Final Secret of the Illuminati

by Robert Anton Wilson

  In one optimistic mood, Paul told me that his current work will result “in 15 years maximum” in extending human life “to 400 or 500 years average.”

  One reason I am so confident that something will come of this kind of research “in 15 years maximum” is that Paul has so many competitors. (As mentioned a few pages ago, Dr. Johan Bjorksten is currently talking of raising lifespan to 800 years.) Whoever gets there first may pick up a Nobel prize as a result. The rest of us will get a shot at living long enough for immortality to be achieved.

  Consider also the acceleration of scientific breakthroughs:

  Dr. Isaac Asimov notes, in his The Genetic Code, that there seems to be a 60-year cycle between the first understanding of a new scientific principle and the transformation of the world by applications of that principle. Thus, he instances the discovery of electromagnetic equivalence by Oersted in 1820; 60 years later, in 1880, electrical generators and motors were in wide use and the Industrial Revolution had occurred in the Western nations; the telegraph was also widespread and our age of Mass Communications was dawning.

  Similarly, in 1883, Thomas Edison first noted the so-called “Edison effect,” although he never understood it or realized its importance. Within 60 years, by 1943, the technology of electronics, as distinguished from electricity — technology based entirely on the “Edison effect” — had spread radio everywhere and was already beginning to replace it by television.

  Again, in 1896, Becquerel noted the sub-atomic behavior of uranium. Sixty years later, in 1956, two cities had been destroyed by atom bombs and nuclear generating plants were operating in many places.

  In 1903, the Wright Brothers got their monoplane off the ground for a few minutes. Sixty years later, in 1963, jetliners carrying over 100 passengers were circling the earth daily.

  In 1926, Goddard fired his first rocket into the air; in 1986, obviously, WoManned landings on nearby planets will be commonplace.

  Sixty years, Dr. Asimov concludes, is the normal time between a scientific breakthrough and the remaking of the world by the new technology derived from that breakthrough. Since DNA was discovered in 1944, the biological revolution (including longevity, and possibly immortality) should be peaking in 2004. We are now three years past the midpoint of that cycle (1974) and the new technology should be coming faster and faster.

  Some of the readers of this book — the more determined ones — may never die at all.

  Appearances and disappearances

  It gets even spookier now.

  People who claimed to be messengers of God, of the extraterrestrials, or of various Ascended Masters, began to contact me, sometimes in weird ways. Most of them were nuts. Some of them still leave me wondering.

  For instance, one chap who claimed to be a representative of the real Illuminati, and who struck the Skeptic as quite possibly a professional con-man, took Arlen and me out to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in Berkeley and spent $70 on it. He assured us that he was protecting us at all times, dropped a few hints that he might be God, and slipped me $200 before he left, assuring us that our poverty would not continue much longer.

  He never came back or tried to exploit the Poor Fool in any way. What kind of con-game is it where the Mark ends up richer instead of poorer?

  This skeptic still believes this fellow as a benevolently inclined fellow psychic with a taste for drama and mystery. I do not believe he was in the “real” Illuminati (except for four or five minutes a week, when the Shaman wonders about all the impossible theories he usually screens out as too melodramatic to be true . . .).

  In our last meeting at Vacaville Prison, I told Tim Leary, “Giordano Bruno, the first philosopher in history to suggest that there were Higher Intelligences in this galaxy, used Tantric yoga.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said.

  “Oh,” I asked, “you’ve read Francis Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition?”

  “No,” he said. “It was obvious from Bruno’s own writings. Sex-magic is always the first of the Secrets.”

  At that meeting, Timothy was exuberant and, for him, strangely secretive. “I’ll be out soon,” he said. “It’s all falling into place.”

  The following week he was moved from Vacaville to Terminal Island, near Los Angeles. Joanna Leary told his friends in the Bay Area that letters to him were pointless, since he would be moved again shortly.

  The Great Silence began.

  Weeks passed.

  Mike Horowitz, of the Fitzhugh Memorial Library, came to the Poor Fool one night with a strange story. Joanna Leary had appeared at his house with three men who she claimed were from a photocopying company. She had a letter in Timothy’s unmistakable handwriting, instructing Mike to turn over Leary’s archives for photocopying and permanent storage.

  “They were cops,” Mike told me. “I could smell it.”

  “What the hell . . .”

  “I don’t know,” Mike said. “I just don’t know . . .”

  We chewed on it for hours. If Timothy was making a deal with the Feds, what sort of deal? Paranoia drifted in and out of the room as we discussed, theorized, reconsidered.

  The Oracle did a Tarot divination, at Mike’s insistence.

  (I distrust my own readings, when personal emotion is involved.) I forget my own interpretations but I remember that the card showing “resultant of the affair” was the Star. According to Kenneth Grant’s Magical Revival, this card represents Sirius. Coincidence?

  I performed another divination on Timothy, for another baffled friend, a week or so later. The Star came up as “the resultant” again.

  Coincidence again?

  In September 1974 paranoia descended in full force.

  Leaks began to appear in the Hearst press, planted by the Federal cops, that Timothy was ready to testify against any and all of his former friends to get himself out of jail.

  Damnably, those of us who had watched the metamorphoses of Leary from Scientist to Guru, from Guru to Marxist Revolutionary, from Revolutionary back to Scientist, knew that he was capable of virtually any further transformation, however unlikely it would appear in ordinary psychology.

  The Berkeley Barb printed an undocumented story that Joanna had been busted for cocaine. “Aha,” voices said,

  “that’s how the Feds got Timothy to crack . . .” But the story wasn’t checkable. “It’s all a scam,” other voices claimed, “the Feds are trying to panic the counter-culture . . .”

  Then the Second Wave of rumors began.

  The Fiendish Psychologists at Vacaville had tampered with Tim’s head, voices said around San Francisco. He was a zombie, like McMurphy at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Kesey, like the true shaman he was, had unknowingly predicted Leary’s fate ten years before it happened.

  Watergate was still erupting; even the most resolute anti-paranoids and skeptics about Conspiracy Theories were pushed, more and more, into admitting that the Government was Capable of Anything . . .

  And none of us were able to get a message in to Timothy or an answer out. He was totally incommunicado with the Feds.

  A lesson in Karma

  Lao-Tse says (at least in Leary’s translation) that the Great Tao is most often found with parents who are willing to learn from their children. This remark was to cause me considerable mental strain and dilation around this time in our narrative, because my children had become very self-directed adolescents and were getting into occultism with much more enthusiasm and much less skepticism than I thought judicious.

  For a few years, we could not discuss these subjects without arguing, despite my attempts to remember good old Lao-Tse and really listen to the kids. They believed in astrology, which I was still convinced was bosh; in reincarnation, which I considered an extravagant metaphor one shouldn’t take literally; and in that form of the doctrine of Karma which holds, optimistically, that the evil really are punished and the good really are rewarded, which I considered a wishful fantasy no more likely than t
he Christian idea of Heaven and Hell. Worst of all, they had a huge appetite for various Oriental “Masters” whom I regarded as total charlatans, and an enormous disdain for all the scientific methodology of the West.

  My own position was identical to that of Aleister Crowley when he wrote:

  We place no reliance

  On Virgin or Pigeon;

  Our method is Science,

  Our aim is Religion.

  After every argument with one of the kids, I would vow again to listen more sympathetically, less judgmentally, to their Pop Orientalism. I finally began to succeed. I learned a great deal from them.

  A “miracle” then happened. I know this will be harder for the average American parent to believe than any of my other weird yarns, but my horde of self-willed and self-directed adolescents began to listen to me. Real communication was established. Even though I was in my 40s and greying in the beard, I was able to talk intelligently with four adolescents about our philosophical disagreements, and our mutual respect for each other grew by leaps and bounds.

  This, I think, is the greatest result I have obtained from all my occult explorations, even if the unmarried will not appreciate how miraculous it was.

  Luna, our youngest — the one who might have levitated in Mexico and who had her first menstrual period synchronistically on the day Tim Leary was busted in Afghanistan — taught me the hardest lesson of all. She had begun to paint in watercolors and everything she did charmed me: it was always full of sun and light, in a way that was as overpowering as Van Gogh.

  “What do all these paintings mean?” I asked her one day.

  “I’m trying to show the Clear Light,” she said.

  Then, returning from school one afternoon, Luna was beaten and robbed by a gang of black kids. She was weeping and badly frightened when she arrived home, and her Father was shaken by the unfairness of it happening to her, such a gentle, ethereal child. In the midst of consoling her, the Father wandered emotionally and began denouncing the idea of Karma. Luna was beaten, he said, not for her sins, but for the sins of several centuries of slavers and racists, most of whom had never themselves suffered for those sins. “Karma is a blind machine,” he said. “The effects of evil go on and on but they don’t necessarily come back on those who start the evil.” Then Father got back on the track and said some more relevant and consoling things.

  The next day Luna was her usual sunny and cheerful self, just like the Light in her paintings. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” the Father said finally.

  “I stopped the wheel of Karma,” she said. “All the bad energy is with the kids who beat me up. I’m not holding any of it.”

  And she wasn’t. The bad energy had entirely passed by, and there was no anger or fear in her. I never saw her show any hostility to blacks after the beating, any more than before.

  The Father fell in love with her all over again. And he understood what the metaphor of the wheel of Karma really symbolizes and what it means to stop the wheel.

  Karma, in the original Buddhist scriptures, is a blind machine; in fact, it is functionally identical with the scientific concept of natural law. Sentimental ethical ideas about justice being built into the machine, so that those who do evil in one life are punished for it in another life, were added later by theologians reasoning from their own moralistic prejudices. Buddha simply indicated that all the cruelties and injustices of the past are still active: their effects are always being felt. Similarly, he explained, all the good of the past, all the kindness and patience and love of decent people is also still being felt.

  Since most humans are still controlled by fairly robotic reflexes, the bad energy of the past far outweighs the good, and the tendency of the wheel is to keep moving in the same terrible direction, violence breeding more violence, hatred breeding more hatred, war breeding more war. The only way to “stop the wheel” is to stop it inside yourself, by giving up bad energy and concentrating on the positive. This is by no means easy, but once you understand what Gurdjieff called “the horror of our situation,” you have no choice but to try, and to keep on trying.

  And Luna, at 13, understood this far better than I did, at 43, with all my erudition and philosophy . . . I still regarded her absolute vegetarianism and pacifism as sentimentality.

  Witchcraft

  Another kind of occult experience occurred on April 26, 1974. The Shaman was working a ritual with a group of Bay Area witches, who call themselves the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn. During the part of the ceremony in which the group “raises the Cone of Power” (molds the “astral” or orgone field into a cone which can be seen and directed at will by the members), I had a vision of my son, Graham, who was then in Arizona with some friends. Graham was lying on the ground and cops were walking toward him. I could see no more; but the Shaman hastily placed a smaller “cone of power” around him as a protective device and tried to leave a telepathic message that he should phone me in the morning. The Father was somewhat frightened, imagining that Graham might have been in an auto accident.

  The next morning when the phone rang, I said at once, “That’s Graham.” (I often announce phone calls before answering them, these days.*) He told us of his adventure with “the pigs,” as young people call our gallant law-enforcement officers. He and his friends had been sleeping in the woods, when some cops drove into the clearing and discovered their car. The kids expected, at the minimum, to be chased out of the woods and sent on their way; more likely, by previous experience, they feared being jailed overnight, until parents of each and every one of them were contacted and it was proven conclusively that none of them were runaways. (Nobody under 21 has any civil liberties in the U.S.A.)

  ~•~

  *Some readers are sure I’m lying like a diplomat. Others believe because they want to. Don’t believe or disbelieve. Get Crowley’s books and try the experiments.

  ~•~

  The cops walked toward the spot where the kids were sleeping. Those who had awakened, including Graham, watched them come. Then, abruptly, the cops turned around, walked back to their car, and drove away.

  We checked the times. The incident occurred a few minutes before midnight. So did my astral vision. Whether or not my “cone of protection” pushed the police away “astrally” is an experimental question to be determined fully only when a lot more rigorous scientific work in this area has been accomplished. I was satisfied, at the minimum, that there is somewhat more to witchcraft than mere self-hypnosis.

  I had gotten involved with the witches as part of a concerted effort to gain initiation into as many shamanic schools as possible, another idea I had acquired from dear old Uncle Aleister. In Liber Aleph, Magick and other books, Crowley urges the student of higher consciousness to become involved with as many gods and goddesses as possible, so as not to fall into the error of monotheism. He himself left us some really superb invocations to various divinities, together with a variety of poetic and prose accounts of his love affairs with Allah, Nuit, Pan, Kali, the Virgin Mary and quite a few others. (“Thank God I’m an atheist,” he wrote also, in an essay on “The Psychology of Hashish.”) My working hypothesis was still that any “luminous being” I contacted was probably subjective, if there was no objective supporting evidence; and possibly extraterrestrials (converted into anthropomorphic form by my nervous system), if they produced objective results like my being in California and Arizona at the same time. Or sending my “astral body” to Arizona while my physical body was in California. Or however you account for the above experience.

  Meanwhile, I was researching other Contactees, not just those who got pancakes from the stars, like Joe Simonton, or messages of brotherly love, like the notorious George Adamski, but the myriads who were not normally considered Contactees at all.

  Nikola Tesla, secular shaman

  The first claims of extraterrestrial communication, I had found, were made by the electronics pioneers Marconi and Tesla. Both were ridiculed and simply stopped discuss
ing the subject.

  Tesla is an especially interesting case for our purposes. Many (including his principal biographer) regarded Tesla as virtually superhuman, and yet he was so naive in practical matters that he was cheated again and again by the businessmen to whom he sold his inventions. Tesla’s major goal in life was to make abundant energy so cheap that all the world would live in affluence; he came so close to this in his later work that the corporations which had funded him withdrew their support, fearing he would undermine the monopolies which made them rich. He is also one of the only two men to have refused the Nobel Prize (the other was Jean-Paul Sartre).

  Tesla’s greatest discovery was the mechanism by which alternating current can be electrically generated and used; far more than Edison’s direct-current machines, Tesla’s A.C. generators unleashed the modern technological revolution. This illumination came to Tesla in a series of quasi-mystical visions during his adolescence. The key events were:

  1. The visions themselves, in some of which Tesla literally went into trance and talked to entities nobody else could see.

  2. A series of mysterious illnesses between the visions. In some of these, Tesla became acutely sensitive and felt all perceptions as painful (colors were too bright, noises too loud, etc.). Several times, Tesla nearly died of an apparent draining-away of life energy which his doctors simply couldn’t explain.

  3. After the final vision, in which Tesla “saw” that everything in the universe obeys a law of Octaves (we will see the importance of Octaves later), Tesla was transformed into a kind of secular seer. He developed a most peculiar inner vision. He could literally “see” in perfect detail any machine he thought about, right down to microscopic measurements and dimensions, as if he were using actual tools to measure an actual machine. He patented dozens of these devices and became a millionaire before he was 30.63