The illuminatus! trilogy

by Robert Shea; Robert Anton Wilson

  How many times she came, he never knew; he came himself, without once touching his penis, when the Host was finally dissolved.

  He staggered back dizzily, and the air now seemed as resistant to motion as brackish water.

  “Yogge Sothothe Neblod Zin,” the priest began chanting. “By Ashtoreth, by Pan Pangenitor, by the Yellow Sign, by the gifts I have made and the powers I have purchased, by He Who Is Not to Be Named, by Rabban and by Azathoth, by Samma-El, by Amon and Ra, vente, vente, Lucifer, lux fiat!”

  Joe never saw it: he felt it—and it was like chemical Mace, blinding and numbing him at once.

  “Come not in that form!” the priest screamed. “By Jesu Elohim and the Powers that You fear, I command thee: come not in that form! Yod He Vah He—come not in that form.”

  One of the women began weeping in fear.

  “Quiet, you fool,” Simon shouted at her. “Don’t give it more Power.”

  “Your tongue is bound, until I release it,” the priest said to her—but the distraction of his attention had its cost; Joe felt It growing in potency again, and so did the others, judging from their sudden involuntary gasps.

  “Come not in that form!” the priest shouted. “By the Cross of Gold, and by the Rose of Ruby, and by Mary’s Son, I command and demand it of thee: come not in that form! By thy Master, Chronzon! By Pangenitor and Panphage, come not in that form!”

  There was a hiss, like air pouring into a vacuum, and the atmosphere began to clear—but it also dropped abruptly in temperature.

  MASTER, CALL NO MORE UPON THOSE NAMES. I MEANT NOT TO ALARM THEE.

  The Voice was the most shocking experience of the night for Joe. It was oily, flattering, obscenely humble, but there was still within it a secret strength that revealed all too well that the priest’s power over it, however obtained, was temporary, that both of them knew it, and that the price of that power was something it longed to collect

  “Come not in that form either,” said the priest, more stern and more confident. “Ye know full well that such tones and manners are also intended to frighten, and I like not such jokes. Come in this form which thou habitually wearest in thy current earthly activities, or I shall banish thee back to that realm of which you like not to imagine. I command. I command. I command.” There was nothing campy about the Padre now.

  It was just a room again—an odd, medieval, mideastern room, but just a room. The figure that stood among them could not have looked less like a demon.

  “OK,” it said in a pleasant American voice, “we don’t have to get touchy and hostile with each other over a little theatrics, do we? Just tell me what sort of business transaction you went and dragged me here for, and I’m sure we can work out all the details in a down-home, businesslike, cards-on-the-table fashion, with no hard feelings and mutual satisfaction all around.”

  It looked like Billy Graham.

  (“The Kennedys? Martin Luther King? You are fantastically naive still, George. It goes back much, much farther.” Hagbard was relaxing with some Alamout Black hash, after the Battle of Atlantis. “Look at the pictures of Woodrow Wilson in his last months: The haggard look, the vague eyes, and, in fact, symptoms of a certain slow-acting and undetectable poison. They slipped it to him at Versailles. Or look into the Lincoln caper. Who opposed the greenback plan—the closest thing to flaxscript America ever had? Stanton the banker. Who ordered all roads out of Washington closed, except one? Stanton the banker. And Booth went straight for that road. Who got ahold of Booth’s diary afterward? Stanton the banker. And turned it over to the Archives with seventeen pages missing? Stanton the banker. George, you have so much to learn about real history….”)

  The Reverend William Helmer, religious columnist for Confrontation, stared at the telegram. Joe Malik was supposed to be in Chicago covering the SDS convention; what was he doing in Providence, Rhode Island, and what was he involved in that could provoke such an extraordinary communication? Helmer reread the telegram carefully:

  Drop next month’s column. Will pay large bonus for prompt answers to these questions. First, trace all movements of Reverend Billy Graham during last week and find out if he could possibly have gotten to Chicago surreptitiously. Second, send me a list of reliable books on Satanism and witchcraft in the modern world. Tell nobody else on the magazine about this. Wire me c/o Jerry Mallory, Hotel Benefit, Providence, Rhode Island. P.S. find out where The John Dillinger Died for You Society has its headquarters. Joe Malik.

  Those SDS kids must have turned him on with acid, Helmer decided. Well, he was still the boss, and he paid nice bonuses when he was pleased. Helmer reached for the phone.

  (Howard, the dolphin, was singing a very satirical song about sharks, as he swam to meet the Lief Erikson at Peos.)

  James Walking Bear had no great love for palefaces most of the time, but he had just dropped six peyote buttons before this Professor Mallory arrived and he was feeling benevolent and forgiving. After all, the Road Chief once said at a very sacred midsummer peyote festival that the line about forgiving those who trespass against us had a special meaning for Indians. Only when we all forgave the whites, he had said, would our hearts be totally pure, and when our hearts were pure the Curse would be lifted—the white men would cease to trespass, go home to Europe, and vex one another instead of persecuting us. James tried to forgive the professor for being white and found, as usual, that peyote made forgiveness easier.

  “Billie Freschette?” he said. “Hell, she died back in sixty-eight.”

  “I know that,” the professor said. “What I’m looking for is any photographs she may have left.”

  Sure. James knew what kind of photographs.

  “You mean ones that had Dillinger in them?”

  “Yes, she was his mistress, virtually his common-law wife, for a long time, and—”

  “No soap. You’re years too late. Reporters bought up everything she had that showed even the back of Dillinger’s head, way back, long before she came here to the reservation to die.”

  “Well, did you know her?”

  “Sure.” James was careful not be spiteful and didn’t add: all Menominee Indians know one another, in a way you whites can’t understand “knowing.”

  “Did she ever converse about Dillinger?”

  “Of course. Old women always talk about their dead men. Always say the same thing, too: never was another man as good as him. Except when they say there never was another man as bad as him. They only say that when they’re drunk, though.”

  The paleface kept turning colors, the way people do when you’re on peyote. Now he looked almost like an Indian. That made it easier to talk to him.

  “Did she ever say anything about John’s attitude toward the Masons?”

  Why shouldn’t people turn colors? All the trouble in world came from the fact that they usually stayed the same color. James nodded profoundly. As usual, peyote had brought him a big Truth. If whites and blacks and Indians were turning colors all the time, there wouldn’t be any hate in the world, because nobody would know which people to hate.

  “I said, did she ever mention John’s attitude toward the Masons?”

  “Oh. Oh, yes. Funny you should ask that.” The man had a halo around his head now, and James wondered what that meant. Every time he took peyote alone things like that would happen, and he’d end up wishing there were a Road Chief or some other priest around to explain these signs properly. But what about the Masons? Oh, yes. “Billie said the Masons were the only people John Dillinger really hated. He said they railroaded him to prison the first time, and they owned all the banks, so he was getting even by robbing them.”

  The professor’s mouth dropped open in surprise and delight—and James thought it was kind of funny to see that, especially with the halo turning from pink to blue to pink to blue to pink again at the same time.

  (“A big mouth, a tiny brain/He only thinks of blood and pain,” Howard sang.)

  Notes found by a TWA stewardess in a seat vacated by a M
r. “John Mason” after a Madison, Wisconsin, to Mexico City flight June 29, 1969: one week after the last SDS convention of all time:

  “We only robbed from the banks what the banks robbed from the people”—Dillinger, Crown Point Jail, 1934. Could have come from any anarchist text.

  Lucifer—bringer of light.

  Weishaupt’s “illumination” & Voltaire’s “enlightenment”: from the Latin “lux” meaning light.

  Christianity all in 3s (Trinity, etc.) Buddhism in 4s. Illuminism in 5s. A progression?

  Hopi teaching: all men have 4 souls now, but in future will have 5 souls. Find an anthropologist for more data on this.

  Who decided the Pentagon building should have that particular shape?

  “Kick out the Jams”??? Cross-check.

  “Adam” the first man; “Weis,” to know; “haupt,” chief or leader. “The first man to be a leader of those who know.” Assumed name from the beginning?

  lok-Sotot in Pnakotic manuscripts. Cd. be Yog-Sothoth?

  D.E.A.T.H.—Don’t Ever Antagonize The Horn. Does Pynchon know?

  Must get Simon to explain the Yellow Sign and the Aklo chants. Might need protection.

  C. says the hneophobe type outnumbers us 1000-to-1. If so, all this is hopeless.

  What gets me is how much has been out in the open for so long. Not just in Lovecraft, Joyce, Melville, etc., or in the Bugs Bunny cartoons but in scholarly works that pretend to explain. Anybody who wants to go to the trouble can find out, for instance, that the “secret” of the Eleusinian Mysteries was the words whispered to the novice after he got the magic mushroom: “Osiris is a black God!” Five words (of course!) but no historian, archeologist, anthropologist, folklorist, etc. has understood. Or, those who did understand, didn’t care to admit it.

  Can I trust C? For that matter, can I trust Simon?

  This matter of Tlaloc should convince me, one way or the other.

  (“He only thinks of blood and slaughter/The shark should live on land not water.”)

  (“To hell with the shark and all his kin/And fight like hell when you see his fin.”)

  When Joe Malik got off the plane at Los Angeles International Airport, Simon was waiting for him,

  “We’ll talk in your car,” Joe said briefly.

  The car, being Simon’s, was naturally a psychedelic Volkswagen. “Well?” he asked as they drove out of the airport onto Central Avenue.

  “It all checks out,” Joe said with an odd calm. “It did rain blue cats when they dug up Tlaloc. Mexico City has had unusual and unseasonable rains ever since. The missing tooth was on the right, and the corpse at the Biograph Theatre had a missing tooth on the left. Billy Graham couldn’t have gotten to Chicago by any normal means, so that was either the best damned makeup job in the history of show business and plastic surgery or I witnessed a genuine miracle. And all the rest of it, the law of Fives and all. I’m sold. I no longer claim membership in the liberal intellectual guild. You behold in me a horrible example of creeping mysticism.”

  “Ready to try acid?”

  “Yes,” Joe said. “I’m ready to try acid. I only regret that I have but one mind to lose for my Shivadarshana.”

  “Right on! First, though, you’ll meet him. I’ll drive right to his bungalow—it’s not far from here.” Simon began humming as he drove; Joe recognized the tune as the Fugs’ “Rameses II Is Dead, My Love.”

  They drove for a while in silence, and Joe finally asked, “How old is … our little group … exactly?”

  “Since 1888.” Simon said. “That’s when Rhodes horned in and they ‘kicked out the Jams,’ like I told you in Chicago after the Sabbath.”

  “And Karl Marx?”

  “A schmuck. A dupe. A nebbish from the word Go.” Simon made an abrupt turn. “Here we are at his house. The greatest headache they had since Harry Houdini knocked out their spiritualist fronts.” He grinned. “How do you think you’ll feel talking to a dead man?”

  “Weird,” Joe said, “but I’ve felt weird for the last week and a half.”

  Simon parked the car and held the door open. “Just think,” he said. “Hoover sitting there every day with the death-mask on his desk, and half-suspecting, deep down in his bones, how we suckered him.”

  They crossed the yard of the small, modest bungalow. “What a front, eh?” Simon chuckled. He knocked.

  A little old man—he was five foot seven exactly, Joe remembered from the FBI files—opened the door.

  “Here’s our new recruit,” Simon said simply.

  “Come in,” John Dillinger said, “and tell me how an asshole egghead like you can help us beat the shit out of those motherfucking Illuminati cocksuckers.”

  (“They fill their books with obscene words, claiming that this is realism,” Smiling Jim shouted to the KCUF assembly. “It’s not my idea of realism. I don’t know anybody who talks in that gutter language they call realism. And they describe every possible perversion, acts against nature that are so outrageous I wouldn’t sully this audiences’ ears by even mentioning their medical names. Some of them even glorify the criminal and the anarchist. I’d like to see one of these hacks come up to me and look me in the eye and say, ‘I didn’t do it for money. I was honestly trying to tell a good, honest story that would teach people something of value.’ They couldn’t say that. The lie would stick in their throats. Who can doubt where they get their orders from? What person in this audience needs to be told what group is behind this overflowing sewer of smut and filth?”)

  “May storms and rains and typhoons beat them,” Howard sang on. “May Great Cthulhu rise and eat them.”

  “I got into the JAMs in Michigan City Prison,” Dillinger, much relaxed and less arrogant, was saying as he, Simon, and Joe sat in his living room drinking Black Russians.

  “And Hoover knew, from the beginning?” Joe asked.

  “Of course. I wanted the bastard to know—him and every other high-ranking Mason and Rosicrucian and Illuminati front-man in the country.” The old man laughed harshly; except for his unmistakable eyes, which still held the strange blend of irony and intensity that Joe had noted in the 1930s photos, he was indistinguishable from any other elderly fellow who had come to California to enjoy his last years in the sun. “The first bank job I pulled off, in Daleville, Indiana, I used the line that I always repeated: ‘Lie down on the floor and keep calm.’ Hoover couldn’t miss it. That’s been the motto of the JAMs ever since Diogenes the Cynic. He knew no ordinary bank robber would be quoting an obscure Greek philosopher. The reason I repeated it on every heist was just to rub it in and let him know I was taunting him.”

  “But going back to Michigan City Prison …” Joe prompted, sipping his drink.

  “Pierpont was the one who initiated me. He’d been with the JAMs for years by then. I was just a kid, you know—in my early twenties—and I had only pulled one job, a real botch. I couldn’t understand why I got such a stiff sentence, after the D.A. promised me clemency if I’d plead guilty, and I was kind of bitter. But old Harry Pier pont saw my potential.

  “At first I thought he was just another big-house faggot, when he started tracking me around and asking me all sorts of personal questions. But he was what I wanted to become—a successful bank-robber—so I played along. To tell you the truth, I was so horny it wouldn’t have mattered if he was a faggot. You have no idea how horny a man gets in prison. That’s why Baby-Face Nelson and a lot of other guys preferred to die rather than go back to the big house again. Hell, if you haven’t been there, you can’t understand. You just don’t know what being horny is.

  “Well, anyway, after a lot of bull about Jesus and Jehovah and the Bible and all that, Harry just asked me point-blank one day in the prison yard: ‘Do you think it’s possible there might be a true religion?’ I was about to say, ‘Bullshit—like there might be an honest cop,’ but something stopped me. I realized he was dead serious, and a lot might depend on my answer. So I was cautious. I said, ‘If there is, I haven’t heard abo
ut it.’ And he just came back, real quiet, ‘Most people haven’t.’

  “It was a couple of days afterward that he brought the subject up again. Then, he went right on with it, showed me the Sacred Chao and everything. It took my breath away.” The old man’s voice trailed off, as he sank into silent memories.

  “And it really does go back to Babylon?” Joe prompted.

  “I’m not much of an intellectual,” Dillinger replied. “Action is my arena. Let Simon tell you that part.”

  Simon was eager to leap into the breach. “The basic book to confirm our tradition,” he said, “is The Seven Tablets of Creation, which is dated at about 2500 b.c. the time of Sargon. It describes how Tiamat and Apsu, the first gods, were coexisting in Mummu, the primordial chaos. Von Junzt, in his Unausprechlichen Kulten, tells how the Justified Ancients of Mummu originated, just about the time the Seven Tablets were inscribed. You see, under Sargon, the chief deity was Marduk. I mean, that was what the high priests gave out to the public—in private, of course, they worshipped Iok-Sotot, who became the Yog-Sothoth of the Necronomicon. But maybe I’m going too fast. Getting back to the official religion of Marduk, it was based on usury. The priests monopolized the medium of exchange and were able to extract interest for lending it. They also monopolized the land, and extracted tribute for renting it. It was the beginning of what we laughingly call civilization, which has always rested on rent and interest. The old Babylonian con.