The room was in the luxury suite of the Hotel Durrutti, which meant that it was decorated in abominable Spanish-Moorish decor, the sheets were changed daily (to a less luxurious suite), the cockroaches were minimal, and the plumbing sometimes worked. Concepcion contemplated the bullfight mural on the opposite wall, Manolete turning an elegant Veronica on an unconvincingly drawn bull, and said thoughtfully, “Oh, a Iloigor is a god of the black people. The natives. A very bad god.”
Chips glanced at the statue again and said, more to himself than to the peasant girl, “Looks vaguely like Tlaloc in Mexico City, crossed with one of those Polynesian Cthulhu tikis.”
“The Starry Wisdom people are very interested in these statues,” Concepcion said, just to be making conversation, since it was obvious that Chips wasn’t going to be ready to prong her again for at least another half hour.
“Indeed?” Chips said, equally bored. “Who are the Starry Wisdom people?”
“A church. Down on Tequilla y Mota Street. What used to be Lumumba Street and was Franco Street when I was a girl. Funny church.” The girl frowned, thinking about them. “When I worked in the telegraph office I was always seeing their telegrams. All in code. And never to another church. Always to banks all over Europe and North and South America.”
“You don’t say,” drawled Chips, no longer bored but trying to sound casual; his code number in British Intelligence was, of course, 00005. “Why are they interested in these statues?” He was thinking that statues, properly hollowed out, could transport heroin; he was already sure that Starry Wisdom was a front for BUGGER.
(In 1933, at Harvard, Professor Tochus told his Psychology 101 class, “Now, the child feels frightened and inferior, according to Adler, because he is, in fact, physically smaller and weaker than the adult. Thus, he knows he has no chance of successful rebellion, but nevertheless he dreams about it. This is the origin of the Oedipus Complex in Adler’s system: not sex, but the will to power itself. The class will readily see the influence of Neitzsche …” Robert Putney Drake, glancing around the room, was quite sure that most of the students would not readily see anything; and Tochus himself didn’t really see either. The child, Drake had decided—it was the cornerstone of his own system of psychology—was not brainwashed by sentimentality, religion, ethics, and other bullshit. The child saw clearly that, in every relationship, there is a dominant party and a submissive party. And the child, in its quite correct egotism, determined to become the dominant party. It was that simple; except, of course, that the brainwashing takes effect eventually in most cases and, by about this time, the college years, most of them were ready to become robots and accept the submissive role. Professor Tochus droned on; and Drake, serene in his lack of superego, continued to dream of how he would seize the dominant role … In New York, Arthur Flegenheimer, Drake’s psychic twin, stood before seventeen robed figures, one wearing a goat’s-head mask, and repeated, “I will forever hele, always conceal, never reveal, any art or arts, part or parts….”)
You look like a robot, Joe Malik says in a warped room in a skewered time in San Francisco. I mean, you move and walk like a robot.
Hold onto that, Mr. Wabbit, says a bearded young man with a saturnine smile. Some trippers see themselves as robots. Others see the guide as a robot. Hold that perspective. Is it a hallucination, or is a recognition of something we usually black out?
Wait, Joe says. Part of you is like a robot. But part of you is alive, like a growing thing, a tree or a plant….
The young man continues to smile, his face drifting above his body toward the mandala painted on the ceiling. Well? he asks. Do you think that might be a good poetic shorthand: that part of me is mechanical, like a robot, and part of me is organic, like a rosebush? And what’s the difference between the mechanical and the organic? Isn’t a rosebush a kind of machine used by the DNA code to produce more rosebushes?
No, Joe says. Everything is mechanical, but people are different. A cat has a grace that we’ve lost, or partly lost.
How do you think we’ve lost it?
And Joe sees the face of Father Volpe and hears the voice screaming about submission….
The SAC bases await the presidential order to take off for Fernando Poo, Atlanta Hope addresses a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, protesting the gutless appeasement of the comsymp administration in not threatening to bomb Moscow and Peking the same time as Santa Isobel, the Premier of Russia rereads his speech nervously as the TV cameras are set up in his office (“and, in socialist solidarity with the freedom-loving people of Fernando Poo”), the Chairman of the Chinese Communist party, having found the thought of Chairman Mao of little avail, throws the I Ching sticks and looks dismally at Hexagram 23, and 99 percent of the peoples of the world wait for their leaders to tell them what to do; but in Santa Isobel itself, three locked doors across the suite from the now-sleeping Concepcion, Fission Chips says angrily into his shortwave, “Repeat none. Not one Russian or Chinese anywhere on the bloody island. I don’t care what Washington says. I’m telling you what I have seen. Now, about the BUGGER heroin ring here—”
“Sign off,” the submarine tells him. “HQ is not interested in BUGGER or heroin right now.”
“Damn and blast!” Chips stares at the shortwave set That bloody well tore it. He would just have to proceed on his own, and show those armchair agents back in London, especially that smug W., how little they actually knew about the real problem in Fernando Poo and the world.
Storming, he charged back to the bedroom. I’ll just get dressed, he thought furiously, including my smoke bombs and Luger and laser ray, and toddle over to this Starry Wisdom church and see what I can nose out. But when he tore open the bedroom door he stopped, momentarily stunned. Concepcion still lay in the bed but she was no longer sleeping. Her throat was neatly cut and a curious dagger with a flame design on it stuck into the pillow beside her.
“Damn, blast and thunder!” cried 00005. “Now that absolutely does tear it. Every time I find a good piece of ass those fuckers from BUGGER come along and shaft her!”
Ten minutes later, the GO signal came from the White House, a fleet of SAC bombers headed for Santa Isobel with hydrogen bombs, and Fission Chips, fully dressed, toddled over to the Starry Wisdom church where he encountered, not BUGGER, but something on an entirely different plane.
THE FOURTH TRIP, OR CHESED
Jesus Christ On A Bicycle
Mister Order, he runs at a very good pace
But old Mother Chaos is winning the race
—Lord Omar Khayaam Ravenhurst, K.S.C.,
“The Book of Advice,” The Honest Book of Truth
Among those who knew that the true faith of Mohammed was contained in the Ishmaelian teachings, most were sent out into the world to seek positions in the governments of the Near East and Europe. Since it pleased Allah to decree this task for them, they obeyed willingly; many served thus for their whole lives. Some, however, after five or ten or even twenty years of such fealty to a given shah or caliph or king, would receive, through surreptitious channels, a parchment bearing the symbol: That night, the servant would strike, and disappear like smoke; and the master would be found in the morning, throat cut, with the emblematic Flame Dagger of the Ishmaelians lying beside him. Others were chosen to serve in a different manner, maintaining the palace of Hassan i Sabbah himself at Alamout. These were especially fortunate, for it was their privilege to visit more often than others the Garden of Delights, in which the Lord Hassan himself would, through his command of magic chemicals, transfer them into heaven while they still lived in the body. One day in the year 470 (known to the uncircumcized Christian dogs as 1092 a.d.) another proof of the Lord Hassan’s powers was given to them, for they were all summoned to the throne room and there sat the Lord Hassan in all his glory, while before him on the floor lay a plate bearing the head of the disciple Ibn Azif.
“This deluded one,” the Lord Hassan declared, “has disobeyed a command—the one crime that cannot be forgiven in our
Sacred Order. I show you his head to remind you of the fate of traitors in this world. More; I will instruct you on the fate of such dogs in the next world.” So saying, the good and wise Lord Hassan rose from his throne, walking with his characteristic lurching gait, and approached the head. “I command thee,” he said. “Speak.”
The mouth opened and the head emitted a scream such that all the faithful covered their ears and turned their eyes away, many of them muttering prayers.
“Speak, dog!” the wise Lord Hassan repeated. “Your whine is of no interest to us. Speak!”
“The flames,” the head cried. “The terrible flames. Allah, the flames …” it babbled on as a soul will in extreme agony. “Forgiveness,” it begged. “Forgiveness, O mighty Lord.”
“There is no forgiveness for traitors,” said the all-wise Hassan. “Return to hell!” And the head immediately silenced. All bowed down and prayed to Hassan and Allah alike; of the many miracles they had seen this was certainly the greatest and most terrible.
The Lord Hassan then dismissed everyone, saying, “Forget not this lesson. Let it stay in your hearts longer than the names of your fathers.”
(“We want to recruit you,” Hagbard said, 900-odd years later, “because you are so gullible. That is, gullible in the right way.”)
Jesus Christ went by on a bicycle. That was my first warning that I shouldn’t have taken acid before coming down to Balbo and Michigan to see the action. But it really seemed right, on another level: acid was the only way to relate to that whole Kafka-on-a-bummer example of quote democratic process in action unquote. I found Hagbard in Grant Park, cool as usual, with a bucket of water and a pile of handkerchiefs for the teargas victims. He was near the General Logan statue, watching the more violent confrontations across the street at the Hilton, sucking one of his Italian cigars and looking like Ahab finally finding the whale … Hagbard, in fact, was remembering Professor Tochus at Harvard: “Damn it, Celine, you can’t major in naval engineering and law both. You’re not Leonardo da Vinci, after all.” “But I am,” he had replied, poker-faced. “I recall all my past incarnations in detail and Leonardo was one of them.” Tochus almost exploded: “Be a wise-ass, then! When you start flunking half your subjects, perhaps you’ll come back to reality.” The old man had been terribly disappointed to see the long row of As. Across the street, the demonstrators advanced toward the Hilton and the police charged again, clubbing them back; Hagbard wondered if Tochus had ever realized that a professor is a policeman of the intellect. Then he saw the Padre’s new disciple, Moon, approaching…. “You haven’t been clubbed yet,” I said, thinking that in a sense Jarry’s old presurrealist classic, “The Crucifixion of Christ Considered as an Uphill Bike Race,” was really the best metaphor for the circus Daley was running. “Neither have you, I’m glad to see,” Hagbard replied: “Judging from your eyes, though, you got teargassed in Lincoln Park last night.” I nodded, remembering that I had been thinking of him and his weird Discordian yoga when it happened. Malik, the dumb social-democratic-liberal that John wanted to recruit soon, was only a few feet away, and Burroughs and Ginsberg were near me on the other side. I could see, suddenly, that we were all chessmen, but who was the chessmaster moving us? And how big was the board? Across the street, a rhinoceros moved ponderously, turning into a jeep with a barbed-wire crowd-sticker on the front of it. “My head’s leaking,” I said.
“Do you have any idea who’s picking it up?” Hagbard asked. He was remembering a house lease in Professor Orlock’s class. “What it amounts to, in English,” Hagbard had said, “is that the tenant has no rights that can be successfully defended in court, and the landlord has no duties on which he cannot, quite safely, default.” Orlock looked pained, and several students were shocked, as if Hagbard had suddenly jumped up and exposed his penis in front of the class. “That’s putting it too baldly,” Orlock said finally…. “It might be somebody years in the future,” I said, “or the past” I wondered if Jarry was picking it up, in Paris, half a century before; that would account for the resemblance. Abbie Hoffman went by just then, talking to Apollonius of Tyana. Were we all in Jarry’s mind, or Joyce’s? We even have a Sheriff Wood riding herd on us and Rubin’s horde of Jerry men…. “Fuller’s car is a stunt, a showpiece,” Professor Caligari fumed, “and, anyway, it has nothing to do with naval architecture.” Hagbard looked at him levelly and said, “It has everything to do with naval architecture.” As in law school, the other students were disturbed. Hagbard began to understand: they are not here to learn, they are here to acquire a piece of paper that would make them eligible for certain jobs….
“There are only a few more memos.” Saul said to Muldoon, “Let’s skim them and then call headquarters to see if Danny found this ‘Pat’ who wrote them.”
ILLUMINAT! PROJECT: MEMO #15
8/6
J.M.:
Here’s the weirdest version of the Illuminati history that I’ve found so far. It’s from a publication written, edited and published by somebody named Philip Campbell Ar-gyle-Stuart, who holds that the conflicts in the world are due to an age-old war between Semitic “Khazar” peoples and Nordic “Faustian” peoples. This is the essence of his thinking:
My theory is that an extremely devilish imposed overcrust was added to the Khazar population consisting of humanoids who arrived by flying saucer from the planet Vulcan, which I assume to be not in intra-Mercurial orbit around the sun, but rather in the earth’s orbit, behind the Sun, forever out of sight to earthlings, always six months behind or ahead of the earth in orbital travel….
Likewise for the Gothic Faustian Western Culture. The previously comparatively inert and purposeless migrating population streams known as Franks, Goths, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Swabians, Alemani, Lombards, Vandals, and Vikings suddenly had an overcrust added consisting of Norman-Martian-Varangians, arriving from Saturn by way of Mars in flying saucers….
After 1776 it (the Khazar-Vulcanian conspiracy) used the Illuminati and Grand Orient Masons. After 1815 it used the financial machinations of the House of Rothschild and after 1848 the Communist movement and after 1895 the Zionist movement….
One more thing needs to be mentioned. Mrs. Helena Petrovna Blavatski (nee Hahn in Germany), 1831-1891, founder of Theosophy … was both hypocritical and devilish, a true witch of great evil power allied with Illuminati, Grand Orient Masons, Russian Anarchists, British Israel Theorists, Proto-Zionists, Arabian Assassins and Thuggi from India.
Source: The High I.Q. Bulletin, Vol. IV, No. 1, January 1970. Published by Philip Campbell Argyle-Stuart, Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Pat
“What was that word?” Private Celine asked eagerly.
“SNAFU,” Private Pearson told him. “You mean to say you never heard it before?” He sat up in his bunk and stared.
“I’m a naturalized citizen,” Hagbard said. “I was born in Norway.” He pulled his shirt away from his back again; the Fort Benning summer was much too hot for the Nordic half of his genes. “Situation Normal, AU Fucked Up,” he repeated. “That really sums it up. That really says it.”
“Waifll you’ve been in This Man’s Army a little longer,” the black man told him vehemently. “Then you’ll really appreciate the application of that word, dads. Oh, man, will you appreciate it.”
“It’s not just the army,” Hagbard said thoughtfully. “It’s the whole world.”
Actually, after they immanentized the Eschaton, I found out where my head was leaking that night (and a few other nights, too.) Into poor George Dorn. The leak almost gave him water on the brain. He kept wondering where all that Joyce and surrealism was coming from. I’m seven years older than he is, but we’re on the same valence because of similar grammar school experiences and revolutionary fathers. That’s why Hagbard never really understood either of us, fully: he had private tutors until he hit college, and by that stage Official Education is beginning to make some partial concessions to reality so the victims have at least a chance of surviving on the
outside. But I didn’t know any of that in Grant Park that night or how the Army helped Hagbard understand college, because I was working out this new notion of the total valence of the set remaining constant. It would mean that I would have to leave when George came on, or say, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield had to do the pill or auto-wreck shticks before there was room for Racquel Welch’s vibes.
ILLUMINAT! PROJECT: MEMO #16
8/7
J.M.:
I think I’ve found the clue as to how Zoroaster, flying saucers and all that lunatic-fringe stuff fits into the Illuminati puzzle. Dig this, boss-man:
The Nazi Party was founded as the political appendage of the Thule Society, an extremist fringe of the Illuminated Lodge of Berlin. This lodge, in turn, was made up of Rosicrucians—high Freemasons—and its preoccupation was mourning the death of the feudal system. Masons of this time were, like the Federalist Party in post-revolutionary America, working diligently to prevent “anarchy” and preserve the old values by bringing about Christian Socialism. Indeed, the Aaron Burr conspiracy, which Professor Hofstadter notes was allegedly Masonic in origin, was an American prototype of German intrigues of a century later. To their external scientific socialism these Masons added mystic concepts which were thought to be “gnostic” in origin. One of these was the concept of “Gnosticism” itself, called Illumination—which held that heavenly beings directly or indirectly gave humanity its great ideas and would come back to Earth after mankind had achieved sufficient progress. Illumination was a brand of pentecostalism which was persecuted by orthodox Christianity for centuries and had become lodged in Freemasonry through a complex historical process which is impossible to explain without a major digression. It is sufficient to say that the Nazis, being “Illuminated,” felt themselves to be divinely inspired and therefore felt justified in rewriting the rules of good and evil to suit their own purposes.
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