The Real Conspiracies Behind the Film

Here are some of the actual conspiracy theories that influenced the film’s story.

Bohemian Club

The Bohemian Club is a private gentleman’s club located in the San Francisco Bay area. Originally founded as regular meeting of journalists and artists in 1872, it eventually expanded to except businessmen, global politicians and military commanders. The group meets annually at a camp named the Bohemian Grove. Numerous pagan rituals are performed at these annual meetings including the “Cremation of Care” ritual where robed figures burn a figure in effigy in front of the statue of a giant owl. Documented members of the Bohemian Club include George HW Bush, George W Bush, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Colin Powell, Walter Cronkite, Donald Rumsfeld, William Randolph Hearst and David Rockefeller Sr. to name just a fraction.

Though the Bohemian Club boosts some of the most powerful men in politics and commerce, it claims no business is discussed within the camp and the group has no overall agenda. Conspiracy theorists would of course tell you otherwise and will point out numerous suspicious shifts in foreign policy and global monetary trends, which seem to coincide with the key players involved in these events attending a meeting of the Bohemian Club. Whatever you believe, what is undeniably interesting is the almost complete lack of media coverage on groups such as the Bohemian Club. As conspiracy theorists are keen to point out, if 100 of the worlds most famous actors or athletes met and performed a pagan ritual in the woods, every journalist in the world would be reporting on it. Yet the men who actually possess the real power in the world do this, and other than a handful of articles, there’s barely a whisper of it in the mainstream press.

Further Information:

Time Magazine Reports on the Bohemian Club
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,871313,00.html

Vanity Fair Reports on the Bohemian Club
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/05/bohemian-grove200905

Presidential Adviser David Gergen speaks to Alex Jones about the Bohemian Club
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NOjmuO972Y

Alex jones sneaks into the Bohemian Club with a hidden camera
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzLjFfSmpuo

Bilderberg Group

The Bilderberg Group is an annual invitation only conference that centers on the main geo political issues facing the western world. Bilderberg meetings are closed to the public and are made up of a who’s who of power players from business and politics. This has made it one of, if not the biggest target of conspiracy theorists that believe secret agendas are being formulated in these highly secretive meetings. The group is named after the Hotel de Bilderberg, which was the location of their first meeting in the Netherlands in 1954. Heads of state, including Juan Carlos I of Spain and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and many prominent politicians from North America and Europe have attended past meetings. In recent years, board members from many large publicly traded corporations have attended, including IBM, Xerox, Royal Dutch Shell, Nokia and Daimler.

Further Information:

CNN Report on the Bilderberg Group
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I3sqpRtKUA&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL205B1538CF729368

Canadian News reports on the Bilderberg meeting in Ottawa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWOLJmi5Efw

New World Order

New World Order (NWO) is the term conspiracy theorists believe refers to the agenda of the secretive power elite to create a one-world government. Conspiracy theorists believe that the ultimate goal of secret organizations like the Bohemian Club and Bilderberg Group, as well as prominent think tank organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission, is to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, which would replace sovereign nation-states. Though used throughout history in different ways, the term New World Order gained prominence in recent years after George H.W. Bush began to use it frequently when referring to the post Soviet era of a one super power world. The theory is that with the cold war ended, the power elite were able to fast track their agenda to incrementally centralize power in the world through the creation of international oversight bodies such as the IMF and World Bank, which could enforce laws globally across borders. Also key to the centralization of power was the creation of multi country unions such as the European union, African Unions and eventually the North American Union.

Sceptics of the NOW conspiracy theory believe that the term New World Order has been used by countless people for over a hundred years with no connection to one another. Each of them having a different intention behind the term that has nothing to do with a one-world government. They believe the NOW theory is simply a paranoia of the world’s march towards globalization and the loss of individual sovereignty.

Further Information:

Lou Dobbs CNN Report on the creation of a North American Union
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3E4s4JTzsY

CNBC Report on the North American Union currency “The Amero”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYXx1ZL28UE&feature=related

Mithraism

In the film, the fictional secret society known as the Tarsus Club centers around the worship of an ancient pagan god named Mithras. Though the secret society is fictional, Mithraism itself was a very real mystery religion practised in the Roman Empire from the 1st to 4th centuries AD. Worshippers of Mithras had a complex system of seven grades of initiation which were performed largely in underground caves called mithraeum. Because they were underground many of the mithreaum have survived intact and been discovered all across the former Roman Empire stretching from Scotland to the heart of India. The Mithraic cult was a vast and entirely secret society made up of primarily Roman soldiers.

Though it’s a point of debate among Mithraic scholars, many believe that the Roman deity Mithras is actually the same deity as the Persian god Mithra who was worshipped over 2,000 years before the Roman incarnation. The Persian deity was said to have been born on the 25th of December, died and was resurrected three days later. Again, Mithraic scholars differ greatly on this aspect, but many theories have been put forth suggesting this is in fact the true genesis of the story of Jesus Christ.

Further Information:

Mithraism discussed on the Stephen Fry program
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j1dnLS8fuM

Essay on Mithraism by David Ulansey
http://www.mysterium.com/mithras.html