This book is a study of religions, cults and the political orders that grew up with them. It begins with the Indo-Iranian world, the prophet Zarathustra and the god Mithra, and ends with two modern systems that claim to stand outside every tradition before them: the Knowledge Seekers Workshops of Mehran Tavakoli Keshe, and the sociobiological philosophy of religion in Mitchell Heisman’s Suicide Note. In between it follows Judaism and the Second Temple sects, the Greco-Roman mysteries and Gnosis, Christianity from its first communities to its modern divisions, Islam and its branches, the religions of India and East Asia, the Western esoteric tradition and Freemasonry, Satanism and modern occultism, the new religious movements, and the long entanglement of belief with power. Its title, Religions, Cults and Power: From Zoroaster and Mithra to the Singularity, states the arc.
Purpose
The owner’s brief asked for a study, not a judgement. The aim is to bring together, in one ordered and cross-referenced work, what the sources in the LSN library actually say about these subjects. Where the sources agree, the book says so. Where they disagree, it sets the positions side by side with the evidence each author offers. The study does not rank traditions, defend or attack any faith, or decide which reading of a contested question is correct. A reader who wants to know what Mary Boyce, Albert Pike, Karen Armstrong, Douglas Reed, Mehran Keshe or Mitchell Heisman claims on a given point should be able to find it here, stated in that author’s terms and credited to that author.
Politics runs through the whole book because the sources themselves keep finding it there. The Sasanian maxim that religion and kingship are twins, which Shaked traces into Ibn al-Muqaffa’s theory of government [Shaked, From Zoroastrian Iran to Islam, #60406, article VI], is one formula of a pattern that recurs from the Achaemenid inscriptions to the Vatican’s concordats and the Islamic Republic. Part 14 is given entirely to that pattern, and the political side of each tradition is also treated in its own Part.
Scope and sources
The book has 174 chapters arranged in 17 Parts, all of them complete. Part 1 (ch. 1–8) lays the foundations the later Parts build on: the method of the study, prehistoric and archaic religion, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan and Ugarit, the Indo-Iranian inheritance, the Vedic gods, and the sacred drinks and sacred kingship of the earliest temple-states. The comparative chapters of Part 17 draw on these foundations throughout.
All material comes from two bodies of evidence. The first is the LSN library, a private collection of roughly 120,000 works. For this subject it holds scholarly monographs (Boyce on the Zoroastrians, Vermaseren on Mithras, Dunn on Christian origins, Armstrong’s histories of religion), primary texts in translation (the Avesta and Pahlavi books, the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, the Zohar, the Analects, Pike’s Morals and Dogma), works by religious insiders and apologists, polemics from every side, esoteric and Traditionalist writers, conspiracy literature, and two large single-author corpora: several hundred Keshe Foundation workshop transcripts and summaries [Keshe Foundation, KSW Summaries 1-393, #378714] and Heisman’s treatise of about 1,900 pages [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, catalogue record]. A substantial part of the collection is in Romanian, and Romanian sources are quoted in English translation.
The second is the library’s offline reference shelf, a set of Kiwix books that includes the English and Romanian Wikipedia, Wikisource and Project Gutenberg. The shelf supplies dates, names and mainstream summaries, and it is the main check against which single-author claims can be read.
The mix is deliberate. A study that used only academic works would leave out much of what the library holds on Freemasonry, Satanism, the secret-society literature and the new religious movements, and it would have no way to present the Keshe and Heisman material on its own terms. A study that used only the alternative shelf would have no mainstream baseline to measure it against. The book uses both and labels both.
Method
Three rules govern every chapter.
Facts as the sources present them. Material is not softened, shortened or omitted because it is offensive, politically sensitive or contrary to current consensus. The Vendidad’s purity laws, the medieval accusations against Jews and heretics, the anti-Masonic and anti-Jesuit literature, LaVey’s elitism, Keshe’s statements on Israel and the Vatican, and Heisman’s most provocative theses are all reported as their sources state them. Nor does the book add moral commentary or disclaimers to them.
Fidelity means attribution. No single author’s claim is presented as established fact. Sentences take the form “According to Moulton…” or “Keshe claims…”. When the library contains no independent check on a claim, the chapter says so. The most important such case is Keshe: the library holds no independent biography or journalistic study of him, so his biography and his account of his own influence are reported as self-account throughout Part 15 [ch. 149; ch. 158].
Neutral connective prose. The editorial voice links, summarises and compares, but it does not argue. Where a chapter sets out a debate, as with the date of Zarathustra (ch. 9), Cumont and his critics (ch. 24), the historical Jesus (ch. 48), the brainwashing controversy (ch. 125) or the Waco fire (ch. 133), each side is given its strongest evidence as its own authors give it.
How citations work
Citations are inline, in square brackets. A library work is cited as [Author, Short Title, #work_id], where the number is the work’s identifier in the LSN library catalogue and can be used to retrieve it. A section, chapter or passage heading is added when known, for example [Boyce, Zoroastrians, #55117, ch. 6 “Alexander and Iran”]. After the first full citation in a passage, a shortened form such as [Boyce, #55117] or simply [#55117] refers to the same work. Keshe workshop transcripts are cited by workshop number and work id, as in [Keshe, KSW 360, #378072]. The reference shelf is cited as [Wikipedia: Article Title] or [Reference book: Title]. Page numbers are given only where the source supplies them; quotations are taken from the library text to which they are credited.
How to read the book
The Parts run roughly in historical order, but each one can be read on its own. Cross-references in the form “(ch. 26)” point to the chapter where a topic is treated in full. Every chapter ends with a short list of key points. The Introduction that follows maps the whole arc Part by Part and is the best place to choose a route. Readers interested mainly in comparison can go straight to Part 17, whose eight chapters set the traditions side by side on cosmology, the nature of God, saviour figures, the afterlife, sacred time, priesthood and power, and close with a master timeline and with a final measure of Keshe and Heisman against the whole study (ch. 167–174). The bibliography lists every library work cited, by work id.