The Illuminatus! Trilogy

by Robert Anton Wilson

  * An interesting account of a traditional system used by quite primitive Mexican Indians, yet basically similar to any and all of the above, is provided by anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, who underwent training with a Yaqui shaman, and recounts some of the terrors vividly in The Teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, and Tales of Power. Don Juan used peyote, stramonium, and a magic mushroom (probably psilocyble Mexicana, the drug Tim Leary used for his first trip).

  The difference between these systems is that some aim to liberate every candidate and some, like Sabbah's and Weishaupt's, deliberately encourage the majority to remain in ignorance, whereby they may with profit be endlessly exploited by their superiors in the cult. The same general game of an illuminated minority misusing a superstitious majority was characteristic of Tibet until the Chinese Communist invasion broke the power of the high lamas. A sympathetic account of the Tibetan system, which goes far toward justifying it, can be found in Alexandra David-Neel's The Hidden Teachings of Tibetan Buddhism; an unsympathetic account by a skeptical fellow mystic is available in The Confessions of Aleister Crowley.

  Another word about Alamout black: It is not for the inexperienced psychedelic voyager. For instance, the first time Simon Moon tried it, in early 1968, he had occasion to use the men's room in the Biograph Theatre (where he had gone to see Yellow Submarine while under the influence). After his bowel movement he reached for the toilet paper and saw with consternation that the first sheet hanging down off the roll was neatly stamped

  OFFICIAL

  BAVARIAN ILLUMINATI

  EWIGE BLUMENKRAFT!

  On ordinary marijuana or hashish, such illusions occur, of course- but they are not true hallucinations. They go away if you look 'at them hard enough. No matter how hard Simon looked at the toilet paper, it still said

  OFFICIAL

  BAVARIAN ILLUMINATI

  EWIGE BLUMENKRAFT!

  Simon went back to his seat in the theater badly shaken. For weeks afterward he wondered if the Illuminati had some sinister reason for infiltrating the toilet paper industry, or if the whole experience were a genuine hallucination and the first sign, as he put it, "that this fucking dope is ruining my fucking head." He never solved this mystery, but eventually he stopped worrying about it.

  As for Hassan i Sabbah X and the Cult of the Black Mother, the authors have been able to learn precious little about them. Since they are clearly related somehow to the Assassins and the cult of Kali, Mother of Destruction, one can consider them part of the Illuminati, or Podge, side of the Sacred Chao; since they seem to be businessmen rather than fanatics, and since Kali might be a version of Eris, one can consider them part of the Discordian or Hodge side. Amid such speculation and much mystery, they go their dark way, peddling horse and preaching some pretty funky doctrines about Whitey. Perhaps they intend to betray everybody and run off with the loot at an opportune moment-and, then again, maybe they are the only really dedicated revolutionaries around. "Nothing is too heavy to be knocked on its ass, and everything is cool, baby" is the only summary of his personal philosophy that Hassan i Sabbah X himself would give us. He's a studly dude, and we didn't press him.

  APPENDIX TZADDI: 23 SKIDOO

  Linguists and etymologists have had much exercise for their not-inconsiderable imaginations in attempting to account for this expression. Skidoo has been traced back to the older skedaddle, and thence to the Greek skedannumi, "to disperse hurriedly." The 23, naturally, has caused even more creative efforts by these gentry, since they are unaware of the secret teachings of Magick. One theorist, noting that Sidney Carton in Dickens' Tale of Two Cities is the twenty-third man guillotined in the final scene,* guessed that those playgoers who were eager to get out of the theater before the crowd counted off the executions and skidoo'd toward the exits numbered 23. Another eminent scholar assumes that the expression has something to do with men hanging around the old Flatiron Building on Twenty-third Street in New York City- a notoriously windy corner- to watch ladies' skirts raised by the breeze; when a cop came, they would skidoo. Others have mused inconclusively about the early telegraph operator's signal of 23, which means (roughly) "stop transmitting," "clear the line," or, to be crude, "shut up," but nobody claims to know how telegraphers picked 23 to have this meaning.

  * A literary reference which Simon Moon, with his modernistic bias, overlooked.

  The mystery's real origin is a closely guarded secret of the Justified Ancients of Mummu, which Simon had not attained the rank to learn. Dillinger, however, had attained this rank, and uses the formula quite correctly in the bank robbery scene in the Third Trip. It was printed by "Prater Perdurabo" (Aleister Crowley) in The Book of Lies (privately published, 1915; republished by Samuel Weiser Inc., New York, 1970). The text of the spell makes up the totality of Chapter 23 in that curious little book; and it reads:

  (23)

  SKIDOO

  What man is at ease in his Inn?

  Get out.

  Wide is the world and cold.

  Get out.

  Thou hast become an in-itiate.

  Get out.

  But thou canst not get out by the way thou camest in. The Way out is THE WAY.

  Get out.

  For OUT is Love and Wisdom and Power.

  Get OUT.

  If thou hast T already, first get UT.

  Then get O.

  And so at last get OUT.

  It is not permissible to explain this fully, but it may be stated guardedly that T is the union of sex and death, Tau, the Rosy Crucifixion; UT is Ugita in the Upanishads; and O is the Positive Void.*

  * Fission Chips, like our other characters, was given a chance to peruse this manuscript before publication and correct any factual errors that may have crept in. Of this appendix, he said, "I think my leg is being pulled again, chaps. I suspect that Crowley wrote that in 1915 as a joke on his readers, and you blokes found it and inserted a reference to a magic formula used by Dillinger in your story just so you could then compose this appendix and 'explain' it." Such skepticism, straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, may be compared to the stance of the Bible Fundamentalist who avers that JHVH made the universe in six days in 4004 B.C. but included fossils and other false leads to make it appear much older. One could equally assert that the cosmos appeared out of Void one second ago, including us and our false memories of a longer duration here.

  APPENDIX VAU: FLAXSCRIP AND HEMPSCRIP

  Flaxscrip was first introduced into Discordian groups by the mysterious Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., in 1968. Hempscrip followed the year after, issued by Dr. Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S. (In the novel, taking one of our few liberties with historical truth, we move these coinages backward in time and attribute hempscrip to the Justified Ancients of Mummu.)

  The idea behind flaxscrip, of course, is as old as history; there was private money long before there was government money. The first revolutionary (or reformist) use of this idea, as a check against galloping usury and high interest rates, was the foundation of "Banks of Piety" by the Dominican order of the Catholic Church in the late middle ages. (See Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.) The Dominicans, having discovered that preaching against usury did not deter the usurer, founded their own banks and provided loans without interest; this "ethical competition" (as Josiah Warren later called it) drove the commercial banks out of the areas where the Dominicans practiced it. Similar private currency, loaned at a low rate of interest (but not at no interest), was provided by Scots banks until the British government, acting on behalf of the monopoly of the Bank of England, stopped this exercise of free enterprise. (See Muellen, Free Banking.) The same idea was tried successfully in the American colonies before the Revolution, and again was suppressed by the British government, which some heretical historians regard as a more direct cause of the American Revolution than the taxes mentioned in most schdolbooks. (See Ezra Pound, Impact, and additional sources cited therein.)

  During the nineteenth century man
y anarchists and individualists attempted to issue low-interest or no-interest private currencies. Mutual Banking, by Colonel William Greene, and True Civilization, by Josiah Warren, are records of two such attempts, by their instigators. Lysander Spooner, an anarchist who was also a constitutional lawyer, argued at length that Congress had no authority to suppress such private currencies (see his Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations and Frauds). A general overview of such efforts at free enterprise, soon crushed by the Capitalist State, is given by James M. Martin in his Men Against the State, and by Rudolph Rocker in Pioneers of American Freedom (an ironic title, since his pioneers all lost their major battles). Lawrence Labadie, of Suffern, N.Y., has collected (but not yet published) records of 1,000 such experiments; one of the present authors, Robert Anton Wilson, unearthed in 1962 the tale of a no-interest currency, privately issued, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the 1930s depression. (This was an emergency measure by certain local businessmen, who did not fully appreciate the principle involved, and was abandoned as soon as the "tight-money" squeeze ended and Roosevelt began flooding us all with Federal Reserve notes.)

  It is traditional among liberal historians to dismiss such endeavors as "funny-money schemes." They have never explained why government money is any less hilarious. (That used in the U.S. now, for instance, is actually worth 47 percent of its "declared" face value). All money is funny, if you stop to think about it, but no private currency, competing on a free market, could ever be quite so comical (and tragic) as the notes now bearing the magic imprint of Uncle Sam-and backed only by his promise (or threat) that, come hell or high water, by God he'll make it good by taxing our descendants unto the infinite generation to pay the interest on it The National Debt, so called, is of course, nothing else but the debt we owe the bankers who "loaned" this money to Uncle after he kindly gave them the credit which enabled them to make this loan. Hempscrip or even acidscrip or peyotescrip could never be quite so clownish as this system, which only the Illuminati (if they really exist) could have dreamed up. The system has but one advantage: It makes bankers richer every year. Nobody else, from the industrial capitalist or "captain of industry" to the coal-miner, profits from it in any way, and all pay the taxes, which become the interest payments, which make the bankers richer. If the Illuminati did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them-such a system can be explained in no other way, except by those cynics who hold that human stupidity is infinite.

  The idea behind hempscrip is more radical than the notion of private-enterprise currency per se. Hempscrip, as employed in the novel, depreciates; it is, thus, not merely a no-interest currency, but a negative-interest currency. The lender literally pays the borrower to take it away for a while. It was invented by German business-economist Silvio Gesell, and is described in his Natural Economic Order and in professor Irving Fisher's Stamp Script.

  Gresham's Law, like most of the "laws" taught in State-supported public schools, is not quite true (at least, not in the form in which it is usually taught). "Bad money drives out good" holds only in authoritarian societies, not in libertarian societies. (Gresham was clear-minded enough to state explicitly that he was only describing authoritarian societies; his formulation of his own "Law" begins with the words "If the king issueth two moneys…," thereby implying that the State must exist if the "Law" is to operate.) In a libertarian society, good money will drive out the bad. This Utopian proposition-which the sane reader will regard with acute skepticism-has been seen to be sound by a rigorously logical demonstration, based on the axioms of economics, in The Cause of Business Depressions by Hugo Bilgrim and Edward Levy.*

  * Economists can "prove" all sorts of things from axioms and few of them turn out to be true. Yes. We saved for a footnote the information that at least four empirical demonstrations of the reverse of Gresham's Law are on record. Three of them, employing small volunteer communities in frontier U.S.A. circa 1830-1860, are recorded in Josiah Warren's True Civilization. The fourth, employing contemporary college students in a psychology laboratory, is the subject of a recent Master's thesis by associate professor Don Werkheiser of Central State College, Wilberforce, Ohio.

  APPENDIX ZAIN: PROPERTY AND PRIVILEGE

  Property is theft

  –P. J. PROUDHON

  Property is liberty.

  –P. J. PROUDHON

  Property is impossible.

  –P. J. PROUDHON

  Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

  –RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Proudhon, by piling up his contradictions this way, was not merely being French; he was trying to indicate that the abstraction "property" covers a variety of phenomena, some pernicious and some beneficial. Let us borrow a device from the semanticists and examine his triad with subscripts attached for maximum clarity.

  "Property1 is theft" means that property1, created by the artificial laws of feudal, capitalist, and other authoritarian societies, is based on armed robbery. Land titles, for instance, are clear examples of property1; swords and shot were the original coins of transaction.

  "Property2 is liberty" means that property2, that which will be voluntarily honored in a voluntary (anarchist) society, is the foundation of the liberty in that society. The more people's interests are comingled and confused, as in collectivism, the more they will be stepping on each other's toes; only when the rules of the game declare clearly "This is mine and this is thine," and the game is voluntarily accepted as worthwhile by all parties to it, can true independence be achieved.

  "Property3 is impossible" means that property3 (= property1) creates so much conflict of interest that society is in perpetual undeclared civil war and must eventually devour itself (and properties1 and 3 as well). In short, Proudhon, in his own way, foresaw the Snafu Principle. He also foresaw that communism would only perpetuate and aggravate the conflicts, and that anarchy is the only viable alternative to this chaos.

  It is not averred, of course, that property3 will come into existence only in a totally voluntary society; many forms of it already exist. The error of most alleged libertarians- especially the followers (!) of the egregious Ayn Rand- is to assume that all property1 is property2. The distinction can be made by any IQ above 70 and is absurdly simple. The test is to ask, of any title of ownership you are asked to accept or which you ask others to accept, "Would this be honored in a free society of rationalists, or does it require the armed might of a State to force people to honor it?" If it be the former, it is property? and represents liberty; if it be the latter, it is property1 and represents theft.

  APPENDIX CHETH: HAGBARD'S ABDICATION

  Readers who do not understand the scene in which Hagbard abdicates in favor of Miss Portinari should take heart. Once they do understand it, they will understand most of the mysteries of all schools of mysticism.

  APPENDIX LAMED: THE TACTICS OF MAGICK

  The human brain evidently operates on some variation of the famous principle enunciated in The Hunting of the Snark: "What I tell you three times is true."

  –NORBERT WEINER, Cybernetics

  The most important idea in the Book of Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage is the simple-looking formula "Invoke often."

  The most successful form of treatment for so-called mental disorders, the Behavior Therapy of Pavlov, Skinner, Wolpe, et al., could well be summarized in two similar words: "Reinforce often." ("Reinforcement," for all practical purposes, means the same as the layman's term "reward." The essence of Behavior Therapy is rewarding desired behavior; the behavior "as if by magic" begins to occur more and more often as the rewards continue.)

  Advertising, as everybody knows, is based on the axiom "Repeat often."

  Those who think they are "materialists" and think that "materialism" requires them to deny all facts which do not square with their definition of "matter" are loath to admit the well-documented and extensive list of individuals who have been cured of serious maladies by that very vulgar and absurd form of magick known as Christian Science. Non
etheless, the reader who wants to understand this classic work of immortal literature will have to analyze its deepest meanings, guided by an awareness that there is no essential difference between magick, Behavior Therapy, advertising, and Christian Science. All of them can be condensed into Abra-Melin's simple "Invoke often."

  Reality, as Simon Moon says, is thermoplastic, not thermosetting. It is not quite Silly-Putty, as Mr. Paul Krassner once claimed, but is much closer to Silly-Putty than we generally realize. If you are told often enough that "Budweiser is the king of beers," Budweiser will eventually taste somewhat better- perhaps a great deal better- than it tasted before this magick spell was cast. If a behavior therapist in the pay of the communists rewards you every time you repeat a communist slogan, you will repeat it more often, and begin to slide imperceptibly toward the same kind of belief that Christian Scientists have for their mantras. And if a Christian Scientist tells himself every day that his ulcer is going away, the ulcer will disappear more rapidly than it would have had he not subjected himself to this homemade advertising campaign. Finally, if a magician invokes the Great God Pan often enough, the Great God Pan will appear just as certainly as heterosexual behavior appears in homosexuals who are being handled (or manhandled) by Behavior Therapy.

  The opposite and reciprocal of "Invoke often" is "Banish often."

  The magician wishing for a manifestation of Pan will not only invoke Pan directly and verbally, create Panlike conditions in his temple, reinforce Pan associations in every gesture and every article of furniture, use the colors and perfumes associated with Pan, etc.; he will also banish other gods verbally, banish them by removing their associated furnitures and colors and perfumes, and banish them in every other way. The Behavior Therapist calls this "negative reinforcement," and in treating a patient who is afraid of elevators he will not only reinforce (reward) every instance in which the patient rides an elevator without terror, but will also negatively reinforce (punish) each indication of terror shown by the patient. The Christian Scientist, of course, uses a mantra or spell which both reinforces health and negatively reinforces (banishes) illness.* Similarly, a commercial not only motivates the listener toward the sponsor's product but discourages interest in all "false gods"- by subsuming them under the rubric of the despised and contemptible Brand X.