The illuminatus! trilogy (41 page)

“It always starts with nonsense,” Simon is telling Joe in another time-track, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in 1969. “Weishaupt discovered the Law of Fives while he was stoned and looking at one of those shoggoth pictures you saw in Arkham. He imagined the shoggoth
was a rabbit and said,
‘du hexen Hase,’
which has been preserved as an in-joke by Illuminati agents in Hollywood. It runs through the Bugs Bunny cartoons: ‘You wascal wabbit!’ But out of that schizzy mixture of hallucination and logomania, Weishaupt saw both the mystic meaning of the Five and its pragmatic application as a principal of international espionage, using permutations and combinations that I’ll explain when we have a pencil and paper. That same mixture of revelation and put-on is always the language of the supra-conscious, whenever you contact it, whether through magic, religion, psychedelics, yoga, or a spontaneous brain nova. Maybe the put-on or nonsense part comes by contamination from the unconscious, I don’t know. But it’s always there. That’s why serious people never discover anything of real importance.”

“You mean the Mafia?” Joe asks.

“What? I didn’t say anything about the Mafia. Are you in another time-track again?”

“No, not the Mafia alone,” Hagbard says. “The Syndicate is much bigger than the Maf.” The room returns to focus: it is a restaurant. A seafood restaurant. On Biscayne Avenue, facing the bay. In Miami. In 1973. The walls are decorated with undersea motifs, including a huge octopus. Hagbard, undoubtedly, had chosen this meeting place just because he liked the decor. Crazy bastard thinks he’s Captain Nemo. Still: we’ve got to deal with him. As John says, the JAMs can’t do it alone. Hagbard, grinning, seemed to be noting Joe’s return to present time. “You’re reaching the critical stage,” he said changing the subject. “You now only have two mental states: high on drugs and high without drugs. That’s very good. But as I was saying, the Syndicate is more than just the Maf. The only Syndicate, up until October twenty-third, nineteen thirty-five, was nothing more than the Mafia, of course. But then they killed the Dutchman, and a young psychology student, who also happened to be a psychopath with a power drive like Genghis Khan, was assigned to do a paper on how the Dutchman’s last words illustrate the similarity between somatic damage and schizophrenia. The Dutchman had a bullet in his gut while the police interviewed him, and they recorded everything he said, but on the surface it was all gibberish. This psychology student wrote the paper that his professor expected, and got an
A
for the course—but he also wrote another interpretation of the Dutchman’s
words, for his own purposes. He put copies in several bank vaults—he came from one of the oldest banking families in New England, and he was even then under family pressure to give up psychology and go into banking. His name was

(Robert Putney Drake visited Zurich in 1935. He personally talked to Carl Jung about the archetypes of the collective unconscious, the
I Ching
, and the principle of synchronicity. He talked to people who had known James Joyce before that drunken Irish genius had moved to Paris, and learned much about Joyce’s drunken claims to be a prophet. He read the published portions of
Finnegans Wake
and went back for further conversations with Jung. Then he met Hermann Hesse, Paul Klee and the other members of the Eastern Brotherhood and joined them in a mescaline ritual. A letter from his father arrived about then, asking when he was going to give up wasting his time and return to Harvard Business School. He wrote that he would return for the fall semester, but not to study business administration. A great psychologist was almost born then, and Harvard might have had its Timothy Leary scandal thirty years earlier.

Except for Drake’s power drive.)

I. THE FAUST PARSON, SINGULAR. Napalm sundaes for How Chow Mein, misfortune’s cookie.

Josephine Malik lies trembling on the bed, trying to be brave, trying to hide her fear. Where, now, is the mask of masculinity?

This delusion that you are a man trapped in a woman’s body can only be cured one way. I might be kicked out of the American Psychoanalystical Association if they knew about my methods. In fact, already had a spot of bother with them when one of my patients cured his Oedipus complex by actually fucking his mother, convincing himself extensionally as the semanticists would say that she really was an old lady and not the woman he remembered from infancy. Nevertheless, the whole world is going bananas as you must have observed, my poor girl, and we have to use heroic measures to save whatever sanity remains in any patient we encounter.
(The psychiatrist is now naked. He joins her on the bed.)
Now, my little frightened dove, I will convince you that you really are a true-born, honest-to-God woman….

Josephine feels his finger in her cunt and screams. Not
at the touch: at the reality of it. She hadn’t believed until then that the change was real
.

And modern novels are the same: in the YMCA on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, looking out the window at the radio tower atop Brooklyn Technical High School, a man named Chaney (no relative of the movie family) spreads his pornographic tarot cards across the bed. One of them, he notes, is missing. Quickly, he arranges them in suits, and hunts for the lost card: it is the Five of Pentacles. He curses softly: that was one of his favorite orgy tableux.

Rebecca. The Saint Bernard
.

“It’s probably all jumbled in your head,” I went on, furious that our plan was falling apart, that I needed his trust now but had no way to earn it. “We’ve been disintoxicating and dehypnotizing you, but you almost certainly can’t tell where the Illuminati left off and we rescued you and started reversing the treatment. You’re due to explode into psychosis within twenty-four hours and we’re using the only techniques that can defuse that process.”

“Why am I hearing everything twice?” Saul asked, balancing between wary skepticism and a sense that Malik was not playing games any more but urgently trying to help him.

“The stuff they gave you was an MDA derivative—very high on mescaline and methedrine both. It has an echo effect for seventy-two hours minimum. You’re hearing what I’m going to say before I say it and then again when I do say it. That’ll pass in a few minutes, but it’ll be back, every half hour or so, for the next day yet. The end of the chain is psychosis, unless we can stop it.” “Unless we can stop it.”

“It’s easing up now,” Saul said carefully, “Less of an echo that time. I still don’t know whether to trust you. Why were you trying to turn me into Barney Muldoon?”

“Because the psychic explosion is on Saul Goodman’s time-track, not on Barney Muldoon’s.”

Ten big rhinoceroses, eleven big rhinoceroses
…

“You Wascal Wabbit,” Simon whispers through the Judas Window. Immediately the door opens and a grinning
young man with the Frisco-style Jesus Christ hair-and-beard says, “Welcome to the Joshua Norton Cabal.” Joe sees to his relief that it was a normal but untypically clean hippie hangout, and there are none of the sinister accoutrements of the Lake Shore Drive coven. At the same time, he hears the strange man in the bed asking, “Why were you trying to turn me into Barney Muldoon?”
My God, now it’s happening when I’m awake as well as when I’m asleep
. Simu-multi-taneously, he hears the alarm and cries, “The Illuminati must be attacking!”

“Attacking this building?” Saul asks confusedly.

“Building? You’re on a submarine, man. The
Lief Erich-son
, on its way to Atlantis!”

Twenty big rhinoceroses, twenty-one big rhinoceroses
…

“Number Seventeen,” read Professor Curve, “‘Law and anarchists will give the American people a speedy Cadillac.’”

You can call me Doc Iggy. My full name, at present, is Dr. Ignotum P. Ignotius. The P. stands for Per. If you’re a Latinist, you’ll realize that translates as “the unknown explained by the still more unknown.” I think it’s a quite appropriate name for my function tonight, since Simon brought you here to be illuminized. My slave name, before I was turned on myself, is totally immaterial. As far as I’m concerned, your slave name is equally pointless, and I’ll call you by the password of the Norton Cabal, which Simon used at the door. Until tomorrow morning, when the drug starts wearing off, you are U. Wascal Wabbit. That’s U., the initial, not why-oh-you, by the way.

We accept Bugs Bunny as an exemplar of Mummu here, too, but otherwise we have little in common with the SSS. That’s the Satanist, Surrealists and Sadists—the crew who began your illuminization in Chicago. All we share with them actually is use of the Tristero anarchist postal system, to evade the government’s postal inspectors, and a financial agreement whereby we accept their DMM script—Divine Marquis Memorial script—and they accept our hempscript and the flaxscript of the Legion of Dynamic Discord. Anything to avoid Federal Reserve notes, you know.

It’ll be a while yet before the acid starts working, so I’ll just chat like this, about things that are more or less trivial—or quadrivial, or maybe pentivial—until I can see that you’re ready for more serious matters. Simon’s in the chapel, with a woman named Stella who you’ll really dig, getting things ready for the ceremony.

You might wonder why we’re called the Norton Cabal. The name was chosen by my predecessor, Malaclypse the Younger, before he left us to join the more esoteric group known as ELF—the Erisian Liberation Front. They’re the Occidental branch of the Hung Mung Tong Cong and all
their efforts go into a long-range anti-Illuminati project known only as Operation Mindfuck. But that’s another, very complicated, story. One of Malaclypse’s last writings, before he went into the Silence, was a short paragraph saying, “Everybody understands Mickey Mouse. Few understand Hermann Hesse. Hardly anyone understands Albert Einstein. And nobody understands Emperor Norton.” I guess Malaclypse was already into the Mindfuck mystique when he wrote that.

(Who was Emperor Norton? Joe asks, wondering if the drug is beginning to work already or Dr. Ignotius just has a tendency to speak more slowly than most people.)

Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. San Francisco is proud of him. He lived in the last century and got to be emperor by proclaiming himself as such.
For some mysterious reason
, the newspapers decided to humor him and printed his proclamations. When he started issuing his own money, the local banks
went along with the joke
and accepted it on par with U.S. currency. When the Vigilantes got into a lynching mood one night and decided to go down to Chinatown and kill some Chinese, Emperor Norton stopped them
just by standing in the street with his eyes closed reciting the Lord’s Prayer
. Are you beginning to understand Emperor Norton a little, Mr. Wabbit?

(A little, Joe said, a little
…)

Well, chew on this for a while, friend: there were two very sane and rational anarchists who lived about the same time as Emperor Norton across the country in Massachusetts: William Green and Lysander Spooner. They also realized the value of having competing currencies instead of one uniform State currency, and they tried logical arguments, empirical demonstrations and legal suits to get this idea accepted. They accomplished nothing. The government broke its own laws to find ways to suppress Green’s Mutual Bank and Spooner’s People’s Bank. That’s because they were obviously sane, and their currency did pose a real threat to the monopoly of the Illuminati. But Emperor Norton was so crazy that people
humored
him and his currency was allowed to circulate. Think about it. You might begin to understand why Bugs Bunny is our symbol and why our currency has the ridiculous name hempscript. Hagbard Celine and his Discordians, even more absurdly, call their money flaxscript. That commemorates the Zen
Master who was asked, “What is the Buddha?” and replied, “Five pounds of flax.” Do you begin to see the full dimensions of our struggle with the Illuminati?

At least, for now, you can probably grasp this much: their fundamental fallacy is the Aneristic Delusion. They
really
believe in law ‘n’ order. As a matter of fact, since everybody in this crazy, millennia-old battle has his own theory about what the Illuminati are really aiming at, I might as well tell you mine. I think they’re all scientists and they want to set up a scientific world government. The Jacobins were probably following precise Illuminati instructions when they sacked the churches in Paris and proclaimed the dawn of the Age of Reason. You know the story about the old man who was in the crowd when Louis XVI went to the guillotine and who shouted as the king’s head fell, “Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged”? All the symbols that De Molay introduced into Masonry are scientific implements—the T-square, the architect’s triangle, even that pyramid that has caused so much bizarre speculation. If you count the eye as part of the design, the pyramid has 73 divisions, you know, not 72. What’s 73 mean? Simple: multiply it by five, in accordance with Weishaupt’s
funfwissenschaft
, the science of fives, and you get 365, the days of the year. The damn thing is some kind of astronomical computer, like Stonehenge. The Egyptian pyramids are facing to the East, where the sun rises. The great pyramid of the Mayans has exactly 365 divisions, and is also facing to the East. What they’re doing is worshipping the “order” they have found in Nature, never realizing that they projected the order there with their own instruments.