The illuminatus! trilogy

by Robert Shea; Robert Anton Wilson

  “That’s your trip, baby,” a second Superman said. “I don’t give a fuck what any motherfuckin’ honky thinks about our music.”

  YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A NOTHING

  “Mick Jagger hasn’t even played ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ yet and already the trouble has started,” an English voice drawled…Attila and His Huns were trying to do acute bodily damage to the Senate and the People of Rome…Both groups were speeding, and they had gotten into a very intellectual discussion of the meaning of one of Dylan’s lyrics … A Hun bopped a Roman with a beer stein as another voice mumbled something about Tyl Eulenspiegel’s merry pranks.

  YOU’RE NOT A THING AT ALL

  Joe had always had the policy at Confrontation that real screwballs should be sent to him for interviewing, but the little fat man who came in didn’t seem particularly crazy. He just had the bland, regular, somewhat smallish features of a typical WASP.

  “The name is James Cash Cartwright,” the fat man said, holding out his hand, “and the subject is consciousness energy.”

  “The subject of what?”

  “Oh—this here article I have written for you.” Cartwright reached into his alligator briefcase and pulled out a thick sheaf of typewritten paper. It was an odd size, possibly eight by ten. He handed the manuscript to Joe.

  “What kind of paper is this?” said Joe.

  “It’s the standard size in England,” said Cartwright. “When I was over there in 1963 visiting the tombs of my ancestors, I bought ten reams of it. I took the plane from Dallas on November 22, the day Kennedy was shot. Synchronicity. Also, I sneezed the moment the gunman squeezed. More synchronicity. But about this paper, I’ve never used anything else for my writing since then. Kind of gives a man a nice feeling to know that all the trees that went into my paper were chopped down over ten years ago, and no trees have died since then to support the proliferation of Jim Cartwright’s philosophical foliage.”

  “That certainly is a wonderful thing,” said Joe, thinking how much he loathed ecological moralists. During the height of the ecology fad, back in 1970 and ’71, several people actually had had the nerve to write Joe saying that ecologically responsible journals like Confrontation had a duty to cease publication in order to save trees. “Just what fruit have your philosophical researches borne, Mr. Cartwright?” he asked.

  “Golden apples of the sun, silver apples of the moon,” said Cartwright with a smile. Joe saw Lilith Velkor defying Gruad atop the Pyramid of the Eye.

  “Well, sir,” said Cartwright, “my basic finding is that life energy pervades the entire universe, just as light and gravity do. Therefore, all life is one, just as all light is one. All energies, you see, are broadcast from a central source, yet to be found. If four amino acids—adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine—suddenly become life when you throw them together, then all chemicals are potentially alive. You and me and the fish and bugs are that kind of life made from adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine: DNA life. What we call dead matter is another kind of life: non-DNA life. Okay so far? If awareness is life and if life is one, then the awareness of the individual is just one of the universe’s sensory organs. The universe produces beings like us in order to perceive itself. You might think of it as a giant, self-contained eye.”

  Joe remained impassive.

  Cartwright went on. “Consciousness is therefore also manifested as telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis. Those phenomena are simply non-localized versions of consciousness. I’m very interested in telepathy, and I’ve had a lot of success with telepathic research. These cases of communication are just further evidence that consciousness is a seamless web throughout the universe.”

  “Now wait a minute,” said Joe. “Automobiles run on mechanical energy, heat energy, and electrical energy, but that doesn’t mean that all the automobiles in the world are in contact with each other.”

  “What burns?” said Cartwright, smiling.

  “You mean in a car? Well, the gas ignites explosively in the cylinder—”

  “Only organic matter burns,” said Cartwright smugly. “And all organic matter is descended from a single cell. All fire is one. And all automobiles do communicate with each other. You can’t tell me anything about gas or oil. Or cars. I’m a Texan. Did I tell you that?”

  Joe shook his head. “Just what part of Texas are you from?”

  “Little place called Mad Dog.”

  “Had a notion you might be. Tell me, Mr. Cartwright, do you know anything about a conspiratorial organization called the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria?”

  “Well, I know three organizations that have similar names: the Ancient Bavarian Conspiracy, the New Bavarian Conspiracy, and the Conservative Bavarian Seers.”

  Joe nodded. Cartwright didn’t seem to have the facts straight—as Joe knew them. Perhaps the fat man had other pieces of the puzzle, perhaps fewer pieces than Joe had. Still, if they were different, they might be useful.

  “Each of these organizations controls one of the major TV networks in the U.S.,” said Cartwright. “The initials of each network have been intentionally chosen to refer back to the name of the group that runs it. They also control all the big magazines and newspapers. That’s why I came to you. Judging by the stuff you’ve been getting away with printing lately, not only do the Illuminati not control your magazine, but you seem to have the benefit of some pretty powerful protection.”

  “So, there are three separate Illuminati groups, and among them they dominate all the communications media —is that correct?” said Joe.

  “That’s right,” said Cartwright, his face as cheerful as if he were explaining how his wife made ice cream with a hand freezer. “They dominate the motion-picture industry too. They took a hand in the making of hundreds of movies, the best known of which are Gunga Din and Citizen Kane. Those two movies are especially full of Illuminati references, symbols, code messages, and subliminal propaganda. ‘Rosebud,’ for instance, is their code name for the oldest Illuminati symbol, the so-called Rosy Cross. You know what that means.” He snickered lewdly.

  Joe nodded. “So—you know about ‘flowery combat.’”

  Cartwright shrugged. “Who doesn’t? Dr. Horace Naismith, a learned friend of mine, and head of the John Dillinger Died for You Society, has written an analysis of Gunga Din, pointing out the real meaning of the thuggee, the evil goddess Kali, the pit full of serpents, the elephant medicine, the blowing of the bugle from the top of the temple, and so forth. Gunga Din celebrates the imposition of law and order in an area terrorized by the criminal followers of a goddess who breeds evil and chaos. The thuggee are a caricature of the Discordians, and the English represent the Illuminati’s view of themselves. The Illuminati love that movie.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if we’re not all working for them, one way or another,” said Joe, trying deliberately to be ambivalent to see which way Cartwright would move.

  “Well, sure we are,” said Cartwright. “Everything we do that contributes to a lack of harmony in the human race helps them. They are forever shaking up society with experiments involving suffering and death for large numbers of people. For instance, consider the General Slocum disaster on June 15, 1904. Note that 19 plus 04 equals 23, by the way.”

  Him too? Joe groaned mentally. He’s got to be either one of us or one of them, and if he’s one of them, why is he telling me so much?

  “You tell me,” Cartwright said, “if all consciousness is not one, just how did Joyce happen to pick the very next day for Ulysses, so the General Slocum disaster would be in the newspaper his characters read? You see, Joyce knew he was a genius, but he never did understand the nature of genius, which is to be in better touch with the universal consciousness than the average man is. Anyway, the Illuminati were trying, with the General Slocum disaster, a new, more economical technique for achieving transcendental illumination—one that would require only a few hundred sudden deaths instead of thousands. Not that they care about saving lives, you understand, though t
he desire might result from the return of the repressed original purpose of the Illuminati, which was benign.”

  “Really?” said Joe. “What was the benign purpose?”

  “The preservation of human knowledge after the natural catastrophe that destroyed the continent of Atlantis and the first human civilization, thirty thousand years ago,” said Cartwright.

  “Natural catastrophe?”

  “Yes. A solar flare that erupted just when Atlantis was turned toward the sun. The original Illuminati were scientists who predicted the solar flare but were scoffed at by their fellows, so they fled by themselves. The benevolence of those early Illuminati was replaced by elitist attitudes in their successors, but the benign purpose keeps coming back in the form of factions which arise among the Illuminati and split off. The factions preserve traditional Illuminati secrecy, but they aim to thwart the destructiveness of the parent body. The Justified Ancients of Mummu were expelled from the Illuminati back in 1888. But the oldest anti-Illuminati conspiracy is the Erisian Liberation Front, which splintered off before the beginnings of the current civilization. Then there’s the Discordian Movement—another splinter faction, but they’re almost as bad as the Illuminati. They’re sort of like a cross between followers of Ayn Rand and Scientologists. They’ve got this guy named Hagbard Celine, their head honcho. You didn’t read about it because the governments of the world were too scared shitless to do anything about it, but five years ago this Celine character infiltrated the nuclear-submarine service of the U.S. Navy for the Illuminati—and stole a sub. He’s a supersalesman, Celine is—he could talk old H. L. Hunt right out of half his oil wells. He was a Chief Petty Officer. First he converted about half the crew with the most incredible line of bullshit you’ve heard since Tim Leary was in his prime. Then he put some kind of drug in the ship’s air supply, and while they were under the influence he converted most of the others. The ones that were stubborn he just blew out through the torpedo tubes. Nice guy. Now, mind you, this sub was armed with Polaris missiles. So the next thing Celine does is get himself off to someplace in the ocean where they can’t find him and blackmail the fucking governments of the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and Red China to each give him ten million dollars in gold, and after he gets the thirty million he will scuttle his missiles. Otherwise he will dump ‘em on a city of one of those three countries.”

  “Was Celine still working for the Illuminati at that point?”

  “Hell, no!” Cartwright snorted. “That’s not how they play the game. They like to operate stealthily, behind the throne-room curtains. They work with poison and daggers and things, not H-bombs. No, Celine told the Illuminati to go fuck themselves, and there was nothing they could do but grind their teeth. He’s been operating like a pirate ever since. And I’ll tell you something else. There’s more than one world leader, including the Illuminati leaders, that hasn’t been able to sleep at night because of what else Hagbard Celine has on that submarine.”

  “What’s that, Mr. Cartwright?”

  “Well, see, the U.S. Government did a very dumb thing. They weren’t satisfied to have just nuclear weapons aboard their Polaris submarines for a while. They also thought the subs should be armed with the other kind of weapon— bugs.”

  Joe felt himself go cold, and the back of his neck prickled. Let others worry about the nuclear devastation all they want. Disease—the extinction of the human race through the spread of some manmade plague for which man would have no remedy—was his particular nightmare. Maybe because at the age of seven he’d very nearly died of polio; though he’d been healthy ever since, the fear of fatal illness had been impossible to shake.

  “This Hagbard Celine—these Discordians—have a bacteriological weapon aboard the submarine?”

  “Yeah. Something called Anthrax Tau. All Celine has to do is release it in the water and within a week the whole human race would be dead. It spreads faster’n a two-dollar whore on Saturday night. Any living thing can carry it. But one nice thing about it—it’s fatal only to man. If Celine ever gets crazy enough to use it—and he’s pretty crazy these days, and getting worse all the time—it’ll give the planet a fresh start, so to speak. Some other life form could evolve into sentience. Now, if we have a nuclear war, or if we pollute the planet to death, there won’t be any life left worth talking about. Might be the best thing that ever happened if Hagbard Celine shot that Anthrax Tau down the tube. It would sure prevent worse things from happening.”

  “If there were no one left alive,” said Joe, “from whose point of view would it be the best thing that ever happened?”

  “Life’s,” said Cartwright. “I told you, all life is one. Which gets me back to my manuscript. I’ll just leave it with you. I realize it’s much longer than what you usually publish, so feel free to excerpt from it as you please, and to pay me at your usual rates for whatever you publish.”

  That evening Joe stayed till nine at his office. He was, as usual, a day late getting copy to the typesetter on his editorial column and the letters column. These were two parts of the magazine that he felt only he could do right, and he refused, to delegate either job to Peter or anyone else on the staff. First he ran the letters through his typewriter, shortening and pointing them up, then adding brief editorial answers where called for. After that he put aside his notes and research for the editorial he’d planned for this August issue, and instead he wrote an impassioned plea that each reader make himself personally responsible for doing something about the menace of bacteriological warfare. Even if what Cartwright had told him was a crock, it reminded him of his long-held conviction that germ warfare was far more likely to put the quietus to the human race than nuclear weapons. It was just too easy to unleash. He envisioned Hagbard in his submarine spewing the microbes of all-destroying plague out into the seas, and he shuddered.

  His briefcase weighed down by Cartwright’s manuscript, which he’d decided to take home with him, he stood in the lobby of his office building, gazing gloomily at the tanks full of tropical fish in the window of the pet store. One tank had, as an ornament, a china model of a sunken pirate ship. It made Joe think again of Hagbard Celine. Did he trust Hagbard or didn’t he? Was it possible to really believe in a Hagbard with the Captain Nemo psychosis, brooding over tubes and jars full of bacteria cultures, one hairy finger hovering tentatively over a button that would send a torpedo full of Anthrax Tau germs out into the inky waters of the Atlantic? Within a week all humans would die, Cartwright had said. And it was hard to think that Cartwright was lying, since he knew so much about so many other things.

  When Joe got home he put on his favorite Museum of National History record, The Language and Music of the Wolves, and lit up a joint. He liked listening to the wolves when he was high, and trying to understand their language. Then he took Cartwright’s manuscript out of his briefcase and looked at the title page. It didn’t say a word about consciousness energy, indeed, it referred to a subject Joe found much more interesting:

  HOW THE ANCIENT BAVARIAN CONSPIRACY

  PLOTTED AND CARRIED OUT

  THE ASSASSINATIONS OF MALCOLM X, JOHN F. KENNEDY,

  MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., GEORGE LINCOLN ROCKWELL,

  ROBERT KENNEDY, RICHARD M. NIXON, GEORGE WALLACE,

  JANE FONDA, GABRIEL CONRAD, AND HANK BRUMMER

  “Well,” said Joe, “I’ll be fucked.”

  “It was quite a trip,” said Hagbard Celine.

  “You’re quite a tripper,” Miss Portinari replied. “You really did Harry Coin very well. Probably just the way he’ll do it, when he gets up the nerve to come see me.”

  “It was simpler than doing my own trip,” Hagbard said wearily. “My guilt is much deeper, because I know more. It was easier to take his guilt trip than to take my own.”

  “And it’s over? Your fur no longer bristles?”

  “I know who I am and why I’m here. Adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine.”

  “How did you ever forget?”

  Hagbard grinned. “It’s
easy to forget. You know that.”

  She smiled back. “Blessed be, Captain.”

  “Blessed be,” he said.

  Returning to his stateroom, he was still subdued. The vision of the self-begotten and the serpent eating its own tail had broken the lines of word, image, and emotional energy that were steering him toward the Dark Night of the Soul again—but resolving his personal problem did not rescue the Demonstration or help him cope with the oncoming disaster. It merely freed him to begin anew. It merely reminded him that the end is the beginning and humility is endless. It merely, merrily, turned the Wheel another Tarot-towery connection …

  He realized he was still tripping a little. That was readily fixed: Harry Coin was tripping, and he wasn’t Harry Coin right now.

  Hagbard, remembering again who he was and why he was there, opened his stateroom door. Joe Malik sat in a chair, under an octopus mural, and regarded him with a level glance.

  “Who killed John Kennedy?” Joe asked calmly. “I want a straight answer this time, H.C.”

  Hagbard relaxed into another chair, smiling gently. “That one finally registered, eh? I told John, all those years ago, to emphasize that you should never trust anyone with the initials H.C, and yet you’ve gone on trusting me and never noticing.”

  “I noticed. But it seemed too wild to take seriously.”

  “John Kennedy was killed by a man named Harold Canvera who lived on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago, near the Seminary Restaurant, where you and Simon first discussed his theories of numerology. Dillinger had moved back to that neighborhood for a while in the late fifties, because he liked to go to the Biograph Theatre for old times’ sake, and Canvera was his landlord. A very sane, ordinary, rather dull individual. Then, in Dallas in 1963, John saw him blow the President’s head off before Oswald or Harry Coin or the Mafia gun could fire.” Hagbard paused to light a cigar. “We investigated Canvera afterward, like scientists investigating the first extraterrestrial life form. You can imagine how thorough we were. He had no politics at all at the time, which puzzled the hell out of us. It turned out that Canvera had put a lot of money into Blue Sky, Inc., a firm that made devices for landing on low-gravity planets. That was back in the very early fifties. Finally, Eisenhower’s hostility to the space program drove Blue Sky to the bottom of the board, and Canvera sold out at a terrible loss. Then Kennedy came in and announced that the U.S. was going to put a man on the moon. The stocks he’d sold were suddenly worth millions. Canvera’s brain snapped—that was all. Killing Kennedy and getting away with it turned him schizzy finally. He went in for spiritualism for a while, and then later joined White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism, one of the really paranoid anti-Illuminati groups, and ran a telephone message service giving WHORE propaganda.”