from? The religious and secular forms of millennialism described earlier in this chapter have relatively unproblematic origins, because they rose out of well-defined bodies of religious and political ideas. Even systems of millenarian thought that are clearly heretical or deviant define themselves in opposition to a known orthodoxy. For instance, the more militant forms of late medieval Catholic millennialism emerged in opposition to the official Augustinian doctrine of the church, just as fringe Maoist revolutionary groups later placed themselves in opposition to more established custodians of Marxist thought.
Religious and secular millennialism are, to be sure, never absolutely pure types, emerging solely from within a single tradition with no outside influences. Soviet Marxist-Leninism surely absorbed and secularized some of the religious salvationism of the Russian Orthodox Church, and many in the Nazi inner circles combined racial pseudoscience with occultism. Nonetheless, neither participants nor observers have much difficulty in assigning most millenarian movements to some single, dominant category. A movement is religious or secular. If the former, it may be Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, or some such; if the latter, racialist, socialist, and so on. Classification problems can sometimes emerge concerning particular cases (to what secular category does one assign French revolutionary Jacobinism?), but it is rarely in much doubt that some appropriate category can be identified.
The belief systems with which this inquiry is concerned, however, permit no such easy pigeonholing. They are beholden to no dominant set of ideas. They are not the work of religious heretics rebelling against the constraints of orthodoxy; nor are they the product of deviationists defying received political doctrines. Instead, they combine elements so disparate that it is often impossible to determine what if any influence predominates. The practitioners of improvisational millennialism are not mere syncretists, hybridizing a few belief systems that happen to impinge on their consciousness. Rather, they construct wholly new creations out of bits and pieces acquired from astonishingly diverse and unrelated sources. It is as though there were some reservoir of motifs into which the new millenarians can dip, acquiring scraps of this or that ideology, idea, or creed. But what sort of reservoir is this that encompasses not only the familiar themes of religious and secular millenarians but also the more outré elements—Jesuit-Masonic conspiracies, Jewish cabals, sudden shifts in the polar axis, UFOs bearing alien emissaries, subterranean tunnel systems populated by strange races? This is a mélange that we may intuitively recognize as standing outside the boundaries of even most typical millenarian discourse.
Three ideas will help us to gain a clearer understanding of the reservoir from which improvisational millennialists draw their ideas: rejected knowledge, the cultic milieu, and stigmatized-knowledge claims. Rejected knowledge is a concept developed by James Webb to aid in mapping the outer boundaries of the occult in Western culture. The closely related concept of the cultic milieu was devised by sociologist Colin Campbell to designate the sources from which many New Religious Movements draw their inspiration. Finally, in reaction to these ideas, I use the concept of stigmatized knowledge claims to designate a broader intellectual universe into which both rejected knowledge and the cultic milieu may be fitted.8
Rejected Knowledge
In his histories of European occultism, Webb describes the occult as “rejected knowledge.” This term refers less to the possible falsity of knowledge claims (though they may indeed be false) than to the relation between certain claims and the so-called Establishment—the dominant institutions associated with the spread of European Christianity. Christianity, in the course of achieving cultural hegemony, suppressed or ignored bodies of belief deemed to be irrelevant, erroneous, or outmoded. By the same token, those whose beliefs seem to conflict with dominant values sometimes choose to withdraw into subcultural undergrounds. The result is the creation of worldviews that exist in opposition to the prevailing ones and manifest in such forms as “Spiritualism, Theosophy, countless Eastern (and not so Eastern) cults; varieties of Christian sectarianism and the esoteric pursuits of magic, alchemy and astrology; also the pseudo-sciences.”9
Such underground worldviews tend to be ill-defined potpourris in which are “jumbled together the droppings of all cultures, and occasional fragments of philosophy perhaps profound but almost certainly subversive to right living in the society in which the believer finds himself.” This cultural dumping ground of the heretical, the scandalous, the unfashionable, and the dangerous received renewed interest in the nineteenth century, when at least some in the West became bored or disillusioned with rationalism. Such ideas were often presented under the rubric of “ancient wisdom”—the alleged recovery of a body of knowledge from the remote past supposedly superior to the scientific and rational knowledge more recently acquired.10
Webb’s conception of the occult as rejected knowledge is not universally accepted by scholars of occultism, in part because not all traditions of sectarianism, mysticism, and deviant spirituality were rejected by the mainstream. Until the end of the seventeenth century, and especially during the Renaissance, they enjoyed high levels of social acceptance. This quarrel among students of the occult need not detain us, however, for our concern is with the present, not the past; and for that purpose, rejected knowledge remains a useful idea. Improvisational millenarians are frequently drawn to beliefs that have an occult provenance— for example, the belief that a superior civilization on the continent of Atlantis before it sank constructed a global system of tunnels connecting its cities to other parts of the world. Improvisationalists do indeed seem attracted to precisely the kinds of ideas Webb had in mind, those that have been discarded or whose believers have chosen to withdraw into a secretive domain of their own. Cultural rejection is clearly a powerful force that gives believing in the occult a certain frisson, and that same thrill of the forbidden is often found among conspiracy believers.11
The Cultic Milieu
Attractive as the concept of rejected knowledge is, it has limitations, and not only with regard to the place of occultism in earlier periods. A more significant problem is its limited focus. Webb was concerned with mapping the occult in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, based on a conventional understanding of what that term encompassed, including such subjects as spiritualism and Theosophy. But the domain of the occult omits much of both millennialism and conspiracism. Improvisationalists are ideological omnivores. They draw on the “ancient wisdom” claimed by occultism, but they do not necessarily limit themselves to such sources; their reservoir of knowledge claims is partly but not entirely defined by the concept of occult-as-rejected-knowledge. Hidden knowledge may suffer not only from overt rejection but merely from lack of attention. That is to say, it may never be addressed, even negatively, by knowledge-validating institutions. Those who accept knowledge claims that stand on the fringes often confuse inattention with rejection. As far as they are concerned, those who do not address their claims have in fact rejected them. To grasp the novel character of the improvisational style, therefore, requires a concept broader than rejected knowledge. Just such a concept is available in the form of the cultic milieu.
The term cultic milieu was introduced in the early 1970s by British sociologist Campbell. It was subsequently applied to some of the New Religious Movements that flourished during the period, but it remained little utilized until recently. Campbell was concerned with the process by which so-called cults develop, but he was not employing cult as the word is now commonly used. In keeping with predominant usage in the sociology of religion, Campbell did not regard the term as inherently pejorative. Thus, his use does not carry the conventional implications of violence, irrationality, or brainwashing currently associated with the term. Rather, he treated cults as loosely structured religious groups that make few demands on their members and that are often based on belief systems that deviate from the dominant culture. Unlike sects, they are not groups that have broken away from existing religious organizations over disputes about leadership, doctrine, or personality. Since they are not breakaway groups, Campbell sought to determine how they came into being, a question made more significant by the fact that cults constantly form and dissolve.12
Campbell argued that
