The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

twenty-three merchantmen had already gone to Davy Jones’s locker in the area.

A letter written by Winston Churchill, First Lord of Admiralty, to Walter Runciman, the president of Britain’s Board of Trade, seems damning evidence of the conspiracy: “It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany… For our part we want the traffic—the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.”

Furthermore, the radio exchanges between the Lusitania and the Admiralty from early May remain classified to this day.

Conspiracy or cock-up? The Lusitania was not “neutral shipping” and the fact that Churchill hoped that a ship got into useful trouble is not proof he planned the Lusitania sinking. In 1915, the minds of the Admiralty were concentrated on the Dardenelles campaign, and the sailing of one liner was a minor matter. Also, the ship was famously fast and well built, and the brass at the Admiralty likely presumed she was uncatchable at best, unsinkable at worst.

A foul-up would also explain the cover-up and locking-up of the radio traffic between the Admiralty and Lusitania: if the blunder had been made public, it would have been an embarrassment in front of the world.

Further Reading

Colin Simpson, The Lusitania, 1972

PAUL McCARTNEY

The Beatles, a.k.a. the Fab Four. John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Actually, make that the Terrific Three plus an imposter. According to a rumour broadcast in October 1969 by Detroit disc jockey Russ Gibb, Paul McCartney had died in a car crash in 1966, having been distracted by a lovely meter maid. As this would have destroyed The Beatles, Paul was replaced by a lookalike, William Campbell. (Or was it Billy Shears?) With a little plastic surgery here, a handy growth of facial hair there, William/Billy made a passable Paul and The Beatles kept on making money, money, money.

The Paul is Dead rumour swept the world. The evidence for Gibb’s proposition? Nothing less than The Beatles’ own lyrics and album covers. Racked by guilt, the remaining mop-tops could not stop themselves inadvertently hinting at Paul’s demise, in a sort of mass outbreak of Freudian slips. Thus on the sleeve of Sergeant Pepper Paul is standing next to a grave, while the hand of the statue of the Hindu god Shiva, “The Destroyer”, points directly at Paul. Then there’s the BEATLES wreath, and the doll in the red-lined dress, to symbolize Jane Asher, who died in the car with him. Inside, the sleeve depicts Paul wearing an arm patch with the letters OPD, standing for “Officially Pronounced Dead”. The lyrics are the clincher. In “She’s Leaving Home” the accident is revealed to have been on “Wednesday morning at five o’clock”, while “Good Morning Good Morning” confirms there was “nothing to do to save his life” and the climactic “A Day in the Life” acknowledges he “blew his mind out in a car”.

If the track “I’m so Tired” on The White Album is played backwards, the words become “Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him”.

But it is The Beatles’ 1969 Abbey Road that provides the mother lode of clues to Paul’s death. On the LP cover the four Beatles are pictured crossing the road in a funeral procession. Lennon is the priest (he’s wearing white), Harrison is the grave-digger (wearing denim), Starr is the funeral director (dressed formally). McCartney is the corpse: he’s out of step with the others, has bare feet, and is smoking a cigarette—the symbol of death in Sicilian culture. More, the licence plate on the car reads “LMW 281F”, which stands for “Linda McCartney Weeps”.

In 1993, Paul McCartney played sly homage to the long-running conspiracy theory about his premature death by titling his live album—Paul is Live!

On this album, as on all the other records made by Paul McCartney post-1966, Billy Shears/William Campbell sounded exactly like the pre-1966 Paul McCartney.

Funny that.

MARY MAGDALENE

She only had a walk-on part in the drama of the New Testament, but Mary Magdalene has become the star turn of modern conspiracy theory.

In the gospel accounts of Jesus’s life, Mary (a.k.a. Miriam of Magdala) is the woman from Galilee who watches his crucifixion, and is the first person to see him after the resurrection. But lo! in the modern alternative theory Mary is Jesus’s wife and the mother of his children, whose descendants then walked the face of the Earth, specifically France, where they ruled as the Merovingian dynasty. The Holy Grail of legend is no longer the platter used by Jesus at the Last Supper, but Christ’s bloodline, which has extended down over the years to reach, inter alia, the Sinclairs in Scotland, Italian nobility and Princess Diana. Safeguarding the Holy Grail are two ancient orders: the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion. Although sworn to secrecy, Templars and Priory members have been unable to resist leaving clues to the existence of Mary’s marriage and motherhood, notably in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting, where it is not the apostle John that is depicted to the right of Jesus but Mary, while the V shape formed between the two acknowledges the symbol for femininity.

Obviously, all of the above contradicts the theology of the Catholic Church. To cover up Jesus’s intimacy with Mary—and so maintain its own power—the Catholic Church, it is suggested, cast Mary as a harlot and excised gospels featuring her. The Church also deliberately misinterpreted in medieval times “Sangreal” as “Saint Grail” rather than the correct “sang real ”, meaning royal blood.

If Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code takes the laurels for most popular exposition of the Mary Magdalene conspiracy, the vade mecum is the 1982 “non-fiction” bestseller Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. And this in turn owes something to Hugh Schonfield’s The Passover Plot (1965), while the British poet Robert Graves had speculated that Mary was Jesus’s wife as early as 1946 in King Jesus.

The Priory of Sion, Christ’s children ruling Gaul, the mistranslation of “Sangreal”, the discovery by Father Berenger Sauniere of the Holy Grail at Rennes-le-Chateau is… all humbug, set afoot by a hoaxing minor French aristocrat, Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, who wanted to give himself regal glory by planting “evidence” that he was the rightful king of France. (He would have done a more persuasive job if the key Middle Ages documents “found” at the Bibliotheque Nationale had been written in medieval and not modern Latin.) Even so, aspects of the Mary Magdalene conspiracy hold up. The early Catholic Church did ban and burn gospels not in accordance with its views. Courtesy of the discovery in 1948 by an Egyptian peasant called Muhammad Ali al-Samman of a buried collection of “Gnostic” texts at Nag Hammadi the content of some of these banned gospels is now known. The role they assign to Mary is controversial. In the Gospel of Philip, Jesus is declared to be “the partner of Mary Magdalene, [and he] loved her more than all the disciples and often kissed her on the mouth”. In Greek, the language of the Gnostic texts, “partner” can also mean “companion”; but whether “bride” or “close friend”, it is abundantly obvious that in this early strain of Christianity Mary was regarded as being a crucial figure in Christ’s ministry. There is even a Gospel of Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi haul. A key incident in this gospel is a confrontation between Mary and the apostle Peter, in which Peter tries to humiliate Mary on the grounds that she is a woman, but is roundly told off by Jesus.

Even if Mary was the literal bride of Christ—and it is a big if—there is no guarantee that children came from the union. But it is a matter of historical record that various early Church dignitaries, from St Peter to St Paul (whose Letter to Timothy is an unintentional classic of misogyny) to Pope Gregory the Great, suppressed pro-Mary Magdalene currents in early Christianity and denigrated her role in Christ’s ministry. They would not have seen themselves as conspirators, but fighters for “orthodoxy” in what was effectively a theological battle.