The Ominous Aftermath of The Dark Gods
A cautionary tale of what happens when, maybe, you get too close to the truth
I’m not the first person to write about The Dark Gods and I probably won’t be the last. Authored by Anthony Roberts and Geoff Gilbertson, and published in 1980, it has something of a reputation as ‘cursed book’. Allegedly it influenced The Stranglers in the making of their 1981 concept album The Gospel According to the Meninblack. And Pat Mills of 2000 AD mentions having been influenced by it when conceiving the Sláine series.
Anthony Roberts was a huge Tolkien fan. Born in 1940 and raised in Fulham, aged 19 he purchased a copy of Geoffrey Ashe’s King Arthur’s Avalon, became a devotee of the magazine The Ley Hunter, read The Flying Saucer Vision by John Michell and, inevitably, moved to Glastonbury in 1981. But even before then he was actively writing and publishing works addressing the Matter of Avalon. In 1976 the imprint he set up with his wife Janet – Zodiac House – published Glastonbury: Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem; an overview of all the major Avalonian themes, albeit with a geomantic and Earth mysteries bent, including contributions from the likes of John Michell, Colin Wilson and Nigel Pennick. Roberts was an agitator and polemicist; an idealist, freedom fighter and ‘revolutionary anarchist’ in his own words, and a self-appointed guardian of the Avalonian Spirit. He gave most belief systems short shrift – including much of the New Age movement; but at the centre of his worldview lay a firm belief that Glastonbury was the spiritual heart of Albion (on that claim, I don’t disagree with him); the key to realising and restoring a lost Golden Age.
In 1978, whilst still working as an archivist and librarian at The Times newspaper, Roberts met Geoff Gilbertson, and they began collaborating on the work that would become The Dark Gods. In Gilbertson’s view, Roberts ‘made exploration beyond the mundane dynamic… [and] made Glastonbury an interesting place to live.’ Also a Glastonbury resident, Gilbertson was, somewhat in contrast to Roberts, a bit of a hippy; an innocent abroad and a holy fool; inspirational, but with a paranoiac edge.
Nevertheless, the two found enough common ground to piece together The Dark Gods’ extremely odd, unified conspiracy theory; one where humankind has forever been subject to ‘sentient, discorporate [evil] forces inimical to the development of the human spirit’; so-called parahumans or ultraterrestrials (UTs) who manipulate human belief-systems to control the destiny of life on this planet.
In essence, the book argues that, across the ages, encounters with beings as diverse as fairies, aliens, demons, Men In Black (MIBs) and various supernatural creatures have all displayed common characteristics, suggesting a single species or entity at work behind each. They are identified as demonic in appearance, dark-skinned, slant-eyed, high-cheekboned and very tall, with strong auras of total menace. Aleister Crowley, Joseph Smith of the Mormon Church, George Adamski, and George King of the Aetherius Society, have all apparently encountered entities with similar attributes.
HP Lovecraft looms large as – like Kenneth Grant – Roberts regards the Great Old Ones as genuine incarnations of the UT phenomenon, who gain access to this world via psychic gateways facilitated by ‘black magick’ rituals (a state of affairs also echoed in the myth of Atlantis.) Lovecraft’s prose is therefore a coded message disguised as imaginative fiction. Likewise, CS Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy reveals by analogy how the earth lies in thrall to demonic entities, perpetually at war with the forces of light. And Tolkien’s works are similarly an exposition of the Dark Gods’ conflict, interpreted through deep myth in terms of evil forces’ opposition to the order of creation.
Gilbertson takes the Arthurian story of Parzival as another parable, where the black magician Klingsor is an earthly tool for archontic entities who seek to ‘pervert the perfection of God into a hideous reflection of their own twistedly evil ruin’. Klingsor creates a dark counterfeit of the true Grail Castle, luring knights into corruption and death. Thus, Parzival describes how baleful forces deliberately attempt to divert humankind from its true inheritance through deceit; the poisoned grail’s spell can only be broken when its empty and illusory nature is discerned.
Adam Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati is identified as a UT agency, its purpose to overthrow all forms of order and establish a ruling class to mould humankind according to the aims of its antagonistic, powerful overlords. The Freemasons, the Thule Society, and the Bilderberg Group are other UT fronts. Collectively they represent the elite servants of evil – the ‘illuminated ones’ – who venerate Lucifer the Light-Bringer and seek to establish the rule of the Dark Gods on earth.
The authors claim that Albert Pike, the Confederate Army general, Freemason, Illuminati member and Dark Gods disciple concocted a plan in 1840 to foment three world wars, according to his masters’ will:
The Third World War was to be fashioned by llluminati agents who would whip up the differences between political Zionists and the eastern Islamic world. This would produce a Middle Eastern 'Armageddon' that would destroy the two religions and further weaken the rest of the world powers who would be drawn into the conflict against their will. The three revolutions that would counterpoint all this carefully engineered turmoil were the Russian, the Chinese and the Indo-Chinese.
And, to be fair, in early 2025 this scenario doesn’t seem wildly improbable.
However, the apogee of these UT-powered organisations lay in Nazism where politics, occultism, magick, sociology, militarism, nationalism and misguided idealism were multiplexed into a seductive, demonic whole, with obvious consequences. As the political offshoot of the occult Thule Society, Nazism reified the Dark Gods’ agenda of moral inversion and societal chaos.
They are voracious in their appetites for psychic sustenance, and are essentially psychic vampires. The book makes the fascinating claim that these beings are fed via various occult groups whose purpose is to attract gullible idealists and place them under the control of diabolic intelligences via various hypnotic techniques. The initiation of individuals into these orders functions as a kind of false illumination i.e. not by the advancement and refinement of the soul ‘through attunement to the divine rhythms’, but by inadvertently opening themselves up to control by another more powerful coercive will.
These false occult groups can be identified by their denial of Christ as Messiah and Saviour – the enemy of the evil UTs. In their denial they ‘corrupt and destroy spiritual goodness and purity, while feeding on the life-force of their human initiates’. Suspects in this great adversarial psychic conspiracy include: The Rosicrucians, Theosophists, The Golden Dawn, the OTO, the A:.A:, Stella Matutina, Mormons, Scientologists, Aetherians, and Findhorners.
Samuel MacGregor Mathers of the Golden Dawn describes an encounter with the Secret Chiefs – entities who possess terrible superhuman powers and direct the Order’s efforts and who the authors align with the so-called ‘illuminated ones’ – in a manifesto he sent to all members on October 29, 1896:
As to the Secret Chiefs of the Order, to whom I make reference and from whom I have received the wisdom of the Second Order, which I have communicated to you, I can tell you nothing. I know not even their earthly names, and I have rarely seen them in their physical bodies… My encounters with them have shown me how difficult it is for a mortal, however advanced, to support their presence… I do not mean that during my rare meetings with them I experienced the same feelings of intense physical depression that accompanies loss of magnetism; on the contrary, the sensation was that of being in contact with so terrible a force that I can only compare it to the continued effect of that which is usually experienced by any person close to whom lightning passes during a violent storm; coupled with a difficulty of respiration similar to the half strangling effect produced by ether. As tested as I have been in occult work, I cannot conceive a much less advanced initiate being able to support such a strain, even for five minutes, without death ensuing. The nervous prostration after each meeting being terrible and accompanied by cold sweats and bleeding from the nose, mouth and ears.
Notably, the authors observe that the UT’s ominous interventions in human affairs seemed to occur on the 24th day of the month.
In particular, Rudolph Steiner is identified as an Illuminati stooge; a disciple of the Dark Gods, evident in his doctrine of moral reversal and in the promulgation of an initiatory programme of reversing and confusing the human mind, and distorting all its natural values.
Not even Dion Fortune – the great advocate of Glastonbury as wellspring and omphalos of the Western Mystery Tradition – escapes unscathed. Roberts criticises the initiatory nature of her Fraternity of the Inner Light, and its straying into more sinister aspects of ritual high magick, suggesting she too was lured into the precincts of the Dark Gods.
And the antidote to these existential threats? Love, harmony, spiritual and personal sovereignty. It is a surprisingly orthodox position; intellectually naïve and spiritually conservative. It suggests a desire for refuge in the certainties of Christianity. In Roberts’ words:
The struggle of good and evil is eternal, only to be reconciled through the transcendent and loving will of God in that final, eschatological cataclysm known as the Last Judgement!
So, overall The Dark Gods is a strange beast; a Robert Anton Wilson-esque neo-gnostic omni-conspiracy of which the likes of John Lamb Lash, Naomi Wolf, Miguel Serrano, Samael Aun Weor, David Icke, and Carol A. Reimer would be proud.
And yet.
The book possesses a strangely unsettling aura. Roberts’ wife Janet recounts how, after it had been published, and while he was working one night at The Times library, Roberts received a visit from two German men interested in where he had obtained his information about Rudolph Steiner. Roberts told them he had consulted a work called The Occult Establishment by James Webb. Within three months Webb, who was aged 35, was dead.
Plagued by illness, threats and censorship, The Dark Gods was almost never published. It was the last book Roberts wrote. In 1990, aged 49, he died of a heart attack upon Glastonbury Tor. Significantly, it was both the day of a full moon eclipse and John Michell’s birthday.
Gilbertson claimed he came under sustained psychic attack after its publication and blamed the book for various illnesses later in his life. Even while writing this essay I experienced a few odd moments: flickering lights and sensations of a gathering darkness in the corners of the room where I was working.
Geoff Gilbertson enjoyed a longer life than Roberts, although it was riddled with psychological instability. He died aged 67. The date? The 24th day of October, 2017…
Further Reading
In Memory of Geoff Gilbertson by CJ Stone
Geoff Gilbertson obituary at The Guardian
Review of The Dark Gods at Nocturnal Revelries
Review of The Dark Gods at Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy
Great article, very informative. It has inspired me to search out a copy for my collection. Perhaps the real dupes of the ‘Dark Gods’ are those paranoid souls who push conspiracy theories, like David Icke.
This is a brand new one for me, never heard of either the author or the book. It's incredible how a momentum can build behind the ideas in work such as this, insomuch as they go beyond just being talismanic, their influence almost becoming Lovecraftian in reach. There's a real feeling of battery-licking relationality too - especially when it comes to the physical descriptions which remind me a little of the now culturally perennial Nosferatu!