The illuminatus! trilogy

by Robert Shea; Robert Anton Wilson

  “If you can never be sure whether what you are doing is good or bad,” said George, “aren’t you liable to be pretty Hamlet-like?” He was feeling much better now, much less afraid, even though the enemy was still presumably out there trying to kill him. Maybe he was getting darshan from Hagbard.

  “What’s so bad about being Hamlet-like?” said Hagbard. “Anyway, the answer is no, because you only become hesitant when you believe there is such a thing as good and evil, and that your action may be one or the other, and you’re not sure which. That was the whole point about Hamlet, if you remember the play. It was his conscience that made him indecisive.”

  “So he should have murdered a whole lot of people in the first act?”

  Hagbard laughed. “Not necessarily. He might have decisively killed his uncle at the earliest opportunity, thus saving the lives of everyone else. Or he might have said, ‘Hey, am I really obligated to avenge my father’s death?’ and done nothing. He was due to succeed to the throne anyway. If he had just bided his time everyone would have been a lot better off, there would have been no deaths, and the Norwegians would not have conquered the Danes, as they did in the last scene of the last act. Though being Norwegian myself I would hardly begrudge Fortinbras his triumph.”

  At that moment Howard appeared again outside their bubble. “The Zwack is retreating. Your laser beam punctured the outer shell, causing a leak in the fuel-storage cells and putting excessive stress on the pressure-resisting system. They were forced to climb to higher levels, which put them so far away from you that they’re now heading south toward the tip of Africa.”

  Hagbard expelled a great sigh of relief. “That means they’re heading for their home base. They’ll enter a tunnel in the Persian Gulf which will bring them into the great underground Sea of Valusia, which is deepest beneath the Himalayas. That was the first base they established. They were preparing it even before the fall of High Atlantis. It’s devilishly well defended. One day we’ll penetrate it though.”

  The thing that puzzled Joe most after his illuminization was John Dillinger’s penis. The rumors about the Smithsonian Institute, he knew, were true: even though any casual phone-caller would get a flat denial from Institute officials, certain high-placed government people could provide a dispensation and the relic would be shown, in the legendary alcohol bottle, all legendary 23 inches of it. But if John was alive, it wasn’t his, and, if it wasn’t his, whose was it?

  “Frank Sullivan’s,” Simon said, when Joe finally asked him.

  “And who the hell was Frank Sullivan to have a tool like that?”

  But Simon only answered, “I don’t know. Just some guy who looked like John.”

  Atlantis also bothered Joe, after he saw it the first time Hagbard took him for a ride in the Lief Erikson. It was all too pat, too plausible, too good to be true, especially the ruins of cities like Peos, with their architecture that obviously combined Egyptian and Mayan elements.

  “Science has been flying on instruments, like a pilot in a fog, ever since nineteen hundred,” he said casually to Hagbard on the return trip to New York. (This was in ’72, according to his later recollections. Fall of ’72—almost two years exactly after the test of AUM in Chicago.)

  “You’ve been reading Bucky Fuller,” was Hagbard’s cool reply. “Or was it Korzybski?”

  “Never mind who I’ve been reading,” Joe said directly. “The thought in my head is that I never saw Atlantis, any more than I ever saw Marilyn Monroe. I saw moving pictures which you told me were television reception of cameras outside your sub. And I saw moving pictures of what Hollywood assured me was a real woman, even though she looked more like a design by Petty or Vargas. In the Marilyn Monroe case, it is reasonable to believe what I am told: I don’t believe a robot that good has been built yet. But Atlantis … I know special-effects men who could build a city like that on a tabletop, and have dinosaurs walking through it. And your cameras trained on it.”

  “You suspect me of trickery?” Hagbard asked raising his eyebrows.

  “Trickery is your metier,” Joe said bluntly. “You are the Beethoven, the Rockefeller, the Michelangelo of deception. The Shakespeare of the gypsy switch, the two-headed nickel, and the rabbit in the hat. What little liver pills are to Carter, lies are to you. You dwell in a world of trapdoors, sliding panels, and Hindu ropetricks. Do I suspect you? Since I met you, I suspect everybody.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Hagbard grinned. “You are well on your way to paranoia. Take this card and keep it in your wallet. When you begin to understand it, you’ll be ready for your next promotion. Just remember: it’s not true unless it makes you laugh. That is the one and sole and infallible test of all ideas that will ever be presented to you.” And he handed Joe a card saying

  THERE IS NO FRIEND ANYWHERE

  Burroughs, incidentally, although he discovered the 23 synchronicity principle, is unaware of the correlation with 17. This makes it even more interesting that his date for the invasion of earth by the Nova Mob (in Nova Express) is September 17, 1899. When I asked him how he picked that date, he said it just came to him out of the air.

  Damn. I was just interrupted by another woman, collecting for the Mothers March Against Hernia. I only gave her a dime.

  W, the 23rd letter, keeps popping up in all this. Note: Weishaupt, Washington, William S. Burroughs, Charlie Workman, Mendy Weiss, Len Weinglass in the Conspiracy Trial, and others who will quickly come to mind. Even more interesting, the first physicist to apply the concept of synchronicity to physics, after Jung published the theory, was Wolfgang Pauli.

  Another suggestive letter-number transformation: Adam Weishaupt (A.W.) is 1-23, and George Washington (G.W.) is 7-23. Spot the hidden 17 in there? But, perhaps, I grow too imaginative, even whimsical….

  There was a click. George turned. All the time he’d been in the control center with Hagbard, he had never looked back at the door through which he had come. He was surprised to see that it looked like an opening in thin air—or thin water. On either side of the doorway was blue-green water and a dark horizon which was actually the ocean bottom. Then, in the center, the doorway itself and a golden light silhouetting the figure of a beautiful woman.

  Mavis strode onto the balcony, pulling the door shut behind her. She was wearing forest-green tights with white patent leather boots and a wide white belt. Her small but well-shaped breasts jiggled naturally under her blouse. George found himself thinking back to the scene on the beach. That was only this morning, and what time was it anyway? What time where? Back in Florida it was probably two or three in the afternoon. Which would make it one p.m. in Mad Dog, Texas. And probably about six out here in the Atlantic. Did time zones extend beneath the water? He supposed they did. On the other hand, if you were at the North Pole, you could skip around the Pole and be in a different time zone every few seconds. And cross the International Date Line every five minutes if you wanted to. Which would not, he reminded himself, make it possible to travel in time. But if he could go back to this morning and replay Mavis’s demand for sex, this time he would respond! He now wanted her desperately.

  Well and good, but why did she say he was not a schmuck, why did she imply admiration for him because he would not fuck her? If he had fucked her because she asked him and he felt he should but without wanting to, he would have been a pure and simple schmuck. But he could have pronged her simply because she would have been nice to fuck, regardless of whether she would have admired him or despised him. But that was their game—Mavis’s and Hagbard’s game of saying I do what I want to do, and I don’t give a damn what you think. George cared a great deal about what other people thought, so not fucking Mavis at the time was at least honest, even if he was beginning to see some merit in the Discordian (he supposed it was Discordian) attitude of super self-sufficiency.

  Mavis smiled at him. “Well, George, had your baptism of fire?”

  George shrugged. “Well, there was the Mad Dog jail. And I’ve been in a few other bad scen
es.” For instance, there was the time I held a pistol to my head and pulled the trigger.

  She’d sucked his cock, he’d watched her in manic manustupration, but he was desperate to get inside her, all the way, up the womb, riding her ovarian trolley to the wonderful land of fuck, as Henry Miller said. What the hell was so special about Mavis’s cunt? Especially after that induction ceremony scene. Hell, Stella Maris seemed like a less neurotic woman and was certainly a classic lay. After Stella Maris, who needed Mavis?

  A sudden question struck him. How did he know he’d laid Stella? It could have been Mavis inside that golden apple. It could have been some woman he’d never met. He was pretty sure it was a woman, unless it was a goat or a cow or a sheep. Best not put that kind of joke past Hagbard either. But even if it was a woman, why visualize Stella or Mavis or somebody like them? It was probably some diseased old Etruscan whore that Hagbard kept around for religious purposes. Some Sibyl. Some wop witch. Maybe it was Hagbard’s rotten old Sicilian mother with no teeth, a black shawl, and three kinds of VD. No, it was Hagbard’s father who was Sicilian. His mother was Norwegian.

  “What color were they?” he said suddenly to Hagbard.

  “Who?”

  “The Atlanteans.”

  “Oh.” Hagbard nodded. “They were covered with fur over most of their bodies, like any normal ape. At least, the High Atlanteans were. A mutation occurred around the time of the Hour of the Evil Eye—the catastrophe that destroyed High Atlantis. Later Atlanteans, like modern humans, were hairless. Those of the oldest Atlantean ancestry tend to be rather furry.” George couldn’t help looking down at Hagbard’s hand as it rested on the railing. It was covered with thick black hair.

  “All right,” said Hagbard, “it’s time to head back to our North American base. Howard? You out there?”

  The long, streamlined shape performed a somersault on their right. “What’s happening, Hagbard?”

  “Have some of your people keep an eye on things here. We’ve got work to do on land. And—Howard, as long as I live I will be in debt to your people for the four who died to save me.”

  “Haven’t you and the Lief Erickson saved us from several kinds of deaths planned for us by the shore people?” said Howard. “We’ll keep watch over Atlantis for you. And the seas in general, and that which Atlantis has spawned. Hail and farewell, Hagbard and other friends—

  “The sea is wide and the sea is deep

  But warm as blood through it there rolls

  A tide of friendship that will keep

  Us close in Ocean’s blackest holes.”

  He was gone. “Lift off,” Hagbard called. George felt the surge of the sub’s colossal engines, and they were sailing high above the hills and valleys of Atlantis. With the special lighting of Hagbard’s television screen system, it seemed much like flying in a jet plane over one of the continents above the ocean’s surface.

  “Too bad we don’t have time to get deeper into Atlantis,” said Hagbard. “There are many mighty cities to see. Though of course none of them can approach the cities that existed before the Hour of the Evil Eye.”

  “How many of these Atlantean civilizations were there?” asked George.

  “Basically, two. One leading up to the Hour, and one afterward. Before the Hour, there was a civilization of about a million human beings on this continent. Technically, they were further advanced than the human race is today. They had atomic power, space travel, genetic technology and much else. This civilization was struck a death blow in the Hour of the Evil Eye. Two-thirds of them were killed —almost half the human population of the planet at that time. After the Hour, something made it impossible for them to make a comeback. The cities that came through the first catastrophe relatively undamaged were destroyed in later disasters. The inhabitants of Atlantis were reduced to savagery in a generation. Part of the continent sank under the sea, which was the beginning of the process that ended when all of Atlantis was under water, as it is today.”

  “Was this the earthquakes and tidal waves that you always read about?” George asked.

  “No,” said Hagbard with a curious closed expression. “It was manmade. High Atlantis was destroyed in a kind of war. Probably a civil war, since there was no other power on the planet that could have matched them.”

  “Anyway, if there’d been a victor, they’d still be around now,” said George.

  “They are,” said Mavis. “The victors are still around. Only they’re not what you might visualize. Not a conquering nation. And we are the descendants of the defeated.”

  “Now,” said Hagbard, “I’m going to show you something I promised when we first met. It has to do with the catastrophe I’ve been talking about. Look there.”

  The submarine had risen high above the continent, and it was possible to see landscapes stretching for hundreds of miles. Looking in the direction in which Hagbard pointed, George saw a vast expanse of black, glazed plain. Out of its center jutted something white and pointed, like a canine tooth.

  “It is said of them that they even controlled the comets in their courses.” said Hagbard. He pointed again.

  The submarine sailed closer to the jutting white object It was a four-sided white pyramid.

  “Don’t say it,” said Mavis, giving him a warning look, and George remembered the tattoo he had seen between her breasts. He looked down again. They were above the pyramid now and George could see the side that had been hidden from him as they approached. He saw what he had half-feared, half-expected to see: a blood-red design in the shape of a baleful eye.

  “The Pyramid of the Eye,” Hagbard said. “It stood in the center of the capital of High Atlantis. It was built in the last days of that civilization by the founders of the world’s first religion. It doesn’t look very big from up here, but it’s five times the size of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, which was modeled after it. It’s made of an imperishable ceramic substance which repels even ocean sediment. As if the builders knew that to last it would have to survive tens of thousands of years of ocean burial. And maybe—depending on who they were—they did know that. Or maybe they just built well in those days. Peos, as you saw, was a pretty durable city, and that was built after High Atlantis fell, by the second civilization I spoke of. That second civilization reached a level somewhat more advanced than that of the Greeks and Romans, but it was nothing like its predecessor. And some malevolent force seemed bent on destroying it, too, and it was destroyed, about ten thousand years ago. Of that civilization we have the evidence of ruins. But of High Atlantis we have only records and legends dug up from the later civilization—and, of course, poetry from the Porpoise Corpus. This is the only artifact, this pyramid. But its existence and durability prove that as long ago as ten Egypts, a race of men existed whose technology was far advanced beyond what we know today. So advanced that it took twenty thousand years for that civilization’s successor culture to disappear completely. The men who destroyed High Atlantis did their best to make it disappear. But they couldn’t quite manage it. The Pyramid of the Eye, for instance, is indestructible. Though it’s probable that they didn’t want to destroy it.”

  Mavis nodded sombrely. “That is their most sacred shrine.”

  “In other words,” said George, “you’re telling me that the people who destroyed Atlantis still exist. Do they have the powers they had then?”

  “Substantially, yes,” said Hagbard.

  “Is this the Illuminati you told me about?”

  “Illuminati, or Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria is one of the names they have used, yes.”

  “So they didn’t start in seventeen seventy-six—they go a long way back before that, right?”

  “Right,” said Mavis.

  “Then why did you lie to me about their history? And why the hell haven’t they taken over the world by now, if they’re all that powerful? When our ancestors were savages, they could have dominated them completely.”

  Hagbard replied, “I lied to you because the human mind
can only accept a little of the truth at a time. Also, initiation into Discordianism has stages. The answer to the other question is complicated. But I’ll try to give it to you simply. There are five reasons. First, there are organizations like the Discordians which are almost as powerful and which know almost as much as the Illuminati and which are able to thwart them. Second, the Illuminati are too small a group to enjoy the creative cross-fertilization necessary to progress of any kind, and they have been unable to advance much beyond the technological level they reached thirty thousand years ago. Like Chinese Mandarins. Third, the Illuminati are hamstrung in their actions by the superstitious beliefs that set them apart from the other Atlanteans. As I told you, they’re the world’s first religion. Fourth, the Illuminati are too sophisticated, ruthless and decadent to want to take over the world—it amuses them to play with world. Fifth, the Illuminati do rule the world and everything that happens, happens by their sufferance.”

  “Those reasons contradict each other,” said George.

  “That’s the nature of logical thought. All propositions are true in some sense, false in some sense and meaningless in some sense.” Hagbard didn’t smile.

  The submarine had described a great arc as they talked and now the Pyramid of the Eye was far behind them. The eye itself, since it faced eastward, was no longer visible. Below, George could see the ruins of several small cities at the edges of tall cliffs that fell away into darker depths—cliffs that doubtless had been the seacoast of Atlantis at one time.

  Hagbard said, “I’ve got a job for you, George. You’re going to like it, and you’re going to want to do it, but it is going to make you shit a brick. We’ll talk about it when we get to Chesapeake Base. Now, though, let’s go down into the hold and have a look at our acquisitions.” He flicked a switch. “FUCKUP, get your finger out of your ass and drive this thing for a while.”