The Illuminatus! Trilogy
Page 11
Doris didn't like the Necronomicon, although she considered herself an emancipated and free-thinking young woman. There was something sinister, or to be downright honest about it, perverted about that book and not in a nice, exciting way, but in a sick and frightening way. All those strange illustrations, always with five-sided borders just like the Pentagon in Washington, but with those people inside doing all those freaky sex acts with those other creatures who weren't people at all. It was frankly Doris 's opinion that old Abdul Alhazred had been smoking some pretty bad grass when he dreamed up those things. Or maybe it was something stronger than grass: she remembered one sentence from the text: "Onlie those who have eaten a certain alkaloid herb, whose name it were wise not to disclose to the unilluminated, maye in the fleshe see a Shoggothe." I wonder what a "Shoggothe" is, Doris thought idly; probably one of those disgusting creatures that the people in the illustrations are doing those horny things with. Yech.
She was glad when J. D. Mallison- finally left and she could return the Necronomicon to its position on the closed shelves. She remembered the brief biography of crazy old Abdul Alhazred that Dr. Armitage had written and also given to the library: "Spent seven years in the desert and claimed to have visited Irem, the city forbidden in the Koran, which Alhazred asserted was of pre-human origin…" Silly! Who was around to build cities before there were people? Those Shoggothes? "An indifferent Moslem, he worshipped beings whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu."
And that insidious line: "According to contemporary historians, Alhazred's death was both tragic and bizarre, since it was asserted that he was eaten alive by an invisible monster in the middle of the market-place." Dr. Armitage had been such a nice old man, Doris remembered, even if his talk about cabalistic numbers and Masonic symbols was a little peculiar at times; why would he collect such icky books by creepy people?
The Internal Revenue Service knows this much about Robert Putney Drake: during the last fiscal year, he earned $23,000,005 on stocks and bonds in various defense corporations, $17,000,523 from the three banks he controlled, and $5,807,400 from various real-estate holdings. They did not know that he also banked (in Switzerland) over $100,000,000 from prostitution, an equal amount from heroin and gambling, and $2,500,000 from pornography. On the other hand, they didn't know either about certain legitimate business expenses which he had not cared to claim, including more than $5,000,000 in bribes to various legislators, judges and police officials, in all 50 states in order to maintain the laws which made men's vices so profitable to him, and $50,000 to Knights of Christianity United in Faith as a last-ditch effort to stave off total legalization of pornography and the collapse of that part of his empire.
"What the deuce do you make of this?" Barney Muldoon asked. He was holding an amulet in his hand. "Found it in the bedroom," he explained, holding it for Saul to examine the strange design:
"Part of it is Chinese," Saul said thoughtfully. "The basic design- two interlocking commas, one pointing up and the other down. It means that opposites are equal."
"And what does that mean?" Muldoon asked sarcastically. "Opposites are opposite, not equal. You'd have to be a Chinaman to think otherwise."
Saul ignored the comment. "But the pentagon isn't in the Chinese design- and neither is the apple with the K in it…" Suddenly, he grinned. "Wait, I'll bet I know what that is. It's from Greek mythology. There was a banquet on Olympus, and Eris wasn't invited, because she was the Goddess of Discord and always made trouble. So, to get even, she made more trouble: she created a beautiful golden apple and wrote on it Kallisti. That means 'for the prettiest one' in Greek. It's what the K stands for, obviously. Then she rolled it into the banquet hall, and, naturally, all the goddesses there immediately claimed it, each one saying that she was 'the prettiest one.' Finally, old man Zeus himself, to settle the squabble, allowed Paris to decide which goddess was the prettiest and should get the apple. He chose Aphrodite, and as a reward she gave him an opportunity to kidnap Helen, which led to the Trojan War."
"Very interesting," Muldoon said. "And does that tell us what Joseph Malik knew about the assassinations of the Kennedys and this Illuminati bunch and why his office was blown up? Or where he's disappeared to?"
"Well, no," Saul said, "but it's nice to find something in this case that I can recognize. I just wish I knew what the pentagon means, too…"
"Let's look at the rest of the memos," Muldoon suggested.
The next memo, however, stopped them cold:
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #9
7/28
J.M.:
The following chart appeared in the East Village Other, June 11, 1969, with the label "Current Structure of the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy and the Law of Fives":
The chart hangs at the top of the page, the rest of which is empty space- as if the editors originally intended to publish an article explaining it, but decided (or were persuaded) to suppress all but the diagram itself.
Pat
"This one has to be some damned hippie or yippie hoax," Muldoon said after a long pause. But he sounded uncertain.
"Part of it is," Saul said thoughtfully keeping certain thoughts to himself. "Typical hippie psychology: mixing truth and fantasy to blow the fuses of the Establishment. The Elders of Zion section is just a parody of Nazi ideology. If there really was a Jewish conspiracy to run the world, my rabbi would have let me in on it by now. I contribute enough to the schule."
"My brother's a Jesuit," Muldoon added, pointing at the Society of Jesus square, "and he never invited me into any worldwide conspiracy."
"But this part is almost plausible," Saul said, pointing to the Sphere of Aftermath. "Aga Khan is the head of the Ishmaelian sect of Islam, and that sect was founded by Hassan i Sabbah, the 'old man of the mountains' who led the Hashishism in the eleventh century. Adam Weishaupt is supposed to have originated the Bavarian Illuminati after studying Sabbah, according to the third memo, so this part fits together- and Hassan i Sabbah is supposed to be the first one to introduce marijuana and hashish to the Western world, from India. That ties in with Weishaupt's growing hemp and Washington's having a big hemp crop at Mount Vernon."
"Wait a minute. Look at how the whole design revolves around the pentagon. Everything else sort of grows out of it"
"So? You think the Defense Department is the international hub of the Illuminati conspiracy?"
"Let's just read the rest of the memos," Muldoon suggested.
(The Indian Agent at the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin knows this: from the time Billie Freschette returned there until her death in 1968, she received mysterious monthly checks from Switzerland. He thinks he knows the explanation; despite all stories to the contrary, Billie did help to betray Dillinger and this is the payoff. He is convinced of this. He is also quite wrong.)
"… children seven and eight years old," Smiling Jim Trepomena is telling the KCUF audience, "are talking about penises and vaginas-and using those very words! Now, is this an accident? Let me quote you Lenin's own words…" Simon yawns.
Banana-Nose Maldonado evidently had his own brand of sentimentality or superstition, and in 1936 he ordered his son, a priest, to say one hundred masses for the salvation of the Dutchman's soul. Even years afterward, he would defend the Dutchman in conversation: "He was OK, Dutch was, if you didn't cross him. If you did, forget it; you were finished. He was almost a Siciliano about that. Otherwise, he was a good businessman, and the first one with a real CPA mind in the whole organization. If he hadn't gotten that crazy-head idea about gunning down Tom Dewey, he'd still be a big man. I told him myself. 'You kill Dewey,' I said, 'and the shit hits the fan everywhere. The boys won't take the risk; Lucky and the Butcher want to cowboy you right now.' But he wouldn't listen. 'Nobody fucks with me,' he said. 'I don't care if his name is Dewey, Looey, or Phooey. He dies' A real stubborn German Jew. You couldn't talk to him. I even told him how Capone helped set up Dillinger for the Feds just because of the heat those bank-heists were bringing down.
&
nbsp; You know what he said? He said: 'You tell Al that Dillinger was a lone wolf. I have my own pack.' Too bad, too bad, too bad. I'll light another candle for him at church Sunday."
HAND IN HAND TOGETHER WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED
Rebecca Goodman closes her book wearily and stares into space, thinking about Babylon. Her eyes focus suddenly on the statue Saul had bought her for her last birthday: the mermaid of Copenhagen. How many Danes, she wonders, know that this is one form of representation of the Babylonian sex goddess Ishtar? (In Central Park, Perri the squirrel is beginning to hunt for the day's food. A French poodle, held on a leash by a mink-coated lady, barks at him, and he runs three times around a tree.) George Dorn looks at the face of a corpse: it is his own face. "In Wyoming, after one sex-education class in a high school, the teacher was raped by seventeen boys. She said later she would never teach sex in school again." Making sure he is alone in the Meditation Room of the UN building, the man calling himself Frank Sullivan quickly moves the black plinth aside and descends the hidden stairs into the tunnel. He is thinking, whimsically, that hardly anybody realizes that the shape of the room is the same as the truncated pyramid on the dollar bill, or guesses what that means. "In Wilmette, Illinois, an 8-year-old boy came home from a sensitivity training class and tried to have intercourse with his 4-year-old sister." Simon gave up on his pentagons and began doodling pyramids instead.
Above, beyond Joe Malik's window, Saul Goodman gave up on the line of thought which had led him to surmise that the Illuminati were a front for the International Psychoanalytical Society, conspiring to drive everyone paranoid, and turned back to the desk and the memos. Barney Muldoon came in from the bedroom, carrying a strange amulet, and asked, "What do you make of this?" Saul looked at a design of an apple and a pentagon… and, several years earlier, Simon Moon looked at the same medallion.
"They call it the Sacred Chao," Padre Pederastia said. They sat alone at a table pulled off to the corner; the Friendly Stranger was the same as ever, except that a new group, the American Medical Association (consisting, naturally, of four kids from Germany), had replaced H. P. Lovecraft in the back room. (Nobody knew that the AMA was going to become the world's most popular rock group within a year, but Simon already thought they were superheavy). Padre Pederastia was, as on the night Simon met Miss Mao, very serious and hardly camping at all.
"Sacred Cow?" Simon asked.
"It's pronounced that way, but you spell it c-h-a-o. A chao is a single unit of chaos, they figure." The Padre smiled.
"Too much, they're nuttier than the SSS," Simon objected.
"Never underestimate absurdity, it is one door to the Imagination. Do I have to remind you of that?"
"We have an alliance with them?" Simon asked.
"The JAMs can't do it alone. Yes, we have an alliance, as long as it profits both parties. John- Mr. Sullivan himself authorized this."
"OK. What do they call themselves?"
"The LDD." The Padre permitted himself a smile. "New members are told the initials stand for Legion of Dynamic Discord. Later on, quite often, the leader, a most fetching scoundrel and madman named Celine, sometimes tells them it really stands for Little Deluded Dupes. That's the pans asinorum, or an early pans asinorum, in Celine's System. He judges them by how they react to that."
"Celine's System?" Simon asked warily.
"It leads to the same destination as ours- more or less- by a somewhat wilder and woollier path."
"Right-hand or left-hand path?"
"Right-hand," the priest said. "All absurdist systems are right-hand. Well, almost all. They don't invoke You-Know-Who under any circumstances. They rely on Discordia… do you remember your Roman myths?
"Enough to know that Discordia is just the Latin equivalent of Eris. They're part of the Erisian Liberation Front, then?" Simon was beginning to wish he were stoned; these conspiratorial conversations always made more sense when he was slightly high. He wondered how people like the President of the U.S. or the Chairman of the Board of GM were able to plot such intricate games without being on a trip at the time. Or did they take enough tranquilizers to produce a similar effect?
"No," the priest said flatly. "Don't ever make that mistake. ELF is a much more, um, esoteric outfit than the LDD. Celine is on the activist side, like us. Some of his capers make Morituri or God's Lightning look like Trappists by comparison. No, ELF will never get on Mr. Celine's trip."
"He's got an absurdist yoga and an activist ethic?" Simon reflected. "The two don't mix."
"Celine is a walking contradiction. Look at his symbol again."
"I've been looking at it and that pentagon worries me. Are you sure he's on our side?"
The American Medical Association came to some kind of erotic or musical climax and the priest's answer was drowned out. "What?" Simon asked, after the applause died down.
"I said," Padre Pederastia whispered, "that we're never sure anybody is on our side. Uncertainty is the name of the game."
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #10
7/28
J.M.:
On the origin of the pyramid-and-eye symbol, test your credulity on the following yarn from Flying Saucers in the Bible by Virginia Brasington (Saucerian Books, 1963, page 43.):
The Continental Congress had asked Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to arrange for a seal for the United States of America… None of the designs they created or which were submitted to them, were suitable…
Fairly late at night, after working on the project all day, Jefferson walked out into the cool night air of the garden to clear his mind. In a few minutes he rushed back into the room, crying, jubilantly: "I have it! I have it!" Indeed, he did have some plans in his hands. They were the plans showing the Great Seal as we know it today.
Asked how he got the plans, Jefferson told a strange story. A man approached him wearing a black cloak that practically covered him, face and all, and told him that he (the stranger) knew they were trying to devise a Seal, and that he had a design which was appropriate and meaningful…
After the excitement died down, the three went into the garden to find the stranger, but he was gone. Thus, neither these Founding Fathers, nor anybody else, ever knew who really designed the Great Seal of the United States!
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO
7/29
J.M.:
The latest I've found on the eye-and-pyramid is in a San Francisco underground paper (Planet, San Francisco, July 1969, Vol. I, No.4.), suggesting it as a symbol for Timothy Leary's political party when he was running for governor of California instead of just running:
The emblem is a tentative design for the Party's campaign button. One wag suggests that everyone cut out the circle from the back of a dollar bill and send the wholly dollar to Governor Leary so he can wallpaper his office with them. Then paste the emblem on your front door to signify your membership in the party.
Translations: The year of the beginning New Secular Order
Both translations are wrong, of course. Annuit Coeptis means "he blesses our beginning" and Novus Ordo Se~ clorem means "a new order of the ages." Oh, well, scholarship was never the hippies' strong point. But - Tim Leary an Illuminatus?
And pasting the Eye on the door - I can't help but think of the Hebrews marking their doorways with the blood of a lamb so that the Angel of Death would pass by their houses.
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #12
8/3
J.M.:
I've finally found the basic book on the Illuminati: Proofs of a Conspiracy by John Robison (Christian Book Club of America, Hawthorn, California, 1961; originally published in 1801). Robison was an English Mason who discovered through personal experience that the French Masonic lodges- such as the Grand Orient- were Illuminati fronts and were the main instigators of the French Revolution, His whole book is very explicit about how Weishaupt worked: every infiltrated Masonic group would have several levels, like an ordinary Masonic lodge, but
as candidates advanced through the various degrees they would be told more about the real purposes of the movement. Those at the bottom simply thought they were Masons; in the middle levels, they knew they were engaged in a great project to change the world, but the exact nature of the change was explained to them according to what the leaders thought they were prepared to know. Only those at the top knew the secret, which- according to Robison- is this: the Illuminati aims to overthrow all government and religion, setting up an anarcho-communist free-love world, and, because "the end justifies the means" (a principle Weishaupt acquired from his Jesuit youth), they didn't care how many people they killed to accomplish that noble purpose. Robison knows nothing of earlier Illuminati movements, but does say specifically that the Bavarian Illuminati was not destroyed by the government's crackdown in 1785 but was, in fact, still active, both in England and France and possibly elsewhere, when he wrote, in 1801. On page 116, Robison lists their existing lodges as follows: Germany (84 lodges); England (8 lodges); Scotland (2); Warsaw (2); Switzerland (many); Rome, Naples, Ancona, Florence, France, Holland, Dresden (4); United States of America (several). On page 101, he mentions that there are 13 ranks in the Order; this may account for the 13 steps on their symbolic pyramid. Page 84 gives the code name of Weishaupt, which was Spartacus; his second-in-command, Freiherr Knigge, had the code name Philo (page 117); this is revealed in papers seized by the Bavarian government in a raid on the home of a lawyer named Zwack, who had the code name Cato. Babeuf, the French revolutionary, evidently took the name Gracchus in imitation of the classical style of these titles. Robison's conclusion, page 269, is worth quoting: