Unbelievable part 24: Conspiracy Theories

3 July 2020

In these oddest of odd times, now seems as good a moment as any to probe the conspiracy theory angle on my Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable research. For a while now I’ve been teasing out the notion that although the story central to the exhibition was not true, that doesn’t mean it was also improbable, implausible, or even impossible. Indeed, the deeper and wider my investigation goes, the more evidence I uncover that points at the very least to the story’s plausibility, a believability that alone convinced many of its lies (eikós). I’m heading further towards reading the Apistos/Amotan story as one built upon unrealised possibilities rather than out-and-out fabrications.

This part of my journey is being mapped somewhat by reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy (Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, 1975), which I came to via a tenuous link to an obscure reference (if it’s a reference at all) in The Diver, as outlined in part 21. As with The Soft Machine, I’m struggling to read The Illuminatus! Trilogy, mainly because I am struggling to concentrate at all, and partly because it also flits about and is written from a 1970s white-male perspective with which I am utterly bored. There are some nuggets of gold informing my quest, though, so I slowly persist where time allows. And I remind myself of the science-fiction angle – taking science maybes, could-bes and only-as-yet unrealised possibilities – to enjoy it a bit more.

The main obstacle remains overcoming the feeling of frivolity at such a serious time. As long as I recognise the privilege of being able to sit in the sun and jot these notes for a project that may go nowhere, it’s worth more – or worth something – if I get on with it instead of becoming paralysed and silenced by guilt. Keep learning, keep doing, keep changing. Just keep going at something.

Right, conspiracy theories. I’m edging into this against a backdrop of insistences that 5G and/or a lab accident caused the novel coronavirus. I’m not interested enough in those specific ideas to engage with them, but I do possess a mild curiosity about the cultures around conspiracy theories more generally, largely fuelled by my fandom of The X-Files and its recurring characters The Lone Gunmen, who had their own spin-off series of that title in 2001. As well as the show’s canon conspiracies involving a syndicate of men doing shady deals with an advanced extraterrestrial race, they also imagined truths behind the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and weighed in on the fabled Roswell crash in 1947 and goings on at Area 51.

It is with these traditions of plausible, not-beyond-the-realms-of-extreme-possibility science-fiction and conspiracy culture that I see Treasures as residing or intersecting. My research so far is indicating that its stories and histories are plausible and rely on a foundation of the approaches our ancient-world ancestors took in understanding everything around them and the ways they expressed those understandings.

Twenty-seven pages in to The Eye in the Pyramid – the first in The Illuminatus! Trilogy – and connections with Treasures are emerging, not least in the conspiracy theories around planted hoax histories of ‘the Illuminati’, a Mason-like cult, the evidence for the existence of which is often itself based on believable myths. Nevertheless, Detective Saul Goodman feels strongly that the Illuminati were real because he senses a deeper, more complex truth veiled by university student pranks whose ironic insistence on their truth claims only obscures the cult into myth. Very much a precursor to what I enjoyed so much about The X-Files, the books in the trilogy are described in the blurb on my copy as:

‘only partly works of the imagination. They tackle all the important cover-ups of our time – from who really shot the Kennedys to why there’s a pyramid on a one-dollar bill – and suggest a truly mind-blowing reality.’

Saul’s self-professed ‘way of thinking beyond and between the facts’ (p. 22) is informed through conversations with his (substantially younger and extremely horny for him) wife who has a degree in anthropology and psychology and who is highly knowledgeable on the Illuminati cult and historical figures from whom elements of language and culture appear to have been shaped in the real world. It is Rebecca who points out early on that Berkeley students in the 1960s reignited interest in the fifteenth to eighteenth-century western European cult by providing evidence of its conspiracies, all for their own amusement.

An as yet unclear link is made to Hassan-i Sabbah who founded the Order of Assassins in the late eleventh century. He is also mentioned in novels by William S. Burroughs, author of The Soft Machine. Rebecca points out that Sabbah ‘taught that nothing is true and everything is permissible’ (p. 22), which is quoted in Phil Hine’s Condensed Chaos, according to the Wikipedia page on Sabbah. What I still might look into is Rebecca’s further assertions that Sabbah introduced marijuana to the West and his name gives us ‘hashish’.

In addition to the information, what I find notable is that Rebecca’s responses to Saul’s questions are tonally similar to the museum-esque descriptions for the Treasures works in the guide, whose writing is attributed to Amie Corry, and includes such authoritative etymological relations and the ways stories from world religions or cultures are presented.

What we are apparently dealing with in the elusive Illuminati is a myth some are easily convinced by through plausible but fabricated evidence, but it actually could be real and is definitely possible. Much to mull over there.

Then there are the recurring mentions of statues of Tlaloc, the rain god of the Aztec pantheon, the closest relation to which in Treasures is perhaps the Mayan-esque Calendar Stone, as the real statue – the very one named in the novel – and the calendar stone from which Hirst’s is inspired, are held in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Well, they think it’s Tlaloc; apparently it might also be an unspecified female deity. [Androgyny for the win.] Interestingly, Tlaloc maintained a presence in Mexico during the Mayan period and even through its colonisation by Spain and the forced conversions to Catholicism. There must be a link here to the ways we have, culturally at least, held on to the Greco-Roman pantheons and myths even though these gods are no longer worshipped.

The conspiracies entwined with ancient-world gods are shaping up to inform quite the research journey, and I hope this will fuel my motivation to keep going. 

In the meantime, a viewing trail which may or may not be useful: 

Slip me a fiver at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/peablair.