Sexual Alchemy

Posted on July 1, 1988 by quackenbush | Comments Off

Sexual Alchemy

by Robert Anton Wilson

from GNOSIS Issue #8: Alchemy
Summer 1988
reprinted in Email to the Universe

The Chariot of Antimony by Basil Valentine (1642) contains the following typical bit of Alchemical exposition:

Let the Lion and Eagle duly prepare themselves as Prince and Princess of Alchemy – as they may be inspired. Let the Union of the Red Lion and the White Eagle be neither in cold nor in heat … Now then conies the time when the elixir is placed in the alembic retort to be subjected to the gentle warmth…. If the Great Work be transubstantiation then the Red Lion may feed upon the flesh and blood of the God, and also let the Red Lion duly feed the White Eagle – yea, may the Mother Eagle give sustain-molt and guard the inner life.’

In general, the preceding passage is representative of the Iimpid clarity of exposition and crystalline lucidity of style to be found in alchemical literature. We can already see why so many Rationalist historians have concluded that the alchemists simply went off their skulls from inhaling too many narcotic and/or toxic vapors and wrote hallucinogenic gibberish.

Occultists of various schools, of course, have other ideas. They all agree that alchemical literature was written in code – because “humanity is not ready to receive certain knowledge,” say the esoteric; because any alchemist who wrote clearly would bring down the wrath of the Inquisition on his head, say the more pragmatic. Unfortunately, there are a few dozen theories about what the code means. What follows is the theory that I have found most satisfactory over the years, although I am not smart enough to be absolutely sure it is the one and only correct theory.²

According to Louis T. Culling, Grandmaster of an occult lodge called the G.B.G. (short for Great Brotherhood of God), in his Manual of Sex Magick, the main terms in the code, and their translations, are as follows:

RED LION – the male Alchemist, or his penis.

WHITE EAGLE – the Alchemist’s mate, or her vagina.

RETORT – the vagina and/or womb.

TRANSMUTATION – (or transubstantiation) an altered state of consciousness.

ELIXIR – the semen.³

Applying this key to Valentine’s gnomic paragraph, we find that he is instructing the novice alchemist to find a suitable mate, and to take a “royal” or lofty attitude – i.e. he is a Prince, she a Princess, ergo they are no longer ordinary people. (cf. Tim Leary^‘s 1960s’ slogan, “Every man a Priest, every woman a Priestess, every home a shrine.”) The union of the alchemical mates should be ^“neither in cold nor in heat” —- they must be passionate, not indifferent to each other or merely casual, but they must not be too damned passionate. That is, they should not gallop toward Climax in the manner all too typical of our culture. The sexual communion, in short, should be tantric, leading to the “transubstantiation” – a higher state of consciousness.

The late Dr. Francis Israel Regardie, an egregious chap who had two separate selves and careers — as Dr. Francis Regardie he was a neo-Reichian psychotherapist, while as Israel Regardie he wrote a series of books which have influenced contemporary American occultism more than the work of any other single author — also taught this interpretation of alchemy, but, unlike Culling, only in the traditional codes. For instance, inThe Tree of Life Regardie offers the following advice on how the Cabalistic Magician may add alchemy to his working armory:

“Through the stimulus of warmth and spiritual Eire to the Athanor, there should be a transfer, an ascent of the Serpent from that instrument to the Cucurbite, used as a retort. The alchemical marriage or the mingling of the two streams of force in the retort causes at once the chemical corruption of the serpent in the menstruum of the Gluten, this being the Solve part of the al chemical formula of Solve et coagula…. the operation should not take less than an hour.⁴

Dr. Regardie offers the further helpful hint that, complex as it sounds, the operation is “no harder than riding a bicycle.” In correspondence, Dr. Regardie cheerfully acknowledged that I had decoded this correctly. Culling differs from Regardie chiefly in claiming that the ascent of the Serpent requires at least two hours.

If some readers still feel a bit in the dark about what is involved in the prolonged tantric act, consider the following broad hints from Thomas Vaughn, another 17th Century alchemist roughly contemporary with Basil Valentine:

The true furnace is a little simple shell… But l had almost forgot to tell thee that which is all in all, and is the greatest difficulty in all the art – namely the fire… The proportion and regimen of it is very scrupulous, but the best rule to know it by is that of the Synod: “Let not the bird fly before the fowler.” Make it sit while you give fire and then you are sure of your prey. For a close I must tell thee that the philosophers call this fire their bath, but it is a bath of Nature, not an artificial one; for it is not of any kind of water… In a word, without this bath, nothing in the world is generated.⁵

As Kenneth Rexroth noted in his introduction to The Works of Thomas Vaughn, Vaughn seems to have been less concerned with hiding the secret, like earlier alchemists, than with making it clear by progressively broader and broader hints. There is only one bath from which all creatures are generated and ‘that is the bath of vaginal fluids, which is “not of any kind of water.” The furnace that is also a shell is a nice poetic image of female anatomy, worthy of John Donne -‑ whose poems sometimes suggest that he was in on the secret. Note especially Donne’s “Love’s Alchemy,” with its “pregnant pot” and “The Ecstasy,” with its clear tantric emphasis.

The “bird” (English slang for woman, but also a cross reference to the traditional Eagle symbolism) must sit while the alchemist gives fire. This is, of course, the traditional tantric position, which slows down the sexual communion and creates maximum intimacy and tenderness. Similarly, the lovers in Donne’s “The Ecstasy” sit and make “pictures” in each other’s eyes, leading most commentators to think no sexual connection was involved, but the yabyum (sitting) position of Tantra also demands communion by eye contact.

John Donne and other Elizabethans who show signs of knowing this tradition – Sir Philip Sydney and Sir Walter Raleigh, especially, but try re-reading Shakespeare’s sonnets with this model in mind – probably came under the influence of Giordano Bruno of Nola, who was lecturing at Oxford while Donne was there. It was during those Oxford years that Bruno published his Eroica Furioso, which alternates love poems with prose passages on the union of the soul with God. It is usually assumed that the poems are allegories about the soul’s pilgrimage, but they may just as well be keys to the yoga that produces the ultimate union and communion. (Incidentally, the historian Frances Yates believes that Bruno was the model for at least two of Shakespeare’s characters – Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Prospero in The Tempest.)⁶

Bruno, of course, ultimately returned to Italy, where the Inquisition locked him in a dungeon for 8 years and then burned him at the stake. Most historians note only that the Nolan (as he liked to call himself) was condemned for teaching the Copernican theory of astronomy, but actually he was charged with 18 offenses, including practising Magick and organizing secret occult societies dedicated to overthrowing the Vatican. Francis Yates suspects that the latter might be true and finds a Bruno-esque influence in the first Rosicrucian manifestoes.⁷ Certainly, The Alchemical Marriage of Christian Rosycross shows more than a tinge of Bruno’s Tantrism, and “dark sayings” like “It is only on the Cross that the Rose may bloom” strongly suggest both Bruno’s sex-magick and his love of paradox.⁸ (Two of the Nolan’s favorite koans were “In filth, sublimity; in sublimity, filth” and “In joy, tears; in tears, joy.”)

The question of how this tantric tradition got into Europe has no clear, unambiguous answer. Ezra Pound, in addition to his other achievements and infamies, was one of the leading scholars in the area of early French poetry, and in the revised 1916 edition of The Spirit of Romance included a chapter presenting evidence that a tantric cult existed in Provence at the time of the Troubadours and is referred to guardedly in much of their poetry. In addition to the data presented by Pound, I have noted that the characteristic verse-form of the Troubadours, seven stanzas, may refer to the seven “chakras” involved in tantric yoga. Certainly, there is nothing earlier in European literature (but much in Tantra) to foreshadow Pierre Vidal’s shocking, “I think I see God when I look upon my lady nude.” That was hair-raising blasphemy when written; but even more in the inner t^radition of Tantra is Sordello’s lovely:

And if flee you not, Lady who has captured my soul, No sight is worth the beauty of my thought

Pound guessed (and admitting he was guessing) that this “yoga of male and female energies” had surfaced in medieval France after a thousand years of underground existence as Gnostic heresy. Louis de Rougemont, however, in Love in the Western World, presents an impressive body of evidence that the Troubadour yoga had been brought back from the Middle East by crusaders who learned it from Arab mystics, probably the more oddball Sufis.⁹

Louis Culling, op. cit., claims that the tantric tradition in the West is of definite Sufi origin and is also coded into the Rubiyat of Omar Khayaam. This allegation is based, alas, on “inner teachings” of various occult orders and not on sources recognized by historians. Surely, there seems to be a tantric element in the 14th Century Sufi Mahmoud Shabistari who wrote, “In every atom a thousand rational beings are contained.”

The Ordo Templi Orientis (of which Aleister Crowley was Outer Head for a quarter of a century) teaches the elements of Tantra in nine slow and care-fully scheduled “degrees” of initiation; the first degree unambiguously attributes this tradition to Sufism in general and, in particular, to Mansur el Hallaj – a Sufi martyr who was stoned to death for proclaiming the eminently tantric (and vedantic) doctrine, “I am the Truth and there is nothing within my turban but God.” (Some O.T.O. initiates think the true story of Mansur is the origin of the myth of Hiram in orthodox Masonry.) In my Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits (Falcon Press, 1988), I give some credence to all these theories but suggest that a major role was also played by Hassan i Sabbah, founder of the Ishmaelian sect of Islam, who used both drugs and tantric sex to produce psychedelic experiences, which allegedly caused many to believe they had literally been privileged to experience Paradise while still alive.

This is the point at which most commentators on this Art tend to stumble or to wave their arms excitedly and start howling in rage. Some think all you have to do is adopt the “right attitude” during sex and – hey, presto – you are an alchemist or a magician or at least a Hermeticist of some sort. Others proclaim that all such yoga is “black” and “left-hand” and undoubtedly diabolical. While I cannot hope to dissolve the prejudices of the latter group in a short article, I can at least jar the naivete of the former group somewhat.

Tantric yoga requires at least as much discipline as hatha yoga and as much capacity for loving and giving of oneself as bhakti yoga. To be effective at all, that is, the Tantra of sex must have the delicacy of a first-rate ballet troupe and the tenderness of true communion – in the religious sense of that term. Aleister Crowley, our century’s leading proponent of this yoga (and the teacher of Louis Culling, by the way) said this yoga requires “the nine and ninety rules of Art.” Elsewhere Crowley expressed this in the mantra, which has many additional meanings outside Tantra, “Love is the law, love under will.” One only knows if the art has been mastered if one comes to a state of consciousness in which one can immediately grasp, without doubt or hesitation, the meaning of another of Crowley’s hermetic aphorisms, “Every man and every woman is a Star.”

The power of Tantra may be indicated by the fact that Ezra Pound, who never studied this art under a Master, learned enough from his years scrutinizing Troubadour texts that, by 1933, in his essay on Guido Cavalcanti, he speaks of “magnetisms that border on the visible” and consciousness “extending several feet beyond the body.” These are characteristic signs of passing from ordinary sex to meta-sex, from the crude act Shakespeare called a “momentary trick” (and D.H. Lawrence called “the sneeze in the loins”) to tantric transcendence. What happens beyond those magnet isms and that expansion of consciousness is not worth discussing; those who know, know – and those who know not will simply not believe.

One might venture, however, that the mingling of yang and yin magnetisms tends to produce a synergetic third which burns up or consumes the original elements. Kenneth Grant, an oddball Crowleyan obsessed with menstrual magick (“the Mystery of the Red Gold”), speaks of this as the “bisexualization of both partners.”¹⁰ More precisely, one can say that, in Chinese terms, active yang becomes passive yang, passive yin becomes active yin, and both tend to merge into the Tao, to re-emerge in new and unexpected forms. Crowley’s notorious 2 = 0 equation, which he alleged explained the universe and would eventually explain quantum mechanics, at least serves as a useful glyph for this stage of the alchemical mutation. And, although Crowley loved to play the bogie-man and terrorize the naive and nervous, one should take with some seriousness his warning when he says in Magick:

The Cup is said to be full of the Blood of the Saints; that is, every saint or magician must give the last drop of his life’s blood to that cup in the true Bridalchamber of the Rosy Cross… It is a woman whose cup must be Filled… the Cross is both Death and Generation, and it is on the Cross that the Rose blooms.¹¹

One has to be knowledgeable in both Freudian and Jungian analysis to understand this even dimly, until one has had the experience. But then everybody who did LSD in the ’60s knows a little about Death and Rebirth; we are not a totally unprepared generation for these Mysteries.

This begins to sound too metaphysical. The processes involved can be defined very materialistically, in terms of exercizing to move the center of Consciousness from usual domination by the left brain hemisphere and the sympathetic (active) nervous system to balance between both hemispheres and a growing ability to relax into the parasympathetic (passive, receptive) nervous system. The old mystic terminology lingers on chiefly because it is poetically precise and psychologically highly suggestive.

It is, however, worth quoting Dr. J. W. Brodie-Innes, an initiate of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in England in the 1890s, who said of the relevance of traditional occult concepts:

‘Whether the Gods, the Qlipothic forces or the Secret Chiefs really exist is comparatively unimportant; the point is that the universe behaves as though they do. In a sense the whole philosophy of the practise of Magick is identical with the Pragmatist position of Pierce the American philosopher.¹²

In other words, we never know “the universe” per se; we know the universe as filtered through our consciousness, and when consciousness alters, the known universe alters. Crowley defined Magick as “the art of causing change by act of will,” and Dion Fortune defined it as “the art of causing change in consciousness by act of will,” and neither was over-simplifying or being cute: The traditional Aristotelian “Iron Curtain” between Mind and Universe has no meaning in magick, for the same reason it no longer has any meaning in quantum physics. As John Lilly wrote:

…if one plugs the proper beliefs into the metaprogrammatic levels of the (brain)… the computer will then construct (from the myriads of elements in memory) those possible experiences that fit this particular set of rules. Those programs will be run off and those displays made which are appropriate to the basic assumptions and their stored programming.¹³

The Puritan looking at the Playmate of the Month sees something disgusting, awful, diabolical, and sinful; Pierre Vidal would see another manifestation of the glory of God. It all depends on the programs in the bio-computer. But all programs have a tendency to be-come self-fulfilling prophecies: a classic case is the sad, melancholy man who sits often in the dark, shunning sunlight, or walks around wearing dark glasses all the time, and gradually becomes even gloomier until he arrives at clinical depression. He has created the set and the setting for depression.

Conversely, those who achieve Divine Union with a beloved sexual partner tend to create their own self-fulfilling prophecies, and the most common effect is that all things become as beautiful as Vidal’s nude lady was when he saw Her as God. This transmutation of experience is technically called “the multiplication of the first matter” and many alchemists said of it, wittily, that this “gold,^“ unlike ordinary gold, could not be spent or used up, because the more of it you pass on to others, the more of it you find you still have.

All religions preach charity and forgiveness; but those virtues are hard to practice when you are surrounded by sons of bitches. When the alchemical gold” is found, when consciousness mutates, you are surrounded by gods and goddesses, and the more of the “gold” you give away, the more comes back to you from an increasingly divine Mother Eagle. Quite simply, it is a short and almost inevitable step from Tantra to pantheism. It is no accident that William Blake, who, like Shabistari, saw “infinity in a grain of sand,” also penned the most searing indictment ever written of the puritan and ascetic hatred of Eros:

Children of a future age

Reading this indignant page

Know that in a former time

Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.¹⁴

Robert Anton Wilson is the author of numerous books including the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, The New Inquisition, and Cosmic Trigger (Falcon Press, Santa Monica).

NOTES

1. See The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony, reproduced in The Alchemical Tradition in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Richard Grossinger, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 2nd edition 1983, pp. 34-47.

2. However, I am quite sure that many readers of GNOSIS are that smart, and you can look forward to seeing their corrections of my ignorant guesses in the letters column of the next issue.

3. A Manual of Sex Magick, Louis T. Culling, Llwellyn Publications, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1971, p. 57.

4. The Tree of Life: A Study in Magic, Israel Regardie, Samuel Weiser, New York, 1975 edition, p. 251.

5. “Coelum Terrae, ” in The Works of Thomas Vaughn, ed, A. E. Waite, University Books, New Hyde Park, NY, 1968, pp. 219-221.

6. Giordano Bruno the Hermetic Tradition, Frances A. Yates, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977, p. 357.

7. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Frances A. Yates, Routledge & Kegan Paul, Boston, 1974 ed., p. 216.

8. Reprinted in Commentary on the Chymical Wedding, Gareth Knight and Adam McLean, Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks #18, Edinburgh, 1984.

9. Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont, Harper & Row, New York, 1974.

10. The Magical Revival, Kenneth Grant, Samuel Weiser, New York, 1974, p. 142.

11. Magick in Theory and Practice, Aleister Crowley, Dover Publications, New York, 1976, pp. 41-42.

12. For more writings of Brodie-Innes, see: The Sorcerer and His Apprentice: Unknown Hermetic Writings of S. L. MacGregor Mathers and J. W. Brodie-Innes, ed. R. A. Gilbert, Aquarian Press, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, 1983.

13. Programming and Meta programming in the Human Biocomputer, John C. Lilly, Bantam Books, New York, 1974, p. 50.

14. From “A Little Girl Lost,” Songs of Experience, William Blake, Dover Publications, New York, 1984, p. 40.

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Tagged Aleister Crowley

Dreams of Flying

Posted on May 1, 1988 by quackenbush | Comments Off

Dreams of Flying

by Robert Anton Wilson

from Magical Blend #19, May-June-July 1988
reprinted in Email to the Universe

I have recently been reading a most enjoyable novel called The Dream Illuminati by Wayne Saalman (Falcon Press, Santa Monica, 1988). Mr. Saalman has found an epic theme – dreams of flight, and the achievement of flight.

Historically, dreams of flying appeared in the collective unconscious before the reality of flight existed in technology, and it seems plausible that if we understood our dreams better we would use our technology more wisely. Our machines manifest our dreams in matter crafted to coherence, and a psychoanalysis of our culture could easily derive from an examination of how we use science to materialize our fantasies and nightmares.

Mr. Saalman’s science-fantasy made me wonder: Why have we always dreamed of flying, and why have we built flying machines? This question seems “eminently” worth pondering in a world where 200,000,000 people pass through Kennedy International Airport every year, flying the Atlantic in one direction or the other.

To understand the profound, it often appears helpful to begin with clues that seem trivial. I suggest that we contemplate what our children look at every Saturday morning on TV. One of the most popular jokes in animated cartoons shows the protagonist walking off a cliff, without noticing what he has done. Sublimely ignorant, he continues to walk-on air-until he notices that he has been doing the ^“impossible,” and then he falls. I doubt very much that there will be any reader of Magical Blend who has not seen that routine at least onec; most of us have seen it a few hundred times.

It might seem pretentious to see a Jungian archetype adumbrated in crude form in this Hollywood cliché, but follow me for a moment.

When Hollywood wishes to offer us the overtly mythic, it presents Superman, who can “leap over tall buildings in a single bound,” and a more recent hero named Luke Skywalker.

The Tarot, that condensed encyclopedia of the collective unconscious, begins with the card called The Fool, and the Fool is depicted walking off a cliff-just like Donald Duck or Wily Coyote in the cartoons. Funny coincidence, what?

A Greek legend (which James Joyce took as the archetype of the life of the artist) tells us of Daedalus and Icarus: Daedalus who, imprisoned in a labyrinth (conventional “reality”), invented wings and flew away, over the heads of his persecutors, and Icarus, the son of Daedalus, who flew too close to the Sun Absolute and fell back to Earth. Like Porky Pig walking off a cliff, Icarus’ fall contains a symbolism many have encountered in their own dreams.

The Sufi order employs as its emblem a heart with wings (and the Ordo Templi Orientis employs a circle – symbolizing both emptiness and completion – with wings). The Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth, had the head of a winged creature, the ibis; his Greek equivalent, Hermes, was portrayed as more human, but had bird’s wings on his sandals.

The Wright Brothers, who made flying possible for all of us, remain beloved figures in the folk imagination-but how many readers can name the inventors ouch equally marvelous (but earthbound) devices as the television, the vacuum cleaner, the computer, the laser or the modern indoor toilet? Yet while other geniuses seem “forgotten by the masses,” the classic put-down to satirize any conservative who sets limits to what human art can accomplish remains “I told Wilbur and I told Orville, you’ll never get that crate off the ground.”

I suspect that part of the function of flight consists in destroying our concept of limit; opening us to the insight Dr. John Lilly expressed so eloquently in The Center of the Cyclone:

In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experimentally and experientially. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits.

The poet Hart Crane, trying to describe what Wilbur and Orville Wright meant to his generation (he died in the 1930s), wrote that from Kitty Hawk onward, he sensed “the closer clasp of Mars.” By 1938 people tuning in on an Orson Welles radio program after the drama started believed they were, hearing a newscast and the Martians were already here. A quantum jump had occurred in the limits of our social imagination_ Humanity had, like the poet, sensed the “closer clasp” of Mars.

Just slightly more than 30 years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, like a character in the fiction of Jules Verne, and ten years later, our instruments invaded the Martian desert already familiar to “us” through the visions of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. If this does not confirm William Blake’s notorious claim that “Poetic Imagination” should be considered another name for ^“God,^“ it certainly suggests that Poetic Imagination may function as another name for Destiny.

Perhaps we should ponder more deeply on the fact that Daedalus means ^“artist^“ in Greek. Daedulus, designer of labyrinths, imprisoned by those he served in a labyrinth he himself built – Daedalus, inventor of wings that took him from the Earth to Outer Space – why does he represent Art, instead of Science?

Well, to understand this we must remember that the ancient Greeks did not distinguish Art from Science as we do. The genius of an artist, Aristotle says, lies in his texne, the root from which we get our word ^“technology;” but texne basically means skill or craft, or the ability to make things that never existed before.

In our age, by contrast, Stravinsky was regarded as “witty” or “paradoxical” (or deliberately enigmatic) when he called him-self a “sound engineer.” An artist who considers himself a kind of engineer? That is a hard thought for us to grasp. Yet a few moments’ reflection will show that as much precise structural knowledge can be found in Stravinsky’s music as in Roebling’s blue-prints for the Brooklyn Bridge-that edifice (considered “miraculous” when it was new) which Hart Crane took as a symbol of the unity of Art and Science.

Our dichotomized and dualistic thinking has been denounced so often lately that I hardly need to labor this point. I would prefer to suggest a possible common origin of both art and science. The musician and the architect, the poet and the physicist, all inventors of new realities-I propose, all such Creators may be best considered late evolutionary developments of the type that first appears as the shaman. Please remember that shamans in most cultures are known as “they who walk in the sky,” just like our current shaman-hero, Luke Skywalker

It should not be regarded as accidental or arbitrary that Swift put Laputa, the home of the scientists, in the sky, in order to disparage the wild-eyed and Utopian scientists of his time for not having all four feet on the ground; Aristophanes put Socrates in the clouds, to similarly disparage speculative agnostic philosophy. Outer Space seems the natural home of all descendents of the shaman, whether they be called artists, philosophers or scientists.

The ironies of Swift and Aristophanes, and the myths of the fall of Icarus and Donald Duck, indicate that the collective unconscious contains a force opposed to our dreams of flight. This appears inevitable. As Jung, the foremost explorer of the collective psyche, often pointed out, an ineluctable polarity exists in the symbols of dream and myth, a “Law of Opposites” which Jung compared to the Chinese concept ofyin and yang energies. Jekyll contains Hyde; love easily becomes hate; Cupid and Psyche reappear as the Phantom of the Opera and Margaritta, and also as King Kong and Fay Wray.

In the present context, the Law of Opposites means that we yearn to soar, yet we fear to fall. Our “inner selves” are mirrored not just in Orville Wright rising like a bird from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk, but also in Simon Newcombe, the great astronomer who “proved” mathematically that such flight was impossible.

As I have elsewhere suggested, neophilia and neophobia – love of the novelty and fear of novelty – result from the primal polarities of the first imprint of the newborn infant. In other words, what Dr. Timothy Leary calls the bio-survival “circuit” of the nervous system-the oral bio-survival system, I prefer to call it, since it includes the immune, endocrine and neuropeptide sub-systems as well as the autonomic nervous system-imprints either basic explorativeness or basic conservatism very quickly. That explains, I think, why some babies “chortle with delight” when tossed up in the air and caught, while others scream with terror. Infants who like this experience of flight, I suggest, already have the neophiliac imprint and those who act terrified have the neophobe imprint.

Of course, “the universe” can count above two (even if Aristotelian logicians cannot) and few of us are either pure neophilics or pure neophobics. Rather, we wobble about on a gradient between neophilia and neophobia-between joy and anxiety, between conservatism and experimentalism, between yearning to soar and fear of falling. A t times we feel like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, convinced that “a true Heaven has no limits” and trying to fly higher and faster; other times we become the old Reaganite gulls, nervously warning that to fly too high too fast will ruin your brain and directly contradicts the traditional mores of the flock (“Just say no to soaring.”) We contain both Orville Wright leaping into the air toward a future “where no man has gone before” and Simon Newcombe proving that Orville will certainly fall and smash himself like Humpty Dumpty.

As Joyce so poetically writes:

My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall-ill seen him come down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down under his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup.

Despite the multiple dream-images here-the Irish rain falling to become the Irish river Anna Liffey, Lucifer and his hosts falling from Heaven, the falls of Adam and Eve and Humpty Dumpty, Mary receiving the divine seed from the Archangel, Magdeline washing the feet of the Saviour, the Paraclete descending as a dove to bring the Apostles the Gift of Tongues, a housewife washing up the breakfast dishes-Joyce primarily invokes our deep awareness that gravity “pulls us down,” our deep yearning to break-free of this “drag” and soar back to our home above the clouds.

In 1988, the ancient Egyptian and Gnostic belief that our origin and our destiny reach far beyond Earth no longer seems as quaint and queer as it did in recent generations. In books like Dr. Timothy Leary’s Info-Psychology, Dr. Francis Crick’s Cosmic Panspermia and Sir Fred Hoyle^‘s Evolution from Space, there appears a body of evidence strongly suggesting that life did not begin on this planet but arrived here from elsewhere in space. While the interpretations of these brilliant philosopher-scientists differ,’ their various kinds of evidence, from diverse fields of enquiry, does make a strong case that evolution is older and more universal than we traditionally think. One leaves their books suspecting that the orthodox biological view regarding Earthly evolution apart from Cosmic evolution results from unvoiced pre-Copernican assumptions about Earth’s centrality and its isolation.

In addition to the sophisticated and learned works of Leary, Crick and Hoyle, we have also recently witnessed the growth of a vast body of “vulgar” or at least popular literature arguing the proposition that Ancient Astronauts seeded this planet, not with all life, but merely with (post-Neanderthal) humanity. Instead of dissecting the flaws in the arguments of this seemingly “crank” literature, it might be more illuminating, I think, to wonder why this popular mythos provides the masses with an unsophisticated and anthropocentric form of the theories more soberly presented in works like Info-Psychology, Cosmic Panspermia,and Evolution from Space. Why do we find both first-rate and second-rate minds suddenly preoccupied with extraterrestrial evolution, while ninth-rate minds increasingly embrace Pop UFOlogy?

And why, one may next wonder, does this theme also appear centrally in the most beautiful, the most “haunting” and the most often-revived science-fiction film of all time-Kubrick’s magnificent 2001?

When one Idea or Archetype appears in learned tomes, in tabloids, in folk-belief, in new cults, and in great art, all at about the same time, one suspects the presence of what Jung called, in his book Flying Saucers, “a shift in the constellation of the archetypes.” In terms of current neuroscience, what Jung means, I think, is that the DNAICNS “dialogue”-the neuropeptide “language” between genes and brain-is preparing us for a new evolutionary leap.

In The Dream Illuminati, there is a scene in which the hero says bluntly:

I realized that 1 was only as free as I thought myself to be and that there was no limit to how high we can fly!

Here we see again that the Archetype of flight carries always an umbilical connection to the idea of the transcendence of all limits. (“What is believed to be true is true or becomes true…”)

And we must wonder again if more than childish fantasy lurks in the concept of Donald Duck walking on air only until he “remembers” that this “is” officially “impossible” in our current reality-tunnel.

In 1904, when Einstein was starting to write his first paper on Relativity and the Wright Brothers were testing the airplane design that finally worked after many failures, Aleister Crowley, the most controversial mystic of our century, “received”-or created by Poetic Imagination-a document which he ever after believed was a communication from Higher Intelligence. In this work, called Liber Al or The Book of the Law, there is contained what purports to be a message from Nuit, the Egyptian star goddess, interpeted in Crowley’s commentaries as the supreme consciousness of the cosmos, or the sum total of all synergetically interactive intelligences throughout space-time. Among other things this “entity” or corporation told Crowley;

Every man and every woman is a star…I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy…For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union…Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendor within you: come unto me!

Many interpretations of these verses are possible, of course. Of course.

Personally, after reading some of the current scientists who see evolution as both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, I cannot look at the words of Liber Al without thinking that, in some sense, the interstellar creators who planted life here may be sending us a signal to return to our home in the stars—that “great blue bedroom” which Joyce poetically invokes on the last page of Finnegans Wake and in which the astronaut, David Bowman, abruptly finds himself at the climax of 2001.

Of course, the language of poetic myth, like that of dream, should always be considered analogical and allegorical, not literal; to see only one meaning here means that one will “fall into the pit of Because and perish with the dogs of Reason” (to cite Crowley again). The content of a true archetype contains an infinity of mirrors.

For instance, my Dream Diary for 23 April 1968 records that when I woke in the morning I remembered the following images from my night’s hermetic journey:

I am in a Chicago nightclub once patronized by John Dillinger. I find that the present patrons are also a group of gangsters. They regard me with hostility, and I become frightened. I try to leave; they try to stop me. I open a door.

I find myself on the IRT subway in New York. I am riding in the front car and watching the tunnel ahead of the train (as I did as a boy). Suddenly, I see a brick wall ahead and realize the train is going to crash into it and kill everybody aboard, including me.

I am out of the subway and walking in Cicero, Illinois. An angry mob surrounds me. They seem to know that I was in the recent Martin Luther King march against segregation here. I cannot escape them. Suddenly, I know intuitively what to do. I cry out, “Elohim!” and sprout wings and fly above their heads. The sky is beautiful and I feel free of all anxieties, at peace, unreasonably hopeful about everything.

When I awoke, I was thinking of Chesterton’s description of the mystic experience as “absurd good news.”

At the time of this dream, I was involved with Chicago friends in propagating the John Dillinger Died For You Society, a parody of Fundamentalist religions which, like all good jokes, had its serious side. I was fascinated by the way that certain outlaws like Dillinger (or Jesse James, or Robin Hood) were virtually forced to live to the full the archetypal myth of Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Christ and Joyce’s Tim Finnegan. I also meditated much on the way in which outlaws who did not even approximately “live” the myth subsequently had their lives rewritten in folk-imagination to conform to it. The first part of the dream-record con-fronts me with the dark side of the archetype, and reminds me that real gangsters are not the mythic figures imposed on them by Poetic Imagination but nasty and frightening sociopaths.

In the second part of the dream, I enter into the Underground Initiation. Although using symbols from my own life (the subway), I find myself retracing the steps of Ishtar in the land of the dead, Odysseus sailing to Hades for wisdom, Jesus and Dante descending to Hell, etc. In alchemy this was called negrito, which Jung compares to the initial stages of psychotherapy.

In a sense, the Underworld Journey appears the reciprocal of, and preparation for, the Achievement of Flight. Dante had to walk through Hell before climbing Mount Purgatory and soaring above the clouds to Heaven. In retrospect, I am especially de-lighted with the Freudian wit of the unconscious in using modem “Underworld” figures-gangsters-to represent the mythic Underworld.

In the third part of the dream, the traditional Wrathful Demons attack me, personified by the citizens of Al Capone’s home town, Cicero-perhaps because the people out there always reminded me of Wrathful Demons whenever I had to associate with them. I escape by crying out a name from the Hebrew Bible, whereupon I am able to fly, like Dante or Daedalus, from the Pit to the Stars.

What I find most curious about these dream fragments is that, when I experienced them in 1968, I knew nothing about Cabala. I was puzzled on awakening about the name Elohim and the way I had magically used it in the dream. All I knew about that name in those days was that it appears in the first chapter of Genesis and that there is a dispute between philologists and theologians about whether it means “God^“ or “the gods”- i.e. whether the first chapter of the Bible is or isn’t a fragment left over from a polytheistic phase of Judaism.

It was over two years after this very Jungian dream that I became interested in Cabala and eventually learned that Elohim is therein considered a great Name of Power – used in e.g. the Middle Pillar Ritual, which every Cabalist in training is expected to do at least once a week. The function of Cabalistic ritual in general, and this ritual in particular, was once defined by Crowley as “to raise the mind of the student perpendicularly to Infinity” – beyond all limits. This is symbolized in my dream, as in many dreams and myths, by the imagery of flight and the conquest of gravity. The 1968 dream seems to contain precognition of Cabalistic work I would be doing very seriously c. 1971-75.

Of course, if one dares to suggest that a dream contains precognition; the Rationalist immediately declares the connection between the dream image and later waking events ^“is” “mere coincidence.” Those with a psychological block against recognizing electricity would probably say, similarly, that when you flick the switch and the light goes on that “is” also “mere coincidence.”

At the time I had this dream or set of dreams in 1968, I was suffering from a moderately severe depression and the general symptoms of what is now called “mid-life crisis.” I had a very good job at Playboy magazine, with an excellent salary for the ’60s, but I was approaching 40 and wanted to write full-time. (Three years later, after beginning Cabalistic work, I quit my job and have been writing full-time ever since. Al-though I have experienced the usual share of shocks, disappointments and bereavements, I have not suffered clinical depression again.)

The reader might find it illuminating to compare this record with a dream recounted in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. In this case, the dreamer saw a winged horse with one wing broken, struggling lofty and falling continually back to Earth. Campbell does not even bother interpreting this symbolism, merely informing us that the dreamer was a poet forced to work at a menial job to support his family; one understands immediately.

In a sense, we have all had our “wings” broken; it remains the major function of such “hallowed institutions^“ as organized religion and Free Compulsory Education to see that our “wings” are broken, or at least clipped, before we reach adulthood. How else will society have the insectoid units it needs to fill the cubicles in its hive economy?

But what if we begin to regrow healthy organs of Poetic Imagination and flight? What if we “put on the wings and arouse the coiled splendor within^“ as Liber Al urges? Is it not predictable that society will react with the fury described by Wayne Saalman in The Dream Illuminati? (Think of the careers of Dr. Wilhelm Reich and Dr. Timothy Leary…) Joyce did not name his emblematic Artist merely Daedalus but Stephen Daedal s^.-after St. Stephen, the Protomartyr who reported a Vision and was stoned to death for it.

And does it not appear ultimately beneficial, in evolutionary perspective, that society should react in that manner? Those of us who have no avocation for martyrdom must learn, when we realize how much neophobia remains built into the contraptions of “society” and ^“the State,^“ the art of surviving in spite of them. In a word, we must “get wise^“ in both the Socratic meaning of that phrase and in the most hardboiled street meaning. Neophobia functions as an Evolutionary Driver, forcing the neophiliac to get very smart very fast.

This theme is inexhaustible, but my space and time are not. As a final bit of hermetic wisdom, I offer you Proposition 12 of Aleister Crowley’s masterwork, Magick:

Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limitation is based on experience of^–the past, and every step in his progress extends his empire. There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or to what he may do.

FOOTNOTE

‘Leary thinks life was planted here by advanced intelligences lovingly seeking “children” for companionship, while Crick proposes that advanced civilization coldly and scientifically created Earthside DNA as an interesting experiment, and Hoyle argues that some seeds got here by accident (on comets, etc.) and some was deposited by Higher Intelligences for reasons inscrutable to us at present. I suspect that all three theories are influenced by the personal traits of their inventors.

[submitted to RAWilsonFans.com by RMJon23]

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Posted in Essays, Excerpts

1988 OBIE Interview

Posted on April 23, 1988 by quackenbush | Comments Off

ROBERT ANTON WILSON

Interview: 1988

This is an edited transcript of an interview which took place in Los Angeles on April 23, 1988. I would like to thank Bob Wilson and his wonderful wife Arlen for inviting me into their home, and special thanks to Bruce Eisner for helping to arrange it. The interview was broadcast on college radio station KFJC, 89.7 FM in Los Altos Hills, California five weeks later. –David A. Banton

DAB: This is David B, here in Los Angeles in the home of Robert Anton Wilson. It is April 23, 1988, a significant day in Robert Anton Wilson philosophy. What is the significance of 23?

RAW: Well, 23 is a part of the cosmic code. It’s connected with so many synchronicities and weird coincidences that it must mean something, I just haven’t figured out yet what it means! In several of my books, including the Illuminatus trilogy and Cosmic Trigger, I have given examples of a tremendous number of coincidences connected with 23. Take today as an example, April 23: this is the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, April 23, 1556 and his death, April 23, 1616. Also April 23, 1616, the same time Shakespeare died in England, Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, died in Spain. April 23, 1014 is when Brian Boru died, he was the first high king of Ireland to be a political as well as religious leader. He unified all Ireland and drove the Danes out, and on April 23, 1014 he was killed by one of the Danes after the battle of Clontarf, where he defeated the Danes for the final time, and liberated Ireland from foreign rule. August 23, 1170 is when the Normans came in, and Ireland has been under foreign rule again, in whole or in part, ever since. On Aug. 23, 1920 James Joyce was discussing coincidences with a friend in a Paris bar when he suddenly saw a giant black rat and fainted dead away. So that ties Joyce together with the invasion of Ireland, and Shakespeare, and Brian Boru. All of this is in (James Joyce’s) Finnigan’s Wake, by the way.

DAB: You have a whole series of books focusing on the Illuminati. What is the Illuminati, and how did that become an inspiration for so many books?

RAW: Well, the Illuminati was a secret society in Bavaria in the 18th Century. A certain number of paranoid individuals believe the Illuminati still exists and has either taken over the world, or taken over most of the world, or something like that. I discovered the anti-Illuminati literature in the late 60’s when there were all sorts of weird conspiracy theories going around. And then I discovered there were two ambiguities connected with the Illuminati. First, there are those who say the Illuminati don’t exist, versus those who say the Illuminati still exist, and then among those who say the Illuminati do exist, there are two schools of thought: those who claim they’re the arch-villains of all history, and those who claim they’re the heroes who are trying to liberate the human race from superstition and ignorance. And so, I decided a group that ambiguous, where we don’t know whether they exist or not, and we don’t know whether they’re the good guys or the bad guys, they’re the perfect symbol, to me, for all the confusions of the age we’re living through, and all of the rampant paranoia of our time. Conspiracy theories have never been more popular, not even in Nazi Germany.

RAW: Recently, Falcon press has been reprinting a lot of your books, and there’s a little joke in the list of Falcon Books. With so many of them by Robert Anton Wilson, it asks, is Falcon Press owned by Robert Anton Wilson? Well, is it?

RAW: No, that’s just one of the publisher’s little jokes. Falcon Press is actually owned by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was the English branch of the Illuminati, according to some conspiracy buffs. Of course, it wasn’t really, that’s just what some nutty people say. And I want to also deny Mae Brussel’s claim, uh, no it’s not Mae Brussel, it’s Lyndon LaRouche. Lyndon LaRouche claims I’m the head of the Illuminati; there’s no truth in that whatsoever. Mae Brussel is the one who said I’m an agent of the Rockefeller conspiracy. That is the truth, I can’t deny that one! Actually, my whole cellar is full from floor to ceiling with bars of gold sent to me personally by David Rockefeller for all the services I provide for the Rockefeller Conspiracy.

DAB: Ah-ha!

RAW: I confessed that several years ago when Mae first made the charge against me, and I confess as frequently as possible to that, because the more people who believe my cellar is full of bars of Rockefeller gold, the better my credit rating will be, so I don’t see how that can harm me at all. It can only do me good.

DAB: Speaking of the Golden Dawn, they have a mysterious reputation as some sort of secret society, and you say there is some variation of that going on today?

RAW: Oh yes, the Golden Dawn has three chapters in the Los Angeles area alone. It’s got chapters all over the country, in England, in Canada, New Zealand, Australia . . . and I believe there’s a chapter in Switzerland, I don’t know where else.

DAB: What exactly do they do?

RAW: Well, the Golden Dawn is a hermetic society devoted to altering consciousness on a planetary scale. Its objectives cannot be defined more clearly than that. It’s a Cabalistic, Rosicrucian, magickal group. Among the more famous members of the Golden Dawn have been William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet; Arthur Machen, the great fantasy writer; Florence Farr, one of the great actresses of the Victorian age, who incidentally was the mistress of both Yeats and Bernard Shaw, that’s an interesting link; and, oh of course, Aleister Crowley was a member of the Golden Dawn all his life. The current head of the Los Angeles Temple of the Golden Dawn is a close friend of mine. However, I am not a member of the Golden Dawn myself.

DAB: Nor have ever been?

RAW: (laughing) Nor have I ever been! Except that the head of the Golden Dawn says I am . . . he was asked that question in an interview, Christopher Hyatt, the head of the Golden Dawn, the Outer Head. He was asked if I was a member, and he said Wilson belongs to all groups and none. I think that’s such a perfect definition, I don’t attempt to improve on it.

DAB: You mentioned Aleister Crowley. You’ve written about him a lot. How did you first become interested in him?

RAW: Sometime around 1970, or ’69, I was having lunch with Alan Watts and I mentioned the Illuminatus trilogy, which I was working on at the time, and the symbolism of the eye on the pyramid, which is the symbol of the Illuminati. And Alan said, that reminds me, the best book I’ve read all year is called The Eye in the Triangle by Israel Regardie, and I took Alan Watts very seriously. I mean, he was a very funny man, but when Alan said something was worth reading, I took that seriously, so I went out and bought the book, The Eye in the Triangle, and it turned out to be a biography of Aleister Crowley. Israel Regardie was Crowley’s secretary for a while in the 1930’s. Then later he was a psychotherapist right here in Los Angeles . I got into correspondence with Dr. Regardie for several years, before his death, and learned quite a bit from him about the inner traditions of the Golden Dawn, and about Crowley’s work.

DAB: So how about the eye in the triangle, what does that symbol represent?

RAW: The eye on top of the pyramid, let’s start with, the eye on top of the pyramid represents the transcendental ego as distinguished from the normal ego. It represents your awareness of your role as an evolutionary agent with all past generations holding you up to the position you’re in now. The pyramid represents all past generations and the open eye represents your realization of your oneness with all past generations, especially all past generations of magicians. Reality, as we call it, is the temporary resultant of continuous conflict between rival gangs of magicians and shamans. The eye in the triangle by itself represents the Eye of Horus. Horus is the lord of two horizons in Egyptian mythology; that means he’s the lord of the rising and the setting son, birth and death, and all other opposites. War and meditation are two of his chief characteristics.

DAB: The average person would think of a magician as a side-show entertainer. What is a magician, in your definition?

RAW: Well, it’s an ambiguous word. It can refer to prestidigitation, conjuring, other show business tricks, or it can refer to the ancient science of the magi, which is where the word magic comes from etymologically, it’s the science of the magi. It’s the science of rapid, voluntary brain change, how to use the human brain for fun and profit.

DAB: That brings us to something you’ve written about called the HEAD Revolution: Hedonic Engineering and Development.

RAW: The HEAD Revolution is my term for what’s been happening since the 1960’s, the discovery of newer and better technologies all the time for rapid alteration of brain functioning. We’ve gone from psychedelic drugs, to biofeedback and Lilly isolation tanks, and a lot of fascinating new machines like the Mind Mirror, which is an accelerated biofeedback system that gives you a continuous profile of both hemispheres of your brain, and which frequencies they’re working on. Every year, the technology of rapid brain change gets more advanced, trying to figure where it’ll be five years from now particularly makes me dizzy, it’s moving so fast at present.

I think it’s a great example of the evolutionary function of stupidity. When the government made psychedelic research illegal in the 60’s, scientific, open above-board research I mean, that did not stop research, the research just went underground, together with a great deal of partying and hell-raising and whatnot with those drugs. I thought it was the stupidest thing the government ever did, but in retrospect I think stupidity has an evolutionary function, because when they stopped that research, all the leading researchers in the field went into other areas, and so we’ve discovered dozens of other ways of rapid brain change. Lilly worked on his isolation tank, others went into biofeedback. Stan Grof, who came to this country seeking scientific freedom because he felt he didn’t have enough scientific freedom in Czechoslovakia, he came to this country seeking scientific freedom and they told him he couldn’t do any more LSD research, so he went to work on breathing techniques and the effect of sound on the brain, and has developed some very interesting post-Reichian, post-yogic techniques of brain change. So, by and large, the stupider the establishment is, the smarter the rebels become. Establishment stupidity is the greatest spur to creativity in evolutionary history. That’s why I think Reagan has been a godsend to this country. He’s brought more stupidity to Washington than anybody in my lifetime, and there’s been a tremendous upsurge of creativity while he’s been in there.

DAB: Have you tried any of these new brain machines?

RAW: Every one I can get my hands on. I started out with the Pulstar, which sends magnetic pulses into the brain, and the brain goes into the rhythm of those pulses, so you go to any frequency you want to go to, you move down from beta to alpha, to theta to delta, wherever you want to go, with direct magnetic impulses. I tried the Isis ,which uses light, and the Synchro-energizer, which uses light and sound, and the Neuro-pep which uses light and sound. I have a Pulstar, and Neuro-pep, and an Endomax. Endomax uses impulses against the mastoid bones behind the ear, and affects the hypothalamus directly, which controls the neuropeptide system in the whole body. And recently, I got to try the Graham Potentializer, which is a long, table-like contraption between two electromagnetic generators, and it revolves in a certain mathematical pattern that Graham has worked out. He claims ten sessions on that will raise your IQ tremendously. I only had one session on it, so I can’t judge yet, but after one session I was high as a kite, and I was feeling delighted with myself and the world for about 24 hours afterwards.

The Graham Potentializer is much more expensive than the others. I think what will happen, the way it’ll reach the mass market, is not people buying Potentializers, but people setting up places like with Lilly tanks, where you can go in and rent an hour on a Graham Potentializer like you can go in and rent an hour in a Lilly tank in most cities these days. When I go around the country on my tours, I always ask my audiences, can you get an hour in a Lilly isolation tank here, and in the last year I haven’t been anyplace where the answer wasn’t yes. No matter where you go in this country now, you can rent time in a Lilly tank. I think in a couple of years, you’ll be able to rent time on a Graham Potentializer, wherever you go.

The latest one I’ve tried is the Mind Mirror, which is the most sophisticated biofeedback system to come along. It gives you an instantaneous reading. I found out I’ve got a disorganized awakened brain, I found that very interesting, I kind of suspected it.

DAB: What exactly is a disorganized awakened brain?

RAW: Well, it’s a pattern that’s similar to the awakened brain state measured in Zen masters and yogis, but it’s not quite, it’s a little more raggedy. It’s usually found in scientists and artists, and some psychics.

DAB: Do you think these new brain technology tools and the flotation tanks are good enough to replace say, LSD and other chemicals for brain change? Are those no longer relevant?

RAW: I think the avant-garde edge of the consciousness revolution, the HEAD Revolution, is moving away from chemicals towards machines, because you can get much more precise control. Molecules are great big ungainly things to throw at your brain compared to electronic impulses. I think pretty soon, within five years, we’ll be able to have a little computer keyboard, and just punch in the right code to send the right impulse into your brain, to have any brain experience you want. The first time you tasted chocolate ice cream, you just punch in the right code, you get that back; your first sexual experience, you punch in the right code you get that; samadhi, you punch in the right code, you get that. And so on. I think that can’t be more than five years away, the way this technology is moving.

DAB: In the 70’s you and Leary came up with the SMIILE formula, which stands for Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, and Life Extension. Do you still find those three things to be important?

RAW: Oh, very much so. Space migration is tremendously exciting to me, because it’s the opening of a new frontier. Historically, every time a new frontier has opened, there’s been a big upsurge of creative energies, a Renaissance effect, a creativity boom, and the human race badly needs that at this point. Also, I think most of the energy problems that it’s fashionable to worry about will be solved when we get out of the closed system of one planet and start dealing with many worlds. When we have hundreds and hundreds of space colonies dotted all over the earth-moon system, or as far out as the asteroid belt probably, then there won’t be any more energy problem, there’s so damn much energy out there compared to the energy available on the surface of the Earth. And it will also solve the population problem, more and more people will be migrating into space, I’m sure. I want to go myself, some people think that’s whimsical in a man my age, but I’m expecting rejuvenation technology will be along in the next 10-15 years . . .

DAB: The Life Extension part of SMIILE . . .

RAW: Yes, I figure 20 years from now, I’ll be 20 years younger instead of 20 years older.

DAB: So you think you’ll make it into space one day then?

RAW: Oh, absolutely!

DAB: Do you think you’ll run into any UFO’s? You talk about that a lot, do you believe in UFO’s?

RAW: Of course! I don’t know what they are, but to deny them is like denying frogs falling out of the sky or brick walls, these are very obvious things. You may have different explanations of them. I don’t know what UFO’s are, I don’t know whether they’re spaceships, or time ships, or a special kind of hallucination triggered by abnormal electromagnetic conditions . . . that’s a theory suggested by a psychologist named Persinger, which I find very persuasive, but not totally convincing. Or maybe they’re archetypes escaped from the collective unconscious, as Jung suggested, or maybe they’re all heat inversions. I don’t know, maybe there is no one theory that accounts for all of them. But they’re certainly there, to say that they’re not there is like saying that Charlie Chaplin doesn’t exist. Charlie Chaplin may have been an actor, but he existed in some sense. Charlie Chaplin and UFO’s are at least as real as the Gross National Product.

DAB: We’ve covered the Space Migration part of the SMIILE formula, what about Intelligence Increase?

RAW: Well, I think these brain machines I’m talking about are going to play a tremendous role in raising intelligence. Graham, who claims to do more scientific measurement than anybody else in the brain-machine field, he claims he can demonstrate a definite increase in IQ in anybody who has used the Potentializer more than 10 times. And I’ve seen, I think it’s pretty clear that most of these machines have some effect on the IQ, as well as general health and tranquilization.

DAB: Life Extension: You were once Director of the Prometheus Society, right? Weren’t they involved in that?

RAW: I was the Western Director.

DAB: Does that group still exist and are you still involved with them?

RAW: I sort of lost touch with them, I don’t know whether they still exist or not. I’ve lived in Ireland for five years, I sort of lost touch with the L5 Society, the Prometheus Society, and a lot of things I was involved in before I went over to Europe. Now I’m trying to reestablish connections with groups that interest me.

DAB: What is the L5 Society?

RAW: That’s a society of scientists and others that are concerned with colonizing the L5 area, which is La Grange Point 5. There are 5 La Grange points around the moon, which are places where the gravity of Earth and Moon are approximately equal to each other, and they’re good places to build space colonies, for engineering reasons. L5 used to be considered the best. The latest calculations I’ve seen indicate that L4 may be better, but the L5 Society has already got that name, so I doubt they’re going to change it, even if we end up colonizing L4 instead of L5.

DAB: You’ve been living in Ireland for the last 5-6 years, now you’re back here in California . What are you current plans?

RAW: Oh, I intend to hang around LA for quite awhile, but I’m doing a lot of traveling, too. So far this year, it’s only April, so far this year I’ve been in Phoenix, Dallas, New York, New Jersey and Boulder, Colorado. Next week I go back to Austin, Texas, and at the end of May I’m going over to Europe and doing lectures all over Germany and Switzerland and Holland. And I intend to keep traveling, I find it exhilarating to be a citizen of the planet, rather than of one particular place.

DAB: Are you planning to go back to Ireland eventually?

RAW: Well, I am going back to Ireland to pick up a lot of my property I left there last Fall. When I came over here the last time I was doing a lecture tour, I didn’t expect I’d get hired to write a movie, so I didn’t go back to Ireland to get all my gear right away. I was trying to figure out how long will I be on the movie, how long do I want to be here, and so on, I’ve got involved in several other projects around Hollywood and it’s obvious I’m going to be here for quite awhile, so I’m bringing more of my gear over from Ireland while I’m doing the European lecture tour. But nothing is permanent, I may be living in Switzerland in five years, or I may be living in Mexico, or maybe in Japan.

DAB: I understand you’ve been working on a book about James Joyce.

RAW: Well, I was working on a book on Joyce, and I finally decided that for financial reasons, the kind of money you make out of writing scholarly books on Irish writers is not really huge. I’m publishing about a third of the Joyce book together with essays on other writers, under the title Coincidance, and that’s due out any day now from Falcon Press. Meanwhile I’m working on more commercial ventures. There will come a time, sometime in the future, when I will write a whole book on Joyce. Meanwhile, I’ve got a third of a book on Joyce bound together with two-thirds of a book on other subjects.

DAB: What is your fascination with Joyce?

RAW: I could talk all day about that! Joyce was more interested in synchronicity more than any other writer before me, and he influenced me a great deal. My fascination with synchronicity grows more out of Joyce than out of Jung. Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are all about synchronicity, and they came out long before Jung ever wrote anything on the subject. Joyce fascinates me because of many other things. In Ulysses, he was the first one to write a relativistic novel, the first Einsteinian novel. Every other novel before Ulysses had one point of view, which was supposed to be the objective point of view, and in Ulysses, Joyce refuses to give you an objective point of view. He gives you about 54 different points of view, and leaves it up to you to decide which of the various narrative voices you’re going to believe. And I find that a very appropriate style for the 20th Century, it’s entirely compatible with relativity and quantum mechanics . . . the amount of deception and propaganda in the 20th Century world, where you can’t take anything at face value. It’s compatible with modern philosophy, everything from Nietzsche and Wittgenstein on, we’ve learned more and more about how the mind creates its own reality-tunnel; it’s entirely compatible with modern psychology and neurology and cultural anthropology.

I don’t see why anybody is still writing Victorian novels, I think everybody should be writing Joycean novels, to be contemporary, to be compatible with modern science, modern philosophy and modern civilization in general. People who are writing pre-Joycean novels, it seems to me like they’re riding around in a stagecoach instead of using a car or a plane.

DAB: Of all the books you’ve written, how many are novels, 6 or 7 maybe?

RAW: It depends on how you count. If you count the Illuminatus trilogy as one novel, you get a different figure. If you count the Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy as one novel, you get a different figure. If you count the Illuminatus trilogy as three, and the Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy as three, then I seem to have nine novels in print.

DAB: And the other three are Masks of the Illuminati . . .

RAW: The Earth Will Shake, and The Widow’s Son.

DAB: Aren’t those two books part of a trilogy, too?

RAW: No, that’s part of a pentology.

DAB: A pentology?

RAW: Yes, that’s a series of five books.

DAB: And so far two of them have come out.

RAW: That’s right. I’m working on the third, which is called Nature’s God.

DAB: And what is the basic concept behind that series of books?

RAW: Well, that series deals with European, and to some extent, American history, between 1764 and 1824. That was a period in which all the rules changed, everything, the whole Western world went through a total change. We went from feudal, agricultural monarchy to capitalist democracy and industrialism. Everything changed, the style of music changed, we went from Baroque to Romantic, everything changed. Philosophy changed, it was in that period that David Hume’s books appeared, knocking the bottom out of all previous philosophy. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations appeared there, the Declaration of Independence, of course. I’m taking that as a model to show how revolutions work. They work on many levels besides violent revolutions, there are non-violent revolutions, but they’re all tied together. We’re going through a period like that right now, and what got my started writing those novels was to give an example of a previous period that was as revolutionary as the period we’re living through; to show some of the general laws of what happens when society goes through rapid transition. We’re going through a dozen revolutions at once right now, too.

DAB: So the new novels could almost be thought of as an earlier . . . For example, the Illuminatus Trilogy took place in the seventies, right? So the new series takes a similar view, but from an earlier cultural revolution.

RAW: Well, the pentology deals with 1764 to 1824. Masks of the Illuminati deals with the 1890’s to 1914. Illuminatus is set in the 70’s, but has flashbacks to the 1930’s and everything in between the 30’s and the 70’s. The Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy is set in the 80’s and the early 90’s, and when I write a few more and fit them into the pattern , I’ll have a complete history of the Western world from 1764 to 2001.

DAB: That’s quite a feat! Do you have a favorite of the books that you’ve written? I think my personal favorite right now is the Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy.

RAW: Oh, thank you, that’s the one that got more bad reviews . . . you know, that’s about to be reprinted, I’m happy to say. But that got more bad reviews than anything else I’ve ever written, it only got two good reviews I ever saw. The “LA Times” said it was hilarious, multi-dimensional, a laugh a paragraph, something like that. “New Scientist” in England had the other good review, they said it was the most scientific of all science-fiction novels. Everybody else said it was unintelligible, deliberately obscure, pretentious, incoherent, everything they say about Joyce!

DAB: Right, like when Finnegan’s Wake came out.

RAW: Yes, exactly, just like Finnegan’s Wake. As a matter of fact, it’s my attempt to translate Finnegan’s Wake into a quantum comedy. Even the title has the same rhythm as Finnegan’s Wake: Finnegan’s Wake, Schrödinger’s Cat, Finnegan’s Wake, Schrödinger’s Cat, there are all sorts of analogies built in.

DAB: You appeared on a punk rock album by a band called the Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy?

RAW; No, that was the title of the album, the name of the band is the Golden Horde.

DAB: How did you get involved with that project, and what exactly did you do on that?

RAW: Well, they came up to me after a lecture in Dublin, and said, we’re a punk rock group. And I said, yes, I kind of suspected that from the way you’re dressed. And they said, we’d like to have you on our next record. And I said, hey, I’d love that, I’d love to make a punk rock record. Not many men my age get invited to make punk rock records. And I wrote a whole bunch of lyrics, and they picked out the ones they liked, and then they lured me down to the studio to improvise some surrealist poetry in between in the songs, and so it’s a combination of rock and poetry and surrealism and gnosticism. It’s basically Celtic-Gnostic punk rock.

DAB: Is this album available anywhere that you know of?

RAW: It seems to be released on a need-to-know basis. People have found copies of it in the United States. I have seen them, I have autographed them. It’s very hard to find, but not impossible.

DAB; You have another album called “Secrets of Power,” made up of talks you gave . . .

RAW: No, that was a stand-up comedy act I did in a nightclub in England. I’m doing stand-up comedy these days, just because I’ve never done it before. I’ve done stand-up comedy in London, Dublin, New York, San Francisco and a couple of other smaller places I don’t quite recall. I think I’m getting better at it all the time, and I’m enjoying it, I’m having a great time. It’s a tremendous challenge. When you’re doing a lecture, or even a workshop, they don’t have to be laughing all the time. But when you’re in a nightclub, they’ve got to be laughing all the time or you feel like you’re dying up there, and it gives you a tremendous adrenaline rush. It’s the next best thing to skydiving, as far as scaring the hell out of yourself for fun. As Edmund Kean said on his deathbed, Sir Edmund Kean the great British actor, his last words were, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” And it really is, so I enjoy the challenge.

DAB: Leary’s been doing some stand-up comedy, too. Have you seen his act?

RAW: Oh, yes!

DAB: Back to the album: The “Secrets of Power” album is released on the Illuminated Records label. How was that arranged?

RAW: Well. the boys down at Illuminati Headquarters said, Bob, we want you to put . . . no, no, I’m not supposed to reveal that! The cover story is that the people who started the record company named it after my Illuminatus novels. And then when they discovered I was in Ireland, and they were in London, they decided to have me do a record for them. That’s the cover story, anyway, and I’ll stick to that!

Oh, this morning I looked at “Bride of the Monster” for the first time.

DAB: “Bride of the Monster”?

RAW: It’s an Ed Wood movie, he made the world’s worst movies. He made “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” you must have heard of that. “Bride of the Monster” has Bela Lugosi live, instead of his (Wood’s) wife’s chiropractor pretending to be Bela, as in “Plan 9”? This one has Bela Lugosi while he was still alive, and Tor Johnson, the guy who played the sheriff in “Plan 9,” he plays Bela Lugosi’s moronic assistant. Bela plays a classic mad scientist, and it is just as bad as “Plan 9,” it’s incredibly bad! Ed Wood was a backwards genius, he set out to make horror movies and he didn’t know how to do it, and he ended up making, unintentionally, he made the funniest movies ever to come out of Hollywood. Ever scene in this movie which tries to scare you is so stupid that you bust out laughing. Ed Wood is proof that Mencken was wrong. Mencken said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” Well, Ed Wood did go broke by underestimating their intelligence. It is possible, you can underestimate the intelligence of the masses!

DAB: So, you’re a fan of bad science fiction movies?

RAW: Oh, yes. Bad movies are generally just plain bad, and you can’t stand them, but bad science fiction and bad horror is funny. And the worse it is, the better it is, because the less convincing, the more amateurish, the more stupid and clumsy it is, the funnier it gets. Like “Plan 9,” with that immortal line, “The message couldn’t get through because of the weather conditions in outer space.” “Bride of the Monster” has some really wonderful stuff, too. There’s an atomic explosion at the end and the main characters are all standing around, there’s no fall-out, no blinding white light, none of the side effects of a real atomic explosion, just a mushroom shaped cloud and they stand there and look at it. And the chief of police says, “He meddled in God’s domain,” which is probably the corniest line in the history of films, but this together with an atomic explosion that isn’t an atomic explosion, it’s absolutely hilarious. I think there should be an Ed Wood memorial toilet somewhere in Hollywood. He brought movies, he brought his movies down to the crap-house level!

DAB: What about good science-fiction? A lot of your books are considered science-fiction, although they are often hard to categorize. Do you have any current favorite science-fiction writers?

RAW: The guy who wrote Neuromancer,William Gibson. I’d say he’s my current favorite. Phillip K. Dick, but he’s dead, or they claim he is. They took the liberty of burying him anyway. There are people who think Phil isn’t dead, you know.

DAB: Like some people think Jim Morrison isn’t really dead.

RAW: That’s another interesting question. Why did so many photographs disappear from the LA Police Department connected with the Bobby Kennedy assassination?

DAB: One of your recent books is The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about this book.

RAW: I coined the term irrational rationalism because those people claim to be rationalists, but they’re governed by such a heavy body of taboos. They’re so fearful, and so hostile, and so narrow, and frightened, and uptight and dogmatic. I thought it was a fascinating paradox: irrational rationalists. Later on I found out I didn’t invent that. Somebody else who wrote an article on CSICOP, that’s the group they all belong to: Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Somebody else who wrote about them also used the term irrational rationalism. It’s a hard term to resist when you think about those people.

I wrote this book because I got tired satirizing fundamentalist Christianity, I had done enough of that in my other books. I decided to satirize fundamentalist materialism for a change, because the two are equally comical. All fundamentalism is comical, unless you believe in it, in which case you’d become a fanatic yourself, and want everybody else to share your fundamentalism. But if you’re not a fundamentalist yourself, fundamentalists are the funniest people on the planet. The materialist fundamentalists are funnier than the Christian fundamentalists, because they think they’re rational!

DAB: They call themselves skeptical.

RAW: Yes, but they’re not skeptical! They’re never skeptical about anything except the things they have a prejudice against. None of them ever says anything skeptical about the AMA, or about anything in establishment science or any entrenched dogma. They’re only skeptical about new ideas that frighten them. They’re actually dogmatically committed to what they were taught when they were in college, which was about 1948-53, somewhere in that period. If you go back and study what was being taught in college in those days as the latest scientific theories, you find out that’s what these people still believe. They haven’t had a new idea in 30 years, that’s all that happened to them. They just rigidified, they crystallized around 1960.

DAB: The Amazing Randi recently “debunked” Uri Geller, the guy who bends metal. What do you think about the Amazing Randi in particular? I understand that he has investigated some of these faith healers, he’s debunked some of that. So some of the work that he’s done seems to be rational. What would be an example of something irrational that he’s done?

RAW: Well, his whole critique of the research of Plutof and Targ, at Stanford Research Institute. Randi was not there, he was not on the scene, and yet he claims to know what was going on there better than the two scientists who were supervising it. This implies 100% accurate telepathy. He was in New Jersey at the time of the experiments. The only way he could know better than the scientists running the project what was going on in their laboratory is if he had 100% accurate telepathy. Now he’s offering a $100,000 reward to anybody with 100% accurate telepathy; he should give all the money to himself! How else could he know? If he wasn’t there, he can’t know, he’s only guessing, and to the extend that he thinks he knows, and doesn’t realize he’s guessing, that’s what I mean by irrational rationalism. He’s lost all track of reality. He doesn’t know when he’s guessing anymore.

I’ve heard him make charges against scientists that remind me of Joe McCarthy. The only excuse for such things is that such a person doesn’t realize he’s guessing anymore, he thinks any suspicion that crosses his mind must be true. And that’s the only way you can forgive them, because every ethical system has some equivalent to the Bible injunction against bearing false witness against your neighbor. Anybody who goes around charging so many people with being frauds and criminals and whatnot, the only way to forgive them is that they don’t understand the seriousness of what they’re doing. And they believe they are infallible. If he had any sense of fallibility, he couldn’t do such things.

DAB: Let’s talk about the whole New Age movement happening now, Shirley McClaine, crystal healing and all that: Didn’t I hear something about you writing a book about that?

RAW: Yes, I’m writing a book about New Age sewage.

DAB: New Age sewage?

RAW: Yes, I got the idea from William Erwin Thompson, the anthropologist. He pronounces New Age as “Newage” so it rhymes with sewage. And I thought, boy there sure is enough of that around, isn’t there, New Age sewage. Just because there’s a slight chance people may not have read my other books, and may read The New Inquisition, and think I’m only against one type of fundamentalism, I decided to make the sequel to it, an attack on the imbeciles on the other side. And so, I’m going to tear into Ramtha and all these other sages who come back . . . the main thing Ramtha proves is you can be dead 40,000 years and still be a bore. That may be interesting news, but that’s . . . Everything I’ve heard from Ramtha sounds like an editorial from the Reader’s Digest in 1958 or something.

Then there are these ecological loonies who would like to abolish the human race so that the trees could live in peace again. I think they’re kind of funny. Then there’s these animal rights activists who also seem to have a very low opinion of humanity. I don’t know why they don’t all commit suicide, and get rid of the most, I mean, if you hate humanity, you’ve got to regard yourself as one of the prime offenders, because you know yourself better than the rest of humanity. If they have a low view of humanity, they must have a very low view of themselves. I wish they’d remove themselves from the scene and stop annoying the rest of us. I like people, I like humanity.

DAB: Except for the ones who don’t like people?

RAW: Well, I like them, too, I just find them a bit of a drag!

DAB: Is the Pope infallible?

RAW: I regard that as a game rule of the Catholic game. If you want to play the Catholic game, you’ve got to accept that rule. Like if you want to play baseball, you’ve got to accept the rule of the umpire, who is considered infallible. I don’t believe umpires or popes are de facto infallible, it’s just a game rule. I choose not to play the Catholic game. I’d find myself terribly constricted to live in a world where some right-wing Polish schlimazel is supposed to be infallible. I’d sooner accept Randi as infallible than the Pope.

DAB: Don’t you, in fact, hand out Pope cards?

RAW: Oh yes, I do. Kirby Hensley set out back in the 50’s to make every man, woman and child, and other miscellaneous, on the planet a clergy-entity.

DAB: Clergy-entity?

RAW: Yes, well clergy-person has human chauvinism in it, and Hensley got over that very early in his career. After ordaining all sorts of men and women, he started ordaining chimpanzees and parrots, and house cats and all sorts of critters. A friend of mine named Malaclypse the Younger got the idea that it’s not enough to make everybody a clergy-entity, let’s make everybody a Pope. He started printing up Pope cards and distributing them, and I thought it was a good idea, so I started distributing Pope cards too, and there are oh, a couple hundred at least Discordians who are distributing Pope cards.

Only recently, the Vatican announced that Cardinals can give indulgences over television, which raises some interesting theological problems, because if you make a videotape of it when a Cardinal is giving an indulgence and you play the videotape over and over, do you get perpetual indulgence? And then can you join the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in San Francisco? The Jesuits haven’t answered that, yet. But while they’re working on it, I figure, well, if they can do indulgences over television, I can do pontifications over television, or radio. So every time I’m on a television or radio show, I make the whole audience Popes.

As a matter of fact, everybody who is listening to me right now, if they take a deep breath and relax while I say the magic formula, “Spectacles, testicles, brandy, cigars,” they’re all Popes. Everybody listening, they’re all now as infallible as the guy in Rome, or Randi, or Carl Sagan, or the Ayatollah Khomeini, or any other authority on the planet. You’re all equally infallible, and take crap from nobody!

DAB: And they thought they were just listening to the radio!

RAW: Yes, they didn’t know I was about to liberate them totally, did they?

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The Return of Philip K. Dick

Posted on February 1, 1988 by quackenbush | Comments Off

The Return of Philip K. Dick
A Review of Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection

by
Robert Anton Wilson

from Magical Blend #18, February 1988

I tell you these things for what they are worth. They are true things; they happened. –VALIS

Of all the books I’ve read in the past year, none has impressed and moved me quite as much as Scott Apel’s Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection. The story Scott tells is about as uncanny as a kangaroo in a Mozart string quartet, but it is all based on fact.

I assume that readers of Magical Blend will be aware of who Phil Dick was and of the mysteries and controversies that have made his final years as enigmatic as John Kennedy’s last six seconds in Dallas. Briefly, for the benefit of those who aren’t hip to the Dick Phenomenon:

Philip K. Dick was one of the most prolific and also one of the most disturbing of recent American science fiction writers. His books, by ordinary literary standards, are better written, more humanistic and insightful, more “artistic” and, above all, more philosophically profound than almost anything you can find in the sci-fi field. Also, the majority of them were more frightening, or at least more unsettling, than most current novels, inside or outside of science fiction. You always had the feeling that his books might bite you.

Phil Dick was a man obsessed with the basic questions of philosophy and epistemology: What is real (if anything)? How much of our experience can be trusted? Do we really know anything about the strange universe in which we live or are we just guessing? Reading him was about as soothing as the 11 o’clock news and almost as likely to drive you to booze or downers. Or, if that is hyperbole, Phil at least had the same capacity as the TV news to make you wonder if you had somehow gotten onto the wrong planet.

Those who don’t read science fiction have probably encountered one of Phil Dick’s esoteric fables in film version. The gruesomely poetic (or poetically gruesome) Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford, was based on Phil’s novel,Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The most Dickian things in the movie are the Christian symbolism sensitive viewers have noted (the dove and the dying android) and the ironic implication that some androids may be more human than some humans. Phil, in fact, was fascinated by the Turing problem, as it is called in computer circles: how can you tell a sufficiently advanced Artificial Intelligence from a “real” human being? This was related, in Phil’s philosophical musings, to the classic problem of ontology: how much of perceived “reality” is an illusion of our own minds?

Blade Runner also contains one of Philip K. Dick’s major obsessions: the image of a United States under totalitarian control, but of such a subtle nature that most citizens aren’t even aware that democracy has died and has been secretly replaced by fascism. You might say that, while many radicals shout that “extreme” view in their rhetoric, Phil never howled about it in political speeches, but quietly, in his fiction, brooded over the possibility that it could happen or it might even have happened already. He gets under your skin. He makes you wonder if the 11 o’clock news isn’t just a preview of the Bela Lugosi classic that follows it: maybe our country really is like that?

This obsession grew after the mysterious break-in at Phil’s house on November 17, 1971. This was preceded by what Phil, at the time, feared was an onset of paranoid thinking on his part. He thought he was being watched for many weeks. He tried to evaluate this “irrational” thinking and worried that he had done too many drugs back in the wild 1960s. Then it happened. Persons unknown broke into Phil’s house, stole many of his papers, and set off a small bomb to destroy other of his records and documents. Phil assumed, at the time, that some government agency was responsible (he had been active in the Peace Movement for many years) but, in retrospect, this is just one more weird piece of the jigsaw puzzle of Phil’s last decade.

After exploring basic questions about reality and illusion in his fiction for over 20 years, and then wondering for three years who had trashed his house and why, in 1974 Phil Dick had just about the most mind-blasting “mystical” experience to hit anybody in our times. Phil spent the rest of his life (he died, tragically, of a sudden stroke in 1982 at the age of only 53) trying to understand in some rational way this 1974 experience which was, in its intensity and content, no more rational than country that has a Statue of Liberty as its symbol and compulsory urine testing as its sacrament. Phil’s last and best novels are all attempts to make sense of the 1974 Epiphany at least in artistic terms; these mind-bending epics are Radio Free Albemuth, VALIS and The Divine Invasion.

Phil’s 1974 “illumination” (or whatever it was) began while he was under the influence of sodium pentothal, given by a dentist during an extraction. On returning home, Phil had a sudden flood of memories involving a past life in ancient Rome. Later, other memories about that “past life” came back to him repeatedly, in intervals between sleep and waking. Other visions involved seeming contact with extraterrestrials; seeming contact with another Philip K. Dick in a parallel universe where the United States of America did not exist and was replaced by the Portuguese States of America; seeming experiences of channeling in which Phil knew ancient languages he had never studied; and, at one point, a night-long and encyclopedic vision of the history of painting which seemed to be a part of a transmission from Russian parapsychologists to interstellar telepaths. Those are the highlights of the less crazy parts of the original experience.

Other parts Phil always found impossible to verbalize or conceptualize, but he was left with the strong intuition that a divine being of some sort, a new Buddha or Christ, was about to appear on this planet. This was reiterated in subsequent visions, less chaotic and more traditionally religious, that came to Phil in later years.

Those locked in a Fundamentalist Materialist reality-tunnel will, of course, say that Phil Dick simply went goofy. Phil himself seems to have entertained certain worries on that score, and only his robust and healthy sense of humor saved him from being terrified about what happened in 1974 and some of the strange after-tremors in later years. Besides, as a man who was both an original philosophical thinker and a creator of scientific romances, Phil was able to generate so many “explanations” of his altered states of consciousness that he never lapsed into believing any one explanation was necessarily the true and only explanation.

If at various times Phil Dick thought that perhaps he had undergone a temporary psychotic break, after all, he also thought, other times, that maybe he had telepathically contacted extraterrestrials, or had gotten caught in a PSI channel through which Russians and extraterrestrials are communicating (without notifying the rest of humanity). He also hypothesized that the megavitamins he was taking in 1974 might have “blown a hole” as it were in the corpus callosum, allowing vast amounts of non-verbal data from the holistic right hemisphere of his brain to pour into the analytical left hemisphere, which tried to make verbal maps of a Noah’s flood of visual/transpersonal information that does not lend itself to coherent verbal description. (I like this alternative in some ways. The first maps Phil made of his experience were the maps a science fiction writer would naturally use in trying to define the undefinable.)

An oddity of the extraterrestrial hypothesis is that Phil specifically made the ETs denizens of Sirius when he wrote the semi-fictionalized VALIS. Make of this what you will. Phil never identified his “guides” with Sirius in any of his conversations. Nonetheless, I was having experiences in 1973-74 which, at the time, I thought were telepathic communications from Sirius. (This “psychotic episode” or transcendental communion with Higher Intelligence is recounted in my book, Cosmic Trigger.) Later, one psychic reader told me I was actually channeling an ancient Chinese Taoist alchemist; but another psychic reader told me I was channeling a medieval Irish bard. Growing less bold in my theorizing as I get older, I now tend to think, most of the time, as Phil tried to think most of the time, that I was merely receiving signals from the right hemisphere of my own brain. I still wonder about Sirius occasionally, however.

It is interesting that, also in the 1970s, English mainstream writer Doris Lessing began writing science fiction novels about ETs from Sirius who are intervening on Earth to save us from a calamity of our own making. In the third of these novels, The Sirian Experiments, Ms. Lessing tells a tale that parallels Phil Dick’s experiences and my own in dozens of ways. When I met Ms. Lessing in 1983, she said she had never read anything by Mr. Dick or myself.

I guess we better file that under the Funny Coincidence department. I almost wish we could file it under the It Never Happened department.

I must emphasize that a great deal of the time, Phil Dick suspected that he had received a religious vision, and that his training in scientific and modernistic modes of thinking was blocking him from understanding fully the transcendental gnosis he had been granted. He was increasingly preoccupied with Gnostic Christianity in his last years.

Many of the themes of the 1974 Epiphany and of later visions have a Gnostic flavor but are also pregnant with numinous Jungian archetypes. The “head Apollo,” symbol of artistic intuition, was prominent in many of Phil’s visions. Various forms of female Messiahs appear in his fiction, as artistic analogs of this image. The cryptic but unforgettable mantra or koan, “The Buddha is in the park,” connected to both the new Messiah and the Head Apollo, came in a hypnogogic dream and later haunted Phil. The nonsensical and/or prophetic phrase “King Felix” — connected by synchronicities to Felix the Cat, the reborn messiah, and an odd printing alignment in one of Phil’s early novels — came to unify all opposites, like a Jungian archetype of reconciliation.

Personally, although I only met Phil a few times, I formed the strong opinion that he was as sane as most writers or poets, and saner than a great many I could name. Certainly he was never as grandiose or cranky as William Blake, or as pompous as Walt Whitman, nor seemed seriously unbalanced to his friends, like Christopher Smart did (to mention just three other writers who were granted trans-human visions).

When Phil died in 1982, much of the sci-fi world was engaged in debating whether his visions came from extraterrestrials or Russian mind-researchers or some kind of real “God” out there or just from “the collective unconscious” of Jung. Then things got really strange.

A letter Phil had written in 1981, circulated by him to about 70 friends, began to be reproduced and distributed in all sorts of places. In that letter Phil states that Jesus has been reborn and lives on the island of Sri Lanka. This religious proclamation is very hermetic, however, in that Phil also says Jesus is incarnated in the whole biosphere of Earth and then distances himself from the message of the letter by attributing the vision of the new Christ to Horselover Fat, a character in Phil’s novel, VALIS. (But then Horselover Fat clearly is Philip K. Dick, or part of him…)

While Phil Dick fans were trying to figure that one out, the post-mortem mysteries began. Rumors circulated all over the U.S. and Europe that Phil was not dead at all; some claimed that he had faked his death and gone into hiding, for unknown reasons. Some even insisted they had seen Phil — in Boston, in Amsterdam, in all sorts of odd places. About the only place he wasn’t reported was the men’s room in the Pentagon, but then, if he showed up there, those bastards would never tell us, would they?

The Philip K. Dick Society, a serious group of friends and fans of Phil’s, has investigated Phil’s death rather thoroughly, and there is no doubt that he is, medically at least, really dead. The people who claim to have seen him wandering about are either liars, or hallucinators, or are seeing his ghost. (Take your choice.)

Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection is largely a personal account of D. Scott Apel’s personal involvement with Phil and Phil’s mystical ambience. The first, and longest, part is an in-depth interview by Scott and Kevin Briggs in which Phil Dick discusses his Epiphany of 1974 with intelligent skepticism, good humor and flashes of brilliant wit; but, despite his lack of grandiosity and his willingness to consider all possible theories, Phil clearly indicates that he really suspects the experience was of crucial importance, not just to himself but, possibly, to the future of humanity. Some form of Higher Intelligence is trying to tell us something, using Phil as one of its channels — maybe. When you think he is about to accept the gnosis literally, Phil retreats again to agnosticism.

These pages are not only intellectually exciting but deeply moving; never before has a man with such a truly religious vision tried so hard to be intelligently skeptical and remember that the emotional depth of an experience is no proof of its objective validity. Nietzsche, who claimed the mystics were never honestly analytical and philosophical about what happened to them, would have had to admit that this criticism did not apply to Phil Dick.

This long, fascinating interview is followed by a hitherto unpublished story by Phil, “The Eye of the Sibyl.” Like Phil’s last novels, this is one more attempt to make an artistic analog of the transcendental visions he had experienced, and it is interesting both as science fiction and as a parable, similar to the teaching stories of the Sufis, in which suprarational matters are conveyed by indirection. A Priest of the Sibylline oracle in Rome is transported forward in time, becomes a little boy in Berkeley named Phil Dick, grows up to be a science fiction writer, and gradually remembers that he is actually an ancient Roman living in modern America. The conclusion indicates that extraterrestrials have caused this time-warp because America needs a science fiction writer who understands fully the doom that comes inevitably to imperialistic nations. In fact, the story is based on another of Phil’s visions, between sleep and waking, about his earlier life in ancient Rome.

In that vision of time-travel from Rome to America, Phil got a view of the extraterrestrials who were manipulating him. He says they looked like the ones described by Betty and Barney Hill in that famous UFO contactee case.

This means they also look like the little jokers who kidnapped Whitley Strieber, according to his recent book, Communion. Students of occultism are quite familiar with these mischievous midgets, because Aleister Crowley painted one of them over 50 years ago. Crowley called them “Enochian entities,” because he contacted them by using the “Enochian calls” – Cabalistic formulas (in no known language) which Crowley learned from the notes of 17th century sorcerer, Dr. John Dee. Jungians, no doubt, would say these dwarfs are archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Another short piece follows, “A Dream of Amerasia” by Ray Faraday Nelson, a gifted sci-fi writer who had once started to collaborate on a novel with Phil Dick, called Ring of Fire. Both got involved in other projects and that novel was never written. This essay describes a dream in which Phil’s ghost appeared to Mr. Nelson and encouraged him to sit down and write Ring of Fire. While this is less eldritch (as Lovecraft would say) than the reports of those who claim to have seen Phil’s ghost walking around in broad daylight, in this context it gives one pause, does it not? It is implied that Phil, from beyond the grave, will continue to act as collaborator. Ray says he is going to write that novel – which concerns an alternative universe in which Japan won World War II and occupies California. (Like the “Portuguese States of America” in Phil’s 1974 vision, such a world might be as real as our own, according to the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model which increasing numbers of young physicists now embrace.)

A much longer section, “The Dream Connection” by Scott Apel again, takes up in a sense where Ray Nelson leaves off. Like Ray, Scott encountered Phil’s ghost in a dream — but it did not just happen once in Scott’s case. It happened over and over again. Each dream was followed by one or more Jungian synchronicities, all of them weird enough to convince Fundamentalist Materialists that Scott is as mad as Phil was or else is a damned liar. Most of these synchronicities have a surrealist humor to them (especially the ones involving Disneyland) that reminds me powerfully of the novels and personality of Dick…

I know Scott Apel quite well and I am totally convinced he is not crazy and not a liar. In any case, such webs of dream-and-synchronicity are very common in certain groups; for instance, patients in Jungian therapy, acid-heads, students of yoga or Cabala, and artists and poets are particularly prone to this kind of experience. But even scientists have occasionally endured such spooky interminglings of dream and reality (Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel laureate in physics, is a notable case).

Scott Apel concludes that the evidence of his dreams and synchronicities, the analogous case of Ray Nelson’s dream-contact with Phil, and a few ambiguous seances in which Scott attempted to contact Phil Dick directly, all add up to a good argument for the survival of the individual consciousness after death. You can think what you want about that. The data remains fascinating whatever way you choose to interpret it.

One of the most suggestive anecdotes in The Dream Connection happened before Phil’s death, by the way. Phil had once told Scott of a dream in which he was told that he would be contacted by a certain woman who was an agent of an underground society of humans who are in communion with the extraterrestrials who are manipulating events on this planet to save us from catastrophe. Just before his death, Phil said he had finally received a letter from a woman who fit the description of the promised messenger from Higher Powers. Nobody has yet shed light on whether Phil met her or what happened if he did meet her. (In Radio Free Albemuth, the Phil Dick character does meet her, and then they are both killed by the Secret Police…)

Concluding matter in this anthology contains a letter about Phil’s philosophy by Theodore Sturgeon, a copy of Phil’s Gnostic epistle about Christ being alive in Sri Lanka, and an afterward by myself in which I give a Jungian and somewhat Buddhist interpretation to the events Scott prefers to interpret within the models of Christian Spiritualism. The metaphors may be a matter of taste. Those trained in shamanism would say that Phil Dick was a man of Power and his Power lingers in the world his body has left.

There are more books about Phil Dick coming out every few months, it seems. Few of them, so far, have shown as much insight and empathy as this anthology by Scott Apel. For a while at least, Scott’s book will be the definitive work on the science fiction writer who became as much of a mind-bender as his own most imaginative novels.

What are we to make of the case of Philip K. Dick? I have thought a lot about that since Phil first told me of his “out of body/out of mind” experiences at a sci-fi convention in 1977, and my comments in Scott’s book are not my final thoughts by any means. Somehow, I keep circling back to the allegory in VALIS — a variation on the theme we have already encountered in “The Eye of the Sibyl.”

In VALIS, the last 2000 years of history never happened. Certain evil forces, never quite defined, have placed us in deep hypnosis and we do not realize that we are actually still living in the Roman Empire. One man, Horselover Fat, discovers the truth, but his friends all think he is crazy and try to persuade him to be “cured.”

Yet, while these brainwashed subjects continue to hallucinate Richard Nixon and the CIA and moon-rockets and Bubble Gum Rock and so forth, Fat alone sees what is really happening: the Roman Empire survives, and slavery and madness and sadism survive as they always have. We are governed by Caligula and his kith and kin; the people of gnosis (the awakened) are being thrown to the lions every day. We do not see the mass murder going on, but retain dream-distorted images of part of the genocide: the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon…

Somehow I think all Phil’s theorizing about extraterrestrials and parallel universes were attempts to put into words the same urgent insight that Horselover Fat conveys by insisting, over and over, “The Empire never ended.”

Similarly, in Radio Free Albemuth the United States appears to have been taken over by an anti-Communist dictatorship, and all sorts of Communists or alleged Communists are being locked up in concentration camps. This sounds like a ghastly parody of the Joe McCarthy era, but then comes the typical Phil Dick switch. The dictatorship is actually run by the Communists and the persons exterminated are not Communists after all but Christians. Grok? The Empire never ended.

If I may offer my own exegesis: Phil’s visions are telling us that people who claim to be Christians (and especially the ones who claim to be anti-Communist) are not true Christians at all; the true Christians, or gnostics, have been driven underground and hide below the surface of our civilization, which is a Black Iron Prison to those who have awakened enough to see a bit of what is really going on. The last 2000 years have been a nightmare, and in a sense never happened. The Redeemer is alive, either in Sri Lanka, or in the whole ecosphere (Phil gave both versions in the same letter). This summary contains the parts of Phil Dick’s revelation that seemed most important to him. I think Phil’s vision is most important to all of us, whether we accept it literally or interpret it as an allegory.

Scott Apel has done a marvelous job of taking us to a Disneyland of the Illuminati, and Phil Dick’s spirit is indeed alive and brilliantly shining in this mind-boggling book.

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The Semantics of “Good” & “Evil”

Posted on January 30, 1988 by quackenbush | Comments Off

The Semantics of “Good” & “Evil”

by Robert Anton Wilson

from Critique: A Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics #28, 1988

The late Laurance Labadie once told me a parable about a king who decided that everytime he met somebody he would kick them in the butt, just to emphasize his power. My memory may have elaborated this yarn a bit over the years, but basically it continues as follows: since this maniac wore a crown and had an army, people soon learned to tolerate being kicked fairly often, and even began to accept it philosophically or stoically, as they accept taxation and other impositions of kings and governors. They even learned to bend over as soon as they saw the king coming.

Eventually, the king died and his successor naturally continued the tradition and kicked anybody he chanced to meet. Centuries passed, and, in the usual course of things, the nobility as a whole had demanded, and acquired, the same “right” as the king: any baron could kick anybody of lesser rank, and the knights could kick anybody except the barons or the royal family, etc. A large part of the population spent most of its waking hours facing a wall, crouched over, waiting for the next boot in the bottom.

The coming of democracy, in that amazing parallel universe, could only be understood according to the traditional thought-forms or acquired mental habits of the strange people there. Democracy therefore meant to those peculiar folks that anybody could kick anybody else as long as the kicker could prove that he (or she) had a bigger bank balance than the person receiving the boot in the rump. Within the context of the gloss or grid or reality-tunnel in that world, “democracy” could not have any other thinkable meaning. (See Berger and Luckman’s The Social Creation of Reality if this sounds fantastic to you.)

Of course, at first everybody rejoiced in the Constitution of the new democracy, for now “justice” (as they understood it) had been achieved: if you had good health and good luck, you could eventually accumulate enough money in a bank to have the “right” to kick as many people as had the “right” to kick you, and if you were especially shrewd or especially lucky, you could rise to the level where you could kick almost everybody and nobody whoso ever could kick you.

Of course, eventually Heretics appeared in that world, as in ours. These people wanted kicking abolished entirely, and they refused to admit that this constituted a “wild and radical idea.” They said it just seemed like “common sense” and “common decency” to them. Naturally, no sane, sound person would take such loonies seriously for a moment. In order to avoid thinking about the arguments of the Heretics, the sane, sound citizens developed a vocabulary to dehumanize and discredit them. Anybody who objected to being kicked regularly was called a “whiner,” a “malcontent,” a “coward,” a “queer,” a “gutless Liberal,” a “loser,” a “defective,” a “deviant,” a “nut,” a “bum” etc.

You see, the people in that world had been conditioned to believe that if you pinned such labels on Heretics, then it was not necessary to think about any of their arguments. (I will pass over in silence the creepy possibility that certain contributors to Critique seem to have arrived from that goofy alternative reality with their ideas of what constitutes reasonable debate unchanged during spatio-temporal transformation.)

Larry Labadie had his own point to make in creating that parable: as an anarchist, he believed the State Socialists were carrying over the worst features of Capitalism in their proposed Utopia. To me, however, the parable has a more general meaning, which I would state as follows: If people have lived with something every day of their lives, and especially if they know it has continued for many centuries, it becomes almost impossible to question it without sounding like some kind of pervert or eccentric, or, at best, like an intellectual wiseacre who can be suspected of just playing head-games or merely “toying with ideas.” At worst, the sane, sound domesticated people will decide you want to destroy the world or overthrow the deity or intend some atrocity equally drastic, and they will conspire to silence you.

To illustrate: after two centuries, most educated people can understand the philosophy of Deism as expounded by Voltaire. Historical research makes abundantly clear, however, that most of Voltaire’s contemporaries did not understand Deism at all; references to him as an “atheist” can be found continually, not just in writers with polemical intent, but also in many who evidently thought they were writing objective expository prose. It seemed impossible at that time for most persons to comprehend that denying the Christian God (G_c, for convenience) did not mean denying any and all possible Gods (G_x).

Midway between Voltaire’s time and our own, Theodore Roosevelt, in a celebrated speech, referred to Thomas Paine as a “dirty little atheist.” Contemporary accounts describe Paine as clean and tall, and his own writings express a Deist, not Atheist, philosophy. It seems that c. 1900 many still found it hard to recognize that between Christian Orthodoxy and Atheism many other possible philosophical positions — Aristotelian “excluded middles” — can be found by the independent enquiring mind. To proceed from philosophical kindergarten to graduate school in one step, consider this more advanced illustration: between 1900 and c. 1926, quantum physicists discovered that certain Aristotelian “laws of thought” simply do not apply to the sub-atomic level. Specifically, one cannot meaningfully speak of a sub-atomic “particle” as a thing-in-itself possessing indwelling “properties’ apart from the observer and the observerational apparatus. Worse: a sub-atomic “particle” cannot even be called a “particle” without the quotation marks, since it acts like a wave as often as it acts like a particle.

As I say, this sub-atomic non-Aristotelianism emerged from experiments and analysis in the first quarter of this century. The subsequent half a century has confirmed that the sub-atomic world acts in an even more non-Aristolelian fashion than appeared at first, and no attempt to hammer the data into an Aristotelian framework has succeeded.

What has emerged as the consequence of this? As Labadie’s parable of the alternative world indicates, the consequence seems to be that quantum mathematics not only seems weird to laypersons but even to the leading physicists themselves, who have trouble understanding each other. If a scientific system cannot be stated in Aristotelian terms, nobody in our society is quite sure how it *can* be stated. To return to our metaphor, quantum philosophers seem to be trying to think of a world without arse-kicking while their minds are subtly programmed by a world in which such arse-kicking remains a predominant feature.

Thus, the famous or infamous “Copenhagen Interpretation” of Neils Bohr and his students (c. 1926-28) seems to me to mean that we cannot talk meaningfully about any absolute Aristotelian “reality” apart from us, but only about the relative “realities” we existentially-experimentally encounter and/or measure — but that Interpretation of the Copenhagen Interpretation must be described as only the way it seems to me. According to Dr. Nick Herbert of UC-Santa Cruz, the Copenhagen Interpretation means that no such animal as “reality” can ever be found at all, at all. I do not mean to exaggerate: in _Quantum Reality_, Dr. Herbert actually states the Copenhagen view as “There is no deep reality.” But, then, he dislikes the Copenhagen view, and has called it “the Christian Science school of physics.” Prof. Mermin of Columbia, defending the Copenhagen Interpretation, does sound as radical as Dr. Herbert, attacking it; Mermin says bluntly that “the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody is looking at it.”

John Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist, also actually writes bluntly that the Copenhagen view means “nothing is real” on one page of his book, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, but more restrainedly he says later that “‘reality’ in the everyday sense” appears not useful in physics. Nobel laureate Eugene Wiegner, meanwhile, says that the Copenhagen position proves that we create the manifestations we observe in a laboratory (by designing the experiments that produce those manifestations) and therefore cannot apprehend anything as itself but only as it appears to us. Or, rather, I *think* that describes what Wiegner says. Wiegner’s critics claim that he says we create “reality” by thinking about it, which makes the old man sound like he has overdosed on acid or too many Shirley MacLaine TV specials.

John von Neumann, meanwhile, suggested in 1933 that quantum systems should be mathematically considered as having three possible states (yes, no and maybe, in nonmathematical language) in contrast to the two states of Aristotelian logic (yes and no.) Prof. David Finkelstein still argues that this makes more sense than any other way of talking about the sub-atomic world, but the majority of physicists think von Neumann merely performed a mathematical “stunt” with no physical significance.

The dominance of kicking in the thoughts of Labadie’s alternative world, and of Aristotelian logic in our world, indicates the difficulty humans experience in trying to perceive, or communicate their perceptions, outside the grid or gloss of the conditioned reality-tunnel of their “tribe” or society.

For instance, we often hear, and perhaps ourselves say, “It is raining.” Such a sentence illustrates what Bertrand Russell called the domination of subject-predicate grammar over Western “thought” or philosophy (or perception?). “It” seems to appear in that sentence only because subject-predicate grammar demands a subject for the verb-form “is raining.” If you ask yourself what that mysterious “it” denotes, you will find the question rather puzzling (unless you believe in a primitive rain-god like Zeus or Jehovah . . .) The same subject-predicate structure underlies most pseudo-scientific thinking, such as that of Moliere’s physician who said opium makes one sleepy because it contains a “sleep-producing property.” Most folk-explanations of human behavior notoriously fall into this category – e.g. a woman does not work because she has a “laziness-producing demon” in her or “is” “lazy,” where a functional analysis would seek a crisper, less demonological explanation in a depressed economy, in nutritional or endocrine imbalances, or, most likely, in some syngergetic combination of social and internal dynamics.

In general, traditional Western thought, especially on the folklore level, posits indwelling Aristotelian “essences” (or spooks) to explain virtually everything, where science – and, curiously, Eastern philosophy tend to find explanations in functional relationships described phenomenologically in terms of observed interactions. This may explain why science and Eastern philosophy appear equally absurd (or equally nefarious) to those raised in the traditional Western Christian reality-tunnel.

Specifically, we in our Western world have been conditioned and/or brainwashed by 2000 years of Christian metaphysics about “Good” and “Evil,” and to question that system of thought or reality-tunnel — or to offer a phenomenological alternative — creates a high probability (of about 99.97%, I estimate) that nobody will understand what one wishes to communicate. Nonetheless, I intend to take that risk here. I will experience great surprise and no small delight if any of the negative comments this elicits show any comprehension of my actual meanings.

To begin with, it seems to me that, as Nietzsche said, naive or intuitive concepts of “good” and “bad” have a different history than, and can otherwise be distinguished from, hypothetical indwelling spooks like “Good” and “Evil.” As probably used by our earliest ancestors, and as used by most people today, “good” and “bad” have the same meanings as they have for any other animals: “good” means “good for me” and “bad” means “bad for me.” Thus, a dog “knows” somehow that foul-smelling food should be considered “bad for me;” an educated human knows further that some sweet-smelling food may act “bad for me” also. All animals, including humans, “know” at birth, and continue to “know” — unless (in the case of humans) counter-conditioned or brainwashed — that hugging, cuddling, petting and oral and/or genital embrace definitely act upon the organism in ways “good for me.”

From this pre-metaphysical or phenomenological or operational point of view, I quite readily and easily identify many events or “things” in space-time that appear “good for me” (e.g. tasty food, freedom of the press, clever comedy, great painting, love-making, Beethoven, my word processor, money arriving regularly in large doses, certain drugs and vitamins, the above mentioned hugging-petting-fusion etc., etc.). I also observe easily many “things” or events in space-time that appear “bad for me” (e.g. Fundamentalist Christianity, Communism, Naziism, all other attempts to interfere with my liberty, toxic food, toxic waste, horror movies, certain drugs etc., etc.). I also observe that many things that seem “bad for me” seem “good” or harmless for others.

Continuing on this existential-phenomenological basis, it next appears to me that “good for me” and “bad for me” must be considered relative functions, in several senses. What appears “good for me” often appears “bad” for somebody else; or what appears “good for me” may sooner or later have consequences “bad for me;” or what appears “good for me” when age 20 may no longer appear “good for me” at age 50; and some recreations I judge “good for me” may later clearly appear “bad for me.” In general, “good for me” always remains relative to my knowledge or ignorance at the time I make the judgement, and I know from experience that I judge wrongly at times. (Notably, although hugging, cuddling etc. always appear “good for me,” the consequences of picking the wrong partner or the wrong time may clearly emerge later as unequivocally “bad for me.” This probably underlies most sexual superstitions, phobias and fixations.)

Some animals seem at times genetically programmed to recognize, some of the time, “good for my pack” or even “good for my species,” as documented in e.g. E. Wilson’s _Sociobiology_, Dawkin’s _The Selfish Gene_ and similar works. With or without such genetic programming as hidden agenda, many humans clearly show the capacity to think about, and aim for, that which appears “good for my species” or even (recently) “good for the biosphere as a whole.” Such judgements still remain relative to the general welfare of the judger, relative to location and history in space-time (what appears good for the foxes will probably appear bad for the chickens) and, even in the case of “good for the biosphere” relative to the knowledge or ignorance of the judger.

Before proceeding, I beg the reader to notice that if human semantics had remained on this primitive phenomenological level, and the relativity of judgement remained obvious to all, negotiation and compromise would perforce play a larger role in history than they have hitherto, and violent “crusades” and religious/ideological wars would have played a comparatively smaller role. It always appears possible to negotiate about what appears good and bad to us in concrete situations; but it becomes increasingly impossible to negotiate successfully when metaphysical “Good” and “Evil” enter the universe of discourse. The tendency becomes then to fight, and to fight as violently as possible, as the blood-curdling history of Christian dogmatism clearly shows, and as such secular religions as Naziism and Communism have proven again in our own century.

By comparison, the Confucian ethic remains phenomenological; Confucius explicitly said that his system “was not against human nature” and compared it to “loving a beautiful flower or hating a bad smell, also called “respecting one’s own nose.” Taoism and Buddhism differ from Confucius chiefly in greater awareness of the relativity of judgements (and the possibility of trans-ego perception or detached-from-ego perception); but neither contains anything like the Occidental metaphysical concept of “Good” and “Evil.” Indeed, some of the most famous passages in Taoist and Buddhist scripture hurl ridicule at any metaphysical notions of nonrelative “Good” and “Evil” — notions which apparently emerged occasionally in the Orient, among eccentrics, as Oriental pantheism occasionally appears in the Occident, among eccentrics.

Nietzsche, as most people know, believed that metaphysical “Good” and “Evil” not only contradict most intuitive organismic evaluations of “good for me” and “bad for me” but appear to have been devised with the intent of contradicting (and confusing) such naive or “natural” reactions. (Most priestly notions of sexual “Good” and “Evil,” notoriously contradict and confuse naive or natural organismic evaluations, for instance.) In other words, Nietzsche claimed that priests invented “Good” and “Evil” to obtain *power over others* — to persuade people not to trust their own evaluations; to place all trust, instead, on the priests themselves as alleged representatives of a hypothetical gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and mass called “God.” It appears to have been Nietzsche’ opinion that since this hypothetical gaseous vertebrate could not be located in normal sensory-sensual (existential) space-time, the priests, in effect, intended to teach people, “Don’t trust yourself; trust us” or, more bluntly still, “Don’t think; we’ll do the thinking for you.”

According to this analysis, political tyrants, who only control our bodies and actions, exhibit less raw “lust for power” than Popes or Ayatollahs or other priests who try to control our thoughts and judgements, i.e. to invade our inmost sanctuary. (See Nietzsche’s _Will to Power_ for an extensive analysis of this phenomenon.)

Whatever one thinks about this Nietzschean attempt to psychoanalyze the motives of the ancient priestcraft, it appears historically that the “Good” and “Evil” metaphysics, as distinguished again from simple organismic judgements of “good for me” and “bad for me,” has functioned to give power, and always more power, in horse doctor’s doses, to priests and preachers of all hues and persuasions. (It seems easy to think of a Buddhist or Taoist monk or Confucian gentleman-scholar as possibly living in isolation, but a Christian clergyperson, by definition, seems to be somebody who tells *other people* what to think and what to do., i.e. has *power* over then usually based on raw fear and threat, e.g. “You will go to Hell if you doubt me.”) After 2000 years of Christianity, most people accept being told what “is” “Good” and “Evil” by an alleged expert just as automatically as the people Labadie’s parable accepted being kicked.

Does history tend to justify Nietzsche’s view that this system of otherworldly metaphysics (interpreted by alleged experts on that alleged other world) leads to “degeneracy,” “decadence,” “sickness,” “neuroses,” “lunacy,” “epilepsy” etc.? Well, I don’t know about epilepsy (which now appears organic or genetic rather than sociological) but Nietzsche’s other terms all refer to the prevalence in Christian society of what he called “resentment” and “revenge” — envy or rage against those who live without Christian metaphysics, coupled with ferocious desire to punish or destroy such people. It seems impossible to real a page of St. Paul without encountering this kind of resentment-and-revenge compulsion almost immediately, and you can hear it on TV any night by turning the dial to the Fundamentalist channels in the high 40s, where the leading evangelists will usually be found fomenting hatred against non-Christians (when not tearfully confessing whatever personal sins or crimes have previously been unearthed and well-publicized by the pagan media). The Christian theologian, historically, seems a person intent on terrorizing others into doing what he wants them to do and thinking what he wants them to think, or killing them if they will not submit.

The animal, the child, the pre-literate society, the Confucian, the Buddhist, the Taoist, and most of the world live in reality-tunnels in which “good” and “bad” remain demarked by organismic evaluations of “good for me/good for my tribe” and “bad for me/bad for my tribe.” Only the Christian sects – and such secular religions as Naziism and Communism which may be considered, as the historian Toynbee considered them, late Christian heresies – contain the idea of absolute “Good” and “Evil” and the encitement to violence implied in such a concept.

It appears to me, then, that by “turning everything upside down” (Nietzsche’s phrase) – i.e. by denying organismic and relative evaluations of “good” and “bad” and replacing them with definitions of “Good” and “Evil” decided by some priestcraft or some Central Committee – we have strayed far from sanity and into the realm of fantasy and madness. Concretely, when I decide to class something as “good” or “bad,” I remember that I have done the classifying, and also that I have no overwhelming evidence of personal infallibity; I take responsibility for the judgement, in the Existentialist sense, and I remain open to learning, and to changing my mind, if new data indicates that I should revise my evaluation. But if I classify something as “Good” or “Evil” in the metaphysical sense, defined by some priesthood or Party Line, I do not “take responsibility,” I become virtually a ventriloquist’s dummy through which the priests or ideologists speak and act, and I abdicate all possibility or learning more or revising my mistakes. It does not seem terribly exaggerated when Nietzsche calls this “turning everything upside down” because in submitting to such an abstract system and denying my own perceptions, I have reversed evolution and “resigned” as it were from the human race. I could easily be replaced by a robot or servo-mechanism at that point. Humans generally do not behave like robots unless they have been indoctrinated with some metaphysical system like Christianity or its close relatives, Judaism and Islam, or its late heresies, Nazism and Communism.

If this essay can escape being regarded as intemperate polemic or wild exaggeration, I must explain in more detail the concrete functional difference between organismic “good” and “bad” evaluations — “respecting one’s own nose” in the Confucian sense – and metaphysical “Good” and “Evil.” Then my point will perhaps appear clear, even to those who most vehemently reject it.

I propose that the organismic, intuitive, primitive, “naive” evaluations of “good for me or my gene pool” and “bad for me or my gene pool” — even when condensed into the simpler “good” and “bad” – reflect our actual situation as bodies moving in space-time. Evolution has given surviving species an assortment of genetic programs that roughly inform each individual organism about “good for me” and “bad for me.” These genes do not appear infallible – as witness the dog who drank spilled paint because paint smells more like good food than like bad food. These genetic programs may tolerate modification by learning experience, in dogs, cats and other higher mammals, including some (non-dogmatic) human beings. Empirical learning itself may be modified by careful reasoning from inferences, etc. All of these (genetic programs, learning, reasoning) reflect an endeavor to gather the data for an accurate map of our position in space-time and of what profits or harms us or our tribe or species. On the other hand, the metaphysical doctrines of absolute “Good” and “Evil” do not reflect our trajectories as bodies in space-time in any respect. Metaphysics and its language structure reflect rather a fantasy-world or world-created-by-definitions which does not meaningfully refer to our concrete existential history in space-time at all. If this point appears as recondite or hermetic as the most inscrutable pages of Heidigger, I will try to make it more simple with the following two columns of examples.

I	II
The electron is a wave.	The electron appears as a wave when recorded by this instrument.
The first man stabbed the second man with a knife.	The first man appeared to stab the second man with what appeared to be to be a knife.
The car involved in the hit-and-run accident was a blue Ford.	In memory, I think I recall the car involved in the hit-and-run accident as a blue Ford.
This is a fascist idea.	This seems like a fascist idea to me.
Beethoven was better than Mozart.	I enjoy Beethoven more than Mozart.
This is a sexist movie.	This seems like a sexist movie to me.

The first column consists of statements in ordinary English, as heard in common usage at this primitive if of evolution. I believe this column contains the same structural implications as Aristotelian logic and the Christian metaphysics of “Good” and “Evil.” I also believe this column reflects a fantastic view of the world in which we assume ourselves not “personally” involved in the act of evaluation but paradoxically able to discern the spooky, indwelling “essences” of things.

The second column consists of parallel statements rewritten in E-prime, or English-prime, a language proposed for scientific usage by such authors as Alfred Korzybski, D. David Bourland and E.W. Kellogg III. E-prime contains much the same vocabulary as standard English but has been made isomorphic to quantum physics and modem science generally) by abolishing the Aristotelian “is” of identity and reformulating each statement phenomenologically in terms of signals received and interpreted by a body (or instrument) in space-time. In short, believe that E-prime contains the same structural impications as science, radical Buddhism (Zen, Mahayana) the naive evaluations of “good” and “bad” that seem natural to most people who have not been indoctrina Christianity or its totalitarian modern derivatives.

Concretely, “The electron is a wave” employs the Aristotelian “is” of identity and thereby introduces the false-to-experience notion that we can know the indwelling Aristotelian “essence” of the electron. “The electron appears as a wave when recorded with this instrument reformulates the English sentence into English-prime, abolishes the “is” of identity and returns us to an accurate report of what actually transpired in space-time, namely that the electron was constrained by a certain instrument to appear a certain way.

In English we talk blithely about things or entities that may or may not exist, and often about things that a never be proven to exist or to not exist; in E-prime we can only talk about what has actually been experienced and by what method it has been experienced. Aristotelian English encourages our tendency to wander off into worlds of fantasy; E-prime brings us back to concrete phenomenological recording of what we actually experienced in space-time.

Similarly, “The first man stabbed the second man with a knife,” even though lacking the formal “is” of identity appears Aristotelian English to me, because it assumes the non-involvement of the observer and of the observer’s nervous system. The proposed E-prime translation, “The first man emed to me to stab the second man with what seemed to be a knife,” scientifically includes the instrument (the speaker’s nervous system) in the report, recognizes phenomenology, and, incidentally, often happens to accord with brute fact. (This example refers to a well-known experiment in General Psychology, in which a banana in the first man’s hand performs the “stabbing” but most students, conditioned by Aristotelian habits, nonetheless “see” the knife they expect to see. This experiment dramatizes the fact that hallucinations can be created without hypnosis or drugs, merely by taking adantage of our habit of thinking we see “things” when we only see our brain’s images of things.)

“The car involved in the it-and-run accident was a blue Ford” again contains Aristotelian absolutism and ignores the instrument used — the brain. The E-prime translation reminds us that the brain often “remembers” incorrectly.

“This is a fascist idea” contains the Aristotelian “is” and asserts that the speaker has the mystic ability to discern the hidden “essence” within or behind phenomena. The E-prime translation reminds us that the speaker has actually performed an evaluative act in interpreting signals apprehended by his or her body moving in space-time.

“Beethoven is better than Mozart” contains the usual Aristotelian fantasy about indwelling spooks or essences. The E-prime translation, “I enjoy Beethoven more than Mozart” places us back in ordinary space-time where the speaker’s ears and brain can be recognized as the source of the evaluation, and we realize that the statement actually refers to said ears and brain and not to the two collections of music seemingly discussed.

“This is a sexist movie” (standard English) again assumes a fictitious uninvolved observer mystically perceiving inner essences, while “This seems like a sexist movie to me” (E-prime) returns us to Earth and ordinary face-time by including the existential fact that the observer has been involved in making the evaluation.

It has been claimed, by Korzybski, that the neurolinguistic habit of regularly using E-prime trains the brain to avoid common errors of perception, uncritical inferences, habitual prejudices, etc. and to show increased capacity for creative thought and greater enjoyment/involvement in life. This has not been proven, since few have taken the trouble systematically to retrain themselves in E-prime and they have not been exhaustively tested by psychologists. However, it remains my impression that those scientists and laypersons most apt to use “the spirit of E-prime” (if not always the exact letter) do exhibit the positive traits claimed by Korzybski, or at least exhibit these traits more than a random sample of the population.

On the other side, those most apt to use and over-use the “is” of identity, historically, make up the major part of the world’s long, tragic list of fanatics, paranoids, Crusaders, Inquisitors and Ideologists, and have responsibility for the bloodiest and most horrible atrocities recorded in human annals.

In summary, I suggest that existence never contained “Good” and “Evil” – or “inches” or “pounds” or “ergs of energy” or “degrees Fahrenheit” – until complicated primate brains (“human minds, “in more polite language) put them there as systems of classification. I suggest further that the “naive” view of “good for me or my clan” and “bad for me or my clan” contains all that can meaningfully be said about our actual experience in space-time, and that metaphysical “Good” and “Evil” speak fantastically of mythic realms beyond any possible verification or refutation in space-time.

I will scarcely find myself surprised if this article inspires heated and fervent rebuttals. I await such ripostes with equanimity. I do hope, however, that nobody raises the spectre of the old, hackneyed argument that without the metaphysical concept of absolute “Evil” we will lose our desire or will to protect ourselves against such monstrous gentry as Hitler, Stalin, Jack-the-Ripper, etc. Nobody but Ahab himself ever seems to have believed the whale was absolutely “Evil” (for biting off his leg while he was trying to kill it) and one does not have to regard tigers, polio microbes or other natural entities phenomenologically “bad for us” as also metaphysically and absolutely “Evil” in order to combat them. It does not take metaphysical dogma to fight the patently nefarious; it only takes quick wits in spotting the “bad for me” as soon as it appears on the horizon. Animals literally do this, and humans figuratively do it, by the method of Confucius: respecting one’s own nose.

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Tagged Nietzche

Art as Black Magick and Moral Subversion

Posted on January 15, 1988 by quackenbush | Comments Off

Art as Black Magick and Moral Subversion

by Heinrich von Hankopf

from Critique: A Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics #27, 1988

Bob Banner’s long review of David Tame’s The Secret Power of Music (Critique, Vol. VI, No. 1,2, Spring/Summer, 1986; #21/22) certainly goes a long way toward exposing the diabolical, sinister, unhallowed, un-Christian and un-American influences within Jazz and Rock, but I feel that all this merely scratches the surface of the Greatest Conspiracy of All Time – the revolutionary, socialistic, immoral, demonic, hellish, mind-corrupting, occult and Satanic influence of virtually all the so-called “art” of the world.

Mr. Tame points out that Rock derives from Jazz which possibly derives from voodoo, and that voodoo is certainly evil because some people who dislike Blacks have alleged that Voodoo involves animal and (sometimes) human sacrifice. This should, of course, immediately lead us to suspect equally sinister influences at work in the music of Mendelssohn and Mahler, who were both Jews, since some people who dislike Jews have alleged that the Jewish religion involves the sacrifice of humans — Christian infants, according to most of these sources – and certainly the Old Testament makes clear that animal sacrifice was once part of the Jewish religion. If you listen closely, the melodies of Mendelssohn and Mahler reek of eerie, eldritch and nameless influences, strongly suggestive of such blasphemous rituals.

In this unholy context, it is alarming to note the major reputation in the modern world of George Gershwin, who was not only Jewish but admittedly incorporated jazz techniques into his music, thereby invoking Papa Legba, Erzulie and the other terrible voodoo gods and goddesses that Mr. Tame warns us against–and quite possibly summoning Yahweh, the bloodthirsty monster in the Old Testament, as well.

(Incidentally, although Liberal Historians will argue that there is no credible evidence of human sacrifice by Voodooists and Jews, and animal sacrifice may be only part of their distant past – pace, Mr. Tame – there is no doubt at all that the Jews killed Christ. In 2000 years they have not yet produced a convincing alibi for this atrocity, and the obscene, drug-mad and subversive “sick comic” Lenny Bruce offered only the weak, and contradictory, excuses, “I am often asked why we killed Christ. What can I say? Maybe it was one of those wild parties that got out of hand. I don’t remember. Maybe we killed him because he wouldn’t become a doctor.”)

But there are worse depths to explore, as everybody knows by now, Mozart and Haydn were both Freemasons – and Nesta Webster, the Abbe Barruel, the United Methodist Church of Scotland and the majority of Conspiracy researchers of the past two hundred years all agree that Freemasonry is intimately allied to Zionism, atheism, secularism, scientism, humanism, skepticism, socialism and almost everything else conservatives dislike. (I also think I heard the Rev. Gene Scott – or was it the Rev. Pat Robertson? —read a pamphlet one night on TV proving Freemasons are the fiendish cabal who have taken cream out of our restaurants and replaced it with that sinister white powder that “coincidentally” resembles the hellish drug cocaine and always gets spilled when you try to open the microscopic plastic packets in which it is served.) In any event, the melodies of Haydn and Mozart reek of sensuality, and the Ninth Degree of Freemasonry justifies murder and treason, as every Conspiracy book for two centuries will tell you, and as Stephen Knight recently documented again in The Brotherhood.

Beethoven was not only a Freemason, too, like his libertine heroes Haydn and Mozart, but also closely allied with the most infamous of all Masonic orders, the monstrous Illuminati of Bavaria–a fact discussed at length in Maynard Solomon’s scholarly and objective biography, Beethoven. Solomon also shows that Beethoven’s first major work, The Emperor Joseph Cantata, was directly paid for by the Illuminati. This Satanic, subversive, diabolical, socialistic piece of music glorifies the Emperor Joseph von Hapsburg, whom it hails as “the foe of darkness and superstition,” because he closed the Christian schools of Austria and replaced them with modernistic secular humanist education–a sure sign of the most insidious kind of Illuminati conspiracy afoot, as the late Gary Alien will certainly agree. (The von Hapsburgs continue to plot mischief. Johann von Hapsburg financially supported the foul, noisome and probably Gnostic Priory of Sion conspiracy, as you can read in Holy Blood, Holy Grail; and the current scion of the family, Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, is a Bilderberger!!!)

Beethoven continued to associate with Freemasons and Illuminati throughout his Vienna years, and much of his music contains clearly Promethean and revolutionary (i.e. Satanic) impulses. Like the libertine (and foul-mouthed) Mozart, Ludwig patronized whores and probably died of syphilis.

Antonio Vivaldi, the hero of some naive musical conservatives–who recognize and deplore the anarchist tendencies of Romantics like Mozart and Beethoven — appears to present a pleasant surface, but there are erotic, cthonic, pantheistic and lascivious elements in some of his concerti if you listen closely, and it is known that he led a shameful life. Although a Catholic priest (which perhaps gave him access to holy wafers for Black Masses?), he had so many mistresses that the Church removed him from all priestly duties and banished him from Naples to Ireland, which was then so isolated that further news of his amours would not scandalize the Continent. Even now they say in Dun Laoghaire and Baile-atha-Claith that in Father Vivaldi’s day you couldn’t throw a brick over a wall without hitting one of his bastards.

Richard Wagner was not only a Freemason but was probably a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis (according to Aleister Crowley, who should know about that, being Outer Head of the O.T.O. himself.) A close study ofParcifal will clearly demonstrate that, as Crowley claimed, the whole opera is an adaptation of the ninth degree (Sex Magick) rite of the O.T.O. and the insertion of the lance into the cup has Tantric, erotic, prurient and Black Magick symbolism (just as Mozart’s Magic Flute is based on the blasphemous third degree of orthodox Freemasonry, which replaces Jesus by the Widow’s Son, Hiram, as the martyred savior). The cthonic, Cthuhoid Evil of Wagner’s works are indicated by the fact that Hitler said National Socialism was directly inspired by them–as confirmed by Adolfs close friend, August Kubizek, and Wagner’s widow, Cosima. Although some still quarrel over numbers, it seems evident that National Socialism practiced human sacrifice on a scale far beyond that attributed to Voodooists or Jews by even the most avid xenophobes, and the Nazi State even came close to the record genocides committed by the Christian churches.

After Wagner, all is chaos and the formless void, as I am sure Mr. Tame will agree. The atonalities of the Jew Mahler and the ambiguous Schoenberg; the barbarisms of the homosexual Tchiakovsky; the aleatorisms of Bartok or John Cage–the whole tendency of modem music bears the stamp that Mr. Tame has clearly recognized as socialistic, anarchistic, barbaric, Satanic and un-American. It all reminds one of the inhuman antedeluvian frenzies Lovecraft has so terrifyingly portrayed in “The Music of Erich Zann.”

The anthropologist William Irwin Thompson has said that Hard Rock represents “music played on the interface between noise and information.” Such has been the sick, decadent, socialistic tendency in much of our music since those damnably weird late string quartets of the Illuminatisymp Beethoven, but it is also the tendency of modem art in general – and, as I shall show, of art throughout history, although some artists are more clever at concealing their seductive, socialistic, un-American and hellish purposes than others have been.

The warped perspectives and unreal “psychedelic” colors of the Marxist and probably syphilitic Vincent Van Gogh are a clear illustration that decadence is not confined to music. This demoniac Dutchman also poisoned his brain with absinthe, a drink now illegal because it acts like a hallucinogenic drug in the LSD family. Even Hitler, steeped in occultism, found Van Gogh decadent and ordered his paintings banned, saying in warning to those who might imitate such unwholesomeness, “Anybody who paints the sky green shall be sterilized at once.” It is also noteworthy that Van Gogh was expelled from the clergy for his socialist and subversive acts–he once gave his bed away to a poor family who owned none–and, like the fiendish musicians we have been discussing, he often consorted with whores.

Paul Gaugin heartlessly deserted his wife and family, went to live with nonwhite savages (whom he preferred to white civilized men and women) and painted, like his friend Van Gogh, in a suspiciously psychedelic style. Cezanne was wilder still, and some contemporary critics claimed that he must have had an eye disease, just as Beethoven’s deafness may explain the unholy, kakadaemoniac barbarism of his later music. (But all who received their sex education in a good Christian school know what causes blindness and deafness. Ludwig was a lifelong bachelor.)

The Dadaists produced accidental art by combining elements at random; Tristan Tzara even produced “poems” by picking words out of a hat while blindfolded. This is non-Aristotelian, certainly, and therefore, like modernism in general, un-American. Picasso was an openly avowed Communist and, although there is no clear evidence of overt membership in the BILDERBERGERS, the number of his mistresses and concubines undoubtedly surpasses that of King Solomon, Aleister Crowley or even George Washington. Like Van Gogh, Gaugin and the whole “modernist” movement, and like Jazz and Rock, Picasso’s art definitely “plays on the interface between noise and information.” He actually painted a Jazz band once, and he said, in defense of decadence, “One must run faster than beauty, even if it appears one is running away from it.” He even deliberately imitated the primitive art of Africa instead of the art of nice white people, and if Mr. Tame looks closely I am sure he will see Voodoo symbolism in some of Pablo’s Cubist renditions of tortured bulls and sexually frenzied women. Evil is everywhere, for those whose eyes are open and ready to see it.

Jean Cocteau, 23rd Grand Master of the ill-famed Priory of Sion, was homosexual and his paintings, poetry and films are as non-linear, non-Aristotelian and therefore barbaric as the works of his friend Picasso. Cocteau said specifically that “To be an artist is to be a suspicious character” and “The true artist is always a revolutionary.” He helped launch Surrealism, with all its barefaced celebration of erotic, African, primitive, irrational and overtly Communist elements. Andre Breton revealed the anarchistic and sociopathic impulses behind Surrealism blatantly, hanging a lurid sign in the gallery that inflicted the first exhibit of Surrealist art on the unsuspecting and previously sane and decent public; the sign, seemingly humorous, gave a clear warning of what was to come. It said:

DADA IS NOT DEAD!

WATCH YOUR OVERCOAT!

Salvador Dali differed from the other Surrealists only in preferring Hitler to Communism, and once offered the typically Surrealist rationalization, “Hitler has three balls and four foreskins.” Dali also said, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad” and insulted us with such degenerate un-American paintings as the Cthulhoid, monstrous, unspeakable Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone and the vile, vulgar, lewd and infamous Great Masturbator. (Although not a lifelong bachelor like Beethoven, Dali has lived in so-called “celibacy” since the death of his wife.) Worse yet: he once gave a lecture inside a diving suit, making it impossible for the audience to hear him.

Nor is any of this a peculiarly modern development. Mark Twain once pointed out (in “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism”) that the very term Old Masters “is a contraction, an abbreviation.” Raphael painted so many voluptuous nude females that Sir Henry Merivale called his paintings “fit furnishings for a brothel” and the Dublin critic, de Selby, has said “The man must have had one hand on the paintbrush and the other on his Willy,” it would be no exaggeration to call him the Playboy Centerfold artist of his day. Why the Feminists and the Moral Majority are not crusading to have his paintings burned is a mystery to me. Renoir was even worse; even the libertine Gaugin said, “This man paints with his penis.”

Michelangelo, another of the endless list of homosexuals and therefore un-American artists, painted and sculpted many raunchy male nudes with the same lubricity Raphael leeringly depicted in his lurid renditions of naked women. The same sodomistic Michelange1o physically assaulted the Pope when His Holiness objected to the obscenities and blasphemies on the celling of the Cistine Chapel, which still embarrass church authorities today. Leonardo was such a raving queen that mothers hid their boy children in the cellars when they heard he was in town; the second Christ in his egregious The Last Supper clearly indicates that he was privy to the secret Gnostic teaching about Jesus’s twin brother and lends weight to the claim that, like Cocteau, he was a Grand Master of the abhorred and loathesome Priory of Sion. The life of the whoremonger Fra Filippo Lippi is memorialized in Browning’s scandalous poem of that name.

In fact, the eminent critic George Jean Nathan, in & celebrated essay, “Art as a Corruptor of Morals,” argued seriously that it was impossible to find a major artist anywhere in history who was not a rascal or scoundrel of some sort. The record of the poets and novelists, is particularly shocking to decent, God-fearing Americans. Sappho was a lesbian. Homer must have led a secret life because nothing is known about him, leaving us to wonder what enornities he took such care to hide – Catullus and Propertius show overt signs of sado-masochism (as do, more recently, Swinburne, almost all English novelists and, of course, de Sade and Masoch.) Ovid wrote bawdy and indecent verse, lived an un-Christian life, and was exiled for gross indecency. Dante imported drugs to Italy for money, had an erotic obsession with a little girl younger than Lolita, and was exiled for political conspiracy. Villon was a whoremaster and thief. Malory of the Morte d’Arthur was jailed for robbery and rape.

Shakespeare’s first child was born only six months after the wedding and his love poems are not written to his legally wedded wife at all–but some to a promiscuous Negress and some to a Gay Boy seemingly named Willy Hughes, perhaps because of the size of his virile member. Swift, although a clergyman, had two or three mistresses, was rumored to be an atheist, wrote treasonable pamphlets under various pen-names, and authored several works so vile that unexpurgated editions are seldom encountered; one of his “poems” has the perverse refrain, “But Celia, Celia, Celia shits.” Defoe was a spy, a thief and a blackmailer. Lewis Carroll shared Dante’s preference for little girls rather than grown women and perverted his mathematical treatise on symbolic logic by including weird, Surrealist, mind-corrupting pseudo-proofs that lead to such conclusions as “some dowagers are thistles.”(A few commentators have wondered, as we all should, about the hookah or hashish pipe in Alice in Wonderland and the magic mushrooms that also appear.)

Baudelaire, Gautier and Flaubert all smoked hashish (as Mark Twain also did, at the instigation of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who seems to have also seduced Robert Louis Stevenson into this vile habit, while the latter was in San Francisco.) It is no surprise that Baudelaire and Flaubert both had mistresses, and that both were prosecuted for gross indecency. Some of Twain’s drug-warped works were so vile that his wife persuaded him not to publish them, and others were so blasphemous and indecent that they were withheld from print by his family for over 70 years. Melville and Whitman were both bisexual, with a strange passion for sailors, and Poe was a drunkard and drug-abuser. Wilde was another bisexual and in the poem “To Liberty” and the essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” bluntly advocates anarchist and pacifist principles. Yeats, who managed to be an anarchist and a fascist at the same time, belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the same Black Magick society that spawned the infamous Aleister Crowley. Yeats wrote one poem, “Easter 1916,” glorifying socialist revolutionaries and another, “The Second Coming,” prophesying a “rough beast” (Crowley?) who will replace Christ in the New Aeon. In addition to his membership in the diabolical Golden Dawn, Yeats also joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, direct ancestor of the terroristic Irish Republican Army of today. Joyce admired Wilde, was also an anarchist and lived in sin with a peasant girl for 27 years before he finally grudgingly married her (only to ensure that his bastard children would receive the royalties to his books after his death). Like Yeats, Joyce was once associated with the Theosophical Society, founded by the hashish-fiend Blavatsky, who despised Christian orthodoxy and espoused ecumenicism and World Government. Ezra Pound, a friend of both Yeats and Joyce, was a fascist and lived in a menage a trois with a wife and a mistress; he collected books on magick and shows an unwholesome sympathy for Gnostic immanentalism. The influence of the non-linear, relativistic, non-Aristotelian and therefore un-American experiments in prose and poetry by these two arch-conspirators, Joyce and Pound–who blatantly promoted each other’s works and sneeringly satirized the simple and decent literature of more wholesome minds–has been poisonous and omnipresent ever since. Joyce and Pound can be found as major influences in the poetry of the Jewish homosexual Jazz fan Alien Ginsberg, the New Deal “liberal” Charles Olson, the Black Revolutionary Leroi Jones &c and in the prose of the homosexual Punk Rock fan and drug addict William S. Burroughs, as well as in the brutal Hemingway, the decadent Beckett, the socialistic Steinbeck, the alcoholics Faulkner and Fitzgerald etc.

The record grows increasingly tedious and distressing. Like George Jean Nathan in “Art as a Corruptor of Morals,” I will not examine the shocking careers of the actors and opera singers at all, but merely refer you to the police records, wink knowingly, and pass on. The simple fact is that artists as a group tend to be totally unacceptable in polite society, unruly and un-Christian in behavior, and look at things from weird personal angles that seldom have anything in common with the views of decent, ordinary people. If I may risk a Joyceism, most people are like Mr. Tame, quite tame, but most artists are like Mr. Wilde, quite wild.

This brings us back to Dr. Thompson’s remark about “the interface between noise and information.” I am sure that Thompson was using the terms in their technical sense in mathematical communication theory. Noise, in this theory, is chaotic, erisian, stochastic; information is structured, orderly and “harmonious.” It is immediately clear that the wild will always prefer noise and the tame will always prefer information; but there is a paradox here. Shannon, the creator of mathematical information theory, demonstrated that if a signal is too “rich” in information, it will *appear at first* to be noise. The conventional mind, it appears, requires redundance to identify information, and suspects noise where the amount of new information (creativity) is inordinately high.

But where ordinary domesticated humans fear the noisy and chaotic, the artist is always attracted to them, suspecting that they may contain hidden information which only appears “noisy” because it is “a shocking revaluation of all we ever been” in Eliot’s phrase. This is why Nietzsche defined art as a synergy of Apollonian and Dionysian elements–that is, of rational order and irrational exhuberance, or of the “classical” and the “romantic”–in short, of the interplay of noise and information, the familiar and the unfamiliar, valuation and revaluation. As Pound said somewhere, what the public loves, because it is familiar, is precisely what the creative artist is bored with now. However, popular and seemingly ordinary books or paintings, adored by the public and boring to the creative minority, were or appeared chaotic and noisy when they were first produced. Yesterday’s Dionysian rebel is today’s Apollonian norm, and today’s erisian chaos is tomorrow’s boring cliché.

In this dialectic of noise and information, the artist is always trying to seduce the public away from its habitual perceptions into new and startling states of awareness. Burroughs, the greatest and therefore the most sinister of modern writers, has stated the case with brutal frankness: “Whomever makes a strong impression on you is a vampire and will possess you.”

Mr. Tame’s fear of certain kinds of music is only one example of the public’s general fear of artistic anarchy and creativity. The artist-vampires are always trying to lure straight, square citizens into coming away from their familiar reality-windows to look through new and startling windows that show a strange and bizarre new world. This is why Kenneth Burke declared all art to be “perspective by incongruity,” the symbolic equivalent of an electrical shock or a psychedelic drug. It is for this reason that every State, every Church and every conservative philosopher from Plato onward has feared novelty and originality in art, and has tried to control it with the strictest possible censorship. For those who wish a totally Apollonian world, with all the fecund and “dangerous” Dionysian elements buried in that part of the unconscious which Jung called the Shadow, this is the sound policy and the safe politics. (Only those who share the scientistic Jungian-Freudian view that the Repressed always returns explosively, can challenge this.)

In short, art like science is innately revolutionary and unwholesome. A new breakthrough in art, like a new scientific theory or a new technology, always transforms the world in dangerous and unpredictable new directions. This is sufficient reason for all sane, sound, domesticated people to fear and loathe the artistic personality. Those courageous conservatives who dare to declare their opposition to scientism should now be brave enough to recognize this fact and take a firm, uncompromising stance against artism also.

Ten years ago in Berkeley, California, an old woman died. Her landlord, whom I knew, had to enter the home after the police had removed the body, to check up on how much cleaning and refurbishing would be needed before he could place the house on the market again. He had heard from neighbors that the woman never was seen to go out, but he was not prepared for what he found. There were no electric lights; when bulbs burned out, the woman had not replaced them. The accumulated clutter and trash of at least 15 to 18 years was everywhere. All shades were drawn and all shutters closed. The woman had lived for perhaps two decades in the urban equivalent of a cave.

I think I understand that old woman. She had created her own reality-tunnel and she had hermetically sealed it so that no alien signals could penetrate her shields. She was safe from the “vampires” who might make an impression on her. The great conspiracy in mind-manipulation and consciousness expansion which is art, and the thousand and one other conspiracies old women worry about, could not get through to her. She was alone. She was safe. She was self-enclosed.

I suggest that Mr. Tame and certain other contributors to CRITIQUE should seriously consider this old woman’s example. Nobody knows how many metaphysical conspiracies are afoot in the world, how many mind-manipulators are out to get us, how terrifying the world is when you consider that Satan is not only subtle, insidious and tireless, but also very often quite plausible, according to some of the best-known passages in Holy Writ. Perhaps the safest course is to follow the old woman’s path of isolation, create our own caves, and hide out until we are ready to die.

(this article posted across usenet by Dan Clore)

—————————————

Letters to the Editor from Critique: A Journal Questioning Consensus Reality, #28
Dear Editor,

I really enjoyed CRITIQUE #27 like every issue before. I appreciate the new size and the improving layout. I had some good laughs reading Heinrich Von Hanfknopf’s review of your review of David Tame’s SECRET POWER OF MUSIC. By the way, HANFKOPF is a rather unusual German name. HANF is the German expression for the now illegal substance you can use for making paper, cloth or joints. KOPF just means head. Is it much far away to suspect Mr. R.A. Wilson exploring covertly the boredom of Mr. Tame’s Correct Answer Machine? Anyway, I always enjoy Mr. Wilson’s witty pieces. Though I still presume that Timothy Leary was in the beginning a tool of the Russel-Wells-Huxley network, introducing drug use on mass-scale not for liberation but for mind control. Mr. Wilson’s scribbling always gives me a fresh look on things and prevented me even sometimes from falling into the fundamentalist trap. Thanks for that. In the case of drugs I prefer the view presented by Phillip K. Dick in A SCANNER DARKLY. This book was really a breakthrough for me. Having seen so many zombies myself (sometimes by looking into the mirror), having experienced so many drug-induced coercive behavior patterns (I call it the Woodstock/Altamont Syndrome), I came to the conclusion that in certain societies drug use is indeed harmful to the majority of users, plunging them into self-destructive or just stupid reality tunnels instead of freeing them. Reading A SCANNER DARKLY I found out that seeing the dark side of it doesn’t mean you have to lose your humor and forget about the goodness (the divine spark) of the people involved. However, with the coming of the mind machines we will hopefully find a way to deal properly with the two sides of our brain.

A last word: Please Mr. Editor, stay on the edge, don’t read HEIDI.

Thomas Fink

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Dear Editor:

My elation felt over the new shape of “Critique” Journal was shortened by finding in it the deplorable article by “Hanfkopf” “Art as Black Magick.” Well, what can you expect from a “Hanf-” (cannabis, hemp, hashish, marijuana) “-kopf (head), an “acid head” plain and simple. If you want to know about Louisiana Medical Marijuana Doctors and the effects of medical marijuana, you can check it out here!

I am quite certain that this cannabis freak is unable to produce one work of art apart from looking for recreational marijuana near me, be it music or painting or sculpting. Yet he scandalizes great artists in a way that has nothing to do with critique–it is just slander. Why are you dirtying your magazine with such?

Especially outrageous I find on p. 54: “…evident that National Socialism practiced human sacrifice on a scale far beyond that attributed to Voodooists or Jews–and the Nazi State even came close to the record genocides committed by the Christian Churches.”

You as the editor had the power to cut out this incredible piece of insane calumny. You must know better that during the NS time in Germany such crimes as “genocide” (planned extermination of humans) did not occur. And that “human sacrifice” idiotic charge would offend the last aboriginal tribe somewhere in darkest never-neverland. Against Germans anything goes, right? There is no need for probity and accuracy? Just mouth anything that comes to poisonous minds–the calumnies come thick and fast against Germans since 74 years now, beginning with the Belgian children’s hands chopped off by the Kaiser’s soldiers, we have had nearly everything that can possibly be thought up by professional liars and “Hemp Freaks.” Voodooism, human sacrifice, this halfwit “Hanfkopf” even draws composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) into the slime: You print it.

No, my friend, things in “Nazi” time were absolutely different, and I know because I was there, born 1914. And Germans can walk proud. In the name of all Germans–I am offended, Mr. Banner. Our patience is worn out. We now strike back with the truth, against vilification.

Oscar W. Grussendorf

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Posted in Essays

Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective

Posted on January 15, 1988 by quackenbush | Comments Off

Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective

by Robert Anton Wilson

from Critique: A Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics #27, in 1988
reprinted in Email to the Universe

Our esteemed editor, Bob Banner, has invited me to contribute an article on whether my politics are “left” or “right,” evidently because some flatlanders insist on classifying me as Leftist and others, equally Euclidean, argue that I am obviously some variety of Rightist.

Naturally, this debate intrigues me. The Poet prayed that some power would the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us; but every published writer has that dubious privilege. I have been called a “sexist” (by Arlene Meyers) and a “male feminist . . . a simpering pussy-whipped wimp” (by L.A. Rollins), “one of the major thinkers of the modern age” (by Barbara Marx Hubbard) and “stupid” (by Andrea Chaflin Antonoff), a “genius” (by SOUNDS, London) and “mentally deranged” (by Charles Platt), a “mystic” and “charlatan” (by the Bay Area Skeptics) and a “materialist” (by an anonymous gent in Seattle who also hit me with a pie); one of my books has even been called “the most scientific of all science-fiction novels” (by New Scientist physics editor John Gribbon) and “ranting and raving” (by Neal Wilgus). I am also frequently called a “Satanist” in some amusing, illiterate and usually anonymous crank letters from Protestant Fundamentalists.

I can only conclude that I am indeed like a visitor from non-Euclidean dimensions whose outlines are perplexing to the Euclidean inhabitants of various dogmatic Flatlands. Or else, Lichtenstein was right when he said a book “is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out.” Of course, we are living in curved space (as noted by Einstein); that should warn us that Euclidean metaphors are always misleading. Science has also discovered that the Universe can count above two, which should make us leery of either/or choices. There are eight – count ’em, eight – theories or models in quantum mechanics, all of which use the same equations but have radically different philosophical meanings; physicists have accepted the multi-model approach (or “model agnosticism”) for over 60 years now. In modern mathematics and logic, in addition to the two-valued (yes/no) logic of Aristotle and Boole, there are several three-valued logics (e.g. the yes, no and maybe Quantum Logic of von Neumann; the yes, no and po of psychologist Edward de Bono; etc.), at least one four-valued logic (the true, false, indeterminate and meaningless of Rapoport), and an infinite-valued logic (Korzybski). I myself have presented a multi-valued logic in my neuroscience seminars; the bare bones of this system will be found in my book, The New Inquisition. Two-valued Euclidean choices – left or right of an imaginary line – do not seem very “real” to me, in comparison to the versatility of modem science and mathematics.

Actually, it was once easy to classify me in simple Euclidean topology. To paraphrase a recent article by the brilliant Michael Hoy [Critique #19/ 20], I had a Correct Answer Machine installed in my brain when I was quite young. It was a right-wing Correct Answer Machine in general and Roman Catholic in particular. It was installed by nuns who were very good at creating such machines and implanting them in helpless children. By the time I got out of grammar school, in 1945,1 had the Correct Answer for everything, and it was the Correct Answer that you will nowadays still hear from, say, William Buckley, Jr.

When I moved on to Brooklyn Technical High School, I encountered many bright, likeable kids who were not Catholics and not at all right-wing in any respect. They naturally angered me at first. (That is the function of Correct Answer Machines: to make you have an adrenaline rush, instead of a new thought, when confronted with different opinions.) But these bright, non-Catholic kids – Protestants, Jews, agnostics, even atheists – fascinated me in some ways. The result was that I started reading all the authors the nuns had warned me against–especially Darwin, Tom Paine, Ingersoll, Mencken and Nietzsche.

I found myself floating in a void of incertitude, a sensation that was unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable. I retreated back to robotism by electing to install a new Correct Answer Machine in my brain. This happened to be a Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine, provided by the International Socialist Youth Party. I picked this Machine, I think, because the alternative Correct Answer Machines then available were less “Papist” (authoritarian) and therefore less comfortable to my adolescent mind, still bent out of shape by the good nuns.

(Why was I immune to Stalinism – an equally Papist secular religion? I think the answer was my youth. The only Stalinists left in the U.S. by the late ’40s were all middle-aged and “crystalized” as Gurdjieff would say. Those of us who were younger could clearly see that Stalinism was not much different from Hitlerism. The Trotskyist alternative allowed me to feel “radical” and modern, without becoming an idiot by denying the totalitarianism of the USSR, and it let me have a martyred redeemer again a I had in my Catholic childhood.)

After about a year, the Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine began to seem a nuisance. I started to suspect that the Trotskyists were some secular clone of the Vatican, whether they knew it or not, and that the dogma of Papal infallibility was no whit more absurd than the Trotskyist submission to the Central Committee. I decided that I had left one dogmatic Church and joined another. I even suspected that if Trotsky had managed to hold on to power, he might have been as dictatorial as Stalin.

Actually, what irritated me most about the Trots (and now seems most amusing) is that I already had some tendency toward individualism, or crankiness, or Heresy; I sometimes disputed the Party Line. This always resulted in my being denounced for “bourgeoisie tendencies.” That was irritating then and amusing now because I was actually the only member of that Trot cell who did not come from a middle-class background. I came from a working class family and was the only genuine “proletarian” in the whole Marxist kaffeklatch.

At the age of 18, then, I returned to the void of incertitude. It began to seem almost comfortable there, and I began to rejoice in my agnosticism. It made me feel superior to the dogmatists of all types, and adolescents love to feel superior to everybody (especially their parents – or have you noticed that?). Around the same time as my Trotskyist period, I began to read the first Revisionist historians, whom I had been warned about by my high school social science teachers, in grave and awful tones, as if these men had killed a cat in the sacristy. My teachers were too Liberal to tell me I would go to Hell for reading such books (as the nuns had told me about Darwin, for instance), but they made it clear that the Revisionists were Evil, Awful, Unspeakable and probably some form of Pawns of the Devil.

I recognized the technique of thought control again, so I read all the Revisionists I could find. They convinced me that the New Deal Liberals had deliberately lied and manipulated the U.S. into World War II and were still lying about what they did after the war was over. (In fact, they are still lying about it today.)

The Revisionist who impressed me most was Harry Elmer Barnes, a classic Liberal who was a til of a Marxist (in methodology) – i.e., in his way of looking for economic factors behind political actions. I was amused and disgusted by the attempt of the New Deal gang to smear Professor Barnes as a right-wing reactionary. Barnes, in fact, was an advocate of progressive ideas in education, economics, politics, criminology, sociology and anthropology all his life but the New Deal Party Line had smeared him so thoroughly that some people have heard of him only as some cranky critic of Roosevelt and assume he was a Taft Republican or even a pro-Nazi. In fact Barnes supported most of the New Deal’s domest policies, and dissented from Liberal Dogma only in opposing the spread of American adventurism and militarism all over the world.

Charles Beard, another great historian of classic Liberal principles, agreed that Roosevelt deliberately lied to us in World War II and was smeared in the same way as Professor Barnes. This did not encourage me to have Faith in any Party Line, even if it called itself the modern, liberal, enlightened Party Line.

(I have never been convinced by the Holocaust Revisionists, however, simply because I have met a great many Holocaust eyewitnesses, or alleged eyewitnesses, in the past 40 years. Most of these people I seemingly met by accident, in both Europe and America. A conspiracy that has that many liars planted in that many places–or has always paid such special attention to me that it placed these liars where I would meet them – is a conspiracy too omnipotent and omnipresent, and therefore too metaphysical, for me to take seriously. A conspiracy so Godlike in its powers could, in principle, deceive us about anything and everything, and I wonder why the Holocaust Revisionists still believe that World War II occurred, or that any of past history ever happened.)

I reached 20 and became an employee (i.e. a robot) in the McCarthy Era and the Eisenhower years; my agnosticism became more total and so did my suspicion that politics is a carnival or buncombe (as Mencken once said). It seemed obvious to me that, while Senator Joe was a liar of stellar magnitude, a lot of the Liberals were lying their heads off, too, in attempts to hide their previous fondness for Stalinism. That was something I, as a former Trotskyist, knew about by experience. In bon ton East Coast intellectual circles, before McCarthy, Stalinism was much more “permissible” than Trotskyism; it was almost chic. If I still regard the McCarthy witch-hunt of the 1950s as abominable, I also remember that some of the victims had engaged in similar witch-hunts against the Trotskyists in the early 1940s.

It is probably impossible for a social mammal to be totally “apolitical.” Even if I was allergic to Correct Answer Machines, my mind kept searching for some general social ideas that I could take more or less seriously. For a while I dropped in and out of colleges and in and out of jobs and searched earnestly for some pragmatic mock-up of “truth” without a Correct Answer Machine attached. And yet both Left and Right continued to appear intellectually bankrupt to me.

* * * *

Coming from a working class family, I could never have much sympathy for the kind of Conservatism you find in America in this century. (I do have a certain fondness for the classic Liberal Conservatives of the 18th Century, especially Edmund Burke and John Adams.) After I married and had children to support, the abominations of the Capitalist system and the wormlike ignominy of the employee role began to seem like prisons to me; I was a poor candidate for the Conservative cause. On the other hand, the FDR Liberals, I was convinced, had lied about World War II; they first smeared and then blacklisted the historians who told the truth; and they had jumped on the Cold War bandwagon with ghoulish glees.

I was anti-war by “temperament” (whatever that means – early imprints or conditioning? Genes? I don’t know the exact cause of such a deep-seated and life-long bias). Marxist dogma seemed as stupid to me as Catholic dogma and as murderous as Hitlerism. I now thought of myself as an agnostic on principle. I was not going to join any more “churches” or submit to anybody’s damned Party Line.

My agnosticism was also intensified by such influences as further reading of Nietzsche; existentialism; phenomenolgy; General Semantics; and operational logic. There have remained major influences on me and I want to say a few words about each.

Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Superman did not turn me on in youth; coming from the proletarian, I could not see myself as one of his aristocratic Uebermenschen. On the other hand, his criticism of language, and of the metaphysical implications within languages, made a powerful impression on me; I still re-read one or two of his books every year, and get new semantic insights of them. He is, as he bragged, a hard nut to digest all at once.

Existentialism did not convert me back to Marxism (as it did to Sartre); it merely magnified my Nietzschean distrust of capitalized nouns and other abstractions, and strengthened my preferences for sensory-sensual (“existential”) – modes of perception-conception. The phenomenologists—especially Husserl and the wild man of the bunch, Charles Fort – encouraged my tendency to suspect all general theories (religious, philosophical, even scientific) and to regard human sense experience as the primary datum.

My polemics against Materialist Fundamentalism in The New Inquisition and the Aristotelian mystique of “natural law” (shared by Thomists and some Libertarians) in my Natural Law; or, Don’t Put a Rubber On Your Willy are both based on this existentialist-phenomenologist choice that I will “believe” in human experience, with all its muddle and uncertainty, more than I will ever “believe” in capitalized Abstractions and “general principles.”

General Semantics, as formulated by Korzybski, increased this anti-metaphysical bias in me. Korzybski also stressed that the best sensory data (as revealed by instruments that refine the senses) indicates that we live in a non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean and non-Newtonian continuum. I have practised for 30 years the exercises Korzybski recommends to break down Aristotelian-Euclidean-Newtonian ideas buried in our daily speech and retrain myself to perceive in ways compatible with what our instruments indicate about actuality.

Due to Korzybski’s neurolinguistic training devices, it is now “natural” for me to think beyond either/or logic, to perceive the unity of observer/observed, to regard “objects” as human inventions abstracted from a holistic continuum. Many physicists think I have studied more physics than I actually have; I merely neurologically internalized the physics that I do know.

Operational logic (as formulated by the American physicist Percy Bridgman and recreated by the Danish physicist Neils Bohr as the Copenhagen Interpretation of science) was the approach to modern science that appealed to me in the context of the above working principles. The Bridgman-Bohr approach rejects as “meaningless” any statements that do not refer to concrete experiences of human beings. (Bridgman was influenced by Pragmatism, Bohr by Existentialism.) Operationalism also regards all proposed “laws” only as maps or models that are useful for a certain time. Thus, Operationalism is the one “philosophy of science” that warns us, like Nietzsche and Husserl, only to use models where they’re useful and never to elevate them into Idols or dogmas.

Although I dislike labels, if I had to label my attitude I would accordingly settle for existentialist-phenomenologist-operationalist, as long as no one of those three terms is given more prominence than the other two.

In the late ’50s, I began to read widely in economic “science” (or speculation) again, a subject that had bored the bejesus out of me since I overthrew the Marxist Machine in my brain ten years earlier. I became fascinated with a number of alternatives – or “excluded middles” – that transcend the hackneyed debate between monopoly Capitalism and totalitarian Socialism. My favorite among these alternatives was, and to some extent still is, the individualist-mutualist anarchism of Proudhon, Jossiah Warren, S.P. Andrews, Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. I do not have a real Faith that this system would work out as well in practice as it sounds in theory, but as theory it still seems to me one of the best ideas I ever encountered.

This form of anarchism is called “individualist” because it regards the absolute liberty of the individual as a supreme goal to be attained; it is called “mutualist” because it believes such liberty can only be attained by a system of mutual consent, based on contracts that are to the advantage of all. In this Utopia, free competition and free cooperation are both encouraged; it is assumed persons and groups will decide to compete or to cooperate based on the concrete specifics of each case. (This appeals to my “existentialism” again, you see.)

Land monopolies are discouraged in individualist-mutualist anarchism by abolishing State laws granting ownership to those who neither occupy nor use the land; “ownership,” it is predicted, will then only be contractually recognized where the “owner” actually occupies and used the land, but not where he charges “rent” to occupy or use it. The monopoly on currency, granted by the State, is also abolished, and any commune, group, syndicate, etc., can issue its own competing currency; it is claimed that this will drive interest down to approximately zero. With rent at zero and interest near zero, it is argued that the alleged goal of socialism (abolition of exploitation) will be achieved by free contract, without coercion or totalitarian Statism. That is, the individualist-mutualist model argues that the land and money monopolies are the “bugger factors” that prevent Free Enterprise from producing the marvelous results expected by Adam Smith. With land and money monopolies abolished, it is predicted that competition (where there is no existential motive for cooperation) and cooperation (where this is recognized as being to the advantage of all) will prevent other monopolies from arising.

Since monopolized police forces are notoriously graft-ridden and underlie the power of the state to bully and coerce, competing protection systems will be available in an individualist-mutualist system, You won’t have to pay “taxes” to support a Protection Racket that is actually oppressing rather than protecting you. You will only pay dues, where you think it prudent, to protection agencies that actual perform a service you want and need. In general, every commune or syndicate will make its own rules of the game, but the mutualist-individualist tradition holds that, by experience, most communes will choose the systems that maximize liberty and minimize coercion.

Being wary of Correct Answer Machines, I also studied and have given much serious consideration to other “Utopian” socio-economic theories. I am still fond of the system of Henry George (in which no rent is allowed, but free enterprise is otherwise preserved); but I also like the ideas of Silvio Gesell (who would also abolish rent and all taxes but one–a demmurage tax on currency, which should theoretically abolish interest by a different gimmick than the competing currencies of the mutualists.)

I also see possible merit in the economics of C.H. Douglas, who invented the National Dividend–lately re-emergent, somewhat mutated, as Theobold’s Guaranteed Annual Wage and/or Friedman’s Negative Income Tax. And I am intrigued by the proposal of Pope Leo XIII that workers should own the majority of stock in their companies.

Most interesting of recent Utopias to me is that of Buckminster Fuller in which money is abolished, and computers manage the economy, programmed with a prime directive to advantage all withoutdisadvantaging any – the same goal sought by the mutualist system of basing society entirely on negotiated contract.

Since I don’t have the Correct Answer, I don’t know which of these systems would work best in practice. I would like to see them all tried in different places, just to see what would happen. (This multiple Utopia system was also suggested by Silvio Gesell, who was not convinced he had a Correct Answer Machine; that’s another reason I like Gesell.) My own bias or hope or prejudice is that individualist-mutualist anarchism with some help from Bucky Fuller’s computers would work best of all, but I still lack the Faith to proclaim that as dogma.

There is one principle (or prejudice) which makes anarchist and libertarian alternatives attractive to me where State Socialism is totally repugnant to my genes-or-imprints. I am committed to the maximization of the freedom of the individual and the minimization of coercion. I do not claim this goal is demanded by some ghostly or metaphysical “Natural Law,” but merely that it is the goal that I, personally, have chosen – in the Existentialist sense of choice. (In more occult language, such a goal is my True Will.) Everything I write, in one way or another, is intended to undermine the metaphysical and linguistic systems which seem to justify some Authorities in limiting the freedom of the human mind or in initiating coercion against the non-coercive.

…and then came what Charles Slack calls “the madness of the sixties.” I was an early, and enthusiastic, experimenter with LSD, peyote, magic mushrooms and any other compound that mutated consciousness. The result was that I became even more agnostic but less superior about it. What psychedelics taught me was that, just as theories and ideologies (maps and models) are human creations, not divine revelations, every perceptual grid or existential reality-tunnel is also a human creation–a work of art, consciously or unconsciously edited and organized by the individual brain.

I began serious study of other consciousness-altering systems, including techniques of yoga, Zen, Sufism and Cabala. I, alas, became a “mystic” of some sort, although still within the framework of existentialism-phenomenology-operationalism. But, then, Buddhism–the organized mystic movement I find least objectionable–is also existentialist, phenomenologist and operationalist….

Nietzsche’s concept of the Superhuman has at last become meaningful for me, although not in the elitist form in which he left it. I now think evolution is continuing and even accelerating: the human brain is evolving to a state that seems Superhuman compared to our previous history of domesticated primatehood. My favorite science is neuroscience, and I am endlessly fascinated by every new tool or technique that breaks down robot circuits in our brains (Correct Answer Machines) and spurs creativity, higher intelligence, expanded consciousness, and, above all, broader compassion.

I see no reason to believe that only an elite is capable of this evolutionary leap forward, especially as the new tools and training techniques are becoming more simple. In neuroscience as in all technology, we seem to follow Bucky Fuller’s rule that each breakthrough allows us to do more work with less effort and to create more wealth out of less raw matter.

Once I broke loose from the employee role and became self-supporting as a writer, the “horrors of capitalism” seemed less ghoulish to me, since I no longer had to face them every day. I became philosophical, like all persons free of acute suffering. I prefer to live in Europe rather than pay taxes to build more of Mr. Reagan’s goddam nuclear missiles, but I enjoy visiting the U.S. regularly for intellectual stimulation….

I agree passionately with Maurice Nicoll (a physician who mastered both Jungian and Gurdjieffian systems) who wrote that the major purpose of “work on consciousness” is to “decrease the amount of violence in the world.” The main difference between our world and Swift’s is that while we have stopped killing each other over religious differences (outside the Near East and Northern Ireland), we have developed an insane passion for killing each other over ideological differences. I regard Organized Ideology with the same horror that Voltaire had for Organized Religion.

Concretely, I am indeed a Male Feminist, as L.A. Rollins claimed (although seeing myself often on TV, I deny that I simper; I don’t even swish); like all libertarians, I oppose victimless crime laws, all drug control laws, and all forms of censorship (whether by outright reactionaries or Revolutionary Committees or Radical Feminists).

I passionately hate violence, but am not a Dogmatic Pacifist, since I don’t have Joan Baez’s Correct Answer Machine in my head. I know I would kill an armed aggressor, in a concrete crisis situation where that was the only defense of the specific lives of specific individuals I love, although I would never kill a person or employ even minor violence, or physical coercion, on behalf of capitalized Abstractions or Governments (who are all damned liars.) All these are matters of Existential Choice on my part, and not dogmas revealed to me by some god or some philosopher-priest of Natural Law.

I prefer the various Utopian systems I have mentioned to the Conservative position that humanity is incorrigible and I also think that if none of these Utopian scenarios are workable, some system will eventually arrive better than any we have ever known. I share the Jeffersonian (“Liberal”?) vision that the human mind can exceed all previous limits in a society where freedom of thought is the norm rather than a rare exception.

Does all of this make me a Leftist or a Rightist? I leave that for the Euclideans to decide. If I had to summarize my social credo in the briefist possible space, I would quote Alexander Pope’s Essay On Man:

For forms of Government let fools contest;

Whate’er is best administered is best:

For modes of Faith let graceless zealots fight;

He can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.

Comments Off on Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective

Posted in Essays, Excerpts

Tagged General Semantics

The Priory of Sion

Posted on November 14, 1987 by quackenbush | 1 comment

THE PRIORY OF SION

Jesus, Freemasons, Extraterrestrials, The Gnomes of Zurich,Black Israelites and Noon Blue Apples

by Robert Anton Wilson

from GNOSIS Issue #6: Secret Societies
Winter 1987-’88

The Priory of Sion first came to the attention of Americans with the publication in 1981 of Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh, a book so sensational and wildly speculative that many readers decided to believe nothing in it. Some even doubted the existence of the Priory of Sion, the alleged 800-year old secret society which is the main topic of the book. Other, of course, were eager to swallow everything in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and there is now a wide subculture, mostly in occult and witchy circles, who fervently believe that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and their descendents are alive and well in various royal families of Europe; the allies or supporters of this “holy bloodline” make up the backbone of the elusive Priory of Sion, according to Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh.

Personally, I did not have an immediate yes-or-no reaction to this new Christian “heresy.” I have long believed that Aristotelian either/or logic is inadequate to deal with the “real,” or sensory, or existential, world (since such logic only applies to the abstractions or fictions created by Jesuits, Randroids, Marxists and other metaphysicians). I therefore did not believe or reject all of Holy Blood, Holy Grail as a lump or package deal. I wondered how much of it could be verified and how much of it could be refuted and how much would remain at least temporarily in the “maybe” state of quantum particles – like a coin tossed in the air and tumbling about before coming down to rest in a definitive Heads or Tails position.

In checking out the historical scenario of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, I found that the largest part of it belongs in the Maybe category. That is, most of it is speculation that can neither be proven or disproven by any of the techniques recognized by historians who attempt to practice scientific method. Of course, there are “high Maybes” and “low Maybes.” The genealogies relating the von Hapsburgs or Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to the Merovingian kings of the dark ages seem to be high Maybes; although there is a certain degree of uncertainty in all gene pools, the intermarriages of European royalty have been zealously documented for many centuries (since property and inheritance are involved in determining who was the son of which royal house). Dozens and scores of other matters-such as the membership of Sir Isaac Newton in the alleged Priory – are very low Maybes; the arguments cited by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh are neither conclusive nor even plausible, and amount to what the chaps at M.I.T. call “hand waving.” The attempted genealogical links further back, from the Merovingians to Jesus of Nazareth, are even lower Maybes and without exaggeration can be called wild guessing.

I decided to investigate other books on the Priory of Sion mystery in search of further data, if there was any to be found and if the whole saga was not made up almost entirely of “hand waving.” Since I have dozens of other interests, I have not devoted the whole of the past six years to studying this question, but I have done a lot of reading, much of it in books not available in the United States (since I live in Europe). I can begin stating my conclusions by saying, like a famous editor, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Priory of Sion.” Whether the Priory is 800 years old or has any link to Jesus, however, are still questions that remain in the the quantum “maybe” state; the coins in that case have not landed yet, or have not landed where I can see them.

The Gnomes of Zurich and the Priory

The European literature on the Priory of Sion is much more voluminous than is realized by those who have only read Holy Blood, Holy Grail. It is also much more diverse and, as you will shortly see, various authors have attempted to expose or explain the Priory with a variety of theories, some of which make the Jesus/Magdalene bloodline story rather tame by comparison.

To begin with a source that is merely speculative, mysterious, and a bit sinister, but at least makes sense – before plunging into the books that are very, very, very mysterious wildly speculative and make no sense at all – in 1973 there appeared in Basel, Switzerland, Les Dessows d’une Ambition Politique by a Swiss journalist named Mattieu Paoli. The thesis of this book was fairly mundane, with only a few eldritch touches. Paoli had discovered the existence of a secret Freemasonic society of some sort made up of French intellectuals and aristocrats, because some of the literature of this secretive group was being distributed within Switzerland in a very restricted way. This literature, in fact, was circulated only to members of the Grand Loge Alpina, the largest and most influential Freemasonic group in the Swiss cantons. Of course, European ears prick up with curiosity at the first mention of the Grand Loge Alpina. Among Continental conspiracy buffs, the Grand Loge Alpina has a reputation for unspecified mischief rather akin to that of the Bohemian Club in America. That is, although not even the most avid critic has ever clearly demonstrated that the Grand Loge Alpina engages in criminal or even unethical behavior, it is known to include some of the richest men in Switzerland and the genera] assumption is that, like the Bohemian Club, it is some sort of “invisible government,” or at least a place where the Power Elite meet to discuss their common interests. In a general sort of way, the GLA (an abbreviation for the Grand Loge Alpina which I shall use occasionally to avoid monotony) is more or less the group that English Prime Minister Harold Wilson once characterized as “the Gnomes of Zurich” – the cabal of bankers and financiers who, Wilson claimed, have more power than any rival coalition in Europe.

Another shady rumor about the Grand Loge Alpina – which is worth pursuing a bit, since Paoli first discovered the French secret society through its connection with the GLA – is that the GLA has heavily infiltrated the Vatican Bank, in collaboration with the definitely criminal and conspiratorial P2 (or Propaganda due), the Italian “Freemasonic” group which controlled the Italian secret police in the 1970s, took money from both the CIA and KGB (and apparently double-crossed both), had over 900 agents in other branches of the Italian government and has been accused of every possible felony from massive bank fraud to assassination and terrorism, to laundering Mafia drug money through the Vatican Bank and its affiliates, to plotting a fascist coup. The source of the claim that the Grand Loge Alpinainfiltrated the Vatican Bank and aided or abetted the dirty dealings of P2 is David Yallop’s sensational book, In God’s Name, which is accurate as far as I have been able to check it but contains literally hundreds of assertions which cannot be checked because Yallop claims he cannot divulge his sources without risking their lives. A large part of Yallop’s book, therefore, also remains, for non-Aristotelians like me, in the quantum “maybe” state. (For the curious: two books dealing with the frauds and felonies of the Vatican Bank and their links with P2 and the Mafia, which document all their claims and do not quote unidentified sources, are Richard Hammer’s The Vatican Connection and Penny Lernoux’s In Banks We Trust.)

A digression about Freemasonry itself is probably obligatory at this time. Contrary to popular impressions, Freemasons do not belong to one global brotherhood with a unified system of dogma and ritual. The world is, in fact, full of Freemasonic lodges that do not recognize other Freemasonic lodges as “Fellow Craft” or “real Freemasons” at all.

There are two types of split within the Freemasonic brotherhood – political and metaphysical. The political split dates back to the French Revolution, when all Freemasonic groups were anti-Papist and “radical” (inclined to replace absolute monarchy with either Constitutional monarchy or with a Republican or even Democratic form of government). This radical spirit began to splinter when British Freemasons saw the Continental lodges moving too far to the Left, and arranged that, in the U.K. at least, the Grandmaster of all Craft lodges would always be a member of the Royal Family, thereby guaranteeing a conservative flavor to the Grand Lodge and other Anglo-dominated Craft groups such as Scottish Rite and the Royal Arch. Most Continental lodges, however, are still basically radical (e.g. the Grand Orient Lodge in France and Italy).

The metaphysical split occurs within both the conservative and radical Craft groups. It divides Freemasons into those who, on one hand, joined Freemasonry for practical purposes (business contacts or covert political action) and only give lip service to the “mystical” goals of Freemasonry without knowing or caring much about what those “mystical” goals are; and, on the other hand, the “occult” lodges which practice Freemasonry quite consciously as a system of initiation similar to the ancient Mystery schools, Gnosticism or Sufism. To make things more complicated, some see the initiatory rituals of the Craft leading to pantheism or even a kind of transcendental humanism, while others see the rituals as leading back to a more traditional theism or even theocracy. To know that the Priory of Sion is Freemasonic or an offshoot of Freemasonry is not really to know much about its actual inner tradition.

Freemasonry has been repeatedly condemned by the Vatican, and all Freemasons are officially excommunicated. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland also recently announced that no man can be a Freemason and a Christian at the same time. This hostility from the ultra-orthodox is justified (in its own internal logic) because Freemasonry was based, originally, on the rather Sufic doctrine that all religions are somewhat distorted remnants of a true Revelation that can only be rediscovered through gnosis (inner experience) by one person at a time. (It is the purpose of Freemasonic ritual to convey this gnosis by techniques of drama and shock somewhat similar to those of shamanism, Sufism, the Gurdjieff schools or Tibetan Buddhism.) Conservative lodges in Christian countries, however, still use the Bible as centerpiece of the Craft altar. (Moslem Freemasons use the Koran.) The Orleanist lodges have reversed the gnostic tradition and are totally agnostic; they use a book of blank pages on their altar, and seem to share the Firesign Theatre’s celebrated doctrine, “We’re all Bozos on this bus.”

The Rights and Privileges of Low-Cost Housing

Returning to Mattieu Paoli and his discovery of the links between the Grand Loge Alpina and the unknown French Freemasons: M. Paoli’s attempts to learn more about the latter group read like comic opera – but so does much of this epic. The French group had a magazine (limited in circulation only to its own members and those of the Grand Loge Alpina.) It was called Circuit, and, although Paoli does not make much of this, the cover of the first issue he saw depicted a map of France with a Jewish Star of David superimposed upon it and something that looks much like a spaceship or UFO hovering above. (I know that I am pushing the paranoia buttons of both anti-semites and the more demoniac UFO theorists, but I also believe that this is precisely the intent of the Priory of Sion, which seems to have a flair for gallows humor.) This strange magazine, Circuit, was devoted entirely to astrology and other “occult” subjects but was attributed to the Committee to Secure the Rights and Privileges of Low Cost Housing – a group which Paoli was unable to locate anywhere and which nobody else has ever been able to track down either.

At this point readers of normal skepticism will begin to share my suspicion that the Priory of Sion at least has its own brand of humor. In fact, the very name Priory of Sion may be intended to spread panic among those weird people who still believe in the Elders of Zion conspiracy. Paoli eventually tracked down the publication offices of Circuit. It was produced, not at the fictitious Committee to Secure the Rights and Privileges of Low Cost Housing, but at the very real and powerful Committee for Public Safety of the de Gaulle government in Paris. The Committee for Public Safety, named after the similar group during the French Revolution, was managed by two close friends of President de Gaulle – Andre Malraux, novelist, art critic and Nobel prizewinner in literature; and one Pierre Plantard de Saint Clair, about whom we will shortly learn more and understand less.

Paoli, who had noted that de Gaulle had contributed an article to Circuit, found other reasons to suspect that the de Gaulle government was aware of, and sympathetic to, the goals of a shadowy Freemasonic lodge called the Priory of Sion – which, by then, he had determined was the real group behind the masquerade of the Committee to Secure the Rights and Privileges of Low Cost Housing. The rest of Paoli’s book is devoted to demonstrating that the Priory wielded considerable power in Gaullist and conservative circles; Paoli speculates, backed by fairly plausible evidence and inference, that the Priory intends some major shift to the Right in French and possibly European politics, or some form of Christian Socialism to rival and undermine the spread of Marxism.

It is probably only a coincidence, but I cannot resist adding that Paoli was later shot as a spy in Israel.

Extraterretrials and Rains Of Frogs

Also in 1973 appeared La Race Fabuleuse by Gerard de Sede – a book which, if you are willing to believe it, explains the Star of David and the spaceship which Paoli had noted on the cover of Circuit. In a word, La Race Fabuleuse is the kind of book loved by those who are wild about von Daniken and Velikovsky. It deals with a secret society – never called the Priory of Sion explicitly, although de Sede later admitted to Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh (the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail that he was indeed writing about the Priory in La Race Fabuleuse. By and large, the book deals with unsolved mysteries of French history and is full of intriguing puzzles and novel ideas.

For instance, the town of Stenay has the Devil’s head on its coat of arms, and frogs are often reported falling from the sky there. If that’s the kind of thing that turns you on, de Sede is your main man in the Priory mystery. Other strange data in La Race Fabuleuse include stuff like this: The last Merovingian king, Dagobert II, was murdered by persons unknown on December 23, 689, in the Ardennes forest, which is named after a Stone Age bear-goddess. Arcadia in ancient Greece was named after a bear-goddess, too, and Nostradamus is a pen-name which means one devoted to “Our Lady” – a term which usually, in France, refers to the Virgin Mary. One whole chapter argues that the “prophecies” of Nostradamus are not predictions about the future at all (that was a mask to slip his quatrains past the censors) but coded revelations about what really happened in the past and was excluded from official history. We are offered a new theory about the Man in the Iron Mask, but that is left unfinished and we are led instead into the mystery of why Louis VX was obsessed with Poussin’s painting. The Shepards of Arcadia, which brings us back to that bear goddess again. After a while, one realizes that de Sedeis not explaining anything but dropping hints that lead in dozens of directions and one suspects the whole book may be a complicated hoax.

Then de Sede does explain; alas, his source cannot be revealed and is hidden behind the title and initial, “Marquis de B.” Marquis de B can neither confirm nor deny that de Sede is quoting him correctly because he (the Marquis) was murdered in the Ardennes forest, just like Dagobert II, and on the anniversary of Dagobert’s death – December 23, 1971. Anyway, if you are still with me, the reason Dagobertand the mysterious Marquis were murdered is that they both belonged to a secret Society made up of persons descended from the Tribe of Benjamin in ancient Judea; and the Tribe of Benjamin was not exactly like the orthodox Hebrews at all. In fact, the Tribe of Benjamin intermarried with extraterrestrials from Sirius, became superhuman due to this exotic genetic strain, and then migrated to Greece, and then to France…

Whether or not one is inclined to believe a yarn like that on the basis of the weird data offered, what is even more intriguing about La Race Fabuleuse is that, even if one believes in these Jewish-extraterrestrial French nobles, that theory only explains some of the historical enigmas de Sede has presented to us. What about those frogs falling out of the sky at Stenay, and why are two forests named after bear goddesses made part of de Sede’s narrative, and who the help are the gang that keeps murdering off these Supermen, and why can’t the Supermen protect themselves better? (For that matter, the head of Satan on the coat of arms of Stenay, with which the book begins, is never explained either.)

As the French themselves say, it gives one ferociously to think.

Treasure, Codes and Moon Blue Apples

In a later book, L’ Or de Rennes-le-Chateau, de Sede does not answer any of these questions, but provides us with more wild theories and even more strange data. Briefly, a priest manuscripts in an old church in the Provencal town of Rennes-le-Chateau. (Like Stenay, the town with the head of Satan on its coat of arms, Rennes-le-Chateau was the home of a castle of the Merovingian dynasty, to which the murdered Dagobert II belonged.) You are going to love this if you have any sense of humor at all. De Sede does not decode the Sauniere parchments, but the code is so simple a child might guess it. The manuscripts have some letters raised above the others. Read these letters only and get the message found by the ingenious authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

“TO DAGOBERT II. KING, AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD..SHEPHERDESS, NO TEMPTATION, THAT POUSSIN, TENIERS, HOLD THE KEY, PEACE 681. BY THE CROSS AND THIS HORSE OF GOD I COMPLETE-OR DESTROY-THIS DAEMON GUARDIAN AT NOON. BLUE APPLES.”

The conjunction of Dagobert and Sion, of course, seems to authenticate the medieval origin the Priory claims for itself (although nobody, to my knowledge, has carbon-dated the Sauniere parchment, which might be a late forgery.) I cordially invite you make what you can of the rest of the secret message. Cabalists are especially likely to find something of interest in the 681. Others will be emotionally drawn to conjecture about the “daemon” and the “horse” (not house) of God. Personally, I am aesthetically fond of the noon blue apples as a topic for speculation when I can’t get to sleep at night…

The damned thing about this is that there may indeed have the priest who found the parchment, Father Sauniere, became quite wealthy by unknown means, and that has kept “the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau” a topic of keen interest among French conspiracy buffs and puzzle addicts for nearly a hundred years now.

Later, however, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh were to offer another explanation of Father Sauniere’s wealth. But I will come to that…

Surrealism and Catholic Traditionalism

This is as good a place as any to mention the short and undated Le Cercle d’ Ulysse by Jean Delaude. This pamphlet does not bother us with demons, horses of God or frogs falling from the sky, and doesn’t have a single noon blue apple. It states bluntly that the Priory of Sion is a conservative Catholic secret society devoted principally to the cause of making Archbishop Lefebvre the next Pope.Delaude also claims that the Grandmaster of the Priory is the Abbe Ducaud-Bourget (Lefebvre’s leading disciple), who succeeded the surrealist poet Jean Cocteau, who had been Grandmaster until 1963. (Holy Blood, Holy Grail produces documentary evidence that Cocteau was indeed a Grandmaster of the Priory or, at least – one suspects everything at this point – that somebody did a good job of forging Cocteau’s name on a Priory document.)

While the noon blue apples have a Cocteauean or surrealist flavor to them, it does appear that the Sauniere parchment really did exist at least as early as the 1890s, so I reject the theory proposed by my wife at this point, which is that the Priory is the last and greatest of all surrealist pranks. No: Cocteau may have given his own flavor to the enterprise, but the Priory clearly has a pre-Cocteau origin, even if it doesn’t necessarily date back to copulation between ancient Benjaminites and UFOnauts from Sirius. (Still: it was Cocteau who said “The poet must always be a shady character” and “One must run faster than beauty, even if it seems one is running away from it.” I find these remarks helpful in trying to intuit what the hell the Priory is really all about.)

As for Archbishop Lefebvre and the Abbe Ducaud-Bourget – linked to the Priory by Delaude, remember? – these are two extremely right-wing gentlemen indeed, leaders of what is called the Catholic Traditionalist movement, and many have not been shy about hurling the word “fascist” at them (Oddly, Lefebvre was a member of the pro-fascist Action Francaise group in the 1930s, but Ducaud-Bourget was part of the anti-Nazi resistance in the 1940s.) For our purposes Lefebvre and Ducaud-Bourget can be characterized as the leaders of that very conservative faction of the Catholic church, not yet excommunicated, which is in such total rebellion against the “Liberalism” (as they see it) of the Vatican that their lack of excommunication may be the most interesting (and enigmatic) thing about them.

Archbishop Lefebvre has long proclaimed that “Freemasons and Satanists” have taken over the Vatican, although that expression is a bit redundant in his case, since Catholic Traditionalism regards all Freemasons as Satanists (an opinion shared by some Protestant Fundamentalists). Abbe Ducaud-Bourget was the first of the many speculators to claim that the sudden death of Pope John Paul I (JP-I) was murder. Still, the Vatican tolerates these heretics within the Church. One of their British supporters told The Guardian newspaper that Lefebvre holds a “weapon” over the Vatican, but declined to say what the “weapon” was. Naturally, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh think it has something to do with the sex life of Jesus.

Father Juan Krolm, the chap who tried to kill Pope John Paul II (JP-II) at Fatima a few years ago, was ordained and trained by Archbishop Lefebvre, but later became even more of an extremist. Amusingly, at his trial, Father Krohn said he had no guilt about trying to kill “the Antichrist” – his name for JP-Il – and that the only shame in his life was what he called “sins of the flesh.”

According to Father Malachi Martin, S.J. – another heretic – Archbishop Lefebvre was responsible for sending inflammatory documents to the previous Pope, JP-I (the one whose death has aroused more conspiracy theories than anybody’s since that of John F. Kennedy). In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church, Father Martin says this Lefebvre material included documentation of Freemasonic affiliations of various Cardinals, together with sexual scandal, including photos of some Vatican officials with their girl friends and others with their boy friends. Unless I misread him, Father Martin seems to imply that it is a strange coincidence that Pope John Paul I’s death followed so quickly upon his receipt of this expose material from Archbishop Lefebvre.

Whatever one thinks of that speculation, and the claims about the “murder” of JP-I attributed to unnamed sources in Yallop’s In God’s Name, there is no doubt that Mino Pecorelli, editor of the expose newspaper L’Osservatore Politico, did send JP-I a list of P2 and Grand Loge Alpina members on the staff of the Vatican Bank just before that Pontiff’s sudden demise. What happened to Pecorelli leaves little room for speculation. He was shot dead on a street in Rome, quite definitely by professional assassins. If you must speculate, Signor Pecorelli was shot through the mouth – the sasso in bocca, traditional Mafia punishment for informers.

The Sex Life of the Late Redeemer

For the sake of the few who haven’t read the much-discussed Holy Blood, Holy Grail, it is well to review a few of the counter-claims of the egregious work. The authors, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh, argue that, while Paoli may have been an independent investigator, de Sede and Delaude appear to be members of the Priory of Sion and that their works are not intended to reveal much of the truth but just to arouse curiosity, controversy and mystery, and also to prepare the intellectual climate in France for whatever astounding political or religious revolution the Priory intends in the near future. Specifically,Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh claim there is no evidence that Archbishop Lefebvre and his right-wing crowd have any link with the Priory; they assert that that asserted linkage is a Priory joke at Lefebvre’s expense. They also reject the extraterrestrial yarn, and replace it with their own lovely yarn that the Priory is descended from Jesus and his unacknowledged bride, Mary Magdalene.

It is worth mentioning at this point that the alleged romantic alliance between Jesus and Magdalene is not the invention of Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh. The Gnostic gospels – all as early and historically as plausible as the orthodox gospels – imply such a relationship several times, and Jesus is described as kissing Magdalene romantically in one celebrated text. It is also true that celibacy was regarded by orthodox Jews of Jesus’s time much as it is regarded in the post-Freudian world of today: namely, as a rather kinky, unmanly and somewhat reverse life-style. Finally, Jesus is called “Rabbi” even in the orthodox gospels and no man could be a rabbi in orthodox Judea at that time who was not married. These facts are well known to occultists and freethinkers and have even been discussed, albeit gingerly, by a few liberal Christian theologians. What is unique about Holy Blood, Holy Grail is the claim that the offspring of Jesus and his bride are alive and among us today; but even that has a kind of precedent. That odd little cult, the British Israelites, have always claimed that the royal family of England is descended from the House of David – although they never claimed the descent was by way of Jesus, of course.

The shock that orthodox Christians feel at the concept of Jesus as husband and father is distinctly odd in historical perspective. The leaders of the other major patriarchal religions – Zoroaster, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius – were all family men. As for the pagan gods: some were family men, but some were also notorious fornicators. Christian sex-denial is a very strange and eccentric departure from the norms of world religion, in which fertility is generally considered sacred and venerated as one of the main manifestations of divine grace and beauty.

Be that as it may, at this point two suspicions cross a mind as baroque as mine. First, if certain books in French may be Priory propaganda disguised to look like outside investigations, as Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh claim, could their own Holy Blood, Holy Grail be more such propaganda, similarly disguised? And second, why do the authors, like de Sede, drag in many subjects which do not fit their own solution to the mysteries? Are they hinting or blandly raising smoke screens or are they just disorganized in their thinking? (For instance, they spend almost as much space as de Sede on the bear-goddesses of Greece and France, but this has no logical connection with their Jesus/Magdalene theory any more than it has with de Sede’s Sirius theory. They also spend a lot of time on Poussin’spainting, The Shepherds of Arcadia, without ever really explaining its importance, although I think perhaps they are hinting that the grave in the painting is that of the son of Jesus and Magdalene, who evidently died in Rennes-le-Chateau in southern France.)

Concretely, at least Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh did manage to get an interview with a member of the Priory of Sion, and one who even admitted he was the Grandmaster of the whole lodge. This was the shadowy Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair whom some of you may remember co-managed the Committee for Public Safety (under de Gaulle) from the office where the Priory’s magazine, Circuit, was published. M. Plantard was marvelously esoteric in his conversation with Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh. He neither confirmed nor denied their theory that he is descended from Jesus and Magdalene. He explained that the “treasure” in the Father Sauniere parchment was “spiritual” rather than “material” and added the helpful (or deliberately obscure) comment that this spiritual treasure “belongs to Israel” and will be returned there “at the proper time.”

Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh think the “treasure” is the royal bloodline of David and Jesus, which flows in the veins of M. Plantard and his young son…

Bankers, Anarchists and the Hollow Earth

Since Holy Blood, Holy Grail appeared in 1981, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh brought forth in England, in 1986, The Messianic Legacy, a book which attempts to support their Jesus/Magdalene bloodline theory with more evidence, most of it speculative. (As I was about to mail this off to the editors of GNOSIS, I learned that this book has just been published in the U.S. by Henry Holt & Co.) Naturally, some further tidbits come to light. Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair gave these intrepid researchers several more interviews, all hermetic at best and downright dishonest at worst; then he abruptly announced that he had resigned as Grandmaster of the Priory and was not allowed to inform them of the name of his successor.

The door, in short, was closed in the faces of the investigators and they were left out in the cold trying to make what they could out of the gnomic utterances M. Plantard had granted them. Some of his leads, however, did allow them to document, rather convincingly, that the Priory of Sion is not an exclusively French/Swiss product but has powerful branches in England and the U.S., seemingly linked to parts of the banking industry… which reminds one of Paoli’s linkage between the Priory and Swiss banking, leading to grubby and sordid notions of what sort of mystery we are actually exploring here.

For those who find International Banking Conspiracies too corny (or too right wing), there is always the alternative of Michael Lamy’s Jules Verne: Initiate et Initateur (1984). According to M. Lamy, Vemewas not only an initiate of the Priory of Sion but of the Bavarian Illuminati as well, and the Priory itself is, in many respects, a regrouping and a new false front for the Illuminati. The Priory’s politics areOrleanist, which Lamy clarifies as “aristocratic-anarchistic” – i.e. Nietzschean. (Think of Verne’s characteristic heroes.) The real delight, however, is the secret of Rennes-le-Chateau, the mysterious town where Father Sauniere found the parchment about Dagobert, Sion, the treasure and those noon blue apples, and where there is a grave that looks like the one in Poussin’s enigmatic painting.

The secret is – ready? – that the earth is hollow, of course (didn’t you always suspect it?) and that in a Church at Rennes-le-Chateau is a secret door leading down to the underworld, which is inhabited by a race of immortal superhumans. You see? Verne hinted at this, various times, in several of his novels.

Actually, the church mentioned by Lamy really exists and even if nobody else has found the hidden door leading down to the hollow earth, it is certainly one of the weirdest churches in Christendom. Among other things, it has a motto over the door saying `THIS PLACE IS TERRIBLE.” It also has, among the Stations of the Cross, one showing a child clad in what might be Scottish plaid among the crowd watching Jesus carry his cross. Another Station can be interpreted as showing conspirators removing the late Redeemer from the grave during the night, as if to fake the Resurrection. You will be delighted to know that this church is officially dedicated to Mary Magdalene.

Father Sauniere, who was responsible for these un-Papist details of decor, was a member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light in Paris, a group which at various times also included Gerard Encausse andAleister Crowley. Encausse, under the pen-name “Papus,” wrote one of the most influential modern books on Tarot; he later went to Russia and became involved with the mystic Rasputin who wielded considerable influence on the Czar and his family before the Russian Revolution. Crowley wrote another influential book on Tarot and became Outer Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a secret society almost as inexplicable (to outsiders) as the Priory of Sion. Curiously, both the Priory and the O.T.O. are linked, by various commentators, with the Knights Templar, the medieval secret society which is also claimed to be the origin of Freemasonry by many Masonic historians.

The Illuminati and the Knights of Malta

I’m sorry, but at this point I cannot resist throwing in one of those odd coincidences that I keep stumbling upon in researching secret societies. Holy Blood, Holy Grail claims, with some evidence, that Father Saunier’s weird church in Rennes-le Chateau (near an old Knights Templar fortification, by the way) was built with money’s the eccentric priest received from the Archduke Ferdinand von Hapsburg (who, they also claim, gave the other money that led the town to believe Sauniere had found a treasure). A hundred years earlier, the Emperor Joseph von Hapsburg legalized Freemasonry in Austria, abolished Catholic schools which he replaced with modern secular (or non- denominational) schools and was the hero of Beethoven’s first major work, the Emperor Joeseph Cantata, in which he is hailed as “bringer of light” and “foe of darkness and superstition.” According to Maynard Solomon’s biography, Beethoven, the Illuminati paid Ludwig to write that bit of music propaganda for the von Hapsburg “Illuminated Monarch” (as he was often called). It almost makes one wonder if the von Hapsburgs are kingpins in some occult group at least two centuries old, as the Priorty books imply.

Of course, Holy Blood, Holy Grail includes genealogies which allege that the von Hapsburgs are descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene. However, the connection is through Dagobert and theMerovingians, so if you would rather believe de Sede’s thesis, the von Hapsburgs are actually descended from ancient Hebrews and extraterrestrials from Sirius. Whichever theory you prefer, or even if you doubt both of them, it is interesting that the von Hapsburgs have held the honorary title of Kings of Jerusalem for nearly 800 years.

The current scion of the clan, Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, is President of the League for the United States of Europe, a group which has played a large role in creating the European parliament and is steadily working toward greater unity between the European nations. He is also a member of – hold your breath – the Bilderbergers, which gives him two odd links with Bernhard of the Netherlands. Prince Bernhard was the founder and prime mover behind the Bilderberger society, and the same Prince Bernhard is, according to the Baigent-Lincoln-Leigh genealogies, descended Merovingian kings and hence from either Jesus or those ancient astronauts from Sirius.

On the other hand, Dr. von Hapsburg is known as a fervent anti-Communist and is a Knight of Malta – i.e. an officer of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), the most right-wing of all Catholic secret societies.

Other known members of SMOM have included Franz von Papen (the man who persuaded President von Hindenberg to make Hitler the Chancellor of Germany), William Casey (the CIA chief who died during the Irangate hearings), General Richard Gehlen (Hitler’s Chief of Intelligence who later became director of covert operations in Soviet Russia for the CIA), General Alexander Haig, Alexandre deMarenches (former chief of French intelligence), William F. Buckley Jr., Clare Booth Luce (who was, of course, a Dame, rather than a Knight, of Malta), Licio Gelli (founder of the P2 conspiracy which laundered cocaine money for the CIA’s favorite Latin American dictators by way of the Cisalpine Overseas Bank whose board of directors included Vatican bank chief Bishop Paul Marcinkus), the late Roberto Calvi of Banco Ambrosiano, who co-owned the Cisalpine Bank and was so mysteriously found hanging from a bridge in London on June 18, 1982, and the late Michele Sindona, lawyer for the Mafia and manager of Vatican financial affairs in the U.S., who was convicted of 65 counts of bank fraud in New York, convicted of murdering a bank examiner in Rome, and died in prison while awaiting trial on further charges relating to the P2 bombings in Italy in the 1970s. (See Lernoux’s In Banks We Trust for details on P2, the CIA and the banking industry. See Covert Action Information Bulletin No. 25, Winter 1986 for more on SMOM and its role as Vatican secret police.) English journalist Gordon Thomas claims, in The Year of Armageddon, that the Knights of Malta serve as couriers between theVatican and the CIA.

Lest the naive begin to think all this makes some kind of sense in terms of a rational paradigm involving Catholic and other conservative interests plotting to accomplish rational political-economic goals that seem desirable to them, every part of this jigsaw except the Knights of Malta is hostile to the Vatican and has often been officially condemned by the Vatican. The Illuminati, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, P2, and the Priory of Sion are all included in the Vatican’s general condemnation (reiterated for over 200 years now) against all Freemasonic lodges. All of these occult offshoots of Masonry seem to include in their systems certain Hermetic and Sufic ideas that have been condemned as heresy by the Vatican, and the books I have summarized seem to demonstrate that all these secret societies wish to replace the Vatican with some form of mystic Christianity with distinctly Gnostic overtones.

Jungian and Rastafarian Connections?

The Cult of the Black Virgin, by Ean Begg, leads us further from clarity and deeper, much deeper, into the murk. To begin with, Begg ‘s biography on the back of the book informs us that he is a former Dominican monk and currently a Jungian psychotherapist – a suggestive background for a man who has written the most philosophically dense Priory of Sion book to appear thus far. Basically, Beggdeals with one of the great unsolved mysteries in European archaeology and in Catholic history – the existence of well over 400 statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary in European churches, in which “the Mother of God” (as Catholics call her) is clearly and unambiguously depicted as Black or Negroid.

Of course, the disciples of Marcus Garvey in general, and the Rastafarians in particular, argue that Jesus and his family (and the ancient Israelites in general) were Black; but these statues are not a Rastafarian propaganda project. Most of the Black Virgins in European churches have existed for several hundred years and some seemingly have been around since at least the birth of Christianity. You will not be surprised to learn that Ean Begg attributes them to the Priory of Sion, which he holds is at least as old as the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail claimed in their wildest passages.

Why did the Priory go around planting evidence that Jesus’s mother was Black? If they wanted to implant some proto-Rastafarian racial doctrines about “God’s chosen people” being Black, why didn’t they make Jesus and Joseph and the disciples Black, too, while they were about it? Begg does not answer these questions. In fact, he does not answer any questions, but raises more questions instead. He spends a lot of time quoting familiar arguments that the Black Virgins were originally idols of the Egyptian goddess, Isis, which the Christians co-opted; but he shows that this doesn’t explain all the Black Virgins, many of which were created in recent centuries and not imported from Egypt.

Begg goes on to give us an especially tender version of Jung’s theory of the Anima – the Ideal Female image in every male psyche – and tells us legends in which Isis and Mary Magdalene function as incarnations of the Anima. He seems to be hinting at the theory that Magdalene was the wife of Jesus, but he never states that explicitly. He also implies, repeatedly, that the Black Virgins are not Virgins at all but portray Magdalene, an aspect of the Anima which he suggests a more important to Western man than the Virgin archetype. Many digressions deal with the Tarot, which Begg tries to persuade us is chiefly a guide to the inner mysteries of the Priory of Sion. (Encausse and Crowley, members of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light which included Father Sauniere, were also authorities on the Tarot.)

After taking us all around Robin Hood’s barn, Begg leaves us with two strong impressions or hints: we need to understand Jung and we need to understand Sufism. Somehow, Jung, who considered himself a Gnostic, and Sufism, which some claim is an Eastern branch of Gnosticism, are the true keys to the Black Virgins and to the Priory of Sion’s ultimate mission on this planet. Many hints seem to imply broadly that Begg writes not as an outsider but as an initiate of the Priory’s mysteries.

It is of some interest that Begg confirms the claim of the new book by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh (The Messianic Legacy) that M. Plantard de Saint-Clair is no longer the Grandmaster of the Priory of Sionand that the identity of the current Grandmaster is not to be revealed to the profane.

Atlantis and the Vagina of Nuit

The latest and most remarkable book in this whole bizarre area is Genisis by David Wood. That is not a misprint but a Joycean or hermetic pun; we are back again to the Magdalene-Isis connection. Wood is the kind of writer who usually deals with ley lines, and he has gone over the area around Rennes-le-Chateau drawing lines and making diagrams like a pixilated Pythagoras. What he has found is that the Church of Mary Magdalene is connected in a complex pattern with every other major church or primitive megalith in the area and the lines connecting them make up a pattern which Mr. Wood calls “the vagina of Nuit.” It looks about as much like a vagina to me as Ronald Reagan looks like the Guggenheim Museum in New York; but I am of the cynical school of cartographers who believe any seven spots can be connected into a ley-line pattern if you use a small enough map and a thick enough pencil. Mr. Wood, however finds staggering revelations in the genitalia of this early Egyptian sky-goddess.

It is impossible to give a coherent account of the argument of Genisis for the same reason it is hopeless to try to explain Dali’s Debris of on Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone a Rationalist. Isis is one aspect of the Earth Mother, and Nuit is another aspect, and for some reason the Knights Templar, who were accused of sodomy by the Church, did not really commit sodomy but instead cut off their penises and saved them in special chalices (for reasons that make sense to Mr. Wood but not to me), and this somehow or other proves that France was originally colonized from Atlantis, and the human race as a whole (not just some royal families) is of partly extraterrestrial origin, having been the product of interbreeding between proto-humans and the Space Brothers who appear as the sons of God in Genesis, and the genetic engineer who raised us above the animal to the human level got himself included in the Bible, much maligned, as Satan, and… well, it gets wilder and hairier as it goes along.

For what it is worth, I can comment that Aleister Crowley – once a member of the same Hermetic Brotherhood of Light that included Father Sauniere – believed that the world was astrologically predestined to experience a revival of the worship of Nuit. Crowley also believed any vagina was the vagina of Nuit to a Tantric magician who knew how to turn his beloved into an incarnation of the goddess. Crowley’ssexmagick, however, did not involve amputating the penis but rather prolonging coitus to the state of hypnoidal trance. Nuit was also Black, like the mysterious “Virgins” in Ean Begg’s book. And de Sedehinted, way back in La Race Fabuleuse, that the head of Satan on the coat of arms of Stenay is somehow crucial to the Priory of Sion mystery.

And the Beat Goes on…

Before attempting to conclude or summarize all this, I have two personal anecdotes to add to the tale. The first is a report from Frederic Lehrman, the dean of Nomad University in Seattle, who visited Rennes-le-Chateau a year ago and looked over some of the sites mentioned in the Priory literature. Lehrman met a young man who was also interested in the whole mystery and who had made a major discovery. He had actually found a hidden sheaf of papers, inside a hollow statue in the Temple of Magdalene (or so he said.)

The papers were not in code, like those found by Father Sauniere in the 1890s and they did not deal with Merovingian kings or noon blue apples. They were stories from a German newspaper dated 1904 and did not refer in any way to any of the subjects connected to the Priory in any previous literature.

Perhaps some joker placed those old German news clippings in the statue to bewilder the next researcher. (But how would a casual joker guess that a statue was hollow?) Perhaps the Priory did it as another of their merry pranks. Perhaps there really is some deep code in those news stories and the young man will find it reveals the secret of the Alchemical Furnace or who shot Kennedy, or where Moses was when the light went out, or something like that.

My second anecdote is even more ambiguous. At a seminar in Hof-am-Frankenwald in Bavaria – the old stomping grounds of the Illuminati – I actually met a man who I’ll call Fiitz, who was a member of the Priory of Sion (or so he alleged). He came from Holland and was very much the Amsterdam New Age type, which is not unlike the Marin County New Age type. He told me that all the books on the Priory were inaccurate and that the true initiates of the Prior found them all hilariously silly.

On the grounds that maybe Fritz really was a member of the Priory of Sion and not a put-on artist, I paid very close attention to everything he said during the seminar weekend. He was pro-Green (inEurope that means ecological, decentralist and anti-Marxist radical.) He was keen on space colonies, negative on life extension, shared the Bucky Fuller-Werner Erhard-Bob Geldof vision that we can abolish starvation in this generation, and seemed unconvincing (to me) when agreeing with some local Theosophists about the evils of psychedelic drugs. He used the word “pneumocracy” to describe his ideal society and explained that this means “rule by the Spirit.” (That we are entering the age of rule by the Spirit was the “heresy” of Joachim of Fiore, 13th century founder of a stream of radical millenarianism in Europe.) All of Fritz’s attitudes would seem to be typical of what I know of left-wing occult Freemasonry in Continental Europe.

Due to my unfortunate sense of humor and my inclination to mischief, I tried a little test on Fritz when the weekend was over. When I shook his hand, I formed a certain series of grips and whispered a formula I shall here hide behind the metathesis, “Bob Saw Jupiter’s Moons.” He looked startled and responded with the correct counter-sign and the words I shall disguise as “Tuba Concerto.” I cannot say more about this for reasons of discretion, but I can vouch for Fritz’s initiation into one of the higher levels of orthodox Freemasonry or else into one of the “occult” Freemasonic lodges that share these grips and magick formulae. This adds some credibility to his claim of membership in the Priory of Sion, or at least to some personal knowledge of the Priory. (Even if he belonged to a different occult lodge, those grips would entitle him to visit in any occult Freemasonic lodge on the Continent, and would probably get him into Priory meetings.)

In conclusion, I think we have a high B.S. factor in all the public revelations about the Priory of Sion. I offer five alternative theories which all make sense to me at various times, although I am far from totally convinced by any of them.

1. The Priory is a left-wing occult group in the tradition of the Grand Orient lodge and the Illuminati. Its intent is to overthrow the political power of the Vatican and recreate Gnostic
Christianity. Its long-range politics (within this model) are still mysterious. Gnostic cults have varied from theocratic autocracy and downright tyranny to Dionysian and or Discordian anarchism.

2. The Priory is, like P2 in Italy, actually a front for the Sovereign Military order of Malta (SMOM). Its function is to serve as another Vatican secret police organization and pretend to be Freemasonic, so that if the members are caught in any high crimes the Freemasons will be blamed instead of the Knights of Malta. (This actually seems to have worked in Italy. Although the ringleaders of P2 – Gelli, Calvi,Sindona – were all Knights of Malta, hardly anybody knows that who hasn’t researched P2 thoroughly, and most people think of P2 as “a Freemasonic conspiracy.”)

3. The Priory really is a front for Archbishop Lefebvre and Catholic Traditionalism. It intends to abolish Liberalism, Rationalism, Socialism and Modernism in general, and usher us back into the medieval world of an absolute Papacy and no more damned heretics anywhere. All the seeming evidence that appears to contradict this is part of a smoke screen and intended to dupe those who would not otherwise cooperate in such a reactionary program.

4. The Priory is made up of Totally Enlightened Beings who happen to be very rich bankers and love art and artists. They enjoy playing mindfuck games on other, un-Enlightened financiers and on groups that imagine they are Enlightened but aren’t.

5. What we have here is just another commercial “conspiracy,” or “affinity group,” with an unusually Continental flavor of art and culture about it. Cocteau ‘s membership seems well documented; almost as well documented is that of Claude Debussy, the composer; Malraux could hardly have been ignorant of what was going on in the office he shared with Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair. By and large, Continental politicians and businessmen are more “cultured” and “intellectual” than their American counterparts, and think it prestigious rather than “queer” to have artists among their friends: Europe does not share the American delusion that artistic/philosophical interests are unmasculine and make one unfit for positions of power. The Priory of Sion might be what the Bohemian Club could have become ifAmerica’s ruling class were not terrified that any intellectual interests on their part would make them look like “sissies.” In short, the Priory could be a club of rich and powerful men who also enjoy occult and historical romanticizing: the aristocratic equivalent of the Society for Creative Anachronism or Dungeons and Dragons.

Whichever theory you prefer, or if you like a sixth theory of your own, the whole Priory of Sion saga seems to shed a new and (I would say) surrealist or psychedelic light on the famous remark by Ishmael Reed: “The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies.”

Robert Anton Wilson is the author of numerous books including the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, The New Inquisition, and Cosmic Trigger (Falcon Press, Los Angeles CA).

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James Joyce – Ulysses

Posted on January 1, 1987 by quackenbush | Comments Off

James Joyce – Ulysses

by Robert Anton Wilson

from Magical Blend, Issue 15, 1987

…the time is come wherein a man of timid courage seizes the keys of hell and of death, and flings them far out into the abyss, proclaiming the praise of life, which the abiding presence of truth may sanctify, and of death, the most beautiful form of life.

The time was 1 February, 1902: the place, the Literary and Historical Society room in University College, Dublin. The speaker, who would be twenty years old the following morning, 2 February, was James Joyce; and it does not take great perspicacity to observe that his style was not yet equal to the task of containing his vision. Dublin students, who are always great wits, had a wonderful time parodying “timid courage” in the following days, but one of them (whose name has been, alas, lost) had even more fun with the final strophe, satirizing it as “absence, the highest form of presence.“

In Ulysses, the dead and absent are not only present but omnipresent. Stephen Dedalus is afflicted with what psychiatrists would call clinical depression; Stephen with his medieval erudition, prefers to call it “agenbite of inwit”-the incessant gnawing of rat-toothed remorse. His sin? He refused to kneel and pray when his dying mother asked him, an act not motivated by atheism but by antitheism: Stephen fears that there might be a malign reality in the God he has rejected, and that any act of submission might open him to invasion and reenslavement by that demonic Catholic divinity. Probably, only another ex-Catholic can understand that anxiety, but any humane person can understand the dreadful power of the guilt that, personified by Stephen’s mother, haunts him all through the long day’s journey of 16 June 1904 into night.

Stephen is the overture, and, later, the anti-chorus. The major theme of Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, Irish Jew, timid here, solid wanderer in the formless abyss, the greatest comic and tragic figure in modem literature. If Stephen is haunted by a dead mother, Bloom is equally preoccupied with a dead son: Rudy Bloom, dead at the age of 11 days, absent from the public world of Dublin, alive and ever-present in Bloom’s memories.

If the dead have power over our imaginations, the absent have even more power. Conspicuously absent from the text of Ulysses – he only appears on stage once, to utter banalities to a shopgirl, is Hugh “Blazes” Boylan, who is also overconspicuously absent from Bloom’s thoughts most of the day. Only about two thirds of the way through the book, on first reading, do we discover why Bloom’s private inner conversation with himself (which we are privileged to share) always wanders into chaotic images and a wild search for a new topic of interest whenever Boylan’s name is mentioned by another character. Bloom knows, but does not want to know, that Blazes Boylan is having an affair with Bloom’s wife, Molly. By being absent from Bloom’s consciousness, Boylan acts like an invisible magnetic field governing thought processes that we can see, but cannot understand, until we know Boylan is there, unthought of, deflecting and determining the conscious thoughts we do see. That the name Blazes Boylan suggests devils and hell reminds us that Joyce’s “man of timid courage,” Bloom, will seize the keys of hell and of death” before the book is over.

Bloom earns his living cadging ads for a newspaper. On 16 June 1904, he is trying to secure an ad for Alexander Keyes, whose company logo is a pair of crossed keys, suggesting the coat of arms of the Isle of Man. Symbolically, the crossed keys indicate everything associated with Celtic crosses, Christian crosses, Egyptian Tau-crosses and all crossed emblems of rebirth; and the Isle of Man symbolizes humanity’s isolation and solidarity at once (another Joycean paradox): every man is an island, but we are all crossed or linked with each other, as Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are crossed and linked in ways neither understands. (It is no accident that the first sentence of Ulysses has 22 words, one for each letter of Cabala, and that the last is “crossed.^“)

Indeed, Ulysses is made up of crossed keys in time as well as in space. In the first chapter, Stephen Dedalus broods on his agenbite of inwit, eats breakfast, and replies with dry, bitter wit to the more robust, blasphemous and outrageous jokes of Buck Mulligan. Only when we discover the parallelism with Homer’s Odyssey that explains Joyce’s title do we realize that Stephen is re-living the experiences of Telemachus, who at the beginning of the Odyssey awakens in a tower, as Stephen does, and is mocked and bullied by Antoninoos as Stephen is mocked and bullied by Mulligan. When Stephen, in chapter two, is given pompous and pontifical advice by the Ulster Protestant, Mr. Deasy, we are again watching trans-time synchronicity: Telemachus was similarly given ad-vice by Nestor in the similar section of the Odyssey. The parallels follow throughout: Bloom is Ulysses, Molly is Penelope, the Catholic Church is the island of the lotus eater, the newspaper office where everybody quotes their favorite political speeches is the Cave of Wind, etc. Dead and absent for 3,000 years, Homer’s images are alive and present, in some sense, in Dublin.

In what sense (as the impatient may ask) is Stephen literally the reincarnation of Telemachus and Bloom of Ulysses? Or is the connection one of Jungian synchronicity (not yet discovered when Joyce wroteUlysses)? Or might one posit Dr. Sheldrake’s morphogenetic resonances in time? Joyce does not answer. He exhibits the living presence of the absent dead and lets us draw our own conclusion.

That the simple model of reincarnation or metempsychosis (which is deliberately hinted at by Joyce in Chapter 4, when Molly asks Bloom the meaning of ^“methimpikehoses^“ and Bloom tries to explain “the transmigration of souls” to her) will not quite cover the case is indicated by the secondary level of parallels with Hamlet which underlies and reinforces the parallels with Homer. A whole stream of symbols linking Stephen with Hamlet, Bloom with the ghost of Hamlet^‘s father, Molly Bloom with Gertrude etc. gradually emerges on re-readings of the book. What Joyce is exhibiting to us is, in fact, a coherent synergy or blot, as Bucky Fuller would say: a pattern that coexists in many places and times. The dead and absent will be again live and present, in this context, because history repeats the same stories endlessly, just changing the names of the players.

But Ulysses is also a mock-encyclopedia, with every chapter corresponding to one human science or discipline; and the discipline emphasized in chapter one is theology, as Joyce’s notes indicate. This begins with Buck Mulligan’s burlesque of the Mass, runs on through Stephen’s tortured reflections on the “mystic oneness” of Father and Son in the Trinity, comes back in Mulligan’s hilarious “Ballad of Joking Jesus,” and permeates every paragraph in subtle ways. If Stephen=Telemachus as son disinherited (Stephen’s father, a drunk, has sold at auction the properties Stephen expected to inherit) and Stephen= Hamlet as son haunted (by a mother’s ghost, not a father’s, but still haunted), the theological context of the chapter implies that Stephen= Telemachus= Hamlet because all young men, at some point, are obsessed with a father who is either dead or missing-in-action: namely, God the Father. Ulysses is set exactly 18 years, or nearly a breeding generation, after Nietzsche announced that God was dead. Stephen as young rebel orpuer aeternis is a perennial archetype; Stephen as individual is representative of the first generation to arrive at maturity with that grim Nietzschean autopsy on their minds.

This is why Mulligan remarks that he and Stephen are both “Hyperboreans.” He is almost certainly referring to the startling opening paragraph of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist:

Look me in the face. We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far out we have moved. “Neither by land nor by sea will you find the Hyperboreans”-Pindar al-ready knew that about us. Beyond the north, beyond ice and death, lie our life, our happiness. We have discovered joy, we know the way, we have the exit out of the labyrinth of history.

Nietzsche ‘s labyrinth of history, which Stephen later calls the nightmare of history, is the rules laid down by State and Church. Mulligan has indeed found his way out of the labyrinth; but Stephen has not. He is named after the maker of labyrinths Daedalus: whose name also means “artist” in Greek-and he remains trapped in the labyrinth of his own narcissistic agenbite until Bloom de-livers him.

For Bloom, as for Stephen, God is either dead or missing-in-action; but Bloom, at 38, has been a freethinker longer and is no longer hysterical about it. Approaching middle-age (by 1904 standards, when average life expectancy was 50), Bloom has lost faith, successively, in Judaism, Protestant-ism, Catholicism and Freemasonry; one feels that his attachment to Socialism is precarious also. In the abyss of uncertainty, Bloom re-mains a modern Ulysses steering his way diplomatically and prudently among such hazards as drunken Catholics (Simon Dedalus), anti-semitic Nationalists (the Citizen) and unctuous undertakers who may be police informers (Corny Kelleher.) Mourning his dead son, ashamed of and yet attached to his father who died a suicide, knowing his wife is “unfaithful,” Bloom retains equanimity and practices charity discreetly and inconspicuously: feeding the seagulls, helping the blind boy across the road, negotiating to protect the rights of Paddy Dignam’s widow, visiting Mina Purefoy in the hospital. Lest we think this kindly chap is a paragon, Joyce keeps Bloom in the same precise naturalistic focus as we watch him defecate, urinate, peep into a masochistic porn novel and masturbate. Joyce announced that he did notbelieve in heroes, and Bloom is no hero: just an ordinary decent man. There are a million like him in any large city: Joyce was merely the first to put him in a novel, with biological functions and timid courage unglamorized and uncensored.

The climax of Ulysses – the brothel scene in which Stephen, drunk, actually sees his mother’s ghost cursing him, and Bloom, exhausted, dreams in hypnogogic reverie of his son not at the age of his death (II days) but at the age he would be if he had lived (11 years)–brings us back to the living presence of the absent dead. But in that scene also, Bloom’s timid courage becomes timid courage as he risks scandal, gossip, disgrace and even associating with the possible informer, Corny Kelleher, in order to protect Stephen from two drunken and violent English soldiers. This is the pivot-point of the novel, and, since Joyce carefully avoids revealing Bloom^‘s actual motivations, critics have had endless entertainment “interpreting” for us.

My own guess is that, even if Bloom is looking for a substitute son, as some say, or has unconscious homosexual urges as others claim, or is hoping to procure for Molly a lover less gross and offensive to Bloom’s sensibilities than Boylan, as Marilyn French recently suggested, the answer lies in a four-letter word that each of Joyce’s three major characters speaks once at a crucial point in the narrative. Stephen speaks it first, in the library, when asking himself what he left out of his theory of Hamlet; he answers, “Love, yes. Word known to all men.” Bloom speaks_. it to the Citizen, offering an alternative to politics and national hatreds:

– Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. And Molly concludes her ruminations on what’s Wrong With Men by repeating the theme of the two major male voices in the narrative: they don’t know what love is.

Beneath the Odyssey, Hamlet and Don Giovanni (recently discovered), Ulysses also parallels the most effective and memorable of the parallels of Jesus: the story of the Good Samaritan.

The dead and absent survive, then, because we love them. Ulysses itself, the most complexly intellectual of comedies, is a testament to love: to Alfred Hunter, a man of whom we know only a few facts: he lived in Dublin in 1904; he was Jewish; his wife was, according to gossip, unfaithful; and one night he took home a drunken, depressed, impoverished and totally embittered young man named lames Joyce and sobered him and fed him. All else about Alfred Hunter is lost, but those facts plus artistic imagination created “Leopold Bloom;” and if Hunter is dead and absent, Bloom remains forever alive and present for students of literature.

The curiosity of Joyce’s mature technique is that while on first reading Ulysses seems only intermittently funny and consistently “naturalistic” (realistic), on successive re-readings it becomes progressively funnier and spookier. None of Joyce’s 100 or more major and minor characters knows fully what is going on in Dublin on that one extraordinarily ordinary day of 16 June 1904-“a day when nothing and everything is happening,” as Edna O’Brien recently wrote. The first-time reader is similarly ignorant, navigating through 18 chapters and 18 hours of “realism” that is often as squalid and confusing “as real life,” Beneath this surface, as we have already seen, the ghosts of Homer, Shakespeare, Mozart and (if I am right about the Good Samaritan theme) Jesus are present-although-absent as the archetypal themes of their works are reflected in this everyday bustle of ordinary early 20th Century city.

Everybody in the story is involved in misunderstandings or ambiguities that be-come clearer and more hilarious on each re-reading. This existential fact that every mind creates its own reality tunnel is the abyss of which Joyce spoke, at nineteen, in the lecture on absence and death from which we began.

By the middle of the book, almost everybody in Dublin thinks Bloom has won a great deal on the horse race that day. On first reading, we are likely to think so, too, and wonder why he hasn^‘t gone to pick up his winnings. Only on careful re-reading do we discover the confusions out of which this inaccurate rumor got started.
A dog who appears vicious and ugly to one narrator appears “lovely” and almost ^“human” to another narrator, and a third narrator claims the dog actually talks.
Alf Bergan sees Paddy Dignam at 4 p.m. but Paddy was buried at 10 in the morning; we are to decide for ourselves if Alf saw a ghost or just shared in the general fallibility of human perception.
Some Dubliners think Bloom is a dentist, and discovering the source of that error is amusing to the rereader.
Bloom thinks Molly doesn’t know about his Platonic “affair” with Martha Clifford, but Molly knows more than he guesses about that and all his other secrets.
Nosey Flynn, the first Dubliner to tell us Bloom is a Freemason, is wrong about everything else he says; it takes careful study to discover that this fount of unreliable gossip is right about this particular detail.

The tradition of the realistic novel, at this point, has refuted itself, in a classic Strange Loop. Joyce has given us more realism than any other novelist and the upshot of it is that we don’t know what’s real anymore. If Dante’s epic was informed by the philosophy of Aristotle, whom he called The Master of Those Who Know, Joyce’s epic, as Ellmann commented, is dominated by David Hume, the Master of Those Who Don’t Know. We have seen Reality and found it an abyss indeed; Blake only claimed to see infinity in a grain of sand, but Joyce has shown us the infinity by opening every hour of an ordinary day to endless interpretations and re-interpretations.

Things become even more interesting, and weirder, when we begin to count the coincidences in this very, very average day: a day so banally normal that early critics complained chiefly that many chapters are boring and pointless.

The Irish critic Sheldon Brivic has counted over 1000 coincidences integrating the banalities and confusions of 16 June 1904 into a patterned harmony that none of the characters consciously apprehend, al-though their thoughts and actions are creating or co-creating it in collaboration with each other and with the dead and absent. As Brivic says (Crane Bag, VI, 1):

The unconscious Joyce represents is not merely an area within the brains of his creatures. It is a network of connections through time and space that extends beyond any awareness most absolute.

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