Who Is Irma Plavatsky? Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and the Internationalisation of Popular Culture from the Dime Novel to The Da Vinci Code

Massimo Introvigne

Introduction

Why did The Da Vinci Code become such an extraordinary bestseller? Not only its critics who, on average, rated the novel as good but not exceptional, but also its author Dan Brown, were surprised. In the London copyright case in 2006 wherein he was accused of plagiarism, Brown (Introvigne 2006) told judge Paul Smith that “many people have told me they actually prefer [his previous and originally unsuccessful novel] Angels & Demons to The Da Vinci Code,” and he seemed to share this opinion. However, Brown testified that a great deal of the success of The Da Vinci Code is down to the excellent promotion the book received. The Da Vinci Code got a huge launch. My first three books were barely promoted. There were more Advance Reader Copies given away for free of The Da Vinci Code than the whole print run for Angels & Demons. I am convinced that The Da Vinci Code would have failed if it had been published by my previous publishers—equally, I think Angels & Demons would have been a big success if published by Random House with as much fanfare as they brought to The Da Vinci Code. (Introvigne 2006). But was its popular success really all due to the money spent on advertis- ing? Theologians, social scientists, and literary critics often disagree. For many theologians, the success of The Da Vinci Code is both good and bad news: it attests to a substantial contemporary interest in Jesus Christ, and an equally substantial eagerness to explore alternative versions of his story from the one usually told by mainline churches. Some Christian groups have been keen to prevent a different reading of the gospels (Moore 2009) that could lead to a hyper-real religious construction by the lay popula- tion. In this sense, the threat was not so much the fear of people creat- ing a full-blown hyper-real religion out of this novel (as is the case for Jediism and Matrixism, based on films, for example), but more of people constructing a new type of gospel, in which the demarcations between the official history and popular culture are blurred. In this sense, as ­Neo-Pagan 268 massimo introvigne groups find inspiration for their religion from popular culture, the same process had to be prevented in Christian groups influenced by The Da Vinci Code. In this hyper-real phenomenon, readers of Brown’s conspiracy theory might simply question the official Christian story, or might even fully embrace the new version carried by popular culture. For many social scientists, the fact that Angels & Demons failed in 2000 (of course, it was rescued from oblivion and made into a bestseller in 2004 and a film in 2009, but only after the triumph of the Code) may have to do with some- thing that occurred between 2000 and 2003: the events of September 11, 2001. Before 9/11, conspiracy theories were becoming passé and unfashion- able. 9/11 proved that conspiracies (however one prefers to interpret this notion) do exist and often succeed in history, making literature on con- spiracy theories popular again. Conspiracy theories succeed because they present history as both scary and strangely reassuring. The extreme com- plexity of history, so difficult to grasp for the layperson, is reduced to a few conspiracies: of the Jesuits, the Illuminati, the Priory of Sion, Opus Dei, the Vatican, perhaps the CIA, Mossad or Al Qaeda. Conspiracies surrounding the Antichrist have a long history and regularly resurface during periods of crisis (McGinn 1994). Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), who founded the Theosophical Society, interpreted human history as the perennial struggle between a benevolent Great White Lodge led by more- than-human Ascended Masters, and a malignant Black Lodge.

Freemasonry. Esoteric Brotherhoods and Conspiracy Theories

There is now considerable scholarly study of conspiracy theories (see Ciuffoletti 1993; Barkun 2003) and it is one of the arguments of this chapter that when conspiracy theories are used in a religious fashion, they are part of the hyper-real religious phenomenon. Indeed, people can be inspired at various levels by a mix of historical facts and popu- lar history/culture (or mythical history, see below) for their religious work, where the difference between reality and fiction becomes blurred. While we can regard grand metaphysical theories such as Blavatsky’s as meta-conspiracies, historians deal daily with micro-conspiracies (such as Al Qaeda’s 9/11 co-ordinated terrorist attacks) which obviously do exist, and at least occasionally succeed. Somewhere in the middle are macro- ­conspiracies. Unlike meta-conspiracies they do not rely primarily on supernatural explanations, although these may occasionally be involved. But unlike micro-conspiracies, the aim of a macro-conspiracy is not con-