Liberals see Ann Coulter as a Republican she-devil with skirts so short you can see her brains. Others view her as the blonde babe savior promised to the American right in the pages of fundamentalist scripture. Ann Coulter is defiantly the last woman in this country still carrying the torch for the long-dead Red baiter Joseph McCarthy.
-David Bowman, Salon.com
Man, the things you learn on television. I was watching My Coolest Years: The Dirty Hippies on VH-1 over the weekend, when who do I see but Ann Coulter? She's a self-professed Deadhead who saw The Dead live some 62 times. Who knew??? I somehow think that Jerry wouldn't be horribly pleased with books like Slander
and Treason.
Oh please, oh please Ann... just ask "what would Jerry do?"
All that aside, I recently decided to start re-reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I think it has to do with finally reading Foucault's Pendulum and all this buzz about The Da Vinci Code. I wanted to go back to the old master and see what he could tell me ten years on since I last read the book.
Certainly everything I've read, seen, and heard these days about one of these occult/conspiracy detective stories convinces me that they can't be that hard to write. At least, once you master all of the requisite story elements, generally beginning with the Poor Knights of the Temple (i.e. the Templars.) From there, it seems possible to branch out in any number of directions: the Ark of the Covenant, the Merovingian descendents of Jesus and Mary Magdelene, the Shroud of Turin, the Illuminati, the Ishmaelite Assassins of Hassan I Sabbah, or the Kabbalist rabbi's and the Golem of Prague.
I have to think that if I was going to write such a book, I would have to lend it a rather eugenic spin. Taking the premise that all history is indeed actually conflict between secret societies, I would look at it from the point of view of abetting or blocking the next major step in human evolution. I could start with a premise that the ruling classes of ancient Atlantis in the Meditteranean represent the confluence of a number of genetic factors that produce a superior human form (in terms of beauty, strength, intelligence, and longevity.) Before being able to increase their number sufficiently to rule the earth however, Atlantis was destroyed by the fatal eruption of a massive caldera volcano. The resulting diaspora of Atlantean survivors would have spread north to Greece and Anatolia, east to the Fertile Cresent, and south to Egypt. Here the Atlanteans would be forced to mingle with the native populations and the true qualities of Atlantean genetics would only re-emerge haphazardly in their descendants.
As all such works are supposed to offer alternative visions of well known myths, this scenario offers some interesting possibilities. Certainly the story of Adam and Eve and the expulsion from The Garden represents the true fall of Atlantis. The story of Noah represents the flight of their descendant Noah from the flooding of the Black Sea. The Kabbalic tradition of the transmission of esoteric knowledge between Abraham and his immediate descendants could be explained as the transmission of inherited traits.
From there, the grand sweep of history could take over. Joseph could descend into Egypt, looking to infuse his descendants with further Atlantean characteristics from the Egyptian gene pool. The Exodus represents the eventual conclusion of that effort, and the establishment of Mosaic Law to enshrine the concept of a Chosen People (or rather an Atlantean gene pool) that do not intermarry with the surrounding populations. Unfortunately, history takes a hand before the experiment can be completed and the Jews are spread across Mesapotamia.
The Christian movement could represent a branched revival of the effort. Jesus could be one of the first Jews possessing nearly full Atlantean blood born in a hundred years. That this happens is due to the fact that his father is Atlantean Greek, not Jewish (Luke is the only Gospel writer who significantly describes his birth, and the similarities between the Nativity and the birth of Athena cannot be ignored.) Then, I could finish it up with the whole Passion analogy; "this is my body" and "this is my blood" represent the symbols of a community seeking to enrich its gene pool... and in order to inevitably recreate the superior human form.
After this, historical pageantry could take over. The writings of Hermes Trismagestimus, the secrets of the Temple of Jerusalem, and the blood on the Shroud of Turin could all play a role. Secret groups and societies could crowd in by the score, each wanting to either create the superior human or prevent it from every appearing. This could naturally culminate in the misguided racial theories of the Nazis and the Thule Society, explaining the Holocaust in terms of the Germans wishing to create the superior human while stamping out the Atlantean parts of the Jewish genome.
Or maybe I just need to sit back, smoke some Alamout Black, and forget about the whole thing...
said drgeek
on 2005-03-30 at 11:28 a.m.
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