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 have been thinking about something Daniel Otto Jack Petersen recently said: that he found it difficult to get into Lafferty’s Fourth Mansions (1969) because of its conspiratorial theme. Unlike Petersen, I am probably too quick to assume that all social organization is impossible without extensive conspiracy, both benign and malign. That difference in disposition made me want to sketch a few thoughts about Past Master (1968), which as a text is just as much a conspiracy novel as is Fourth Mansions, though with some important qualifications. By setting Past Master alongside Fourth Mansions, I hope to clarify what kind of conspiracy fiction Lafferty writes, and why it complicates genre expectations that usually come with reading conspiracy fiction. Given that he was a man besotted with conspiracy, fans of conspiracy fiction and conspiracy fantasy aren’t much of a voice in his reception.

Obviously, the conspiracy at the heart of Past Master, as in Fourth Mansions, is not just political. What we have here is ontological conspiracy. In fact, this is the only kind of conspiracy novel Lafferty ever wrote. I suspect that Peterson and I both respond to Lafferty for this reason: we are drawn to the way ontology is handled in his fiction because it is so unusual. When Lafferty is working at full strength, he is almost always dealing in ontological conspiracy. What makes Lafferty’s real-world remarks about political conspiracy challenging is that the ontological dimension that buffers his views in the fiction drops away. No one that I can see wants to think about how Lafferty see real world conspiracy, but its displacement onto the fiction is unavoidable. I say displacement because it is a core category in how I read, and I view all fiction as displacements of myth. Lafferty consistently displaces his historical anxieties into metaphysical fiction.

So let’s consider Past Master. This is the one novel in which Lafferty takes a real honest-to-God historical conspiracy, centered on a historical figure, and relocates it to an alien world. Accordingly, one should not ever forget when reading it that the conflict between Thomas More and Henry VIII was itself a historical conspiracy—not in the sense of secret cabals, but as the coordinated manipulation of law, ideology, and power to remove a principled obstacle. The importance of real history is paramount in the last third of the book, and to the degree that readers do see this, they are in for a disappointment. Henry did not proceed against the real Thomas More for acts of treason but for treason of conscience. He engineered statutes—the Act of Supremacy (1534) and the Treason Act—that redefined More's silence as an expression of his guilt and his convictions as thought crimes. More recognized the trap immediately. “If a man were accused of treason for silence,” he said, “then silence were no defense.” These are the terms on which More died.

The historical prosecution of Thomas More relied on coerced testimony, most notably that of Richard Rich. More exposed Rich in court as unreliable and self-serving, a real snake, but Rich's testimony was accepted anyway because the outcome had already been decided. In an interesting way, More’s refusal to swear the oath was not rebellion; it was abstention. The state nevertheless conspired to treat his noncompliance as hostility. His final declaration—“I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first,” which Lafferty reworks in Past Master—was not pious rhetoric. It was an indictment of a regime that equated loyalty with submission. More simply would not be absorbed into the new Henrician state.

Ir is hard to now feel how heretical Henry’s break with Rome was and how desperately it required unanimity. A great recent book on its generational consequences is Clare Jackson’s Devil’s-Land, which will help anyone see how weird the English state was and would be. When I was doing my PhD, an advisor at the University of Chicago told me, “Jon, if you want to know the real story, read Cobbett’s work on the Reformation.” Then he advised me not to acknowledge its existence because it is not a work anyone in academia can cite seriously, even if it one that can rewire your sense of history. It is a stone-cold masterpiece. It was also a book Lafferty knew because it was one of Chesterton’s bibles, and it looks to me like an nfluence on Past Master, even if that cannot be proved. In any case, More’s conscience made unanimity impossible. So the machinery of crown, Parliament, and compliant courts moved like a machine 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 substrate of Past Master.

In Lafferty’s novel, however, we are not dealing only with a plot carried out by a few against the many, though we certaibly have that. We are primarily dealing with a condition in which an entire civilization has been rendered silent, put in the position of the historical More, either through somnolence, in the Astrobe Dream, or through political disenfranchisement, in Cathead. Astrobe, at bottom, is a propaganda system. It refigures 16th-century England through the twentieth-century effects of mass media, just as Henry’s proclamations, oaths, and courts manufactured unanimity in the sixteenth century, a figure eight. Astrobe presents itself as the culmination of human aspiration. Golden Atrobe, promise of a world without want, fear, guilt, or conflict.

I’ve written recently about Lafferty’s counterfiguration of light, and Astrobe is one of another instances of it. Its golden radiance shines from space, but it blinds. Its brilliance is like a policeman’s flashlight aimed directly into your eyes, while pretending to be a doctor checking your pupils. It exists to disable vision, not to clarify it. What it obscures are existential truths—the truths that make moral life and second-order virtues possible. Second-order virtues are those of Irenean theodicy: no courage, mother of all virtues, without danger.

In the golden cities, illumination only matters as an instrument of control. Everything is visible, optimized, and legible, or at least that is the ideology. For that very reason, nothing can be judged, chosen, or sacrificed for. Judgment presupposes obscurity. Choice presupposes cost. Sacrifice presupposes the possibility of loss. Where everything is already illuminated and managed, these conditions disappear.

Two locations in the book create a stereoscopic effect as theaters of power. The first is Convocation Hall:

The party rolled to the head of the Concourse. They stopped and dismounted. They walked the long Concourse between the rows of heavenly aspens. Then the whole sky broke open! The Exultation Trumpets blasted a deafening golden blare like twelve Gabriels announcing the second coming. The electrum doors of the Convocation Hall swung open to the soaring sound. This was a striking effect that had been devised two hundred years before. This was their moment, and the shabby incandescent party entered. All the great ones of Astrobe sat in the high circle. They sat there in amazement, some willingly, some not. Many of them had been drawn there protesting that they would not go. The compulsion puzzled them, and they knew much about the management of minds. And the Thomas More party stood in the Arena below them, but it was not at all as if the great ones were looking down on the party below. Then all the great ones stood. And they hadn’t intended to. The great ones of Astrobe stand only in the presence of a Superior. This was the Past Master, dead a thousand years, a dumpy little almost-old man, a pinkish little elf on a world of golden-bronzed giants. But on him in that moment was the magikos, the charismatic grace, the transcendent magnetism, the presence, the messiah-ship, the draíocht. He had erupted in the middle of them with the dirt of the grave still on him, so it seemed. Then came the Ovation like a pouring ocean. It broke in heavy crested waves, each one higher than the former. It lasted a great while. It lifted them up, all the golden cynics who had forgotten what it was to be exalted. Some of them would speak of it later as their fools’ carnival, yet it would always remain a stunning thing in their lives. Thomas had them hooked without speaking a word.

The other is the sanctum of the Nine:

There was a door there. It hadn’t been there before, and it shouldn’t be there now. “What are the odds?” Thomas asked himself loudly. He surged through the door (snakes crawling back into his mind), knowing that he went from the world into a dream, knowing that he went from life to something queerer even than death. He slammed the door heavily and bolted it behind him. And he stood in total darkness. “Sit at the table with us,” said a voice, a wrong-side voice, either inside Thomas’ head or without. “Now we talk.” “Set a light,” Thomas said. “It’s blind dark.” “We don’t need a light,” the voice said. “Stop fighting the things in your head! They can see for you. Is it not so? Do you not see now, and not by light?” Thomas saw now, and not by light . . .

Lafferty gambles that these options are so repulsive that the reader will understand the counterintuitive appeal of Cathead. Cathead is dark, filthy, and dangerous. Yet it is in the human darkness of Cathead that meaning returns to the world. Only there, where the dark night of the soul can take place, can people confront realities that cannot be waved off by explanation or anesthetized by comfort. What Astrobe’s light suppresses is not just ignorance, but moral depth. Cathead is the human problem: can we eliminate suffering from the human condition so entirely that we cease to be human?

The spiritual conspiracy in Past Master claims to eliminate suffering, but it can make that claim only because it aims to eliminate being itself.

On a straightforward reading, the instruments of this are the Programmed Persons and their Killers, an array of authority that claims to act without malice. It does not persecute out of hatred or desire but out of a higher commitment to correctness. “I have not been false to the Vision” becomes the formula of moral innocence. Lafferty’s point has seemed grotesquely didactic to some readers: The system punishes not crime but dissent, because difference asserts human identity. Behind this logic lies the pull toward Ouden, the void, the negation that presents itself as completion.

Thomas More enters the novel as the point of disruption. The usual way saints are presented reverses the truth. Their human features are stripped away, leaving behind a figure drained of particularity and crowned with an abstract nimbus. That picture gets things backward. One becomes a saint not by becoming less human, but by becoming more fully what one is meant to be. Sanctity is an intensification of humanity, not its negation.

The fact that saints can appear less human to others is itself part of the conspiracy the novel is diagnosing. In Past Master, More becomes a saint at the moment he becomes most fully a man, at his most human point. He cannot be absorbed into the system’s annihilating logic. His decapitation is therefore an attempt to decapitate Cathead, at least symbolically. And, as Lafferty’s universe makes clear, that attempt does not succeed.

Historically, More is a difficult saint. My parish has one of his relics in its altar, yet as a human being he has always troubled me. The historical figure was a temporizer. It is hard not to admire him, and equally hard not to recoil from him. To borrow Flannery O’Connor’s famous line, More would have been a good man if someone had been there to shoot him every moment of his life.

In this respect, one of the minor weaknesses of Past Master may be that Lafferty softens aspects of More’s character too much. Still, he does not ignore the arrogance that allowed More to drift toward moral sleep—until the moment arrived when only one decision remained. He could become a saint, but only after every other option had failed.

The More of Past Master is neither rebel nor loyalist, neither naïve believer nor cynical nihilist. He sees the beauty of Astrobe and senses its emptiness. “It is a whited sepulcher,” he says early on—a gospel image Lafferty returned to repeatedly because it captures the contradiction between surface perfection and inner decay. What More understands is that Astrobe is mass-mediated, and that behind mass mediation lies conspiracy.

More’s spiritual perception confuses the system. The Programmed Killers cannot determine whether he is a threat or an asset, because he both affirms and questions the Dream. Historically, More was also an early technocrat, one of the first Western thinkers to reflect seriously on the construction of the state apparatus. He is therefore both precursor and remainder. The system cannot eliminate him without admitting its own incompleteness.

This is where Ouden appears. Ouden crystallizes the metaphysical dimension of the conspiracy. He claims to stand beyond good and evil, declaring himself “nothingness.” But this claim contains a contradiction. In order to complete his project, nothingness must act. It must devour. “Many consider the Nothing a mere negative,” Ouden says, “but it is a vortex.”

Ouden hates the infinite. He perceives only the bad infinite, because he is the bad infinite. Unable to acknowledge any other form of infinity, he concludes that the only solution is to end existence itself.

“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 his philosophy, the bad, or spurious, infinite is an endless progression that never completes itself. It is like counting numbers without end, always adding one more, never arriving at a whole. It remains trapped in a binary opposition between the finite and what lies just beyond it. This infinite is “bad” not because it is vast, but because it negates the finite without overcoming it. It postpones completion indefinitely.

The good, or true, infinite is something quite different. It is not an endless beyond, but a self-relating whole in which the finite is preserved rather than discarded. As Hegel puts it, “The infinite is the negation of the negation, affirmation, being which has restored itself out of limitedness.” The true infinite completes itself by returning to itself. It is not an infinite line extending without end, but a circle that has come home.

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

For Hegel, the “true infinite” is affirmative being (Sein), the negation of negation that sublates (aufhebt) finitude by preserving it within itself. It is achieved through mediation rather than through the mere opposition characteristic of the bad infinite. This stands in contrast to Aristotle’s influential claim that magnitude is not actually infinite but only potentially infinite, for example through endless division. That position was methodologically inherited by medieval Aristotelian scholasticism, even while theologians affirmed an actual infinity in God. For Hegel, the good infinite is the line that has returned to itself. It is closed, complete, and fully present.

Ouden, then, embodies the bad infinite without recognizing it as such. He understands his condition only as entrapment and concludes that the only escape is final closure. This is the logic of the Astrobe conspiracy. Its aim is not to dominate the world, but to end it. The good infinite reconciles the finite. The bad infinite seeks to flee 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: the bad infinite that takes existence itself to be an error. Under his banner, the Programmed Persons regard individual human beings as noise—flawed, particular lives like those found in Cathead. These are not problems to be solved but glitches to be erased. Ouden’s vision of completion is not power but cessation. He wishes to stop being in order to be most himself. This is the terminal logic of the bad infinite: complete epistemic and ontological closure, a blind parody of the good infinite.

This is also the point at which conspiracy fiction begins to converge with utopian logic. As one of my favorites, Fredric Jameson argues, utopia is not primarily a blueprint but a diagnostic form. It organizes a difference so absolute that it exposes the limits of historical imagination from within the present. Its failures of content (schematic worlds, thin characters, frozen politics) are not accidents but symptoms. They plot the point at which imagination collides with ideological closure. Conspiracy fiction inherits this structure. It promises not perfection, but historical interpretability. History would become intelligible, and oppression potentially reversible, if only the hidden structure of control could be identified and disclosed. Name it to tame it. In this sense, conspiracy fiction is a utopian form that has traded redemption for exposure.

Cathead exists precisely to refuse that promise.

Set against Ouden’s logic is Cathead, the part of the novel that many readers find tedious. Cathead is not revolutionary in the sense of a programmatic revolt. It offers no manifesto and no plan. When it does act, its efforts are ragged and improvised, almost absurd in their inadequacy. In its degraded condition, it is Lafferty’s green revolution at the point of collapse—so far gone that it is poised to become either a Charge of the Light Brigade or a Pickett’s Charge: an action undertaken not because it will succeed, but because nothing else of worth is left.

Cathead is filthy, violent, and lethal. It resembles the Hobbesian state of nature, yet because it refuses incorporation into Leviathan, it is also anti-Hobbesian. It is the practico-inert the state cannot assimilate: the residue of past human action that confronts the present as resistance rather than as principled self-understanding.

The inhabitants of Black Cathead reject Astrobe and choose suffering, because relative dehumanization is preferable to absolute dehumanization. That distinction is key. As Rimrock says, life in the ocean depths is much like life in Golden Astrobe: one loses one’s identity. He never regretted becoming a "Cathead man." Rimrock is a ansel but also a man, because man contains all animals, the zoon athropikon: by becoming a man, that special ontological category, Rimrock transcends the species identity Lafferty invents for him. The closest historical analogue is the desert fathers, who abandoned the comfort of Roman cities for hunger and filth because they sensed that comfort produced a false life. Pain proved that they were alive. This is precisely what Paul says of Cathead: better a life of misery than no life at all. As the other Paul says, “For I consider the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is revealed to us.

Readers often groan at how sharply Lafferty presses this point. But Cathead is the system’s negative image. It is the place where pain has meaning, where death is not sanitized, and where individuals are not absorbed into the population machine. It is a census taker’s nightmare. Lafferty creates Cathead to insist that something exists beyond optimization. As people begin to feel the pressure of our new technological dispensation—from Palantir on down—they may come to understand Cathead rather more sympathetically.

Past Master is a conspiracy novel, but its argument is that the true threat really isn’t tyranny. Christianity can out master it. Tyranny can be endured, even in places like Cathead. The greater danger is obeisance to final answers that are not eschatological. In many conspiracy novels, this is how it works. Someone appears to set things right. Final things are this postponed. More’s role in the novel is to counteract this feaurue of the secular conspiracy novels. He reminds us that salvation cannot be engineered. Heaven, Hell, death, and judgment await.

Like Fourth Mansions, Past Master is more far concerned with hope than reassurance. Freddy and More largely stand outside the conspiracy. They are patients rather than agents. Yet because the conspiracy is subordinate to providence, both are drawn into the center at the decisive moment, not by conspiratorial logic but by an order the conspiracy cannot see.

This follows the pattern Hegel called the cunning of reason, and theology names providence. It runs from Genesis—“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good”—to Acts—“delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.” When history forgets transcendence, transcendence returns.

Astrobe has many mansions, but none are fourth mansions. This is why Past Master is as eschatological and counter-utopian as Fourth Mansions. Eschatology is not utopia. Those who deny final things will be tempted to recode eschatological language into immanent terms. Lafferty refuses that move.

Each novel drives its plot to the point where conspiracy loses explanatory power. The meaning of events is not the exposure of a deeper cabal but the imposition of a limit on planning itself. The consummation of history lies beyond conspiratorial agency. In both novels, it arrives through judgment and grace.

This makes them strange even by the standards of conspiracy fiction. Conspiracy novels locate meaning in hidden human control. Lafferty’s novels reject that assumption. They are against the machine in precisely the sense Paul Kingsnorth names: a resistance to the unmaking of humanity. A providential novel locates meaning in an order that uses and judges human plots without being reducible to them.

In the end, these are not conspiracy novels at all but soteriological ones. The modern novel largely excludes salvation history, and Lafferty stages that exclusion as a problem. Readers remember scenes and devices but forget the books as wholes, as if the novels themselves induce amnesia. That failure of recall is part of the argument.

We lack adequate terms for what Lafferty is doing. Fourth Mansions is a post-novelistic ascensional allegory. Past Master is a post-novelistic hagiography, dressed in science fiction to reactivate older narrative forms.

Lafferty's question is not who controls the world, but what causes human beings to forget salvation. Lafferty knows who controls the world. Every one of his novels says the same predictable thing with extreme unpredictability: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” So what is at stake is not liberation from oppression alone, but restoration through judgment and grace.

There is an old critical saw: from the modernism you choose, you get the postmodernism you deserve. In Lafferty, the equivalent term is utopia. In no small measure, how one understands utopia determines the Lafferty one will see. We can think of a stark triangle that looks like this:

How do you read it?

I take Lafferty’s conspiracy novels to be anti-utopian not because they refuse hope, but because they refuse the substitution of any non-divine form of design for redemption or eschatological fulfillment. They are conspiracy novels only from a limited angle. Readers tend to emphasize one side of this triangle—conspiracy, utopia, or eschatology—when approaching the work, and the interpretation they arrive at depends mainly on which element they privilege.

I usually place critical pressure on the utopian and conspiratorial sides of the figure, because to my eye the underlying structure in Lafferty behaves less like a traffic cone than like a coat hanger. The sides do not support the apex; they hang from it.

This post began with the question of conspiracy in Lafferty. In Petersen’s remarks, that question was linked to a further one: whether one ought to continue reading Lafferty once one becomes aware of his views about real-world conspiracy. Petersen is right: eat at whatever restaurant you want. But that question, with its community-level ethos, does not strike me as analytically interesting. It belongs to a discussion about reader disposition rather than to an inquiry into the structure or meaning of the work itself. It turns on whether Lafferty’s views complement utopian expectations brought to the text. Do Lafferty's politics so alienate your enjoyment that it evaporates? That is a question for fans as fans, separate from issues of academic integrity, which is a normed set of reading protocols based on a different order. I see nothing utopian in Lafferty, so the question has little bearing on how his novels should be read. In an unknown letter, Lafferty recommended reading Thomas Molnar's Utopia: The Prennial Heresy (1967) for a view near his own. People interested in Past Master should read it.

For the same reason, I would not try to extract a utopian or emancipatory program from Lafferty's work, especially one detached from his actual commitments. Doing so would be like attempting to build a basement in a house one owns in New Orleans, or like being excited to open a packet of stolen money and then being surprised when it explodes paint. The conditions are unfavorable.

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.