Introduction

Conspiracy theories are often seen as a phenomenon whose origins lie in the era of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (Popper 1962: 7; White 2002: 4), with the imagination of Masonic and Illuminati plots linked to both dramatic transformations in society and thought, and the appearance of actual secret societies. For conservative elites, the French Revolution was seen as the triumph of subversive conspirators, a milestone in the global conspiracy against humankind (see Chapter 5.3). Yet, if we look further back in the past, we see that conspiratorial thinking has been part and parcel of history for much longer. Indeed, rudimentary conspiracist narratives already existed during antiquity and the Middle Ages (see Chapters 5.1 and 5.2), and this fits with the claims of some anthropologists and social psychologists who consider that conspiracy theories are the product of a universal mental mechanism when confronted with the unknown (Groh 1987).