Category Archives: Excerpts

The Celtic Roots of Quantum Theory

by Robert Anton Wilson

excerpt from Email to the Universe

The reality of metaphysics is the reality of masks.  -Oscar Wilde

The day in 1982 when my wife, Arlen, and I arrived in Ireland we tried her battery-operated radio to listen avidly to whatever we might find: our way of dipping our toes in the new culture before plunging into its alien waters totally. By the kind of coincidence that I don’t regard as coincidental we found an RTE* interviewer discussing local legends about the pookah with a Kerry farmer. As a longtome pookaphile, I found the conversation spellbinding, but the best part came at the end:
——————-
*RTE = Radio Telefis hEirenn, the State-owned but feisty and independent radio-TV monopoly.
——————-
“But do you believe in the pookah yourself?” asked the RTE man.

“That I do not,” the farmer replied firmly, “and I doubt much that he believes in me either!”

I knew then that I had indeed found my spiritual homeland, wherever I may otherwise roam, and that Yeats and Joyce and O’Brien had not risen out of a vacuum. We had planned to say six months; we eventually stayed six years.

Anthony Burgess once argued that English English, American English and all the other varieties of Anglophonics have become rational and pragmatic [closure-oriented] but Irish English remains ludic and esthetic [open-oriented]. The rest of us speak dry prose; the Irish speak playful poetry.

While I see some truth in that formulation, I would prefer to describe all-other-English as belonging to what Neurolinguistic therapist Dr Richard Bandler calls the meta-model [statements we can logically judge as true or false] and Irish English as belonging to the Milton-model [statements not containable in true-false logic but capable of seducing us into sudden new perceptions.]

The Milton-model, named after Dr. Milton Erickson –“the greatest therapeutic hypnotist of the 20th Century,” in the opinion of his peers — contains no propositions subject to proof or disproof, uses language the way that Kerry farmer did, and can cause both intellectual and physiological transformations. Because of his many successes in curing the allegedly incurable, Dr Erickson often became proclaimed “the Miracle Worker.”

Oddly, most of Dr. Erickson’s patients did not think they had undergone hypnosis at all. They just remembered having a friendly chat with an unusually sympathetic doctor. ..

According to the Korzybsk-Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, the language a people speak habitually influences their sense perceptions, their “concepts” and even the way they feel about themselves and the world in general. “A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos,” as Whorf stated the case.

The clinical record of Erickson and his school indicates that language tricks can even make us ill or make us well again.

The Irish neurolinguistic system illustrates these theorems uncommonly well.

Whether you call it ludic language, Ericksonian hypnosis or the verbal equivelant of throwing LSD in the linguistic drinking water, Irish English — even in the professional hands of all of Ireland’s greatest writers –shows the same non-aristotelian “illogic” or Zen humor as that Kerry farmer

Witness:

Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul
–W.B. Yeats

Try taking all literary, scientiific, theological and philosophic connotations out of “death” and “life” — see them merely as two predicaments of grammar — and then — ?

“Men are born liars.”
— Liam O’Flaherty, in the first sentence of his autobiography.

Logcians call this an Empedoclean paradox. To an Irish stylist, it does not appear Empedoclean nor paradoxical but merely another pregnant bull. Since O’Flaherty belonged to the class of all men, he lied; but if he lied, his statement does not carry conviction, so maybe he told the truth….

“Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad or only pretending to be mad?”
— Oscar Wilde.

Thy spirit keen through radiant mein
Thy shining throat and smiling eye
Thy little palm, thy side like foam —
I cannot die!

O woman, shapely as the swan,
In a cunning house hard-reared was I:
O bosom white, O well-shaped palm,
I shall not die!
–Padraic Colum

[A Romantic poem, in style; anti-Romantic in content — whether you think of the female as a human lady or a symbol of Ireland a la Cathleen ni Houlihan, Dark Rosaline or shan van vocht, Colum still will not die for Her.]

“Durtaigh disloighal reibel aigris dogs.”
–Myles na gCopaleen

[It only makes sense if you pronounce it as Gaelic, and then it becomes ordinary English, expressing an ordinary English attitude toward their Hibernian neighbors.]

“They shall come to know good.”
— James Joyce. [Read it silently, then read it aloud.]

“There is in mankind a certain
*************************************************** Hic multa
******************************************************************
disiderantur***************************************************************

And this I take to be a clear solution of the matter.”
— Jonathan Swift [all expurgations in Swift’s original text.]

“I considered it desirable that he should know nothing about me but it was even better if he knew several things that were quite wrong.”
— Flann O’Brien

Or, to take a few examples that lend themselves better to condensation than quotation:

Consider Swift’s “pamphlet war” with the astrologer Partridge, in which Swift claimed Partridge had died and Partidge vehemently insisted on his continued viability. Swift won hands down by pointing out that just because a man claims he’s alive does not compell us to accept his uncorraborated testimony.

Or: Bishop Berkeley, proving with meticulous logic that the universe doesn’t exist, although God admittedly has a persistent delusion that it does.

Or — the scandalous matter of Molly Bloom’s adulterous affairs in Ulysses, which number between one [Hugh Boylan] and more than thirty [including a few priests and Lords Mayor and one Italian organ grinder], depending on which of Joyce’s 100+ narrators one chooses to believe. This grows more perplexing when one realizes that some of the “narrators” seem more like styles than persons: styles masquerading as persons.

Or maybe the ghosts of departed stylists, in the sense that Berkeley called Newton’s infinitesmals the ghosts of departed quantities?

Colonized and post-Colonized peoples learn much about text and sub-text; and Yeats did not develop his mystique of Mask and Anti-Mask out of Hermetic metaphysics alone. In my six years sampling Dublin pubs [1982-88] I overheard many conversations in the form:

–I saw your man last night.
–Oh? And?
–All going well there.

Who the devil is “your man”? Does this concern hashish from Amsterdam for the Punk Rock crowd, gelignite on its way to Derry, or just ingrained habits –Masks and Anti-masks– shaped by 800 years of Occupation? After all, the speakers might simply refer to tickets for a soccer game….[You will find a similarly oblique dialogue in the second section of the “Wandering Rocks” montage in Ulysses, except that “your man” has become “that certain party.” Palestinians have probably become that “Irish” by now.]

I do not claim that Sassanach conquest alone produced Ireland’s elusive wit and ludic poesy; but it sharpened tendencies already there as far back as Finn Mac Cumhal. Yeats says somewhere that Ireland was part of Asia until the Battle of the Boyne; but that dating merely represents W.B.’s reactionary Romanticism. Joyce knew thatIreland remained part of Asia; Finnegans Wake explicitly tells us it emerged from “the Haunted Inkbottle, no number, Brimstone Walk, Asia in Ireland.”

You can test one level of truth in this by simply asking directions in both Tokyo and Dublin. In either place you will encounter old-fashioned politeness and friendliness unknown in most of the industrial world, and you will get sent in the wrong direction. Hostile humor? I think not. Asiatic languages, including Irish English, simply do not accommodate themselves to Newtonian grids, either spatial or temporal.

Arlen and I used to play a game in Dublin: whenever we saw two clocks we would compare them. They never agreed.

In Cork, the four clocks on the City Hall tower always show four different times; locals call them “the Four Liars.”

The sociologist may class this as “post-Colonial syndrome”– based on the baleful suspicion that the English invented time to make a man work more than the Good Lord ever intended — but Joyce noted that the only three world-class philosophers of Celtic geneology, Erigena, Berkeley and Bergson, all denied the reality of time [and only Berkeley lived under English rule.]

A Dublin legend tells of an Englishman who, noting that the two clocks in Padraic Pearse station do not agree, commented loudly that this discordance”is so damned typically bloody Irish.” A Dubliner corrected him: “Sure now, if they agreed one of them would be superfluous.”

Even more in the Daoist tradition: Two Cork men meet on the street. “Filthy weather for this time of year,” ventures the first.

“Ah, sure,” replies the second, “it isn’t this time of year at all, man.”

Compare the Chinese proverb, “Summer never becomes winter, infants never grow old.” Einstein’s relativity and Dali’s melting clocks belong to the same universe as these Hibernio-Chinese Eccentrcities.

In County Clare and the West generally one often hears the grammatical form, “My uncle was busy feeding the pigs one night and I a girl of six years….” [One also hears this in Synge’s plays — all of them.] Elsewhere in the English speaking world one would hear, “My uncle was busy feeding the pigs one night when I was a girl of six years…” The Irish English retains the grammar of Irish Gaelic, but it thereby retains the timeless or Daoist sense of a world where every now exists but no now ever “becomes” another now.

Nor does this neurolinguistic grid, or reality-tunnel, only manifest in Irish speech and literature. William Rowan Hamilton, one of Eire’s greatest mathematicians, probably the greatest of all, made many contributions, but two have special interest for us here.

One — Hamilton invented non-commutative math, which I shall try to explain. In arithmetic, 2 x 3 = 3 x 2, or they both equal 6 [if you haven’t raised too many pints that night.] Ordinary algebra, the only kind most of us ever learned in school, follows the same rule: a x b = b x a. Everybody knows that, right? Well, in Hamilton’s algebra, a x b does NOT = b x a.

More “Asiatic” influence? More of the Celtic Twilight? Well, in Pure Mathematics, you can invent any system you want as long as it remains internally consistent; finding out if it has any resemblence to the experiential world remains the job of the physicist, or the engineer. It required about 100 years to find a “fit” for Hamiltonian algebra, and then it revolutionized physics. Hamilton’s math describes the sub-atomic [quantum] world, and ordinary math does not.

The reader may classify Hamilton’s feat as a variety of precognition or maybe just as more of the Hibernian compulsion to challenge everything the Saxon regards as unquestionable.

Two — Physicists of Hamilton’s day endlessly debated whether light travels as “waves” like water or as discrete “particles” like bullets. He supported both totally contradictory models, although in different contexts. Among Fundamentalist Materialists, they call this the Heresy of “perspectivism,” but again, after 100 years, it became part of quantum mechanics, although usually credited to Neils Bohr, who only rediscovered it.

Perspectivism also haunts postmodern literary theory, cultural anthropology — and, especially, the Joyce Industry, as more and more Joyce scholars realize that all of the 100+ narrative “voices” in Ulysses seem equally true in some sense, equally untrue in some sense and equally beyond either/or logic in any sense.

Quantum Mechanics owes a second huge debt, and a perpetual head-ache, to another Irish physicist, John Stewart Bell.

Bell’s Theorem, a mathematical demonstration by Dr. Bell published in 1965, has become more popular than Tarot cards with New Agers, who think they understand it but generally don’t. Meanwhile it remains controversial with physicists, some of whom think they understand it but many of whom frankly admit they find it as perplexing as Mick Jagger with his guitar hopping around like a chicken on LSD in the middle of a Beethoven string quartet.

In a [hazardous] attempt to translate Bell’s math into the verbal forms in which we discuss what physics “means,” Bell seems to have proved that any two “particles”oncein contact will continue to act as if connected no matter how far apart they move in “space” or “time” [or in space-time.] You can see why New Agers like this: it sounds like it supports the old magick idea that if you get ahold of a hair from your enemy, anything you do to the hair will effect him.

Most physcists think a long series of experiments, especially those of Dr Alain Aspect and others in the 1970s and Aspect in 1982 have settled the matter. Quantum “particles” [or “waves’] once in contact certainly seem “connected,” or correlated, or at least dancing in the same ballet….But not all physicists have agreed. Some, theAntiBellists, still publish criticisms of alleged defects in the experiments. These arguments seem too technical to be summarized here, and only a small minority still cling to them, but this dissent needs to be mentioned since most New Agers don’t know about it, and regard Bell’s math with the same reverence Catholics have for Papal dogma.

The most daring criticism of Bell comes from Dr N. David Berman of Columbia, who believes he has refined the possible interpretations of Bell down to two:

(1) non-locality [“total rapport”] and
(2) solipsism.

We will explain non-locality below, but Dr Berman finds it so absurd that he prefers solipsism. [“Is The Moon There When Nobody Looks?” Physics Today, April 1985. He says the moon, and everything else, does’t exist until perceived; Bishop Berkeley has won himself one more convert.]

Among those who accept Bell’s Theorem, Dr David Bohm of the University of London offers three interpretations of what it means:

“It may mean that everything in the universe is in a kind of total rapport, so that whatever happens is related to everything else ; or it may mean that there is some kind of information that can travel faster than the speed of light; or it may mean that our concepts of space and time have to be modified in some way that we don’t understand.”[London Times, 20 Feb 1983.]

Bohm’s first model, “total rapport,” also called non-locality, brings us very close– very, very close — to Oriental monism: “All is One,” as in Vedanta, Buddhism and Daoism. It also brings us in hailing distance of Jungian synchronicity, an idea that seems “occult” or worse to most scientists, even if it won the endorsement of WolfgangPauli,a quantum heavyweight and Nobel laureate. You can see why New Agers like this; you will find it argued with unction and plausibility in Capra’s The Tao of Physics. It means atomic particles remains correlated because everything always remains correlated.

I suggest that physicists often explain this in Chinese metaphors because they don’t know as much about Ireland as they do about China, and because they haven’t readFinnegans Wake.

The strongest form of this non-local model, called super-determinism, claims that everything “is” one thing, or at least one process. From the Big Bang to the last word of this sentence and beyond, nothing can become other than it “is,” since everything remains part of a correlated whole. Nobody has openly expressed this view but several (Stapp, Herbert et al) have accused others, especially Capra, of unknowingly endorsing it.

Bohm’s second alternative, information faster-than-light, brings us into realms previously explored only in science-fiction. Bell’s particles may be correlated because they act as parts of an FTL (faster than light) cosmic Internet. If I can send an FTL message to my grandpa, it might change my whole universe to the extent that I wouldn’t exist at all. [E.g., he might suffer such shock that he would drop dead on the spot and not survive to reproduce.] We must either reject this as impossible, or else it leads to the “parallel universe” model. I’m here in this universe, but in the universe next door the message removed me, so I never sent it there.

Remind you, a bit, of that Kerry farmer?

Even more radical offshoots of this notion have come forth from Dr John Archibald Wheeler. Dr Wheeler has proposed that every atomic or sub-atomic experiment we perform changes every particle in the universe everywhichway in time, back to the Big Bang. The universe becomes constant creation, as in Sufism, but atomic physicists, not Allah, serve as its creators. Yeats again wakes? [He would, of course, place Bards as the creators, not mere measurers and calculators, but still the human mind has “made up the whole.”]

Dr Bohm’s third alternative, modification of our ideas of space and time, could lead us anywhere…including back to the Berkeleyan/Kantian notion that space and time do not exist, except as human projections, like persistent optical illusions.(Some think Relativity already demonstrates that…and some will recall Mr. Yeats again, and that Kerry farmer….) All particles remain correlated because they never move in space or time, because space and time only exist “in our heads.”

Meanwhile, a Dr. Harrison suggests that we may have to abandon Aristotelian logic, i.e. give up classifying things into only the two categories of “true and real” and “untrue and unreal.” In between, in Aristotle’s excluded middle, we may have the “maybe” proposed by von Neumann in 1933, the probabilistic logics (percentages/gambles) suggested by Korzybski, the four-valued logic of Rapoport (true, false, indeterminate and meaningless) or some system the non-Hibernian world hasn’t found yet. The Kerry farmer would handle all of this better than the typical graduate of any university outside Ireland.

And so we see that two Irishman, Hamilton and Bell, have the majority of physicists arguing about issues that make them sound like a symposium among Berkeley, Swift, Yeats, O’Brien and Joyce. Through their literature, speakers raised in Irish English have transformed the printed page; now their mathematicians, raised in the sameneurolinguistic grid, have revolutionized our basic notions of “reality,” which in the light of what we have seen, badly needs the dubious quotes I just hung on it.

Afterthought 2004: Two of the giants of quantum math, Schrödinger and Dirac, both spent time at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. Schrödinger, in fact, wrote his most important nonmathemetical book there — What Is Life? [1948], in which he defined life as a function of negative entropy. This thought seemed so radical and far-out that nobody began to grasp it until Wiener and Shannon showed that information also behaves like negative entropy. Information = that part of a message you didn’t expect; the unpredictable part.

Or as Wiener once said, great poetry contains high information and political speeches contain virtually none.

And therefore Life = negative entropy = high information = surprise and initial confusion = tuning-in the previously not-tuned-in…..

Got it?

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

by Robert Anton Wilson

excerpt from Email to the Universe

‘Say the magic word and the duck will come down and pay you $100.’    — Marx

In the small and otherwise little-known town of Rennes-le-Chateau in Southern France, near the Spanish border, stands a decidedly odd cathedral which has become a center of controversy, conspiracy theories and occult speculation for over a century. Although it belongs to the Roman Catholic church, and looks superficially orthodox from a distance, you don’t even have to go inside to begin suspecting you have found the weirdest goddam church in the entire Christian world, because over the entrance stand the ominous words

THIS PLACE IS CURSED

If nameless awe and Lovecraftian fears of cosmic horror do not drive you back, you will proceed, and discover that this temple is dedicated to Mary Magdalene, the most poorly recorded yet ill-reputed of the disciples of Jesus.  In the Bible itself, she appears as a name and only a name. According to long-held legend, she was a common whore; and even after she reformed, she remains a bit of an embarrassment to the more puritanical Christians, i.e, most of them.

An “accursed” church named after the Monica Lewinsky of the New Testament does present a puzzle, but the real mindfucks appear inside, on the Stations of the Cross. One station seems to show shadowy figures smuggling Jesus’s body out of the grave in the middle of the night [as if to fake the Resurrection?] and another, even more unorthodox when you think it over, shows a Scotchman in kilts amid the crowd at the Crucifixion…..as  if to validate the  secret tradition of Scotch Rite freemasonry….?

Lest you think all this the work of the Monty Python crew, the Church of Mary Magdelene was built in the 1890s by the local parish priest, Father Beranger Sauniere, but where he got the money for the construction seems even more problematic than the eldritch edifice itself. Rennes-le-Chateau, a small town, could barely afford a priest, and Father Sauniere in his early days often survived on free meals from his congregation, yet he suddenly became rich. In addition to the church, he built a Tower, also dedicated to Mary Magdelene, and a bridge, and other public works, but nobody knows where he got the money.

Some legends soon grew in the village, claiming that Father Sauniere had found the lost treasure of the Knights Templar [who had a castle in the area] or that he had re-discovered the secret of alchemy. In L’Or de Rennes-le-Chateau [The Treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau], an odd bloke named Gerard de Sede claimed that Sauniere had discovered some old parchments containing a “priceless” historical and occult revelation.  He even reproduces the alleged parchments, which consist only of two pages from the New Testament, in Latin.

Three other researchers named Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh later discovered that some of the letters in these parchments do not follow the alignment of the rest of the text, but hang above it, like exponents in mathematics. These letters formed words, not in Latin but in French — but the words create a new mystery of their own. Slightly condensed, they say:

THIS TREASURE BELONGS TO DAGOBERT II KING

AND HE IS THERE DEAD SHEPHERDESS NO TEMPTATION

THAT POUSSIN TENIERS HOLD THE KEY PEACE 681 BY

THE CROSS AND THE HORSE OF GOD I COMPLETE THIS

DEMON GUARDIAN AT NOON BLUE APPLES

We shall return to this dazzling revelation, or surrealist hoax, but first we will examine Father Sauniere a bit more deeply. This simple country priest often visited Paris and evidently mingled with the occult lodges there, including some of those associated with Aleister Crowley (a hint?). Before he died, Sauniere made a final confession, as a good Catholic should; but the priest who heard the confession found it so terrible that he denied the last rites and refused to grant absolution. According to Catholic dogma, Sauniere immediately went to Hell — for an accursed church, a Scotchman at the Crucifixion, noon blue apples, and some aeon-old horror that allegedly makes sense of all this….

Wait. It gets even weirder.

Gerard de Sede, whom I have already dared to call an odd bloke, produced another book, La Race Fabuleuse [The Fabulous Race], which deals with Stenay, a town far from Rennes-le-Chatteau, which happens to have the head of Satan on its Coat of Arms. Although de Sede prominently mentions [but never does explain] this blasphemy, he does have a lot of interesting things to say. Frogs often fall out of the sky onto Stenay, an annoyance to orthodox science, which cannot explain them.

Charles Fort and the Fortean Society have catalogs of inexplicable frogfalls. And fishfalls. And some falls of strange metal objects. I hope that helps you, here in the murk.

The Merovingian kings, a dark age dynasty [c 400-700 c.e], had a falling frog on their Coat of Arms. [Less sinister than Satan, but more perplexing?] The church in Stenay is built so that on midsummer day you can stand at the altar, look through the arched doors and see Sirius rising behind the sun. And Dagobert II, a Merovingian king, was murdered by persons unknown in the Ardennes Forest on 23 December, 679 c.e.

            THIS TREASURE BELONGS TO DAGOBERT II KING

            AND HE IS THERE DEAD…

Hey, maybe some of this makes sense?

De Sede finally offers us a revelation, or part of one, thanks to one Marquis de B. [All the best conspiracy books have sources who cannot be identified. Even Woodward and Bernstein had “Deep Throat.”] The Marquis, himself descended from Dagobert, tells de Sede that the spooky Merovingians resulted from matings between certain ancient Israelites of the Tribe of Benjamin and extraterrestrials from Sirius. They have lived in hiding and obscurity for many centuries, because a certain powerful conspiracy has tried to murder them all, just like they murdered poor old Dagobert. Although neither de Sede nor de B. name this conspiracy, the evidence seems arranged so as to point a strong finger of suspicion at the Vatican.

Although the Marquis promised further revelations, he never got to provide them. Like Dagobert II, he was murdered on 23 December [in 1972] in the Ardennes Forrest. Or so de Sede claims.

Another part of the puzzle emerges from a Swiss source — journalist Mattiew Paoli, who, in a book titled Les Dessous [Undercurrents] exposed what he considered a conspiracy to restore monarchy in France, under the guise of two groups called respectively [a] the Committee to Protect the Rights and Privileges of Low-Cost Housing and [b] the Priory of Sion. His evidence actually   seems to indicate that both groups act as fronts for something even older and more esoteric.

Both of these secretive organizations had links with the Grand Loge Alpina in Switzerland and the Committee for Public Safety, an office of the de Gaulle government in Paris.

The Grand Loge Alpina ranks as the richest freemasonic lodge in the world, since most of its members belong to the elite Swiss banking families that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once claimed had more power than all the governments of Europe combined. He even called them “the Gnomes of Zurich.” Timothy Leary also used to say that the Cold War came to an end when the Americans and Russians discovered that the Swiss own the whole world already.

The Committee for Public Safety seemed to consist of only Andre Malraux, Nobel Laureate in literature, and Piere Plantard de Saint Clair, a fabulously rich occultist. Both men had served heroically in the Resistance, during the Nazi occupation, and had long personal friendships with de Gaulle. Yet Paoli’s evidence seemed to implicate them in a plot to replace de Gaulle’s democratic [if right-wing] government with a restored monarchy.

It does not compute, as Robby the Robot would say.

But dig this: Paoli reproduces the front page of one issue of Circuit, the official journal of the Committee to Protect the Rights and Privileges of Low-Cost Housing and/or the Priory of Sion: it shows a map of France with a Star of David superimposed on it and a conventional “flying saucer” hovering above.

What was it de Sede claimed about ancient Israelites who mated with extraterrestrials from Sirius? Hmmm..?

After publication of Les Dessous, Paoli went to Israel, where the government arrested him for spying, convicted him, and shot him dead by firing squad, he then quickly dying of natural causes as a result. Unless we want to let this stuff really weird us out, we better regard that as a mere coincidence. Even considering it a synchronicity might get us into deep and murky waters, especially if we’re a little bit stoned.

La Race Fabuleuse and Les Dessous both appeared in 1973. On 23 July that year, I had the first of a series of experiences which seemed like communications from Sirius, although, grown older and wiser, or at least more cautious, I now tend to attribute them to Too Much Acid. [See my Cosmic Trigger trilogy,] Early the next year, sci-fi supergenius Philip K. Dick had a set of similar experiences, which he at times attributed to communications from Sirius — although he also thought they might actually emanate from his dead friend, Bishop James Pike, or from a Gnostic disciple of Jesus named Thomas.

In 1976 appeared The Sirius Mystery by Robert K.G. Temple,  a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, who evidently had felt the Sirius Vibe in his  own academic way. His book argues that ancient intercourse between Earth and Sirius had occurred about 4500 years ago in the mid-East, but unlike de Sede he does not suggest sexual intercourse, merely the intellectual variety, and he locates the contact point in Sumeria, not Israel…. but still…

Things heated up in 1982 with the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail by the aforementioned Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh.  It had no references to Sirius, but among other things, it tried to prove that de Sede belonged to the Priory of Sion [the real brains behind the Committee to Protect the Rights and Privileges of Low-Cost Housing]; that the Priory had existed since the 14th Century and carried on the secret inner traditions of the Knights Templar, the warrior-monks systematically exterminated by the Inquisition 1300-1307 on charges of heresy; that Pierre Plantard de Saint Clair acts as the current Grand Master of the Priory; and that the Priory serves to protect the Merovingians and their descendents from a murderous vendetta by the Vatican [a thesis only hinted at by de Sede.]

Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh even obtained an interview with Priory Grand Master Plantard de Saint Clair, who evaded most of their questions, but did admit that Father Sauniere found a “treasure,” adding hermetically that the treasure was not material but “spiritual,” that it belonged to Israel, and that it would be forwarded thereto “at the proper time.” Well, that sure helps a lot, doesn’t it?

The real bombshell falls at the end, when the authors offer their own solution to these enigmas. Jesus, they claim, married Mary Magdelene and they had a son. After the Crucifixion, the widow and the widow’s son fled to France, and he became the progenitor of the Merovingians. They even produce a photo of the sepulture of the widow’s son, which is quite near Rennes-le-Chateau, and point out its strong resemblance to a similar tomb in the painting, Shepherds of Arcadia, by Nicholas Poussin.

SHEPHERDESS NO TEMPTATION

            THAT POUSSIN TENIERS HOLD THE KEY PEACE 681

This painting shows three shepherds looking in awe at the tomb, and the tomb bears the inscription, Et in Arcadia ego….[“And in Arcadia, I….”] Baigent et al point out that if you permutate the letters of this fragment, you can obtain I TEGO ARCANA DEI {“I conceal the secrets of God.”] I surmise with further ingenuity you could obtain “Noon Blue Apples” again, perhaps in Lithuanian.

DeSede had already mentioned this cryptic painting, in La Race Fabuleuse, hinting that it was linked to the Merovingians and Father Sauniere. He also claimed that it once belonged to Louis XVI, who kept it in an isolated room where visitors to the palace could not see it.

But to return to the late Redeemer and his alleged paramour. Ms. Magdalene, if one accepts them as the ancestors of the Merovingians, as Baigent et al would have it, and if one accepts the divinity of Jesus, as most Christians do, then the medieval doctrine of “the divine right of kings” suddenly makes sense. The Merovingians seem to have intermarried with every other royal family in Europe — royals only marry royals, you know — so almost every king and queen of Europe from the middle ages onward has carried some of the holy “blood” of Jesus by way of the holy grail of Mary’s uterus. If you translate “blood” as genes, this makes sense, sort of.

Maybe we should give up all the democratic heresy of the last 200 years and accept the genepool of Jesus and Mary Christ as our God-given rulers?

Well, not if you think de Sede has a more plausible argument for the extraterrestrial/Hebraic origin of the Merovingians.

Or you can skeptically regard all this as a complicated joke perpetrated by an odd consortium of aristocrats with too much time on their hands.

But then why did the Swiss bankers get involved? They definitely do not have too much time on their hands. And where the hell did Sauniere get his sudden wealth and why did he use part of it to build a church for an allegedly reformed alleged hooker?

Baigent and his associates also produce a heap of genealogical charts showing who, in the modern world, belongs to the “divine” Merovingian genetic pool, together with an alleged list of Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion. Some interesting names appear:

Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. He’s related to the Merovingians and, although this does not appear in the Baigent genealogy, he founded the Bilderbergers, a mysterious group of rich white males who appear in dozens of conspiracy theories by both Leftwing and Rightwing opponents of the current power structure. Although never convicted of any real crime in any real court, the Bilderbergers do indeed look conspiratorial to a lot of writers not rich enough, white enough or male enough to gain admittance; and they act with extreme secrecy. According to Lawrence Wilmot, writers for both the London Economist and the French TV news admitted to him that they have orders not to mention the Bilderbergers, and other journalists responded with “ironic laughter” when asked why they never touched   on this subject.

[A few known American members of the Bilderbergers: George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, David Rockefeller.]

Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, heir of the longtime rulers   of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, descendent of the Merovingians and another Bilderberger. According to Baigent & Co., the von Hapsburg family financed Father Sauniere and the building of the Church of Mary Magdelene in the last century. According to Maynard Solomon’s very scholarly and non-conspiracy-oriented biography, Beethoven, the Emperor Joseph von Hapsburg, in the 18th Century, appeared as a hero, an “Enlightened Monarch” to the Bavarian Illuminati, who commissioned Ludwig to immortalize him in the Emperor Joseph Cantata, where he is hailed as “foe of darkness and bringer of light.” Dr. Otto himself still carries the mysterious title. King of Jerusalem, which always belongs to the eldest male von Hapsburg of every generation. [Because they are descended from King Jesus? Or from those Jewish Extraterrestrials?]

Jean Cocteau, 23rd Grand Master of the Priory of Sion and a major figure in modernist art, having done notable work in painting, film, drama, poetry, ballet etc. A Gay opium addict, related to much of the French aristocracy, Cocteau had friendships with Ezra Pound, Dali, Picasso, Orson Welles, and almost everybody important in High culture, and helped create the surrealist movement. That may explain the Noon Blue Apples — if Sauniere didn’t really find those parchments and Somebody forged them later…..

And other revelations and/or hoaxes have surfaced….

In The Messianic Legacy [1987] Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh spend half the book proving links between the Priory of Sion and modern banking, implicating banks in England, Canada and the U.S. as well as the Usual Suspects in Switzerland. The other half of the book concerns the equality of men and women in early Christianity, placing the Papist all-male priesthood as the first “heresy.”

Pierre Plantard de Saint Clair also appears again, for a brief interview, in which he announces that he has resigned as Grand Master of the Priory, refuses to name his successor, and drops dark hints that the whole megillar has secretly come under the control of the Knights of Malta, a rightwing Catholic organization often accused elsewhere of plotting a revival of Fascism.

An undated pamphlet, Scandals of the Priory of Sion, signed “Cornelius,” has circulated among conspiracy buffs for some time. It links the Priory to the Mafia and the P2 conspiracy in Italy.

You’ve heard of the Mafia. P2, better known in Europe than over here, grew out of the CIA’s Project Gladio, created by James Jesus Angleton, Chief of Counter Intelligence — a man who appears in more conspiracy theories than anyone since Adam Weishapt. Gladio, intended to influence Italian elections, had an Italian organizer named Licio Gelli, who had previously worked for both the Gestapo and the Communist Underground during World War II, convincing each side that he was betraying the other. As soon as Angleton hired Gelli, Gelli repeated his previous achievement and got on the payroll of the KGB, too, again convincing each side that he was really loyal to them and betraying the   other guys. Gelli also belonged to the Knights of Malta, by the way.

Once he had funding from both the CIA and the KGB, Gelli formed P2, a secret society recruited entirely from 30 members of the Grand Orient Lodge of Egyptian Freemasonry. P2 then became the “secret government” of Italy, infiltrating over 900 members into the official government, laundering drug money through the Vatican Bank and Banco Ambrosiano, and assassinating everybody who seriously pissed them off. Muders charged to P2 include many left-wing labor leaders; Prime Minister Aldo Moro; Mino Pecorelli [the first journalist to expose their machinations], Roberto Calvi [president of Banco Ambrosiano, who after being indicted, seemed inclined to turn state witness]; Michele “The Shark” Sindona [president of Franklin National Bank, who also seemed inclined to turn informer after being convicted of murdering a bank examiner]; and, probably, the previous Pope. Calvi and Sindona also belonged to the Knights of Malta — and so does Dr. Otto von Hapsburg [see above.]

According to “Cornelius,” P2 was a tool, a front, for the Priory of Sion; James Jesus Angleton only thought he ran the show from CIA headquarters in Langtry. [However, according to Larry Gurwin of theInstitutional Investor, Italian investigators believe the real control came from a still-unidentified Puppet Master in Monte Carlo.] Corenlius also claims the Priory of Sion murdered Giorgio Ambrosoli, the bank examiner whose death the courts had blamed on Michele “The Shark” Sindona of P2; and that Cardinal Jean Danielou also belonged to the Priory.

Cardinal Danielou had literary friendships with Jean Cocteau, of the Priory of Sion, and Nobel laureate Andre Malroux of de Gaullle’s Committee for Safety and the esoteric Committee for the Rights and Privileges of Low Cost Housing and/or the Priory of Sion.  The Cardinal himself died, somewhat oddly, in the apartment of a strip-tease dancer, in 1974.

In 1985 David Wood produced GENISIS — not a misprint, but a Joycean pun, [Gen-ISIS — get it?] Based on the English science, or art, or group madness, called ley hunting, this book seeks a mystic secret in the geograpical arrangements of the sites important in the Priory/Magdelene mystery. You do this by connecting all the key points with straight lines, and if nothing significant emerges, you may try curved lines if they are arcs of a circle. If that doesn’t work, try a smaller map and a thicker pencil. Using the right map and pencil, plus a few circles, Wood emerges with a design he calls the Vagina of Nuit.

Although it doesn’t look like any human vagina I ever saw outside of a Picasso painting, the Vagina of Nuit does yield some interesting geometrical proportions.– numbers significant in mystic tradition. From these, Wood deduces that Mary Magdelene never existed as a person; she is the Egyptian sky-goddess Nuit in disguise. Furthermore, the Merovingians came from Atlantis, not the stars, but the whole human race was genetically engineered by a group of extraterrestrial scientists from Sirius.

I knew that Sirius would creep back into the story eventually.

Wood also asserts that members of the Priory of Sion must all amputate their penises to obtain initiation, as a sacrifice to Nuit, or Isis, or [if we must use current mythology] Mary Magdalene.

Sounds less attractive even than Heaven’s Gate, which only wanted you to cut off your balls.

But, at this point, I cannot resist inserting the fact that several quite intelligent scientists have offered evolutionary theories as far out as Wood’s. Sir Francis Crick, Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the DNA molecule, has long argued that the DNA contains too much information to have happened by means of any finite series of “lucky accidents.” Since the word “God” remains taboo in scientific circles, Crick claims the designer of DNA, and hence of all life on Earth, must be an advanced extraterrestrial race. Similar ideas have come forth from the distinguished astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, and from Dr. Timothy Leary, among others.

Inside the “Men’s Club”: Secrets of the Patriarchy, by “Hawthorne Abendsen” [no date: A-Albionic Research, Ferndale, Michigan] offers yet another perspective on all this weirdity. The Priory of Sion, Abendsen claims, controls all the other all-male secret societies you ever heard of, and thus all of our civilization. It worships Al-Shaddai [Lord of Battles], the god who appeared to Abraham, and it has created all later, gentler images of divinity [e.g., the God of Love] as deceptions to fool the masses. You might say Hannibal Lecter is their High Priest.

Worship of Al-Shaddai consists of making wars, as a God of Battles would wish, and also of periodic animal and human sacrifices of the sort Fundamentalist Christians attribute to Satanists. Satan has nothing to do with it, according to Abendsen: blood sacrifice, in or out of warfare, remains the central ritual of the Judaic-Christian-Moslem system, and anything else you’ve heard is just part of the cover-up, to conceal why our rulers do the murderous things they do.

Although this yarn sounds a lot like put-on or parody, Abendsen has a certain family resemblance to a great many serious thinkers of recent decades. Radical Feminists all consider our culture Patriarchal; Dr, Wilhelm Reich called it Authoritarian-Patriarchal; Dr James De Meo calls it Armored Patrist etc. The latest cuss word for it, logophallocentrist, contributed by the postmodernists, means that we have a social system based on belief in the special magic power of words and penises. Dr. Leonard Shlain, in The Alphabet versus the Goddess, blames it all on the invention of the alphabet, an argument that out-McLuhans McLuhan.

“Hawthorne Abendsen,” by the way, seems to have gotten borrowed or stolen from Phillip K. Dick, who used it as the name of the author of the book-within-the-book, in his sci-fi classic, The Man in the High Castle.

Yes: the same Phillip K. Dick who later decided he was receiving messages from Sirius…..

As the French themselves say, it must make one furiously to think and to jump up and down. And in Rennes-le-Chateau, the accursed church of Mary Magelene still stands, or lurks, still announcing its accursedness. A friend of mine, Fred Lehrman of Nomad University, recently visited the site and tells me he met an intrepid researcher there, who had discovered that one of the statues contained a sliding panel with a German newspaper from 1904 hidden inside. Since some of the words in the paper had underlining in pen, this investigator hopes to find a code revealing Everything.

I wish him luck; but I fear he will find something like “Stately plump Buck Mulligan has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim JFK Dallas 1963 midnight purple bananas…..”

(Submitted to rawilsonfans by Eric Wagner)

La Belle Dame sans Merci

by Robert Anton Wilson

Excerpt from Email to the Universe

The four weirdest and scariest drug stories I know all involve belladonna, a chemical for which I now have the same sincere respect as I have for hungry tigers, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, IRS and Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

The first story I’ll tell comes from a young friend, then a 1960s drop-out hippie freak but now, 2001, a Ph.D. in sociology. He tried belladonna around 1965 under the impression that it had much the same effects as LSD. When he immediately went into toxic convulsions, friends rushed him to a hospital where the ER staff pumped out his stomach — probably saving his life, but a bit too late to save him from delirium, since the belladonna had already entered his blood stream.

When he returned to what seemed normal consciousness he found himself in a hospital bed, surrounded by people in other beds with different ailments.  Then a Beautiful Blonde Nurse with Great Big Hooters entered the ward, accompanied by an olde style New Orleans jazz band.

As my friend watched entranced, the nurse proceeded to perform a classic Strip Tease dance with plenty of tantalizing tease but eventual total nudity followed by even more bumps and grinds. The music seemed louder and raunchier than any jazz he had ever heard, and came to a wild Dionysian climax when the naked nurse crawled into bed with a delighted patient and proceeded to make love to him, loudly and frequently and more ways than a dozen porn stars.

My friend never once suspected that this might be a hallucination. Nor did it seem an unusually innovative medical procedure. You don’t ask philosophic or ontological questions during a belladonna journey the way you usually do on real psychedelics. He only began to wonder if any of that sex stuff really happened the following morning.

….and that’s this whole story. Belladonna erases a great deal of your memory of what you saw during the trip. He might have had dozens of other visions that night but all he ever remembered was the nurse from Mitchell Brothers Clinic for the Horrendously Horny. I guess I would have remembered her too.

The second, more perplexing yarn comes from another 1960s veteran, but I lost touch with him and have no idea how his life worked out. He told me he took the belladonna in his dorm room at the college he attended and then waited for psychedelic fireworks and transcendental experiences.

Nothing happened for a while.

Then his friend Joe entered the room and asked what he was doing. He told Joe about the belladonna and said he was waiting to feel an effect. Joe asked him something but he didn’t quite hear it.

Then his friend Joe entered the room and asked what he was doing. He told Joe about the belladonna and said he was waiting to feel an effect. Joe asked him something but he got distracted by having two Joes in the room. He tried to explain about the two Joes but then one of them vanished. He tried to tell Joe “Hey, you came in before you came in, ” but his tongue seemed unable to function and he thought he was merely grunting like a hog.

Then his friend Joe entered the room, and this time he got The Fear.  He fled the room and the dorm and hopped on his motorcycle to Get Away, speeding across the campus and down the nearest highway as fast as he could gun her.

He didn’t even own a motorcycle. I often wonder what the other people on campus and on the highway thought they saw when he went racing past them on his phantom bike….?

Medieval witches used belladonna in their brews, and some scholars think that’s why they believed they could fly through the sky on broomsticks. Modern witches — at least the ones I’ve known — prudently substitute the kinder, gentler cannabis.

The next morning my friend returned to “consensus reality” and found himself in a ditch several miles from campus. He had no bumps or bruises –and nobody else’s motorcycle either– but his right shoe and right sock had disappeared. He never did find them and never remembered anymore of that night either.

My longest yarn involves my own experience with belladonna, in 1962.  What can I say about why I did it? I hadn’t heard the above stories yet, I was young, I was a damned eejit, and the guy who gave it to me said it was “just like peyote.”

Let me explain that this happened on a farm in the deep woods.

A few minutes after I took the stuff — drank it as a tea, actually — my wife Arlen developed a severe case of fangs and quickly turned into a beautiful, sexy, red-headed vampire with malice in her eyes. I immediately rushed to the kitchen sink, stuck a finger down my throat and forced several painful fits of vomiting. When I could vomit no more I told her — she looked normal again for a moment: beautiful, sexy, red-headed but friendly, not vampirish — “This is a Bad Trip, but I’ll find my way back to you, I promise.”

Those were the last sane words I spoke for the next 12 hours.

I remember taking a long walk through a forest of magic green jewels with the Tin Woodsman of Oz. Later, the next day, it became clear that this was Jeff, a friend Arlen had phoned to help me through the Emergency. He was walking me around our cabin, thinking fresh air might help.

I remember some dwarfs in Nazi uniforms trying to shove me into a furnace literally “as hot as Hell.” I have never felt more terror in my life.

Blank space”: memory loss.

I remember thinking the worst was over and trying to tell Arlen and Jeff that some parts of it were quite good, really.  I was lighting one cigarette after another, chain-smoking I thought. Jeff and Arlen saw me striking the lighter repeatedly but I never did have a cigarette in my mouth.

I remember trying to explain something I had discovered Out There. Arlen wrote it down. The note said, “The literary critics will all have to be shot because of the Kennedy administration in Outer Space of the Nuremberg pickle that exploded.”

Not quite as good as the last words of Dutch Shultz, I’d say, but a bit better than what William James brought back from his nitrous oxide adventure: “Over all, there is a smell of fried onions.”

Around dawn, I had to go to the out-house, Jeff accompanied me to make sure I didn’t wander off into the Pink Dimension or get lost amid the buzzing and whistling things in the Realm of Thud.

I opened the out-house door and found Jeff already in there. I closed the door and told him, “I can’t go in. You’re already in there.”

He persuaded me reasonably that he wasn’t in there, but outside with me, so I opened the door again, found nobody inside and took a healthy crap.

I felt even closer to “normal” when I came out, but then I noticed King Kong peeking at me over the top of the trees. He seemed whimsical and unthreatening and when I looked again he turned into just another tree.

The next day I moved slowly back into the ordinary world, and by evening I felt well enough to go to a movie, Kurasawa’s The Seven Samurai. I enjoyed the first half, especially the innovative technique of alternating between black-and-white and color, but in the second half Toshiro Mifune’s nose started growing like Pinocchio’s and I knew I was hallucinating again, which vexed me a bit.

No more flashbacks occurred for about a month and then one day all the people in the supermarket turned into iguanas. That only lasted a few seconds, and it was the last of the trip. I never tried this nefarious chemical again, and I hope to gawd you won’t either.

My last story I heard from novelist William S. Burroughs, who bought some “morphine” once that some wiseacre had cut with belladonna. He never remembered anything of the experience, but a friend did: he said that at one point William walked to the window, opened it and stuck a leg out.

“What are you doing?” the friend asked.

“Going down for some cigarettes,” William replied. The friend grabbed him and dragged him back into the room, which was on the third floor.

“Bella donna,” by the way means beautiful lady in Italian. Go figure.

(submitted to rawilsonfans.org by EWagner382)