The mystical number is 11, which means “a new start” in Kabalism and “error and repentence” in most other systems of numerology.
Tarot trump 21, The Fool, symbolizes this age as a dreamy-eyed youth unknowingly walking over an abyss. The Hitlerjugend, and the disciples of various other fuehrers and messiahs, immediately come to mind. That this card is disputed by various Tarot experts, and is given a numerical value of 0 rather than 21 by the wisest, indicates the confusion in all Unordnung periods. The dog who barks to warn the Young Fool, like the yin lines in the hexagram, represents the desperate attempts of the biogram to break through the repression or censor-band and make itself heard.
Typical Cancerians who exemplified Unordnung are Julius Caesar, Mary Baker Eddy (whose philosophy was an explicit denial of the biogram), Albert Parsons, Emma Goldman, Benjamin Peret, Vladimir Mayakofski, Henry David Thoreau, Durrutti, P-J Proudhon Brooks Adams, General Kitchener, Luigi Pirandello (the literary master of ambiguity), Erich Ambler (the literary master of conspiracy), Calvin Coolidge (who issued the classically muddled Cancerian statement “Be as revolutionary as science and as conservative as the multiplication table”), Andrei Gromyko, Nelson Rockefeller, John Calvin, Estes Kefauver, and Rexford Tugwell.
An Unordnung period has always been thought of (even before Hegel provided the words) as a synthesis between the thesis of Verwirrung and the antithesis Zweitracht; since it is a false synthesis on the logogrammic level only, it always gives birth to the fourth stage, the Parenthesis.
BEAMTENHERRSCHAFT
This is the age of bureaucracy, and to live at this time is, as Proudhon said, “to have every operation, every transaction, every movement noted, registered, counted, rated, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, refused, authorized, endorsed, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected…to be laid under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, exhausted, hoaxed, and robbed.” The governing I Ching hexagram is 47, K’un, , oppression or exhaustion, the dried-up lake, with the usual reading of superior men oppressed by the inferior. This is the time when homo neophobe types most rigorously repress homo neophile types, and great heresy hunts and witch trials flourish. This correlates with the number 8, signifying the Last Judgment, because every citizen is to some extent a State functionary, and each is on trial before the jury of all. The traditional Chinese associations with this hexagram are sitting under a bare tree and wandering through an empty valley—signifying the ecological havoc wreaked by purely abstract minds working upon the organic web of nature.
The 16th Tarot trump, The Tower, describes this age. The Tower is struck by lightning and the inhabitants fall from the windows. (Cf. the Tower of Babel legend and our recent power failures.) The traditional interpretations of this card suggest pride, oppression, and bankruptcy.
This correlates with Libra, the mentality which measures and balances all things on an artificial scale (Maya). Typical Libras who have manifested Beamtenherrschaft characterists are Comte de Saint Simon, Justice John Marshall, Hans Geiger, Henry Wallace, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Dewey, and Dr. Joyce Brothers.
In Beamtenherrschaft ages there is ceaseless activity, all planned in advance, begun at the scheduled second, carefully supervised, scrupulously recorded—but inevitably finished late and poorly done. The burden of omniscience on the ruling class becomes virtually intolerable, and most flee into some form of schizophrenia or fantasy. Great towers, pyramids, moon shots, and similar marvels are accomplished at enormous cost while the underpinnings of social solidarity crumble entirely. While blunders multiply, no responsible individual can ever be found, because all decisions are made by committees; anyone seeking redress of grievance wanders into endless corridors of paperwork with no more tangible result than in the Hunting of the Snark. Illuminati historians, of course, describe these ages as glowingly as Zweitracht epochs, for, although control is in the hands of homo neophobe types, there is at least a kind of regularity, order, and geometrical precision about everything, and the “messiness” of the barbaric Verwirrung ages and revolutionary Unordnung ages is absent.
Nevertheless, the burden of omniscience on the rulers steadily escalates, as we have indicated, and the burden of nescience on the servile class increasingly renders them unfit to serve (more and more are placed on the dole, shipped to “mental” hospitals, or recruited into whatever is the current analog of the gladiatorial games), so the Tower eventually falls.
GRUMMET
The age of Grummet begins with an upsurge of magicians, hoaxers, Yippies, Kabouters, shamans, clowns, and other Eristic forces. The relevant I Ching hexagram is 59, Huan, , dispersion and dissolution. The gentle wind above the deep water is the Chinese reading of the image, with associations of loss of ego, separation from the group, and “going out” in general. Yin lines dominate all but the top of the hexagram; the forces leading to a new Verwirrung stage are pushing upward toward release. This is also called Paralysis by the Illuminati, because, objectively, nothing much is happening; subjectively, of course, the preparations for the new cycle are working unconsciously.
The mystic number is 5, union of male (3) with female (2) and final resolution of conflict between Verwirrung and Zweitracht.
The governing Tarot trump is number 6, the Lovers, in which the woman looks upward at the angel (Eris, the biogram) and the man looks at the woman (the logogram, yang, reaches synthesis with biogram, yin, only through reconciliation with the female). Hence, the upsurge of feminism in such periods, together with a renewed emphasis on clans, tribes, and communes.
Typical Virgos manifesting Grummet traits are Charlie Parker, Antonin Artaud, Louis Lingg, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Grandma Moses, Lodovico Ariosto, Greta Garbo, Hedy Lamarr, and Goethe and Tolstoy (who manifested strong yin values while never quite getting reconciled with the women in their own lives. Tolstoy, however, as the classic dropout, is an archetypal Grummet persona and almost completed the Sufi course of “quit this world, quit the next world, quit quitting!”).
After Grummet, of course, authority has collapsed entirely, and the biogram stands on equal footing with the logogram. Hodge and Podge being once again in dynamic balance, a new Verwirrung period begins, and the cycle repeats.
Since Weishaupt dreamed this schema up while he was under the influence of several hallucinogenic drugs, one should regard it with some skepticism. It is certainly not true in every detail, and there is no theoretical or empirical demonstration that each of the five ages must always have 73 permutations. The fact that Grummet-Virgo personalities (and all other of the five personality types) are born in all ages, even if they come to dominance in their appropriate epochs, leaves many mysteries still unsolved. In short, all that a sober scholar can say of the Illuminati theory of history is that it makes at least as much sense as the exoteric Marx-Hegel, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin theories.
The , who regard all Illuminati theories as false projections onto the external world of inner spiritual processes, are particularly skeptical about this one, since it involves several false correlations between the I Ching and the Tarot, the Zodiac, etc.
Finally, it should be noted that of all the people Hagbard employed as resonance for the vibes used against the Saure family in Ingolstadt, only Lady Velkor, Danny Pricefixer, and George Dorn were not Virgos. Hagbard evidently believed that the Illuminati magical links work when Illuminati activities are occurring in a given area—and, hence, virtually all of “his” people at the festival were Virgos and thereby linked with the Grummet/Huan-59/Trump 6 chain of astrological associations. On the other hand, the presence of three non-Virgos shows Hagbard’s pragmatic approach and his refusal to be ruled even by so exact a science as astrology.*
In this connection, when George Dorn and his mother went to Radio City Music Hall to see The Lotus Position, the last movie made by the American Medical Association before their tragic deaths, they happened to meet a tall Italian and a very beau
tiful black woman whom he introduced as his wife. Mrs. Dorn didn’t catch the Italian’s name, but it was obvious that George had a very great admiration for him. On the bus back to Nutley, she decided to straighten the boy out.
“A man who respects himself and his own race,” she began, “would never think of marrying into the colored.”
“Shut up, Ma,” George said politely.
“That’s no way to talk to your mother,” the fine lady said, going ahead blithely. “Now, your father had some radical ideas, and he tried to get the unions to accept the colored, but he never thought of marrying into them, George. He had too much self-respect. Are you listening, George?”
“How did you like the AMA?” he asked.
“Such wonderful young boys. So clean-cut. And that darling sister of theirs! At least they didn’t think there was anything attractive about long hair on men. Do you know what long hair makes men look like?”
“Like girls, Ma. Is that right?”
“It makes them look worse than girls, George. It makes them look like they’re not really men, if you know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean, Ma.” George was profoundly bored.
“Well, I mean a little bit on the lavender side.” She tittered.
“Oh,” he said, “you mean cocksuckers. Some of my best friends are cocksuckers, Ma.”
At this Simple piece of factual information, the remarkable lady turned red and then purple, and then twisted in her chair to look out the window in angry silence for the rest of the trip. The curious thing is that, before George could get the courage to shut the old battleaxe up that way, he first had to try to shoot a cop and then try to shoot himself and finally take hashish with Hagbard Celine, and yet she was a Virgo and he was a Capricorn.
* Do you believe that?
* This sentence may manifest a lapse into mockery or mystification by otherwise sober authors.
APPENDIX DALETH
HASSAN i SABBAH AND ALAMOUT BLACK
When the Prophet died in 4632 A.M.,* the true faith was almost immediately shattered by conflict between the Shiite and Sunnite parties. More than a century of religious and civil warfare followed, and by 4760 A.M. the Shiites themselves had split and given birth to a subsect known as the Ismailis, or Ishmaelians. It was out of this group that Hassan i Sabbah formed the Order of the Assassins in 5090 A.M.
Ishmaelian religion had already at that date become a nine-level affair in the manner typical of mystical secret societies. Those of the lowest grade, for instance, were merely informed that Al Koran contained an allegorical meaning in addition to its surface teachings, and that their salvation lay in following orders. As a neophyte progressed through the various grades, more and more of the allegories would be explained, and a doctrine would gradually emerge which is, in essence, that taught by all the mystics of East and West—Buddhists, Taoists, Vedantists, Rosicrucians, etc. The doctrine is, in important aspects, unspeakable (which is why the trainee required an imam—the Ishmaelian equivalent of a guru—to guide him in the nonverbal aspects); the ninth and highest grade, however, had no parallel except in very strict Theravada Buddhism. In this ninth grade, which Hassan attained shortly before founding the Hashishim, it was taught that even the personal mystical experience of the seeker (his own encounter with the Absolute, or the Void, or the Hodge-Podge, or God, or Goddess, or whatever one chooses to call it) should be subject to the most merciless analysis and criticism, and that there is no guide superior to reason. The Ishmaelian adept, in short, was one who had achieved supreme mystical awareness but refused to make even that into an idol; he was a total atheist-anarchist subject to no authority but his own independent mind.
“Such men are dangerous,” as Caesar observed, and certainly they are dangerous to the Caesars; the Ishmaelians were being persecuted throughout the Moslem world, and strong efforts were being made to exterminate them entirely when Hassan i Sabbah became Imam of the whole movement.
It was Hassan’s cynical judgment (and many Illuminated beings, such as the Lamas of Tibet, have agreed with him) that most people have no aspiration or capacity for much spiritual and intellectual independence. He thereupon reorganized the Ishmaelians in such a way as to allow and encourage those of small mind to remain in the lower grades.
The tools of this enterprise were the famous “Garden of Delights” in his castle at Alamout (a good duplication of the Paradise of Al Koran, complete with the beautiful and willing houris the Prophet had promised to the faithful)— and a certain “magick chemical.” Those of the lowest grade were brought to Alamout, given the miraculous concoction, and set loose for several hours in the Garden of Delights. They came out convinced that they had truly visited heaven and that Hassan i Sabbah was the most powerful Holy Man in the world. They were assured, furthermore, that if they obeyed every order, even at the cost of their own lives, they would return to that Paradise after death.
These men became the first “sleeper agents” in the history of international politics. Where the three major contending religions of that time in the Near East (Christianity, Judaism, and orthodox Islam) insisted that it was an unforgivable sin to deny one’s faith, Hassan taught that Allah would forgive such little white lies when they served a worthy purpose. Thus, his agents were able to pass themselves off as Christians, Jews, or orthodox Moslems and infiltrate any court, holy order, or army at will. Since the other religions had the above-mentioned prohibition against such deception, they were unable to infiltrate the Ishmaelians in turn.
The use of these agents as assassins is discussed passim in the novel, and Weishaupt’s opinion that Hassan had discovered “the moral equivalent of war” is an interesting commentary. Hassan never had to send an army into battle, and armies sent against him were soon stopped by the sudden and unexpected deaths of their generals.
One of Hassan’s successors was Sinan, who moved the headquarters of the cult from Alamout to Messiac and may (or may not) have written the letter about Richard the Lion-Hearted which George recalls in the Third Trip. Sinan, contemporaries claimed, performed miracles of healing, conversed with invisible beings, and was never seen to eat, drink, or perform the functions of urination and excretion. He was also credited with telepathy and with the ability to kill animals by looking at them. It was he (and not Hassan I Sabbah, as many popular books state) who ordered two of the lower members of the Order to commit suicide in order to impress a visiting ambassador with his power over his followers. (The two obeyed, leaping from the castle wall into the abyss below.) Sinan also made attempts to form an alliance with the Knights Templar, to drive both orthodox Christians and orthodox Moslems out of the arena, but this evidently fell through.
The Hashishim were finally crushed, despite their powerful espionage and assassination network, when the whole Middle East was overrun by hordes of Mongols, who came from so far away that they had not been infiltrated. It took several centuries for the Hashishim to make a comeback as the nonviolent Ishmaelian movement of today, under the leadership of the Aga Khan.
Finally, it was at Hassan i Sabbah’s death that he allegedly uttered the aphorism for which he is best known, and which is quoted several times in the novel: “Nothing is true. All is permissible.” The orthodox Moslem historian Juvaini—who may have invented this whole episode—adds that as soon as these blasphemous words passed his lips, “Hassan’s soul plunged to the depths of Hell.”
Ever since Marco Polo recorded the story of the Garden of Delights, Western commentators have identified Hassan’s “magick chemical” as pure hashish. Recent scholarship, however, has thrown this into doubt, and it is clear that hashish, and other marijuana preparations were well known in the Near East for thousands of years before Hassan ever lived; for instance, the plant has been found in grave mounds of late Neolithic Man in the area, dated around 5000 B.c., as Hagbard mentions in the novel. It is implausible, then, that the ingenious Sabbah would have tried to pass this drug off as something new and magical.
Some have suggested that Hassan, who was known to have traveled much in his youth, might have brought opium back from the East and mixed it with hashish. The scholarly Dr. Joel Fort goes further and argues, in The Pleasure Seekers, that Hassan’s supercharger was wine-and-opium, with no marijuana products at all. Dr. John Allegro, in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, argues that both Hassan and the first Christians actually achieved the paradisical vision with the aid of amanita muscaria, the “fly agaric” mushroom, which is poisonous in high doses but psychedelic (or at least deleriant) in small quantities.
The present book’s suggestion—Alamout black, an almost pure hashish with a few pinches of belladonna and stramonium—is based on:
(1) the strong etymological evidence that the Hashishim were somehow involved with hashish;
(2) the unlikelihood that wine, opium, mushrooms, or any combination thereof could account for the etymological and historical association of Hassan with hashish;
(3) the reasons previously given for doubting that hashish alone is the answer;
(4) the capacity of stramonium and belladonna (in small doses) to create intensely brilliant visual imagery, beyond that of even the best grades of hashish;
(5) the fact that these latter drugs were used in both the Elusinian Mysteries and in the European witch cult contemporary with Hassan (see R.E.L. Masters, Eros and Evil).
Since it is not the intent of this book to confuse fact with fancy, it should be pointed out that these arguments are strong but not compelling. Many other alternatives can be suggested, such as hashish-belladonna-mandragora, hashish-stramonium-opium, hashish-opium-belladonna, hashish-opium-bufotinin,* etc., etc. All that can be said with certainty is that Hagbard Celine insists the correct formula is hashish-belladonna-stramonium (in ratio 20:1:1), and we believe Hagbard—most of the time.
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