encyclopedic
and
epic.
Each civilization, we are told, produces at its high-water mark one or more encyclopedic works which summarize the knowledge, technology, culture, philosophy of the epoch. Such books are like neurogenetic manuals which summarize and explain a primitive planetary culture to an Intelligence Agent from another world. Dante, Boccaccio, James Joyce, Hesse. As American civilization moves from its adolescence into the final terrestrial stages of technological centralization preceding Space Migration, it is beginning to produce such encyclopedic writings. For example, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, the Illuminatus trilogy of Wilson and Shea, and the book you hold in your hand.
Please consult this book if and when you wish a modern, personal summary of such basic concepts as: the Illuminati conspiracy, the Sirius phenomenon, UFOs, mind-changing drugs, new experiential perspectives on Lee Harvey Oswald, Jim Garrison, Hugh Hefner, the 24 clones of Timothy Leary, the meaning of the number 23, Aleister Crowley, Aldous Huxley, Carl Sagan, Gurdjieff, Alan Watts, William Burroughs, immortality, Nikola Tesla, modern quantum theory, the physics of consciousness, the eight evolving circuits of the nervous system, etc.
In each of these academic references there is an anecdotal flash so that these important names and topics become alive on the page. This is good writing.
Cosmic Trigger is also an epic work.
An epic is a story of exploration, voyaging, adventurous search for meaning.
Cosmic Trigger is an odyssey recounting the personal quest of the author. He explores the labyrinthine regions of his own brain with drugs and many other neuro-activating methods. He experiments with magick, ritual, ESP, isolation. He continually consults his most treasured traveling companions — his beautiful red-haired wife, Arlen, and his sparkling, wise children.
Wilson realizes (as do all alchemists) that he must evolve as the work develops. He knows that the motto solve et coagule means that he, too, must accept personal dissolution, that he must vary his own temperature and pressure, test his own sanity in the crucible of change. He gives up a deluxe-sexy job and retreats to social isolation. He plunges unflinchingly into outcaste poverty. He becomes that most recklessly heroic person — the self-employed intellectual! He turns his back on faculty salary and establishment grant and lives by his wits and wisdom. Reading this book, we share his grinding Blakean poverty, his highs and lows.
Cosmic Trigger sparkles with humor, openness of mind, courage, understanding, tolerance. It is the epic adventure of a man who invites us to grow and change with him.
We thank you, Robert Anton Wilson, for this timely and timefull treasure.
Los Angeles, California
Summer, 1977
PROLOGUE:
Thinking About the Unthinkable
Everything you know is wrong.
– The Firesign Theatre
Thinking About the Unthinkable
As the late, great H.P. Lovecraft might begin this narrative: It is now nearly 13 years since the ill-fated day when I first began investigating the terrible legends surrounding the enigmatic Bavarian Illuminati, an alleged conspiracy that some people believe rules the world. Like a Lovecraft hero, I embarked on my research with no suspicion of the perils awaiting me: I thought I was just investigating a notable case of political paranoia and expected to find only some insight into the psychology which causes otherwise sane individuals to subscribe to such absurdly ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Eventually, in collaboration with Robert J. Shea, I wrote a three-volume satirical novel on the conspiracy, Illuminatus! Completing such an exhaustingly long book should have terminated my interest in the subject, but my researches continued nonetheless, evidently propelled by some mysterious momentum. (Rising organ music, please.) I had become psychically hooked to the Illuminati. Like a tarantula in the bed-sheets or the laugh of a woman you once loved, the accursed Illuminati simply could not be forgotten or ignored. This was most annoying to the Skeptic, who is one of the 24 selves who live within me and the only one who usually possesses veto power over all the others.
Eventually, my interest in the Illuminati was to lead me through a cosmic Fun House featuring double and triple agents, UFOs, possible Presidential assassination plots, the enigmatic symbols on the dollar bill, messages from Sirius, pancakes from God-knows-where, the ambiguities of Aleister Crowley, some mysterious hawks that follow Uri Geller around, Futurists, Immortalists, plans to leave this planet and the latest paradoxes of quantum mechanics. It has been a prolonged but never boring pursuit, like trying to find a cobra in a dark room before it finds you.
Briefly, the background of the Bavarian Illuminati puzzle is this. On May 1, 1776, in Bavaria, Dr. Adam Weishaupt, a professor of Canon Law at Ingolstadt University and a former Jesuit, formed a secret society called the Order of the Illuminati within the existing Masonic lodges of Germany. Since Masonry is itself a secret society, the Illuminati was a secret society within a secret society, a mystery inside a mystery, so to say. In 1785 the Illuminati were suppressed by the Bavarian government for allegedly plotting to overthrow all the kings in Europe and the Pope to boot. This much is generally agreed upon by all historians. Everything else is a matter of heated, and sometimes fetid, controversy.
It has been claimed that Dr. Weishaupt was an atheist, a Cabalistic magician, a rationalist, a mystic; a democrat, a socialist, an anarchist, a fascist; a Machiavellian amoralist, an alchemist, a totalitarian and an “enthusiastic philanthropist.” (The last was the verdict of Thomas Jefferson, by the way.) The Illuminati have also been credited with managing the French and American revolutions behind the scenes, taking over the world, being the brains behind Communism, continuing underground up to the 1970s, secretly worshipping the Devil, and mopery with intent to gawk. Some claim that Weishaupt didn’t even invent the Illuminati, but only revived it. The Order of Illuminati has been traced back to the Knights Templar, to the Greek and Gnostic initiatory cults, to Egypt, even to Atlantis. The one safe generalization one can make is that Weishaupt’s intent to maintain secrecy has worked; no two students of Illuminology have ever agreed totally about what the “inner secret” or purpose of the Order actually was (or is . . .). There is endless room for spooky speculation, and for pedantic paranoia, once one really gets into the literature of the subject; and there has been a wave of sensational “exposes” of the Illuminati every generation since 1776.1 If you were to believe all this sensational literature, the damned Bavarian conspirators were responsible for everything wrong with the world, including the energy crises and the fact that you can’t even get a plumber on weekends.
For instance, the first explosion of anti-Illuminati hysteria in this country, in the 1790s, was stirred up by fanatic Federalists and centered on the charge that Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic Republican party were pawns of the European Illuminati. The second major cluster of excited exposes came in the 1840s, and was circulated by the Anti-Masonic Party, who believed that the Illuminati still controlled the Masons and had infiltrated our government at all levels. In both of these instances, the Illuminati were portrayed as radical democrats or outright anarchists in the tradition of the ultra-left wing of the French Revolution. Current anti-Illuminati literature, which is mostly distributed through the anti-Semitic, paramilitary Right, portrays the Illuminati as the masters of both international Communism and international banking. A separate and weirder strain of anti-Illuminati theory, occasionally interacting with this political conspiracy literature, portrays the Illuminati as Nazis, black magicians, astral mind-fuckers and Satanists.
But these are only the major themes of the anti-Illuminati symphony. There are countless individuals who have tooted some be-bop riffs — e.g., Philip Campbell Argyle-Smith, editor of a bizarre journal called High IQ Bulletin, claims that the Illuminati, known as “Jews” on this planet, are actually invaders from Vulcan. I have also seen a book (author and title now forgotten, alas) which argued that the Illuminati are
a Jesuit conspiracy which infiltrated Masonry and then took over the world, using the Masonic front to keep anybody from guessing that the real control actually comes from the Vatican, heh-heh-heh. Typical of the ingenuity of such conspiracy theories, the facts which most glaringly contradict it (namely, the anti-Masonic fulminations and excommunications by all the Popes for the last century, and the tons of anti-Catholic propaganda circulated by Masonic lodges) are explained as “part of the cover-up.”
And, of course, anti-Illuminati diatribes of all schools somberly agree that “accidents have a way of happening to those who find out too much about the Bavarian Illuminati.” (Let’s have that rising organ music again, and an eldritch laugh, like The Shadow’s on the old radio series.)
Once when I was appearing on a radio show on KGO-San Francisco, where listeners call in and talk to the guests, a woman phoned to say I knew so much about the Illuminati that I must be one of them.
I became whimsical. “Maybe,” I said, “the secret of the Illuminati is that you don’t know you’re a member until it’s too late to get out.”
This was too metaphysical for the caller. “Furthermore,” she said triumphantly, pursuing her own script, “you’re the people who control the Federal Reserve and the Morgan and Rockefeller banks.”
“Well,” said the Writer of Satire, temporarily displacing the Skeptic, “I certainly won’t deny that. It can’t help but improve my credit rating.”
That woman is probably still telling her friends how she got one of the Illuminati to confess right over the radio.
Actually, I no longer disbelieve in the Illuminati, but I don’t believe in them yet, either. Let us explain that odd remark quickly, before we go any further in the murk. In researching occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions (called Chapel Perilous in the trade). You come out the other side either a stone paranoid or an agnostic; there is no third way. I came out an agnostic.
Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called “I,” cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Every thing you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.
That’s what the legends always say, and the language of myth is poetically precise. For instance, if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived. You might think you are just waiting for a bus, or wandering from room to room looking for your cigarettes, watching a TV show, or reading a cryptic and ambiguous book. Chapel Perilous is tricky that way.
I entered Chapel Perilous quite casually one day in 1971 while reading The Book of Lies by the English mystic Aleister Crowley.2 Crowley aroused my interest because he had indubitably been a high adept of both yoga and occultism, was regarded as a Black Magician by many and as the Magus of the New Aeon by some, and had a contradictory reputation as heroic mountain climber, poet, bisexual pioneer Hippy, alchemist, sadistic prankster, worker of wonders and charlatan. I was especially charmed by the persistent legend that Crowley had once turned poet Victor Newburg into a camel, and the testimony of many that he had smashed a glass across a room by staring at it, in a demonstration at Oxford. All of Crowley’s books are witty, paradoxical, brilliant, obscure and deliberately enigmatic in varying degrees, but The Book of Lies is by all odds the most mystifying of all, and hence a favorite of mine since I love to solve puzzles and mysteries.
Facing the title page of The Book of Lies is a nonchalant announcement informing the reader, “There is no joke or hidden meaning in the publisher’s imprint.” This seems to be a veiled warning about what will follow, but is actually the first lie in the book; occult historian Francis King has carefully determined the date on the imprint is inaccurate by at least a year. This type of perverse artistry is typical of Crowley’s dealings with the reader, and I have enjoyed myself over the years deciphering his similarly gnomic jokes in other books. I always return to The Book of Lies, however, because Crowley claimed that somewhere in that book he had revealed the inner secret of freemasonry and Illuminism, coded so that only those with “spiritual insight” would be able to decipher it. In 1971, I had already read the book many times without finding the secret, but I was still trying, since Crowley is regarded as a ringleader of the Illuminati conspiracy by many writers3 and, indeed, used the title “Epopt of the Illuminati,” along with a few dozen other honorifics, when he was in the mood to put on some swank.
Suddenly, in a “blinding flash” or at least a mini-Satori, I knew Crowley’s secret. It was in Chapter 69 and deals with Tantric Sex. It will be explained, you may be sure, at the appropriate place in our narrative. The effect on me was that I entered a belief system in which the anti-Illuminati authors I had studied so extensively were no longer seen by me as simple paranoids. They were looking at something quite real, I now felt, and were only misinterpreting it a little bit. They were those without the pentacle of valor who stand in terror outside the door of Chapel Perilous, trembling and warning all who would enter that the Chapel is really an Insect Horror Machine programmed by Death Demons and dripping fetidly with Green Goo.
I immediately determined upon a course of neuro-psychological experiments which would, I thought, demonstrate objectively whether or not I had really guessed the true secret. The principal results of these experiments are presented in this book. The outstanding result was that I entered a belief system, from July 1973 until around October 1974, in which I was receiving telepathic messages from entities residing on a planet of the double star Sirius.
I also began to find — sometimes by the most implausible coincidences — various documentary leads firmly tying the long, mysterious history of Illuminism to occult beliefs about Sirius. These “lucky coincidences” — or synchronicities as they are called in Jungian psychology — are commonplace among those who get involved with occult secret societies in general and Chapel Perilous in particular. As Neal Wilgus notes in The Illuminoids,
From the beginning The Illuminoids was shaped by coincidence, from the discovery of Daraul’s Secret Societies to the publication of Shea and Wilson’s Illuminatus . . . A book by another Wilson — Colin Wilson’s The Occult — was also discovered at just the right moment and often “fell open at the right page” just as Wilson says other references did for him.4
That last sentence is a fitting overture to the ambiguities we shall soon confront. Not even I am sure whether the last clause refers to me or to Colin Wilson.
After October 1974 (due to a meeting with Dr. Jacques Vallee, an extraordinarily erudite astronomer, cyberneticist and UFOlogist), I began to develop new belief systems to explain my Sirius experience, not necessarily involving the breathtaking assumption that I was literally receiving actual transmissions from an ESP-broadcaster in the Sirius star system.
Dr. Vallee has been concerned with UFOs since the early 1960s, when he saw two of the beasties. Over the years Vallee has broadened his investigations to include “psychic” experiences that relate in one way or another to the UFOs, such as my Sirius experiences. He believes that this whole area of otherworldly communications has been going on for centuries and will probably not turn out to be extraterrestrial. The extraterrestrial content of the experience these days, he says, is just an adaptation to 20th
Century beliefs. The phenomenon took other and spookier forms, his data indicate, in other epochs.
This made perfect sense to me, since I had originally gotten in touch with “the entity” by means of Crowleyan occultism. The extraterrestrial explanation was not the real explanation, as I had thought; it was just the latest model for the Experience, as angels had been a model for it in the Middle Ages, or dead relatives speaking through mediums had been a model in the 19th century.
Then, on Sunday, March 13, 1976, a dispatch from Reuters News Service appeared in newspapers around the world. I read it in the San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle and it was like opening a door in my own house and finding Ming the Merciless shooting it out with Flash Gordon.
The dispatch concerned Robert K.G. Temple, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society of England, a scientist of dignity and status, who was propounding a theory wild enough to come from the pages of von Daniken himself. Temple claimed that Earth had been visited by an advanced race from a planet in the system of the double star, Sirius, around 4500 B.C. Temple based this assertion on the fact that definite and specific knowledge of the Sirius system can be found in the mythology of the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and some surviving African tribes — knowledge which modern astronomy has only rediscovered with the fantastically delicate instruments of the last two decades.
Now, anybody would be taken aback to see an astronomer of Temple’s status expressing such a Hearst Sunday Magazine theory, but I was beyond surprise; I was discombobulated.
I mentioned the Reuters dispatch a few days afterward to a friend, Saul Paul Sirag, a monstrously erudite physicist who usually knows more about any other science you mention than most of the experts in that field.
“Oh, Temple’s data aren’t all new,” Saul Paul said. “Anthropologists have known for years that several African tribes have very advanced knowledge about the Sirius system. For instance, some of them knew about the companion of Sirius — a dwarf star — long before we discovered it with our telescopes.”
Final Secret of the Illuminati Page 3