II. Narrative (continued)

Once you become acquainted with conspiracy lore the underlying rationale of Ru Mills's text is easy to understand. In "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" Richard Hofstadter observed that the essential element of conspiracy theories was a belief in the existence of a "... vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetuate acts of the most fiendish character" (1966:14). And the conspiracy outlined in "Ru Mills" text certainly qualifies.

One of the major narrative threads can be found in a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1983). It argues that, contrary to the canonical gospel accounts, Jesus of Nazareth survived crucifixion, fathered children who left Palestine and migrated to the South of France. These children founded the Merovingian dynasty, and who ruled between the fifth and eighth centuries CE until they were overthrown (King Dagobert II, a Merovignian was assassinated and the Roman Catholic Church is supposed to have conspired in his death. The Vatican is this conspiracy's omnipotent, omnipresent "they". Well, one of them).

So, according to this narrative, the descendants of Jesus formed a royal and divine bloodline, a literal embodiment the divine right of kings. They have a connection to a small village in the Pyrenees called Rennes-le-Chateau, which is seen as significant for several reasons. First, and this is an indirect allusion to the Diana conspiracy, it is a sacred site that has geographic and geometric significance. It is regarded by believers as a "geometric temple". The references to Pont de l'Ama as a pagan sacrificial site is probably related to this belief. Second, Rennes-le-Chateaus has been controlled throughout history by the Celts, Romans, pagans, Visigoths, Cathars, Catalan bandits and the Knights Templar. Consequently, many legends have grown up around this village, especially legends of treasure hidden by the Cathars, Merovingians and the Knights Templar. Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail contend that the secret treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau is the Holy Grail which according to legend, the Knights Templar rescued from Palestine during the European occupation of Palestine. However, the authors also claim that the "Holy Grail" is a not an actual cup used by Jesus of Nazareth at the Last Supper. Instead, it is a metaphor. In medieval texts it is referred to as Sangraal or Sangreal, which is translated to mean "royal blood".

The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail further assert that two modern dayoff shoots of the Knights Templar--the French Priory of Zion and the Italian version known as the Propaganda Duista (P-2)--have as their goal the restoration of all the monarchies of Europe, specifically those descended from the Merovingian bloodline. Their purpose is to unite Europe under this dynasty, establishing a European theocracy.

The logic underlying this narrative, derived from the British Royal Family, Priory of Zion, and the New World Order conspiracies, is that Diana's death was no accident. It was another act in a centuries old battle for world domination between the Vatican and the British royal family (and the New World Order by extension). Her "willing sacrifice" puts her son in direct succession to the throne, which means that the House of Windsor (the imposters), will be replaced by a "true royal" descendant of the Merovignian bloodline and form a united theocracy.

The New World Order is a phrase often invoked in certain conspiratorial circles. It refers to an Anglo-American elite whose purpose is to create a one world government. "It is centered on Wall Street and nurtured in New England prep schools and Anglophilic Ivy League Universities. ....[T]he Eastern Establish is the bane of anti Communists, who see the Rockefellers aiding and abetting, in fact, masterminding the international Communist conspiracy" (Vankin 215, 1991). The Rockefellers are prominent characters in New World Order conspiracies, as are their associate organizations: the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderburg Group and the Round Table Groups that were founded by the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes.

The Project Blue Beam reference may be a reference to Project Blue Book, which are files of the United States Air Force recording all reports of UFO sightings (with the exception of the alleged Roswell, New Mexico crash in 1947) and scientific explanations for each. This speculation is my own, inspired by the rise in the use of conspiratorial motifs in popular culture. The X-Files, for example, bases much of its backstory (in the words of creator and producer Chris Carter, it's mythology) from UFO conspiracies, which in turn always link up with the New World Order narratives. The holographic imaging equipment that will be used to create miraculous appearances of Diana sounds much like the advanced technologies supposedly recovered from crashed UFOs that powerful world governments have been fighting to develop. Philip Corso, a retired Air Force officer was interviewed on the ABC News program Nightline during the fiftieth anniversary of the 1947 Roswell incident. His book, The Day After Roswell , claims that most of the technological innovations since the alleged crash had come from recovered alien technology. This idea has shown up on X-Files, and in films like Independence Day and Men in Black.

Popular culture is the major distributor of conspiracy theories to the general public. Unlike the true believers of various conspiracies who conduct their own research, form communities and exchange information, mass media audiences are passive bearers and come to their knowledge of conspiracies out of awareness. Once I began researching conspiracy theories, I was struck by how many of them I had heard of before. Over the past three years, I have become amazed at how many books, films, television shows and comics have been making use of conspiracy narratives as source material. During the 1996-96 television season New York Undercover did shows on the C.I.A. crack connection and the Martin Luther King assassination; Early Edition did a two part show on the JFK assassination; the movie Conspiracy Theory was released this summer and The Shadow Conspiracy came and went a few months earlier. My interest in conspiracy theories ran parallel with my interests in popular culture and my attempts to understand the reaction to Diana's death.

The question that arises is why have conspiracy theories seem to have become so prevalent at this time. Vankin and Whalen attribute their ubiquity to the easy access that people have to the internet, access which is often the source of moral panics used to justify governmental attempts to regulate the web.

And, if one were given to cynicism, we could say with good reason.

In No Sense of Place, Joshua Meyrowitz draws a connection between the way in which social information is mediated and how that mediation shapes social behavior. "The more a medium of communication tends to separate what different people in a society know, the more the medium will allow for many ranks of authority; the more a medium of communication tends to merge informational worlds, the more the medium will encourage egalitarian forms of interaction" (1989: 64). The emergence of new information technologies presents a challenge to society in every sense of the word, the most obvious being challenges to the status quo. The internet, potentially, can merge informational worlds. It gives people access to information that they have not had before, and being a more "egalitarian" form of interaction, it can destabilize social hierarchies.

The internet began as a network for academics, scientists and government officials, and then rapidly began to be used by anyone with access to a computer. The proliferation of the personal computer made the net increasingly attractive to commercial business, which in turn help to open it up for everyday use. And because it was an unregulated media, people formed communal networks dedicated to their interests. These interests could be centered around fandom (television, film, books, music), politics, education, art, and previously taboo subjects such as sex or conspiracy theories.

The expansion of the internet provided another channel of communication for conspiracy theories, one freer and more sympathetic to the open expression of belief in them. It provide a safe site where people could discuss their ideas, and before long, dozens or newsgroups and websites had formed. Before computers were widely available, conspiracy theorists circulated their beliefs by word of mouth, in underground broadcasts, alternative presses, and the circulation of unpublished xeroxed written works and documents. These narratives that have been circulating within a extensive information underground for generations. This information undergound formed precisely because the open expression of conspiracy has been unacceptable.

Virtual communities are much like proto-folk groups, that is, how we have imagined the folk to be at the beginning. Before the formation of these so-called virtual communities, conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists were primarily spread by face to-face interaction. And conspiracy lore functions like folklore in its respective groups. Conspiracy theories, like folklore, functions as phatic communication; they act to create, maintain, and strengthen social relationships, as well as to pass on information.

The correlation between virtual and folk communities provides a useful entry for folklorists interested in the study of contemporary culture. It moves us from the misrepresentation of folk groups as a static, separate, antiquarian remnant of the past to a dynamic community fully participant in modern life. These conditions make conspiracy theories ripe for folkloristic analysis, since Folklore Studies include the analysis of the materials that cultural groups produce, as well as the process by which cultural production takes place. The discipline's established interest in narrative and folk belief could be applied to the analysis of conspiracy theories and to the process of conspiratorial thought and activities. The on-going circulation of new and old conspiracies calls for the use of folklore methodologies, especially those developed for legendry and belief. The broad scope of conspiracy theories requires a knowledge of culture that is holistic and qualitative, rather than reductionist and quantitative, in order to accurately model complex phenomena. A consideration of population dynamics demonstrates the significance of this idea and how conspiracy theories emerge in groups.

Population dynamics make comparisons between different-sized populations and calculates their growth through a procedure mathematicians call normalization. Normalization simplifies the mathematics of population dynamics. Typically, a linear formula, known as an exponential growth equation, is used to model a population that varies. Its values are set between 0 and 1. The formula represents the population with variables such as X_n, X_n +1, X_n-1 and X_n = 1. X_n = 1 represents 100 percent of the maximum possible population. X_n = 0.5 represents half the value or 50 percent. The exponential growth equation allows you to compare the preceding year's population with the current year's population. The type of population being represented is irrelevant; the formula provides ratios of populations for salmon, rabbits, gypsy moths, bacteria, influenza viruses, or human beings.

Linear equations give quantitative information about the growth of populations. They describe how they rise and fall; how they multiply and die out. Exponential growth equations provide portraits of the periodic behavior of populations. However, the equation describes a process in which the population in any one year is directly proportional to the population the year before. This produces a strictly linear result. Emphasizing the linear characteristics of a population leaves out the nonlinear, seemingly chaotic behaviors they often undergo. This exclusions masks a great deal about the qualitative character of populations.

In 1845, P.F. Verhulst introduced a new term to the exponential growth equation that described the way a population develops in a closed area. He multiplied X_n by a new term (1-X_n) which, in effect, multiplied X_n by itself. This procedure introduces feedback and nonlinearity into the equation, which results in yearly population growth dependent on what came before, nonlinearly. Such factors as the effect of the various environmental factors on the way populations develop could now be calculated.

Verhulst's equation has significance that extends beyond the quantitative measure of populations:

Verhulst's modified equation has a host of applications. It has been pressed into service by entomologists to compute the effect of pests in orchards and by geneticists to gauge the change in the frequency of certain genes in a population. It has] been applied to the way a rumor spreads. At first a rumor will expand exponentially until nearly everyone has encountered it. Then the rate will drop off quickly as more and more people say "I heard that one." Verhulst's equation also applies to theories of learning. What is learned now is related to the amount of information learned previously. Learning first increases, but after some time the learner becomes saturated so that more effort brings only minimal results (Briggs and Peat 1989, 56-57).

Rumor, gossip, learning, narratives, as well as conspiracies are iterative phenomena, recurrent events that move through populations as part of the social dynamic of cultural groups. The rapid rise and spread of conspiracy theories around the death of Diana Spencer is an example of the continuous feedback that chaotic behaviors produce in living cultures.

Feedback, or iteration, using the output of one function as the input of another, continually "reabsorbs or enfolds what has come before" (66) indicates the presence of chaos. This is not the chaos of randomness and disorder. Instead, it is the chaos found in nonlinear dynamics, more commonly known as chaos theory. There are two distinct streams of chaos theory--the strange attractor and the order out of chaos branches. The first emphasizes the hidden order that exists within seemingly random patterns. It separates the word chaos from its connotations of randomness and reveals the deep structures of encoded order that exist within chaotic systems.

The second branch investigates the spontaneous self-organization of systems that emerge "far from equilibrium". Commonly called dissipative structures, these systems are able to maintain their identity by remaining open to the flux of their environments. Since the emergence of chaos theory in the mid-nineteen eighties, more and more links have been made between abstract sciences and physical systems. Culture is one of those systems. Culture can be viewed as a complex organic or living system, once we recognize the prevalence of chaotic behavior in physical and cultural systems. Culture can be modeled as a living system that exhibits the characteristics of chaotic behavior: nonlinearity, complex forms, recursive symmetries between scale levels, sensitivity to initial conditions and feedback mechanisms (Hayles:11-14, 1990).

Nonlinear modeling of culture is achieved in the introduction of James G. Miller's living systems theory (1978, 1990) which defines all living entities as complexly structured open systems. Miller identifies eight levels of increasing complexity as living systems: cells, organs, organisms, groups, organizations, communities, societies, and supranational systems (1990). When we consider social systems accordingly, the interaction of the physical and the cultural becomes an essential element in understanding complex phenomena. A system does not exist in total isolation. Instead, a living system has boundaries that are permeable, which allows the system to import the energy essential to maintain itself.

Energy in a living system comes in the form of matter or information. Information energizes the social system, allowing it to survive while, at the same time, permitting exchanges with other systems. Informational input makes it possible for a system to carry out essential activities such as production, reproduction and the maintenance of its structure. "Information input from the environment makes it possible for systems to orient themselves in space-time, to react and adapt to changing circumstances, to find food and possible for systems to orient themselves in space-time, to react and adapt to changing circumstances, to find food and mates, and to receive feedback about the results of their actions" (1990:160).

Systems may be closed or open. Open systems are characterized by permeable boundaries that permit continuous interactions with their environments. This allows open systems to maintain their boundaries. "The family... is an open system with members frequently entering and leaving the system whenever someone goes to work or school. Information from the environment enters the system whenever someone turns on a television set, a radio, reads a newspaper, or answers or uses the telephone" (Fisher 1978: 200). Living systems are characterized by openness, nonlinearity and interdependence. A culture, community or group is a living system that maintains its boundaries through information, which is passed along by its members. This information does more than simply transmit social data. It maintains and strengthens social relationships.

However, there are degrees of openness in a system, and higher level living systems invoke closure, or establish patterns to eliminate uncertainty. Simply put, people use information to reduce uncertainty. Once zero uncertainty is obtained there are no other alternatives that one need choose from. This results in order, rules, regulations, or constraints on the system. Rank orders result, hierarchies are established, institutions form and take power. Worldviews emerge.

Alan Dundes has shown that folklore can be used as source material for the examination of the worldviews of different cultures. Worldview is the patterned cognitive sets by "which people perceive, consciously or unconsciously, relationships between self, others, cosmos, and the day-to-day living of life" (Dundes 1980:69). Such genres as myths, legends, folk tales, folk belief, proverbial expressions or even items of folk speech are reflective of these unconscious, unstated values that cultures make as matters of course.

What is left out is the presence of conflict. Although order is established in a system, the closure can be challenged by alternate views. Accordingly, worldviews are not universal. They are symbolic representations of global concerns that have been locally manifested by specific cultures. Challenges to established worldviews are seen as threats to order and met with resistance and sometimes with violence. There are sanctions for daring to challenging a system's conventions and traditions and beliefs. These sanctions are often official and carried out by the formal institutions of power, but there can be unofficial sanctions, carried out by other members with which one has social interaction.

Chaotic behavior occurs on both the physical and living levels. Patterns within apparently randomly generated numbers, chemical processes or geological phenomena are chaotic. This suggests that culture is a living system that exhibits chaotic behavior. Conspiracy theories pass on social information while simulataneously creating, maintaining and strengthening social relationships. The problem is that the information being distributed is officially frowned upon.

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