Alkonti School

The Archontics are introduced as a fourth-century religious movement founded in Armenia and marked, in the novel’s account, by an anti-Jewish theology. They later reappear inside the narrators’ fabricated history as the supposed origin of a Russian branch of a secret organization, a role that lets the narrative show how conspiracy theories transform religious difference into accusations of political control.

Origins and Doctrine

In the historical sequence that Casaubon presents to Belbo, the Archontics emerge in the fourth century amid movements of Manichean inspiration spreading across the Mediterranean. Their founder is identified as Peter of Capharbarucha, and their doctrine places the Jewish God, Sabaoth, in the seventh heaven and identifies him with the Devil. Salvation, in this account, requires rejecting Sabaoth and baptism in order to reach the Great Mother of Light in the eighth heaven.

Belbo responds to the explanation with ironic acquiescence, treating the group’s rejection of baptism as though it were a decision made for the purposes of their conversation. Casaubon then moves on to the Massalians, who are described as a distinct later movement. The transition places the Archontics within a sequence of groups the speakers connect to Manichean ideas, but the Archontics themselves are identified by their specific cosmology and anti-Jewish teaching.

The Archontics in the Invented Plan

The group’s historical description becomes material for the Plan, the elaborate conspiracy that Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi construct by linking disparate movements and events. In their later account, Diotallevi claims that the Paulicians originated the late-nineteenth-century antisemitic campaign associated with the Protocols. Belbo then divides a supposed Jerusalemite group into three branches: a neo-Templar branch, a Baconian branch, and a Russian branch identified with the Paulicians.

Within this invented genealogy, the Archontics’ ancient anti-Jewish theology helps make the alleged Russian branch seem to have a long history of opposition to Jewish communities. Belbo’s scheme attributes to the Paulicians a reactionary alliance with landowners and influence at court, contrasting them with the Jewish intelligentsia he describes as liberal and revolutionary. The argument is not evidence of a real institutional continuity: it is an example of how the Plan turns religious labels and historical fragments into an imagined lineage of political antagonism.

Antisemitic Fabrication and Political Use

The novel places this conspiracy-making alongside the history of the Protocols and the political uses of antisemitic claims. The text recounts how the Protocols were assembled from earlier political writing and circulated as purported evidence of a Jewish plot. In the narrators’ conspiratorial retelling, Rachkovsky substitutes Jews for Witte in a text derived from the writings of Elie de Cyon, allowing the forged document to appear to expose a Jewish conspiracy and to undermine Witte’s political program.

The account also describes how the conspiratorial narrative continually absorbs contradictory material. The Protocols attribute mutually inconsistent aims to the supposed conspirators, while the speakers reinterpret those contradictions as further parts of a hidden plan. The Archontics’ anti-Jewish doctrine is thus not simply an isolated detail in a history of religious movements: once incorporated into the Plan, it becomes another supposed link in a political story that assigns Jewish people responsibility for social and governmental change.

Significance in the Narrative

The Archontics’ role is brief but revealing. Their specific beliefs provide a historical-sounding origin point for the Plan’s imagined Russian branch, while the surrounding discussion shows how the speakers convert an ancient religious movement into support for a modern conspiracy. The novel’s larger account traces the Protocols to earlier texts and political fabrication, making clear that the apparent continuity is manufactured rather than demonstrated.

That mechanism reaches its most disturbing expression when a speaker claims that the Holocaust’s bureaucracy must have served the Plan’s search for a hidden clue. The claim treats mass murder as a puzzle to be solved within the conspiracy, rather than confronting its reality on its own terms. Read alongside the Archontics’ appearance in the invented genealogy, it demonstrates the Plan’s power to absorb history into an antisemitic fiction—and the ethical danger of treating that fiction as explanation.