12

The Hour of the Time debuted on WWCR on January 4, 1993. Known as World Wide Country Radio before changing to World Wide Christian Radio, the Nashville-based station was the biggest thing in shortwave at the time. Its massive 100,000-watt signal was capable of reaching millions (the company’s brochure says “nearly a billion”) of listeners around the world. Renting a regularly scheduled slice of prime time on the WWCR’s transmitter wasn’t cheap, but if you were Bill Cooper, a messenger whose message needed to be heard, it was the place to be.

Cooper had done episodes of The Hour of the Time in the previous year, but at random times, intervals, and hookups. Those early shows still retained the laid-back, Khalil Gibran–quoting detachment of the FM stations he listened to in the 1970s. By the time he reached WWCR, however, Cooper was a nearly fully formed presence, able to escalate from folksy plain talk to full-blown Jonathan Edwards “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” mode at the drop of a hat. As with his Radio Teen days, when he spread the credo of rock and roll to the captive kids of Red China, he was a man on a mission, good and getting better. The very first song he played on his inaugural WWCR show was the Beach Boys’ “Make It Big.”

While Cooper had been able to crash the rinky-dink ufology party by sheer force of will, the “patriot” radio market was another kind of minefield. Even WWCR’s mega-wattage was no guarantee of success. Here was a media with a history that included such figures as Father Charles Coughlin and the stem-winding priest from Royal Oak, Michigan, whose broadcasts endorsing the rising 1930s European fascism reached an astounding ninety million listeners per week. Mainstream conservative performers like Rush Limbaugh were attracting up to twenty million dittoheads a day.

Shortwave was the underground alternative, and like most sub-rosa scenes, the competition was fierce. WWCR already carried several “patriot” shows featuring off-grid stars like Chuck Harder and Tom Valentine. Cooper developed a healthy animus for both, especially Valentine, whose Radio Free America show occupied the prime 9–11 P.M. time slot and enjoyed the sponsorship of The Spotlight, the weekly newspaper of Willis Carto’s powerful Liberty Lobby. Other competition included “celebrity” hosts like William Pierce, head of the racist National Alliance and author of the seminal novel The Turner Diaries; militiaman Mark Koernke, aka “Mark from Michigan”; and G. Gordon Liddy, Nixon’s old Watergate plumber. The next time the feds come to your door, Liddy told his listenership of staunch Second Amendment supporters, “Go for a head shot; they’re going to be wearing bulletproof vests. . . . Head shots! Head shots! Kill the sons of bitches!”

In the face of such opposition, Cooper proclaimed The Hour of the Time to be “not like any radio program you’ve ever heard.” Cooper was his own man, totally independent. “There’s nobody here who is afraid of anyone, or anybody, or anything,” he told the audience on the debut show. “There are no vested interests in a career in radio, so if we get thrown off the air, it is not going to bother us one bit. We are not going to compromise anything we say no matter what pressure is put upon us. We’re going straight through with it all the way.”

During the nine-year run of The Hour of the Time, Cooper wildly exaggerated the size of the audience, regularly claiming listenership to be more than ten million. More likely, he topped out at five figures, often far less. Those who did tune in, however, remained deeply loyal.

A lot of it had to do with the nature of the shortwave experience. The cult of the ham radio hobbyist, the regular guy down the street with the big antenna on the roof, is one more American romance that has vanished in the Internet age. Cooper often lamented the ingress of faceless technology upon the self-esteem of the American male.

He told listeners about how he used to “take pride” in tuning up his car, adjusting the carburetor, “getting it to run a little rich the way I liked it.” It was something he learned from his father, who wouldn’t be caught dead in anything less than a V-8. Now, “just in my lifetime,” Cooper told the audience, “I’ve gone from driving automobiles that I could take apart and put together blindfolded by myself as a teenager, to cars that I can lift the hood and not even recognize most of what I’m looking at, except that I know that it’s an engine in there, some kind of system that ignites the fuel,” Cooper bemoaned.

It was one more way the controllers separated you from the utility of your person. This was how Silent Weapons worked, how they stuck the dunce cap of helplessness on your head.

Shortwave cut against the trend. With its throwback crackle and thrilling blurts of feedback, it connected to another time when any Joe Blow could cuddle up with his Sky Buddy and send his call sign out into the wild blue, getting all goony because the person on the other side of the line was in Botswana or Brunei. It was tech from a time when a man could look a machine straight in the eye, on a level playing field.

Yet even with powerful frequencies like WWCR, things could go wrong. The signal might be interrupted by the weather, spots on the sun, or maybe that electric fence put up by the asshole next door. It could also be, as many Cooper listeners were often convinced, that the government was jamming the show to keep his message from getting out.

Rob Houghton, a Canadian listener who later worked with Doyel Shamley to transfer the Complete Cooper MP3 library to the HOTT website, recalled his early years as a member of the audience.

“I remember sitting there, in my room. Sometimes friends came over, but mostly by myself, getting ready for Bill’s broadcast. I looked forward to it. I had my ‘pen and pencil by my side at all times,’ the way Bill always said I should because ‘tonight’s broadcast was going to contain important, very important information.’ And then, the transmission would go out. You’d get static, dead air. Sometimes it came back, sometimes it didn’t.”

It was part of the experience. If Bill Cooper possessed even a thin hair of the truth, it should not be available on demand, summoned up with the half-thinking stab of an index finger on a dashboard preset. You should have to work for it, seek it out, be privileged to hear it.

Stanley Kubrick’s monolith, 2001: A Space Odyssey

Cooper covered the patriot waterfront, broadsiding the usual suspects, the Federal Reserve, the lying media, the fat-cat Monopoly-board plutocrat elites, etc., etc. He threw in some Wild West ruralism and hit the Second Amendment stuff hard. Claiming to have spent years in law libraries, he produced voluminous arguments questioning the legitimacy of federal agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He did a twelve-part series on “asset protection,” offering seminars on how to draw up complex trusts to shield cash from federal overreach. Eighteen HOTT hours were spent reading a report prepared by his Citizens Agency for Joint Intelligence (CAJI) called “Treason,” detailing unconstitutional acts committed on a daily basis by elements of the US government, elected and not.

“This is not conjecture, this is not guesswork, it is documented,” Cooper said, channeling his inner Senator Joe McCarthy, to whom he bore an unmistakable facial resemblance. Here was the proof, he said, of treason by “every politician who has occupied any office since World War Two.” Anyone thinking they could stop the report was wasting his time “coming out here to get it,” Cooper said. As always, he had made 100 copies of the proof and sent them to trusted allies around the world.

There was no way to keep this information from getting into the hands of the American people, Cooper told the guilty. “It is too late for you. This is what will convict you.”

The early days of The Hour of the Time were a remarkably fecund period for Cooper. Every day seemed to bring a new brainstorm, another avenue of investigation through which to lay bare the vast powers conspiring to enslave hardworking Americans. To the trolls who called him a fall-down drunk, he said, “In the past few years I wrote a book that became a bestseller. I put out a full-size newspaper. I made a dozen documentaries. I do a nightly radio show heard around the world. If I’m a drunken bum, what are you?”

When he was manic, he could work all night. As Doyel Shamley said, “You came into the kitchen and he’d be typing at the table with a pot of boiling water, spitting, on the stove right next to him. He’d never even look up.”

But nothing in the HOTT catalog compares with Mystery Babylon, the massive forty-three-hour series that remains Cooper’s most revered work. If “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” exposed the contemporary blueprint for the Iluminati’s takeover of the planet, Mystery Babylon went far deeper, tracing the ontology of the organization back to its origins.

Like “Behold a pale horse,” the phrase “Mystery Babylon” dated back to the key source material, the book of Revelations, specifically Rev. 17: 3–5, where the exiled John of Patmos offers his searing description of the most famous of all prostitutes.

The Prophet wrote: “And I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.”

Mystery Babylon was nothing less than “the story of the entire human race, as seen by the Initiates and Adepts” of the hidden religion that ruled the world, Cooper said, placing the cosmology’s origin not at the moment of Creation as described in Genesis, or the unheard Big Bang of five billion years ago. Instead, Cooper found Mystery Babylon’s beginning at a distinctly more modern source: Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Commencing the series’ opening episode with the obligatory playing of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, Cooper said: “When I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, I was amazed, awed, to say the least. . . . The entire scope of the movie was overpowering and, for most of the people of the world, completely baffling. Most people who saw that movie did not understand from beginning to end what it was that they had experienced, but they knew they had experienced something profound, that something had been communicated to the dark, deep recesses of their mind which they did not understand, that they were incapable of understanding.”

Cooper wasn’t the only one in awe of Kubrick’s movie. As many members of the “baby boom” can attest, the overwhelming experience of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time was in keeping with the tumult of the times. In New York, the film opened at the Loew’s Capitol Theatre on April 4, 1968, the very day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. You walked mind-blown from Kubrick’s movie to see the gut-punching news going by on a ribbon of blinking lights in the middle of Times Square.

Almost immediately, riots broke out in African American neighborhoods across the country. In Washington, the local police were overwhelmed, forcing President Lyndon Johnson to send in thirteen thousand federal troops to help quell the disturbances. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley deployed ten thousand cops to the South and West Side ghettos. “Shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand,” Daley ordered. “Shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city.”

While this was happening, my hippie friends and I kept watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. We went four nights running. The first row wasn’t close enough. It was better to lie down on the plush carpet that sloped gently upward to the curved, eighty-foot-wide Super Cinerama screen. We peered up and soaked it in: the monkeys and the monolith, the ballet of the spaceships, the odd, furtive bureaucratic chit-chat about cover stories and something being dug up on the moon.

Then came the battle between man and his creations, a story that reached back beyond The Golem and Frankenstein and will continue on, long past Blade Runner, The Terminator, The Matrix, and half a million more dystopian plots yet to come. For Kubrick and his collaborator, Arthur C. Clarke, the joke was that HAL, the plaintive-voiced computer who decides “the mission is too important” to be left in the hands of the astronauts, played by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, who was the most human entity aboard the ship. Indeed, HAL’s demise at the hands of Dullea’s Dave Bowman is among the most excruciating death scenes in movie history.

“My mind is going, Dave,” HAL tells the astronaut, who is unscrewing the computer’s memory cells. “I can feel it . . . I can feel it . . .” Reduced to a second-grade learning level, HAL speaks of a tune he learned from his early programmer, Mr. Langley.

“It is called ‘Daisy,’” HAL says, offering to sing it for his killer.

“Yeah, sing it for me, HAL,” Dullea says, continuing his lobotomizing work.

“Daisy . . . Daisy . . . give me your answer, do,” HAL sings, his voice slurring as he runs down. “I’m half . . . crazy over . . . the love of yoooou . . .” It was probably the last game of chess a human being would win against a computer.

After that was the “space gate” acid-test stuff, the strange room at the end of time, and the giant bug-eyed fetus floating in the cosmos. No one knew what was happening, but that was what made it great. All through life, at home, in school, on whatever stupid job, you always had to have an answer. Yes, sir, no, sir, fifty Hail Marys. If your answer was “correct,” you got a check next to your name. 2001 freed you from that bondage. It flattened you to the floor with the joyful rush of no answer, of not knowing.

Risking his life on the Cua Viet in his PBR while me and my college-age buddies protested the rightness of his cause, Cooper missed the opening of 2001. But once he saw the film, his “life was changed.” He embarked on “many years of research,” determined to make sense of the bewildering film. Then it came to him why most people found 2001 so confusing. That was because 2001 was not made for most people.

The movie wasn’t for “the profane,” slug hippies like me and my buddies, along with every other plebeian soul on the planet. Rather, it was for the Initiates and the Adepts of the ancient religion, those who could understand the “symbology” of the “Mystery Schools.”

2001 was the key to “everything that has ever happened in the history of man, and everything that is happening now, and all that is to happen in the future,” Cooper told those who tuned in to the first episode of Mystery Babylon, which, like the prologue of Kubrick’s film, was called “Dawn of Man.”

He told listeners to “go to their local video rental store and watch the movie again from beginning to end” because he was about to explain it all, crack the code. 2001 was a new kind of confidential document, Cooper told listeners. Secrets were no longer stashed away in filing cabinets, kept on snippets of microfiche, or written in invisible ink. No spy died rather than divulge a code word. “Eyes Only” documents were now splashed across the 70mm movie screens, yet remained as classified as anything Admiral Clarey ever handled.

That’s because the keepers of Mysteries did not speak with a single voice. There were always two language systems at work. There was the “esoteric,” the hidden tongue known only to the overlords, and there was the “exoteric,” the vernacular of the everyman, what they allowed you to think and know. Such was the power and the arrogance of the Mystery Schools.

Those were the stakes with the Mystery Babylon series, Cooper told the audience. Through his now two decades of research, he had learned to recognize the true talk of the elites, which was their “symbology.” He was going to crack open the encryption the Rulers had used for more than six thousand years.

People had been killed for doing less, Cooper told the audience. He understood the risks. “Those of you who are smart enough to know what is transpiring here will understand that these are historic broadcasts and by making them I have sealed my fate.”

To understand the world from the beginning, it was necessary to start at the beginning. “Remember what happened in the Garden of Eden?” Cooper asked the audience.

“God told Adam and Eve to tend the Garden. Everything in Paradise was theirs” was the way Cooper told the story. “There was only one thing they couldn’t do. They couldn’t eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God commanded them not to. He told them what would happen if they did. ‘If ye do, ye will surely die.’

“Then Lucifer, through his agent Satan appearing as a serpent, seduced Eve by saying ‘God lied to you. He is hiding from you your own true nature.’ . . . Eve in turn seduced Adam.” That was the story in the Bible, the Judeo-Christian version of God’s expulsion of Man from Paradise, the Original Sin, the Fall. The serpent, the deceiver, was cursed by God to forever “go upon your belly and dust you shall eat.”

But this was not how the Adepts of the Mystery Schools saw it, Cooper told the audience. To them, the snake was the hero. To them, eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was the moment of liberation.

“You see, ladies and gentlemen, in the Mysteries they believe that Lucifer was good, and God, Jehovah, was the bad one. That’s because the Garden wasn’t a Garden at all but a prison where an unjust and vindictive deity was holding men enslaved, in the chains, the bonds of ignorance. . . . Lucifer set man free with the gift of intellect. And with the gift of intellect, Man could become God.”

This was the story of 2001, if you knew how to read the symbology, Cooper said. It was a retelling of the Garden of Eden story from the point of view of the Mystery Schools.

The film begins with a tribe of hairy apes milling around, surrounded by wild pigs and hyenas. This isn’t Yahweh’s Paradise or “the pleasant dwellings in gardens of perpetual residence” that Allah promised to believing men and women in the Koran. It is the Eden of Darwin, a grim utilitarian landscape described by Cooper as “a dark and gray and ugly world . . . with nothing growing, barren rocks, a barren desert.”

These prehumans worshipped the light, Cooper said. The sun, which brought warmth and made things grow was their God. Yet every night, at sunset, their God died, sending them into darkness. Night was the enemy. At night they could be attacked by more powerful, more agile predators. They lived in fear until the morning, when the sun, their God, resurrected the Earth.

Then one night, as the tribe of early men slumbered in a cave, they were awoken by the “humming of bees, millions of bees.” In the symbology of the Mysteries, Cooper said, “bees signify industry,” but not the monotony of the assembly line that drove people like Richard Sharpe Shaver to hear the inner thoughts of his coworkers through factory welding machines. This was “industry working together in a societal form . . . the very basic rudiments of a new society.”

And there it was: The Monolith, the sleek black slab Sir Arthur C. Clarke called The Sentinel in his 1948 short story of the same name. Where did it come from? Why does it suddenly appear here, among these monkeys? That’s the Mystery, a thing unsaid.

In the movie, at first the apes are afraid, but their leader, called Moon-Watcher, approaches the towering stone. He reaches out a half-human palm to touch the impossibly smooth edge, but draws it back. He tries again, comes closer, his finger barely an inch from the sheer surface, the same distance Michelangelo left between the outstretched digits of Adam and the bearded Almighty on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

For those of faith, this gap between man and God represented the unknowable wonder of the universe, but in the Mysteries, there is no separation between God and Man. As the ape places his palm upon the monolith, God, the warden of Paradise, melts out of existence like the Wicked Witch of the West. For all his power, the prison deity has now been subsumed into the birth of human consciousness, a world of the Mind, where Man is the measure of everything.

The 2001 “Dawn of Man” episode was the Garden of Eden story of Mysteries, as told by the adept Stanley Kubrick, the Bronx-born son of a Jewish doctor from the Grand Concourse, Cooper said, describing what happened next, one of the best-known sequences in the annals of cinema.

Moon-Watcher, now illumined by contact with the monolith, picks through the dry bones of a dead animal, looking for a not-yet-petrified morsel to eat. As Also Sprach Zarathustra swells once more on the soundtrack, the ape grabs a desiccated femur.

“He flops it from one side to another,” Cooper said with proper understated suspense. “He hits another piece of rib bone that flies up into the air, and you could see the wheels turning in the mind of this individual.”

It was at that point, Cooper said, “that monkey became the first priest of the Mystery Schools,” because the next thing that happened with this new gift, this intellect and this original thought, was an attack on another group and “the killing of another primitive human being.”

This is what illumination had brought to the mind of the first man, the unremitting narrative of mayhem and suffering. That much was clear when the ape-man exaltedly throws his murderous bone into the sky.

Higher and higher it flies until it turns into the spaceship carrying HAL, the inevitable product of the cult of the mind, which, given half a chance, sought to kill his human masters. It was an ellipse that took in all of history, Bill Cooper said.

This was a teaching that had survived the ages, passed from one roving band of hominids to the next until it was formalized six thousand years ago in the Mesopotamian kingdom of Babylon, the land of the famous tower, where King Nebuchadnezzar II brought the Hebrew prophets Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Daniel, and the rest into captivity after sacking Jerusalem in 587 BC. It was the same Babylon the exiled John of Patmos said was the home of the purple-and-scarlet whore, her golden cup full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.

From this opening, Mystery Babylon traces the pathway of what Cooper called the Luciferian Philosophy. Reading from such texts as E. A. Wallis Budge’s 1911 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection and Manly P. Hall’s Freemasonry of the Ancient Egyptians, Cooper filled the audience in on how the Mystery Schools arose in Egypt, where the teachings were translated into myth. The story told of how King Osiris, symbol of the balance between order and disorder, was murdered by his jealous brother, Set, embodiment of violence and chaos.

Isis, both wife and sister of Osiris searches for her husband’s body, which Set has torn into fourteen pieces, each part buried in a secret place. She finds the severed parts save one, Osiris’s penis, which had been thrown into the Nile and eaten by a catfish. With the help of the wise Thoth, Isis replaces the phallus with a member of gold, raising Osiris to the physical plane just long enough for them to copulate, a union that produces Horus, who will avenge his father.

The way Cooper spins out the history, the Egyptian priestly class then organized the Mysteries into an intellectual hierarchy. It was considered essential that the knowledge passed through the ages remain circumspect, cloaked from the common man, who was considered too coarse to be trusted with the treasure of his own mind.

Greek scholars, acknowledging that Egypt was the center of human thought, came to Alexandria to study the forbidden wisdom. First was Pythagoras, who developed geometry, an abstract language unto its own. Plato then came to Alexandria, where he spent thirteen years studying the Mysteries before his initiation, which was performed, Cooper said, in one of the dark serpentine halls of the Great Pyramid.

According to Cooper, the Luciferian cult of “worshiping the intellect, or wisdom, or the mind” could be summed up in the philosophy of the Gnostics (from gnosis, Greek for “knowledge”), one of the many early Christian and Jewish sects that emerged following the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Devoting an entire Mystery Babylon episode to gnosticism, Cooper made his feelings known by opening the program with a series of horror movie shrieks and playing the theme from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera.

He then read from A History of Secret Societies published in 1961 by Arkon Daraul, the pen name of Idries Shah, a Sufi guru/sophisticate. A member of the Club of Rome, one of Cooper’s most detested secret societies, Shah was also the founder of the London-based Institute for Cultural Research, where his friends and pupils included such writers as Robert Graves, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, and, most provocatively, J. D. Salinger, the reclusive author of the 1950s bastion of eastern US elitism, The Catcher in the Rye.

As Cooper read, “Gnostic belief is that there are two principles: that of good and that of evil. A balance must be struck between these forces; and the balance is in the hands of the Gnostic—the Knower—partly because nobody else can tell whether an action is for the eventual good of the individual or the community.

“There it is again,” he exploded, issuing the cry of the so-called anti-intellectual strain that has run uninterrupted through 250 years of American heartland dissent: “They know, you don’t. Knowledge belongs to them.

“They are looking to attain gnosis, through which they will receive apotheosis. And they believe that they are the only ones in the world who possess truly mature minds and, thus, the only ones in the world capable of ruling the rest of us, whom they refer to as cattle—cattle.”

Cooper then described how the Mysteries followed the path of history and conquest, from Greece to Rome and eventually throughout the empire. With each stop, like coats of paint on the Maltese Falcon, the gnosis acquired another layer of subterfuge. During the Crusades, groups like the Knights Templar brought the Mysteries to Western Europe. The Templars morphed into groups like the Freemasons, who covered the secrets with ever more ornate lore and ritual.

From there the saga enters the modern age, with the founding of the Bavarian Illuminati in Ingolstadt, Germany, on the iconic date of May 1, in the iconic year of 1776, two months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Led by Adam Weishaupt, a young professor and priest trained by Jesuits “to foment rebellion everywhere,” the Illuminati fused the Mysteries with temporal politics.

What began as a freethinking humanist campaign intended, as Cooper said, “to topple the kings and queens of Europe who said they ruled by Divine Right,” Weishaupt’s Illuminati reputedly played major, if unnoticed, roles in both the American and French revolutions.

The ostensible goal remained the same as it had been in the Eden of 2001, to free the human mind, to allow the full flowering of the species’ dominance to take hold over the Earth. It was an irresistible romance, an ultimate hubris. It was Cooper’s position that the utilitarian Illuminati had staged a virtual coup d’état within the Mysteries, their supposed progressive attitudes leading to the rise of capital, communism, and fascism. The notion of “imperfect men ruling imperfect men will never work,” Cooper said, telling the audience it was not by chance that the last three episodes of Mystery Babylon centered on the occult history of the Third Reich. It is where the cult of Man as God always led, “to madness.”

Running 280,550 words in transcription, Mystery Babylon represented Cooper’s most formidable project to date. It took him a full hour-long episode just to read half the bibliography.

There was a personal angle to the story as well. As he noted in Behold a Pale Horse, Cooper had once been a member of a secret society himself, namely the Order of DeMolay, a Masonic organization for young men between twelve and twenty-one.

Founded in 1919 in Kansas City by local businessman and Masonic lodge leader Frank S. Land—later a trustee of Harry Truman’s Presidential Library—the DeMolay Society was presented as an innocent fraternal organization stressing unaffected all-American virtues of courtesy, comradeship, and patriotism—a better sort of Boy Scout.

Joining the DeMolays was his father’s idea, Cooper wrote in Behold a Pale Horse. As a young man who, he said, often found himself in trouble, Cooper felt his father thought joining the society “would give me something to do.” As he would later find out, there was a lot more to the DeMolays than met the eye.

For one thing, the group was named for Jacques de Molay (1243–1314), the twenty-third and final grand master of the Knights Templar. By the time de Molay came to power in the late 1200s, the Templars, made fabulously wealthy through nonstop plunder, had transitioned from holy mercenaries to a supra nation-state. One of the first international banking cartels, the Templars accrued power by lending money to European monarchs, a practice later taken up by the house of Rothschild.

King Philip IV of France was not interested in paying the debt he owed the Templars. On Friday the thirteenth in October of 1307, he had de Molay arrested, torturing him until he falsely admitted heinous crimes. In 1314, when de Molay renounced his statement, he was burned at the stake in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. His reputed final words were often recited by the boys of the DeMolay Society: “The dreadful spectacle presented to me will not make me confirm one lie by another. Life offered me on such infamous terms, I abandon without regret.”

Attending meetings of the society, Cooper became acquainted with the key rituals, including the Ceremony of Light, in which the young DeMolay member is taken into a darkened room lit only by seven burning candles placed at a sacred altar. Called “sentries,” the candles symbolized “beacons in the darkness, lights to illuminate our pathway as we journey ever onward down the road of life.” If the young DeMolays failed to achieve their goals, these flames would be extinguished, and the world would become muted in the shadows and darkness.

Throughout his life, Cooper talked a lot about the process of initiation, almost always in terms of trust. Whether it happens at boot camp, in a frat house, or joining the Mafia, the initiation process qualifies the candidate as someone who can be relied on, “one of us.” In one episode of Mystery Babylon, Cooper says “initiation ceremonies of secret cults invariably involve tests, sometimes most severe ones. . . . It bonds members together in mysticism.”

He talks about how much he treasured his experience as a young DeMolay in Behold a Pale Horse. “I loved the mystery and ritual,” he writes. But he was never initiated. It is with obvious regret that he explains that, due to his father’s shifting military obligations, his family soon “moved to a location out of reach of any lodge” and he became separated from the society. Still, the association was important, Cooper thought. In Behold a Pale Horse he writes that he believed it was his fleeting linkage with the DeMolay Society that gained him access to Admiral Cleary’s files during his stay in Naval Intelligence. Every officer he met there was a Mason, Cooper wrote.

It was something to think about, now that he was a father again. Mystery Babylon was the ultimate conspiracy, a Luciferian plot dating back to the first glimmering of consciousness. The mystery priests of the mind were everywhere, enlisting young people with their ever more technologically sweet candy to suck on.

At the outset of Mystery Babylon, Cooper told the audience that as important as his words were, listening to the music he played during the narrative was equally essential. “Listen to the lyrics,” Cooper advised the audience. “Research the title. Your age group is not the only age group listening, so it doesn’t make any difference whether you like the music or not. It all has a message.”

The Mystery Babylon series included many tunes, the Liza Minnelli version of “I Can See Clearly Now”; U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”; “Long As I Can See the Light” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. But none of this music was as significant, or as troubling, as “When You Wish Upon a Star,” which Cooper used to close the “Dawn of Man” episode.

Written by film music stalwarts Leigh Harline and Ned Washington, “When You Wish Upon a Star” was first performed in Walt Disney’s 1940 animated feature Pinocchio. The tune won the Oscar for best original song. It had been covered by everyone from Rosemary Clooney to Sun Ra. It was an American classic, which was exactly Cooper’s point.

How many parents had sung “When You Wish Upon a Star” to their beloved children before putting them to sleep? It was the theme song of The Wonderful World of Disney, which was one of Pooh’s favorite TV programs.

It was part of Pooh’s homeschooling, to be able to tell a good song from a bad one. And, of course, she was a quick study. One time when he was feeling giddy, Cooper did an entire show in the persona of Wolfman Jack, his all-time favorite deejay. Cooper went wild that night, screaming “Mr. Cooper, he gone” in the Wolfman’s signature howl. Pooh loved it. Later, when she began to appear on the program along with him, Cooper used the Bill Haley line “See ya later, alligator.” To which she replied, on cue, “After a while, crocodile.”

“If you think your child is too young to learn, you’re wrong,” he told listeners. “Their brain is just waiting there. It’s empty. It wants to be filled. A child is in a constant state of discovery and wonder, and whatever you want to teach them, they will soak it up like a dry sponge in a pan of water.” That’s the greatness of the human mind, but also the danger.

Case in point was “When You Wish Upon a Star,” especially as sung by Jiminy Cricket, the top-hatted insect manservant of a wooden puppet best known for a nose that grew every time he lied.

How was Pooh to know that Jiminy Cricket’s creator, Walt Disney, one of the greatest shapers of young minds in the history of the world, was a 33rd-degree Mason of the Scottish Rite? How was she to know that the morning star Jiminy wished upon was Lucifer?