Via my referral logs on this site, I came across a thread on the Joseph Campbell Foundation website with info on a great conspiracy theory in which Campbell himself is the architect of the demonic New World Order. Campbell was quite a hero of mine when I was younger, so it was fun to find out that:

He had intended to create a New World Order by leading the people of earth to believe in a New God. And he knew he had accomplished his purpose. When Joseph Campbell died, he died a satisfied man because he knew his work had created a Revolution in the United States of America. He died satisfied because he knew that he had succeeded in destroying the idea of the Creator as the foundation upon which authority rested in the United States of America, and he knew that his disciples were absolutely committed to carrying on his work.

And it even includes this stirring conclusion: “Unless they are controlled by the citizens of the United States of America, no alternative will be left for those who are committed to protecting the government created by the Founders of the United States of America but War.” That is, war against the followers of Joseph Campbell. Including me, I guess.

The whole thing sounds like paranoid cockamamie bullshit at first glance, of course. But taken in the light of technocratic conspiracy theory, maybe we can make some sense out of it. Joseph Campbell took a very academic approach to religion. He studied it, analyzed it, and in many ways made comparative mythology and religion into the discipline that it is today. Comparative mytholgy seeks to find the common threads of world spiritual traditions and his cycle of the Hero’s Journey is an attempt to abstract the essence of myth into a formula. In other words, the whole thing is a very scientific endeavor, one which the Positivists would have been quite proud, since they believed that sociology could be used to determine the underlying Natural Laws of human mind, society and behavior.

Joseph Campbell advanced that understanding tremendously and his abstracted technical essence of myth was used to pattern a powerful new myth that fused science with a sense of transcendent mysticism: Star Wars (where Star Trek, on the other hand was an outgrowth of the more Humanist side of things). As close friends with George Lucas and a stated major influence of his work, Campbell via Lucas helped create an international myth to contain all the societal changes and upheavals that has gone on in the past two decades with the explosion of the consciousness movements and the New Age. It is no wonder than that Joseph Campbell is also listed as an author of a pivotal 1973 document, Changing Images of Man, allegedly funded by the US government, written by the Stanford Research Institute, and credited with inspiring the New Age movement by way of the Marilyn Ferguson book, the Aquarian Conspiracy - which is itself supposed to be a popular re-telling/propaganda version of the SRI report.

Conspiracy theories aside though (although I’m pretty sure all the information above is fairly well-established factually), Campbell also had a decidedly positive view of science and of humanity as a whole. He definitely subscribed to a model in which we could learn from the past and improve ourselves through effort and study (ie, evolution). He was also able to offer a vision of how science could be synthesized naturally with the rich spiritual history of mankind.

Which is not such a crazy idea after all, considering that the natural sciences in no small measure rose out of the occult sciences, such as alchemy and astrology. Campbell was a thinker whose vision was so vast that he could tie those threads back together again, all while glorifying both humanity and the transcendent mysteries of the universe. I don’t, however, agree that his work denied The Creator, as the obviously literalist Christian author quoted above believes. If anything, he praised God and disdained the churches men built to contain Him and keep Him at bay - a true compatriot of the true Illuminati principles.

With these eyes, I think it’s worthwhile to look at other spiritual thinkers today of similar popularity, if not stature. Ken Wilber, for instance, takes a slightly more technical-seeming, less “Follow Your Bliss,” approach to spirituality. He treats spirituality like a science, which can be organized, analyzed and integralized rationally from top to bottom. Small wonder that he’s so immensely popular today, or that he was tapped to help author the follow up report to the 1973 SRI document, Changing Images 2000.

What Campbell, and especially Wilber represent is that arm of science which is today trying to correct it’s willful ignorance and blindness about interior states. Science is trying to go beyond religion, go beyond psychology (ie, Transpersonal psychology) and fully map out our interior worlds. Why else do you find roots linking Timothy Leary’s LSD and mushroom research to the CIA, or Terence McKenna to the Rockefellers? Because the scientists and the technocrats don’t want to just continue saying that they can’t see inside the human soul. They want to storm the gates of Heaven, map and colonize it. Traditional conspiracy theory would dictate that this is the closing manuever of the Illuminati war against humanity. But if we believe that science came out of the occult (which is a simple fact of history), then it only makes sense that science should want to go back there, now that it believes the culture has been primed and made mature enough to allow it without the interference of theocratic institutions (Islamic fundamentalism, anybody?).

Want more evidence that this is what science is doing? Look all around you: why do you think we’re hearing all this fuss suddenly about Johns Hopkins University publicly “proving” that mushrooms cause mystical experiences? What about that Canadian scientist who has created a helmet that lets you experience God? Why are scientists trying to map the minds of meditating Buddhist monks? What is the emerging field of memetics (along with viral marketing) but the attempt to create a usable model of how ideas themselves operate independent of the individual? And that’s without delving into any of the speculative stuff about government experiments in mind control, remote viewing and mounds and mounds of other psychic experimentation both here and abroad.

Fact is, our insides are being explored just as vividly as our outside world has. Some might say colonized and conquered. But science in its pure form lacks moral judgement. All it seeks to do is discover and develop and the Grand Overarching Conspiracy may be simply that they are getting goddamned close to the goal.

And that goal is the Singularity - itself the ultimate memetic fusion of hippy trippy mystical consciousness-based thinking with scientific progress. Goethe said, “Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.” Perhaps within that statement was encoded not just a pleasant concept, but a literal statement about the fate of the world. I think we may be reaching that day where the two meet again as friends, and embrace. What kind of world will be born of that embrace though, is still anybody’s guess.