Here's a list of my ten fave books about conspiracies, UFOs, the paranormal, and etc. Even more than being books I love, the titles on this list are great for the "beginner" who is just starting to delve into these topics of interest:
10. Hollywood Babylon, by Kenneth Anger
This book isn't about the "Entertainment Illuminati" per se -- but it maps out the framework upon which much of that lore is based. Come thrill at the utter murderous debauchery of Hollywood (where life is apparently cheap)! The author/filmmaker was, and is, heavily into the occult, idolizing Aleister Crowley and working with such luminaries as Anton LaVey and Jack Parsons' widow Marjorie Cameron -- so if anybody would know about the Illuminati's influence in the movie industry, it would be this guy. Also had a sequel book with gorier photos.
9. Dead Names, by Simon
Purporting to be a history of the "Simon" version of the Necronomicon, this book provides not only a nice history of the occult in New York City and background on one of the most famous books of magic in the world -- but it also gives you an "insider's" look at the mass corruption (with possible connections to international espionage) of the various "Orthodox" Christian churches. You'll never quite feel like you're getting the complete story from author Simon, in part because the author is really Peter "Sinister Forces" Levenda (who has a great deal of fun with it all).
8. Subliminal Seduction, by Wilson Bryan Key
If you are into spotting the "secret messages" behind pop-culture, this book is the Bible. Key's ground-breaking work analyzes advertising for "hidden" subliminals (most involving sex) designed to help sell products. These subliminals include sex acts painted in ice cubes and the word "sex" drawn faintly all over photographs. You'll literally never look at ads the same way again; this might mean that you are going as mad as Key, or stumbling upon one of the greatest conspiracies of all time.
7. Hellhounds On Their Trail by R. Gary Patterson
An exhaustive look at the connection between the occult and the music industry, this book is a must for anybody interested in Illuminati/pop-music lore. As with "Hollywood Babylon," the secret societies within Music aren't named as such, but it becomes quickly clear that something bigger and more systematic is going on rather than a handful of unrelated cases. This is one of the few books that have massively creeped me out; as if there was something demonic hidden in the pages themselves (which I realize sounds corny, but that's how I really felt).
6. The Secret History Of The World, by Mark Booth
An epic overview of the history of esoteric thought since the dawn of recorded time, and of the secret societies that keep this knowledge alive (and hidden). You get a really good foundation in alchemy and occult symbology here, and it's stuff you can then apply to a whole host of other research. The only caveat is that, like "Dead Names," you always feel like the author is not telling you the full story -- or that he may have an agenda of his own (I am specifically referring to Booth's postscript entitled "Is The Anti-Christ Already Here?" -- a sharp departure from the balanced tone of the rest of the book).
5. Book Of Lies: The Disinformation Book of Magick
This is one of the very first books that introduced me to the word of conspiracies and the occult, and as such it was very formative for me. It covers it all: Crowley, Hitler, Sirius, William Burroughs, Lovecraft, LaVey, psychedelics, the Apocalypse. It will crack open your head and take you on a whole bunch of different directions (which, strangely, will all sort of take you to the same destination point).
4. The Spear Of Destiny, by Trevor Ravenscroft
This another of those conspiracy "meta-narratives" that ties together a massive amount of different people and ideas -- in this case, the occult, Nazis, secret societies, Christianity, reincarnation, and etc. And again, the narrator seems somewhat unreliable; but more than unreliable, he also seems somewhat mad. The conclusion Ravenscroft makes at the end of this book as to the Jews and the Holocaust is also quite jaw-dropping; the equivalent of driving a car steadily down a road for miles and then taking a sudden and violent left-turn right through the highway's shoulder and into a densely wooded area.
3. The Gods Of Eden, by William Bramley
This is, like "Behold A Pale Horse," a seminal work in conspiriology that countless writers have
2. Sinister Forces, by Peter Levenda
I've admittedly only read the third and last volume of this series -- but its grand, operatic, all-encompassing narrative makes it a titanic work of conspiracy lore. This is Levenda's magnum opus, a work connecting the dots on everything from Satanism to JFK to MK-Ultra to Charles Manson to Jeffrey Dahmer. You can almost feel Levenda fighting off madness/depression/mania as he struggles to part it all down on paper; which is why, more than just conspiracy books, they almost read like works of art.
1. Cosmic Trigger, by Robert Anton Wilson
Yet another meta-narrative, this time weaving together the Illuminati (yes, referred to by name), aliens, synchronicities (as embodied by the "23 Enigma"), mind-expanding drugs, mythology...and of course Aleister Crowley. But what really made me place this book at the top is not just the skillful and humorous way we handles the subject matter -- but his overall advice on how to "handle" conspiracy/occult studies in general. Which is to say: keep an open mind and don't get too hung up o any one point of view (or, "reality tunnel"), as to avoid going stone-cold paranoid and get trapped in the "Chapel Perilous."
There were other books that I've also enjoyed that didn't quite make this list for one reason or another. I quite like David Icke's books, but they are hard to read straight through & are very derivative of other works (read "Gods of Eden" to see how much Icke "borrows"). "Behold A Pale Horse" by Bill Cooper is another book that I just couldn't read straight through, and was really bogged down by all the disparate sources and pages and pages of "official documents." Much of the MK-Ultra lore (Fritz Springmeier, "Trace-Formation," etc.) have some good stuff in it but also seems to go off the rails. Lastly, there's a rich library of conspiracy material with a specifically Christian view-point; I've avoided these in this list, as a lot of it hinges on "if you are not Saved you are going to Hell."
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