[CTRL] David Icke + "Gaia Anti-Christ and the Ex-Files: A Trawl through the Cultic Milieu"

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From: "Ole Gerstr�m" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2000 5:47 PM

Subject: [CTRL] Sv: [CTRL] David Icke

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> Johannes Schmidt III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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> <<Heh. If you have a spare $50, or a very broad-minded public library, try reading through The Truth Will Set You Free. The scholarship on his website is something else. They published as fact an article written some years ago in a gaming magazine about the 'Serpent People' of ancient Lemuria who still walk among us. The article in question was for a role-playing game, which seems to have evaded the researcher's notice. I don't know if Icke himself posted it there, but I'm sure he would be aware of it.>>
>

 

Shyte $50 BUCKS for that pile of CRAP!!!  Imagine all the toilet paper you could BUY with $50.00!!! The difference being, that the latter at least performs a VALUABLE and hygienic service!!!  Icke has more HEADLESS CHOOKS in his mentally castrated sheople menagerie of sycophantic votaries than COLONEL SANDERS could've dreamed of to fill his Kentucky FRIED CHOOK production-line outlets!!!

 

 

 

Gaia Anti-Christ and the Ex-Files: A Trawl through the Cultic Milieu

Damian Thompson -
Kingston University
 
At the end of 1995 the radical Jewish magazine New Moon printed a long and disturbing news feature under the inspired headline "The Icke Man Cometh". The article, billed as a "special investigation", began as follows: "It is has been hard in recent years to ignore the popularity of almost everything that comes under the heading New Age. Yoga, meditation, Kabbalah, Buddhism, alternative medicine, environmentalism, self-improvement and New Age therapies have all gained in popularity, as have all other fringe interests like UFOS and the paranormal. But during the past year, a dark side to the New Age message of sweetness and light has become increasingly clear." According to the authors of the piece, Matthew Kalman and John Murray, a small number of influential New Age leaders are embracing conspiracy theories which are heavily influenced by the racist ideology of the far right. The article singled out David Icke, the former Coventry City goalkeeper and BBC sports commentator whose public declaration in 1990 that he was a son of God, and henceforth would dress only in turquoise, furnished the media with perhaps the most hilarious news story of the year. Well, you can stop laughing, said Kalman and Murray: for in the course of his eccentric spiritual pilgrimage, David Icke has turned into a fully fledged New Age Nazi.

Kalman and Murray went on to quote from a book published by Icke in 1994 called The Robot's Rebellion in which his well-established Green views are overlaid by a fantastical tapestry of far-right conspiracy theories. Icke's villains are Jews, Freemasons, bankers, the FBI, the gun control lobby and aliens; indeed, he describes "Jehovah, the vengeful God of the Jews" as "quite possibly an extra-terrestrial." The Robot's Rebellion sold so well in New Age circles that it went into three editions; a year later Icke followed it up with a book called ...and the truth shall set you free, advertised as "the most explosive book of the 20th century", in which he proclaims that "almost every major negative event of global significance has been part of the same plan by the All-Seeing Eye cult to take over the planet via a centralised world government, central bank, currency [Eurosceptics please note] and army." Icke also describes this cult as "the Illuminati" and "the Brotherhood", but it soon becomes clear that he is most interested in its incarnation as "a global Jewish clique". Icke's antisemitism is of an exotic variety, increasingly well entrenched on the far right, which in addition to blaming the Jews for the First World War and the Russian Revolution, also holds them responsible for the worst excesses of Third Reich, including the Holocaust. Icke accuses Jewish bankers of funding Hitler's rise to power; he urges his readers to take Holocaust revisionism seriously; and explains how anti-semitic persecution is the creation of "thought patterns in the collective Jewish mind... They expect it; they create it."

 

Kalman and Murray's purpose in writing their article, which they followed up with a cover story in the New Statesman, was not just to expose the egregious Icke as a Neo-Nazi. Their point was that his views are representative of a significant strand of thought on the New Age movement. In his books, Icke enthusiastically plugs and Australian New Age magazine called Nexus which carries article by US militia leaders and dabbles in Holocaust revisionism; its circulation is 130,000, more than four times that of the New Statesman. Compare, too, Icke's distinctive brand of antisemitism with an article in the British New Age journal Rainbow Ark on the subject of modern Israel. "When a person has a strong hatred of another race," it says, "their higher self often (karmically) makes sure they incarnate in that race to balance them out, thus many of the worst kind of Nazis have already incarnated in Jewish bodies, explaining therefore some of the fireworks which are going on in Israel." Rainbow Ark, incidentally, often held public meetings at the Battlebridge New Age centre in London's Kings Cross. When interviewed by Kalman and Murray, the centre's organiser, Julie Lowe, said she personally believed in the authenticity of the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As she explained: "I met two old Jewish men at Hyde Park Corner one evening who told me...that if they didn't get their way in the things they wanted, they were able through Philadelphia in America to pull the money out of every city in the world. I've seen it happen in Sheffield, so I believe it."

 

New Age Nazis, as New Moon calls them, might seem too contemptible and ridiculous to merit serious attention. In fact, they go to the very heart of what I want to discuss in this lecture, which is the astonishing capacity of ideas rejected by society at large to make connections with other ideas with which they appear to have nothing in common, but which, for one reason or another, are regarded as beyond the pale by the dominant forces in society. On the face of it, Neo-Nazis and the New Age movement are poles apart, politically and culturally; dig below the surface, however, and we discover that the alignment of the poles is not what we imagine it to be. (As we shall see, I use these terms advisedly.)

 

It is well known, I think, that Hitler was a vegetarian non-smoker, and that his regime's obsession with a Teutonic mythic past of forests and mountains, together with its distrust of capitalism, made it Europe's first environmentally-aware government. For the most part, this fact is treated by commentators as little more than an unhappy coincidence: it hardly tars the Green movement with the Nazi brush, and it certainly does not explain why Green New Agers should be susceptible to theories of racial supremacy. But the bizarre correspondence between the views of Icke, Nexus and Rainbow Ark on the one hand and supporters of the Third Reich on the other is not a matter of simple coincidence; and it cannot be dismissed as the sudden and inexplicable collective insanity of a few members of an otherwise entirely beneficent movement.

 

A few years ago Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's book The Occult Roots of Nazism argued, as its title implies, that the origins of the Third Reich lay partly in esoteric speculation. Many leading Nazis are thought to have belonged to secret societies which tapped into the West's occult tradition; indeed, some of the racial theorists who inspired the Nazis relied as much on occult fantasy as they did on pseudo-science or Nordic myth. To give just one example: Lanz von Liebenfels, a renegade Catholic monk who as an old man was visited by Hitler, believed that there were originally two breeds of people, heroes and apemen, the one blond, athletic and clever, the other cruel, greedy and stupid. As a result of miscegenation, the human race now consisted mostly of mongrel mixtures of hero and animal: the Jews, predictably, were virtually pure apeman, while Aryans were the closest thing to pure hero.

 

The notion of races of men who existed before the dawn of history, or even conventional pre-history, is (to use a metaphor which would appeal to the far right) one of the great leitmotifs of alternative science and history. "Alternative", in this context, refers to theories which lie outside established orthodoxy. In other words, we are dealing with information that society rejects; and later in this lecture I will explain what I mean by this rather loosely-defined concept. But before moving on from the New Age Nazis, I want to turn to a remarkable piece of research which, by following the trail of one particular "alternative" idea, gives us a very clear picture of the strange cultural environment in which New Agers and National Socialists overlap and mingle.

 

In his book Arktos, published in 1993, Joscelyn Godwin, a British historian of esoteric thought who teaches in America, reveals the extraordinary persistence of the "polar myth" in various exotic subcultures. This myth appears in many different versions, ranging from the sophisticated to the sub-literate; but what unites most of them is the striking idea that at some time in the distant past the earth's poles have dramatically shifted. As a result, a section of the globe which was once not only habitable but, in some versions of the myth, a fertile paradise called Hyperborea, has become the Arctic wasteland.

 

Although the notion that the earth once sat upright in its orbit around the sun dates back to the ancient world, the myth of a polar paradise did not really take shape until the 19th century. It appears in its most baroque form in one of the most influential of all esoteric works, The Secret Doctrine by the indefatigable Helena Blavatsky. Madame Blavatsky, an enormously stout dowager descended from Russian aristocrats, thrilled Victorian society with her tales of deepest Tibet, which she claimed to have spent seven years exploring armed only with an umbrella. She was the founder of the movement known as Theosophy, which aims to create a universal brotherhood by disseminating the wisdom of a hierarchy of Hidden Masters living in Tibet. Theosophical ideas lie behind much of what is now classified as New Age, including David Icke's effusions; but what concerns us here is Blavatsky's belief that for many millions of years the North Pole was covered by "an Imperishable Sacred Land". This was the home of the First Race of men, who had colourless ethereal bodies and knew neither sickness nor death. But, during millions of years of slow degeneration, successive races of man gradually took on corporeal form and colour; continents, including Atlantis, rose and sank; and the Sacred Land became an icy fastness.

 

Madame Blavatsky's fanciful scheme was obviously intended for her followers; no-one else could be expected to take it seriously. Yet her insistence on a northern homeland for humanity was neither original nor entirely controversial. During the 19th century, many German scholars had developed a hearty contempt for the Hebrew scriptures as a source of information about man's origins. The fashionable orientalism of the period drew them towards Sanskrit and the Hindu tradition; as Godwin points out, "if the Germans could link their origins to India, then they would be forever free from their Semitic and Mediterranean bondage". Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) was convinced that Indian veneration for a mythical northern mountain must imply a tribal memory of the North Pole. Furthermore, their language proved that they shared common origins with Nordic peoples. They were, in short, one race, and Schlegel even provided a name for it: borrowing an obscure term which was previously applied to the ancient Persians, he said that Indians and northern Europeans were all "Aryans".

 

It was not long before this classification acquired racialist overtones, in which the intellectual superiority of the Aryan race was contrasted with the degeneracy and sloth of other races (and various convoluted explanations were offered as to why modern Indians are not white). We should bear in mind, I think, the uncomfortable fact that until the early years of this century, racialist theory represented scientific orthodoxy; it appealed to enlightened people searching for a reasonable - "non-judgemental", in modern jargon - explanation for inequalities between peoples. But it is also the case that whenever an intellectual discipline produces what appears to be an important breakthrough in our understanding of the world, whether it be racial theory or chaos theory, the chances are that it will be appropriated by people whose most striking characteristic is their lack of intellectual discipline. So it was that ultra-nationalist Germans took the notion of Aryan race and inserted it into a mythology largely of their own invention in which the polar homeland was identified with "Thule", a mysterious land visited by Pytheas of Massilia in his voyages north of Scotland in the third century BC. The violently racist Thule Society, an aristocratic secret order based in Munich after the First World War, urged its members to fight the Jewish enemy "until the swastika rises victoriously out of the icy darkness"; its working-class equivalent was the German Worker's Party, which in 1920 became the Nazi Party. Meanwhile, less sinister esoteric societies continued to build vast imaginative edifices using the imagery of both Hyperborea and Thule; the distinction between the two polar sanctuaries was never clear, and indeed as the century progressed and the mythology developed, the distinction between supporters and opponents of Nazism among the myth-makers was also blurred.

 

I want to make two points at this stage. First, that when we try to follow the twists and turns of an esoteric idea, particularly in the 20th century, we quickly realise that the milieu in which is moves is inclusive to a quite extraordinary degree. No conspiracy theory is so complete that it cannot accommodate a new villain; no map of a forgotten country is so detailed that it cannot squeeze in an extra subterranean city or two; no scientific discovery is so limited in its application that it cannot be given a New Age gloss. Secondly, we are moving in an environment in which the boundary between fact and fiction, to which the world at large ascribes such importance, matters very little. We all know that the history of literature is littered with products of the imagination (such as Gulliver's Travels) whose authors have given them the form of eyewitness narratives. In esoteric circles, however, the equation is often inverted: outlandish works of fantasy are treated (or presented) as true stories which for safety's sake have been dressed up as fiction.

 

Godwin produces a classic example of this: Wilhelm Landig's 1971 novel Goetzen gegen Thule (Gods against Thule), a "fiction full of facts" in which it is suggested that after the destruction of the polar paradise of Thule, its cosmic spirit survived in the hearts of a few scattered people - of different races, interestingly - who are mysteriously transported back to the Arctic after the German defeat in 1945. Their role is to prepare for a new age, the Age of Aquarius, whose harbingers are UFOs called Manisolas which begin life as discs of pure light and then crystallise into metallic form. The allies of the Thuleans include the medieval Cathars, guardians of the Holy Grail; their enemies are the Catholic Church, Freemasons, the United Nations and the Jews, whose Ark of the Covenant was, it is revealed, an astral accumulator designed to steal the energy of the Aryans by filtering it through something called the Hebraic Pole.

 

Landig stops just short of eulogising Hitler; he concedes that the noble Thulean aims of the Third Reich were perverted by the forces of evil. But the same cannot be said of another Polar fantasist, Miguel Serrano, who during the 1950s and 60s was one of Chile's most senior diplomats. For Serrano, Hitler is the Tenth Avatar of Vishnu, who is destined to bring about the end of the Kali Yuga and usher in the New Age. I say "is", for Serrano reports that at the end of the Second World War Hitler escaped in a flying saucer and entered a hollow world inside the earth, in whose secret cities the first Hyperboreans had taken refuge from the disaster that reversed the Poles. This hollow world was discovered by the Nazis during an expedition to Antarctica, says Serrano; very much his own theory, you might imagine, but in fact the theme of Hitler's survival at the South Pole has flourished on the fringes of the New Age for many years, ornamented by reports of disappearing submarines, secret weapons, subterranean headquarters and, it goes without saying, UFOs.

 

It also goes without saying, I think, that the people who enjoy this sort of thing are as far removed from the intellectual mainstream as it is possible to be. The world of conspiracy theories is one we associate with cranks, some of them well-educated but nearly all them personally disturbed, and with people of little or no formal education. That said, however, when we stare at the sort of bubbling cultic soup cooked up by the likes of Miguel Serrano, we can see, in addition to many poisonous creatures floating around, remnants and strands of ideas which are still considered respectable - such as yoga, a great enthusiasm of Serrano's - or have only gradually become disreputable.

 

Take the hollow earth, for example. We can follow the trail of this idea from the entirely reasonable speculation of medieval monks, to the rather more daring conjectures of the 17th-century scholar Athanasius Kircher, who based his theory of a whirlpool at the centre of the earth on an analogy with human anatomy; from there we can follow it into the overheated imagination of the 19th-century American eccentric John Cleves Symmes, whose petition to Congress for an expedition to the lands inside the earth was greeted with nationwide hilarity; and from there to Serrano. (I have no idea if David Icke believes in a hollow earth, but I am sure he would not rule it out.) In the same way, modern scientific theories often undergo a journey from academia or the laboratory to the wilder shores of sanity, a process which, in our information-hungry age, can occur virtually overnight. For example: within months of the scientist James Lovelock outlining his Gaia hypothesis, in which he introduced the idea of the planet as a living organism, books had appeared which built highly speculative philosophies on his thesis; and not long after that, an angry earth-goddess called Gaia began to crop up in every variety of New Age fantasy (including David Icke's).

 

Whether it takes centuries or months, the movement of ideas I have described so far is very clearly in one direction: away from the mainstream of intellectual life. This is important, not least because rejection of intellectual orthodoxy so often reflects (or causes) alienation from society in general; but I don't want to give the impression that all irrational beliefs gravitate automatically towards a lunatic fringe, or that movement is in only one direction. The American sociologist of religion Robert Ellwood, while accepting that there is much that is plainly ridiculous in the New Age movement, argues that it is "a contemporary manifestation of a western alternative spirituality tradition going back at least to the Greco-Roman world. The current flows like an underground river through the Christian centuries, breaking into high visibility in the Renaissance occultism of the so-called 'Rosicrucian Enlightenment', eighteenth-century Freemasonry, and nineteenth-century Spiritualism and Theosophy."

 

Ellwood is right, I think, to emphasise the historical continuity of esoteric thought. I don't want to deny the existence or even the validity of this tradition; on the other hand, it is not the whole story. At this stage I want to introduce the useful, if slightly cumbersome, term "cultic milieu", which was coined by the sociologist Colin Campbell to describe the highly eclectic (and constantly shifting) cultural environment in which the New Age movement operates. As I see it, this cultic milieu extends well beyond the New Age, however broadly we define it: it has the capacity to take in and transform almost any piece of information that society rejects. Instead of an underground river, it is more like a vast metaphorical lake which is fed by many different sources. If we trawl the waters of this lake, we will certainly pick up many life forms which have been carried along by Ellwood's esoteric and occult stream; but there will also be many others, perhaps equally strange, which have been transported there by much more familiar currents, such as Christianity and Hollywood.

 

Consider, for example, one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas known to man: the belief that the world (or the world as we know it) is about to come to an end. For well over 2,000 years, apocalyptic believers of one sort or another have lived in the shadow of the End. Each prophet, and each sect, has outlined a different scenario, in which the apocalypse is brought about by every conceivable agent of transformation: earthquakes, tidal waves, nuclear Armageddon, alien invasion and, yes, polar shift. Yet despite this variety, it does not take a genius to work out that most of these fantasies share a common structure and dynamic. In almost every case, the End is heralded by worldwide catastrophe, which may be natural, supernatural or man-made; but however many millions perish in the cataclysm, a group of believers is spared so that it can populate either an earthly paradise or a heavenly kingdom (and usually a mixture of both).

 

A couple of years ago I began work on a book called The End of Time which compares three categories of modern apocalyptic belief: fundamentalist Christian, ultra-conservative Roman Catholic, and New Age. Up to a point, I found what I was expecting to find: that is to say, striking similarities in the way in which all three groups interpret current affairs as evidence of the coming apocalypse, and in the way in which their scenarios dispose of the unrighteous. Gory fundamentalist images of unbelievers roasting at Armageddon are no more blood-curdling, it seems to me, than the prophecies of the Native American author Sun Bear, in which the planet "shakes itself like a shaggy dog full of fleas", and tens of millions die in the resulting tidal waves; or those of the New Age priestess Ruth Montgomery, whose New World is littered with the bodies of those unfortunate people "not adequately prepared in spirit".

 

What I did not expect to find, and what really persuaded me of the reality of the cultic milieu, was pieces of information that seemed to belong exclusively to one tradition turning up in another. So, for example, it came as a surprise to encounter the figure of the Antichrist, the satanic figure who for two millennia has dominated Christian apocalyptic, in so many New Age prophecies. Ruth Montgomery believes the Antichrist is a young man presently being educated in an American college. The couturier Paco Rabanne, author of a wonderfully batty book called Has the Countdown Begun? (answer: yes) has another candidate. "I have seen the face of a young man now living in London," he says, "who has surprised important people with his 'magic' gifts. He is already extending his psychic undertaking and his personal fortune. Is he no more than a sorcerer with extraordinary powers, or is he the Antichrist, already in ambush awaiting his hour?"

 

Everywhere I looked, I found evidence of cross-fertilisation between traditions which are openly hostile to one another. Ultra-conservative Catholics, for whom the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary signal the End, borrow biblical arithmetic from fiercely anti-Catholic fundamentalists in order to demonstrate that time is running out. Even more surprisingly, fundamentalists, who ostensibly regard the New Age as the province of Satan, cannot resist the lure of some of its ideas. For instance: back in 1982, there was terrific excitement in New Age circles at the approach of something called the "Jupiter effect", an alignment of the planets which a couple of maverick scientists predicted would slow down the earth's rotation, leading to an earthquake which would destroy Los Angeles. Leading fundamentalists might be expected to scoff at this; instead, they jumped straight on the bandwagon. Hal Lindsey, author of The Late, Great Planet Earth, wrote that "what we can expect in 1982 is the largest outbreak of killer quakes ever seen in the history of planet earth along with radical changes in climate". Not to be outdone, Pat Robertson suggested that the chaos caused by the Jupiter Effect might prove the perfect cover for a Soviet strike against the US. But this prospect did not worry the Southwestern Radio Church: it suggested that the Rapture might occur just before the planetary alignment, that the earth would be righted on its axis, and that pre-Flood conditions would be restored.

 

How do we account for this cross-fertilisation? There is broad agreement between social scientists that apocalyptic beliefs of every variety are a response to disorientation and stress. Moreover, although New Agers and fundamentalist Christians tend to come from different social backgrounds, they share a readiness to identify themselves as "outsiders", people who consciously reject the values of the society around them, often as a result of a life-changing spiritual experience. There was a time, of course, when fundamentalist Christianity in America was simply the dominant religious creed of vast areas of the country; but with the passage of time it is acquiring more and more of the characteristics of a counter-culture.

 

I do not think we should be misled by the traditional image of fundamentalists as blazer-wearing conservatives in crew-cuts. When the New York lifestyle magazine Details sent a feature writer to follow the trail of the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh through the Bible belt, he reported back that "die-hard redneck bigots now look like the long-haired biker hippies killed by diehard redneck bigots in movies like Easy Rider." Furthermore, individual fundamentalists are often tremendously receptive to unorthodox ideas, even those condemned as the work of the Devil by their church leaders. Just as New Agers are often fascinated by the biblical number 666, so born-again Christians are more likely to believe in UFOs than the population at large; and, like Ronald and Nancy Reagan, they are more likely to interested in astrology. Even supposedly conservative figures such as Pat Robertson flirt with conspiracy theories of the most colourful variety: in his book The New World Order he introduces us to "a small secret society called the Order of the Illuminati" who first gained control of the freemasons and then proceeded, through the agency of Jewish bankers, to set in motion both the French and Russian Revolutions. Now where have we heard that before?

 

Perhaps the reason so many fundamentalist Christians are so deeply immersed in the cultic milieu is that their religion is far more radical and "alternative" than it first appears. After all, most of them are required to believe that within a few years the entire Church on earth will be carried up to heaven in the Rapture (a doctrine which, incidentally, dates back no further than the 19th century). Anyone who believes that they will be plucked skywards while their unbelieving neighbours die in the agony of Armageddon is likely to feel that they are therefore set apart from the bulk of mankind. Yet American fundamentalists do not live in a vacuum; they watch television (and lots of it). The cultic milieu is not a closed environment, in which only elements of religious or esoteric belief combine and mingle. I've already mentioned UFOs and science fiction; I want to conclude this lecture by looking at the implications of living in a world in which religion is increasingly the poor relation of mass entertainment.

 

I should say immediately that I am entirely convinced by the growing body of research, such as Jim Schnabel's excellent book Dark White, which establishes a direct correlation between reports of UFO encounters and the treatment of the subject by popular literature and Hollywood, Invariably, the fictional representation has always preceded a wave of sightings. I don't think this should surprise us. There are strong reasons to believe that the esoteric secret societies which flourished at the turn of the century borrowed their cosmology from early science fiction; and it also seems likely that some of the "moral panics" of the past, such as the evangelical crusade against the white slave trade in the 1920s, originated either in sensationalist fiction or in those fascinating oral traditions we now call urban myths.

 

The transformation of fiction into quasi-religious beliefs raises many complex questions; and unfortunately there isn't time to address them all here. Let me just say that I don't think we are dealing with a single, easily-identifiable psychological mechanism. Just as the sources of these beliefs are extremely varied, so are the forms in which they manifest themselves: simple credulity, profound religious belief and serious mental disturbance. On the other hand, this process of transformation confirms everything we know about the cultic milieu, and in particular the way in which openness to one piece of unorthodox information (fictional or otherwise) can produce a new mind-set in which a vast range of information rejected by society is potentially accessible.

 

Of course, this isn't the purpose of mass entertainment, which is directed not at New Agers, or fundamentalists, or the feeble-minded, but at the general public. What, then, are we to make of the fact that so many of the entertainment's industry's most successful products deal with what might be called "the unexplained"? The 1990s have seen the development of an apparently insatiable public appetite for films, television series and books which explore mysteries and mystical traditions. It is not easy to say whether this reflects deliberate manipulation of a market or a response to a deep-seated spiritual yearning: probably a bit of both. What is abundantly clear is that Hollywood, the television companies and publishers everywhere do not need to be told about the cultic milieu; they may not have heard of it, but they seem to have a pretty good idea of how it works, and how to make it work for them. There is no better illustration of this than The X-Files, which in the course of three series has trawled one stretch after another of our metaphorical lake, collecting pieces of folklore, urban myth, religious tradition and pseudo-science and joining them together to form patterns which are not only immensely entertaining, but which are immediately recognisable to conspiracy theorists everywhere - and, perhaps, to the conspiracy theorist who lurks inside all of us.

 

I am sorry if this sounds disapproving and puritanical. In fact, I'm not remotely offended by television shows which draw on the cultic milieu; but I do think we should recognise the dangers of becoming addicted to forms of entertainment in which the strands of myth, fiction and fact are so difficult to disentangle. In America, for example, one has to wonder about the effect of television series built round an imaginary government conspiracy on a culture where the paranoid tradition is still so influential: just look at Pat Robertson. We can only guess what David Koresh would have made of the X-Files or Dark Skies; but what we do know is that in reinventing himself as the messiah of Waco he drew heavily on popular culture, and particularly on a sci-fi movie called The Lawnmower Man, in which computer software is fed into a retarded man's brain and he becomes a power-crazed genius. The Branch Davidians at Waco were forced to watch this film many times over by Koresh, who used it as the text for day-long sermons; in the end, it was as much a part of their religion as the Book of Revelation.

 

As it happens, I don't believe that the Branch Davidians bear most of the responsibility for the Waco tragedy. I do believe, however, that apocalyptic cults pose a growing threat to law and order throughout the world; and that the cultic milieu is absolutely central to this threat. There are, for example, literally thousands of new religious movements in Japan which not only build on local traditions of evil spirits, but reach out to elements of Western culture which one might think were entirely foreign to them. For example: almost none of these cults are Christian, but that does not stop many of them borrowing bloody psychedelic images from the last book of the bible. I am thinking of one group in particular whose theology incorporated the following elements: the Book of Revelation, Tantric yoga, Nostradamus, the Age of Aquarius, nuclear physics and the Roman Catholic prophecies of St Malachy. A comically eclectic mixture, I am sure you will agree; but when I tell you the group was called Aum Shinrikyo you will understand why such beliefs need to be taken seriously.

 

What about the implications for this country? It is true, I think, that Britain's political culture is so stable, and its apocalyptic tradition so marginalised, that the potential for violent disorder is limited. In our post-religious society, part of the appeal of material based on"the unexplained" lies in the fact that it invites us to toy with highly unorthodox and subversive ideas without requiring us to incorporate them into our belief system. On the other hand, are we perhaps too confident of our ability to distinguish truth from fantasy? Fictional TV dramas are one thing; quite another are books such as Fingerprints of the Gods which explain the configuration of the pyramids in terms of a long-lost Antarctic civilization and then go on to top Britain's non-fiction bestseller lists for months.

 

The popularity of such perniciously trashy works can only mean that we have lost faith in the ability of orthodox history and science to describe the world in which we live. The same goes for many New Age therapies for serious illnesses, which undoubtedly shorten the lives of some sufferers and which recently provoked the Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph to issue an impassioned denunciation of what he called the "X-Files mentality".

 

Let me end with a cautionary tale. About ten years ago, extremely distressing reports of Satanic activity began to circulate among Britain's born-again Christians. It appeared that an organised network of Satanists were holding covens in which small children were sexually abused; in some cases, women were being impregnated so that they could give birth to foetuses which could then be sacrificed in gruesome rituals. As the stories spread from church to church, "survivors" of this Ritual Satanic Abuse came forward, just as they had in America a couple of years earlier. Their evidence was tantalisingly insubstantial: it mostly consisted of memories which had been "recovered" in therapy. But it was enough to win over significant numbers of social workers, who began to receive specialist training from so-called experts in Satanic Abuse - experts who, on closer inspection, turned out to be fundamentalist Christians. The rest of the story is no doubt familiar to you: small children were removed from their families and effectively forced to incriminate their parents or other adults. A terrible fiction was created; lives and families were destroyed.

 

All this could have been avoided, I would argue, if society at large - the professions, the press, the churches - knew anything about the way in which similar moral panics have arisen in the past, or knew their way round the territory we have been exploring today. They might then have spotted that the recovered memories of Satanic abuse survivors bore an extraordinary resemblance to the testimonies of victims of alien abduction, even down to the smallest anatomical details of the alleged abuse. A coincidence? If you believe that, you'll believe anything.