Conspiracy theories are everywhere around us. Generating countless websites, books, films, series, and podcasts, and encompassing nearly every major negative event that has taken place since the end of World War II, conspiracies have become a phenomenon that anyone as a citizen and thinking individual has had to cope with in the last few decades, arguably reaching a peak during the Trump presidency, with the rise of QAnon and various conspiracy theories about the current Covid-19 pandemic (Barkun 2017; Amarasingam and Argentino 2020; Mitchell et al. 2020; Uscinski et al. 2020).Not surprisingly, the rise of conspiracy theories has also coincided with an increasing scholarly interest, especially within psychology and the social sciences, although studies of conspiracies in literature and film have also grown in number during the last two decades. What has been much less thoroughly researched, however, is how the hermeneutical and epistemological mechanisms that lie at the foundation of conspiracy theories—what I term “conspiracy thinking”—have sneaked into other forms of discourse, and especially those that are far removed from classic conspiratorial themes such as the New World Order, Freemasonry and the Illuminati, the JFK assassination, or even ufology. In other words: Can conspiracy thinking also be traced where there is no hidden or evident conspiracy? What are the consequences for our understanding of the texts that contain and disseminate such modes of thinking? And are the boundaries between a conspiratorial and a legitimate interpretation of a work of art or literature always clear-cut?The aim of this article is to study two contemporary examples of conspiracy thinking related to Henrik Ibsen's plays, and to show how these hermeneutical forms have sneaked into discourses—such as literature and drama, and the critical reflection on them—that in themselves do not have much to do with conspiracies. Although my study is limited to Ibsen, I claim that this example is just one of many that take place in contemporary readings of Western literature. For while blockbusters like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003) have contributed to spreading conspiracy theories widely in literary form, there is also a flourishing literature that seeks to find encoded messages and secret layers of meaning in canonical literary works. Just to mention two famous examples, the same Brown's Inferno (2013) draws upon the long-standing tradition of conspiracy theories related to Dante's Divine Comedy, and the works of William Shakespeare have been subjected to a long series of conspiratorial readings, arguably reaching a peak—at least in a Norwegian context—with Erlend Loe's and Petter Amundsen's mashup of theories about Shakespeare's persona and the coded messages that the English dramatist allegedly left in his texts (Loe and Amundsen 2006). These theories, as extravagant as they may appear, have made their way to mainstream media through both books, films, and TV series, and have garnered considerable public attention.This article focuses on two case studies that have several features in common with the examples mentioned above. These are Hemmeligheten bak Peer Gynt (Benneche 2017; The Secret behind Peer Gynt, henceforth Hemmeligheten) a documentary film that was aired by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the play, and Peer Gynt-koden (Larsen 2006; The Peer Gynt Code, henceforth Koden), a pseudoscientific book published by the Norwegian academic publisher Abstrakt Forlag on the occasion of the centennial of Ibsen's death. I will argue that the interpretations these works present, although apparently marginal and not particularly influential on Ibsen scholarship, are a product of the much larger international phenomenon of conspiracy theories. Studying them allows us to identify not only how conspiracy thinking has spread to mainstream discourse to such a degree that its recipients are not likely to recognize that it is at its basis conspiratorial, but also to make a more general point about the pitfalls of interpretation that readers and scholars alike may fall into.In addition, such case studies help us understand the fascination that canonical works of literature exercise on conspiracy theories. Very often, it is not obscure and unknown works of art that are the object of such theories, but classics of world literature, such as Dante or Shakespeare. Conspiratorial readings aim at convincing a global readership that everything we know about a specific segment of our shared cultural heritage is wrong, and instead present alternative facts and truths. The same mechanism can be found in the two examples examined below. It is, in fact, hardly a coincidence that it was precisely Ibsen's 1867 play Peer Gynt that became the object of such interpretations, and that these were promoted through an academic publishing house and the mainstream media.In this article, I will use Umberto Eco's concept of “hermetic semiosis” as my first methodological tool. I will discuss the hermeneutical mode of reception it rests upon, and how it is applicable to the two examples mentioned above. As I will show in more detail, hermetic semiosis offers relevant interpretive strategies for conspiratorial readings of works—of which Hemmeligheten and Koden are good examples—that are not “hermetic” in a strict sense, but that share a hermeneutical approach with selected esoteric currents. With the help of Karl Popper's Conjectures and Confutations (orig. pub. 1963), I will show how hermetic semiosis is at the core of conspiracy thinking's mode of interpretation. After having described how my main methodology can be framed within conspiracy thinking, I will proceed to an analysis of the two texts, in order to isolate and discuss how their claims resonate with this term. Before presenting the theoretical and methodological framework and analysis, I will first address how and why Peer Gynt seems to be so permeable to hermetic semiosis and conspiracy thinking.As Ellen Rees puts it in Ibsen's Peer Gynt and the Production of Meaning, “among the many beloved texts that make up the canon of world literature, few have been put to use so actively and in so many ways in the production of identity . . . as Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt . . . has been in Norway” (2014, 7). Such a link between Ibsen's play and the search for identity is first and foremost to be understood in a national context, where Peer Gynt has acquired a status as a sort of Norwegian national epos, as “the most canonical work by Norway's most indisputably canonical writer, seen from within the Norwegian context” (Rees 2014, 8). Such status has, according to Rees, caused “a compulsion to participate in the text in both conventional and surprising ways” (2014, 7). Most specifically, with remarkable frequency within the late modern, globalized conjuncture in which we live, Peer Gynt is activated in public discourse as a tool for understanding the current situation, as a touchstone for confirming cultural identity, or even as a sort of prophetic code. . . . There is, so it would seem, a relatively common belief (or desire) that Peer Gynt holds some key to understanding what it means to be Norwegian in a globalized world. (Rees 2014, 9)In partial contrast to these national claims, Rees understands the play as having a “profoundly parodic nature” (2014, 11), one that resists a stable interpretation of the play and especially of its ending (Rees 2014, 17–8). Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's rejection of a fixed identity in late modern society and cultural production, she makes a clear argument against two main avenues of scholarly interpretation of the play, a Hegelian and Cartesian one: “I argue that Peer Gynt should be understood as expressing a fundamentally non-transcendent world-view” (Rees 2014, 13, 19). Rees questions “an interpretive tradition that searches for overarching ‘unity’ in the text, be it narrative, thematic, or aesthetic, which if properly mapped will reveal a hidden truth” (2014, 133). Therefore, according to Rees, Peer Gynt's status as a “national epos” is highly paradoxical, and the play hardly seems to contain a clear-cut “message” or to allow a straightforward interpretation, be it about cultural identity or otherwise.Engaging thoroughly with Rees's argument would take us far beyond the scope of this article. To my mind, her insistence on Peer Gynt's parodic nature (which is viewed as a source of possible, diversified and ever-changing interpretations of the play) runs the risk of denying the play any meaning whatsoever; having peeled it like Peer's onion in the iconic scene of the play, Peer Gynt risks crumbling into an inconsistent and meaningless text. The important point she makes, however, is about the productive side of this inconsistency. While such a feature has allowed many different interpretations of the play, the search for a unity of interpretation—which is arguably to be expected in a piece of literature that is considered to support national claims—has resulted, in its extreme consequence, in conspiratorial interpretations like the ones I will analyze in this article.The Italian semiologist Umberto Eco coined the term “hermetic semiosis” in the late 1980s and discussed it in a number of works. In The Limits of Interpretation (orig. pub. 1990), he uses this term to describe a mode of interpretation that is typical for Gnostic Christianity in the first centuries CE, one that was revived by the hermetic thinkers of the Italian Renaissance. This mode is based on “principles of universal analogy and sympathy, according to which every item of the furniture of the world is linked to every other element (or to many) of this sublunar world and to every element (or to many) of the superior world by means of similitudes or resemblances” (Eco 1994, 24). Hermetic semiosis, Eco continues, “assumes that everything can recall everything else—provided we can isolate the right rhetorical connection” (Eco 1994, 27).Central to hermetic semiosis is an idea of analogy between an element A and an element B, which causes the informed reader to make a connection between them. Eco starts by describing possible principles of resemblance such as metonymy, antonomasia, iconicity, and homonymy, and identifies the central hermeneutic step for the hermetic semiotician: “The main feature of Hermetic drift seems to be the uncontrolled ability to shift from meaning to meaning, from similarity to similarity, from a connection to another” (Eco 1994, 26–7). In other words, any element can be a sign pointing at something else, if one has the eyes to see.Two years later, in Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992), Eco expanded on the implications of hermetic semiosis. Although “from a certain point of view everything bears relationship of analogy, contiguity and similarity to everything else,” the fundamental difference between a “sane” and a “paranoiac” interpretation “lies in recognizing that this relationship is minimal, and not, on the contrary, deducing from this minimal relationship the maximum possible” (Eco et al. 1992, 48; emphasis in the original). A paranoiac interpretation is based on an “obsessive method” in which basic rules of interpretation of evidence are ignored. Whereas typically “evidence is considered as a sign of something else only on three conditions: that it cannot be explained more economically; that it points to a single cause (or a limited class of possible causes) and not to an indeterminate number of dissimilar causes; and that it fits in with the other evidence” (Eco et al. 1992, 48–9), when it comes to hermetic semiosis, it “goes too far precisely in the practices of suspicious interpretation, according to principles of facility which appear in all the texts of this tradition. First of all, an excess of wonder leads to overestimating the importance of coincidences that are explainable in other ways” (Eco et al. 1992, 50; emphasis in the original).Such a hermeneutic method may call to mind practices of suspicious reading and interpretation that spring from post-structuralism, deconstruction, and feminist/queer theory. There is indeed a thin line between the “paranoiac” interpretation described by Eco and the suspicious practices of interpretation sketched by scholars like Eve Sedgwick, who points out that “in a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant” (2002, 125–6; emphasis in the original). Sedgwick maintains that “paranoid inquiry” should be considered as “one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds” (2002, 126), but she is aware that “the broad consensual sweep of such methodological assumptions . . . , if it persists unquestioned, [will] unintentionally impoverish the gene pool of literary perspectives and skills” (2002, 144). Sedgwick's point is a warning that hermeneutic practices, including academic ones, are not immune from paranoid interpretations. The main difference between hermetic semiosis and suspicious academic reading practices lies precisely in the treatment of evidence; while the latter practices usually engage in a scientific dialogue with other interpretations and ground their conclusions in scholarly methods, hermetic semioticians often arbitrarily put pieces of evidence in (real or fictive) relation to other elements. In addition, hermetic semiosis—in contrast to scholarly methods of critical inquiry—often blurs registers of importance, blowing details out of proportion and holding them up as proof of a new, true meaning of a work of art that has previously gone undetected.The basic concepts of hermetic semiosis that are important for the present study are the following: analogy, paranoia, suspicion, and excess of wonder. All these are crucial to understanding how this mode of interpretation left the native environment of Gnostic Christianity, evolved through the centuries, and contaminated more recent forms of interpretation and (re)writing. As Eco points out, in fact, “this attitude toward sacred texts (in the literal sense of the term) has also been transmitted, in secularized form, to texts which have become metaphorically sacred in the course of their reception” (Eco et al. 1992, 53). Eco is primarily concerned with the afterlife of Dante's Divine Comedy, which has spurred the work of a great number of “Followers of the Veil,” as he calls them, who “identify in Dante a secret language or jargon” (Eco et al. 1992, 54). In this article, I will argue that Eco's category applies to Peer Gynt precisely because of the fundamental, if not outright “sacred” status it has gained in a Norwegian context; further, the interpreters behind Hemmeligheten and Koden fully realize the potential that the Dantean Followers of the Veil that Eco refers to have shown.However, a step back has to be taken before we proceed. One possible question that may arise about using hermetic semiosis with regard to Peer Gynt is that it concerns a rather marginal segment of reception, one that has left little or no mark on Ibsen scholarship and has not gathered a huge fan base; also, it can be argued that, at least in the case of Hemmeligheten, there are no direct esoteric references of the kind Eco points out.1 It is here that paranoid interpretation can open up avenues of research that go beyond hermetic semiosis in a strict sense. Once more, Eco is crucial to understanding this transition. In an earlier version of his studies on hermetic semiosis, Eco drew upon the German philosopher Karl Popper's book Conjectures and Refutations (orig. pub. 1963), where he argues that the “metaphysic obsession” of hermetic semiosis has mutated into a “social theory of conspiracy”: The conspiracy theory of society is just a version of . . . a belief in gods whose whims and wills rule everything. It comes from abandoning God and then asking: “Who is in his place?” His place is then filled by various powerful men and groups—sinister pressure groups, who are to be blamed for having planned the great depression and all the evils from which we suffer. (Popper 1969, 123)2In essence, Eco's and Popper's thesis is that hermetic semiosis has crossed the species barrier and paved the way to what we today would call conspiracy theories. This argument and its relevance to the rewritings of Peer Gynt is easily confirmed if we turn to the vast research field about conspiracy theories. A seminal 1952 definition by Richard Hofstadter, for example, singles out a “paranoid style in American Politics” as a “way of seeing the world and expressing oneself” based on “a feeling of persecution” that is “systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy . . . against a nation, a culture, a way of life” (Hofstadter 1996, 3–4). Later, scholars such as Michael Barkun have extracted the main hermeneutical characteristics of conspiracy theories according to three principles: (1) nothing happens by accident, (2) nothing is at it seems, and (3) everything is connected (Barkun 2003, 3–4). These three principles closely recall the four main categories mentioned by Eco: some sort of paranoid attitude based on suspicion makes the conspiracy theorist believe that nothing happens by accident, and that someone is hiding a secret behind the veil of reality; an excess of wonder, often related to details that can be otherwise explained, spurs a domino effect of analogies and connections in which each element points at other ones in an infinite chain of significance. These principles and categories will be key to understanding the case studies below.In addition, Barkun shows that conspiracies are founded on secrecy, in the sense that a known (or hidden) group of people is hiding a portion of truth from the general public (Barkun 2003, 4–5). The need to conceal something on the part of the conspirator also makes the quest for evidence a central task for the conspiracy theorist, with methods that often resemble proper scientific research. As Barkun puts it, conspiracy theories “claim to be testable by the accumulation of evidence about the observable world,” often organized in “elaborate presentations.” However, such an “obsessive quest for proof masks a deeper problem: the more sweeping a conspiracy theory's claims, the less relevant evidence becomes.” The main reason for this lack of relevance is, according to Barkun, that “conspiracy theories . . . reduce highly complex phenomena to simple causes,” often attributing “all of the world's evil to the activities of a single plot, or set of plots” (Barkun 2003, 6–7). The issue of the relevance of evidence, which we have already seen at stake when discussing the boundaries between suspicious interpretation and hermetic semiosis, is central here as well.Barkun touches upon another key element of conspiracy thinking, which also partially resonates with hermetic semiosis: the interpreter's quest to decipher the code/signs contained in a text, be it a proper written work or the metaphorical “text” of history and/or reality, in order to find a hidden “truth.” This is an important element, but also one that causes hermetic semiosis and conspiracy thinking to part ways, at least in part. In fact, Eco presupposes that hermetic semiosis rests upon an indefinite interpretation, meaning that “every time a secret has been discovered, it will refer to another secret,” such that “the ultimate secret of Hermetic initiation is that everything is secret. Hence the Hermetic secret must be an empty one” (Eco et al. 1992, 32). Conspiracy theories, on the contrary, aim at showing us that everything we know is wrong and that only the initiated has reached a final, total, and undisputable truth. Such essentialism has two consequences: in the first place, conspiracy theories tend to be self-confirmatory and therefore unattackable. As Barkun puts it, “because the conspiracy is so powerful, it controls virtually all of the channels through which information is disseminated.” Therefore, “information that appears to put a conspiracy theory in doubt must have been planted by the conspirators themselves in order to mislead.” The consequence is that conspiracy theories become closed, non-falsifiable systems of ideas, “because every attempt at falsification is dismissed as a ruse” (Barkun 2003, 6–7).In other words, contrary to a claim that engages with other explications of a phenomenon, and contrary to scientific attempts at explaining such a phenomenon with a mechanism of confirmation and confutation, conspiracy theories claim exclusive access to a unique, unfalsifiable truth that is not shared by mainstream media and that the public must be made aware of. Conspiracy thinking thus produces “strong theories” that are capable, at least in the intentions of their creators, of explaining all the evils of the world, reducing complex phenomena to simple causes. In addition, their rejection from mainstream discourse spurs narratives of “humiliation” and “tautology” that typically make the conspiracy theorist stand stubbornly by their ideas and refuse to accept alternative explications of the phenomena. While the emphasis on strong theory shows some similarities with “paranoiac” practices of post-structuralist and deconstructionist reading (Sedgwick 2002, 131–5), conspiracy theorists go far beyond their claims and implications by firmly refusing to engage in dialogue with other stakeholders, convinced as they are that only they own the truth about a given phenomenon or set of phenomena. From this point of view, conspiracy theories and thinking are reactionary at heart, if not outright totalitarian, and it is fairly common that conspiracy theories are entangled with racist discourse.Such an emphasis on truth brings us to the second important consequence, that is, the nature of conspiracy theories as reassuring ways of explaining an otherwise inexplicable world. In fact, although they often “magnif[y] the power of evil, leading in some cases to an outright dualism in which light and darkness struggle for cosmic supremacy,” they also offer “a world that is meaningful rather than arbitrary.” Having identified the root of all evil, the conspiracy gives the theorist “a definable enemy against which to struggle, endowing life with purpose” (Barkun 2003, 4). As we shall see, these two consequences are crucial to understanding Hemmeligheten and Koden. They both claim that their version of the story has somehow escaped the attention of previous scholarship, and that the Norwegian public should finally be made aware of a secret being disclosed. Koden also offers “unfalsifiable” evidence of what its author considers the final, reassuring truth about a play that has the status of national epic, but one that, as Rees shows, tends to resist fixed interpretation and has caused debate about its meaning and interpretation since its publication.I have spent time on the relationship between hermetic semiosis, conspiracy thinking, and other “paranoid” interpretive strategies in order to establish a methodological framework that will allow me to show how such mechanisms of interpretation, reception, and rewriting are constantly at stake in the interpretations of Peer Gynt that are the object of this study. More generally, they epitomize the pitfalls and risks that any interpreter runs when conceding to suspicious reading and interpretation. Hemmeligheten in particular also demonstrates an important feature of conspiracy theories, namely, their tendency to reverse facts and fiction in their quest for hidden knowledge, claiming that fictional characters and events relate directly to real people and events and influence their understanding. According to this line of reasoning, works of art can include “encoded messages, originally intended for the inner circle of conspirators, that somehow became public” (Barkun 2003, 29).Studying the way in which hermetic semiosis and conspiracy thinking sneak into mainstream discourse such as national television or scientific writing is relevant to far more than these rewritings of Peer Gynt. As another scholar of conspiracy theories, Peter Knight, points out, the last 60 years have witnessed the rise of a “conspiracy culture” that permeates the public discourse, especially in the United States, to a much deeper degree than the few “paranoiacs” Hofstadter wrote about in the 1950s. Barkun and Knight describe conspiracy theories as a kind of cognitive mapping in the postmodern age, where ideologies and grand narratives have lost ground to a hermeneutic “bricolage” where the individual can seek and construct their own truth about reality (Barkun 2003, 11; Knight 2000, 19–21). Similar to Sedgwick, Knight maintains that postmodernism and deconstruction have fostered a hermeneutic mode of “suspicion” about given truths in academic discourses that has partially degenerated into a flourishing of conspiracy theories (Knight 2000, 73–5). Such distrust of scientific knowledge is evident in both case studies and in the way they approach (or deliberately avoid approaching) previous scholarship. In a very interesting and worrying way, these case studies underline the importance of discussing interpretive methods and approaches within academia, and the risks of over-interpretation that even the application of recognized methods bears within. Arguably none of the Peer Gynt case studies intended to be conspiratorial, but their approach to the research materials ended up being so.This spread of conspiracy thinking (and of hermetic semiosis as a hermeneutical tool behind it) far beyond the underground and into mainstream culture also explains why neither of my case studies identifies any conspiracy, in the sense of a group of people joining together in order to hide the truth about Peer Gynt and its meaning (unless all my colleagues and myself are part of that conspiracy). Cases such as the ones studied here show precisely how conspiracy thinking has permeated public discourse to such a degree that even non-conspiratorial narratives turn out to show exactly the same fallacious interpretive mechanisms of conspiracy thinking. I will now proceed to show how this happens in practice in Hemmeligheten and Koden.Hemmeligheten bak Peer Gynt (Benneche 2017) is a 1-hour TV documentary produced by the Norwegian cultural journalist Ninja Benneche and broadcast by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) on November 14, 2017. It is inscribed in a long tradition of Ibsen documentaries and TV performances shown by NRK. Shortly before the premiere, NRK's official website presented it with the following words: I år er det 150 år siden Henrik Ibsen ga ut sitt livs mest kjente verk, Norges nasjonalepos: Peer Gynt. I alle år har vi sagt at Peer Gynt er selve urbildet på nordmannen. Men etter å ha jobbet med diktet i et år mener NRK-journalist Ninja Benneche å ha funnet hint som kan gjøre denne vanvittige fyren mindre norsk. (Blom 2017)(This year it is 150 years since Henrik Ibsen published the most famous work of his lifetime, Norway's national epos: Peer Gynt. Through the years we have said that Peer Gynt is the primordial image of a Norwegian. But after having worked with the poem for a year, NRK journalist Ninja Benneche believes she has found clues that may make this crazy guy less Norwegian.)In this way, Hemmeligheten establishes—even before it was ever premiered—a narrative of mystery and suspicion, based on clues, that has much in common with conspiracy theories (Melley 2000, 16). As the sociologist Luc Boltanski puts it in his book Mysteries and Conspiracies, “a mystery arises from an event, however unimportant it may seem, that stands out in some way against a background . . . constituted by ordinary understandings as we know them through the intermediary of authorities . . . and/or through experience” (2014, 3; emphasis in the original). Boltanski's argument presupposes a dichotomy between what is perceived as an “apparent but fictitious reality” (Boltanski 2014, 13) based on pre-existing knowledge about “everything that might possibly happen” (Boltanski 2014, 3), and a “hidden but real reality” (Boltanski 2014, 13) that is unveiled by the conspiracy theorist. In his study, Boltanski shows how conspiracy theories follow a set of clues based on an initial situation of secrecy about the “real reality,” one that is typical for detective and spy fiction. The conspiracy theorist's “anxiety about the reality of reality” (Boltanski 2014, 15; emphasis in the original), however, makes him or her over-interpret or misinterpret clues that can be explained in more economical terms, as Eco would say. In so doing, “conspiracies . . . have as their object the construction of reality” (Boltanski 2014, 165; emphasis in the original). Hemmeligheten precisely constructs a narrative reality that runs parallel to more established readings of the play, a reality where—in the typical fashion of fact-fiction reversal—the dramatic text points at and is supposed to explain the real world.For the first 45 minutes, Hemmeligheten follows a fairly standard narrative about Ibsen's life and works up to Peer Gynt. However, Benneche announces from the very beginning that there is a “gåte” (Benneche 2017, 02:24–02:30) [mystery, riddle] behind the play that “mange har forsøkt å løse” (Benneche 2017, 02:43) [many have tried to solve], and that she has “en ny teori som setter hele karakteren i et nytt lys” (Benneche 2017, 02:52–02:57) [a new theory that places the entire character in a new light]. By incorporating short clips from interviews with Ibsen scholars, writers, and even psychologists, Benneche sets up a counter-narrative against the usual understanding of Peer Gynt as the “nasjonalepos” (Benneche 2017, 01:19–01:20) [nation