ABSTRACT
This examination of the eclectic teachings of the Lectorium Roscrucianum, an international Rosicrucian New Religious Movement group originating in the 1930s in the Netherlands, provides a case study of how a ‘modern Gnostic’ worldview is constructed through narrating conspiracy that connotes knowledge, power, and agency. Centre of attention is the leader Jan van Rijckenborgh’s (1896–1968) conspiratorial book Unmasking (1956), an example of late 20th- and early 21st-century millennialism/apocalypticism. My premise is that the LR’s conspiratorial narratives address a theological problem of representation or mystical apophasis. By narrating a revealed dualist gnosis as conspiracy theory, an elaborate myth is constructed that adds relevance and urgency to the LR’s doctrines: a Gnostic-Christian cosmological narrative about the impending end(s) of the world is combined with the implicit esoteric ‘positive conspiracy theory’ about the secret benevolent Rosicrucian brotherhood, which is then inverted into a negative conspiracy about evil others. I conclude that the LR’s conspiratorial narratives display a provisional design that undermines literal belief in them, and that the group´s radical scepticism – distrust of authority, belief in elusive knowledge and in dialectical resolutions, a practice of open-ended recombinations – in certain respects prefigure a contemporary post-New Age ‘improvisational millenarian style’.
