Vad är ursprunget och ur-exemplen på en "genomsamling av alla mysterier och konspirationer"?

Ett mycket inflytelserikt verk i genren av konspirationsfiktion var The Illuminatus! Trilogi av Robert Anton Wilson och Robert Shea, publicerad 1975. Det är en avsiktligt absurd blandning av ett stort antal konspirationsteorier, båda verkliga (många inspirerade av brev från konspirationsteoretiker som Wilson fick när de arbetade på Playboy) och uppfann av författarna. En paragraf från den här översynen om bokens version av Kennedymordet ger en smak:

Readers of The Illuminatus! Trilogy learn, for example, that John Dillinger, the infamous bank robber killed by the FBI outside a movie theater in 1934, actually survived the incident and turned up with a gun at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. But he was late to the event: several other organizations had already placed operatives on the scene with orders to shoot the President —and the real question, according to Wilson and Shea, isn't who planned the assassination of JFK, but which gunman managed to pull the trigger first. But if you seek ultimate answers, you need to dig below the scene of the crime, to the underground lair of the Dealey Lama, whose office is located under the sewers of Dallas. He’s a wise robed and bearded man who presides over a powerful secret society, and is perhaps more influential than either the President or conspirators up on ground level.

Men som översynen noterar är böckerna utformade för att röra med din känsla av verklighet i en slags psykedelisk, 60-talets motkulturstil:

Yet as I look back at my description of this book, I realize that I have misled you. Because this book is just as serious as it is absurd. Even as Shea and Wilson pile up ludicrous incidents on top of one another, they also want to convey words of wisdom. As strange as it sounds, given my summary above, The Illuminatus! Trilogy wants to possess the authority of non-fiction. The authors add footnotes and appendices, and work hard to substantiate many of their claims with citations and evidence. Not all of the sources are real ones—I am rightly skeptical when any author backs up claims with references to the Necronomicon by the "mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred. But much of the documentation withstands scrutiny. Shea and Wilson add to the peculiar flavor of their work by frequently inserting long passages that can only be described as a counterculture philosophy of life. When you reach the final pages of this work, you will find that your greatest challenge as a reader is not evaluating the literary merits of the trilogy, but determining how much of it the authors themselves actually believe—and, by extension, how much credence you ought to give to their claims.

C.S. Lewis (av Narnia berömmelse) skrev en serie romaner på 1930-talet som han kallade " Space Trilogy ". En av de viktigaste teman i dessa romaner var att den antagna mytologin av den antika grekiska och romerska världen verkligen återspeglar det interplanetära politiken i vårt eget solsystem:

Ransom gets much information on cosmology from the Oyarsa (presiding angel) of Malacandra, or Mars. Maleldil, the son of the Old One, ruled the Field of Arbol, or solar system, directly. But then the Bent One (the Oyarsa of Earth) rebelled against Maleldil and all the eldila (similar to the Valar in Tolkien's Silmarillion) of Deep Heaven (outer space).

På en brev beskriver Lewis boken sålunda:

I like the whole interplanetary ideas as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) p[oin]t of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side.

Ett senare exempel på en meta-mytologi skulle vara The Other Log of Phileas Fogg . Det var ursprungligen skrivet 1971 och innehöll en mängd olika mytologiska varelser såväl som fiktiva tecken.

The story takes place within the internal reality first imagined in the 1872 Jules Verne novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. Farmer includes many of the story's original characters, including the eponymous Phileas Fogg as well as his French valet, Passepartout. He also establishes that all of Verne's published works take place within the same shared continuity including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In addition, he includes other elements of crossover fiction, incorporating the Arthur Conan Doyle characters of Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty into his setting. These elements place Phileas Fogg and his entire supporting cast into the Wold Newton family of literary characters.