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 #11
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 Seclorem 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:
Nothing is as dangerous as a mystic Association. The object remaining a secret in the hands of the managers, the rest simply put a ring in their own noses, by which they may be led about at pleasure; and still panting after the secret they are the more pleased the less they see.
Pat
At the bottom of the page was a note in pencil, scrawled with a decisive masculine hand. It said: “In the beginning was the Word and it was written by a baboon.”
ILLUMINAT! PROJECT: MEMO #13
8/5
J.M.:
The survival of the Bavarian Illuminati throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth is the subject of World Revolution by Nesta Webster (Constable and Company, London, 1921). Mrs. Webster follows Robison fairly closely on the early days of the movement, up to the French Revolution, but then veers off and says that the Illuminati never intended to create their Utopian anarcho-communist society: that was just another of their masks. Their real purpose was dictatorship over the world, and so they soon formed a secret alliance with the Prussian government. All subsequent socialist, anarchist, and communist movements are mere decoys, she argues, behind which the German General Staff and the Illuminati are plotting to overthrow other governments, so Germany can conquer them. (She wrote right after England fought Germany in the First World War). I see no way of reconciling this with the Birchers’ thesis that the Illuminati has become a front for the Rhodes Scholars to take over the world for English domination. Obviously—as Robison states—the Illuminati say different things to different people, to get them into the conspiracy. As for the links with modern communism, here are some passages from her pages 234-45:
But now that the (First) Internationale was dead it became necessary for the secret societies to reorganize, and it is at this crisis that we find that “formidable sect” springing to life again—the original Illuminati of Weishaupt.
… What we do know definitely is that the society was refounded in Dresden in 1880…. That it was consciously modelled on its eighteenth century predecessor is clear from the fact that its chief, one Leopold Engel, was the author of a lengthy panegyric on Weishaupt and his Order, entitled Geschichte des Illuminaten Ordens (published in 1906)….
… In London a lodge called by the same name … carried on the rite of Memphis—founded, it is said, by Cagliostro on Egyptian models—and initiated adepts into illuminized Freemasonry….
Was it … a mere coincidence that in July 1889 an International Socialist Congress decided that May 1, which was the day on which Weishaupt founded the Illuminati, should be chosen for an annual International Labour demonstration?
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #14
8/6
J.M.:
And here’s still another version of the origin of the Illuminati, from the Cabalist Eliphas Levi (The History of Magic by Eliphas Levi, Borden Publishing Company, Los Angeles, 1963, page 65). He says there were two Zoroasters, a true one who taught white “right hand” magic and a false one who taught black “left hand” magic. He goes on:
To the false Zoroaster must be referred the cultus of material fire and that impious doctrine of divine dualism which produced at a later period the monstrous Gnosis of Manes and the false principles of spurious Masonry. The Zoroaster in question was the father of that materialized Magic which led to the massacre of the Magi and brought their true doctrine at first into proscription and then oblivion. Ever inspired by the spirit of truth, the Church was forced to condemn— under the names of Magic, Manicheanism, Illuminism and Masonry—all that was in kinship, remote or approximate, with the primitive profanation of the mysteries. One signal example is the history of the Knights Templar, which has been misunderstood to this day.
Levi does not elucidat
e that last sentence; it is interesting, however, that Nesta Webster (see memo 13) also traced the Illuminati to the Knights Templar, whereas Daraul and most other sources track them Eastward to the Hashishim. Is all this making me paranoid? I’m beginning to get the impression that the evidence has not only been hidden in obscure books but also made confusing and contradictory to discourage the researcher …
Pat
Scrawled on the bottom of this memo was a series of jottings in the same masculine hand (Malik’s, Saul guessed) that had jotted the baboon reference on memo 12. The jottings said:
Check on Order of DeMolay
TARO = TORA = TROA = ATOR = ROTA !?????
Abdul Alhazred = ??!
“Oh, Christ,” Barney groaned. “Oh, Mary and Joseph. Oh, shit. We’ll end up either become mystics or going crazy before this case is over. If there’s any difference.”
“The Order of DeMolay is a Masonic society for boys,” Saul commented helpfully. “I don’t know what the Atus of Tahuti are, but that sounds Egyptian. Taro, usually spelled t-a-r-o-t, is the deck of cards Gypsy fortune tellers use—and the word ‘Gypsy’ means Egyptian. Tora is the Law, in Hebrew. We keep coming back to something that has roots in both Jewish mysticism and Egyptian magic….”
“The Knights Templar were kicked out of the church,” Barney said, “for trying to combine Christian and Moslem ideas. Last year, my brother—the Jesuit—gave a lecture about how modern ideas are just old heresies from the Middle Ages warmed over. I had to go for politeness’ sake. I remember something else he said about the Templars. They were engaged in what he called ‘unnatural sex acts.’ In other words, they were faggots. Do you get the impression that all these groups related to the Illuminati are all male? Maybe the big secret they’re hiding so fanatically is that they’re all some vast worldwide homosexual plot. I’ve heard show-biz people complain about what they call the ‘homintern,’ a homo organization that tries to keep all the best jobs for other fruits. How does that sound?”
“It sounds plausible,” Saul said ironically. “But it also sounds plausible to say the Illuminati is a Jewish conspiracy, a Catholic conspiracy, a Masonic conspiracy, a communist conspiracy, a banker’s conspiracy, and I suppose we’ll eventually find evidence to suggest it’s an interplanetary scheme masterminded from Mars or Venus. Don’t you see, Barney? Whatever they’re really up to, they keep creating masks so all sorts of scapegoat groups will get the blame for being the ‘real’ Illuminati.” He shook his head dismally. “They’re smart enough to know they can’t operate indefinitely without a few people eventually realizing something’s there, so they’ve taken that into account and arranged for an inquisitive outsider to get all sorts of wrong ideas about who they are.”
“They’re dogs,” Muldoon said. “Intelligent talking dogs from the dog star, Sirius. They came here and ate Malik. Just like they ate that guy in Kansas City, except that time they didn’t get to finish the job.” He turned back and read from memo 8: “‘… with his throat torn as if by the talons of some enormous beast. No animal was reported missing from any of the local zoos.’” He grinned. “Lord God, I’m almost ready to believe it.”
“They’re werewolves.” Saul answered, grinning also. “The pentagon is the symbol of the werewolf. Look at the Late Late Show some time.”
“That’s the pentagram, not the pentagon.” Barney lit a cigarette, adding. “This is really getting on our nerves, isn’t it?”
Saul looked up wearily and glanced around the apartment almost as if he were looking for its absent owner “Joseph Malik,” he said aloud, “what can of worms have you opened? And how far back does it go?”
WE SHALL NOT
WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED
In fact, for Joseph Malik the beginning was several years earlier, in a medley of teargas, hymn singing, billy clubs, and obscenity, all of which were provoked by the imminent nomination for President of a man named Hubert Horatio Humphrey. It began in Lincoln Park on the night of August 25, 1968, while Joe was waiting to be teargassed. He did not know then that anything was beginning; he was only conscious, in an acid, gut-sour way, of what was ending: his own faith in the Democratic party.
He was sitting with the Concerned Clergymen under the cross they had erected. He was thinking, bitterly, that they should have erected a tombstone instead. It should have said: Here lies the New Deal.
Here lies the belief that all Evil is on the other side, among the reactionaries and Ku Kluxers. Here lies twenty years of the hopes and dreams and sweat and blood of Joseph Wendall Malik. Here lies American Liberalism, clubbed to death by Chicago’s heroic peace officers.
“They’re coming,” a voice near him said suddenly. The Concerned Clergymen immediately began singing, “We shall not be moved.”
“We’ll be moved, all right,” a dry sardonic, W.C. Fields voice said quietly. “When the teargas hits, we’ll be moved.” Joe recognized the speaker: it was novelist William Burroughs with his usual poker face, utterly without anger or contempt or indignation or hope or faith or any emotion Joe could understand. But he sat there, making his own protest against Hubert Horatio Humphrey by placing his body in front of Chicago’s police, for reasons Joe could not understand.
How, Joe wondered, can a man have courage without faith, without belief? Burroughs believed in nothing, and yet there he sat stubborn as Luther. Joe had always had faith in something—Roman Catholicism, long ago, then Trotskyism at college, then for nearly two decades mainstream liberalism (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, “Vital Center”) and now, with that dead, he was trying desperately to summon up faith in the motley crowd of dope-and-astrology-obsessed Yippies, Black Maoists, old-line hardcore pacifists, and arrogantly dogmatic SDS kids who had come to Chicago to protest a rigged convention and were being beaten and brutalized unspeakably for it.
Allen Ginsberg—sitting amid a huddle of Yippies off to the right—began chanting again, as he had all evening: “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare….” Ginsberg believed; he believed in everything—in democracy, in socialism, in communism, in anarchism, in Ezra Pound’s idealistic variety of fascist economics, in Buckminster Fuller’s technological Utopia, in D. H. Lawrence’s return to preindustrial pastoralism, and in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Voodoo, astrology magic; but, above all, in the natural goodness of man.
The natural goodness of man … Joe hadn’t fully believed in that, since Buchenwald was revealed to the world in 1944, when he was seventeen.
“KILL! KILL! KILL!” came the chant of the police—exactly like the night before, the same neolithic scream of rage that signaled the beginning of the first massacre. They were coming, clubs in hand, spraying the teargas before them, “kill! kill! kill!”
Auschwitz, U.S.A., Joe thought, sickened. If they had been issued Zyklon B along with the teargas and Mace, they would be using it just as happily.
Slowly, the Concerned Clergymen came to their feet, holding dampened handkerchiefs to their faces. Unarmed and helpless, they prepared to hold their ground as long as possible before the inevitable retreat. A moral victory, Joe thought bitterly: All we ever achieve are moral victories. The immoral brutes win the real victories.
“All hail Discordia,” said a voice among the clergymen—a bearded young man named Simon, who had been arguing in favor of anarchism against some SDS Maoists earlier in the day.
And that was the last sentence Joe Malik remembered clearly, for it was gas and clubs and screams and blood from then on. He had no way of guessing, at the time, that hearing that sentence was the most important thing that happened to him in Lincoln Park.
(Harry Coin curls his long body into a knot of tension, resting on his elbows and sighting the Remington rifle carefully, as the motorcade passes the Book Depository and heads toward his perch on the triple underpass. He could see Bernard Barker from the CIA down on the grassy knoll. If he carried this off right, they promised him more jobs; it would be the end of petty crime for him, the beginning of big-ti
me money. In a way he was sorry: Kennedy seemed like a nice enough young fellow—Harry would like to make it with both him and that hot-looking wife of his at the same time—but money talks and sentiment is only for fools. He released the bolt action, ignoring the sudden barking of a dog, and took aim—just as the three shots resounded from the grassy knoll.
“Jesus Motherfuckin’ Christ,” he said; and then he caught the glint of the rifle in the Book Depository window. Great God Almighty, how the fuck many of us are there here?” he cried out, scampering to his feet and starting to run.)
It was almost a year after being clubbed—June 22, 1969—that Joe returned to Chicago, to witness another rigged convention, to suffer further disillusionment, to meet Simon once more and to hear the mysterious phrase “All hail Discordia” again.
The convention this time was the last ever held by the Students for a Democratic Society, and from the first hour after it opened, Joe realized that the Progressive Labor faction had stacked all the cards in advance. It was the Democratic party all over again—and it would have been equally bloody if the PL boys had their own police force to “deal with” the dissenters known then as RYM-I and RYM-II. Lacking that factor, the smoldering violence remained purely verbal, but when it was all over another part of Joe Malik was dead and his faith in the natural goodness of man was eroded still further. And so he found himself, aimlessly searching for something that was not totally corrupt, attending the Anarchist Caucus at the old Wobbly Hall on North Halsted Street.
Joe knew nothing about anarchism, except that several famous anarchists—Parsons and Spies of Chicago’s Hay-market riot in 1888, Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts, and the Wobbly’s own poet-laureate, Joe Hill—had been executed for murders which they apparently hadn’t really committed. Beyond that, anarchists wanted to abolish government—a proposition so evidently absurd that Joe had never bothered to read any of their theoretical or polemical works. Now, however, eating the maggotty meat of his growing disillusionment with every conventional approach to politics, he began to listen to the Wobblies and other anarchists with acute curiousity. After all, the words of his favorite fictional hero, “When you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.”
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 12