists had infiltrated Hollywood and academic institutions) and the antisemitic movements sparked by Henry Ford’s mass publication and distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which likewise posited a secret conspiracy to control what people think and believe) in the United States shared this same basic trait. And of course panics about The Illuminati, Freemasons, and non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations (the IMF, WTO, WEF, etc) have also at their core a belief in clandestine decisions being made from the shadows to control the world.

Thus we can easily see that primary elements of the QAnon conspiracy are hardly new, but rather seem to be merely a new re-iteration of previous conspiracies. History does not repeat itself, but it is full of repeating forms.

“Conspirituality” and Undead Truths

Many recent attempts to unravel the QAnon conspiracy theory have drawn particular attention to the apparent intersections of alternative, occult, neo-Pagan, or New Age beliefs and their adherents. Likewise, a lot of attention has also been given to these intersections in another recent conspiracy theory, that of COVID-19 “denialism.” For instance, the writer Jules Evans has written several essays drawing attention to what has been called “Conspirituality” (a term coined a decade ago by researcher Charlotte Ward).

Unfortunately, while the work being done on conspirituality has certainly been interesting, this focus on alternative, non-mainstream and non-scientific religious and spiritual beliefs in modern conspiracy theories can often lead one to think that such conspiracies are a feature of alternative spiritual beliefs. This ignores that, especially in the United States, the vast majority of believers in the QAnon conspiracy are professed Christians. In fact, the very basis of this conspiracy theory is that there exists a spiritual battle between good and evil: the primary actor on the side of good (Donald Trump) was chosen by the Christian god to fight that god’s eternal enemy, Satan and his followers.

That is, QAnon is at its mythic base a Christian conspiracy theory. Even the so-called “QAnon Shaman” Jake Angeli, despite his comical barbarian dress and melange of syncretic beliefs, spoke repeatedly in his YouTube videos and social media posts about the Christian god and of Satan, as well as angels (“Angeli” was not his birth name) and about core Christian concepts such as salvation and sin.

This point leads us to a greater problem in these attempts to understand conspiracy theories and to place them into larger narratives. Conspiracy theories cannot be dismissed as aberrations of thought created wholesale from fringe or ridiculous beliefs. Instead, like animated corpses resembling the living, they are composed of the very same things from which “reasonable” or acceptable beliefs are composed.

This particular point has been brought out by Erica LaGalisse’s short work, Occult Features of Anarchism. LaGalisse proposes that conspiracy theories should be seen as pre-political (albeit misguided) attempts at explaining an actual problem. Conspiracy theories are crafted from what is at hand, weaving together observable facts into a narrative that attempts to explain why things are happening or how power is constituted. Yet those who construct or believe them ultimately lack larger context and more effective understandings of the mechanisms they are attempting to describe.

Jews, Witches, and “Ritual Child Abuse”

Here we should note that the very thing that makes conspiracy theories so powerful is that they are woven from truths, regardless of how outlandish and false the body of the theory actually is. For example, many conspiracy theories involving Jewish cabals and sexual practices, in both the Medieval period as well as the present, identify actually-existing incidents and situations yet narrated them in bizarre and untrue ways.

Samuel Oppenheimer, 17th century court Jew to the Austrian Empire.

We see this particularly in antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews pulling the strings of rulers in the Middle Ages. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “court Jews” existed in many European centers of power and were employed by nobles to raise funds for military and economic ventures. These individuals then raised funds from their communities and lent them to the aristocracy who were able in this way to skirt official Church edicts against usury.

In return, the individuals and Jewish communities from whom the money was raised were able to not only to profit from the returns (assuming the rulers who’d borrowed the money were actually successful), and more importantly were able to gain protection and favor from the aristocracy. However, to those without knowledge of these “hidden” political exchanges occurring, the court Jew became seen as the real power behind the thrones.

The court Jew was a truth, but was wrongly woven into an untruth. Any real power court Jews were able to wield over the decisions of kings and nobles came only from the power of the purse. It was at best a reciprocal relationship but more often an unequal one, always favoring the nobles. When debts could not be paid, the court Jew had no way of enforcing the agreement. Worse, because of the inferior status of Jews in Europe, it required little effort for the nobility to disavow their economic agreements and turn peasants and town folk against those communities.

A more common antisemitic conspiracy theory from the Medieval period involves accusations of pedophilia and ritual sexual abuse of children, particularly centered on the Jewish practice of male ritual circumcision. To a society that does not practice it, the cutting of a part of a male child’s genitalia can quite understandably seen as “ritual child abuse,” and even more so a particular aspect of the ritual.

During circumcision, after the boy’s foreskin is removed, the presiding rabbi would perform metzitzah b’peh, a practice in which he would put the boy’s penis in his mouth and suck on it. Though arising from folk healing practices to stop infections caused by blood clots, sucking an infant boy’s penis after it has been cut certainly looks from the outside as a bizarre practice. In moments of social and moral panic, especially during the Black Plague or the massive political instability in 17th, 18th, and 19th century Europe, it’s not difficult to see how rumor and vague knowledge of this practice could become, in the popular mind, a belief that Jews were performing ritual sexual abuse on their own children and kidnapping Christian boys to do the same.

That is, two major tropes that repeat throughout conspiracies about Jews are based on actual situations and actions. Yet something has gone wrong in the translation of those facts into narratives of motives. The Court Jew and the rabbi who cuts and then sucks on an infant boy’s penis existed, but the conspiracy theories positing the “truth” of why they existed—and what they were actually doing—were false.

Medieval panics about ritual child abuse were not limited to antisemitic conspiracy theories, nor were they even primarily antisemitic. Accusations of witches stealing and consuming the flesh of infants (again, especially male infants) in order to perform magic or to seal pacts with the devil or other powers abounded at the same time as the panics about Jewish ritual child abuse. In these cases, the conspiracy theories were aimed at a completely different group of people (women, especially unmarried women or women acting as midwives and healers).

Witches supplying the Devil with stolen children.

As Silvia Federici has noted in Caliban & The Witch, conspiracy theories about witches reached fever pitch in the early and middle stages of the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in Europe. The hunts against such women, while ideologically supported by Church authorities, most often were led and administered by secular authorities acting on behalf of a growing political class within the cities (the “bourgeoisie,” specifically those aligned with mechanistic understandings of human nature and biology).

And though the conspiracy theories about what witches were doing often appeared to originate in superstition, the belief that some women were killing infants and using poisons wasn’t false. We see how this manifests particularly in the witch-hunting texts authored in the 16th and 17th centuries denouncing witches for performing malefica, especially using poisons and herbs to end pregnancies. The women accused of being witches were often those with the knowledge of the use of natural abortificants, allowing women to make decisions about whether or not they would give birth rather than leaving such decisions to the Christian god, his priests, and the new political class who relied on high population growth for cheap labor.

Cabals of Power

Conspiracy theories in the modern era likewise point to actually-existing facts and processes, yet narrate these falsely. Here we can note the countless iterations of conspiracy theories regarding the Illuminati or other hidden cabals, groups of extremely wealthy people who are able to exert influence and power over governments.

Such groups actually exist. Consider the International Monetary Fund, an unelected and undemocratic international organization composed of the heads of banks and representatives chosen by individual governments. The IMF wields enormous influence over the everyday lives of people in far-flung places. In Argentina, for example, the IMF caused a massive economic crisis leading to the closing of factories, empty shelves in grocery stores, and most terrifyingly for the everyday Argentinian, a currency crisis which led banks to shut off ATMs, leaving people without any access to their money.

anti-globalisation protest

The IMF wields precisely the sort of power that conspiracy theories attribute to Jewish cabals or to the Illuminati, Freemasons, or “lizard people.” So do other such organizations with even less transparency, including the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. But these organizations are not composed of child-eating Satanists, pedophile rabbis, or lizard people: they are capitalists, politicians, and technocrats meeting together to act in their class interests.

That is, these organizations are actually conspiracies. They are composed of people actually conspiring together to shape and influence the world and maintain power for themselves and the classes of people they support. And their actions and agreements are occulted (hidden). Even for someone who has studied them or been aware of their actions for decades, it isn’t very simple to understand precisely what they are doing, what their specific motives are, nor to trace the compounding effects of their actions.

In the face of such obscurity and complexity, it is not hard to understand how someone without the amount of time or education required to get accurate information about such really-existing conspiracies might make mistakes in their conjectures. More so, the shared class interests and even the everyday lives (taking private jets to Switzerland for meetings, for example) of the people in such organisations are often so different from those trying to understand their workings that they take on an almost mythic or supernatural quality.

Vampiric Capital and Invisible Hands

This point is important, as most popular conspiracy theories involve some use of the mythic and supernatural. The Illuminati, the Elders of Zion, Lizardmen, Freemasons, and the network of pedophile Satanists that we see in these theories are all mythic beings, possessing magical qualities (or wielding magic itself), or are in congress (conspiracy) with otherworldly beings (aliens, Satan, demons), and it is from these supernatural and mythic qualities that the conspiracists draw their power.

To the more “rational” or “scientific” modern mind, it might be tempting to dismiss these mythic aspects as products of superstition or proof of the inferior intellects of those who believe in them. But the rational mind is no less mythic: we need only turn the mirror a little to notice this.

Take for example Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand of the market,” the unseen force which acts upon society and social relations in a way to always reward innovation, improvement, and investment while punishing sloth, conservative commerce, and refusal to compete. We tend to dismiss this talk of a disembodied hand (really, the hand of god) as mere metaphor for a natural process rather than something supernatural, but natural processes and forces function entirely on the mythic realm.

Consider both Darwin’s theory of natural selection and, much later, Richard Dawkins’ theory of “selfish genes.” Both are rather complicated theories to describe how species replicate and change over time, and both rely heavily on descriptions of external agency while disavowing completely that there is any sort of actual agency. Natural Selection is a disembodied process, but appears to “act” on species over time in order to choose (“select”) traits that are most ideal for that species survival. And while Darwin did not seem overly self-conscious about the mythic agency he was describing, Dawkins in his explanations of his “selfish gene theory” goes to almost ridiculous lengths to remind the reader that, although he is talking about genes as if they have personalities and agency, he doesn’t really mean that they do.

Marx himself, that paragon of materialism, likewise relies heavily on mythic language to describe both Capital and the Bourgeoisie. Capital is repeatedly personified and mythologized, described as a vampiric force (“Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, sucks the life of living labor and lives the more the more it sucks”) that has its own desires, needs, interests, and motives. Likewise in his descriptions of class struggle the Bourgeoisie are a mythic force, alchemically changing all of life and social relations (his famous formulation “everything that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned.”)

Natural selection, the market, Capital: each are dressed in the materialist garb of “process” or “force” yet become relentlessly spoken of as if supernatural and mythic. Nature selects, the market corrects, Capital transforms: we cannot speak of these things otherwise, yet must constantly remind ourselves that there is no actual agency less we sound unreasonable and superstitious.

The social theories employed to explain systematic injustices likewise mythologise these forces. Patriarchy, for example: it “exists” but cannot be seen except in its manifestations. It sustains and replicates itself in all of our human interactions, yet it cannot ever be directly attacked. It is hidden, invisible to most men and also to many women, only observable once the person knows what they are looking for (unequal treatment, abuse of emotional labor, “mansplaining” and “rape culture,” etc). So too White Supremacy, or Hetero-centricism, or Anthropocentrism: each are theories or concepts which explain an invisible conspiracy (invisible including and especially to those who perpetuate it) that subjugates and oppresses the world.

The Mythic Political

Let’s be clear: I believe many of these things exist, as likely do you. The fact that they function on the mythic realm as forces or “structural processes” doesn’t discount their existence in the slightest. And that’s where we encounter a deep problem when trying to understand conspiracy theories: is is not their supernatural or mythic elements that make them untrue. Dismissing them on these grounds merely reinforces a particularly western “secularist” delusion that we and we alone have risen beyond the mythic towards the firm basis of reason and rationality.

To underline this delusion, we need only briefly observe the “new atheist” (Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, etc.) conspiracy belief that Western civilization is being taken over or undermined by Islam. While the New Atheists profess a staunch anti-religious stance, their fears about the downfall of enlightened democracies show they still hold onto particularly Christian notions of progress, societal advance, the cohesiveness and unity of Western culture (recalling that all these nations have been—and often still are—dominated by Christianity), and a thinly-obscured conception of the diabolic undermining a sacred order.

“Inside Russia’s Social Media War On America,” Time Magazine 29 May 2017

Take also the American liberal belief that Russia is constantly misleading and tempting people away from the truth, manipulating their beliefs, and undermining American Democracy by installing or helping to install Donald Trump as president of the United States. Beyond the paucity of evidence for this conspiracy theory and the obviously hypocritical position (the United States has absolutely manipulated elections and spread destabilizing propaganda throughout Africa, South America, and the Middle East), these fears pose Russia as a powerful unseen agent, a diabolical power operating through occulted (hidden) means, just as the QAnon conspiracy posits a cabal of Satanic pedophiles working through occulted (hidden) means to control the world.

The matter of Russia deserves a bit more of our attention, because the conspiracy theories around Trump are not the first time that Russia has been accused of diabolism. The “Red Scare” in the United States (also called McCarthyism, the purges enacted by the House UnAmerican Activities Commission, etc.) posed the U.S.S.R as a diabolic force propagating itself through the adoption of communist ideas by writers, journalists, actors, and other cultural figures. The United States Government was so deeply panicked about the possibility of communist take-over that they created their own conspiracy, the Congress For Cultural Freedom. That actually-existing conspiracy, the CCF, was a CIA-funded project to support and promote anti-communist artists, professors, and writers without those they funded knowing where the money came from.

Conspiracy and Rebellion

The Sepoy Mutiny, or The Indian Rebellion

But fears about Russia go even farther back in time. In the middle of the 19th century, a massive but unsuccessful uprising occurred in India against the rule of the British rule through the administration of the East India Company. This rebellion (called the Indian Rebellion or the Sepoy Mutiny) had many causes, including a conspiracy theory. The Sepoys (Indian soldiers employed by the British to enforce their rule and fight off other national powers) came to believe that the gunpowder cartridges they were supplied by the British were coated in beef and pork fat. Because the process of using these cartridges involved tearing them open with the teeth, Hindu and Muslim soldiers would both be in violation of religious laws when the grease touched their mouth (pigs being unclean for the Muslims, cows being sacred to Hindus).

It is still unclear whether or not these rumors were true (the British claimed it was mutton grease, but the British do have a history of lying). This was also not the only trigger for the rebellion. At the same time, religious prophecies circulated that the rule of the British appointed raj would last one hundred years and thus would soon end. In the end, both the conspiracy theory about the cartridges and also the religious prophesy were later blamed on Russian interference by British politicians.

Both the conspiracy about the cartridges and the religious prophecy (itself a kind of conspiracy, as prophesies are a primary aspect of many medieval and current millenarian cults, as well as Q’s prophesy about Trump being chosen to stop the Satanic pedophile cults) stand outside the realm of fact and fiction. There was no way for the Sepoys to confirm which animal fats were used in the cartridges, nor can any prophesy be fact-tested until its predictions either manifest or fail to manifest.

However, both conspiracies contained obscured (occulted) political content. The animal grease wasn’t really the point; rather, it was that the Sepoys did not trust their colonial masters any longer. Likewise with the prediction of the end of the raj, the obscured content was the desire for the raj to be deposed and the British to leave India.

On the other side of the conspiracies about the Indian Rebellion, the British government was not keen on the public getting the sense that colonial rule was in any way unwelcome by the Indians. That is, it is also likely the conspiracies about the animal fat, the religious prophesies, and Russian interference were aggrandized in order to obscure the uncomfortable truth that the British were actually being oppressive to the people they had subjugated.

Conspiracy theories are employed both by the powerful and the powerless, and sometimes it is completely impossible to know from which side they originate. More so, sometimes a conspiracy theory obscures an oppression, as, say, with the conspiracies about Russian involvement in American elections obscuring the Democratic Party and US Government’s own manipulations of elections in America and elsewhere. On the other hand, sometimes it stands as a mythic container for an oppressor or oppression, as with the Sepoys, or also with the countless myths about Kings, Lords, and Nobles being vampires, bathing in the blood of virgins, or stealing and killing children.

Bluebeard and the Maid of Orléans

On this last part we can note a 15th century conspiracy theory, this time with some particularly gruesome details which mirror much of the panic about Satanic ritual child abuse seen in many other theories.

The Breton nobleman Gilles de Rais, nicknamed “Bluebeard,” was a companion of Jean D’Arc. In 1440, he was executed by hanging and then burned for the kidnapping, sexual violation, and murder of almost 100 children, mostly young boys. According to the confessions he and three accomplices made (including an Italian priest renowned as an alchemist and necromancer), the point of these violations was not only for perverse pleasure but to provide sacrifices to demons who required young male flesh.

One is tempted to shake the head at these accusations, except for the peculiar fact that he and his accomplices all confessed to these crimes and this diabolic motive. Of course like many of the witch confessions during the inquisition, it’s just as possible that the physical and psychological torture used in the interrogation process caused these false confessions. More so, Gilles de Rais has quite a few enemies, not least of which were the parts of the French aristocracy who were happy to see the former bodyguard of Jean D’Arc lose popularity with the peasantry. It is, of course, completely possible that this was all made up.

It is also possible that it wasn’t. Consider: if a noble wanted to summon demons and asked a renowned priest who specialized in ritual magic, especially necromancy, and that priest had access to the popular necromantic texts at the time (most written by priests themselves with the stated purpose of fighting demonic practices), then Gilles de Rais would have been told he needed the flesh of boys. That was what both magicians and the clergy believed witches and rabbis were already doing in their demonic rites. Moreover, sexual perversion involving the violation, murder, and even cannibalization of boys isn’t mere fairy tale—this is precisely what Jeffery Dahmer did.

The matter of Gilles de Rais leads to another even more curious conspiracy, that of Jean D’Arc herself. From all accounts, the maid of Orléans was an illiterate peasant girl who claimed that three saints (Michael, Catherine, and Margaret) appeared to her and told her how to liberate France from the English. Besides her wild military successes despite having no military training, accounts of her supernatural ability to survive grievous wounds and to warn other commanders when cannons or arrows were about to hit them confound attempts to find rational explanations.

In fact, most scholarly attempts to de-mythologize Jean D’Arc rely heavily on conspiracy theories. One such attempt posits that she wasn’t a peasant at all, but rather a disavowed noble daughter hidden in the countryside (her royal parents having conspired to hide her until needed). The more prominent “rational” explanation is that Jean D’Arc herself was a conspiracy: no such person existed, but rather was created as a myth to unite France against the English. The problem with this conspiracy theory (that she was herself a conspiracy theory) is her well-attested execution by the English. That is, if Jean D’Arc was mere conspiracy, then she was so well-crafted as to convince the English to capture, try, and execute a woman who convinced them she was Jean D’Arc, making even them collaborators in this French conspiracy.

Just as with Gilles de Rais, we must admit the possibility that Jean D’Arc wasn’t who it is said she was, didn’t do everything (or even anything) that it is claimed she did, or somehow as an illiterate peasant girl managed against all odds to lead spectacular military battles. But also as with Gilles de Rais, we must also ask “but what if this was true?” What if she was really spoken to by saints, or possessed divine or magical abilities beyond what most other humans have? What if the English were correct, that she was a witch?

Here you may want to take a step back and breathe, because I have just led you into the really terrifying in-between space where conspiracy theories become hard to unravel. We are at the heart of them now, a place where objective fact no longer serves as an anchor because we are now in the realm of truth-creation.

This is both the magic and terror of conspiracy. Once we begin to follow individual threads we are trapped like flies in strands of a web. Conspiracy theory is not just theory but an entire cosmology, a way of seeing the world. When we accept one premise (for instance, “powerful people sexually abuse children”) and then allow the possibility of another (“sexual abuse of children is sometimes done as part of occult or demonic rituals,”) it isn’t much of a step to then accept the possibility that powerful people are sexually abusing children as part of occult and demonic rituals.

From that last acceptance we then can easily answer the other questions it begs:

Why do they do it?
“Because they want power.”

What kind of power?
“Occult, magical power.”

Where does that power come from?
“From demons, or Satan.”

What do they want to do with that power?
“They want to rule the world.”

So now we have “Satanic pedophile cabal controlling the world” without really much effort.

The Diabolic Other

But what is the truth of the matter?

That’s the terrifying part, because veracity isn’t actually at stake in conspiracy theories. They are myths conveying entire cosmologies and their own particular sets of truths.

Look at the phrase "cabal of Satanic pedophiles who control the world" from the framework of myth and we see something completely different. It is a shorter, more succinct, and much more poetic way of saying "rich people, who acting outside our standards of morality, who violate innocent people with no repercussions, and whose incomprehensible wealth and power over our media, education, governments, and everyday life feel hegemonic and unassailable.”

That is, the mythic nature of the accusations actually contains something profound. Conspiracy theories should not be dismissed as mere immature pre-political theoretical formations, but rather powerful methods of conveying truth on a mythic level. The problem with them is not their formulation nor the apparent superstitious content, but rather with our own failed ability to see the mythic truth they contain.

The key to understanding this is in the concept of the “diabolic (or mythic) other.” In every conspiracy theory there is some displacement of agency and power onto an unseen force or entity. For forces, we need remember how Marxism places this agency on Capital and the Bourgeoisie, Darwin places this agency on natural forces of selection, and modern social justice theory places this agency on Patriarchy and White Supremacy. In the case of Jewish Cabals, alien lizardmen, the Illuminati, or the Satanic pedophiles, the power and agency comes from their congress or access to supernatural powers (gotten by means of ritual child sexual abuse, cannibalism, and pacts with demons or Satan himself).

The diabolic other is a mythic container for all that is beyond the common reckoning of everyday humans, whether that is the invisible hand of the market or Satan himself. Its workings must be explained to us because they are not self-evident without access to the right prophetic training. And whether that other is indifferent or malevolent, it functions beyond all our human capacity to stop it.

That is, the diabolic other is a god, or functions as a god in our minds, no matter how secular or non-theist we style ourselves. The agency of a natural process is no different from the agency of a god of nature, except that we strip it of reverence (but not of personification). This is just as “supernatural” as the conspiracy theories we label as superstition, but we cannot see it because we accept these things as true.

For the believer in conspiracy theories about Satanic pedophiles or Jewish cabals, their explanations do not feel supernatural at all, since they accept Satan and demonic beings as part of their cosmology. But likewise, the person who believes there is no conspiracy of powerful people abusing children is already situated within a cosmology where powerful people gain their power from chance (fate), from inheritance (ancestral connections), or structural privileges (a pre-destined elite caste).

All politics are mythic, and the mythic is political. Myth describes the way the world works, the hidden processes of creation and change, how power is gained and wielded and maintained. Epic battles between good and evil repeat in struggles between left and right, pre-Christian values such as nobility, honor, and hospitality wear now the secular garb of social justice, civic responsibility, and economic merit.

Neither has the Christian Devil ever gone away. We see his face in whatever we find hateful and destructive to society, be that racist violence, corrupt politicians, terrorism, or foreign agents subverting democracy. We use new words for him, but he is still there behind all our rhetoric and reason, just as the almighty One-God continues moving his invisible hand through our markets, naturally selecting those of us who can best continue life on earth, and showing the wisest technocrats and ideologues (we once called them priests and prophets) the one true path towards the heavenly city on earth.

Once we see how mythic our political understanding of the world already is, we can then look at conspiracy theories for what they really are: heresies against our accepted orthodoxy. They are not myths threatening a realm where reason reigns, they are alternative myths competing with our official myths.

The mythic danger of QAnon is that it paints those we see as good or at least neutral as diabolic, while painting those we see as deeply flawed and dangerous as the true good. The mythic danger of COVID conspiracies is that it likewise undermines our mythic faith that doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and public health technocrats are generally speaking the truth to us.

Most disconcerting of all is that we have no more recourse to reason as proof than those who believe these heretical myths have. It all comes down to faith, who and what we choose to believe, who and what we believe is dangerous and who and what we believe is good. And though this might sound maddening, this acknowledgement can be deeply liberating if we re-introduce an ancient Pagan concept into our understanding of the mythic.

Mystery

That concept is mystery. Mystery refers not only to something unknown, but something which contains secret meaning. In Latin, mysterium referred to “secret rites, worship, or things” and derived from Greek mysteria, religious cults that offered secret wisdom through initiation. These mystery cults existed outside the official religious ceremonies of the city and offered ecstatic experiences and insights into the world that were only available through—and only relevant to—the cults themselves.

These cults were themselves their own cosmologies, offering access to divine wisdom and power unavailable and also irrelevant to the initiated. Only within the mystery did the mystery have power, only in the secret rites were the secrets revealed. And rarely did the mystery spill out or influence the everyday world, except in moments of political upheaval.

Conspiracy theories are the continuation of mystery cults, spilling out more and more from their secret initiation rites into the markets and forums as the civic religion of mythic Capital and Liberal Democracy weakens. Just as the conspiracy theories about secret Jewish and witch rites flooded through the unstable streets of Medieval Europe after the Black Plague and the transition to Capitalism, mysteries about lizard men, Satanic pedophiles, aliens, 5G and engineered diseases are flooding our climate-collapsing modern world.

Mystery now reigns: the orthodox mythic struggles against the heretical mythic, and it is not clear which will survive. But we must remember: mystery requires initiation, and from that initiation new worlds are born, new myths which we ourselves shape and become.

Mystery is conspiratorial, and it is power. From mystery myth is born, and myth is the foundation of all our politics, our governments, and all our social relations. Liberal Democracy, Capitalism, Technological Progress, and the supremacy of human thought and actions over the natural world: these are state myths, the civic religion. Against these myths come new mysteries, some dark and destructive, others ecstatic and liberating.

Whether we live in a world where unseen forces control our lives or become the ones which use those forces to shape our own is merely a matter of what we choose to believe. Thus the real question is not whether or not any of these conspiracy theories are true, but whether we will choose to fight the heretical mythic on behalf of a civic religion which gives us no meaning and is destroying the world, or if we will decide to become the mythic ourselves and use mystery to birth a new world.

RHYD WILDERMUTH

Rhyd is a druid, theorist, and writer. He is also the director of publishing for Gods&Radicals Press. See more of his work at RhydWildermuth.com.