Pickin’ Up Truth Vibrations, Part 9: David Icke Fumbles In the Dark

Another year, another book has come out from David Icke – The Dream. As with his preceding book, The Trap, I had no intention of actually paying anyone any money to look at it, but I had an opportunity to have a skim anyway, so I may as well continue this occasional series keeping track of one of our era’s more damaging demagogues just for the sake of taking note of his latest gambits.

Once again, Icke recycles vast amounts of material here; he seems to operate on a business model these days which calls for one book per year which he dutifully churns out, regardless of whether he has much of anything to say this time. That said, his particular emphasis has been known to shift back and forth; for instance, there was a while when he went really hard after particular Jewish sects, an aspect of his work he has dialled back on recently (though in this book he believes that Jewish religion regards Leviathan as a “Holy Serpent” and that “El”, one of the names of God in Hebrew, refers to Saturn, and suggests that the Star of David is related to Saturn worship).

This time he seems to be dialling up his focus on his metaphysical outlook. That isn’t to say that the book does not also include an awful lot of conspiracy theories, bigotry, and general nastiness towards the usual targets of his ire – but these all arise as tangents coming off his long, rambling, and repetitive restatement of his modern-day update of Gnosticism. Then again, there’s a lot of these tangents, and he lashes out at a bunch of folk; he even suggests that Putin might be a bit of a tyrant, though he still doesn’t accuse Putin of being an agent of the Conspiracy, despite the fact that he’s happy to accuse more or less every other world leader, and in general Russia comes off much lighter than Ukraine in here.

Bite-Sized Book Thoughts (The Fall of Númenor, Back Book 3, and Masks of the Illuminati)

Sometimes I’ll read a book and have a thing or two to say about it on here, but not enough that I think it merits a full article, so here’s the first entrance in my Bite-Sized Book Thoughts – a book-themed update of the old Ferretnibbles concept from the Ferretbrain days.

This time around, I’m going to look at three pieces which are either direct sequels to stuff or further entries in their overall settings – where, as such, I don’t have loads to say about them which wouldn’t be redundant with what I said about related works in their respective series.

The Fall of Númenor (J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Brian Sibley)

This is essentially doing for the Second Age of Middle-Earth what The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, and The Fall of Gondolin did for the major legends of the First Age – bringing together as much as possible of the material Tolkien cooked up on the subject, arranging it in a sensible order, and releasing it as a “new” Tolkien book. With Christopher Tolkien having sailed to Valinor, for this volume the editorial burden is taken up by Brian Sibley, who was responsible for the 1981 BBC Radio dramatisation of The Lord of the Rings – for my money the best adaptation of the story extant.

This is an apt choice; between his hand in the radio drama and his authoring the official making-of books for Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth movies, Sibley has a wealth of experience in the problem of adapting Tolkien, which inherently involves a certain amount of editing Tolkien, which is the task he is faced with here. He wisely decides to follow the chronology in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings; the book is essentially a massively adapted version of that, with additional information from The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-Earth, The Nature of Middle-Earth, and Tolkien’s letters and whatnot parachuted in to expand on the entries there.

Whereas I didn’t like The History of Middle-Earth and The Nature of Middle-Earth, because to an extent they’re as much a compilation of ideas that Tolkien toyed with and then rejected as it is a collection of ideas he added to his worldbuilding but never saw light of day in his published work, I did like Christopher Tolkien’s various expansions on the First Age legends, because they saw him doing the additional legwork of taking all that material and presenting it in a much more focused fashion. This does more or less the same trick, and is able to cover a much greater span of time than any of those volumes because the Second Age is the one that Tolkien developed the least.

As a consequence of Tolkien not really writing any stories set in that time (there’s one fairly developed story of the tempestuous marriage of a Númenorean prince and a woman who does not understand his urge for exploration), this is more backstory than it is a satisfying story in its own right. This will mostly be of interest for use as a worldbuilding reference, looking up Second Age-relevant information – say, if you’re writing fanfic, running a Middle-Earth-based RPG like The One Ring, or are trying to figure out where Amazon have deviated from canon in The Rings of Power. (Answer: everywhere.)

Back Book 3 (K.C. Green and Andrew Clark)

I covered the first two volumes of this graphic novel back when I wrote about the Kickstarter for Book 2. This volume is about as long as both the previous ones put together, but the plot here has become sufficiently un-episodic that it makes sense to burn through it all in one go. The most interesting thing I have to note here is that the production of the book wasn’t crowded through Kickstarter but TopatoGO! – the TopatoCo own-brand crowdfunding platform. This is an interesting development and might make sense for projects likely to use the TopatoCo umbrella for distribution and the like, and may also be a symptom of growing mistrust of Kickstarter due to stuff like their investment in blockchain technologies of dubious utility.

In terms of the action here, this rounds out the series, sees the final revelation of the nature of the strange world that Abigail the gunslinger and Daniel the druid live on, exposes the plans of the witches manipulating King Dang, and brings everything to a satisfying resolution. This whole arc dragged a little bit when I read it on release, because it suffered from the curse of webcomic pacing where you don’t really get much more than a few pages a week, and that’s if you’re very lucky and the artist can work very quickly and update very reliably; it works substantially better read all at once, so I’m glad to get the collection. (The whole sequence is online, but it’s nice to have insurance against it disappearing in the future.)

Masks of the Illuminati (Robert Anton Wilson)

In the days immediately prior to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand kicking off World War I, Sir John Babcock comes to Zürich in a state of high agitation, believing himself to be hounded across Europe by a diabolical conspiracy. Through sheer coincidence, he encounters Albert Einstein and James Joyce – two notable thinkers of their age who happen to both be in town – and regales them with his story. Is he merely highly paranoid, or could it be that he has stumbled across a vast occult conspiracy directed by none less than the wickedest man in the world, one Aleister Crowley?

Published in 1981, Robert Anton Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminati came out hot on the heels of his Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy, in which Wilson dialled the most irritating aspects of his writing up to 11 in order to make much the same points as he did in the Illuminatus! trilogy, only in a more meandering structure with more filler which has dated worse. Since the Illuminatus! trilogy has a highly meandering structure, perhaps a bit of filler, and hasn’t dated brilliantly, that’s saying a lot.

Nonetheless, I actually think Masks of the Illuminati is pretty good. Sure, Wilson’s usual writing quirks are still there, but unexpectedly, out of nowhere, he suddenly learns something resembling narrative discipline, and he ensures his use of his various recurring schticks are actually appropriate to the job at had. For instance, yet again he’s back to mimicing James Joyce at points, but this is generally pulled out for sections written from Joyce’s point of view, so the Joyce-isms are justified by the premise.

(One might argue that that’s also true in Schrödinger’s Cat, since that’s a slice-of-life book without any conventional plot which is consciously borrowing from Ulysses, famously a slice-of-life book without any conventional plot, but in that context it doesn’t stick the landing because it’s also trying to do a dozen other things in a fairly disorganised fashion.)

More broadly, the whole arc of the novel is about an initiatory experience in which Babcock’s worldview is forcibly leapfrogged from a somewhat stuffy and old-fashioned Victorian mindset into a more postmodern outlook – so Wilson’s occasional drifts into experimentalism, his comedic asides, the sections of the book written as scripts (some including cinematic-style notes on shots), the obligatory hallucinatory trip at the end (likely induced by mescaline rather than LSD, but other than that a good old-fashioned Wilson standby), and all the rest are kind of apt in that sense.

In particular, such anachronistically experimental notes end up being a neat device for nudging the reader and reminding them that, despite appearances to the contrary, this is not a straight-up horror novel in the style of Arthur Machen, Robert Chambers, or Lovecraft (not credited in the text, obviously, but an entire strand of the story is a nicely-done riff on The Whisperer In Darkness) with a plot from straight out of Dennis Wheatley; that’s merely the subjective experience of Sir John, who has a worldview which reverts to that sort of thing when under stress.

In addition, whereas Schrödinger’s Cat had Wilson attempt address a large number of subjects in a fairly disorganised way, with the result that he touches on a lot of them in a fairly oversimplified manner, Masks sees him be a bit more careful about setting the boundaries of his narrative. Sure, there’s all sorts of nods to Schrödinger’s Cat and Illuminatus! scattered through the thing, with various characters here conceivably being ancestors or alternate versions of characters from those series, and there’s implications about deeper linkages and the possibility that World War I might have been the result of Illuminati machinations, but those are sideshows, and Wilson makes sure not to get bogged down in them. His story here is the psychological liberation of Sir John Babcock, and he focuses on that.

Wilson actually focusing on something is a novelty, but in this instance it pans out surprisingly well. The entire story spins a yarn about Crowley which, though fictional in its particulars, shows a fairly deep knowledge of Crowley’s life and philosophy and a fair amount of research; Wilson’s erudition on the subject is especially impressive when you remember he was writing at a time before some of the better biographies of Crowley were extant.

Indeed, it is possible to interpret the novel in an entirely sceptical manner – regarding any claims about the Golden Dawn (and therefore Crowley’s A.’.A.’., his Golden Dawn splinter group) having a sort of apostolic succession dating back to the Knights Templar and beyond as spurious and regarding the entire thrust of the novel as psychological, and not magical, and for the book to still tell a story with a satisfying narrative arc. Equally, you can read all sorts of additional stuff into it should you wish. Squaring that particular circle is difficult, and it’s impressive how well Wilson does it. Although Illuminatus! would forever be Wilson’s major claim to fame, Masks of the Illuminati is possibly a better novel if you are after something that resembles an actual novel, rather than a bullshit session between two stoned philosophical autodidacts.

Ready Illuminatus One

It’s a busy April somewhere in the 1970s. Just off the coast of west Africa, a coup sees the island of Fernando Poo become the biggest Cold War flashpoint since the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Las Vegas, a biowarfare scientist’s erratic behaviour might compromise the security of the supervirus Anthrax Leprosy Pi. In Ingolstadt, a music festival that would make Woodstock look like a church picnic is set to raise the psychic energy necessary to enact a monstrous plan. In Atlantis, Howard the dolphin has spotted nefarious activities he’ll need his human allies to deal with. In the face of both the overt international crisis and the more esoteric matters bubbling under the surface, the bombing of the New York offices of Confrontation, a radical left-wing journal, and the disappearance of its editor Joe Malik would seem to be a minor matter. But hardened detectives Saul Goodman and Barney Muldoon discover in the wreckage a stash of memos on Malik’s “Illuminati project” – the product of research into the legendary global conspiracy of the same name.

It sounds too weird to be true – but Confrontation journalist George Dorn has been busted in Mad Dog, Texas by a sheriff who seems to have some decidedly Illuminated decorations in a back room at the local jailhouse, and then sprung from jail by a cadre of free market radicals. Whisked away to a golden submarine and introduced to international seafarer, ace attorney, and mystical leader Hagbard Celine, Dorn is about to discover that the Illuminati are all too real, and that their hidden hand is behind all of the above cosmological crises and more as they seek to Immanentize the Eschaton – or, to get away from the theological language, bring about the end of the world as we know it…

The Illuminatus! Trilogy was originally published in three volumes – The Eye In the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan – but was conceived by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea as a single book, and indeed is more generally available these days in omnibus editions collecting all three books than as separate volumes. Between this and the fairly extensive appendices, there’s a certain conscious riffing on the structure of The Lord of the Rings going on – along with innumerable other nods to other pop culture and counterculture touchstones. In constructing the novel Shea and Wilson touch on music, numerous strands of occultism and New Age thinking (with major doses of Crowley and Discordianism a key part of the curriculum), flavours of libertarianism ranging from Objectivism to Michael Moorcock-esque left-libertarianism, pulp sword and sorcery versions of the history of humanity, horny on main sexual fantasies, references to literary inspirations ranging from William Burroughs to James Joyce, and so on and so forth ad nauseum.

All this is to add window dressing to what is ultimately a fairly thin main plot which, without the conspiracy theorising and the mysticism and the libertarian politics, could have been happily addressed in some 300 pages or so, rather than the cumbersome 800+ pages the trilogy actually weighs in at. However, a tight conspiracy thriller this is not: it’s more of a stoned countercultural morass of parodies which are slightly too on the nose, in-jokes which are milked entirely too often to stay funny, rambling conversations which come across as little more than student common room bullshit sessions given some conspiratorial bling, and a dense thicket of references.

Phantom Recollections of a Profane Youth

Some conspiracy theorists are merely remixers and collage artists, grabbing scraps of other people’s fringe research and assembling them into their own larger pattern. Alex Jones, Bill Cooper, David Icke, and Jim Keith all fit into this category. Other works of conspiracy literature, however, are more original. In some cases, like Martin Cannon’s essay The Controllers or William Bramley’s The Gods of Eden, they look over the existing literature, do a bit of their own legwork and hypothesising, and propose a genuinely new – albeit spurious – concept. In other cases, like the original Alternative 3, the conspiracy theory is constructed out of whole cloth as a deliberate hoax. Then there are those rarer cases, where a novel conspiracy theory appears a priori – constructed not from an eccentric interpretation of existing research and evidence, and not from a deliberate joke, but as an expression of the writer’s idiosyncratic worldview.

And surely, in the modern history of the world, few worldviews have been quite as eccentric as James Shelby Downard’s.

Downard was never exactly famous in his lifetime. Born in 1913 and dying in 1998, he seems to have toiled away in obscurity for much of his mortal span. In the 1970s he appeared on Sirius Rising, an audio lecture in which he assisted Jim Brandon in laying out a theory that secret societies on Earth were trying to contact extraterrestrial intelligences from Sirius – an idea reported by Robert Anton Wilson in his Cosmic Trigger as “the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all” (and as the author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, he’d have heard a fair few of those theories).

A little later, Downard would show up in the company of Michael Hoffman, infamous Holocaust denier and antisemite (Downard, alas, would have few qualms about expressing his own racist views from time to time in his writing), who would produce an edited version of one of Downard’s essays, King-Kill/33°; Adam Parfrey, founder of Feral House, would include the essay in his first edition of Apocalypse Culture (in the revised version it’s switched out for another Downard essay, The Call to Chaos), and an unexpurgated version of it – the “pure Downard” rendition, if you will – appeared in Secret & Suppressed as Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism.

Downard’s theory, as outlined in King-Kill/33° and The Call to Chaos, was that major world events – the Trinity nuclear weapons test, the Moon landing, the Kennedy Assassination, the death of Marilyn Monroe, and so on – were all orchestrated by the Freemasons not necessarily because they valued the direct cause-and-effect results of those events, but because they played a crucial role in vast symbolic rituals intended to shape the psyche of humanity as a whole. Perhaps only Alan Moore’s dizzying (and specifically fictional) theory of the Ripper murders being committed to resonate with London’s sacred architecture, as outlined in From Hell, would ever come close to Downardian territory back in the 1990s when these essays first hit the scene.

A Very Specific Level of Credulousness

I’ve previously discussed 1990s conspiracy theory author Jim Keith on here. He died in 1999 as a result of a blood clot from botched knee surgery following a fall from a stage at Burning Man, which is the sort of death which naturally gets conspiracy theorists very overexcited, and you could have only really called him an underground figure in his lifetime, but I think you can learn a lot about today’s QAnon-themed conspiracy theory influencers from observing his career. Keith had made something of an art of adapting what he was saying to his audience – he’d add in a bit more Robert Anton Wilson when addressing the counter-culture audience, a bit more John Birch Society when addressing the so-called “patriot” scene, and he’d crafted a public persona where if you were coming from either of those perspectives and squinted a bit, you could persuade yourself he was part of your team. Successful QAnon influencers seem to operate by speaking the language of whichever subculture they are attempting to address; extremely notorious and successful ones (like, say, Trump himself) manage to be at least plausibly allied to several subcultures at once.

Of all of Keith’s books, the one which seems to have the most cross-pollination with QAnon at least in terms of subject matter is Mind Control, World Control – at least, it seems like the QAnon field is more inclined to believe in mass brainwashing and mind control than in, say, Alternative 3 – and some of the most notorious QAnon types not only throw a lot of more established conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination out of the window, but flatly deny that he was assassinated. Furthermore, it seems likely that Mind Control, World Control is one of Keith’s most commercially successful book – Adventures Unlimited Press, who keep most of his back catalogue in print, retitled his Casebook On Alternative 3 as Mind Control and UFOs: Casebook On Alternative 3, and presumably that’s because they looked at their sales figures and noticed that Keith’s work on mind control sells particularly well.

Mind Control, World Control is billed as The Encyclopedia of Mind Control, but that’s a bit of a misnomer – it is not in any respect arranged like an encyclopedia, it’s more of an overview of the subject, with Keith outlining a theory on where mind control technology originated and why it was developed in the early chapters and subsequently giving overviews of cases where it has been alleged to be utilised. One might query the research skills of someone who doesn’t seem to know what an encyclopedia is, and sure enough Keith’s approach is fairly scattershot. His main issue is a lack of discernment; on the one hand, he does cover undeniable, well-substantiated instances of government research into mind control like MK-ULTRA, but on the other hand he also entertains the claims of people who are fairly evidently suffering from delusional states of mind, arguing that “In favour of persons whose testimony about electromagnetic mind control seems irrational, it is obvious that persons undergoing this kind of harassment could be driven to madness. They should be given the benefit of their doubt in their testimony.”

Pickin’ Up Truth Vibrations, Part 8: David Icke, Second-Rate Dick

David Icke has a new book out – The Trap – and though it should be pretty evident at this point that I think the man’s an especially nasty and hateful piece of work, I feel like looking away from what he’s doing is dangerous – he’s got too much influence on the hardcore fringe to be dismissed as an utter irrelevancy. I had no intention of paying money for the book, but I had an opportunity to look over a copy, and for the most part I thought that I wouldn’t need to cover it in detail after all – for there’s really very little in it which is actually new.

That said, what is new is absolutely risible.

Recycling material from book to book to book has been an Icke calling card for ages at this point, but The Trap is especially self-indulgent. With his previous book, Perceptions of a Renegade Mind, having released last year, there simply isn’t that much in the way of new developments for him to address. Oh, sure, stuff’s been happening and he does touch on stuff like Elon Musk’s abortive attempt to buy Twitter or other things which have outraged him, but in terms of major social trends there’s not much new under the sun compared to his previous book, other than COVID lockdowns have eased and so the backlash he was riding has died down.

In general, the overall tone of the book is somewhat similar to that one; lots of griping about the “woke”, lots of transphobia which, as I have explained over and over again in this series of articles, makes no sense in the context of Icke’s own cosmology, lots of conspiracism. There’s more autobiography – yet again combing his school days and picking out any minor lucky event as a cosmic sign he had a destiny of multiversal importance. The antisemitism is dialled back on somewhat – it’s still present, but the overt shouting about Sabbatean-Frankists has almost entirely disappeared bar from a brief reference to The Trigger.

Behold! The Proto-Q

The Malleus Maleficarum is a textbook on witchcraft attributed to Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, two Dominican friars who, like many of that order, served as Inquisitors for the Catholic Church. How much of the blame actually resides with them is debatable; Sprenger’s only name was only associated with it decades after its original publication in 1486, and whilst he and Kramer were undeniably associated in some respect it’s suggested that his name was attached to the book to benefit from his somewhat better reputation.

You see, Kramer wrote the book whilst under a cloud: after trying to kick off some witch-hunts in Innsbruck, he had been turfed out of the city by the local bishop, who denounced him as being mentally unsound. The bishop may have had good reason to do so: Kramer’s own behaviour had been deeply questionable, including getting so fixated on the sexual habits of one of the women he’d accused of witchcraft (his grounds for suspicion being that she wasn’t coming to his sermons) that the rest of the tribunal stopped the trial. The theory goes that Kramer was so annoyed by this, he wrote a massive tome about witchcraft essentially as a Renaissance-era equivalent of posting an angry manifesto on an incel forum.

The Malleus has subsequently become infamous for its role in the witchcraft persecutions which became all the more fashionable in subsequent centuries. It should be recalled that in the era that Kramer was working in, the Inquisition wasn’t making witches the main focus of its work. The business of the Inquisition was going after heretics and apostates; even the persecution of Jews by the Inquisition was justified under this umbrella. (Specifically, the Spanish Inquisition was going after Jewish people who had converted to Christianity, or whose ancestors had converted, but were accused of continuing to hold their old beliefs anyway.)

Pickin’ Up Truth Vibrations, Part 7: COVID and the Cosmos

The last time we checked in on Gnostic heresiarch David Icke, he was enjoying a new prominence. A rising tide floats all boats; in this case, a rising tide of bullshit surrounding COVID and QAnon was allowing conspiracy theorists of all stripes to do brisk business. Murders or suicides on the part of not one, not two, but at least three people bearing allegiance to either Icke’s theories directly or grand overarching conspiracy theories that clearly show his fingerprints. If he feels any guilt, I have not noticed him expressing any.

In the meantime, he’s been a regular at anti-lockdown protests and has found time to continue to spew his theories in interminable videos, and has even churned out a new book. It’s taken me a little time to find a source for his new book which I didn’t have to pay money to Icke (or people supporting similarly extreme views as Icke’s) to read, but I managed it and took a look, and to be honest… there ain’t that much to it. Were this the only major release he’d put out, I wouldn’t have enough material for another episode in this series.

But I’ve also had a chance to, for free, watch a documentary he has been energetically pushing, and I think it’s worth taking a look at both next to each other. Whilst Icke’s books have been his bread and butter for decades by this point, and he has got his formula down to the point where he can crank them out pretty easily (it certainly helps that he doesn’t hold himself to mainstream standards of journalistic integrity or investigative rigour), at the same time he also seems to be putting a lot of effort into developing new avenues to both raise money and put his message out there. The book and film I’m going to review here are recent examples of that.

Perceptions of a Renegade Mind

Icke’s latest book has at least had more effort expended on the front cover than The Answer, but the actual contents are pretty low-effort. It has been apparent for some time that Icke’s worldview has largely stopped developing; his grand cosmology and his overarching conspiracy theory has been more or less ossified for years, and all Icke really does is occasionally change up the terminology. For instance, this time around he refers to the Conspiracy as a whole as the “Global Cult”, having gone with “Death Cult” for The Answer and been more direct about attacking Sabbatean-Frankists in The Trigger.

All Perceptions of a Renegade Mind is, then, is a fairly simple introduction to his grand theory of everything, joined at the hip with him applying that theory to current events (mostly, but not exclusively, COVID-themed). This explains how he can knock books like this out so quickly – he’s been churning out videos and interviews and articles for his website all through the pandemic, all he needed to do here was condense them down into a “best of” (for a certain value of “best”) and punt it out the door.

This concludes with a rundown of his cosmology, which is the same basic Ickean Gnostic cosmology which he’s been pushing for some time. There’s a slight new wrinkle here – the Archons seek to be disconnected from the true God but, in doing so, would ail due to no longer having a connection to the source of all life, and so want to use human beings as a power supply (adding in yet more features of The Matrix to Icke’s worldview without, alas, admitting that the Wachowski sisters were crafting a trans allegory) for spiritual energy. Even this, though, is basically just rearranging some of the tiles without materially changing Icke’s increasingly stagnant mosaic.

Jim Keith’s Coy Conspiracism

Adventures Unlimited Press’ release of Jim Keith’s Saucers of the Illuminati describes it as his “final book on UFOs”, but it is in fact nothing of the sort; it’s actually a revision of his first. The book was originally put out by Keith in 1993 under the pseudonym “Jay Katz”. The most widely-available edition adds very little beyond an introduction by Keith (in which he claims it is “my strangest and most controversial work”), a foreword by Kenn Thomas (Keith’s co-author on The Octopus, who doesn’t pass up the opportunity to plug the new edition), and the transcript of a speech on similar themes that Keith gave in 1995 appended to the end (under the title UFOs At the Edge of Reality), and textually speaking more or less everything cited therein beyond these relates to information which was out there by 1993, so the revision involved is presumably mild at best, at least when it comes to the actual content.

As such, the book occupies an important place in tracking the evolution of Keith’s thinking, since it represents a tidied-up version of his first book-length solo work in the field. Prior to this, Keith had been putting out zines (like Dharma Combat) and editing multi-author collections like The Gemstone File and Secret and Suppressed. Moreover, the ideas laid out in here seem to be Keith’s most direct and personal mini-manifesto – the most direct glimpse we have at his personal grand theory of everything. Though later books of his like Black Helicopters Over America and Casebook On Alternative 3 would touch on a lot of these topics, they would tend to hint at the version of the “big picture” Jim lays out here without necessarily making the entire case. (Indeed, it’s hard to find anything in his bibliography which doesn’t in some way further develop ideas he initially lays out here.)

The basic idea of Saucers of the Illuminati is that an interlocking web of secret societies (the Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati, you know, the usual crew) are planning a one world government called the New World Order, which they will inaugurate by faking a visitation from aliens, and all the UFO phenomena going on are just part of the fakery they’re putting together for that whole shebang.

This is all amusing, but why is it relevant? Keith died in 1999 (hence, I suppose, publishers trying to squeeze what they can out of his legacy by reissuing this from time to time), he’s not a currently active individual in the field. That much is true. However I think in many respects the book is an interesting insight into a set of logical and methodological fallacies which underpin a lot of conspiracy theory, as well as a case study in how extreme ideas and the counter-culture can cross-pollinate.

Oh Donna, We’re ALL Devo!

For her follow-up to Kooks, Donna Kossy continued to explore the world of offbeat ideas but changed the nature of the focus. Whereas Kooks tried to focus on a particular kind of off-beat thinker, Strange Creations concerns itself with a particular flavour of “aberrant ideas”: namely, non-mainstream concepts of human origins.

This obviously includes creationism, with Kossy’s treatment largely picking up the story in the 18th Century, when new advancements in geology demolished old beliefs about the age of the Earth and kicked off a backlash which then gathered steam after the scientific establishment came around to evolution as the most plausible theory. (Kossy does, however, note that Christian arguments against a literal interpretation of Genesis date as far back as St. Augustine.)

However, as Kossy points out, creationists are really promoting an extremely narrow alternative to Darwin; in general, they aren’t advocating for the whole swathe of creation myths out there to be taken seriously, or even an appreciable subset of them, they are only really interested in trying to show that the Biblical account of creation in Genesis (or, specifically, one of the two mutually contradictory accounts in Genesis) is more accurate than evolutionary theory. Some go very literalist (especially in the “young Earth” wing of the movement), some allow for more metaphor and allegory, but if you are a creationist in the sense the term exists in American culture (Kossy’s focus), it’s because you want a dose of Bible in your creation narrative and the idea that God just set the entire universe in motion and then all the accidents of evolution ended up happening in accordance with his omniscient foresight (a perfectly acceptable reconciliation between evolution and religious faith which many Christians are happy to follow) isn’t quite Bible-y enough for you.

And the thing is, there’s way more alternatives out there than the Christian narrative – and Kossy’s got them to offer too. You have the rather charming (but factually challenged) aquatic ape theory, which speculates that at some point in human evolutionary history there was an intermediate stage where, after abandoning the forests, our ape-like ancestors started being primarily coastal sorts and sort of went a little way down the evolutionary pathway to becoming oceanic mammals (such as seals). You have the ancient astronaut theory and its variants, which Kossy plausibly traces back to Theosophy. (Yes, David Icke is mentioned in passing, but most of the reptoid-based information here derives from the various sources he ripped off – Icke simply isn’t an original enough thinker for Kossy to spend much time on.) You have various theories centred on the idea that, rather than evolving from simpler life forms, humanity has de-evolved from the status of its nobler ancestors. (Kossy admits her interest in this whole subject kind of comes from her being a big Devo fan.)

And you have a whole bunch of racism.