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 cults emerge out of a supportive social and ideological environment, which he called the cultic milieu. This cultural underground encompasses Webb’s concept of rejected knowledge, but is broader in two ways. First, it includes “all deviant belief systems,” not merely those that find their way into occultism, though the occult remains a major component of the cultic milieu. But that milieu also includes such areas as alternative medicine and healing, not normally considered part of the occult domain. Second, the cultic milieu includes not simply beliefs and ideas but also their related practices, “the collectivities, institutions, individuals and media of communication associated with these beliefs.” There is, in other words, a world of persons, organizations, social interactions, and channels of communication that makes the cultic milieu a genuine subculture rather than a mere intellectual or religious phenomenon.13
The cultic milieu is by nature hostile to authority, both because it rejects the authority of such normative institutions as churches and universities, and because no single institution within the milieu has the authority to prescribe beliefs and practices for those within it. As diverse as the cultic milieu is, however, Campbell finds in it “unifying tendencies.” One such tendency is its opposition to “dominant cultural orthodoxies.” This is a point I shall return to many times, for it is also a major characteristic of the culture of conspiracy, within which the reigning presumption is that any widely accepted belief must necessarily be false. The very oppositional situation of the cultic milieu makes it wary of all claims to authoritative judgment. Its suspiciousness makes it intrinsically receptive to all forms of revisionism, whether in history, religion, science, or politics.14
If disdain for orthodoxy is one trait of the cultic milieu, another is its fluidity. Ideas migrate easily from one part of the milieu to another, their movement facilitated by both a general receptivity to the unorthodox and a communication system of publications, meetings, and (more recently) interlinked Web sites. According to Campbell, “the literature of particular groups and movements frequently devotes space to topics outside its own orbit, includes reviews of one another’s literature and advertises one another’s meetings. As a direct consequence of this individuals who ‘enter’ the milieu at any one point frequently travel rapidly through a variety of movements and beliefs and by so doing constitute yet another unifying force within the milieu.” As we shall see in succeeding chapters, such currents can connect antigovernment, fundamentalist, and UFO subcultures, permitting both individuals and ideas to move among them with astonishing rapidity.15
Campbell’s essay is among the most acute and perceptive descriptions of the dynamics of contemporary religious experimentation. Its major limitation lies in its concentration on religious movements to the exclusion of other kinds of groups. Indeed, the very logic of the concept of the cultic milieu suggests that under certain circumstances, a person’s religion becomes indistinguishable from political ideology and the occult. Thus, without discarding Campbell’s valuable insights, we need to extend the cultic milieu to encompass a broader range of phenomena. This can be done through the concept I call stigmatized-knowledge claims.
Stigmatized Knowledge Claims
By stigmatized knowledge I mean claims to truth that the claimants regard as verified despite the marginalization of those claims by the institutions that conventionally distinguish between knowledge and error—universities, communities of scientific researchers, and the like. Although this definition encompasses rejected knowledge in both Webb’s and Campbell’s senses, it also includes a broader range of outsider ideas. The domain of stigmatized-knowledge claims may be divided into five varieties:
Forgotten knowledge: knowledge once allegedly known but lost through faulty memory, cataclysm, or some other interrupting factor (e.g., beliefs about ancient wisdom once possessed by inhabitants of Atlantis).
Superseded knowledge: claims that