Final Secret of the Illuminati

by Robert Anton Wilson

  Luna said she couldn’t remember moving.

  I don’t know what happened; I wasn’t there. But when I discussed it with Luna, she said, “You believe in ESP, so it happens around you. You don’t believe in levitation, so it doesn’t happen around you.” Then she laughed, and I felt — not for the first or last time — that Luna, whose favorite reading was still comic books, knew more about some things than I did.

  I continued my devotions to Our Lady of Guadalupe, delighted that I could again play the Catholic game (which I had left in high indignation at 14, when it conflicted with my sex drive), but now without taking it seriously. It was only one tunnel-reality and, with Crowley’s metaprograms (invocations), I could just as easily change channels and tune in to an Egyptian god-system or to the Buddhist system. I could also analyze all of these from outside, by re-entering the Scientific Materialist system.

  Synchronicity again appeared. One day in the San Miguel library, I met a woman who was also obsessed with Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe even though a non-Catholic. She was writing a book on the Lady’s miracles and hoped to prove that the Lady was really an extraterrestrial. Although I never heard of this woman or her book again, the idea later popped up in one of the most influential Women’s Lib books of the decade. The First Sex, by Elizabeth Gould Davis. It is now an article of faith with some Welsh feminist witches I met after moving to California.

  Sirius Rising

  In his book on the Israeli psychic Uri Geller, Dr. Andrija Puharich, a neurologist of some professional reputation which he is presumably not eager to destroy by going out on a limb, asserts that both he and Geller have frequently received communications from extraterrestrials.32 The learned community by and large assumes that Dr. Puharich has flipped out.

  Dr. John Lilly, internationally known psychoanalyst, neuro-anatomist, cyberneticist, mathematician and delphinologist, gently hints that he has also received such communications. Academia, relieved that Dr. Lilly is only hinting and not saying it outright, happily ignores the potential breakthrough.33

  Dr. Timothy Leary asserted interstellar telepathy in 1973.34 Since Leary was already in disgrace and prison, nobody paid any attention.

  R. Buckminster Fuller, the most renowned scientist-philosopher alive, was the next to state that he sometimes thinks he receives messages from interstellar telepaths.35 Despite Fuller’s world-wide status, nobody seems to have heard this message from him.

  Most recently, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, physicist, described his own extraterrestrial ESP flashes, in an article in the San Francisco magazine City.36 Nobody paid any attention. Any grocer or state policeman who has such an experience will immediately be reported in tabloids or even on TV, but nobody seems to want to hear this from trained scientific observers. Is it that we are afraid we cannot dismiss them as nuts so easily as we do the grocers and state troopers?

  Suppose I were to tell you that over 100 scientists in the United States have by now had this experience? That figure was supplied by Saul Paul Sirag. Sirag says that so far most of these scientists are only willing to discuss the matter with trusted colleagues, but that more of them lately are considering the possibility of coming out of the closet and talking about it in public.

  Sirag adds that many of this group no longer believe the experience is literally extraterrestrial, although that is still one of the favorite models for describing it.

  Let me record my own “Contact” experiences, from the beginning. Try to be open to the possibility that I might conceivably be sane. The data developed gradually over the years from Jungian “synchronicity” to “ESP” to . . . something else.

  For instance, in the summer of 1972, during a visit to Yellow Springs, Ohio — the town where I had tried to be a farmer for three years in the early ’60s — I was doing a Tarot “divination” for my oldest daughter, Karuna. All Tarot readings to this date, however pleasing to my subjects, had been inconclusive to the Skeptic; every hit could be explained as intuition, reading the subject’s body-language subliminally, or just lucky guessing. This time, the Oracle told Karuna — somewhat surprised at his own audacity — that her previous boyfriend, Roy, would suddenly contact her. (She hadn’t seen him in a year.) The next morning, the phone rang, and the Shaman said at once, again surprised at his self-confidence, “That’s Roy.” It was.

  A happy coincidence? My magick diary (Crowley insists on keeping such a record of all experiments) soon contained similar direct hits, on a weekly basis. The Oracle also developed what all occultists call “inner certainty”; that is, I knew when this faculty was operating and could be trusted. This sense of being tuned in is exactly as specific as the inner knowledge that you are about to become ill and vomit, or that a head cold is coming on, or that you are reaching sexual climax and will ejaculate . . . it cannot be mistaken.

  January 18, 1973 was my 41st birthday, and we were living on a farm again. Karuna, our oldest daughter, informed us in the morning that, in addition to the sun being in Capricorn (my sign), the moon was in Cancer (my wife’s sign). Although I am extremely skeptical about astrology, I decided to keep careful records of anything significant that might occur that day. A few hours after awakening, we heard on the radio that Tim Leary (nearly two years after escaping jail) had been kidnapped in Afghanistan by American agents. I was plunged into depression, and realized for the very first time how much I cared for that brilliant but incautious man, whom I had actually met fewer than a dozen times in the decade. A few hours later, Luna, our youngest daughter, had her first menstrual period. “The blood of the lamb,” I thought, wondering what Carl Jung would make of this bundle of synchronicity.

  In the afternoon, still depressed about Leary’s bad luck, Arlen and I were walking in the woods behind our farm. Suddenly, I had a flash of Timothy grinning. (“They’ll put him in maximum security now,” Arlen was saying. “He’ll probably commit suicide within a year.”) Tim grinned more impudently.

  “No,” the Oracle said quite happily. “The very first photo we’ll see he’ll have the old Leary grin flashing again.”

  I was totally convinced, precognitively, that Dr. Leary’s neurological researches had brought him to the point where he had control over emotional programs and could transcend suffering of all sorts. I “saw” it in a photo of Tim, handcuffed but grinning.

  A few hours later, we drove into a pizza parlor in Mendocino to celebrate my birthday. On the way, we bought an evening newspaper. There, on page one, was the Leary Grin. And he was in handcuffs.

  Graphic above: Dr. Timothy Leary, who received the Star Seed Signals during the Dog days when Wilson was receiving the Sirius Transmissions.

  On June 6, 1973 (six months after the above experience), the Neurologician took a programmed trip on something an underground Alchemist told him was LSD. The program was in two parts, basically: I remained in a dark room, eyes closed, lying on a bed, during most of it. Part one was the playing back, on a tape recorder, of Dr. John Lilly’s “Beliefs Unlimited” hypnosis-tape; this was repeated several times during the first three hours of the experiment. During hours 4 to 5, a tape of Aleister Crowley’s Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel was played.

  Dr. Lilly’s tape repeats over and over that there are no limits to your mind and that anything you can imagine, you can do. The tape is a valuable aid to break down our conditioned expectations about the boundary between the possible and the impossible.

  Lilly’s tape is deliberately encouraging gullibility, of course; but it is quite easy to re-establish scientific skepticism about results obtained, after the experiment is over. Skepticism during the experiment prevents any interesting results.

  The Crowley invocation, frankly, looks like pretentious rubbish if read silently. Read aloud, it vibrates, moans and sings with eerie power. It programs the shaman to alternately envision the “Holy Guardian Angel” as a solar-phallic lion of terrible energy; as an erotic sex-goddess; as the Great Wild Beast Pan; as a green and earthy mother-spirit; and finally as a Total Void at the
heart of everything.

  The Shaman achieved a rush of Jungian archetypes, strongly influenced by the imagery of Crowley’s Invocation, but nonetheless having that peculiar quality of external reality and alien intelligence emphasized by Jung in his discussion of the archetypes. I also “lived” through several “past lives” — including additional details about one “past life” as a Grandmaster in the Bavarian Illuminati, previously unearthed under hypnosis by New York hypnotist Jack Rowan, and also Sufi saint-lives, medieval witch-lives, and, finally, an uprush of “memories” of animal existence. I was an ape-creature, a rodent, a slug, a bug, a fish. I experienced a series of deaths-and-rebirths as animal, human, void, Star; molecular intelligence vibrating through time, and, at the peak, as union of Shiva and Kali, twin gods linked in eternal orgasm according to Bengali Hinduism. The Neurologician saw and understood quite distinctly that Shiva was also Brahma and Jehovah and Pan, etc., while Kali was also Nuit and Aphrodite and the Blessed Virgin Mary, etc. The universe was experienced as the living embodiment of this Divine Couple and not a dead machine.

  The Yogi entered Samadhi and believed, at last, that the wisdom of the adept is truly beyond the floating body-rapture of mere Hatha Yoga. Based on understanding of and participation in a planet-wide Consciousness, Samadhi opens the neuro-atomic memory which is in all living beings, and in that dancing quantum energy mistakenly called “dead matter.”

  The Mystic understood Gandhi’s insistence, “God is in the rock, too — in the rock!” Hell, I was in the rock with God.

  The Poet appreciated Eckhart’s paradox, “Split a stick of wood, and the Christ is in there, too!”

  The Shaman laughed merrily at Crowley’s joking seriousness in telling one disciple, Frank Bennett, that the Holy Guardian Angel invoked in this ritual is merely “our own unconsciousness” and meanwhile telling another disciple, Jane Wolf, that the Holy Guardian Angel is “a separate being of superhuman intelligence.” It is both/and; it is the “bornless one,” as Egyptian priests said. The Satirist even more appreciated Crowley’s boffo one-liner in Magick in Theory and Practice, where he speaks of sexual yoga (in code as usual) as a form of sacrifice and says that he thus sacrificed “a male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence” 150 times a year since 1912. The sacrifice in sexual yoga is the semen, which is, indeed, a “male child” and does indeed contain, within the DNA code, a very high intelligence, the genetic blueprint of planet Earth.

  The Robot staggered in bliss to his desk and typed out, “Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren’t even mammals and looked like alligators or Gila monsters.” The normal paranoia in our culture (fear of animals) has not bothered me since then; I took a pro-life imprint and I am now as cuddly with snakes as with dogs or cats.

  The Shaman lost all fear of death, knowing it to be literally impossible. He understood the wit of Yeats’s fine line, “Man has created death.”

  The Skeptic was whacked out of his skull.

  The next day, and in the following weeks, my yoga meditations were vastly enriched, and I occasionally went for days on end conscious of the two minds thinking, my mind and the “bornless” Mind, or, as Suzuki Roshi used to say, Little Mind and Big Mind.

  Graphic above: Everything you fear is waiting for you in Chapel Perilous, but fear is failure and the forerunner of failure.

  On July 22, 1973 — six weeks after the trip — the Wizard was ready to try again, without the supposed LSD (which might have been mescaline, or STP, or PCP, or fly-paper for all we know). (Stay AWAY from black-market acid, my friend; don’t let these experiments lead you astray. If you must experiment in this dangerous area, use organic plants whose purity is known, such as the peyote cactus or the psilocybin mushroom.)

  This time, I used the Lilly tape and the Crowley invocation again, without drugs, but with prolonged and holy rituals or Tantric sex-trance involving the cooperation of the Most Beautiful Woman in the Galaxy.

  The Investigator remembers thinking, during the six weeks between major experiments, that whatever he had tuned in to was not “Cosmic Consciousness” but a kind of planetary consciousness; he wondered who coined the term, “cosmic consciousness,” and what it contained . . .

  This time I moved in space-time fan-wise, unlike the backward-in-time movement of the drug trip. The Yogi became almost conscious of a kind of galactic star-network, an intelligence that seemed not fully formed but evolving. Somehow, this resonated in my mind with the Sufi teaching that Allah is constantly recreating Himself every second. The trip was full of light and joy, the White Light of the Void jazz you’ve all heard, but dim, not fully achieved. The Researcher went off into sleep not quite satisfied.

  The next morning, July 23, the Shaman awoke with an urgent message from Dreamland and scribbled quickly in his magickal diary, “Sirius is very important.” There was more, almost at the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t remember it.

  During the A.M. I looked through my occult books, seeking references to the Dog Star, Sirius; although skeptical about astrology, I assumed that the Dream-message was some hint that the Sirius cycle should be part of my magick experiments in the future. Astrology seemed like nonsense to me, but I was willing to give it a try, in the open-ended manner of Dr. Lilly’s “Beliefs Unlimited” exercise.

  In The Magical Revival by Kenneth Grant, who is one of the five claimants to being Crowley’s successor as world leader of the Ordo Templi Orientis, I found:

  Phoenix was Crowley’s secret name in the Ordo Templi Orientis . . .. The Phoenix was also an ancient constellation in which Sothis, or Sirius, was the chief star . . .37

  In a later passage, even more strikingly, Grant makes this point about Crowley and Sirius:

  Crowley identified the heart of (his magical) current with one particular Star. In Occult Tradition, this is “the Sun behind the Sun,” the Hidden God, the vast star Sirius, or Sothis . . . 38

  This was interesting, no doubt, but, since I had already skimmed parts of Grant’s book, it didn’t prove anything.

  Nonetheless, it was definitely intriguing. The Skeptic went to town and browsed in the public library. Imagine my state of mind when I discovered that this very day, July 23, when I had received the message “Sirius is very important,” is the day when, according to Egyptian tradition, the occult link (through hyperspace?) is most powerful between Earth and Sirius.

  Celebrations of the Dog Star, Sirius, beginning on July 23, are the origin of the expression “dog days,” meaning the days from July 23 to September 8, when the last rituals to Sirius were performed.

  The Skeptic was spaced-out for hours after reading that. Was it possible . . . had he actually, through Crowley’s invocation, turned on and tuned in to an Earth-Sirius channel used by adepts since ancient Egypt?

  Believe it or not, the very same day, July 23, “they,” or “it,” or whatever, delivered another jolt, just to underline the effect, perhaps. I picked up a book I’d started earlier in the week, Omar Garrison’s Tantra: The Yoga of Sex, and found that, according to Bengali Tantrists, there is a five-day lag between the male and female sex-cycles, the female being 28 days and the male 23.39

  Maybe my unconscious intuition, all through those years of noticing eerie 23s, had been groping to discover the Tantric 23-day male sex cycle.

  Or maybe it had been struggling toward the annual July 23 Earth-Sirius synchro-mesh.

  Maybe . . .

  The Holy Guardian Angel

  How the elephant got into my pajamas I’ll never know.

  – Marx, Animal Crackers

  Once I began to perceive the mystic 23 as a central pivot of both the Crowley-Tantra linkage and the Crowley-Sirius linkage, I was living in a belief-system where almost anything might happen and probably would.

  (“Perhaps the final secret of the Illuminati is that you don’t know you’re a member until it’s too late to get out.”)

  I re-examined my “memories” of having been in the Illuminati
in the 18th century. According to data unearthed by hypnotist Jack Rowan in 1971, and again during my June 1973 invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel, I had been one “Hans Zoesser” (1740-1812), Grand Master of the Vienna lodge, and had participated in the initiation of Thomas Jefferson, no less, in Paris. The Skeptic didn’t even believe in reincarnation, but neural storage certainly could remember key incidents in Zoesser’s life as well as any in “Robert Anton Wilson’s” life. Was the whole purpose of this four-dimensional coincidence-hologram to make “me” realize that both “Hans Zoesser” and “Robert Anton Wilson” were fictions? Many people have had the experience of not knowing who they are or where they are; it usually happens in the first moments after awakening in the morning. The Sufis say that you are closer to Illumination in that instant of micro-amnesia than at any other time.

  Was this at last the illumination of the Illuminati — the experience of skepticism carried to the point where it abolishes itself and, since you can’t believe anything fully, you are as free of skepticism as of any other philosophy and finally open to thinking the unthinkable?

  Or was the final secret simply and bluntly that there really is an interstellar ESP channel to which you can tune in by metaprogramming your nervous system?

  At this point in the internal voyage the Shaman knows that he is far, far into the underground vaults of Chapel Perilous and that the way back to the robot-reality of the domesticated hive is not going to be easy. Or as a black pot-head once said to me (in an earlier period when I was playing Young White Hipster who hangs around with jazz musicians), “Man, you only know you are laid, relayed and PARlayed, fucked, flustered and far from home.”

  It was necessary to conduct some experiments to determine that one was still able to communicate effectively with the hive — with those locked into what Blake called “single Vision and Newton’s sleep.” When it was established that such communication had not broken down, the Shaman and the Skeptic conferred at length, decided we were not actually going mad, and continued occult experimentation. The Neuro-Metaprogrammer adopted a belief system in which there was a real contact going on with Higher Intelligence — i.e., with the extraterrestrial from Sirius — or with the Holy Guardian Angel — or whatever it was . . .