The illuminatus! trilogy

by Robert Shea; Robert Anton Wilson

  The mechanism by which authority and submission are implanted in the human mind is coding of perception. That which fits into the code is accepted; all else is Damned. It is Damned to being ignored, brushed aside, unnoticed, and— if these fail—it is Damned to being forgotten.

  A worse form of Damnation is reserved for those things which cannot be ignored. These are daubed with the brain’s projected prejudices until, encrusted beyond recognition, they are capable of being fitted into the system, classified, card-indexed, buried. This is what happens to every Damned Thing which is too prickly and sticky to be excommunicated entirely. As Josiah Warren remarked, “It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly.” Almost always, we have not understood them. We have murdered them and mummified their corpses.

  A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of “monopoly on the means of production.” Since man extends his nervous system through channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual’s brain.

  Thus, in pre-literate societies taboos on the spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organization. With the invention of written speech—hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical —the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what they write. (Some of the first societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidently kept a knowledge of their hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal fashion, and most writers feel fairly confident that they can publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as desacralized as books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits committed lèse majesté after an address by the then Dominant Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they had overstepped, and the whole tribe—except for the dissident minority—cheered for the reaasertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.

  * The title, he informs us, is taken from R. H. Blythe’s Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics. The story is instructive: Blythe, studying za-zen (sitting zen, or dhyana meditation) in a monastery at Kyoto, asked the roshi (Zen Master) if there was any further discipline he should adopt to accelerate his progress. The roshi replied, concisely, “Never whistle while you’re pissing.” Cf. Gurdjieff’s endless diatribes about “concentration,” the rajah in Huxley’s Island who unleashed talking mynah birds to remind his citizens constantly “Here and now, boys, here and now!” and Jesus’“Whatever thy hand findest to do, do it with all thy heart.”

  APPENDIX MEM

  CERTAIN QUESTIONS THAT MAY STILL TROUBLE SOME READERS

  1. What was Mama Sutra’s “reading,” where Danny Price-fixer questioned her, actually all about?

  Answer: It had nothing to do with the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Confrontation bombing, the Illuminati, or any of the subjects it seemed to suggest, except indirectly. She had aimed in the dark, and picked up bits and pieces of the old movie Manhattan Melodrama, thusly:

  • District Attorney Wade does not refer to the Dallas official who first proclaimed Lee Harvey Oswald’s guilt over TV; it refers to the character played by William Powell in the movie.

  • Clark does not refer to any of the Captain Clarks we have encountered; it refers to Clark Gable, Mr. Powell’s co-star. The Ship is sinking does not refer to the Illuminati spider-ships, or the ship piloted by Captain Clark; it refers to the General Slocum, as Mama guessed—the sinking of this ship on June 15, 1904, is the first scene in the movie. 2422 does not refer to the dates of Oswald’s and Kennedy’s assassinations, or to the old Wobbly address; it refers to a scene in the film where Gable, at a racetrack, walks from box 24 to box 22 (box 23 is never shown, his body being between it and the camera).

  • If I can’t live as I please, let me die when I choose is the last line spoken by Clark Gable in the screenplay.

  The fact that these phrases overlap certain themes in this novel (and in Joyce’s Ulysses) is either coincidence or synchronicity—take your choice. Manhattan Melodrama, you might be interested to know, was playing at the Biograph Theatre on the night of July 22, 1934, and was the last film seen by the man who was shot outside and identified as John Herbert Dillinger.

  2. What was the Masonic signal of distress used by the grocer B. F. Morgan when Dillinger tried to rob him in 1924? Answer: It consists in holding your arms outward, bent upward 90 degrees at the elbow, and shouting, “Will nobody help the widow’s son?”

  3. Is there really a secret passage beneath the Meditation Room in the UN building?

  Answer: If so, we haven’t been able to find it. Other spooky secrets about that room, however, are revealed in The Cult of the All-Seeing Eye, by Robert Keith Spencer (Christian Book Club of America, 1964).

  4. What was the Erotion of Adam Weishaupt mentioned by Hagbard in the First Trip?

  Answer: The word translates, loosely, as “love-in,” and the idea is basically the same. (See the books of Nesta Webster and John Robison cited in the text.) Now do you believe in a conspiracy?

  5. Did Al Capone really help the FBI set up the man who was shot at the Biograph Theatre on July 22, 1934?

  Answer: That’s one of the more plausible arguments in Dillinger: Dead or Alive, by Jay Nash and Ron Offen.

  6. If no animals were reported missing from local zoos, how is that Robert Simpson of Kansas City was found dead with his throat torn as if by “the talons of some enormous beast?”

  Answer: See the sequel, The Homing Pigeons.

  7. If Simon Moon majored in mathematics and was so obsessed with numerology, why didn’t he ever notice the most significant 23 in mathematical history—the 23 definitions that open Euclid’s Geometry?

  Answer: Perhaps for the same reason that the road from Dayton, Ohio, to New Lebanon, Ohio, was due east when Joe Malik drove it on June 25, 1969, but has always been due west on every day before and since then. Or maybe by the same processes that allowed Joe to see a Salem commercial on his TV set in the mid-1970s, although cigarette advertising was banned from television in 1971.

  8. Did Smiling Jim Trepomena achieve the fame he had sought?

  Answer: No Dr. Vulcan Troll’s definitive history of the Great Quake, When a State Dies, mentions on page 123 that “no American Eagle has since been reported, and we can only assume that this species was another victim of nature’s mindless rampage on that tragic May 1.” On page 369, Dr. Troll mentions, among prominent casualties, “The famous Cincinnati lawyer and proponent of censorship James J. Trepomena.” Neither he nor anyone else ever connected the two occurrences.

  9. Where are the missing eight appendices?

  Answer: Censored.

  APPENDIX NUN

  ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT SOME OF THE CHARACTERS

  THE PURPLE SAGE. An imaginary Chaoist philospher invented by Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (another imaginary Chaoist philosopher).

  LORD OMAR KHAYAM RAVENHURST. An imaginary Chaoist philosopher invented by Mr. Kerry Thornley of Atlanta, Georgia. Mr. Thornley was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald’s, was accused of complicity in the John Kennedy assassination by District Attorney Jim Garrison, and is the author of Illuminati Lady, an endless epic poem which you really ought to read.

  GEORGE DORN. His maternal grandfather, old Char
lie Bishop, was once a patient of the famous Doctor William Carlos Williams. The Bishops came to New Jersey in 1723, having left Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 under something of a cloud. Folks in the Nutley-Clifton-Passaic-Paterson area always have a good word for the Bishops, though. But the Dorns were all troublemakers, and George’s paternal grandfather, Big Bill Dorn, was so indiscreet as to get killed by cops during the Paterson silk-mill strike of 1922.

  HERACLEITUS. He was apt to say odd things. Once he even wrote that “Religious ceremonies are unholy.” A strange duck.

  THE SQUIRREL. A set of receptor organs transmitting information through a central nervous system to a small brain programmed for only a few rudimentary decisions—but, in this, he was not far inferior to most of our characters.

  REBECCA GOODMAN. Her maiden name was Murphy, and she was named after Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. You thought she was Jewish, didn’t you?

  THE DEAD EGYPTIAN MOUTH-BREEDERS. There were five of them, of course.

  DANNY PRICEFDOER. Shot in the line of duty two years after the events of this story. Loved the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

  ADAM WEISHAUPT. “He’s a deep one,” they used to say on the faculty of the University of Ingolstadt, “you never know what he’s really thinking.”

  CARMEL. One of his girls once cajoled a Hollywood character actor into calling him on the phone and pretending to be a researcher for the Kinsey Institute, seeking an interview. Carmel couldn’t see any money in it and was trying to end the conversation when the actor asked stuffily, “Well, all we want to know, actually, is do you have intercourse with your mother regularly, or does everybody in Las Vegas call you ‘Carmel the Motherfucker’ for some other reason?” For once Carmel was speechless. The girl spread the story, and everybody in town was laughing about it for weeks.

  PETER JACKSON. His great-grandfather was a slave. His son became the first President of the Luna Federation after the rebellion of the moon colonists in 2025. Much further back, a more remote ancestor was a king of Atlantis; and way in the future, a descendant was a slave on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system. (Peter was one of the crew when Hagbard finally blasted off for the stars in 1999). That’s the way the cookie crumbles; and Peter had an intuitive sense of this paradoxical fatality, which caused him to tell Eldridge Cleaver once, “People who say ‘You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem’ are themselves part of the problem.” (Cleaver replied, wittily, “Fuck you.”)

  THE LAB CHIEF WHO WAS DISINTERESTED IN ANTHRAX LEPROSY DELTA. He later cracked up and wrote letters to the newspapers attacking the entire chemobiological warfare program of the United States government. Spent the last seventeen years of his life receiving treatment in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., occupying the same quarters that once housed the ingenious poet Ezra Pound. His rantings were taken seriously in certain places, especially among some leftward-leaning fellow scientists, but the Vice-President described them to the press as “the despondent demagogy of a paranoid pedant.” A sample of the man’s delusions, from a letter to the three top television networks (never quoted on newscasts because it was too controversial): “The boast of the 19th century was its conquest of these accursed plagues that attack men, women, and helpless infants indifferently. What shall be said of the 20th century, which has recreated them, at great expense and through the efforts of thousands of brilliant but perverted scientific minds, and then stored them live in installations throughout the country, where it is virtually certain, statistically, that an accident will unleash them upon an unsuspecting public, sooner or later?” (Loonies often harbor morbid fears of that sort.) The poor man never responded favorably to any of the efforts of his psychiatrists, even though they gave him ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) so often that his brain was practically fried to the crispness of a Howard Johnson omelette by the time he finally died.

  ANTHRAX LEPROSY DELTA. A life form that could exist only by destroying other life-forms; in this respect, it was like many of us. The first of the products of Charlie Mocenigo’s fertile genius, it could boast only of being ten times as deadly as ordinary anthrax. Insofar as it had consciousness, in a vague and flickering way, it was like that inhabiting a subway train at 5 P.M., concerned only with getting where it was going and then eating. The other strains were much the same, up to Anthrax Leprosy Pi.

  LEE HARVEY OSWALD. Hero of a series of novels by Harold Weissburg, including Whitewash, Whitewash II, Photographic Whitewash, and Oswald in New Orleans. Villain of another novel, entitled Report of the Presidential Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, by Earl Warren, John McCone, et al. Also featured in other works of fiction by Mark Lane, Penn Jones, Josiah Thompson, and various other writers.

  JACK RUBY. The Oliver Hardy to Oswald’s Stanley Laurel.

  THOMAS JEFFERSON. A revolutionary hemp-grower who once wrote, “[The clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough too in their opinion.” Few of the pious tourists who read the italicized portion of this statement carved on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., are aware of its context.

  THE SCHIZOPHRENIC IN CHERRY KNOLLS HOSPITAL. His number was 124C41. Nobody, anywhere, remembered what his name had been.

  MARY LOU SERVDC. She finally married Jim Riley, the dope dealer from Dayton—but that’s another, rather longish, story, and not truly relevant.

  MAYOR RICHARD DALEY. Author of such immortal aphorisms as “After all, I am a liberal myself” (October 22, 1968); “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder” (September 23, 1968); “I have conferred with the Superintendent of Police this morning and I gave him instructions that an order be issued by him immediately and under his signature to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand” (April 17, 1968); “There wasn’t any shoot-to-kill order. That was a fabrication” (April 18, 1968); “You could say Senator Tower is doing a lousy job, but I don’t use that kind of words” (May 1, 1962); “I have lived in Chicago all my life and I still say we have no ghetto in Chicago” (July 8, 1963); “We will have a planned development and will take people out of the ghettos and slums and give them an opportunity to raise their families in decent surroundings” (April 17, 1969); “I didn’t create the slums, did I?” (September 3, 1968); “Together we must rise to ever higher and higher platitudes” (March 13, 1967).

  THE RUSSIAN PREMIER. A comsymp.

  CKARLES MOCENIGO’S FATHER. A professional. He worked for Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Federico Maldonado, and many other colorful American businessmen. Known in the trade as Jimmy the Shrew, because of his sharp, conniving expression. Saved his money, put his boy through MIT, killed people for a living. Found the original Frank Sullivan performing in Havana, 1934.

  GENERAL LAWRENCE STEWART TALBOT. Actually, there was something between him and that girl from Red Lion, Penn.

  MALACLYPSE THE YOUNGER, K.S.C. Author of the Principia Discordia. Disappeared mysteriously in late 1970. His last recorded words were, typically, “Comes the dawn, the sun shall rise in the west.” Then he walked into the Pacific Ocean.

  JOHN HERBERT DILLINGER. When Simon Moon read his biography in search of 23s, he missed a good one: John committed 26 robberies during his publicized career, but only 23 were for money. The other 3 (police stations) seem to have been strictly Art For Art’s Sake.

  SIMON’S FATHER. Tim Moon. He told Simon the lives of Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, Sacco and Vanzetti, and Frank Little at the age when most boys are being told about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Simon remembers: Joe Hill the night before his execution, wiring Wobbly headquarters in Chicago, “Don’t weep for me, boys: organize.” Bartolomeo Vanzetti: “Your laws, your courts, your false god will be a dim rememb
ering of a cursed time when man was wolf to the man.” Tim and his cronies singing in the living room, “Which side are you on, man / Which side are you on?” until Molly complained, “You’ll wake the neighbors.” Tim explaining Big Bill: “Oh, yes, and he had a glass eye. Funny I should forget that. The real eye was knocked out by a cop during a strike.” But you’ll understand Tim best if you see Simon, age six, entering grammar school for the first time and addressing the first boy he meets: “I’m Simon Moon; what’s your name, Fellow Worker?”

  PADRE PEDERASTIA. His real name was Father James Flanagan.

  TOBIAS KNIGHT. The only quintuple agent in the history of espionage.

  JAMES JOYCE. After death, he met Yeats on the fifth plane and said, “Sir, I am now willing to learn from you, since you appear to have been right about Death after all.” Yeats replied, “Not at all. You’re dreaming this.” The remark so vexed Joyce that he immediately sought reincarnation (the fifth plane was full of mystics like Yeats and George Russell and Madame Blavatski, and Joyce knew his rational Aristotelian sensibility would be constantly abused by further conversation with them), entered the womb of Elizabeth Mullins of Ver-non, New Jersey, October 11, 1942, and was aborted December 10, 1942. Entered the womb of Rachel Stein of Ingolstadt, January 18, 1943, and was gassed with her, one month before birth was due, at Auschwitz, September 1, 1943. Thereafter, he retired to a monastery on the sixth plane and wrote his funniest, most bitter book. Parts of it, which he has been transmitting ever since, have been picked up by mediums on the six continents, all of whom assumed they were flipping out and refused to transcribe it.