/lit/ - Literature

>>20935419
I think the best way to describe why it touches people to the quick is the duality it sets up between what you could call ontological monarchy, and ontological anarchy (or anarcho-democracy or something of that nature), taking these not as perfectly analogical terms but good enough for the sake of discussion.

In Gnostic lore (which has quite a few close parallels to the conspiratorial worldview, although not necessarily necessarily in a negative or positive sense, just putting it out there), the evil forces which enslave humanity are themselves intrinsically hidden and secretive, but have worked to shape all of humanity and the world from behind the scenes and replace authentic spiritual revelation, insight, and inspiration with spurious but finely crafted replicas of these.

As an example, in Gnosticism, the Church, in its true sense as “the Bride of Christ,” or anyone analogically taking part in the “Body of Christ” — a more democratic, revolutionary conception — has been replaced by the historico-political-militaristic entity as of the Roman Catholic Church (which is a conspiratorial view, clearly). What started as something IN this world but not OF it, and not chasing after temporal power and even in some cases inevitably rebelling against it or provoking its ire, itself became a maximum focus of temporal power. The Romans who persecuted Christ and His followers became the Roman Catholics who persecuted heretics and led to the horrors of the Inquisition.

There are “Gnostic” subtexts, if you want to call it that, even in mainstream Christianity. The archons I referred to as the sinister forces corrupting humanity, and their ringleader, the Demiurge, is not much different from the Lucifer/Satan/demons mythos, and St. Paul even has a famous saying in which he refers to “rulers” (lit. archons in Greek) in a similar sense as the Gnostics did.

>For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Ephesians 6:12

In three separate chapters of the Book of John, Satan is referred to as the prince of this world (John 12:31, John 14:30, 16:11). Also, the subtexts of theosis or the unio mystica which can also be found in mainstream forms of Christianity, from Eastern Orthodox theology to St. Paul’s claim that “it is not I who lives, but Christ through me,” are simply made even more explicit in Gnosticism, in the vein of Vedantic treatises of the unity of Atman with Brahman, the Sufi mystical system of fana (dissolution) and subsequent baqa (permanence, abiding in) Allah, and the like.