A conspiracy theory assembled cynically, as a game of connecting disparate historical fragments, does not stay inert: once articulated, it recruits believers and eventually coerces its own authors into treating it as real. The fiction acquires momentum independent of the intent behind it, so that the makers lose the ability to stand outside what they made.
Given enough data points, any two can be linked, and a mind committed to finding hidden order will always succeed, because the method itself guarantees connections regardless of whether they exist. The sensation of discovered pattern is produced by the search procedure, not by any underlying structure in the facts.
Three Milan publishing editors, flooded with manuscripts from occult cranks, amuse themselves by feeding fragments into a computer and splicing them into a grand secret history linking the Templars, Rosicrucians and other sects. Their invented conspiracy is taken as genuine by real occultists, one editor is murdered at Foucault's pendulum, and the protagonist awaits his own likely death.
The danger in secret-society lore lies not in any actual hidden power but in the human appetite to believe that such power exists; the believers supply all the energy the myth needs. Viewed this way, occult groups are driven by the desire for a hidden meaning rather than by any meaning that is actually hidden.