Arpad Arutinov

Who was Arpad Arutinov? We may never know, but he left us with a puzzlingly heterodox work, The Back Door of History, the definitive version of which is the magisterial Second Revised Edition. Arutinov effected an epistemological break with conventional historiography and the natural sciences, his thesis being that consensus reality is almost invariably a lie and that the front door of empirical evidence and rational analysis will always be insufficient for comprehending phenomena. Although he founded no school, he taught his readers to look for a back door hermeneutic, a mode of inquiry that leads into a hidden, metaphysical reality where one finds the real motor of history. Mainstream historiography will never sufficiently appreciate him. His was not a linear history but a metahistorical polemic intended to dismantle the reader's own participation in consensus realities. Did he succeed? That Arutinov goes unmentioned in every contemporary consensus history is the measure of his success.

His The Back Door of History pursues its agenda through a deconstructive method, taking a hammer to accepted narratives to expose their impossibility. A case study for this method can be found in the early Islamic expansion. It is an absolute mystery, he writes. The desert Arabs were inferior to their Byzantine and Persian adversaries in every material respect, from military technology and organization to demographics and physical health. The conquest of Damascus, for instance, was for Arutinov a logical absurdity. He brought the same skepticism to the natural sciences, dismissing all orthodox geological theories for the formation of coal and petroleum by contending that the requisite thermal conditions would have vaporized the planet.

Alfred North Whitehead wrote that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato; it is perhaps typical of Arutinov that those footnotes are misguided, nothing short historical myth. His account of Socrates' death tells us that the hemlock of ancient Greece was non-toxic and that Plato’s narrative was a literary device. Socrates living for centuries is far more plausible than the accepted story.

Having demonstrated the failure of conventional explanation and the limits of consensus reality, Arutinov posited an elaborate metaphysics to account for these phenomena. He wrote of a non-locational, causal realm of ransom and recompense where events such as the formation of carbonaceous deposits are patterned and planned. This reality, he argues, is concealed through a principle of cosmic camouflage, exemplified by his Australian Paradox: a landscape composed of unique flora and fauna that nevertheless mimics the 'big picture' of its northern hemisphere counterparts. This substratum is further populated by a host of crypto-zoological and demonic entities—the Shoga-Kobalds manipulated by rock rituals, giants altering cliff-face edicts, and the 'children of Ahriman' mingling with human bloodlines—all of which act beyond the view of a humanity blinded by its “disease of abstraction and generalization.”

Integral to Arutinov's cosmology is his radical reconceptualization of temporality. For at least a dozen years, Arutinov writes, “history has indeed begun to run backwards,” a phenomenon he recognized and symbolically mirrored by adopting a reversed, left-handed script. Referring to the well-known Hawkins' Principle of Re-Entrant Time, he suggests that the present moment is perpetually “within seven minutes of the beginning of the world.” Furthermore, he introduces the concept of extra-dimensional bonus days, accessible to a select portion of humanity in pleasant places outside of ordinary time. This temporal insight is perhaps connected to his historical claim that the eschatological prophecies of the 10th century were literally fulfilled, and that the world did, in fact, end at dawn on April 1, 1000.

Is The Back Door of History a gnostic text? Perhaps. Some have dismissed it as a hoax. It is full of aphoristic pronouncements on topics ranging from the aerodynamic necessity of tails for angels to the predictable national character of the English. Whoever the man was in real life (the fictional accounts are not to be trusted), his authorial persona is that of the lone initiate revealing esoteric truths to a profane world. Through his case studies and metaphysical assertions, he consistently argues that what you and I perceive as history is the shadow play of deeper, occulted forces. Arutinov’s admirers will always be those who believe that legend, paradox, and personal intuition are more reliable guides to reality than what historians pass off as truth.