Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  As Evans-Pritchard continued to study the Azande, he noticed that witchcraft and its related mythology were used to explain not just death, but virtually every aspect of life. “Its influence is plainly stamped on law and morals, etiquette and religion; it is prominent in technology and language,” he wrote in his 1937 book. “If blight seizes the ground-nut crop, it is witchcraft; if the bush is vainly scoured for game, it is witchcraft; if women laboriously bale water out of a pool and are rewarded by but a few small fish it is witchcraft; if termites do not rise when their swarming is due and a cold useless night is spent in waiting for their flight, it is witchcraft; if a wife is sulky and unresponsive to her husband, it is witchcraft.”

  The Zande worldview may sound fatalistic. But it is not. For their mythology also incorporates an array of countermeasures that victims can execute to block, and even reverse, the effect of witchcraft and magic spells.

  Many Zande tribespeople, Evans-Pritchard found, made a regular visit to local oracles, who would inform them if they were under attack from nearby witches—and would even supply them with their names. In the most popular oracular approach, a smidgen of red powder extracted from a poisonous forest insect was thrust down the throat of a fowl, who would then enter violent convulsions. The accusation of witchcraft put to the oracle would be decided on the basis of whether the fowl died or not.

  Once the Zande tribesperson found out who was bewitching him, he could confront the witch, and ask him to desist. Or he could threaten vengeance magic. Or he could simply move out of the area for a short while, since it is imagined that the witchcraft, being physical in its transmission, can travel only short distances. Whatever path the putative victim chose, the important point was that he could do something. He was not without recourse in the face of uncooperative nuts, animals, termites, and women.

  The beliefs of the Azande are unique in their particulars. But they exhibit a universal aspect of human nature: our need for control. When we can’t control something directly, we invent gods and witches who can; gods and witches who themselves can be controlled through chants, ceremonies, amulets, and magic.

  In primitive societies, religion typically is a polytheistic affair involving a menagerie of bickering deities. Homer, for instance, described the Trojan War as the result of a jealous argument among the goddesses Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite. In the Aeneid, similarly, Virgil cast the founding of Rome as originating in a petty grudge held by the goddess Juno against the defeated Trojans. But this began to change—at least, in regards to what we now call the Western tradition—with the narrative of the Hebrew Bible, whose basic elements began taking form approximately three thousand years ago.

  In the emerging theology of the Israelite religion, there was only one true God, the all-powerful Yahweh. In Deuteronomy (among other places in the Bible), he pronounced polytheism to be a sin: “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God . . .” Through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the Abrahamic faiths—this once-novel vision of a world controlled by a single divine entity eventually would become the overarching theme of religious life in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and the New World.

  But even from early days, monotheistic adherents were presented with an agonizing philosophical problem: the presence of evil. Under polytheism, tragedies could be explained by the careless cruelty of warring deities (of which Homer’s Odyssey, for instance, was one long catalog). But under monotheism, that dodge was difficult. If Yahweh was omnipotent and benign, why did he permit natural disasters, mass murders, war, and other forms of slaughter? In short, why did he let bad things to happen to good people?

  It is a question presented (but not satisfyingly answered) in the book of Job, when one of God’s angels afflicts the long-suffering protagonist with boils, destroys all his possessions, and kills his ten children—all for no other reason than to see how the ostensibly pious man would handle it. Job’s agonized plea to God expresses the timeless confusion and agony of a man who has done everything right in life, yet sees his virtue repaid with suffering:

  My body is clothed with worms and scabs,

  my skin is broken and festering.

  My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,

  and they come to an end without hope . . .

  When I think my bed will comfort me

  and my couch will ease my complaint,

  even then you frighten me with dreams

  and terrify me with visions,

  so that I prefer strangling and death,

  rather than this body of mine.

  I despise my life; I would not live forever.

  Let me alone; my days have no meaning.

  What is man that you make so much of him,

  that you give him so much attention,

  that you examine him every morning

  and test him every moment?

  The godly helper who sets Job’s agonies in motion is none other than Satan. But he is not playing his later role of “horrid king, besmeared with blood of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears” (as Milton described him). In the book of Job, as throughout the Hebrew Bible, Satan functions as the divine court’s chief prosecutor—a vital, if necessarily sinister, member of God’s angelic entourage. (His name derives from the Hebrew ha-satan, meaning “the accuser.”) His primary mission is to test Job’s spiritual mettle, not make him suffer for suffering’s sake. It is only much later, in Revelation, that Satan assumes his form as a dragon-like creature bent on destroying God’s kingdom.

  As T. J. Wray and Gregory Mobley argue in their 2005 book, The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil’s Biblical Roots, this satanic transformation arose from a profound psychic need to divide the single God of the Hebrew Bible into two components—an omnipotent King of Kings to receive human prayers, and a demon to take the blame when those prayers weren’t answered. By bending the rules of monotheism to permit the existence of a lesser, malevolent superhuman entity, Christians could ponder a less existentially numbing answer to the prophet Amos’ chilling question, “Does disaster befall a city, unless the LORD has done it?”

  The seeds of Satan’s transformation were sown amid the Babylonian exile, at a time when the idea of monotheism was taking its definitive place in the canon of the Hebrew Bible, and Jewish scholars were casting about to explain how Yahweh could have permitted them to be thrown out of the Kingdom of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar II. The Babylonian exile also coincided with the religious dualism conceived by the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra, originator of Zoroastrianism, who viewed existence as a struggle between light and darkness. In the Zoroastrian faith, a god of light (Ahura Mazda) battles for supremacy against a “fiendish spirit” known as Ahriman—a battle involving a Christ-like savior figure (Saoshyant) that culminates in a decidedly Revelation-like eschatological climax.

  “This type of storytelling sought to reveal the reason for the frustrated hopes of a people who could not reconcile their misfortunes with their theology,” conclude Wray and Mobley in The Birth of Satan. “If the descendants of Abraham and Sarah were partners to a covenant with the Architect of the Universe, then why had their cultural and political properties been condemned by a parade of Near Eastern tyrants? The response of the Jewish apocalypticists was to construct a new theory to explain this conundrum. They built the theory from pieces of Jewish folklore, puzzling Biblical passages, and the myths of surrounding cultures. The theory revealed a cosmic conspiracy at work, led by a supernatural criminal mastermind (Satan) who controlled a vast, nefarious network of demonic forces dedicated to frustrating the divine purpose at every turn.”

  It’s a dark vision of the world. Yet it came with a happy ending. As Norman Cohn noted in his definitive 1957 study of medieval millenarian cults, The Pursuit of the Mille
nnium, it is no coincidence that the Bible’s earliest apocalyptic fantasies—the dream sequences contained in the book of Daniel—were written during the agonies and upheavals of the Maccabean revolt. Daniel’s revolutionary eschatology allowed Jews to believe that their suffering was not in vain: The plagues rained down upon the Jews were merely building up to a climactic cosmic counterreaction, with the Saints of God rising up at the last possible moment to defeat Satan and establish a timeless earthly utopia.

  Centuries later, the same theme would be picked up by Christians—in far more lurid fashion—in Revelation, which some scholars interpret as an allegorical commentary on the Roman persecution of Christians dating from the first century AD. Eventually, it would also find its way into the eschatology of Islamists, who imagine that jihad and martyrdom will propel the world toward a one-state paradise, cleansed of conspiring infidels, under the reign of Sharia.

  This analysis shows why conspiracism and millenarianism often go together: Both of them put the fact of human suffering at the center of the human condition. Conspiracism is a strategy for explaining the origin of that suffering. Millenarianism is a strategy for forging meaning from it: Once our tears and blood fill up some cosmic chalice, the scales of history will tip, and New Jerusalem will open its gates.

  The Devil’s Legacy

  Aside from Christian Doomsayers, for whom conspiracism and scripture often are one and the same, very few of the conspiracy theorists I’ve met are conventionally observant members of mainstream Christian denominations. Consistent with their generalized skepticism toward any conventional institution that commands the obeisance of the masses, most nonevangelical conspiracy theorists tend to embrace the dissident fringes of American religious life. Richard Gage, for instance, has been an active supporter of the Unity movement, which emphasizes New Age concepts such as life force and spiritual healing. Steven Jones, a celebrity Truther who pioneered the myth that the World Trade Center buildings were brought down with thermite, is a Mormon who has authored an article called “Behold My Hands,” in which he presents a mishmash of Mayan-era evidence aimed at proving that Jesus Christ once visited America. Robert Bowman, a former military man who directed the Pentagon’s early Star Wars antimissile research in the 1970s, declares himself the “Bishop Protector of the Society of Blessed XXIII,” a pro-gay, pro-feminist, pacifist, “pre-Constantinian” fringe offshoot of Catholicism.

  But such heterodoxy is immaterial: The mythology of Satan and the End Times is hard-wired so deep into the circuitry of Judeo-Christian civilization that its influence has become universal—even in regard to avowedly secular ideologies. Marx may have declared religion to be “the opiate of the people.” But as noted previously, his theory of class struggle—whereby history’s final act would play out in a Manichean struggle between a virtuous proletariat and its evil capitalist overlords—would have been recognizable to the ancient prophets. (It is telling that the first writer to use the term “communism,” French utopian socialist Étienne Cabet, took his inspiration from Christianity.) In the minds of many secularists, government long ago replaced God as our omnipotent protector. And when that secular god fails in some epic way—when a president is killed in broad daylight, or the heart of Manhattan is pulverized—his worshippers tend to hunt for Lucifers and Christ-killers.

  Wrapped up in their Manichean narratives is the implicit notion that ordinary citizens must choose sides in the coming conflict—and that, when the Day of Judgment comes tomorrow—our fates will be dictated by the choices we make today. By publicly embracing a dissident ideology such as 9/11 Truth, the conspiracist isn’t just making his views known about a particular issue. On a deeper spiritual level, he is marking himself as a righteous one who stands apart from the rottenness around him. The “9/11 Truth” T-shirts, banners, and bumper stickers sold at Truther events serve as modern versions of the dab of lamb’s blood that Jews put on their doorposts to ward off the Angel of Death coming to slay the Egyptians’ firstborn.

  Like religious converts who suddenly see the light of Christ, a surprisingly large number of Truthers told me that they “just knew” that 9/11 was an inside job the second they saw the towers collapse—even though they admit that they couldn’t initially identify any outward signs of foul play. In many cases, Truthers even have unwittingly co-opted the language of proselytization and born-again religious conversion. In his biographical blurb, for instance, San Francisco–area 9/11 Truth leader Ken Jenkins declares that he “completed his awakening to 9/11 truth by Nov. 2001.” His email signature file contains the vaguely Messianic line (adapted from an unrelated 2008 speech delivered by Barack Obama) “We are the ones we have been waiting for. 9/11 Truth is the cause we have been waiting for.”

  Given conspiracism’s common psychological role as a form of ersatz religiosity, it’s no coincidence that several of the late twentieth century’s most commercially successful conspiracy theorists grafted a rejection of mainstream Christianity right into their plots. The resulting tracts—from which Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code took its multimillion-dollar inspiration—provide all the usual Protocols-inspired narratives about creepy men in smoke-filled rooms, plus a second tantalizing treat: the promise of receiving Jesus’ true, hidden message once those patriarchs are defeated.

  Of the many pseudohistorical books that have followed this formula over the years, the most influential has been Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. It became a sensation not once, but twice—the first time on its publication in 1982, and then again two decades later, around the time that the authors sued Brown for allegedly plagiarizing their theory.

  According to the authors’ ambitious re-creation of history, Jesus Christ’s bloodline did not end on the cross. Instead, it traveled to France with his wife, Mary Magdalene, and eventually combined with Frankish royalty to produce the Merovingian dynasty. The authors also describe the existence of an ultraelite, ultrapowerful, ultrasecret society—the Priory of Sion—which will soon spring the truth of Jesus’ surviving bloodline on the world, thereby leading to a sort of divine Merovingian restoration that brings much of Europe into a “pan-European confederation assembled into a modern empire and ruled by a dynasty descended from Jesus.”

  Yet these rulers will be no medieval-style theocrats. The true Christian faith—as Da Vinci Code readers know—supposedly is nothing like the patriarchal, artificial faith encoded in the New Testament by the grandees of the fourth century church. Instead, it is a humane, feminized creed, vaguely infused with the teachings of Mrs. Christ and the ancient, gentle doctrines of the pagan Mother Goddesses.

  As Holy Blood, Holy Grail weaves its way from the Languedoc, to Solomon’s Temple, to Paris and the other centers of European power, it sucks up every stray bit of conspiracist esoterica imaginable—from the Knights Templar (the collective Zelig of old-school conspiracy theorists) and the Holy Grail, to “the mysterious Rosicrucians” to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, all larded up with Sunday-morning anagrams, testimonials from mail-in conspiracists befriended by the authors, and the writers’ own library-stall melodramas.

  Like every popular conspiracy theory, this one has a greedy, murderous archvillain that will stop at nothing to protect its illegitimate power. (It’s the Vatican, of course.) The book also comes with a lost utopia, the one that might already have come to pass if the truth of Jesus’ Merovingian bloodline had not been suppressed at the time the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099: “Once installed on the throne of the kingdom of Jerusalem . . . the [Merovingian] king of Jerusalem would then have taken precedence over all monarchs of Europe, and the patriarch of Jerusalem would have supplanted the Pope. Displacing Rome, Jerusalem would then have become the true capital of Christendom, and perhaps of much more than Christendom. For if Jesus were acknowledged as a mortal prophet, as a priest-king and legitimate ruler of the line of David, he might well have become acceptable to both Muslims and Jews. As king of Jerusalem, his lineal descendant would then have
been in a position to implement one of the primary tenets of Templar policy—the reconciliation of Christianity with Judaism and Islam.” (It turns out the Priory of Sion had another chance to restore the Merovingian dynasty seven centuries later, the authors argue. But their hopes were dashed by—you guessed it—the French Revolution. Plus ça change.)

  This provides a context for those who wonder how The Da Vinci Code could become such a blockbuster despite its far-fetched plot and wooden prose: By putting cloak-and-dagger plots and dissident religiosity between the same two covers, Dan Brown—like the authors on whom he relied—hit upon the (with apologies) Holy Grail of conspiracism. From a Christian reader’s perspective, the most alluring part is that finding an earthly utopia doesn’t even require switching religions or joining an ashram.

  Lives of the Prophets

  Conspiracy-theory expert Chip Berlet calls them “Gnostic heroes”: prophets who have dedicated their lives to spreading their secret knowledge in an effort to save the world from a coming apocalypse. Ken Jenkins is an archetypal Gnostic hero. So is Richard Gage, Michael Ruppert, Ignatius Donnelly and many of the other figures described in this book.

  Even rank-and-file conspiracists see their belief system as something that elevates them from the mass of humanity that has not yet “awoken” to the Truth. Dan Tyler, a sixty-year-old Truther from Nashville, Tennessee, told me, “I don’t know why it is that some of us can ‘see’ where others are blind, that some of us will question while others demur, that some of us will persevere despite the ridicule and damage we suffer for our unorthodox opinions. I don’t know why it is, but I think the answer is important, for it goes to the very nature of truth. Is truth merely a consensus? Or is truth something else, something holy and sacred?”