The illuminatus! trilogy (109 page)

Since all Illuminati with any academic leanings at all are encouraged to major in history, the tendency in most textbooks is not only to black out
Verwirrung
periods but to glorify
Zweitracht
periods as ages of Light and Progress. Indeed, they make entertaining reading: They are ages of expansion, and there are always new people being discovered to be subjugated, “civilized,” and converted to tax-payers and rent-payers. Almost any age described in glowing and admiring language in a history text will prove, on examination, to be a
Zweitracht
era, and the foremost butchers and invaders are treated as the outstanding heroes of humanity. A sympathetic reading of the biographies of these empire-builders almost always indicates that they
were
homo neophile
individuals who turned their talents to destruction rather than creativity because of bitterness engendered by years of torment and baiting by
homo neophobe
types during their childhoods.

The ever-present conflict in a
Zweitracht
period eventually leads to the third stage.

Humanity has been transformed during a
Zweitracht
age, by placing logogram in governing authority over biogram.
Unordnung
is an attempt to restore balance by revolutionizing the logogram; there is no thought about the biogram, because contact with this somatic component of personality has been lost. (This loss of contact has been variously described by pre-Celinean observers: It is “the veil of Maya” in Buddhism, the “censor band” or “repression” in psychoanalysis, the “character armoring” and “muscular armoring” in Reichian psychology, etc.)

The
I Ching
hexagram for this stage is Meng,
, or Youthful Folly. The yang line at the top indicates the continued supremacy of logogram, even though some biogram elements (the yin lines) begin to reassert themselves. The traditional reading is “mountain above water;” that is, the rigid logogram still repressing the Aquarian element as it seeks to liberate itself. The usual Chinese interpretation of this hexagram is “The young fool needs discipline,” and the leaders of all rebellions at this stage always heartily agree with that and demand unquestioning obedience from their followers. This is a time of turmoils, troubles, and tyrannies that appear and disappear rapidly.

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.

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.

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.