Lure of the Arcane: The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy

Notes

Introduction 1. On Brown’s “esoterico-religious” thrillers and other manifestations of popular culture since 1970 and their relationship to right-wing theories concerning plots by occult powers, see Pierre-André Taguieff, La foire aux “Illuminés”: Ésotérisme, théorie du complot , extrémisme (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2005). Taguieff is concerned with ideology rather than literary form and thus deals with very few novels. 2. For further discussion of Brown’s fictional formula see Jan Auracher, “Erleuchtung und Bevormundung—Die Rolle der Geheimgesellschaften in den Bundesromanen von Friedrich Schiller und Dan Brown,” Doshisha Studies in Language and Culture 12 (2010): 665–90, esp. 665–71. 3. In “Erleuchtung und Bevormundung” Auracher exposes similarities between Brown’s novel and the lodge novels of German Romanticism. But there is no indication that Brown was aware of that genre; it is my thesis, in contrast, that both contemporary conspiracy novels and the lodge novels (which I discuss in chapter 5) belong to an older and longer tradition of works involving both illumination (Erleuchtung) and mentoring (Bevormundung). 4. See John Ayto, Twentieth Century Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16; Ayto provides the date without citing the source. 5. See Ted Goertzel, “Belief in Conspiracy Theories,” Political Psychology 15 (1994): 731–42. 6. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), 3–40, here 14 and 4. 7. Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 3–4. 8. On the tension between “good” and “evil” secret societies see Marco Frenschkowski , “Politik, Paranoia, Projektion: Geheimgesellschaften und Weltverschwörungen in der literarischen Imagination des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Macht und Mythos: Tagungsband 2004, ed. Thomas Le Blanc and Bettina Twrsnich (Wetzlar: Phantastische Bibliothek, 2005), 56–76. 9. Daniel Lyons, Newsweek, Feb. 8, 2010, 16. In this connection see also Theodore Ziolkowski , Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 10. Thomas De Quincey, “Secret Societies” (1847), in his Historical and Critical Essays , 2 vols. (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1959), 2:276. 11. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1963), 342. Notes 202 Notes to Pages 6–14 12. See in this connection David V. Barrett, A Brief History of Secret Societies (Philadelphia : Running Press, 2007), xi–xv. 13. Georg Simmel, “Das Geheimnis und die geheime Gesellschaft,” in his Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1908), 337–402, here 391–402. 14. Goertzel, “Belief in Conspiracy Theories,” 739. 15. Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), vii, see esp. 7–16. In this connection see also Taguieff, La foire aux “Illuminés,” 17–23, 126–32. 16. Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society or, a View of the Miseries and Evils Arising from Every Species of Artificial Society, ed. Frank N. Pagano (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), 83. 17. See Pagano’s introduction to his edition of Burke’s Vindication, xvii–xxiii. 18. Melley’s Empire of Conspiracy is based on the thesis that, while conspiracy theory has a long history in the United States, “its influence has never been greater than now” (vii). Barkun, Culture of Conspiracy, also limits his discussion to such “apocalyptic visions in contemporary America” as millennialism, fear of New World Order conspiracies , and anxiety about UFOs and invaders from outer space. Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, takes a broader view: “the phenomenon is no more limited to American experience than it is to our contemporaries” (6), citing (without discussion) earlier fears of Jesuits and Freemasons. 19. See Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 32–33. 20. Theodore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 182–224. 21. Melley, Empire of Conspiracy, cites in passing various literary examples (e.g., Margaret Atwood and Don DeLillo) without discussing the phenomenon of conspiracy-based thrillers. 22. Ralf Klausnitzer, Poesie und Konspiration: Beziehungssinn und Zeichenökonomie von Verschwörungsszenarien in Publizistik, Literatur und Wissenschaft, 1750–1850 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007), 600. Chapter One: The Mystery Cults of Antiquity 1. See Ursula Kästner, “Attische Vasen mit Dionysosdarstellungen: Gefäßform und Dekoration,” in Dionysos: Verwandlung und Ekstase, ed. Renate Schlesier and Agnes Schwarzmaier (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2008), 54–69; and Britta Özen-Kleine, “Dionysos, Hermes, Herakles—Die Verjüngung,” in Die Rückkehr der...