There was an Order of the Golden Dawn and there are at least two fictional Orders of the Black Dawn, one to be found in SM Stirling's A Taint In The Blood. Stirling's originally Satanist Black Dawn was the precursor of the Council of Shadows which does rule the world.
Poul Anderson, invited to contribute to an anthology of original stories about the Knights Templar, was thus given the perfect opportunity to imagine a powerful secret occult organization. Instead, he downplayed it. His contribution, "Death And The Knight," is a Time Patrol story which explains one detail of the Knights' history but otherwise reveals that their supposed idol was merely an Abrahamic relic. The Templars were not a front for the Patrol, did not practice magic and, of course, do not rule the world.
In fact, Stirling's Council of Shadows and Anderson's Knights Templar are an instructive contrast. Beginning from similar premises, in this case secretive organizations, two writers can move in very different directions, in this case either dark urban fantasy or plausible historical fiction.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Your last paragraph here inspired a wild urban fantasy thought in me. What if Stirling's Satanist Order of the Black Dawn was in medieval times the enemy of the Knights Templar because the latter was an earlier form of the Brotherhood combating the Shadowspawn? I can imagine Black Dawn agents intriguing at the courts of Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V to get the Templars suppressed, playing on the avarice of the French king to get him to bully a weak pope to agree to the destruction of the Templars. And, we have to assume a remnant of the Templars survived to continue the struggle against the Black Dawn.
Sean
Sean,
We can assume nothing else!
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
It certainly seems plausible, in paranoid urban fantasy terms! (Smiles)
Sean
Conspiratorial thinking itself tends to produce real-life conspiracies, often imitating or reacting against imaginary ones. It's the life-imitates-art thing again.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
That surprises me! I know there are SOME real plots and conspiracies, but not that "conspiratorial thinking" tends to encourage conspiracies. The most obvious real live conspiracy I know being that of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members scheme and plot to seize power in many Muslim countries and strive to achieve the long term goal of imposing Muslim rule on the entire world. But the ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood are no secret to anyone whose eyes are open and who has also read Andrew McCarthy's THE GRAND JIHAD.
Sean
Russian politics would be a good example. Conspiratorial camarillas are the rule there because Russians tend to assume that's how things work.
During the Cold War, otherwise well-informed and intelligent Russians were always asking Westerners about which faction or conspiracy was behind some series of stories in the London Times or NYT, for example. They couldn't imagine it happening otherwise.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
And that in turn goes straight back to the situation seen during the last half century of Tsarist Russia, when the Okhrana and the various revolutionary secret societies, including Lenin and his Marxists, were intriguing against each other. The Tsarist Okhrana were amazingly successful at infiltrating and even taking over many revolutionary groups. But sometimes Okhrana agents got so lost in the game of double, triple, and quadruple agents that they behaved like revolutionaries themselves, plotting against their own regime. And many revolutionaries, including, perhaps, Stalin himself were Tsarist double agents.
The plotting, double plotting, reverse plotting, etc., became so complex that it's no surprise that paranoia became so endemic in Russian life.
Sean
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