The Tartarian Empire: Conspirituality, Pop Culture, and the End of the Past

ABSTRACT: This article investigates the workings of a conspiritual community focused on the "Tartarian Empire," which members see as a lost, utopian realm erased from memory by a conspiracy. They claim that it was home to a highly spiritual, peaceful society based on the use of free energy. To study the dynamics of this community, we analyzed the content of a subreddit linked to it and employed an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to study key narratives and findings. Following the trail of the community's media usage, a deeper contextualization is proposed: the view of history found here can be analyzed as a symptom of a general crisis of social historical consciousness. Accordingly, this study is a step in reorienting the study of esotericism from elite discourse to popular movements, and bringing it into conversation with other fields in cultural studies.