Past Master as Conspiracy Novel

The skull of Cardinal John Morton, patron and benefactor of Thomas More

"Only a God can save us."— Martin Heidegger, interview with Der Spiegel (1966; published 1976)

I’ve been thinking tonight about something Daniel Otto Jack Peterson recently said, namely that it was hard for him to get into Fourth Mansions because it is a conspiracy novel. I am probably a little too quick to believe that social organization is impossible without large amounts of conspiracy, both benign and malign. I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about Past Master, which is also a conspiracy novel.

The conspiracy at the heart of Past Master, as in Fourth Mansions, is not merely political. It is ontological. That is the only kind of conspiracy novel that Lafferty wrote. I suspect that Peterson and I both respond to Lafferty for this reason: we are both drawn to the way ontology is treated in the fiction. And it is especially relevant in Lafferty, because when he plays at the high-stakes table, as he does in his most serious work, he is almost always dealing in ontological conspiracy. What makes his real-life sense of political conspiracy hard is that the ontological theater falls away. My view is that his fictional conspiracies are always displacements of historical anxieties.

Consider Past Master. It is the book in which Lafferty takes a real historical conspiracy, through a real historical figure, and relocates it to an alien world. In reading it, one should never forget that the conflict between Thomas More and Henry VIII was, in fact, a historical conspiracy, not in the sense of secret cabals, but as the coordinated manipulation of law, ideology, and power to eliminate a principled obstacle. Henry VIII did not proceed against More for acts of treason but for treason of conscience. He engineered statutes (the Act of Supremacy (1534) and the Treason Act) that redefined silence as guilt and belief as crime. More recognized the trap. “If a man were accused of treason for silence,” he said, “then silence were no defense.” This was a legal inversion designed to destroy him.

What happened historically? The prosecution relied on coerced testimony, most notably from Richard Rich, whom More exposed in court as unreliable and self-serving, yet whose word was accepted because the outcome had already been determined. More’s refusal to swear the oath was not an act of rebellion but one of abstention. The state, however, conspired to interpret noncompliance as active hostility. His final declaration, “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first,” which Lafferty reworks in Past Master, was not mere piety. It was an indictment of a regime that had conspired to equate loyalty with total submission.

Henry’s break with Rome demanded unanimity. More’s conscience made unanimity impossible. So the machinery of crown, Parliament, and compliant courts moved in concert to remove him. What this revealed was a conspiracy in which legality masked coercion, and law was repurposed to enforce ideological uniformity. That is the historical background of Past Master.

In Lafferty's book, what we have is not simply a plot carried out by a few against the many. We have a condition in which most of a civilization has become silent. Astrobe, at bottom, is a propaganda project. It is a displacement of the effects orchestrated by the twentieth century through mass media, which is in Lafferty a refiguring of Henry VIII’s use of proclamations, oaths, and courts to manufacture unanimity. Astrobe presents itself as the culmination of human aspiration and enlightened agreement. It promises a world without want, fear, guilt, or conflict. For anyone with even a trace of conspiratorial suspicion, this red meat

But what is too good to be true is not true. That is Astrobe. It is built on the elimination and exclusion of brutal truths, all the truths that make moral life and second-order virtues possible. The governing ideology, referred to repeatedly as “the Astrobe Dream,” asserts an oppressive presentism. “There is no future. The future is now.” This is the core of the conspiracy: Lafferty's theme of amnesia. It is the claim that history has ended and, really, never existed at all. Resistance, then, is worse than wrong. It is meaningless. Disagree? Go and die in Cathead.

How does this work in the novel? The instruments of the Astrobe conspiracy are the Programmed Persons and their Killers. This is an authority that claims to be without malice. The instruments do not persecute out of hatred or desire. They act, as Lafferty wants the reader to see, out of a higher commitment to correctness. “I have not been false to the Vision” is the catchphrase of the good conscience. It is Robespiere's notorious, “La terreur n’est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible.” The failure to embody political virture is guilt. A consequence of this is that Astrobe punishes not crime but dissent, because difference asserts human identity. Behind the conspiracy lies the pull toward Ouden—the big O, point Omega, the void.

Enter Thomas More, the disruptive element. He becomes the man who cannot be absorbed into this annihilating logic. More is an odd figure, and I think Lafferty had mixed feelings about him. In many ways, the historical Thomas More is a difficult Catholic saint. It is hard not to admire him, and equally hard not to be repulsed. One of the curious things about Lafferty’s novel is that he arguably does too much to soften and redeem More’s character. To his credit, though, Lafferty does not overlook the arrogance that made More a man who was ready to go to sleep—until the moment came when he realized he had to make the final decision: to be a saint, after all other options had failed.

Lafferty gives us a Thomas More who is neither rebel nor loyalist, neither constant believer nor cynical nihilist. More sees the beauty of Astrobe, and he intuits its hollowness. “It is a whited sepulcher,” he says early on—an allusion Lafferty returned to repeatedly from the mid-1960s onward, because it so perfectly captures the contradiction between surface perfection and inner decay. Lafferty’s best story on this theme is, of course, a brilliant takedown of mass media. What More recognizes is that Astrobe is mass-mediated, and behind that mediation lies conspiracy.

More is a confused figure, though one with a buried but functioning spiritual radar. The Programmed Killers cannot decide whether he is a threat or an asset, since he both affirms and questions the Dream. Historically, More was something of an early technocrat—one of the first Western intellectuals to reflect seriously on the construction of the state apparatus. He stands at the beginning of developments that would later become population control and governmentality. In conspiratorial terms, Thomas is both remainder and precursor. He is a difficult variable. The system cannot eliminate him without acknowledging its own incompleteness.

This is where Ouden enters. Ouden vivifies the metaphysical dimension of the conspiracy, though as I have argued elsewhere, he is likely a mass-mediated illusion perpetuated by the Nine. Ouden places himself beyond good and evil, at least in his role as the god of the Programmed Persons. He, or whoever speaks through him, says, “I am nothingness,” but he does not stop there. Here we find a performative contradiction. This nothingness, in order to complete its conspiracy, must act, and act decisively. It must devour. “Many consider the Nothing a mere negative,” he says, “but it is a vortex.”

Here, a philosophical detour may be helpful, specifically, a distinction that can shed light on Ouden: the difference between the good infinite and the bad infinite. Perhaps the gretest genius of the infinite, Georg Cantor, said it, "The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest foThe fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.rm has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds."

Ouden hates the infinite. Ouden is a being, if we can call him that, who perceives only the bad infinite because he is the bad infinite that cannot see beyond itself. Because Ouden will not acknowledge any other form of the infinite, he concludes that the only solution is to bring it to an end.

“Consider them as turned inside out. Now everything is on the inside ofmy nothingness. Many consider the Nothing a mere negative, and theyconsider it so to their death and obliteration.”

The idea of the bad infinite comes from Hegel. In Hegel’s philosophy, the bad, or spurious, infinite is an endless progression that never completes itself. It is like counting numbers forever, always adding one more, never arriving at a whole. It is locked in a binary between the finite and what lies just beyond it. This infinite is “bad” not because it is large but because it negates the finite without ever overcoming it. It postpones completion endlessly. The good, or true, infinite, by contrast, is a self-relating whole. As Hegel puts it,

“The infinite is the negation of the negation, affirmation, being which has restored itself out of limitedness." Science of Logic, § 273

It contains and preserves the finite rather than rejecting it. It achieves completion through reflection, not through stopping at first-order negation. For Hegel, it is the return of Medieval perfection, a complication of Aristotle who held that, agaisnt scholasticism, the infinite could only exist potentially ("Now, as we have seen, magnitude is not actually infinite. But by division it is infinite . . . The alternative then remains that the infinite has a potential existence."). For Hegel, the good infinite is the line which has reached itself, which is closed and wholly present.

Ouden, then, is the bad infinite unaware of itself. He thinks that his only escape is final closure. This is the logic of the Astrobe conspiracy. It is not to dominate the world but to end it. The good infinite reconciles the finite. The bad infinite flees it.

“We will close down the worlds and make an end of life. It will be nothing, nothing, nothing, forever, for ever, for never, for never. And when all has ceased to be, it will also happen that nothing has ever been. We will pull the hole in after us. We will put out the stars, one by one and billion by billion. What is not known to be is not. And what is not has never been.”

If Past Master is a novel about the metaphysics of conspiracy, then Ouden represents its final form: a bad infinite that believes existence itself to be an error. Under his banner, the Programmed Persons see the stubborn, unpredictable facticity of individual human beings as noise. They are the flawed, particular persons who live in places like Cathead. For Ouden, they are not problems to be solved. They are glitches to be erased. His vision of completion is not power but cessation. He wishes to stop being in order to be most himself. That is the terminal logic of the bad infinite. It is complete epistemic and ontological closure, a blind parody of the good infinite.

Set against all this is tedious Cathead—Cathead, the part of the novel that tries the patience of readers. To me, this seems like a deliberate artistic choice on Lafferty’s part, not a case of narrative naïveté. Cathead is not revolutionary in the sense that a revolution needs a manifesto. It is, in its sordid way, a version of Lafferty’s green revolution in collapse. It is no longer morally admirable, except in one sense: it utterly rejects the stultifying closure of the Astrobe conspiracy. Cathead is filthy, violent, and lethal. It is the Hobbesian state of nature, but because it refuses to be swallowed by Leviathan, it is also anti-Hobbesian. It is the real practico-inert that the state cannot assimilate.

Its inhabitants reject Astrobe and choose to suffer, because at least suffering is real. In the novel, Paul says the people of Cathead choose misery because it proves they are alive. “Better a life of misery than no life at all.”

Readers of the novel often feel some frustration with how polarized this all becomes, with how decisively Lafferty sharpens the contradictions. The point is not subtle. Cathead is the system’s negative image. It is the place where pain has meaning. There, death is not sanitized. Individuals are not absorbed into the population machine. Cathead is a census taker’s nightmare, a census taker being an agent of optimization and surveillance. It may be crude, but it would be a slow reader who missed that Lafferty creates Cathead to insist that something beyond optimization exists.

The novel, of course, builds toward the execution of Thomas More, which is meant to expose the ultimate logic of the conspiracy. This is state ritual—staged, symbolically charged, and justified as necessity. More will lose his head, but Lafferty makes clear that the Leviathan does not understand what it is doing. In decapitating More, it is decapitating its own head. Without people like More, there is no state.

One of the strongest lines in the book is More’s: “I forbid the forbidding.” Lafferty’s distaste for conspiracy stems from this very impulse. In his view, conspiracy eliminates moral choice. More’s dissent reintroduces it.

Ironically, the execution produces exactly what the conspiracy was designed to prevent. Instead of closure, it generates myth, memory, and unrest. The crowd does not disperse into stillness. It breaks into fury and carnival. Bells ring that “had not been heard within living memory.” The people recover rage, wonder, and grief; and in attempting to extinguish transcendence, the system instead summons it. Thomas, who never sought the role, becomes—once again and against his will—what such systems always create in destroying dissent: a martyr. To the extent that people like the novel nowadays, they don't seem to like this part much. Too naive.

There is something curious about all this. Past Master is a classical conspiracy novel through and through. But its argument is that the true threat to humanity is not tyranny. Tyranny, one can survive, perhaps in miserable conditions like those in Cathead. The greater danger is final answers that are not eschatological. That is ontological tyranny. In a certain kind of conspiracy novel, someone arrives to set everything right. Thomas More is not that figure. He does not save the world. He reminds it that salvation will not be engineered.

Like Lafferty’s other novels about conspiracy—and they are all conspiracy novels—this is not a book of reassurance. It pushes its plot to the point where its characters must finally admit: only a god can save us now, which is what makes it eschatological and counter-utopian.

Pottscamp felt nothing; he was, of course, a machine without feeling. He had no conscience or compassion. This would not bother him at all. It wouldn’t? Then why did he—? Then why did he— WHAT? Sat on the ground and moaned and howled like an old Hebrew. And poured dust and ashes over his head. You’re crazy. He really did that? He really did that.