What is common between the novels of Dan Brown, Esoterico-religious thrillers that have become international best-sellers, and the mass of extreme right pamphlets denouncing conspiracy organised by hidden or semi-hidden powers to establish a ‘global government’? What beliefs and passions share the amateurs of the X-Files TV series, the fans of films, BD or video games featuring secret societies or invasions of extraterrestres, the immoderate consumers of ‘esoteric’ food of all kinds, and the semi-savers can the world of ‘alternative historians’, who are fanatical supporters of the ‘global conspiracy’? By providing answers to these questions, Pierre-André Taguieff invites us to explore the new popular culture that is widely disseminated on the Internet, which is called the Esoterism Bazar. It starts from a finding that: the fictions signed by Dan Brown, among many who have not been equally successful, draw on the same symbolic fund as a multitude of conspiracy pamphlets published since the early 1980s. This stock of rumours, legends and beliefs — sometimes born more than two centuries ago, such as the legend of the Illuminati — continues to be exploited by cultural entrepreneurs specialising in ‘Esoterism’ in the usually vague and catch-all sense of the term, referring to ‘everything exhale a perfume of mystery’. The ‘illuminated’ Foire refers to the production, circulation and reception of these eco -complotist cultural products that are usually neglected or misled by academic work. This book is a demanding reflection on contemporary forms of believing outside the strict boundaries of the institutional religion, no less than the ideological-political field. It is part of the series of works published by Pierre-André Taguieff since The Force of Prefect (1988), whose common ambition is to develop a historical anthropology of modernity, by analysing the representations, values and beliefs seized in their origins and metamorphoses. (Presentation of the publisher)