The illuminatus! trilogy (15 page)
Read The illuminatus! trilogy Online
Authors: Robert Shea,Robert Anton Wilson
Tags: #Science fiction; American, #General, #Science fiction, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Visionary & Metaphysical
Rebecca Goodman closes her book wearily and stares into space, thinking about Babylon. Her eyes focus suddenly on the statue Saul had bought her for her last birthday: the mermaid of Copenhagen. How many Danes, she wonders, know that this is one form of representation of the Babylonian sex goddess Ishtar?
(In Central Park, Perri the squirrel is beginning to hunt for the day’s food. A French poodle, held on a leash by a mink-coated lady, barks at him, and he runs three times around a tree.)
George Dorn looks at the face of a corpse: it is his own face. “In Wyoming, after one sex-education class in a high school, the teacher was raped by seventeen boys. She said later she would never teach sex in school again.” Making sure he is alone in the Meditation Room of the UN building, the man calling himself Frank Sullivan quickly moves the black plinth aside and descends the hidden stairs into the tunnel. He is thinking, whimsically, that hardly anybody realizes that the shape of the room is the same as the truncated pyramid on the dollar bill, or guesses what that means. “In Wilmette, Illinois, an 8-year-old boy came home from a sensitivity training class and tried to have intercourse with his 4-year-old sister.” Simon gave up on his pentagons and began doodling pyramids instead.
Above, beyond Joe Malik’s window, Saul Goodman gave up on the line of thought which had led him to surmise that the Illuminati were a front for the International Psychoanalytical Society, conspiring to drive everyone paranoid, and turned back to the desk and the memos. Barney Muldoon came in from the bedroom, carrying a strange amulet, and asked, “What do you make of this?” Saul looked at a design of an apple and a pentagon … and, several years earlier, Simon Moon looked at the same medallion.
“They call it the Sacred Chao,” Padre Pederastia said. They sat alone at a table pulled off to the corner; the Friendly Stranger was the same as ever, except that a new group, the American Medical Association (consisting,
naturally, of four kids from Germany), had replaced H. P. Lovecraft in the back room. (Nobody knew that the AMA was going to become the world’s most popular rock group within a year, but Simon already thought they were superheavy). Padre Pederastia was, as on the night Simon met Miss Mao, very serious and hardly camping at all.
“Sacred Cow?” Simon asked.
“It’s pronounced that way, but you spell it c-h-a-o. A chao is a single unit of chaos, they figure.” The Padre smiled.
“Too much, they’re nuttier than the SSS,” Simon objected.
“Never underestimate absurdity, it is one door to the Imagination. Do I have to remind
you
of that?”
“We have an alliance with them?” Simon asked.
“The JAMs can’t do it alone. Yes, we have an alliance, as long as it profits both parties. John—Mr. Sullivan himself authorized this.”
“OK. What do they call themselves?”
“The LDD.” The Padre permitted himself a smile. “New members are told the initials stand for Legion of Dynamic Discord. Later on, quite often, the leader, a most fetching scoundrel and madman named Celine, sometimes tells them it really stands for Little Deluded Dupes. That’s the
pons asinorum
, or an early
pons asinorum
, in Celine’s System. He judges them by how they react to that.”
“Celine’s System?” Simon asked warily.
“It leads to the same destination as ours—more or less—by a somewhat wilder and woolier path.”
“Right-hand or left-hand path?”
“Right-hand,” the priest said. “All absurdist systems are right-hand. Well, almost all. They don’t invoke You-Know-Who under any circumstances. They rely on Discordia … do you remember your Roman myths?”
“Enough to know that Discordia is just the Latin equivalent of Eris. They’re part of the Erisian Liberation Front, then?” Simon was beginning to wish he were stoned; these conspiratorial conversations always made more sense when he was slightly high. He wondered how people like the President of the U.S. or the Chairman of the Board of GM were able to plot such intricate games without being on a trip at the time. Or did they take enough tranquilizers to produce a similar effect?
“No,” the priest said flatly. “Don’t ever make that mistake.
ELF is a much more, um, esoteric outfit than the LDD. Celine is on the activist side, like us. Some of his capers make Morituri or God’s Lightning look like Trappists by comparison. No, ELF will never get on Mr. Celine’s trip.”
“He’s got an absurdist yoga and an activist ethic?” Simon reflected. “The two don’t mix.”
“Celine is a walking contradiction. Look at his symbol again.”
“I’ve
been
looking at it and that pentagon worries me. Are you sure he’s on our side?”
The American Medical Association came to some kind of erotic or musical climax and the priest’s answer was drowned out. “What?” Simon asked, after the applause died down.
“I said,” Padre Pederastia whispered, “that we’re never sure
anybody
is on our side. Uncertainty is the name of the game.”
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #10
7/28
J.M.:
On the origin of the pyramid-and-eye symbol, test your credulity on the following yarn from
Flying Saucers in the Bible
by Virginia Brasington (Saucerian Books, 1963s, page 43.):
The Continental Congress had asked Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to arrange for a seal for the United States of America…. None of the designs they created or which were submitted to them, were suitable….
Fairly late at night, after working on the project all day, Jefferson walked out into the cool night air of the garden to clear his mind. In a few minutes he rushed back into the room, crying, jubilantly: “I have it! I have it!” Indeed, he did have some plans in his hands. They were the plans showing the Great Seal as we know it today.
Asked how he got the plans, Jefferson told a strange story. A man approached him wearing a black cloak that practically covered him, face and all, and told him that he (the stranger) knew they were trying to devise a Seal, and that he had a design
which was appropriate and meaningful….
After the excitement died down, the three went into the garden to find the stranger, but he was gone.
Thus, neither these Founding Fathers, nor anybody else, ever knew who really designed the Great Seal of the United States!
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #11
7/29
J.M.:
The latest I’ve found on the eye-and-pyramid is in a San Francisco underground paper (
Planet
, San Francisco, July 1969, Vol. I, No.4.), suggesting it as a symbol for Timothy Leary’s political party when he was running for governor of California instead of just running:
The emblem is a tentative design for the Party’s campaign button. One wag suggests that everyone cut out the circle from the back of a dollar bill and send the wholly dollar to Governor Leary so he can wallpaper his office with them. Then paste the emblem on your front door to signify your membership in the party.
Translations:
The year of the beginning New Secular Order
Both translations are wrong, of course.
Annuit Coeptis
means “he blesses our beginning” and
Novus Ordo Seclorem
means “a new order of the ages.” Oh, well, scholarship was never the hippies’ strong point. But—
Tim Leary
an Illuminatus?
And pasting the Eye on the door—I can’t help but think of the Hebrews marking their doorways with the blood of a lamb so that the Angel of Death would pass by their houses.
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #12
8/3
J.M.:
I’ve finally found the basic book on the Illuminati:
Proofs of a Conspiracy
by John Robison (Christian Book Club of
America, Hawthorn, California, 1961; originally published in 1801). Robison was an English Mason who discovered through personal experience that the French Masonic lodges—such as the Grand Orient—were Illuminati fronts and were the main instigators of the French Revolution. His whole book is very explicit about how Weishaupt worked: every infiltrated Masonic group would have several levels, like an ordinary Masonic lodge, but as candidates advanced through the various degrees they would be told more about the real purposes of the movement. Those at the bottom simply thought they were Masons; in the middle levels, they knew they were engaged in a great project to change the world, but the exact nature of the change was explained to them according to what the leaders thought they were prepared to know. Only those at the top knew the secret, which—according to Robison—is this: the Illuminati aims to overthrow all government and religion, setting up an anarcho-communist free-love world, and, because “the end justifies the means” (a principle Weishaupt acquired from his Jesuit youth), they didn’t care how many people they killed to accomplish that noble purpose. Robison knows nothing of earlier Illuminati movements, but does say specifically that the Bavarian Illuminati was not destroyed by the government’s crackdown in 1785 but was, in fact, still active, both in England and France and possibly elsewhere, when he wrote, in 1801. On page 116, Robison lists their existing lodges as follows: Germany (84 lodges); England (8 lodges); Scotland (2); Warsaw (2); Switzerland (many); Rome, Naples, Ancona, Florence, France, Holland, Dresden (4); United States of America (several). On page 101, he mentions that there are 13 ranks in the Order; this may account for the 13 steps on their symbolic pyramid. Page 84 gives the code name of Weishaupt, which was Spartacus; his second-in-command, Freiherr Knigge, had the code name Philo (page 117); this is revealed in papers seized by the Bavarian government in a raid on the home of a lawyer named Zwack, who had the code name Cato. Babeuf, the French revolutionary, evidently took the name Gracchus in imitation of the classical style of these titles.
Robison’s conclusion, page 269,
is
worth quoting:
Nothing is as dangerous as a mystic Association. The object remaining a secret in the hands of the managers,
the rest simply put a ring in their own noses, by which they may be led about at pleasure; and still panting after the secret they are the more pleased the less they see.
Pat
At the bottom of the page was a note in pencil, scrawled with a decisive masculine hand. It said: “In the beginning was the Word and it was written by a baboon.”
ILLUMINAT! PROJECT: MEMO #13
8/5
J.M.:
The survival of the Bavarian Illuminati throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth is the subject of
World Revolution
by Nesta Webster (Constable and Company, London, 1921). Mrs. Webster follows Robison fairly closely on the early days of the movement, up to the French Revolution, but then veers off and says that the Illuminati never intended to create their Utopian anarcho-communist society: that was just another of their masks. Their real purpose was dictatorship over the world, and so they soon formed a secret alliance with the Prussian government. All subsequent socialist, anarchist, and communist movements are mere decoys, she argues, behind which the German General Staff and the Illuminati are plotting to overthrow other governments, so Germany can conquer them. (She wrote right after England fought Germany in the First World War). I see no way of reconciling this with the Birchers’ thesis that the Illuminati has become a front for the Rhodes Scholars to take over the world for
English
domination. Obviously—as Robison states—the Illuminati say different things to different people, to get them into the conspiracy. As for the links with modern communism, here are some passages from her pages 234-45:
But now that the (First) Internationale was dead it became necessary for the secret societies to reorganize, and it is at this crisis that we find that “formidable sect” springing to life again—
the original Illuminati of Weishaupt
.
… What we do know definitely is that the society
was refounded in Dresden in 1880…. That it was consciously modelled on its eighteenth century predecessor is clear from the fact that its chief, one Leopold Engel, was the author of a lengthy panegyric on Weishaupt and his Order, entitled
Geschichte des Illuminaten Ordens
(published in 1906)….
… In London a lodge called by the same name … carried on the rite of Memphis—founded, it is said, by Cagliostro on Egyptian models—and initiated adepts into illuminized Freemasonry….
Was it … a mere coincidence that in July 1889 an International Socialist Congress decided that May 1, which was the day on which Weishaupt founded the Illuminati, should be chosen for an annual International Labour demonstration?
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #14
8/6
J.M.:
And here’s still another version of the origin of the Illuminati, from the Cabalist Eliphas Levi
(The History of Magic
by Eliphas Levi, Borden Publishing Company, Los Angeles, 1963, page 65). He says there were two Zoroasters, a true one who taught white “right hand” magic and a false one who taught black “left hand” magic. He goes on:
To the false Zoroaster must be referred the cultus of material fire and that impious doctrine of divine dualism which produced at a later period the monstrous Gnosis of Manes and the false principles of spurious Masonry. The Zoroaster in question was the father of that materialized Magic which led to the massacre of the Magi and brought their true doctrine at first into proscription and then oblivion. Ever inspired by the spirit of truth, the Church was forced to condemn— under the names of Magic, Manicheanism, Illuminism and Masonry—all that was in kinship, remote or approximate, with the primitive profanation of the mysteries. One signal example is the history of the Knights Templar, which has been misunderstood to this day.
Levi does not elucidate that last sentence; it is interesting, however, that Nesta Webster (see memo 13) also traced the Illuminati to the Knights Templar, whereas Daraul and most other sources track them Eastward to the Hashishim. Is all this making me paranoid? I’m beginning to get the impression that the evidence has not only been hidden in obscure books but also made confusing and contradictory to discourage the researcher …