Qnosticism
Qanon as a modern esoteric tradition
The purpose of this brief note will be to enumerate in no particular order significant similarities between QAnon and a variety of Western esoteric traditions — especially those that flourished in the Late Antique period, a time ripe with weirdo weltanschauungen. The main reason I am writing this in such an unvarnished style is that I simply need to get these observations out of my head and onto paper. I have been thinking about them almost all year to no productive end and it’s resulted in a kind of build-up of a mental lactic acid: my brain is starting to strain and hurt without any release from the continued effort. And so I will just get these things out now:
“JFK Jr is alive” as contemporary Nero Redivivus Legend
Without getting too bogged down in the weeds of the details: Nero was a more complicated figure than the one many of us were introduced to in history class. He didn’t set Rome on fire and he certainly didn’t fiddle while it burned; the ancient sources even agree that his first five or so years on the throne were pretty good. And while those same sources also agree that the remaining eight years of his reign were terrible, there is good evidence that he remained wildly popular with the common people of the Empire throughout the entirety of his rule and — critically, for us — for a long time after his death.
We can find St. Augustine writing about the strange beliefs that took root in the wake of Nero’s death in his City of God:
And hence some suppose that he shall rise again and be Antichrist. Others, again, suppose that he is not even dead, but that he was concealed that he might be supposed to have been killed, and that he now lives in concealment in the vigor of that same age which he had reached when he was believed to have perished, and will live until he is revealed in his own time and restored to his kingdom. But I wonder that men can be so audacious in their conjectures.
My first contention here, then, is that there are more than superficial similarities between this odd Antique belief and the belief that JFK Jr. is really alive, and is either Q or working closely with Q. As EJ Dickson in Rolling Stone summarizes the JFK Jr. angle:
Hardcore Q believers think that JFK Jr. is not only alive and well, but also that he plans to emerge from his 20-year hiatus from public life by coming out and supporting Trump as his running mate in 2020. Moreover, they believe that a guy in Pittsburgh named Vincent Fusca is actually JFK Jr. in disguise, and they have made T-shirts promoting this belief
My completely unscientific theorem is that both beliefs proceed from some deep-seated desire for an unmistakable royal line to follow, on the part of a precarious and confused populace.
Nero’s death led immediately to the first major Roman civil war the Empire had suffered since Augustus had extinguished his rivals in the 30s BC. While Vespasian quickly put out this new blaze and established the very stable Flavian dynasty, something had still been lost irretrievably: with Nero’s death the male line of the Julio-Claudians, the line that could be drawn straight back to Augustus and Julius, had been broken. From here on out the principate would belong to whatever man was meritorious enough to grab hold of it and maintain it. Yes, for the next hundred years or so that person would consistently be the person whom the proceeding princeps had named as his successor; but finally, in 198 AD, that line too would be broken. My guess is that the disasters that the empire careened toward after Commodus was assassinated would have confirmed the worst fears of those who had been praying for the return of the Divine Nero: these were the uncertain, center-less times we perforce lived in now that our rightful rulers have died out.
The most recent major biography of JFK Jr. is called America’s Reluctant Prince (published 2019), and there are at least two documentaries of his life that use this same royal conceit in their title — John F. Kennedy Jr., The Death of an American Prince and America’s Prince: The John F. Kennedy Jr. Story. Suffice it to say that American media likes to think of JFK Jr. as a lost heir apparent. And this provides an answer to the usual question people ask when you explain this part of the Q cosmology to people: “Why JFK Jr.?” I think that a lot of it comes down to viewing John John as the last heir to a Real America, and his (apparent) death as the (apparent) end of any direct access we might have had to that place. His survival — like the survival of Nero Augustus — promises that these uncertain, artificial times will end, and that the old, true, and good times will resume.
Millenarianism as a central feature of Q
Millenarianism is the belief that some political, social, or religious movement will result in a fundamental change of society, after which a new, happy era will reign. Beliefs like this were, for instance, especially common among the earliest Christians, who, separated from their messiah by only a few decades, had especial reason to believe that the Kingdom of God he spoke about was coming very soon. During their own lives, surely, or so soon after their deaths that their corpses would still be in proper shape to be raised from the dead.
Q is marked, very explicitly, by a similar belief. Pretty much to a person Q Anon people will tell you that after The Plan is completed, and all of the demons that run our world are brutally executed, all of the horrible obvious wrongs of modern life will be righted. People crushed by debt, the rapine of the rich and the powerful, the endless alienation of the populace — these and so many other things will be put to a sudden and awesome end. Indeed, because of the high incidence of Evangelical Christians in Q circles, a lot of them probably have a view of all of this that is pretty much identical in form and content to the view held by those 1st century Christians. They, too, believe that Jesus is coming, and soon, and that with him he brings the Kingdom of God.
Q drops considered as esoteric knowledge
Q drops by design have both an exoteric and an esoteric content. The exoteric content would be the actual words and sentences of the drops themselves, and their most straightforward interpretation. When Q posts a drop predicting that Hillary Clinton will be arrested over the weekend, and flown to Guantanamo Bay to face her well-deserved execution, the exoteric content of that drop is just the proposition that Hillary is going to be arrested and executed this weekend, no matter how obscurely that idea is communicated. The esoteric content, by contrast, might be something like what the first letters of each sentence of the drop spells, or how many words are in the first sentence, or the numerological values of a purposeful misspelling of Hillary’s name.
Gnosticism grew out of traditions like the Jewish Kabbalah and neoplatonism. In both of these traditions there is a strong emphasis on the exegesis of hidden meanings of central texts. The most intuitive example might be that of the story of Genesis: there is the exoteric content of the text — the actual story of God speaking the world into being, the eviction of Adam and Eve from the Garden — and then there is the esoteric content of it, the purposefully hidden meaning that is only accessible by those with the proper knowledge, the proper gnosis.
Syncretism a defining feature of both gnosticism and Q Anon
Gnosticism was marked by its heterogeneity. Growing out of the religious tumult of the Late Antique Levant, Gnosticism incorporated Christianity with elements of Greek mystery traditions, Zoroastrianism, and the elaborate hierarchical cosmology of Late Platonism. Gnosticism happily rolled over and accumulated every interesting bit of worship or ritual it found: Q has very much the same relationship with other conspiracy theories.
Conclusion
Q is, I do not believe, going anywhere, even though the inauguration has come and gone in the course of me starting this note. My main contention here is that the frameworks and theories of the study of esoteric traditions could be particularly apt at making sense of the Q phenomena.
