The illuminatus! trilogy (111 page)

As for Hassan i Sabbah X and the Cult of the Black
Mother, the authors have been able to learn precious little about them. Since they are clearly related
somehow
to the Assassins and the cult of Kali, Mother of Destruction, one can consider them part of the Illuminati, or Podge, side of the Sacred Chao; since they seem to be businessmen rather than fanatics, and since Kali might be a version of Eris, one can consider them part of the Discordian or Hodge side. Amid such speculation and much mystery, they go their dark way, peddling horse and preaching some pretty funky doctrines about Whitey. Perhaps they intend to betray everybody and run off with the loot at an opportune moment—and, then again, maybe they are the only really dedicated revolutionaries around. “Nothing is too heavy to be knocked on its ass, and everything is cool, baby” is the only summary of his personal philosophy that Hassan i Sabbah X himself would give us. He’s a studly dude, and we didn’t press him.

Linguists and etymologists have had much exercise for their not-inconsiderable imaginations in attempting to account for this expression.
Skidoo
has been traced back to the older
skedaddle
, and thence to the Greek
skedannumi
, “to disperse hurriedly.” The 23, naturally, has caused even more creative efforts by these gentry, since they are unaware of the secret teachings of Magick. One theorist, noting that Sidney Carton in Dickens’
Tale of Two Cities
is the twenty-third man guillotined in the final scene,
*
guessed that those playgoers who were eager to get out of the theater before the crowd counted off the executions and
skidoo’d
toward the exits numbered 23. Another eminent scholar assumes that the expression has something to do with men hanging around the old Flatiron Building on Twenty-third Street in New York City—a notoriously windy corner—to watch ladies’ skirts raised by the breeze; when a cop came, they would
skidoo
. Others have mused inconclusively about
the early telegraph operator’s signal of
23
, which means (roughly) “stop transmitting,” “clear the line,” or, to be crude, “shut up,” but nobody claims to know how telegraphers picked 23 to have this meaning.

The mystery’s real origin is a closely guarded secret of the Justified Ancients of Mummu, which Simon had not attained the rank to learn. Dillinger, however, had attained this rank, and uses the formula quite correctly in the bank robbery scene in the Third Trip. It was printed by “Frater Perdurabo” (Aleister Crowley) in
The Book of Lies
(privately published, 1915; republished by Samuel Weiser Inc., New York, 1970). The text of the spell makes up the totality of Chapter 23 in that curious little book; and it reads:

It is not permissible to explain this fully, but it may be stated guardedly that T is the union of sex and death,
Tau
, the Rosy Crucifixion; UT is Utgita in the Upanishads; and O is the Positive Void.
*

Flaxscrip was first introduced into Discordian groups by the mysterious Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., in 1968. Hempscrip followed the year after, issued by Dr. Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S. (In the novel, taking one of our few liberties with historical truth, we move these coinages backward in time and attribute hempscrip to the Justified Ancients of Mummu.)

The
idea
behind flaxscrip, of course, is as old as history; there was private money long before there was government money. The first revolutionary (or reformist) use of this idea, as a check against galloping usury and high interest rates, was the foundation of “Banks of Piety” by the Dominican order of the Catholic Church in the late middle ages. (See Tawney,
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.)
The Dominicans, having discovered that preaching against usury did not deter the usurer, founded their own banks and provided loans without interest; this “ethical competition” (as Josiah Warren later called it) drove the commercial banks out of the areas where the Dominicans practiced it. Similar private currency, loaned at a low rate of interest (but not at no interest), was provided by Scots banks until the British government, acting on behalf of the monopoly of the Bank of England, stopped this exercise of free enterprise. (See Muellen,
Free Banking.)
The same idea was tried successfully in the American colonies before the Revolution, and again was suppressed by the British government, which some heretical historians regard as a more direct cause of the American Revolution than the taxes mentioned in most schoolbooks. (See Ezra Pound,
Impact
, and additional sources cited therein.)

During the nineteenth century many anarchists and individualists attempted to issue low-interest or no-interest private
currencies.
Mutual Banking
, by Colonel William Greene, and
True Civilization
, by Josiah Warren, are records of two such attempts, by their instigators. Lysander Spooner, an anarchist who was also a constitutional lawyer, argued at length that Congress had no authority to suppress such private currencies (see his
Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations and Frauds)
. A general overview of such efforts at free enterprise, soon crushed by the Capitalist State, is given by James M. Martin in his
Men Against the State
, and by Rudolph Rocker in
Pioneers of American Freedom
(an ironic title, since his pioneers all lost their major battles). Lawrence Labadie, of Suffern, N.Y., has collected (but not yet published) records of 1,000 such experiments; one of the present authors, Robert Anton Wilson, unearthed in 1962 the tale of a no-interest currency, privately issued, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the 1930s depression. (This was an emergency measure by certain local businessmen, who did not fully appreciate the principle involved, and was abandoned as soon as the “tight-money” squeeze ended and Roosevelt began flooding us all with Federal Reserve notes.)

It is traditional among liberal historians to dismiss such endeavors as “funny-money schemes.” They have never explained why government money is any less hilarious. (That used in the U.S. now, for instance, is actually worth 47 percent of its “declared” face value). All money is funny, if you stop to think about it, but no private currency, competing on a free market, could ever be quite so comical (and tragic) as the notes now bearing the magic imprint of Uncle Sam—and backed only by his promise (or threat) that, come hell or high water, by God he’ll make it good by taxing our descendants unto the infinite generation to pay the interest on it. The National Debt, so called, is of course, nothing else but the debt we owe the bankers who “loaned” this money to Uncle after he kindly gave them the credit which enabled them to make this loan. Hempscrip or even acidscrip or peyotescrip could never be quite so clownish as this system, which only the Illuminati (if they really exist) could have dreamed up. The system has but one advantage: It makes bankers richer every year. Nobody else, from the industrial capitalist or “captain of industry” to the coal-miner, profits from it in any way, and all pay the taxes, which become the interest payments, which make the bankers
richer. If the Illuminati did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them—such a system can be explained in no other way, except by those cynics who hold that human stupidity is infinite.

The idea behind hempscrip is more radical than the notion of private-enterprise currency per se. Hempscrip, as employed in the novel, depreciates; it is, thus, not merely a
no-interest
currency, but a
negative-interest
currency. The lender literally pays the borrower to take it away for a while. It was invented by German business-economist Silvio Gesell, and is described in his
Natural Economic Order
and in professor Irving Fisher’s
Stamp Script
.

Gresham’s Law, like most of the “laws” taught in State-supported public schools, is not quite true (at least, not in the form in which it is usually taught).
“Bad money drives out good” holds only in authoritarian societies, not in libertarian societies
. (Gresham was clear-minded enough to state explicitly that he was only describing authoritarian societies;
his
formulation of his own “Law” begins with the words “If the king issueth two moneys…,” thereby implying that the State must exist if the “Law” is to operate.)
In a libertarian society, good money will drive out the bad
. This Utopian proposition—which the sane reader will regard with acute skepticism—has been seen to be sound by a rigorously logical demonstration, based on the axioms of economics, in
The Cause of Business Depressions
by Hugo Bilgrim and Edward Levy.
*

Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. —R
ALPH
W
ALDO
E
MERSON

Proudhon, by piling up his contradictions this way, was not merely being French; he was trying to indicate that the abstraction “property” covers a variety of phenomena, some pernicious and some beneficial. Let us borrow a device from the semanticists and examine his triad with subscripts attached for maximum clarity.

“Property
₁
is theft” means that property
₁
created by the artificial laws of feudal, capitalist, and other authoritarian societies, is based on aimed robbery. Land titles, for instance, are clear examples of property
₁
; swords and shot were the original coins of transaction.

“Property
₂
is liberty” means that property
₁
, that which will be voluntarily honored in a voluntary (anarchist) society, is the foundation of the liberty in that society. The more people’s interests are comingled and confused, as in collectivism, the more they will be stepping on each other’s toes; only when the rules of the game declare clearly “This is mine and this is thine,”
and the game is voluntarily accepted as worthwhile by all parties to it
, can true independence be achieved.