Theos-Talk Archives (February 2002 Message tt00786)

The compatibility of conspiracy theories with Theosophy and the New 
Age ideas is not new. The voelkisch-racist movement and Wandervoegel 
groups of interwar Germany mixed nature worship and ecological and 
health issues with anti-Semitism, racism and national revival. Today 
many New Age groups rehearse the nativist aspects of v6lkisch thought 
in a eulogy of the primitive: Native Americans, African bushmen and 
Australian aborigines are credited with a natural wisdom long lost 
among the rational, technologically advanced peoples of the West. As 
long as the idealized groups were perceived as marginal, foreign or 
oppressed, such New Age sentiment was generally left-wing or liberal. 
However, once the models were sought closer to home in the 
prerational, mythical past of Western culture, Olkisch ideas could 
make a fashionable return. In the New Age movement numerous groups 
and workshops are now devoted to reviving the lore of the ancient 
Celts and Teutons. Books on ogham, runes, prophecy and pagan gods 
proliferate. Shamanism, magic and superstition are in. Nostalgia for 
a lost golden age and apocalyptic hopes of its revival recall the 
ideological foreground of earlier demands for fascist renewal.

The U.S. militias, conspiracy cults, and New Age cultural pessimism 
represent varied strands of popular radicalism that are deeply 
hostile toward liberalism in modern politics and society. Some New 
Age ideas eulogize nature and primitive peoples in a gilded vision of 
the ancient past, while environmental extremists question the value 
of human civilization. These ideas originally had their roots in left-
wing dissent, but their increasing tendency toward conspiracy beliefs 
and despair indicate their susceptibility to mdlenarian and mystical 
ideas on the far right. Discouraged by the impervious advance of 
modern technological society and the global economy, many have 
retreated to mental subcultures in which all manner of fantastic and 
threatening plots seem plausible to the extent that enables the 
Protocols to find new readers and believers. As yet, the New Age has 
little room for Hitler worship or Nazi UFOs, but it is noteworthy 
that Rainbow Ark has already speculated that many old Nazis have 
reincarnated in the bodies of modern Israelis as a way of karmically 
balancing former hatreds. Among such marginal beliefs, A kinds of 
revaluation are possible.
As we have seen, conspiracy theory may be traced to ancient religious 
ideas involving humanity's thrall to an evil, lower god who created 
matter and the inferior realm. Only the intervention of a higher, 
merciful god can enable man to attain spiritual redemption. These 
dualist ideas were integral to Gnosticism, Marcionism, Manichaeanism 
and other heretical movements in the early history of Christianity. 
Within a religious worldview, all suffering, disorder and strife 
posit the existence of evil. Personified as the Devil or AntiChrist, 
with the Jews often cast as his representatives on earth, such 
dualist dynamics offered a powerful demonology in medieval 
Christianity. The patriot movement discourse of the Illuminati 
spreading AIDS, negotiating with evil extraterrestrials and enslaving 
mankind through microchip mind control in a demonic New World Order 
openly proclaims its inspiration in the Protocols of the Elders of 
Zion, the modern nineteenth-century rendition of medieval anti-
Semitic fantasies. just as the Protocols found a massive readership 
among the displaced and the disinherited in a changing world before 
and after the First World War, this new conspiracy discourse finds 
new converts among those bewildered and frustrated by the results of 
globalization at the beginning of the new millennium.
>From the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 in the context of 
conspiracy beliefs, to the 11 September 2001, Islamic militant 
suicide pilots that flew into the World Trade Center in New York and 
the Pentagon in Washington D.C. we see this rising tide. Osama bin 
Laden and his al-Qaeda group have their own conspriracy theorie, 
based on the believe that Jesus died in Pakistan and that considers 
imminent the final fight between the Antichrist (the Dajjal of the 
tradition Muslim) and the new mahdi (Bin Laden)imminent, and call for 
a jihad (holy war) against the "Great Satan" of America, the 
supposedly demonic representative of secularization and materialism. 

I hope these ten parts answerred some of the questions put to me 
regarding this subject by severral theos-talk members.


Bri.