Edgar Allan Poe - The First Conspiracy Theorist

Edgar Allan Poe born January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849 was an American writer, poet, author, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the United States, and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

EDGAR ALLAN POE has been more misunderstood than any other poet of the recent past. While his life was beautiful and inspired, yet aspersed, his last moments had more of sublimity than those of any of his contemporaries. Throughout his life, Edgar Allan Poe lost the women he loved, including his mother, adoptive mother and wife, many to tuberculosis. Their absence played a huge role in his writing. He married his 14 year old cousin and as offensive as the marriage may be to modern mores, it appears to have been motivated by Poe's understandable desire to unite what little family he had, while his aunt, Maria Clemm—Virginia's mother—consented to the union, and always lived with the couple afterward.

Netflix did a show called the fall of the house of usher which was inspired by Edgar’s book the raven. His story tells a tale of Uber wealthy families and their selling of their soul to the devil. The price they pay doesn’t compare to the huge amount of death that follows the familes’ fortunes. They lose their loved ones but at the cost of millions who fell victim to their fortune. The movie spins hope which isn’t included in the book, about one family member who ends up saving the lives of millions giving the impression that evil and good cancel each other out. I don’t buy it. Edgar was the first recorded conspiracy theorist trying to expose the royal family bloodlines through poetry and short stories. The masses were brainwashed through controlled publications and the only logical way to expose the evil corruption is through code. 

Readers of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous prose and poetry might be unaware of how often he wrote about science. As John Tresch explains in “The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science,” in the late 1840s, near the end of his life, Poe had established for himself “a unique position as fiction writer, poet, critic, and expert on scientific matters – crossing paths with and learning from those who were producing the ‘apparent miracles’ of modern science.”

Poe exposed pseudoscientific hoaxes – and then, to get his own writing noticed, created them himself. He finally received critical acclaim for his now-classic short stories, among them “The Tell-Tale Heart” (which Tresch describes as “an act of violent irrationality [detailed] in the language of scientific method”) and “The Raven” (which Poe himself proclaimed “the greatest poem that ever was written”). Tresch has painted a full landscape of the journalism of the time, describing the conflicts between writers who made serious scientific observations and those eager to sensationalize or misrepresent new discoveries. “Poe saw his age’s many humbugs and its ‘men of science’ pushing for foolproof forms of scientific authority as secret partners,” writes Tresch. “Together they were establishing the modern matrix of entertainment and science, doubt and certainty. Those who successfully denounced the tricks of charlatans were precisely those with the skills to make themselves believed.”

Speculation and controversy were rife in the press. “In the 1830s and 1840s, the lines between legitimate science, political provocation, and crowd-pleasing quackery were exceedingly difficult to define,” he writes. His descriptions of the way the popular press blended news, entertainment, and hype will remind readers of the media landscape of present-day America, though Tresch himself refrains from explicit comparisons. Poe was also deeply interested in formulating theories about the origins of the universe and the nature of God. Near the end of his life, he wrote a philosophical-scientific treatise called “Eureka,” which has, for reasons that Tresch makes clear, fallen into obscurity. Poe boasted to a friend that “Eureka” was destined to “revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science,” but the result was something more confusing than revolutionary. The biographer labels it “a serious mess, a glorious mess, but a mess.”

Despite his success, Poe succumbed to the “perversity” that he believed was built into human nature: When the going got good, he began to sabotage himself. “One of the searing ironies of Poe’s life,” writes Tresch, “was that during this rise to fame, as he developed an ideal of the quasi-omniscient author in total control of the creative process, his life was falling apart – his career, his relationships, and his very mind – a victim of bad luck, alcohol, and self-sabotage.” In the end, the telltale heart of “The Reason for the Darkness of the Night” is this: “Poe’s fantastic tales, detective stories, and nonfiction writings dramatized the act of inquiry and the struggles, fears, hopes, and delusions of the human being undertaking it. His ... search for hidden causes places him at the center of the maelstrom of American science in the first half of the nineteenth century.” Tresch has produced a steady, clever, engaging literary biography that provides an excellent survey of an overlooked aspect of Poe’s writing.

Poe was a warning to all nations about the hidden elite, their pacts with the devil and what their true intentions are. To steal, kill and destroy everything in their path for profit. The love of money is the root of all evil and those that partake become murderers. Not only was Poe a gifted writer, his heart was to expose evil and through wisdom has continued to show the true intent of corporations and countries and their pursuit for world domination and everlasting life in human form to keep their riches.