The illuminatus! trilogy (22 page)
Read The illuminatus! trilogy Online
Authors: Robert Shea,Robert Anton Wilson
Tags: #Science fiction; American, #General, #Science fiction, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Visionary & Metaphysical
Source:
The High I.Q. Bulletin
, Vol. IV, No. 1, January 1970. Published by Philip Campbell Argyle-Stuart, Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Pat
“What was that word?” Private Celine asked eagerly.
“SNAFU,” Private Pearson told him. “You mean to say you never heard it before?” He sat up in his bunk and stared.
“I’m a naturalized citizen,” Hagbard said. “I was born in Norway.” He pulled his shirt away from his back again; the Fort Benning summer was much too hot for the Nordic half of his genes. “Situation Normal, AU Fucked Up,” he repeated. “That really sums it up. That really says it.”
“Waifll you’ve been in This Man’s Army a little longer,” the black man told him vehemently. “Then you’ll really
appreciate
the
application
of that word, dads. Oh, man, will you
appreciate
it.”
“It’s not just the army,” Hagbard said thoughtfully. “It’s the whole world.”
Actually, after they immanentized the Eschaton, I found out where my head was leaking that night (and a few other nights, too.)
Into poor George Dorn. The leak almost gave him water on the brain. He kept wondering where all that Joyce and surrealism was coming from. I’m seven years older than he is, but we’re on the same valence because of similar grammar school experiences and revolutionary fathers. That’s why Hagbard never really understood either of us, fully: he had private tutors until he hit college, and by that stage Official Education is beginning to make some partial concessions to reality so the victims have at least a chance of surviving on the outside. But I didn’t know any of that in Grant Park that night or how the Army helped Hagbard understand college, because I was working out this new notion of the total valence of the set remaining constant. It would mean that I
would have to leave when George came on, or say, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield had to do the pill or auto-wreck shticks before there was room for Racquel Welch’s vibes.
ILLUMINAT! PROJECT: MEMO #16
8/7
J.M.:
I think I’ve found the clue as to how Zoroaster, flying saucers and all that lunatic-fringe stuff fits into the Illuminati puzzle. Dig this, boss-man:
The Nazi Party was founded as the political appendage of the Thule Society, an extremist fringe of the Illuminated Lodge of Berlin. This lodge, in turn, was made up of Rosicrucians—high Freemasons—and its preoccupation was mourning the death of the feudal system. Masons of this time were, like the Federalist Party in post-revolutionary America, working diligently to prevent “anarchy” and preserve the old values by bringing about Christian Socialism. Indeed, the Aaron Burr conspiracy, which Professor Hofstadter notes was allegedly Masonic in origin, was an American prototype of German intrigues of a century later. To their external scientific socialism these Masons added mystic concepts which were thought to be “gnostic” in origin. One of these was the concept of “Gnosticism” itself, called Illumination—which held that heavenly beings directly or indirectly gave humanity its great ideas and would come back to Earth after mankind had achieved sufficient progress. Illumination was a brand of pentecostalism which was persecuted by orthodox Christianity for centuries and had become lodged in Freemasonry through a complex historical process which is impossible to explain without a major digression. It is sufficient to say that the Nazis, being “Illuminated,” felt themselves to be divinely inspired and therefore felt justified in rewriting the rules of good and evil to suit their own purposes.
(According to Nazi theory) the heavenly beings, before the present Moon was captured, had lived on the highest ground, in Peru, Mexico, Gondor (Ethiopia),
Himalaya, Atlantis and Mu, forming the Uranian Confederation. This was taken quite seriously and British intelligence actually combatted it with the Tolkien fantasy called the “Silmarillion,” basis for the famous “Hobbit” books….
Both J. Edgar Hoover and Congressman Otto Passman are high-ranking Masons and both, significantly, reflect this philosophy and its Manichean attitude. The chief danger in Masonic thinking aside from the “divine right of government” is, of course, Manicheanism, the belief that your opponent is opposing God’s will and is therefore an agent of Satan. This is the extreme application and Mr. Hoover usually reserves it for “Godless Communism” but it is almost always present to some degree.
Source: “The Nazi Religion: Views on Religious Statism in Germany and America” by J. F. C. Moore,
Libertarian American
, Vol. III, No. 3, August 1969.
Pat
They were using Mace now, and I saw one photographer snapping a picture of a cop while the cop was still Macing him (Heisenberg rides again! From out of the west come the thundering hooves of the great hearse, Joint Phenomenon! Except that I was on acid; if I’d been on weed, then it would really, royally, be a Joint Phenomenon). And I heard later that the photographer got an award for that shot. Right then, he didn’t look like he was getting an award. He looked like they had just taken off his skin and touched each raw nerve with a dentist’s drill. “Christ,” I said to Hagbard, “look at that poor bastard. I hope I come out of this with just another teargassing or two. I don’t want any of that Mace.” But acid is placid, you know, and a minute later I was on Joyce’s juices again and thinking of a drama called “Their Mace and My Gripes.” I made the first line fruity, in honor of Padre Pederastia: “What a botch of a pair to plumb this hour’s gripes.”
“Bism’allah”
Hagbard said. “Our karma is made by our deeds, not by our prayers. You’re on the set, so you take the action as it comes.”
“Oh, cut out that Holy Man craperoo and stop reading
my mind,” I protested. “You don’t have to go on impressing me.” But I was off on another tangent, which went something like this: If this set is Mayor Daley’s circus, then Mayor Daley is the ringmaster. If the things below are the things above, as Hermes hermetically hinted, then this set
is
the bigger set. Mr. Microcosm, meet Mr. Macrocosm. “Hi, Mike!” “Hi, Mac.” Conclusion: Mayor Daley, in a small way, is what Krishna is, in a large way. QED.
Just then some SDS kids who’d been teargassed across the street came running our way, and Hagbard got busy handing out wet handkerchiefs. They needed them: they were half-blind, like Joyce splitting his Adam into wise hopes. And I wasn’t much help, because I was too busy crying myself.
“Hagbard,” I gasped in ecstasy. “Mayor Daley is Krishna.”
“Worse luck for him,” he said curtly, distributing the handkerchiefs. “He doesn’t suspect it.”
I thought, suddenly:
Hubert the Hump has coughed and hawked
And spat on the streets that Lincoln walked
The water turned to blood (Hagbard was a joking jolting Jesus: you expected wine maybe?) and I remembered my mother’s story about Dillinger at the Biograph. We all sit there, like him, in the Biograph Theatre, dreaming the drama of our lives, then walk outside to the grandmotherly kindness of the lead kisses that wake us back to our slipping beatitude. Except that he found a way to come back. What was it Charley Mordecai said: “First as tragedy, then as farce?” Marxism-Lennonism: Ed Sanders of the Fugs, the night before, talking about fucking in the streets as if he had read my mind (or had I read his?) and Lennon’s “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” was recorded a year in the future. The Marx and our groupies. The bloody handkerchiefs dipped into water, or wine, and the mass rite went on, the mass went Right On, the Mace they rowed. Capone set it up for the Feds, but John was fed up and left the set, so an extra named Frank Sullivan got the bullets. The Autobiograph Theatre, a drama house and a trauma, yes. I maybe should have taken only half a
tab instead of the full 500 mikes, because at that point the SDS kids, all of them siding with RYM-I at the split next year, looked like they had altarboy robes on and I thought Hagbard was distributing communion wafers, not handkerchiefs. He looked at me, suddenly, with that hawk-faced Egyptian glare, and I observed that he had observed, Hopalong Horus Heisenberg, just where I was at. You don’t have to be a waterman, I thought, to know which way my mind is blowing.
There was a sound from the crowd, like a subway opening all its doors with a suck of air, and I saw the police coming, crossing the street to clear the park.
“Here we go again,” I said. “All hail Discordia.”
“Snafu ueber alles,”
Hagbard grinned, starting to trot beside me.
We headed North, figuring that the ones who retreated eastward would get trapped against the wall and creamed. “Democracy in action,” I said, panting along.
“There thou might’st behold the very image of Authority,” he quoted, shifting his water bucket to keep it in balance. I caught the Shakespearean reference and looked back: my mind had already: each policeman indeed looked like Shakespeare’s dog. I remembered the frantic semantics at the LBJ anti-birthday party, when Burroughs insisted Chicago Cops were more like dogs than pigs, in contradiction to the SDS rhetoric. Terry Southern, taking his usual maniacal middle course, claimed they were more akin to the purple-assed mandrill, most surly of the baboon family. But most of them hadn’t discovered writing yet.
“Authority?” I asked, realizing I’d lost something along the way. We were slowing to a walk, the action was behind us.
“A is not A,” Hagbard explained with that tiresome patience of his. “Once you accept A
is
A, you’re hooked. Literally hooked, addicted to the System.”
I caught the references to Aristotle, the old man of the tribe with his unfortunate epistemological paresis, and also to that feisty little lady I always imagine is really the lost Anastasia, but I still didn’t grok. “What do you mean?” I asked, grabbing a wet handkerchief as some of the teargas started to drift to our end of the park.
“Chairman Mao didn’t say half of it,” Hagbard replied
holding a handkerchief to his own face. His words came through muffled: “It isn’t only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So does a whole definition of reality. A set. And the action that has to happen on that particular set and on none other.”
“Don’t be so bloody patronizing,” I objected, looking around a corner in time and realizing this was the night I would be Maced. “That’s just Marx: the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ideology of the whole society.”
“Not the ideology. The Reality.” He lowered his handkerchief. “This was a public park until they changed the definition. Now, the guns have changed the Reality. It
isn’t
a public park. There’s more than
one
kind of magic.”
“Just like the Enclosure Acts,” I said hollowly. “One day the land belonged to the people. The next day it belonged to the landlords.”
“And like the Narcotics Acts,” he added. “A hundred thousand harmless junkies became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress, in nineteen twenty-seven. Ten years later, in thirty-seven, all the pot-heads in the country became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. And they really were criminals, when the papers were signed. The guns prove it. Walk away from those guns, waving a joint, and refuse to halt when they tell you. Their Imagination will become your Reality in a second.”
And I had my answer to Dad, finally, just as a cop jumped out of the darkness screaming something about freaking motherfucking fag commies and Maced me, as was certain to happen (I knew it as I crumbled in pain) on that set.
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #16
8/7
J.M.:
Here’s some more info on how Blavatsky, theosophy and the motto under the great pyramid on the U.S. Seal fit into the Illuminati picture (or
don’t
fit into the picture. It’s getting more confusing the further I dig into it!) This is an article defending Madame Blavatsky, after Truman Capote had repeated the John Birch Society’s charge that Sirhan Sirhan was inspired to murder Robert Kennedy by reading Blavatsky’s works: “Sirhan Blavatsky Capote” by Ted Zatlyn,
Los Angeles Free Press
, July 26, 1968:
Birchers that attack Madame Blavatsky, though smaller in number and as crazy as ever, find a new home in an atmosphere of suspicion and violence. Truman Capote takes them seriously …
Does Mr. Capote know that the Illuminati (according to sacred Birch doctrine) began in the Garden of Eden when Eve made it with the snake and gave birth to Cain? That all the descendents of snake-man Cain belong to a super-secret group known as the Illuminati, dedicated to absolutely nothing but the meanest low down evil imagined in the Satanic mind of man?
Anti-Illuminati John Steinbacher writes in his unpublished book,
Novus Ordo Seclorum
(The New Order of the Ages): “Today in America, many otherwise talented people are flirting with disaster by associating with those same evil forces … Madame Blavatsky’s doctrine was strikingly similar to that of Weishaupt…. ”
The author also gives
his
version of the
Bircher’s
version of what the Illuminati are actually trying to accomplish:
Their evil goal is to transcend materiality, and to bring about one world, denying the sovereignty of nations and the sanctity of private proverty.
I don’t think I can believe, or even understand, this, but at least it explains how both the Nazis and the Communists can be pawns of the Illuminati. Or does it?
Pat
“Property is theft,” Hagbard said, passing the peace pipe.
“If the BIA helps those real estate developers take our land,” Uncle John Feather said, “that will be theft. But if we keep the land, that is certainly not theft.”
Night was falling in the Mohawk reservation, but Hagbard saw Sam Three Arrows nod vigorously in the gloom of the small cabin. He felt, again, that American Indians were the hardest people in the world to understand. His tutors had given him a cosmopolitan education, in every sense of the word, and he usually found no blocks in relating to people of any culture, but the Indians
did puzzle him at times. After five years of specializing in handling the legal battles of various tribes against the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the land pirates it served, he was still conscious that these people’s heads were someplace he couldn’t yet reach. Either they were the simplest, or the most sophisticated, society on the planet; maybe, he thought, they were both, and the ultimate simplicity and the ultimate sophistication are identical.