by Higgs, JMR
There were 23 years between Stand By Your Man and Justified And Ancient (Stand By The JAMs). The 'Devil Horns' hand symbol has 2 digits up and three clenched, while 2 divided by 3 is 0.666 recurring. The catalogue number of Drummond and Cauty's first record was JAMS23, and their rare live performances usually lasted for 23 minutes. The final KLF Communications info sheet was number 23. The video for It’s Grim Up North was filmed on the M23. The agreement that Drummond and Cauty signed on the Nissan Bluebird was to not discuss the burning for 23 years. The name 'Justified Ancients of Mu Mu' (accidentally misspelled by Cauty and Drummond from Wilson's 'Mummu') has 23 letters.
And so on.
All this, of course, is magical thinking. There is no physical link between any of the dates or incidents mentioned. The link is mental. A recognition that the number is somehow significant leads to a connection between unrelated occurrences of the number.
Magical thinking is also the level which Drummond works on. This has been clear from the very start, with his preoccupation with the rabbit spirit of Echo. Magical thinking is a universal practice – it is, essentially, how our brains work – but it is usually tempered with a practical materialism. What makes Drummond remarkable is that it seems to be his over-riding working level, something he achieves by applying his 'liberation loophole' and accepting the contradictions. The actions of The KLF can only really be understood as magical thinking being manifest by punk bloody-mindedness.
If you look at the 23s associated with Drummond and Cauty, they fall into two distinct types. The first are 'genuine' occurrences, where the number spontaneously manifests itself in unexpected ways. Examples of this would include the Turner Prize being announced on November 23rd, Drummond being 23 when he first read Illuminatus!, or the 23 you’ll inevitably notice shortly after putting this book down. The second category is 'forced' occurrences. These are a deliberate use of the number by someone who is aware of the 23 Enigma and feels drawn to somehow further it. Examples of these are the 23 painted on the roof of the cop car, or using it in a catalogue number. There is nothing mysterious or supernatural about these occurrences. What they do reveal, however, is a desire for synchronicities and magical occurrences. They are a form of sympathetic magic, which acts out the synchronicity on a ritual level in the hope it will conjure up the actual thing.
Drummond and Cauty did this. They did this a lot. They hammered away at it, trying to generate a response. Alan Moore said that the money burning was, "a form of language, a conversation – but you're not sure what the conversation is... you're waiting for a reply," and this was no different from what they had done in The KLF. They were kicking off on a magical level. They were demanding attention. From a magical perspective they were a pair of attention seeking arseholes, demanding to get fucked.
The 23 Enigma is the best known aspect of Discordianism, and Cauty and Drummond used it very deliberately. As should be clear by now, the myth they wrapped around themselves was taken very blatantly from the Illuminatus! books. Taking the name The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu is the most obvious example of this, but there are many more. Their first album included a song called The Porpoise Song, after Howard the Porpoise in the books. The use of lines such as “Kick out the jams motherfuckers,” “immanentized the Eschaton” and “everybody lie down on the floor and keep calm” are all taken from the book.
But how well did they know Wilson's work? In his 2008 book 17, Drummond writes about being asked to appear at an event at the South Bank Centre in London to commemorate the death of Robert Anton Wilson the previous year. Drummond agreed after hearing that Alan Moore would also be appearing, but he was unsure what he should do at the event. For inspiration, he decided to read Illuminatus!
He claims that he had never read the whole thing before. When Campbell gave him a copy to help him design sets, he read little more than the first volume because that was where most of the play was taken from. He was not particularly impressed by what he read. He was more impressed in 1986 when he picked it up again and it inspired him to form The JAMs with Jimmy Cauty, but even then he only read as far as page 138 in a trilogy of over 800 pages. Cauty, although he had seen the play, never read the book at all.
Reading the whole thing, in 2007, was something of a shock.
Because it was in there, all of it - rabbit spirits, Lucifer, submarines, the angels in the lake, even, to his horror, money burning. It seemed like his life had been mapped out in this one book. It went far beyond the obvious stuff he stole from the first volume. At the time he was involved in a choir called The17, for example, not realising that the number 17 kept appearing in the book at the same places as the number 23.
This was a similar situation to how he learnt about the Situationists, for he only really learnt what they were about, and why his actions kept being described as Situationist, in 1995.
Seeing his own history sketched out in the book was deeply unsettling.
Rationally, you can argue that he must have seen later sections back in 1976 and, while he had no conscious memory of them, they could have hung around in his subconscious somehow. Those familiar with the book, however, may wonder if there is more to it than that. I had written 90% of this book before I finally got round to reading Illuminatus! myself, despite having a copy on my shelf for twenty years. Upon reading it, I was startled to discover that it contained a number of subjects which I had already been writing about, unaware of their inclusion in Illuminatus! and unsure if I could justify their inclusion in this book. I had written about usury unaware that the founding reason for The JAMs was to destroy usury, and I had written about Lucifer unaware that a Satanic mass was the initiation into The JAMs. I had noted the surprising number of paedophiles in this story whilst unaware of the character of Padre Pederastia. Such is the way with this particular novel. Reading it almost seems superfluous; it is possible to be swept along just by the idea of it. It is a novel that is perfectly content to sit on a shelf for decades waiting for you to be ready for it.
When the K Foundation were burning their money, Alan Moore was at work in Northampton finishing his version of the Jack The Ripper myth, From Hell. Moore's Ripper, the insane royal surgeon Sir William Gull, viewed his Whitechapel Murders as a magical act. He, like Drummond and Cauty, had no sense of exactly what he was doing. It didn't matter to him. He was just aware of how powerful his actions were, and how deeply they would affect the world. Moore's Ripper, of course, is a fictional creation. While he may not have known the reasons for his actions, his creator had a very clear idea.
In From Hell, Moore claimed that the Ripper murders were a magical act that gave birth to the twentieth century itself - a century with all the horror and violence of the world wars, but also a century of fame and celebrity. And indeed in this Moore may have a point - the public fascination with the Ripper murders was such that it is frequently claimed to have started our current tabloid culture. It is plausible to view the Ripper murders as a microcosm of the century that followed.
There have been many serial killers since then. The killing of five poor women now would not have the impact that it had then, in that it would not be remembered or talked about over a hundred years later. Back in 1888, it was an extraordinarily powerful and shocking event. It negated everything that was accepted about what Victorian culture was capable of creating. Now, it would be a depressingly familiar item on the news, forgotten in weeks. Our children calmly channel-hop past descriptions of events on the news that would make the people of earlier ages faint.
What, in the modern age, would be equally unthinkable? Not horrible or evil or sick, but unthinkable?
What, other than the negation of money?
Not manipulating the symbols of money, but actually negating money itself? Making money itself cease to exist is, if viewed as a sacrificial offering, an extraordinarily potent act.
We have a choice now. We can either look at these events rationally, or use magical thinking. If we look at these events using magical thinking, and in
particular the style of magical thinking that we’ve borrowed from Alan Moore, then a narrative emerges. That story goes like this:
Once upon a time, in the late 1950s, Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley had a conversation in a Californian bowling alley. From that conversation, the idea of Eris, the Goddess of Chaos, arrived in the twentieth century.
The idea of Eris led to the creation of the religion of Discordianism, and to the mass disinformation campaign known as Operation Mindfuck.
The spirit of Eris entered a trilogy of books called Illuminatus!, and via a play based on those books, it reached Bill Drummond.
Bill Drummond was particularly receptive. He did not have a detailed conscious understanding of Eris or Discordianism, but that doesn't matter. What was more important was that not only were Drummond's actions dominated by thinking on a magical level, but that Ken Campbell had taught him that the trick to doing the impossible was to just go ahead and do it.
Drummond's magical thinking, however, was dominated by a pure, unarguable love of pop music. This turned him towards the music industry, although it was always the power of music, the effect it had on people, which interested him more than the making of music itself.
The corporate music industry was perhaps no place for someone like Drummond, but it did allow him to meet Jimmy Cauty. Drummond and Cauty understood each other, even if nobody else understood them. Cauty was more deeply involved in the actual creation of music than Drummond was. He was also someone who you could rely on to get things done. The pairing was a positive feedback loop. With each justifying the other, they would go far further together than they would apart. Sometimes all you need is for someone to see what you are planning and not look bemused.
At this point the spirit of Eris offered the pair a direction. Drummond and Cauty took on the name and objectives of The Justified Ancients of Mummu. True, they weren't aware of what those objectives are. They were distracted by the throwaway line which linked the JAMs to the music industry to the extent that they missed their founding principle, namely the destruction of order by an attack on the very heart of the economic system.
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu launched a suicide attack on the music industry. They are defeated by the forces of order and control, in the form of ABBA's lawyers. This defeat lead to a bonfire of vinyl in a Scandinavian field.
The KLF rose from the ashes of the bonfire, with their first record Burn The Bastards being a direct reference to the incident. This act of burning became a constant thread in The KLF, from the wicker man on Jura to the Viking longboat that failed to reach Mu.
News of the Scandinavian bonfire reached the Discordian heartland of northern California. The disciples of Eris responded by spreading confusion and paranoia to Drummond and Cauty through the tried and tested means of Operation Mindfuck. Cauty and Drummond start to become nicely unbalanced.
Open as they were to non-material influences, Drummond and Cauty provided a life-saving service to the fictional character of Doctor Who. They had no knowledge of this, of course. In return they receive the freedom of money and the taste of success. Clearly, this can be a double-edged sword. To their credit, however, they did not fall for the glamour of money and pissed it away on a road movie, as suggested by the followers of Eris. They were True To The Trail. Although they did not know that The JAM’s original aim was to attack our current money system, their actions here revealed themselves to be remarkably suited to that task. They had not been seduced by the bullshit glamour of wealth. If the thought of Eris, hidden away in Moore's Ideaspace, could be pleased, then Eris was pleased.
The KLF get serious. They enter the belly of the beast. Drummond and Cauty collide with the music industry. It's hardly a fair fight. They lose their souls. They gain a large amount of money.
Drummond and Cauty would much rather have their souls than a large amount of money.
Regaining your soul from the Devil is supposed to be impossible, but Ken Campbell taught them how you do the impossible. You take the first step. Then you take the second, and you don't stop until you've done it.
They stopped being The KLF. They did all they could to remove themselves from music history.
That just left a pile of money. That, too, was part of The KLF and if they wanted their souls back, it would have to go. But money is tricky. Spending it or giving it away wouldn't destroy it. Rather, that would allow it to escape. How could it be destroyed? There was no precedent for such an act. There was no precedent for such a thought. That money might not be invulnerable was unthinkable. To defeat it was impossible.
Nevertheless, that is what they did. They took it to a boathouse on Jura in the liminal period between eras and torched it. The money burnt, like it was nothing more than pieces of paper.
Whatever quality it had that made it more than paper was also burnt.
Did this save Cauty and Drummond's souls? That is really a question for them, but between you and me the answer is yes, it did.
Did it achieve the aims of the Justified Ancients of Mummu, to destroy the usury based money system? On a magical, rather than a practical, level it was the toppling of the first domino. The idea that the economy was not invulnerable was established in Ideaspace.
Drummond and Cauty had done well. They had now finished what they set out to do and could remove the name Justified Ancients of Mummu from their shoulders and retire with honour.
A new era began, the age of networks, and the dot com world it created immediately announced its arrival by creating a massive economic bubble. Thus, the guiding narrative of this era was declared. The global economic collapse began in earnest in 2008. It was always going to, because continuous economic expansion is not possible. And it is still in the process of collapsing, in no way prepared for the energy crisis and the climate crisis that are gathering speed. When Drummond and Cauty started work, however, such a collapse was unthinkable. It resided in the darkest corner of human thought, unvisited and ignored. It needed to come to light. It needed to be actualised. And, in its purest form, that is what Cauty and Drummond did.
They may have intended to save their souls from the Devil of the music industry. They may have been in the process of a mental breakdown and making a last cry for help. They may have been attention seeking arseholes after all. But, in burning a million pounds, Drummond and Cauty performed the magical act which set the scene for a global economic collapse and, in doing so, created the twenty-first century.
That then, is our story for those who are prepared to entertain magical thinking. If you liked this explanation, and found the narrative in this book satisfying, you should click here to move on to the epilogue.
If you are unwilling to entertain magical thinking, or found this narrative unsatisfying, you should click here to continue with this chapter.
So that was the story for those who allowed themselves the luxury of magical thinking. It is tempting to do so, for our minds work that way and completely denying the irrational is surprisingly difficult. Concepts as diverse as marriage, the monarchy or the Olympic Torch can only be understood in this light, and training your brain not to use magical thinking is both extremely difficult and no fun at all. The fact that our thoughts and the world of matter operate under completely different rules is basically something that we have to put up with.
If we stay rational, however, the idea that Drummond and Cauty performed a magical act that kindled the modern world is total bullshit.
That idea, rather than a ‘truth’, is the central tenet of the self-referential reality tunnel created by this book, and the rest of this narrative exists to support, protect and justify it.
From the rational perspective, there is no material connection between the events in the Jura boathouse and the larger changes in the world, and this lack of causality means that anyone who suggests otherwise is the worst kind of fool. Even exploring the idea for entertainment’s sake is suspect these days. From the rational materialist perspective, all we can really say about the money burning
is that it occurred because Cauty and Drummond are a pair of attention seeking arseholes, and note that the path of chaos is always going to lead to a meaningless ending.
This divide between the rational and the irrational is something of fault line in our current culture wars, and with good reason. As we have noted, the mind essentially runs on a form of magical thinking which processes things in a manner unlike how the material world behaves. Concepts like time, space, connection and energy work in fundamentally different ways in the mental and physical realms. This has been something of a sore point for philosophers over the centuries. Much effort has been expended by people trying to convince themselves that, because only one of these contradictory models can be valid, the other is invalid. Rationalists have attempted to train their minds to work in a whole new way, one that permits as little magical thinking as possible. Others have claimed that the material world is basically a plaything of God and only behaves as it does because that is the sort of thing He is into.
Alan Moore has a nice little dodge to avoid this problem. He claims that magic is not real, if we define 'real' as meaning something that unarguably exists in time and space. Magic, he points out, only exists in the mind. This does not mean that it cannot explain the larger world, for there is an established tradition of things which are best explained with things that don't exist.