I read a book about the rise of 9/11 trutherism and other conspiratorial thinking, and in it the author mentions that Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian social and media theorist, seems to have become transfixed by the notion of Freemasons operating at high levels behind the scenes - to the extent of declaring that the American Civil War was actually a secret war between two elements within Freemasonry that was whitewashed to be about something else.
All of this seems a bit incredible for a thinker with such clout. Is it true? How did he come to believe in things of this sort?
Here is an angry letter (with footnote) he wrote to Ezra Pound in 1953 about secret societies. His suspicions - clearly influenced by his strict Catholicism - are pretty middle of the road when considered in that light.
"Last year has been spent going through rituals of secret societies with fine comb. As I said before I'm in a bloody rage at the discovery that the art and sciences are in the pockets of these societies. It doesn't make me any happier to know that Joyce, Lewis, Eliot, yourself have used these rituals as a basis for art activity. Monopolies of knowledge are intolerable The use of the arts for sectarian warfare! ugh. The use of the arts as a technique of salvation! as a channel of supernatural grace! The validity of the rituals is entirely in the cognitive order. Art is imitation of the process of apprehension.
clarification of " " "
Now that I now the nature of the sectarian strife among the Societies I have no intention of participating in it any further, until I know a good deal more. To hell with East and West."
Footnote;
"In the early 1950s McLuhan's interest in Renaissance and Neo-Augustan literatures (e.g. Pope and Swift, who were interested in Rosicrucianism and Masonry), as well as modem literature, led him to undertake research into the effects of esoteric thought on the arts. Tracing the symbolism and rituals that were a means of transmitting gnostic and pagan religious thought in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he became fascinated with the role of Rosicrucianism and Masonry in the transition from the Renaissance to the Age of Reason, and with the continued presence of these themes and associated liturgies and symbols in modern art and literature-as reflected in such works as Eliot's The Waste Land and Joyce's Ulysses. As a Roman Catholic, McLuhan suspected that 'secret societies,' and 'secret doctrines associated with gnosticism, Rosicrucianism, and Masonry persisted among elites in the twentieth century. Following Wyndham Lewis's condemnation of the "freemasonry of the arts" in Time and Western Man McLuhan protested- here and in other letters of the 1950's - what he felt was this continuing influence.