Books tend to attract freaks. Sometimes, as with the young woman on
the bus so smothered by a copy of The Idiot that she doesn’t
notice a fistfight breaking out directly in front of her, these freaks
can be charming. Occasionally, as with the old man who returns to a
bookstore to demand a refund on a copy of Mein Kampf when he
discovers that its foreword is written by a Jew and so is therefore “an
inferior text,” the freaks can be repulsive. Normally, they fall
somewhere in between, but the one thing all freaks have in common is
that, for some reason, they decided that the books they love were more
important to them than actual human beings.
Once I worked in a bookstore cafe, and an older woman came to the
counter and handed me a brown bag stuffed with paper. I asked her what
she wanted me to do with it. She looked at me with a lopsided,
appreciative smile and said, “Oh, I think you’ll know what to
do.” And then she left.
The bag was full of letters that the woman had written to local
newspapers and national publications, warning them of an international
conspiracy involving the Freemasons and other ancient secret
societies—some dating back to Atlantis—to destroy the
United States. The woman was wrong; I didn’t know what to do with
the greasy shopping bag, but it appeared to be such a labor of love
that, when I finally threw the damned thing away three years later,
I still felt guilty.
There’s a new book by Mark Booth that simulates the feeling of
finding a lovingly assembled sackful of conspiracy theories.
It’s titled The Secret History of the World as Laid Down by the
Secret Societies, and it attempts to weave every ancient secret
society into one tapestry. Booth is getting lambasted in review
sections across the globe for it.
The problem that most reviewers have is the specious claim that
Booth’s book misses the point of, or obfuscates some of the lessons of,
the societies. This is rather akin to informing Nabokov that Lolita
would never act like that. Secret societies have always existed, but
the belief that anybody could ever assemble their secret wisdom, or
even that that wisdom would amount to anything meaningful, is
ridiculous. This book is a fiction, sprinkled with gnosticism and
trivia. (Did you know that Mary Poppins was based on Sufism? Does it
matter, now that you do?)
Most conspiracy theorists treasure Robert Anton Wilson’s
Illuminatus! Trilogy, a fictional adventure that similarly ties
together secrets and phenomena into semicoherent theory. Booth’s
History is a breakneck road trip through fact and
fiction—just like Illuminatus!—and it likewise
leaves the reader feeling amused and entertained. Only a freak would
expect anything more. 