with Dr David Robertson
Angela Puca AP: Hello everyone! I’m Dr. Angela Puca and welcome to my symposium. I am a Ph.D. and a university lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of magick, esotericism, shamanism, the occult, and all of its related currents. Today we’ve got a special guest with us and that’s Dr. David Robertson. David is a lecturer in religious studies at the Open University, co-founder of the Religious Studies Project, and co-editor of the journal Implicit Religion. He is the author of Gnosticism and the History of Religions, and UFOs, Conspiracy Theories, and the New Age. David is also co-editor of the Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion. You will find all of these references in the infobox along with the contact details in case you want to reach out to David.
In this interview, we will cover conspiracy theories and magical thinking. As always you will have time stamps and don’t forget to tell me what you think in the comments section.
So, please help me in welcoming Dr David Robertson.
Hello David. How are you today?
David Robertson DR: not too bad, I’m enjoying some sun, and you?
AP: I’m OK. Not too bad. Yeah I’ve also been enjoying the warmer days lately here in the UK. Where are you located now?
DR: I’m in Gifford, which is slightly east of Edinburgh, along the coast. Its been very wet but it’s nice now. You’ll be more suited to the hot weather – being Italian.
AP: Yes, it is not hot weather for me.
DR: I’m a Highlander, this is too hot for me.
AP: It is interesting how the perception of weather and temperature varies depending on your background. Thank you very much for agreeing on doing this interview for the Symposium. I really appreciate that.
DR: That’s my pleasure. Thanks for the invite. It should be fun.
AP: We normally see each other face to face. This is the …
DR: Yeah. Once a year.
AP: Yeah, for the British Association for the Study of Religions. Today we are going to talk about conspiracy theories and the intersections, or possible intersections with magical thinking and magick. So, the first thing I would like to ask you, David, is whether there are parallels between conspiracy thinking and magical thinking? Whether you see a link between these two ways of – diverging from the dominant sense of rationality and also what we mean when we use the term rational or rationality?
DR: Well tell me a little bit more about what you mean by magical thinking. Just what would your viewers understand by you saying that?
AP: That’s a good question. I would say that most of my viewers, I also have academics amongst my viewers, but most of my viewers are practitioners who are interested in getting the academic side of magic and the study of magic, or esotericism, or the occult. So by magical thinking, I would say that they might understand, and I understand, the belief in magick. The belief that magick is something that factually occurs in one’s experience. I’m trying to avoid terms such as ‘true’ or ‘reality’ or ‘real’ because I know that from an ontological point of view these can be quite unstable terms to work with. I’d say that by magical thinking I mean the belief that magic is something that is factual, that can occur in one’s life. And since this is not quite adherent to the dominant theoretical culture that we live in and since that is also the case with conspiracy theories, I was wondering whether you see parallels between these two ways of defining factuality – on the part of people who engage in these two different interactions with their perception and experience of reality.
DR: Okay, there’s a lot there. This is actually a really, really big question and I wasn’t asking only to sort of be academic and pedantic about meanings but because we can mean so many different things by all of the terms that we’ve already used. You know, conspiracy theory, magic, magical thinking. We will have to bring in, you know like, esotericism these kinds of ideas at some point. The way that we approach the question actually, will give us quite different answers. So just to take a very sort of basic kind of common sense approach to the question – may be less than you might think. I mean, if magical thinking is kind of the belief in … to take a Crowleyan understanding of magic, of making change occur according to will, then you’re actually probably going to find less of that way of seeing the world amongst what people usually mean by conspiracy theorists than you are in lots of other sections of the world. We go into the way that academics think about magic and magical thinking and magical world views then we might start to see some more parallels.
I’m thinking especially of Antoine Faivre‘s famous definition of esotericism and probably the most fundamental one of those, is the idea of correspondences and there being a big sort of network of correspondences tying everything in the world in sort of these connections, these semantic connections, meaningful connections and that’s definitely something that we see a lot of the conspiracy theory thinking you know the whole you know the famous image of the “crazy wall” with the connections between this thing and the Bilderbergers are over here and UFOs are over here and JFK is down here and, you know, Donald Trump’s in the middle. That kind of way of connecting, finding meaning by connecting the dots across different spheres of culture and across history and different kinds of meaning. I mean it’s very similar to something that like say Crowley was doing in his “777” you know with a huge series of correspondences connecting all sorts of different symbolic systems from the Cabala and the Egyptian gods and the Greek gods and the numbers and anything else; perfumes and animals.
AP: Yeah, might that also link with the concept that underlies western historicism and also the new age movement which is perennialism. So this concept that there is one perennial philosophy that there is one core truth that underlies all religious traditions. And once you remove all the content, all the context, and all the structures you will find that everywhere you have one unitarian truth that you need to uncover across the board and across history do you think that is linked with what you are saying?
DR: Very much so. Although I wouldn’t necessarily count that as magical thinking and maybe we can come back to that later on when we talk about the idea of secret societies and things like that. But definitely, I mean it’s definitely linked, If we think about the way that those correspondences work, it’s kind of a holistic idea isn’t it that there’s that all of these different aspects of reality are all kind of connected in one. Be that one kind of secret tradition or one being or one kind of great consciousness or just one big narrative that ties the whole thing together. That is definitely something that we find a lot of in conspiracy theory thinking. However, it should be said that it’s also something that we find in a lot of places that we don’t normally think of as either magical or conspiratorial. You know, basic kind of Marxist thinking.
Anything that presents the idea of the self and the psyche as a similar sort of basis. And let’s not forget that 80 per cent of the American population are Christian and we have similar ways of seeing the world as well. So I’m saying that there are similarities here between magical thinking in the esoteric sense and the conspiracy theory world but it’s not something that is unique to those two spheres of the world. There’s lots and lots of people who don’t really fall into either of those camps who are looking for connections and grand narratives and, you know, a model of history where there are hidden agents pulling the strings behind the scenes. Yeah, so another way of approaching the question then of magical thinking and I think this is sort of what you were hinting at before. We could look at the way the idea of stigmatized knowledge.
AP: Yeah rejected knowledge.
DR: Yeah, which is a big part of Hanegraaff‘s recent work but it goes right back to Colin Campbell a sociologist writing in the early sixties. I think and his idea of the “cultic milieu” and he was writing fairly early days of the sociology of religion and he was working in that famous Victorian distinction of religion as either church, sect or cult. Right, so we don’t tend to use cult anymore but he was working in this context where a cult was a new religion and a church was an established religion, a sect was a kind of innovative offshoot and a cult was something entirely new and innovative. He was looking for an explanation as to why new religions, although the specific groups kept popping up and disappearing relatively quickly, how come that in itself was a constant thing, right, how come there were always these similar if not identical little religions constantly popping up and dying away. And he came up with this idea of the cultic milieu, which is a sort of way of describing a subculture or counter-culture an area of culture that is based on stigmatized knowledge or superseded knowledge, rejected knowledge. He saw the cultic milieu as being like the mycelium of a fungus. So it’s there all the time and you mostly didn’t see it but when the conditions were right you would get fruit and so this case it’s cults rather than mushrooms. He saw this as where you would ideas that were rejected or stigmatized or not part of the accepted mainstream, not acknowledged by the authorities. A lot of outdated, older ideas have been superseded. He didn’t tend to think about conspiracy theories – largely because the idea of conspiracy theories wasn’t really developed in the way that we use it nowadays. But he definitely included magical ideas, occult ideas, esoteric ideas more broadly as well as kind of other things like alternative medicines.
Also, things like alternative histories about Atlantis and these kinds of ideas. But more recently it’s been used to explain the conspiracy world. Michael Barkun used a version of this and sort of stigmatized knowledge n his famous book on the subject [Culture of Conspiracy] and UFOs and things like that as well as supernatural and paranormal phenomena, belief in ghosts; these kinds of things. It’s also been used quite a lot by people like Roger Griffin to talk about the far-right who also, of course, are constantly borrowing esoteric ideas and alternative histories and stuff to justify their racialist world views. So in that sense, definitely conspiracy theories and magical thinking are related in that sense, and that they are drawing on things that are stigmatized in one way or another, superseded, non-scientific, mythological …
AP: And do you think that in the case of conspiracy theories; how do they relate with the concept of rationality? Do you use this concept at all in your research?
DR: Of rationality?
AP: Yes. The idea, for example, that these concepts are irrational; is a common belief. But I was wondering if that something that in your research has emerged as something that conspiracy theories have had to face or defend themselves from or do they have a specific idea of what rational means?
DR: It’s not a term I would use normatively. I wouldn’t want to say that something was or wasn’t rational because rational can mean a lot of different things. We often will use it in a common-sense way of saying well, “what somebody’s saying makes sense”, “is it logical to think something” but then we’ll slip into using it in a much stricter way in which rational means, you know, in an empirical or scientific materialist, you know, is there evidence for it and those things are not all the same. I’ll take a topical example: it’s not irrational to think that the government might be manipulating the way it’s presented in the media. That’s not something that is illogical and you know there are historical precedents for it. Many, many historical precedents for it. However, in a specific claim, such as the reason that somebody is saying this is because they’ve planted that in the press or whatever. It may not be rational from the sense of an empirical or scientific materialist position because you haven’t presented any evidence but that doesn’t mean that you’re irrational for thinking that. It’s just slightly less founded. So I think, when scholars use it, they need to be very careful what they’re talking about in terms of rationality. There is a tendency for work on conspiracy theories, particularly, to talk about it as being fundamentally irrational and it’s that’s simply not the case. There are examples of conspiracy thinking which is very out there but most of them aren’t – it’s relatively logical.
AP: Where and why the disconnect between the dominant view happens then?
DR: There’s a lot of reasons for it. It’s complicated. I mean in terms of stigmatizing something for being irrational; the example I always come back to is the studies that set out to show how conspiracy theory believers are schizophrenic or believing in things that lack scientific evidence is that we don’t have the same way of approaching when we’re talking about Christianity, do we. You don’t see surveys showing how 80 per cent of the US population are irrational because they believe in the miracles of Jesus or the Virgin Birth or Transubstantiation or, any of these, sort of, core ideas. I think the issues are is historical and complicated. Many of us would accept that these are the same thing but finding bodies who are going to fund you to do that research is much, much harder. If we took that approach with most of the things that we study, as social scientists, we’d run into problems right. I mean there is very little scientific evidence to support the fact that people are left-wing or right-wing or you know human rights or football teams or the people we love or the nations we identify or the races or the genders or anything that we identify with; these are the things which drive people’s behaviour and drive society and none of these things are things which are grounded in scientific reason even though it’s clearly important to our society in certain respects. So I think stigmatizing these ideas because they’re not scientific or that they’re irrational are misguided. It also means that if you’re wanting to encourage people to take vaccines, that simply presenting them with scientific evidence isn’t going to do it because that’s not the reason that they’re making their decisions in the first place. And that’s not to say that they are per se anti-scientific when you know the science is mobilized regularly, not always particularly well, but I think that’s more to do with the fact that these aren’t people who are professional scientists, than anything else. It’s just that other forms of justification of knowledge are much more prominent; personal experience, a tradition is a massive driver of behaviour. You know, part of the reason we don’t challenge established religions, for instance, is their power over us as traditional discourses. But also the kind of dot-connecting knowledge we’ve been talking about before, the magical thinking, if you want to use that, and as well as kind of channelled information coming from supernatural sources; supernatural in a broader sense. All of which drive people’s behaviour. So, those are also aspects, I think, of the way that those in the magical world would also think. You know, they’re not necessarily rejecting science per se but they’re just putting some sort of limit on it. Would you agree?
AP: Yes and no. It depends on the tradition because, for instance, there are many magic practitioners today both in paganism, and ceremonial magic traditions they tend to be very keen on, not only, science but also academic knowledge – as my project shows. They tend to be very sensitive to what is discovered and the findings from the academic world. So I’d say that, at least according to my research, and from what is my understanding, when it comes to people who gravitate around paganism, esotericism, even witchcraft they tend to be very interested in what the academic scholarship says and so they tend to be lenient towards updating their worldview and their understanding of things according to scientific data. So that’s, I guess, in that sense perhaps there may be a difference there but of course…
DR: So that’s like that’s exactly what I’m saying, though that’s that is exactly what I would expect to find, I mean, if you look at the way that the conversation about lifting the lockdown just now, for instance, is going both the (British) government and the people who are resisting the extension of the lockdown – they’re both saying, look this is what science is telling us. It’s the conspiracy…
AP: It’s interpretation. It’s like having different interpretations of what science has. That’s what you mean.
DR: Right and also that other times you will be prepared to accept other forms of testimony. Many magical practitioners are interested in the academic research and the scientific background of it but they’re also going to massively prioritise their own experiences, in ritual or in their practice.
AP: Yes, I would definitely agree that in that case, in the case of magic practitioners, they tend to be very open to academic scholarship but also they prioritize what they experience in their life and in their rituals.
DR: Right and my experience is that that’s not only the case with magical practitioners but conspiracy theory people. But also, pretty much everyone outside of the kind of clinical, academic context but most of the research on conspiracy theories takes that form. They’re treated like anomalies. If you start off by assuming that people are irrational and you only look at whether there’s kind of scientific evidence for what they’re saying then it’s pretty easy to present people as being crazy and dangerous.
AP: But then it goes for everybody.
DR: It goes for everybody, that’s exactly what I’m saying and the ideas are no more no less irrational than anybody else’s really. Even the scientists writing these kinds of papers still, you know, go home and support a particular team. It’s not how humans work, that’s why we need social sciences. But I think that the big difference is – I mean and this is something which I think people in the kind of pagan and other magical communities will understand – that if you want to present a community is dangerous if you start off with the assumption that doing something is dangerous or crazy then you can find evidence for it.
AP: It sounded somewhat conspiratorial but it’s not.
DR: Well it’s not. I’m talking about the satanic ritual abuse.
AP: Yeah, yeah.
DR: This went on for decades and saw all sorts of people thrown in jail for what is essentially their religious beliefs and a similar thing is happening with conspiracy theories. You know, the rhetoric around what is essentially gossip has become quite hysterical and I think the reasons for that are complicated. It’s to do with existing power structures being under stress, it’s to do with individuals being under stress because you know all sorts of different reasons. Right now it’s to do with the way that the media sphere is kind of struggling to reshape itself. But it makes about as much sense as satanic ritual abuse did, to be honest.
AP: Yeah and another thing that I’d like to ask you is: have you encountered in your research conspiracy theories that are involved in esoteric traditions or practices and can you expand on the possible overlaps between the two words? In this sense, you know, in case there are conspiracy theories that are also following an esoteric tradition.
DR: I didn’t find too many if I’m honest. The vast majority of people I’ve encountered, in my fieldwork, have either been in a kind of “New Agey”, you know, relatively unstructured, holistic New Age kind of spiritual realm, or have been in a sort of Christian context. Whether, sort of, self-identifying as Christian or sort of more cultural. There actually tends to be quite a lot of suspicion, in conspiratorial circles, about the more formal magical traditions.
AP: Yeah, like the Illuminati and all these kinds of things.
DR: Yeah, I mean some of the stuff claimed about the O.T.O. for instance, is quite hysterical and nonsensical. But then as you say – Illuminati, Templars, but also there’s a kind of invented paganism as well which I sometimes call Luciferianism, to separate it from actual Satanic groups, but the kind of thing that, you know, like Q-anon followers and the satanic ritual abuse people in the 90s were claiming these sort of satanic religion, which apparently exists in its millions, although nobody knows anything about them and you know organizing, kind of, deliberately inverting Christianity and all these kind of ideas. So most people, I think, would not … most of the conspiracy theory world would be Christian or kind of more New Age. But that’s not to say that there aren’t things about more, sort of, traditional magical groups that you could see as being identical to what we see in conspiratorial thinking. You know, the idea of there being sort of lineages of masters and small groups battling against dark powers and things like that. Especially the sort of idea of long histories, long obscure histories of these kinds of things and which you’ll find in groups like the O.T.O and things like that. But I don’t think they tend to think of themselves as conspiracy theorists.
AP: No I wouldn’t say so. Also, there are people who follow Luciferian traditions that are genuinely following that as a religious practice and you do have practitioners that distinguish between the figure of Satan and Lucifer as different entities, which is quite interesting.
DR: Yeah and like the Temple of Set as well, which separates – their point of contention with the Church of Satan, if I understand, was that they wanted to see Satan as an actual kind of spiritual figure rather than as a metaphorical one as the LaVeyans did. So, there’s a lot of nuance in that but then that kind of idea that we associate with conspiracy theories of seeing the history of the world is a kind of battle between two hidden groups one who’s got an ultimately malevolent plan for humanity and the other one who’s got a benevolent plan is right there in the mythology of groups like that. But then it’s there in the groups – in Christianity and lots of other, fairly familiar, traditions as well.
AP: These are very common dynamics I’d say and they are articulated and thought of and practiced in very different ways, depending on how they are conceptualized. I was thinking I guess one of the reasons why I wanted to speak with you about this, is that I’ve been wondering lately. How come people believe in magic, and this is something that we have touched on in the interview with Ronald Hutton as well. How come people have believed in magic throughout history even though magic per se, it’s always been rejected in one way or another, whether it was by the dominant religious system or the dominant culture. So, I’ve been pondering over this matter and I thought that now, especially with the political situation, I don’t think there are many overlaps, really, between conspiracy theory and the way magic practitioners articulate their belief and practice in magic. The thing that was of interest to me is: how can people hold beliefs that are opposed to what the mainstream culture says? What is [it] that drives that belief? Because I have also read a few papers about what makes people create a certain worldview and update their understanding of the world depending on the input data. And it tends to be according to a paper that I also mentioned in the latest live stream lecture you have this idea of conformity to the chosen community or the chosen group, which of course it can also include things like tradition. And then you have the idea of trust and reliability of the information. So having these two parameters that allow you to accept or reject input data that comes from the outside and update or not update your understanding of the world. I was wondering: how come people believe in magic regardless of what mainstream culture says? And whether conspiracy theories, in their way of also being in a way not in line with the mainstream culture. Whether it has something to teach us with regards to the belief in magic? I don’t know if it was clear.
DR: Yeah, it’s clear. I’m just thinking of where to start. I mean, I think there are similar patterns. I think the dynamic of it is very similar but I don’t think it’s particularly something that is only magic or conspiracy theories. I think it’s just the way that knowledge works in a social context and the enlightenment idea that we’re all simply going to fall in line with scientific reason and you know this is the progress of society I think we’re long past that. We are you know Steve Fuller, the philosopher Steve Fuller has written quite a bit about the idea of the current post-truth as being a fairly seismic movement in the democratisation of knowledge production. We, as academics, are like the clerics of the middle ages you know we’re a small minority who have been given the task of sort of controlling the quote-unquote truth of society. Telling governments and media and other people what the correct interpretation of things is. The current age is very much … we’re seeing a breakdown of that. I’m probably in a minority of seeing that, ultimately, as being a good thing but it’s certainly leading to a lot of disruption of business as usual.
But people move people… to get back to the point, belief is maybe not such a simple thing as we’ve tended to think. We tend to think of belief as being a propositional right. So it’s like a proposition that we hold in our head that determines our behaviour. So it’s something that’s in there, it’s a sentence. “I believe in astrology” and so that comes out and drives my behaviour. So when I’m reading my horoscope I’m going to read that: okay, I wonder if that’s true? Let me see. I believe in astrology so that is true. But that’s not really how things work. It’s probably more the case that belief is a set of kind of learned behaviors and responses that we pick up from society at large and some of those influences will be more than others. So, for instance, things which don’t clash with the dominant scientific paradigm, at the time, you know, the political ideology, the state you live in; those things are going to be relatively unchecked. But, there may be times in our lives when we come under stress and we reach for explanations that work when the other ones have failed. You know the “no atheists and foxholes” thing is an example of that. So in the stress of war or something, if somebody’s fearful they might die, they might start praying when they never have in their life before.
The one I find most often, actually, is chronic ill health. So people will have either concerns about their own health or a loved one’s health and will reach out for different kinds of therapies than they might have tried at another time. So they might, for instance, if they’re if painkillers and anti-inflammatories and therapies aren’t working, they might try acupuncture or flower remedies or a spiritual healer or Reiki or something like that. And, of course, if this works, then you’re forced to kind of reassess some other assumptions, right. So you have to go, “Okay, well I sort of thought everything was, you know, fairly materialist but Reiki worked and it involves this idea of there being this larger energy pool that’s being drawn. So I now have to reassess a lot of things to take that into account because this thing I tried, it worked – my experience has told me that that worked even though the science didn’t”. So you do have these kinds of relativisations and what you often find is that that will lead people into researching other things. Sometimes that’s on purpose, sometimes they’ll go “okay, right so well if this is true what else might be true.” Other times it’s much more passive, so if you, for instance, if you see a UFO you start reading UFO literature you are sooner or later going to come to the idea that the government covered it up. And you’re sooner or later going to come into contact with the idea of people channelling messages from extraterrestrials.
So you may not accept those but you’re gonna come into contact with them and depending on other aspects of your beliefs and so on, you might start to entertain these especially if as you say you know you become part of a community. If you know for instance you got in contact with some other UFO experiencers or you started hanging out at an alternative health clinic, or you started spending more time with your spiritualist healer, who gave you this book about, you know, Gaia or some other therapy and you’re gonna gradually, in the sort of interpretive drift, that somebody like Tanya Luhrmann talks about. You’re gonna gradually … the Overton window of your beliefs are, and your model of reality is going to gradually shift. And I think that’s that is fairly common for all of us. You know recent examples for instance: if you’re at an anti-lockdown rally you may be there with people who hold fairly right-wing views. You might also be there with people who have much more sort of New Age views. If you’re at a Q-anon rally, you may be there because you’re deeply concerned about child abuse. But you’re going to get there and you’re going to be in contact with people, for instance, who are coming from a much more evangelical Christian, right-wing kind of position and where you move around within that will be determined by a lot of different factors. But that’s that is how beliefs shift and sometimes that can happen on a larger group level as well you know where a group of people, for instance, who have a fairly shared worldview. If that comes under pressure externally or internally, they can gradually begin to collectively move into explanations that are, you know, more spiritual or more conspiratorial or whatever because beliefs and our planned practices and the ideas and all the rest of it they’re all things which we use, there are reasons why. There are always reasons why we reach for new ideas and seek things and seek explanations because we like explanations.
AP: Yeah. So, I guess from what you’re saying, I guess the answer is that it’s not that easy. So it’s not like the belief you have and the experiences you have to need to conform necessarily to the mainstream culture because everybody has different views. And they keep changing, depending on the experiences that you have and the people, you know, you grew up with.
DR: Well yeah, and there is also the idea of there being a sort of single epistemic authority that we all fall in line with. I think is a little bit simplistic. I mean there might be a scientific consensus on certain ideas but there isn’t on others and most of what happens in a state, for instance, isn’t governed by any of those things. Take something like belief in UFOs or belief in ghosts. I mean, you’re talking about 60, 70 percent of the population you know depend there’s been a lot of different surveys and they’re slightly different. But you’re talking about the majority of the population in most western countries. Now those are not officially sanctioned beliefs or positions to have. They’re mainstream in the sense that lots of people have them, but they’re not something which is official or are mandated. So many, many of us will have the idea that there might be something called ghosts in the back of our heads. It’s not gonna be something that we act upon very often unless we see something unexplained and reached for that as an explanation or we’re with other people who are talking about it you know.
AP: So basically, the alleged dominant culture, is just a legend. We are actually more pluralistic than … so it’s perhaps it is a nominal thing? Rather than …
DR: It’s a legend that has a lot of money and a lot of power behind it to enforce it but it’s not the entirety of the world that we exist in. The world of ideas, it’s not only the official ones, you know. It’s to go back to this sort of cultic milieu idea. It’s there are a lot of ideas in circulation at any given time. So I mean this is an important thing, actually, in terms of the academic way of talking about these things. When we talk about something as being stigmatized we have to ask who is stigmatizing. So something like ghosts, for instance. Most people that you come across are not going to reject that outright and same with UFOs. Probably, I mean, I’m guessing figures here. I don’t really know off the top of my head, but maybe half the population, probably more would not outright deny the possibility that there are UFOs visiting that have extraterrestrial life in them. So as we already said, the ideas of traditional established religions are no more, no less logical than the ideas of the conspiracy theory world or of the magical world. They are stigmatized less. The conspiracy ideas, and magical ideas are stigmatized because they are contrary to certain powerful positions. You know, magic and paganism, particularly by the Christian sort of hegemony and conspiracy theories, largely by particular political and scientific positions. So it’s the stigma, the stigmatization is always relative to the power structures of any given context.
AP: Thank you for this very clear overview of the matter.
DR: I hope it was clear. It’s hard to be clear without reducing things to stereotypes. I’m always trying to avoid oversimplifying.
AP: Yeah I think it was pretty clear. I also really liked how you address the matter of rationality or lack thereof. Now I’d like to move to a few questions from my patrons.
DR: Cool.
AP: And the first one is from Nick Tillman and he asks: in what ways can discussing political conspiracy theories in religious language, such as referring to them as resembling or being cults become helpful as a framework for analysing the way people interact with and become indoctrinated by these theories. What dangers may be inherent in elevating belief in these sorts of theories to the level of religious devotion?
DR: It’s a terrible idea and we should never do it and I’ll tell you why. So the examples he gives thereof if you’re indoctrinated into it. Right, when you talk about indoctrinatisation, you’re already starting with the idea that something is dangerous. Okay, can you be indoctrinated into human rights? Can you be indoctrinated into Christianity? No, you’re only indoctrinated into things which the person saying it has already decided are dangerous. The inherent harm of conspiracy theories and such things, I would always argue, are incredibly exaggerated. I’m not saying that there is no harm comes out of them, but compared to the harm that states do to each other, on the battlefield, constantly and the people who are getting upset about Q-anon, for instance, who say they want to protect the children but they’re not protecting any children at all. Those people should be out campaigning for the Catholic Church to be investigated more thoroughly over its cover-up of child abuse. You know there are, the idea that a couple of small new religions and conspiracy theory thinking is the biggest danger to society and these are the organizations that are causing the most harm is, frankly, ludicrous. So what we should stop doing is using language like; “cults”, “indoctrination”, and “brainwashing”, these terms which generations of scholars now have worked hard to show how inaccurate they are and use a more objective language to speak about all groups of people and all kinds of ideas. You know, religious, secular, political whatever. in ways that treat them. You’re taking agency away from people when you say that this one idea is so dangerous that it’s going to brainwash and indoctrinate people into doing harm. It’s just an incredibly reductive way of thinking about human beings in the way that they interact with ideas.
AP: Yeah well I guess Nick was just asking I don’t know what his ideas are on the matter. But yeah, I see what you mean because sometimes the way we think about these conspiracies tends to have a negative connotation.
DR: Very much so and the reason that the idea of conspiracy theories being like a religion has come up again is because of this polarization that you currently see in the political sphere. Especially in the US context where it initially sprung up around Trump’s followers, that it’s a cult right. By doing that what you do is you are able to explain to yourself why other humans are voting for someone that you find completely beyond the pale, completely unacceptable and the reason you’re doing so is because you’re first of all reducing, you’re saying they’re in this group that removes their autonomy. Okay, this other person, this, you know, Trump and his ideas have sort of taken them over. It’s like a virus or something right. So you’re dehumanizing them and it enables you to kind of continue to think about democracy in a way that you like. Because the reason that everybody is voting differently from you is not because that’s what they think and they believe. It’s because they’ve been brainwashed, it’s a cult, it’s this way of making, of saying well they’re irrational right. They’re illogical, they’ve lost their own ability to think, So it excuses this kind of polarization. It’s not that your side’s losing because you’re in the minority. It’s your side’s losing because these other people have been stripped of their reason. I understand why it’s happening but I just urge people to not fall into that trap. It makes the polarization worse if both sides are just presenting each other as being non-thinking, then how can we ever move forward and find common ground? The whole basis of democracy is that people are allowed to agree with you you shouldn’t be there for presenting them all as mindless. This is if people disagree with you are mindless then you need to question whether you’re, in fact, democratic.
AP: I think sometimes I’ve been guilty of that too. So you mean of having those kinds of thoughts regarding people but …
DR: It’s very natural. I’m very human and it’s you know I’m not ridiculing people for that. It upsets me when I find it in academic thought, you know, we’re supposed to be a little bit more sophisticated. We’re absolutely capable of it don’t get me wrong.
AP: Yeah. Then we have two questions from Andrew Reitemeyer. The first one is: I am aware of a vague understanding in modern Western culture, that pagans and especially New Age followers are especially prone to believing in conspiracy theories. Is this notion borne out by research or is this, itself, a conspiracy theory?
DR: Well we’ve kind of touched on some of this right? I don’t think that pagans really are too much. To take the bigger milieu which people are usually meaning when they talk about Q-anon at the moment. I wouldn’t say that the majority of people there are pagans. There is sometimes a tendency to see, you know, for pagans like everybody else, to see the world as a battle of good and evil but that’s nothing particularly conspiratorial there …
AP: And I think that pagans, in particular, don’t tend to have what they call the dichotomic view in terms of good and evil. They’re more nuanced and accept for instance even evil much more. They’re much more comfortable with that and see their deities as being both good and evil so…
DR: But yeah certainly the new age world is prone to it. I mean I wrote about the way that happened in the 1990s, with David Ike is a paradigmatic example of somebody who went from green politics into a strongly kind of theosophical New Age and then into a much more conspiratorial bent now. I do think that people tend to exaggerate. There’s often a sort of thinking that well how come New Age people can get involved in this quite right-wing kind of conspiratorial stuff but I don’t know that it is necessarily right-wing. There is an area of crossover there but somebody like David Ike has never fully… some of his material is definitely leaning towards anti-Semitism but he’s also strongly rejected connections with the American right on a number of occasions. So I wouldn’t be entirely comfortable with simply identifying him as being part of the right. I think the New Age connection is largely what we were talking about earlier on. It’s this idea of, sort of, holism of seeing correspondences and connections between lots of things and as well as the sort of perennialism that you were talking about. You know, the idea that at the core there’s one kind of truth and also there is a sense of a sort of radical individualism where the self is at the centre of the universe if I’m clear about that. So in new age thinking, there’s a real sacralization of the self as being, you know, somehow tied to the eternal and to the godhead. And then a lot of conspiratorial thinking to the individual is kind of right in the centre of history. You know, there’s this battle going on between forces of good and evil and most people don’t see it but the individual here is in the middle, seeking the truth. And so I think there is a there’s a similarity there that means some conspiratorial ideas, not all, can fit quite nicely into a kind of New Agey world. People do drift from one to the other. I mean, if you look at Red Ice Radio, for instance, they started off really quite New Agey and then they drifted into more of a sort of Norse Paganism, and then from that, they went into much more racialist and eventually all the way back to the very sort of Q-anon, US, far-right kind of world that we’ve been more associated with conspiracism.
AP The second question from Andrew is: I keep coming across the Starseed Movement on social media but it is hard to find scholarship about it. Is this an organized religion in any sense? Would it be classified as a UFO religion? And more importantly, for me has there been any academic study on this belief system?
DR: There has been a couple of pieces about it. Starseeds are related to the idea of Indigo Children and Beth Singler has a great book on the history of the Indigo Children idea and its relationship to kind of concerns about child health care and actually, what I was talking about earlier on, that’s a nice connection. There’s also in the new Brill Handbook of UFO religions there’s a chapter called simply called Starseeds by Susanna Crockford which is a really good accessible introduction to it. So yeah, as I said, Starseeds – it’s not a religious movement it’s an idea within the broader kind of New Age world and it’s similar to Indigo Children or “walk-ins”. So Starseed, if I’m understanding correctly, there’s a lot of different variations of it. So somebody will disagree with me I’m sure. Starseeds are kind of cosmic, I don’t say extraterrestrials, but some sort of cosmic intelligence that is incarnated on Earth in order to help with Earth’s planetary evolution, similar to indigo children. The idea of indigo children was that; so you had the new age was coming in the 1980s. So children were being born around the time the New Age was meant to be happening and were already elevated to the higher kind of level of being. So they were being born ready to exist into the New Age and Starseeds and there are other kinds of “Crystal Children”. There are a number of different variations of it. Starseeds is a similar idea. They are essentially extraterrestrial intelligences, born into human bodies, to guide planetary evolution so in a sense. That takes us back to some of the esoteric connections because it is very clearly an evolution of the idea of the “hidden masters” from the Theosophical Society right. Or even the Golden Dawn had had its hidden masters who were spiritually advanced humans who were guiding the progress of humanity. And as the theosophical society went along, they more and more became… well, they as started off they were always in Tibet, and then gradually they became on Venus and Mars, and now you know we’re just seeing a further stage of that idea where they’re actually being incarnated in children on the earth.
AP: Thank you for answering that. I have another question from Alejandro Veintimilla and he is asking: do you think characters like Trump, Chavez and Merkel, and so on hold mythological positions in the human psyche? If true then do you think conspiracy thinking can yield a useful understanding of the political sphere?
DR: That’s an interesting question. Okay, so my understanding of what he’s asking then is, that if figures like Trump or Merkel or whoever are slightly, because of their importance to so many people and to the sort of Zeitgeist if you like, that they are also mythological figures – their symbolic power is greater than simply that of a human being right. So, in which case would a conspiratorial view of history help to understand that? Yeah possibly, possibly. I mean if – it really depends on how much we think of our world is that we have about our world. I mean that as somebody who comes from a critical perspective – you know, the way that we use language, the stories we tell, the way that we use words, the sets of interrelated concepts that we use do affect the way that we understand the world and shape the way that we, the next generation coming up, use our ideas and our concepts and our models of the world – in which case yes, mythic. These kinds of low-level mythical figures do shape the way that we think about the world. I mean for instance to go back to the question about viewing political or conspiratorial movements as kind of religious movements or cults. That has a real effect on the way that the media reports on things. It has a real effect on the way that people mobilize behind one side or another. It has a real effect on how relatively partisan policy gets passed, for instance. Because if you have a political system that swings from one to the other side you have antagonism, you have much harder to get consensus on things. So yes, these ways of thinking about it do affect reality and that’s maybe quite a sort of magical way of thinking about the world as well, isn’t it? That sort of seeing these kinds of figures as not only the human beings and, you know, the flesh suits but also the network of ideas that they embody and that they represent for other people.
AP: Like the Jungian archetypes and in a collective consciousness of some sort.
DR: Yeah, well there’s a sort of sociological take on that yeah, so not so much that, I mean from a magical point of view you could say that they somehow exist and larger on the astral plane than regular people do. But you can also see it in just a straightforward cultural way and that the ideas that they embody gain more capital in the field because they have this symbolic container to rally around.
AP: Thank you for that. He also asks: can you talk about the struggle between gnostic tribes and the Vatican? Isn’t this history inherently conspiratorial?
DR: Yes, yes it is as I wonder if they are, if that he is, whether he is aware that my next book’s about gnosticism.
AP: I think so because when I asked them whether they had questions for you I also mentioned the books that you have published and the ones that you’re working on.
DR: Well yeah, absolutely. It is it’s very much a conspiratorial history. If you look … and yeah, this would be a good plug for my book, coming out in September, [that] has a lot about the way that groups like the Theosophical Society, in particular, and the O.T.O in Germany would appeal to the idea of gnostics as this kind of secret group who were banned by the church and this kind of idea of the battle between the Catholic Church and these kinds of dangerous sexy gnostic Christians, right. It was a really good way for people to appeal – you could appeal to be the real Christianity without having anything to do with Rome, right. So for that, this was the way that the Protestants kind of rediscovered the gnostics, and then you get, as I said Theosophists and Rosicrucians and people like that rediscovering it in the 19th century as a self-identifier. And then it goes into people like Philip K Dick [who] picks up on these ideas in the 70s. When we had this idea of there being these gnostic gospels, but of course hardly anybody read any of them because they weren’t published until the middle of the 70s. But this romantic idea of there being this lost Christianity that was you know forcefully and deliberately suppressed by the church was again, a really appealing idea at a time when there were lots of people looking for forms of spirituality that were an alternative to the traditional restrictive norms of Christianity that they’d grown up in. And probably the apogee of that would be the Da Vinci Code, which I think it’s not coincidental that that narrative becomes such a worldwide hit in the Da Vinci Code, right at the time that the modern conspiracy theory discourse is becoming as big as it is now. It’s exactly the time when a lot of that stuff reaches the mainstream and I think and that’s why none of his other works have had quite the same resonance. Because it is such a romantic view of history that works for just about everybody because you can say whatever you like about the gnostics.
AP: Yeah I think that Alejandro is going to like your upcoming book.
DR: I think so, hopefully.
AP: One last question from David Kirby. He asks: Angela, would you please ask for differentiation between the practice of magic and schizoid disorders. It’s my understanding that the term magical thinking carries weight within the diagnostic criteria. I could be wrong.
DR: Okay. I think they’re talking about the diagnostic handbook of the American Psychiatric Association. There are some interesting things in it, and this is not my area of expertise, so if I get any of the details wrong please forgive me. My understanding is that they, for certain diagnoses of schizotype conditions there are clauses like, for instance, if you have hallucinations and you can have it confirmed by a representative of a recognized religious tradition, then that means you’re okay. But if you can’t then it counts as a hallucination. It counts towards your diagnosis as a schizophrenic or you know some other schizotype illnesses. Right now, of course, a recognized religious tradition – they’re not going to accept paganism. Whatever they mean …
AP: Yeah that’s what that’s what I was about to say. So it makes it even more important for certain religious traditions to get recognized then.
DR: Right, well yeah. It’s a way of protecting sort of particular…
AP: I’ve never I never thought of it to be honest because I always thought of other benefits from being recognized as a religion. I’ve never thought of this specific one but is this the case in Britain as well or is it just the US?
DR: This is the American diagnostic handbook. I don’t think it is the same in Britain. There are similar things in Britain, however. We could talk about that at some point. For instance if you … well is it not the case that … has the Pagan Federation got charity recognition or not? Am I correct in thinking that the Pagan Federation has not managed to be recognized as a …
AP: No I don’t think it has. I think the Druid Network has.
DR: Yeah that’s right, I knew that one – I wasn’t sure if the Pagans had. So, for instance, you know that is an example where, if you were doing Christian practice, for instance, this would be an example of your good character. Whereas if you’re doing Pagan practice this can very easily count against you in a court case. You know, you only need to look at the number of people who have been put into jail for having Dungeons and Dragons and the ACDC t-shirts and whatever. I mean look at the …
AP: I would be.
DR: Yeah no, I’d be pretty easy prey as well, to be honest. But I mean if you look at the cases like the West Memphis Three for instance. The way that relatively innocuous kind of pagan symbolism counts against them as evidence. Which is very similar. Anyway, this kind of religious experience can be evidence or not of mental illness. So if it’s Christian it’s not a mental illness and if it’s something else it is an illness. That is a good example of how certain kinds of knowledge can be stigmatized, right. Bringing it back, however, the question asked for clarification on the difference between magical thinking and schizotype. Now I’m not the person to give clarification. What I would say is that all of these things. It comes down to who’s doing the deciding and for what purposes. So here’s an example of something that would be entirely normal in a pagan sphere or a broader sort of magical sphere. In a strict kind of clinical psychological sense, it’s going to be magical thinking, it’s going to be largely counted as a negative factor. There’ll be other examples where it’s neither one of the other. What I’m saying is, that there is no clear way of distinguishing those things. Those are both ways of describing the same thing but from different positions of knowledge production, like we were talking about earlier on. You know who’s stigmatizing and for what purpose and how does that relate to power. In this case, it’s the people who have their religions connected to power and people who have the right to decide whether you’re mentally ill or simply religious. You know discipline and punishment goes back to Foucault.
AP: yeah I was wondering. Perhaps it may also have a weight on whether the person is functional in society. I’m not sure. I’m not there.
DR: Yeah, it’s not going to be the only factor, but yeah, you know it might be the deciding thing between incarceration or not incarceration, what you know I mean restraint and freedom.
AP: Yeah, so thank you so much David for being so articulate and answering all of my questions and my patrons’ questions. We really, really appreciate your..
DR: It’s been fun. It’s been fun. don’t judge me too harshly for ranting about stuff. It’s just I get excited.
AP: That’s fine. I also get excited about the things that I talk about too so. I think that my audience understood and is prepared. So, thank you again David for coming here to the Symposium.
AP: I hope that you guys enjoyed this interview as well. Let me know, as always, in the comment section and if you did like this video don’t forget to smash the like button, subscribe to the channel, and activate the notification bell so that you will never miss a new upload from me and as usual stay tuned for all the academic fun
AP: Bye for now.