Read The illuminatus! trilogy Online
Authors: Robert Shea,Robert Anton Wilson
Tags: #Science fiction; American, #General, #Science fiction, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Visionary & Metaphysical
The illuminatus! trilogy (6 page)
(“Now I’m getting it,” Mary Lou cried. “It’s not what I expected. It’s different from sex, and better.” Simon smiled benignly. “It
is
sex, baby,” he said. “What you’ve had before wasn’t sex. Now we can start moving … but slowly … the Gentle Way … the Way of Tao….”
They’re all coming back; they never died
—the lunatic raved at the startled attendant—
You wait, guvnor. You just wait. You’ll see it)
The amplifiers squealed suddenly. There was too much feedback, and the sound went off into a pitch beyond endurance. George winced, and saw others hold their ears rock, rock, rock, around the clock.
The key missed the lock, turned and cut Muldoon’s hand
. “Nerves,” he said to Saul. “I always feel like a burglar when I do this.”
Saul grunted. “Forget burglary,” he said. “We might be hanged for treason before this is over. If we don’t become national heroes.”
“A fanfuckingtastic case,” Muldoon grinned. He tried another way.
They were in an old brownstone on Riverside Drive, trying to break into the apartment of Joseph Malik. And they were not merely looking for evidence, both tacitly admitted—they were hiding from the FBI.
The call had come from headquarters just as they were finishing the questioning of associate editor Peter Jackson. Muldoon had gone out to his car to take it, while Saul finished getting a full physical description of both Malik and George Dorn. Jackson had just left and Saul was picking up the fifth memo, when Muldoon returned, looking as if his doctor had just told him his Wasserman was positive
.
“Two special agents from the FBI are coming over to help us,” he said woodenly
.
“Still ready to play a hunch?” Saul asked calmly, pushing all the memos back in the metal box
.
Muldoon merely called Pricefixer back into the cafeteria
and told him, “Two feds will be here in a few minutes. Tell them we went back to headquarters. Answer any question they ask, but don’t tell them about this box.”
Pricefixer looked at the two older officers carefully and then said to Muldoon, “You’re the boss.”
He’s either awfully dumb and trusting, Saul had thought, or he’s so damned smart he’s going to be dangerous someday
.
“Now,” he asked Muldoon nervously, “is that the last key?”
“No, I’ve got five more beauties here and one of them will—here it is!” The door opened smoothly.
Saul’s hand drifted toward his revolver as he stepped into the apartment and felt for a light switch. Nobody was revealed when the light came on, and Saul relaxed. “You look around for the dogs.” he said. “I want to sit down and go over the rest of these memos.”
The room was used for work as well as living and was untidy enough to leave no room for doubt that Malik had been a bachelor. Saul pushed the typewriter back on the writing desk, set down the memo box and then noticed something odd. The whole wall, on this side of the room, was covered with pictures of George Washington. Standing to examine them more closely, he saw that each had a label—half of them saying “G.W.” and the others, “A.W.”
Odd—but the whole case had overtones that smelled as fishy as those dead Egyptian mouth-breeders.
Saul sat down and took a memo from the box.
Muldoon came back into the living room and said, “No dogs. Not a goddam dog anywhere in the whole apartment.”
“That’s interesting,” Saul remarked thoughtfully. “You say the landlord had complaints from several other tenants about the dogs?”
“He said everybody in the building wag complaining. The rule is no pets and he enforced it. People wanted to know why they had to get rid of their kittens when Malik could have a whole pack of dogs up here. They said there must have been ten or twelve from the noise they made.”
“He sure must love those animals, if he took them all with him when he went into hiding,” Saul mused. The pole vaulter in his unconscious was jumping again. “Let’s look in the kitchen,” he suggested mildly.
Barney followed as Saul methodically ransacked the refrigerator and cupboards, finishing up with a careful examination of the garbage.
“No dog food,” Saul said finally.
“I noticed.”
“And no dog dishes either. And no empty dog-food tins in the garbage.”
“What wild notion are you following now?”
“I don’t know,” Saul said thoughtfully. “He doesn’t mind the neighbors hearing the dogs—probably he’s the kind of left-wing individualist who likes nothing better than quarreling with his landlord and the other tenants about some issue like the no-pets rule. So he wasn’t hiding anything until he ducked out. And then he not only took the dogs but hid all evidence that they’d ever been here. Even though he must have known that the neighbors would all talk about them.”
“Maybe he was feeding them human flesh,” Muldoon suggested ghoulishly.
“Lord, I don’t know. You look around for anything of interest. I’m going to read those Illuminati memos.” Saul returned to the living room and began:
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #5
7/26
J.M.:
Sometimes you find things in the damndest places. The following is from a girl’s magazine (“The Conspiracy” by Sandra Glass,
Teenset
, March 1969, pages 34-40).
Simon proceeded to tell me about the Bavarian Illuminati. The nightmarish story begins in 1090 a.d. in the Middle East when Hassan i Sabbah founded the Ismaelian Sect, or
Hashishim
, so called because of their use of hashish, a deadly drug derived from the hemp plant which is better known as the killer weed marijuana…. The cult terrorized the Moslem world until Genghis Khan’s Mongols brought law and order to the area. Cornered in their mountain hideaway, the Hashishim dope fiends proved no match for the clean-living Mongol warriors, their fortress was destroyed, and their dancing girls shipped
to Mongolia for rehabilitation. The heads of the cult fled westward….
“The Illuminati surfaced next in Bavaria in 1776,” Simon told me…. “Adam Weishaupt, a student of the occult, studied the teachings of Hassan i Sabbah and grew hemp in his backyard. On February 2, 1776, Weishaupt achieved illumination. Weishaupt officially founded the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria on May 1st, 1776. Their slogan was
‘Ewige Blumenkraft.’
… They attracted many illustrious members such as Goethe and Beethoven. Beethoven tacked up an
Ewige Blumenkraft
poster on the top of the piano on which he composed all nine of his symphonies.”
The last paragraph of the article is, however, the most interesting of all:
Recently I saw a documentary film on the Democratic Convention of 1968, and I was struck by the scene in which Senator Abraham Ribicoff made a critical remark provoking the anger of the Mayor of Chicago. In the ensuing tumult it was impossible to hear the Mayor’s shouted retort, and there has been much speculation about what he actually said. To me it seemed his lips were forming the words that by this time become frighteningly familiar:
“Ewige Blumenkraft!”
The further I dig, the wilder the whole picture looks. When are we going to tell George about it?
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #6
7/26
J.M.:
The John Birch Society has looked into the subject and they have a theory of their own. The first source I’ve found on this is a pamphlet “CFR: Conspiracy to Rule the World” by Gary Allen, associate editor of the Birchers’ magazine,
American Opinion
.
Allen’s thesis is that Cecil Rhodes created a secret society
to establish English domination of the world in 1888. This society acts through Oxford University, the Rhodes Scholarships and—hold your breath—the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit foundation for the study of International Affairs headquartered right here on Sixty-eighth Street in New York. Seven out of nine of our last Secretaries of State were recruited from the CFR, Allen points out, and dozens of other leading politicians as well—including Richard Nixon. It is also implied, but not directly stated, that William Buckley, Jr. (an old enemy of the Birchers) is another tool of the CFR; and the Morgan and Rothschild banking interests are supposed to be financing the whole thing.
How does this tie in with the Illuminati? Mr. Allen merely drops hints, linking Rhodes to John Ruskin, and Ruskin to earlier internationalists, and finally stating that “the originator on the profane level of this type of secret society” was Adam Weishaupt, whom he calls “the monster who founded the Order of the Illuminati on May 1, 1776.”
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #7
7/27
J.M.:
This is from a small left-wing newspaper in Chicago
(The Roger SPARK
Chicago, July 1969, Vol. 2, No. 9: “Daley Linked With Illuminati,” no author’s name given):
No historian knows what happened to Adam Weishaupt after he was exiled from Bavaria in 1785, and entries in “Washington’s” diary after that date frequently refer to the hemp crop at Mount Vernon.
The possibility that Adam Weishaupt killed George Washington and took his place, serving as our first President for two terms, is now confirmed…. The two main colors of the American flag are, excluding a small patch of blue in one corner, red and white: these are also the official colors of the Hashishim. The flag and the Illuminati pyramid both have thirteen horizontal divisions: thirteen is, of course, the traditional code for marijuana … and is still used in that sense by Hell’s Angels among others.
Now, “Washington” formed the Federalist party.
The other major party in those days, The Democratic Republicans, was formed by Thomas Jefferson [and] there are grounds for accepting the testimony of the Reverend Jedediah Morse of Charleston, who accused Jefferson of being an Illuminati agent. Thus, even at the dawn of our government, both parties were Illuminati fronts….
This story later repeats the
Teenset
report that Mayor Daley used the phrase
“Ewige Blumenkraft”
during his incoherent diatribe against Abe Ribicoff.
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #8
7/27
J.M.:
More on the Washington-Weishaupt theory:
In spite of the fact that his face appears on billions of stamps and dollar bills, and his portrait hangs in every public building in the country, no one is quite sure what Washington looks like. A “Project 20” script, “Meet George Washington” will be seen tonight at 7:30 on Channel (fill in by local stations). The program offers contemporary portraits of the first President, some of which do not even seem to be the same man.
This is a press release sent out by NBC on April 24, 1969. Some of the portraits can be found in
Encyclopedia Britannica
and the resemblance to portraits of Weishaupt is undeniable.
Incidentally, Barbara called my attention to this: the letter in
Playboy
asking about the Illuminati was signed “R.S., Kansas City, Missouri.” According to the Kansas City newspapers, a Robert Stanton of that city was found dead on March 17, 1969 (about a week after the April
Playboy
appeared on the newsstands) with his throat torn as if by the talons of some enormous beast. No animal was reported missing from any of the local zoos.
Pat
Saul looked up at the pictures of Washington on the wall. For the first time, he noticed the strange half-smile
on the most famous of them all, the one by Gilbert Stuart that appears on one-dollar bills.
“As if by the talons of some enormous beast,” he quoted to himself, thinking again of Malik’s disappearing dogs
.
“What the hell are you grinning about?” he asked sourly.
Congressman Koch, he remembered suddenly, in a speech years and years ago when marijuana was illegal everywhere, said something about Washington’s hemp crop. What was it? Yes: it was about the entries in the General’s diary—they showed that he separated the female hemp plants from the males before fertilization. That was botanically unnecessary if he was growing the crop for rope, but it was standard practise in cultivating hemp for marijuana, Koch pointed out.
And “illumination” was one of the words hippies were always using to describe the experience one obtains from the highest grade of grass. Even the more common term, “turning on,” had the same meaning as “illumination,” when you stopped to think about. Wasn’t that what the crown of light around Jesus’ head in Catholic art was supposed to mean? And Goethe—if he was really part of this—might have been referring to the experience in his last words, as he lay dying: “More light!”
I should have become a rabbi, like my father wanted, Saul thought bemusedly. Police work is getting to be too much for me.
In a few minutes I’ll be suspecting Thomas Edison.
ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT
Slowly, Mary Lou Servix swam back to consciousness, like a shipwreck victim reaching a raft
.
“Good Lord,” she breathed softly
.
Simon kissed her neck. “Now you know,” he whispered
.
“Good
Lord,”
she repeated. “How many times did I come?”
Simon smiled. “I’m not an anal-compulsive type—I wasn’t counting. Ten or twelve, something like that, I guess.”
“Good
Lord
. And the hallucinations. Was that what you were doing to my nervous system, or was it the grass?”
“Just tell me about what you saw.”
“Well, you got a halo around you, sort of. A big blue halo. And then I saw that it was around me, too, and that
it had all sorts of little blue dots dancing in sort of whorls inside it. And then there wasn’t even that anymore. Just light. Pure white light.”
“Suppose I told you I have a friend who’s a dolphin and he exists in that kind of limitless light all the time.”
“Oh, don’t start jiving me. You’ve been so nice, until now.”
“I’m not jiving you. His name is Howard. I might arrange for you to meet him.”
“A fish?”
“No, baby. A dolphin is a mammal. Just like you and me.”
“You are either the world’s greatest brain or the world’s craziest motherfucker, Mr. Simon Moon. I mean it. But that light … My God, I will never forget that light.”