Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective

Posted on January 15, 1988 | 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.

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Posted in Essays, Excerpts

Tagged General Semantics

The Priory of Sion

Posted on November 14, 1987 | 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 | 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.

(submitted to rawilsonfans.org by RMJon23)

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review of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Posted on January 1, 1987 | Comments Off

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

reviewed by Robert Anton Wilson

from Magical Blend #17, 1987
reprinted in Email to the Universe

Some people may wonder what a holistic detective agency is, but this new book by Douglas Adams, author of the famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, will explain that for them, with such transcendental clarity that the mind, as in Dante’s Paradise, is nearly blinded by the light.

Can you believe that the disappearance of a cat in London seven years ago cannot only be caused by, but equally be the cause of, the miraculous appearance of the music of J.S. Bach more than twohundred years ago?

If this thought is incomprehensible to you, then you should either study quantum physics or read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Mr. Adams not only explains the relationship between the missing cat and the Goldberg Variations, but also demonstrates how a sofa can get wedged into a stairwell in such a way that you not only cannotget it out but mathematical analysis will prove that it never could have gotten wedged in that position in the first place.

Oddly, there is no fantasy in this book. Dirt: Gently is as logical as Sherlock Holmes and all the macoronic inter-connections he masters are necessary parts of the world of modem physics.

It may be startling to contemplate probability matrices in which everything is the cause of everything in one sense and nothing is the cause of anything in another sense, but such is the probable world in which we probably live according to current science, and it is in one matrix that Dirk Gently has to move a sofa through a solid wall (and incidentally save humanity from extinction-for which he does not charge extra) before the missing cat is located.

Unfortunately, the cat is dead. But that’s only in one probability matrix. In the matrix next door, the cat is probably alive, but we’ve lost Bach. While cat-lovers and music-lovers ponder that conundrum, at least the matrix in which humanity is destroyed has been avoided.

But the damned couch is still stuck in the stairwell, in the probability matrix where we lost Bach and saved the cat.

Alas, I fear that those who talk of “holistic medicine” have little inkling of how holistic sub-atomic physics is. I can only urge that all who wish a glimpse of how our probable universe probably operates should rush right out and buy this marvelous book, which is a thriller, a mystery, a farce and the most scientific novel of the year.

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Some Circuits of Evolution

Posted on September 15, 1986 | Comments Off

Some Circuits of Evolution

By Robert Anton Wilson

from Critique: A Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics
#23/#24, Fall 1986/Winter 1987

The fifth, Neurosomatic Circuit has only appeared sporadically thus far in history and remains latent or only appears in occasion flashes in most humans. It seems to be located primarily in the right brain hemisphere, with a feedback loop to the genitalia. (This loop is the origin of the metaphor of kundalini or “serpent power” in system like Tantra, Ophite, Gnosticism and Voodoo). Training methods to induce the Neurosomatic Circuit to leap into action are known in many yogic and occult schools and include: mediation, pranayama (heavy, rhythmic breathing), cannabis drugs, fasting, prayer and , in many “initiatory” orders a kind of ritualized Shock that may well be a re-imprinting experience. (All of these Shocks, whether found in tribal shamanism or in systems as sophisticated as Tibetan Tantra, are basically similar in structure to the Shocks of Masonic initiation: the candidate is led through a heavily symbolic ritual to a moment of stunning emotional crises.)

Whereas the reality-tunnels of the first four circuits are linear and mechanical, and build up a strong sense of separateness (hyper-egotism), perception on the fifth circuit is global, non-linear, holistic and tends to blur the previously acute sense of division between Self and World. At the same time, the conditioned sense of separateness between “mind” and “body” is also blurred or loosened. The general feeling is one of being “at home in the universe,” “high:” or “floating:” and part of a web that extends far beyond the material organism; the sense of lonely Darwinian:”struggle for survival” is temporarily or permanently abolished. Feud called this “the oceanic experience,” Gurdjieff calls it “the magnetic center,” and in traditional Christian terminology the enlarged self on this circuit is “the new Adam: as distinguished from “the old Adam”, the isolated self formed by the rigid reality-tunnel of the first four circuits.

It seems that art is a neurosomatic circuit function, even though expressed or communicated through third circuit symbols (words in poetry, musical forms, paintings, etc.) There is hardly any artist who has not recorded mild-to-ecstatic neurosomatic Circuit experiences, usually deepening with age, and most artists frankly attribute the artistic drive to the desire to communicate these “high” moments or “peak experiences.” The quarrel in our Occidental culture in recent centuries between Art and Science – i.e. between some artists and some scientists – is largely a dispute over the comparative values of third circuit linear analysis and Neurosomatic Circuit holistic apprehension. The present theory suggests that the full development of the human being involves maximum development of both of these circuits in combination with maximum development of subtlety and flexibility on the other six circuits also.

The Neurogenetic Circuit is even more alien than the Neurosomatic to most conventional scientists. The names give to this circuit in other systems indeed indicate how strange it seems to those constricted by four-circuit tunnel-realities: Jung calls it ”the collective unconscious” (although it may become conscious); Theosophy calls it “the akashic records;” Stanislaus Grof has named it “the phylogenetic unconscious;” Buddhism calls it “the treasury mind;” Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has recently named it “the morphogenetic field”. All of these are regarded by conservative scientists as “mystical” and unscientific concepts, because what they all describe cannot be explained in mechanistic biology. It seems in 1984 that Sheldrake’s “morphogenetic field” is the best name for what is involved here since Sheldrake frankly admits his “field” cannot be reduced to mechanical laws but operates as a resonance through time. On this circuit, to be blunt, one seems to have access to the experience of all of one’s ancestors, including those who have been dead for thousands or hundreds of thousand of years. (Experience of this circuit explains the belief in “reincarnation.”)

Whether or not the Neurogenetic Circuit exists latently in the unconscious of all, as Jung and Grof posit, it only becomes conscious after many years of slowly-increasing Neurosomatic sensitivity, usually accompanied by work in some logic or shamanic discipline. At this point, consciousness, having become less linear and more global (synergetic), gradually begins to experience depth in time. The Hindu concept of the Atman or world-soul is then not an idea but a lived experience. In Dr. Leary’s more modern metaphor, one experiences oneself as a giant robot programmed by the DNA to do specific work in a specific evolutionary niche, and one has increasingly clear “memory” or intuitive understanding of the vectors of the evolutionary drama. Vast tolerance and a certain Nitezschean amorality blended with Buddhist compassion also appear here: one sees all other organisms as similar aspects of the “world-soul” or as similar robots programmed by the same evolutionary vector Life Force. No organism seems “totally wrong” in the sense of conventional Socio-Sexual Circuit “morality,” some organisms merely appear to be mechanical or unconscious of their evolutionary role and potential.

The seventh Metaprogramming Circuit is even more recent, and statistically more rare, than Neurosomatic or Neurogenetic awareness: one can hardly write about it without being accused of being either a satirist or a mental case. It consists of the conscious, controlled ability to draw energy out of any previous reality-tunnel and to put that energy into the construction of a new reality-tunnel; that is, to consciously choose which circuits one is operating on and how the information tapped by that circuit will be organized into Gestalts. This makes possible what theologians fallaciously claim all human beings already possess: the ability to exercise meaningful choice (”free will) and autonomy in the true sense. This can easily degenerate into megalomania, and in many cases it has, and thus this circuit is not very “safe” unless monitored by great sophistication and subtlety on the other circuits, especially the Semantic (mapping-and-manipulating) circuit. Talking too frankly about this circuit can also be hazardous to health to most traditional societies, as illustrated by the Sufi dervish, Manur el-Hallaj, who bluntly declared, “I am the truth and there is nothing within my turban but God” and was stoned to death for his “Blasphemy.:” In general, statements like “I am God” and “I created all this” are inescapable on this circuit, but make severe problems if not balanced by the other circuits and a considerable sense of humor. This circuit is called Shivadarshana in Hinduism – the dance of Shiva, god of intoxication and death – is also called “crossing the Abyss” in Cabala; that should be sufficient warning of the perils involved.

Concerning the final circuit known in 1984, the Non-Local Quantum Circuit, one must be even more gnomic. When this circuit is activated, the conventional conditioned-imprinted reality-tunnels called “me” and “my world” are even more expanded than on the 5^th, 6^th, and 7^th circuits; one appears to blend into Something for which most languages have no word. The Chinese wisely call that Something wu-hsin which means “no mind” and is, perhaps, the class of all minds – which is not itself a mind for the same reason that e.g. the class of all chimneys is not a chimney. In modern science, the closest approximation to wu-hsinis the Implicate order suggested by quantum physicist Dr. David Bohm; from this Implicate Order are projected non-local forms which create the space-time-mind continuum we normally experience. It must be stressed that non-local in this context means also non-causal and non-energetic. If one can imagine a kind of software that co-exists with and is prior to the hardware of the universe, then that is wu-hsin or the Implicate Order.

Accidental entry to this circuit occurs in serious trauma of the sort called “near death” or “clinical death” experience and is then limited to “astral body” or “out-of-body” experiences. At full intensity, this non-local circuit accesses all the information of the cosmos and experience of it is called Illumination; invocation of the word “God” generally seems at that point a rather small, provincial and human-chauvinist metaphor for what is happening but “union with God” is the only term in the normal vocabulary for such information-rich and non-localized awareness.

We cannot say in 1984 what new circuits are forming or are still potential in the human brain.

It appears that the simple Aristotelian idea that we are either conscious or unconscious (asleep or awake) is inadequate. We have seen a whole spectrum of consciousness; it seems clear that each level of consciousness opens many possibilities for new reality-tunnels, and that consciousness has evolved, and it is still evolving; we absolutely cannot predict what we might become and what we might know after the next evolutionary leap. In particular, the seemingly intractable problems of life on this planet – such injustice, exploitation, crime and , above all, war – seem to be maintained by stupidity in the most generally rigid reality-tunnels which prevent further learning or which “hypnotize” us so that we do not see who, where, or what we are doing. But such mechanical stupidity or Maya, or “sleep-walking” is, in this perspective, an early evolutionary state out of which we are, as individuals and as a species, slowly growing toward higher and higher levels of awareness.

That is, every rigid or dogmatic reality-tunnel is a remnant of our mammalian ancestry. The earlier circuits are more mechanical; the later circuits are more “voluntary” or self-regulating. If human life often looks like a spectacle in improperly-wired robots bumping into each other and knocking each other apart, this is because we are not finished as a species; we have the potential of evolving to more subtle and more sensitive functioning. In contrast to a vast over-simplification by H.G. Wells – who said “Modern history is a race between education and catastrophe” – we can say at this point that modern history is a race between higher consciousness and catastrophe.

We have all lived through the fallout from a vast Neurological Revolution that began with the accidental discovery of LSD in 1943, peaked with the bizarre “drug culture” of the 1960’s and then mutated into dozens of new evolutionary vectors in the 1970;s and early 1980’s. It’s become known to literally millions of social scientists, physical scientists, artists, writers, and ordinary people that consciousness can be radically altered, that many old reality-tunnels can be outgrown, that many new reality-tunnels can be imprinted and learned, and that the control of our consciousness is increasing in our own hands. “Whatever can be accomplished by chemical means,” as William S. Burroughs says, “can be accomplished by other means.” In retrospect, psychedelic drugs were only the initial Shock which our culture needed to being mutating into a new stage of evolution, a state for which we have no word and for which I have suggest the symbol, I².

I² means I-observing-I or the mind studying the mind; it also means intelligence studying Intelligence. On a third level of reference, I² also means Information² or the vast information explosion being ushered in by micro-processors and the world-wide electronic network which is creating what Fuller and McLuhan called “a global village.”

Through direct brain stimulation, through Lilly’s isolation tanks, through continuous breakthroughs in organic chemistry and neurology, through scientific investigation of the mechanisms of yoga and Zen, through research into so-called ESP and “out of body experience” (7^th and 8^th circuit functions) through each advance in computer technology, through research on intelligence-raising drugs and vitaminic compounds, etc. we are learning more and more about how rigid reality-tunnels are imprinted and how expanded and “cosmic” realty-tunnels can be induced. We are like sleeping beings who are just learning how to wake ourselves up. In a sense are just discovering that the “missing link” between the ape and True Humanity is ourselves; but we are also learning how to accelerate evolution within our own brains, and how to become what in vanity we once thought we already were: free and responsible beings not limited by mammalian mechanical reflexes.

In a fascinating book on research into longevity, The Conquest of Death, Dr. Alvin Silverstein quotes some impressive figures from the French economist Georges Anderla, showing how the third circuit semantic function has increased our information about the universe since the birth of Christ. Taking all known scientific facts of 1 A.D. as his unit, Anderla calculated how long it took that amount of information to double. The answer is that it took 1500 years – a millennium and a half. But the next doubling was much faster, took only 250 years, and was complete by 1750. The next doubling took only 150 years and was complete by 1900. The next doubling took only 50 years and was complete by 1950, and the next doubling took only ten years and was complete by 1960. The next doubling took seven years and was complete by 1967. Etc. This acceleration is still continuing and some Futurists suggest that knowledge will soon be doubling every year, since microprocessors are accelerating the acceleration.

While we as a species are passing through this “information explosion” which is doubling knowledge each decade at a rate that only occurred in millenniums during the stone Ages, we are also participating in the aforementioned Neurological revolution, whereby we are learning more and more about the functions of the other non-symbolizing circuits of our brain. To grasp the whole picture of what is now happening, one must think simultaneously of both the Information Explosion and of the Neurological Revolution – of both the new facts being processed and the new potentials of consciousness being explored.

It seems to me now, in 1984, that only rigid and dogmatic (or unconsciously unquestioning) adherence to a narrow atheism or futilitarianism – to what Nietzsche caricatured as Idolization of “least possible effort and greatest possible blunder” – can dismiss as “mere coincidence: this conjunction of rapid information increase and rapid consciousness expansion which I call I². It would be the blackest of black jokes if all this sudden coherence, this emerging of new potentials within us, were just the prologue to the final tragedy of nuclear holocaust. Rather, I suspect it is precisely the evolutionary quantum leap that is demanded of us at this time to bypass and transcend such Doomsday scenarios, to continue the evolutionary ascent to higher and higher levels of awareness, even to levels which we cannot begin to guess or imagine at present.

This article is an edited excerpt reprinted with Permission from a larger article called “How to Tell Your Friends From the Apes” in the aforementioned Magical Blend, a quarterly Magazine (Issue 12)

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Tagged 8 circuits

Compuserve chat

Posted on April 14, 1986 | Comments Off

Online conference with Dr. Robert Anton Wilson
14 April 1986

(Sysop Jim) OK, quiet peoples. I present Dr. Robert Anton Wilson.
(Bob Wilson) Cocaine is natures way of telling you the Vatican Bank needs your money more than you do.
(Ben Rowe) Bob, since magick, and the cabala play such a role in your books, I’m curious to know just what you attitude towards such things are, here in the real(?) world. Could you state your feelings briefly?
(Bob Wilson) I regard magick and cabala as doorways to archeological levels of the human brain.
(Ben Rowe) Do you practice any form of it yourself?
(Bob Wilson) Yes.
(Ben Rowe) Care to say what kind?
(Bob Wilson) Ritual invocation, gematria.
(Avatar) To follow up on Ben’s question, are you presently a member of any secret societies or occult orders and could you tell us the names and your grade within them?
(Bob Wilson) That would be telling. Ippsissimus maximus of the Illuminati
and toenail of the Head Temple of the High Priesthood of Eris Esoteric.
(Avatar) Amusing to the last.
(Peter da Silva) I’m not sure what book this was in, I think maybe Right Where you are Sitting Now–you were talking about the possible future of human sexuality. I thought that the sorts of things you were talking about were rather pedestrian. Were you…
(Bob Wilson) Define pedestrian?
(Peter DA Silva) Well, you only considered two sexes, to begin with.
(Bob Wilson) Oh.
(Sysop Jim) A major oversight, no doubt.
(Rodney) When will the next volume of THE HISTORICAL ILLUMINATUS be out and will there be more to follow?
(Bob Wilson) It will be finished a year after I finish writing it. There will be five volumes in this series, of course.
(peter) do you think machines will ever be smarter than people?
(Bob Wilson) they’re already smarter than some people.
(Sysop Georgia) true!
(Peter DA Silva) Can I be obnoxious some more?
(Bob Wilson) Yes.
(Peter DA Silva) Back to my previous question/comment/speech. You didn’t seem to get too heavily into the possibilities of bioengineering as touched on by such people as John Varley (Ophiuchi Hotline, Titan, etc.).
Have you any more thoughts on the subject now that technology has begun to catch up on you?
(Bob Wilson) I think we can engineer immortal superhuman beings in many dimensions of superiority to us. I hope we can learn to re-engineer ourselves neurologically to become more superhuman than our creations by learning from them.
(Peter DA Silva) How about technological immortality?
(Bob Wilson) To understand anything, you must be able to make a working model of it. The more we model the human brain, not only through bioengineering but through computers, the more we can make better brains for ourselves.
(Avatar) First, do you think western civilization will survive the next century, and what do you think will be the significant events which will characterize its existence? Second, what do you think of the “magic” energy machine of Joseph Newman?
(Bob Wilson) Just heard of the Newman machine two days ago. Too soon to form an opinion.
(Sysop Jim) On the first question then.
(Bob Wilson) I think western civilization will survive. It will be increasingly like a libertarian, pagan, psionic science fiction novel, probably by me.
(Geoff) Hi Bob… A question about skepticism. As one of the resident skeptics, I’ve always advocated “keeping your B.S. detector turned up on high” when investigating these strange phenomena. My question… what degree of skepticism is appropriate and when is it time to turn skepticism off?
(Bob Wilson) Skepticism should be dialectical. Doubt A, then doubt NOT A. Then doubt both A and NOT A. Then doubt your own ability to doubt enough.
(Geoff) GREAT!!
(Bob Wilson) Doubt also Doubt itself.
(Ben Rowe) A crowley fan, I see.
(Bob Wilson) Experiment with Alternative belief systems, enter alternative, cognitive grids and as the Zen Master said when asked the way of the Tao, “Move!”.
(Geoff) Thanx, Bob. And welcome to CIS!!!
(Ben Rowe) Bob, one of the perpetual arguments here is about the degree to which subjective phenomena, such as the results of magickal invocations, can be usefully dealt with from a an “objective”, scientific viewpoint. Could you tell us your feelings as to the place of objective inquiry in such fields?
(Bob Wilson) Buddha said, “doubt, and find your own light.” Ritual is to the inner sciences what experiment is to the outer sciences. Believe nothing on faith. Test all things. Enter every reality tunnel If there are only cannibals inside close the door quickly and move to the next reality tunnel. Fear nothing, never complain.
(Sysop Jim) “Test all things” Applying what tests?
(Ben Rowe) I take it that means you think science is pretty much useless in that area.
(Bob Wilson) If the hypothesis gets the result you want, tentatively continue the hypothesis. If the hypothesis busts, make a better hypothesis. As John Lilly says, “Science is the Yoga of the West. Yoga is the science of the East”. Do the experiments , watch the results. I don’t see that that’s not scientific.
(Ben Rowe) The problem we run into here seems to be more in finding some basis to talk about such things. The objectivists wont accept the “evidence” of the subjectivists such as myself, and vice versa. Any ideas about finding a common ground for this sort of discussion?
(Bob Wilson) Objectivists are disciples of Ayn Rand. See mmy definition of “disciples” under NEW AGE in religion SIG.
(Peter DA Silva) I wish I had your optimism about the future, BOB. I don’t see libertaria any time soon. Can you give any of your thoughts as to how it will come about? (wonder if I can get a straight answer this time.)
(Bob Wilson) I will do my part, the part only I can do from my position in space-time. I believe others are doing the same thing from their space. Do what thou Wilt shall be the Whole of the Law
(Peter DA Silva) Sigh…
(Sysop Jim) Peter, these ARE straight answers. Remember, space is curved. Follow up?
(Peter DA Silva) Was hoping for a scenario or prediction, not an oath of allegiance. Right now the authoritarians seem to be winning and my position in space time is a bummer.
(Bob Wilson) Sorry… you created that reality tunnel, you can find your way out… You built the Trap… you know the design better than anyone…
(rich) Bob, ALL phenomena subjective. Is not search for objectivity really search for means of communicating those that are more subjective than others? Does “science” really have any meaning as an “object/idea” unless applied?
(Bob Wilson) Can’t understand your terminology. Question meaningless in my reality tunnel. Try Again!
(rich) Everything is subjective. Inability to express ideas makes it so, but recourse to science demands communication in terms others understand, no?
(Bob Wilson) That means as little to me as everything is green. If everything is Green, we still need separate words for the kind of green that looks like Red and the kind of green that looks like blue. If everything is subjective, we still need words for the subjective things that everybody sees, the subjective things that only one person sees, and the subjective things that you break your leg on, and the subjective things that are called, “the Ballad of the Long Legged Bait.”
(Avatar) The model that modern science uses to explain the world in terms of atoms, molecule, particles, and fields works quite well for many things that we do, but is occasionally assaulted by interesting loopholes like rains of hazel nuts, ancient rocks containing live frogs, screwups in space and time, etc. What extensions to conventional science have you found most effective to enable you to model anomalous events, and could you explain some of them to us?
(Bob Wilson) JUNG’s theory of synchronicity (psychologically-induced space time relativity). Bell’s theorem of non-local hidden variables. Transcending space-time. Persinger’s theory of geomagnetic fluctuations linked to human brain function. I wonder if the link works both ways. Edwin Harris Walker “the complete quantum anthropologist (proceedings of the American Anthropological Association, 1974) unifying Bell theorem with psychokinetic experimental results. Garfinkel.
(Avatar) Of “Simon and Garfinkel”?
(Bob Wilson) Garfinkel on reality glossing and Leary on imprinting of reality tunnels not when they become ordinary by repetition.
(Sysop Jim) If I may, anecdotal or scientific repetition?
(Bob Wilson) Both.
(Peter DA Silva) Problem with tuning perception of reality is it doesn’t get you off the front lines (unless I’m psychotic & dreaming we’re in authoritarian state while we’re in libertarian paradise. If so, please wake me up). So, please quit treating me like parapsychologist at the AAAS & give some indication as to how transition is to occur.
(Sysop Jim) Ha!
(Bob Wilson) Breath normally, eat less sugar… eat foods… get high frequently…
(Peter DA Silva) Hey! I quit putting sugar in my coffee already!
(Bob Wilson) learn to meditate, stop being afraid and angry… you are surrounded by a network of love… take down the bricks, remove the armor… there is nothing to fear. Stop Complaining… have chicken soup once a day…
(Peter DA Silva) Do chicken fajitas count?
(Sysop Jim) I hope you’re getting all this down, Peter.
(Peter DA Silva) In my print buffer.
(Bob Wilson) Learn to laugh, learn to give… lighten up your act, and remember who made the grass green…
(Peter DA Silva) Newton.
(Robby) we all do
(Bob Wilson) and who put the insect monsters in your reality tunnel…
(Peter) Do you believe in GOD?
(Bob Wilson) God is a ridiculously small human concept compared to the coherent intelligence of universe. Everything doesn’t need to have a primate Alpha male in charge to be an intelligent system.
(Mark) Can you tell me the formula for AUM (or where to find said formula)?
(Bob Wilson) Don’t know the laws relating to communication of such information. Don’t want the owner of this machine busted.
(Mark) Data source?
(Bob Wilson) Who makes the grass green?
(Robby) magick in theory and practice by a.c.
(Bob Wilson) Oral Tradition!
(Robby) true
(Sysop Jim) What is AUM?
(Peter DA Silva) Ultimate acid.
(Bob Wilson) Those who know do not speak…
(Mark) Drug to convert neophobes into neophiles.
(Sysop Jim) I see. hokay, Kaci?
(Bob Wilson) Drug obsolete, electrons are the psychedelics of the 80’s
(Peter DA Silva) “Turn On, Tune In, Link Up”?
(Bob Wilson) And shine like stars….
(kaci) dare i digress and ask what persinger’s theory of geo flux is??
(Bob Wilson) Persinger has found statistical links between geomagnetic cycles and fortean data anomalistics and parapsychology. See his space-time transients and unusual events (co-author).
(kaci) in what kind of periodicity?
(Bob Wilson) LAFRENSERIE and brain-mind bulletin circa December 1985… I hope…. Anomalistics correlate with earthquake activity and strong psychic experience with low geomagneticactivity.
(rich) what physical means is postulated for existence and use of psychic powers/uses?
(Bob Wilson) The careless postulate vague psycho-kinetic energies. Persinger postulates measurable geomagnetic fields. Walker derives psychokinetic effects from basic equations of non-local quantum connectedness.
(ELAD) I have found this discussion interesting. but, sorry to say…i am not familiar with mr. Wilson’s books. since there was no bio at the beginning I would appreciate his book listing and books that he recommends.
(Bob Wilson) “This I like”: The book of the Breast , sex and drugs, Illuminatus!, Cosmic Trigger, The Universe Next Door, the Homing Pidgeons, the Trick Top Hat, Neuropolitics, Right Where You are Sitting Now, Masks of the Illuminati, The Illuminati Papers, Prometheus Rising, The Earth Will Shake, The Widows Son, and two I’d rather forget.
(Sysop Jim) And numerous issues of Playboy, yes?
(Bob Wilson) I only wrote the short editorials on why pot should be legalized abortion should be legalized, victimless crimes should be abolished, the draft should be abolished, and a few similar ideas now trite and soon to be conservative. Even Buckley now agrees with me about drugs. Remember the Zen Master who said, “move”.
(Peter DA Silva) Sorry… can’t stop asking hard questions… is my role here. 2 questions this time. 1) have you read and if so what do you think of Julian Jayne’s book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. 2) I wish you would write some Science Fiction (where defined as so:- a SF writer is embarrassed by his inconsistencies, a fantasy writer is proud of them). 3) (I lied) Do you really think there are psychedelics of the ’80s?
(Bob Wilson) Jane’s model interesting. So is Stan Gooch in total man. I prefer Pribram hologram model and Leary 8 circuit model.
(Peter DA Silva) (of course)
(Bob Wilson) Inconsistencies of my books are inconsistencies of quantum mechanics, which is why new scientist magazine called me “most scientific of all science fiction writers” … I blush…. But facts are facts. Thank you for exchanging electrons, the psychedelics of the 80’s.
(Peter DA Silva) If these are psychedelics, I’m going back to drugs.
(Bob Wilson) Have a high Holiday…
(Robert Wiggins) Bob, I’ve been reading you for many years (more than 10) now (I even have Sex and Drugs in hardcover) and wanted to tell you I still go back to read “10 Reasons to Get Out of Bed in the Morning” that appeared in Oui magazine. My question is mundane (but I’m enjoying the conversation here) do you know of a place in NYC that carries your books (and/or Leary’s)
(Bob Wilson) Thou art beat, Forbidden planet and Laissez Faire books, Weisers, ga
(Robby) are you the BOBO of subgenius fame
(Bob Wilson) That would be telling.ga
(Robby) i saw de Selby today he was wearing pink
(Bob Wilson) Others said, “he was a pink elf” but he was glad to be there and meet all of you.
(Robby) de self-by?
(Bob Wilson) I did not invent de Selby. As professor LACKANOOKIE says,
“TIJENTIEN, TIEN JEN TAO , de Selby TZU JAN”. Very roughly, the earth creates people, the sky creates earth. de Selby became what he always was”.
(Peter DA Silva) What are the two books you don’t want to remember, and what do you think of Steve Jackson’s game “Illuminati”?
(Bob Wilson) When did you stop eating your wife …no wait… When did you stop beating your wife?
(Peter DA Silva) I like the first one better.
(Bob Wilson) and was there ever a dog that praised its fleas
(Avatar) OK – I am honored – two quickies. What is your birthdate? and do you believe in Death after Life?
(Bob Wilson) January 18th, 1932. Death and Life are unscientific concepts, as such. All we know is the tuned-in and the not tuned-in. The not tuned-in may be tuned in. /TUN DEATH /MON LIFE with the proper technology or neurology. We are made out of the debris of exploding stars. The not-tuned-in is not nonexistent since nonexistence is a metaphysical concept. Operationally stars, people, quarks Tune in, or tune out, the dance is eternal. LO! The happy moron, he doesn’t give a damn. I wish I was a moron…. MY GOD! Perhaps i am! Love to All. Stop being afraid, Peter. Goodnight.
(Peter DA Silva) Not in my program.

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Man Bites Dogma

Posted on July 23, 1985 | Comments Off

Man Bites Dogma

A Conversation with Robert Anton Wilson
about Politics, Religion, Drugs, and Quantum Mechanics

by Michael Dare
L.A. Weekly, 1988

He’s been called a cult figure to various lunatic fringe groups, Tom Robbins calls him “a dazzling barker hawking tickets to the most thrilling tilt-a-whirls and daring loop-o-planes on the midway of higher consciousness,” he calls himself an iconoclastic comedian, and whether Robert Anton Wilson is a philosopher or a public nuisance is now up to you. His books, The Illuminatus Trilogy, Schroedinger’s Cat, and The Cosmic Trigger all fall somewhere in between non-fiction and pure fantasy, full of unquestionable facts and quotes that somehow always add up to utterly preposterous conclusions. This devotion to eccentricity and breaking down barriers reaches it’s zenith in The Illuminati Papers, a book seemingly written by characters from all his other books. It contains, among other esoterica, a whole page of Haiku by Raymond Chandler in which Wilson has simply taken short descriptive excerpts from Chandler’s work and reformatted them into beautiful miniature poems.

With all the passion of a religious crusader, Robert Anton Wilson is out to destroy all personal belief systems, to force every one of his readers to seriously question any and all thoughts they hold dear. His specialty is in analyzing systems that seem to contradict each other and trying to find the points at which they do agree. In Prometheus Rising he synthesizes the works of Leary, Jung, Freud, Sagan, Gurdjieff, Berne, and several others into a general system that shows how much they have in common, where they disagree, and why. His newest work, Reality is What You Can Get Away With, reads like a screenplay by Picasso – it’s cubist, outrageous, completely non-linear, constantly startling, and very funny. All of his books are part of a series; they’re cinematic, full of cross cutting, montages, flashbacks, and flash forwards. But no one seems to be able to figure out if this new one is a movie or a book since it actively defies both definitions. He’s raised the put-on to the highest art form.

Wilson holds a Ph.D. in psychology, edited the Playboy Forum for six years, has made a comedy record (Secrets of Power) and a punk rock record (The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy), the stage version of his Illuminatus trilogy has been seen in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Seattle, Jerusalem, and was performed recently in Liverpool by the London National Theater in a 12 hour noon to midnight marathon. His latest play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell has only been seen in Ireland where Wilson has lived for the past five years. A screenwriting job brought him to Hollywood recently, where he has been delivering lectures and running fantasy role-playing encounter groups. These evenings are enlightening, self-contradictory, very funny, and hazardous to your dogma. We started out talking about one of his favorite subjects.

——————————————————————————–

DARE
Do you see everything as a conspiracy?

WILSON
No. Somebody once accused me of claiming that everything is subjective, but I don’t make statements about everything, I only make partial statements. I think conspiracy is very prevalent behavior on this planet. It even precedes humanity. Lions conspire – one lion will frighten a herd of antelope to get them running in a certain direction where the other lions will be waiting there to eat them. That’s a conspiracy against antelopes, and I’m sure the antelopes are very bitter about it. Ants conspire, they seize territory and drive off interlopers, rats have very vigorous conspiracies, when a rat from a strange pack gets into a house they’ll hunt him down and kill him. It’s just like the mafia, “Don’t do anything on our territory.”

DARE
Is it possible for a conspiracy to be benign?

WILSON
It would have to be open. The difference between a conspiracy and an affinity group is that when me and my friends do it it’s an affinity group and when someone we don’t like does it it’s a conspiracy. Conspiracies run the literary world, the art world, marijuana arrives here due to conspiracies. It’s a conspiratorial world.
People naturally form groups and to the extent that they’re competing with each other, they try to hide what they’re doing. The best explanation of conspiracy is in The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, a very thick mathematical treatise. It explains that it’s very beneficial to have conspiracies in competitive situations – the bigger an alliance you form, the quicker you move ahead.
The function of every alliance is to conceal information from the other alliance and to spread false information, just like in a poker game. You don’t want them to know what hand you’ve got but you want them to think they know. Poker is the essence of conspiracy. Everybody’s trying to deceive one another. A benevolent conspiracy would have to be open, without the factor of concealment, and everybody’s invited in. That’s the only kind of conspiracy that could really improve the world.

DARE
So you think that Summit Conferences should be broadcast live to everybody?

WILSON
Of course. People are so paranoid about the Bilderbergers because they’re so secretive. For all we know they’re only getting together to look at stag movies once a year. The Bilderbergers have a lot of members in common with the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. To a great extent they’re financed by the Rockefellers and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. They’re all part of one gang that meets once a year in secret. They’re called the Bilderbergers because their first meeting was in Bilderberg. They get more coverage each time they meet because they’re so secretive about what they’re doing. They say they’re meeting to discuss international harmony and the peaceful resolution of our problems, but no one’s allowed to hear what they’re talking about.

DARE
Would giving away the Bilderberger’s secrets make them more benign?

WILSON
No, it would just make them more paranoid, more devious. My business is not to expose but to collect comparative exposes so that the readers can see that conspiracy is normal behavior and that there’s no one big conspiracy that runs everything.
In the ’30s, the Nazis were very much into the theory that the Jewish bankers controlled everything, and that led to such horror that it became forbidden to think about conspiracies at all for decades thereafter. The first people who said there was a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination were all denounced as obstinate nut cases and wandering loonies. My attitude, after looking at the evidence for a long time, is that there is no one big conspiracy, that the historians who refuse to admit conspiracy as a factor in history are just over-reacting to stupid conspiracy theories.
There really are conspiracies of varying sizes, but they’re so busy fighting each other that they have nothing to do with us. Most of them are for monetary reasons. There are conspiracies to decide whose book is going to be reviewed on page one of the New York Times or the Herald Tribune. Often it’s the same book in both, more often than coincidence or even synchronicity can account for. There are commercial conspiracies to fix prices. Some have ideology or mysticism behind them. I don’t think you can understand history until you understand the element of poetic whimsy and sheer irrationality in the minds of so called practical people.
In WW2, both Churchill and Hitler thought they were in direct communication with God. So did MacArthur and Patton. Hitler and Mussolini both outlawed Freemasonry in Germany and Italy. The leaders of the war against them were Roosevelt, a 33rd degree Freemason, Churchill, another high ranking Freemason, Hoover, the head of the secret police in America was a 33rd degree Freemason

DARE
What exactly to those degrees stand for?

WILSON
They indicate how many initiations you’ve gone through. Actually, any Freemason who is nominated to the presidency of the United States gets elevated to the 32nd degree right away. Then if he’s elected, he’s given the 33rd degree, which is only honorary. The 32nd degree in mainly concerned with the Knights of Malta, who are the enemies of Freemasonry.
The Freemasons claim that the Knights of Malta have sworn an oath to stamp out liberalism, free thought, and restore the total reign of tyranny and superstition that existed in the dark ages. It’s a secret society within the Catholic Church that doesn’t seek publicity at all. Very little is known about it. William Casey of the CIA was a Knight of Malta, Alexander Haig is a Knight of Malta. According to Gordon Thomas, an English journalist, the Knights of Malta now act as couriers between the Vatican and the CIA. His theory is very complicated, but it illustrates how conspiracies operate in the real world as distinguished from paranoid fantasy.
The Gray Wolves are a Muslim fundamentalist group who deal heroin to get money to buy arms to carry on their campaign to exterminate Israel. They’ve been very involved in gunrunning because they have a link with the Bulgarian secret police, who are very much into selling munitions underground. The KGB uses the Gray Wolves for operations that, if they’re ever blown, can’t be traced back to Russia. Roberto Calvi of Banco Abrosiano was taking a great deal of this heroin money from the Gray Wolves and the mafia and running it through the Vatican Bank, which doesn’t have to show records to anybody. The Italian government can’t examine their records, it belongs to the government of the state of the Vatican, so they’re the only ones who can look at their own books. If you can get illicit money into the Vatican Bank, it disappears forever, nobody can find any trace of it.
The Gray Wolves had a grudge against the Pope because of his involvement with Calvi, who embezzled so much money that everybody got swindled. He was found hanging from a bridge in London, his secretary was pushed from a window at Banco Abrosiano the same day, a few more executives have died mysteriously since then. Calvi’s partner in the swindles, Michele Sindona, was convicted in this country of 65 counts of stock and currency fraud and faking his own kidnapping to escape prosecution. Back in Italy, he was convicted of the murder of the examiner hired to investigate his bank. After that they were going to put him on trial for conspiracy in 80 murders, but he was poisoned in his cell. All of this is part of how the Bulgarian secret police hired a killer from the Gray Wolves to get the Pope.

DARE
Isn’t the Pope just a figurehead without much power, sort of the Gerald Ford of the Vatican?

WILSON
That’s not true, the Pope does have a lot of power. Consider the case of Pope John Paul I. He was a rebel who didn’t like the way the church was being run, and in 1978 he announced that he would be going through a complete overhaul, throwing out a lot of the old crowd and bringing in new people. Observatori Politico sent him a list of 115 Freemasons in the Vatican, including members of P2, who had infiltrated 900 members into the Italian Government, including the secret police. John Paul ordered an investigation, and within a few days he was mysteriously found dead.
The Vatican has never shown a death certificate and no autopsy was performed. They told two different stories about who found him dead, things disappeared out of his bedroom that have never been accounted for, including his will, his medicine bottle, and his glasses. Pecorelli, the editor of Observatori Politico who sent him the list of P2 and other Freemason members in the Vatican, was shot to death through the mouth, Mafia fashion, on the streets of Rome a few weeks later. You can’t explain that in terms of one big conspiracy, there are obviously interlocking and feuding conspiracies – the Mafia, P2, the Freemasons, the Bulgarian secret police, the CIA, and God knows who else.
Licio Gelli, the grandmaster of the P2 Lodge, was on the payroll of the CIA and the KGB. He was that kind of operator. He disappeared from Italy, which shows how many friends he had in the police. He showed up in Switzerland a few months later to take some money out of a bank account, and he was recognized and arrested. The Swiss put him in a maximum security prison but he was out within two days. One guard claimed he was hypnotized. The fascinating thing is that if you look at pictures of Reagan’s second inaugural, you’ll see Licio Gelli right next to Reagan.
Most of this information can be found in two books, In God’s Name by David Yallop, and In Banks We Trust by Penny Lernoux, which explains how the whole international banking system interlinks with the heroin and cocaine laundering business that the Vatican has been running.

DARE
Are you saying the Pope is a drug dealer?

WILSON
The biggest drug laundromat ever busted in this country was the World Finance Corporation in Miami. The president and several other senior executives were convicted. Two directors of the bank were allegedly former CIA agents, but the prosecutors were blocked in Washington when they tried to investigate the connections between the bank and the CIA.
In any case, the WFC had all this money going into it from South American countries that are in the cocaine business, and they sent it to the CIS Alpine Bank in the Bahamas, which is owned by Archbishop Marcinkus who runs the Vatican Bank, which is where the money ended up. After that it’s in a black hole, it disappears from human vision forever, most likely ending up in Swiss bank accounts. The profits from this go towards keeping those dictators in power, maintaining the secret police and the death squads.
After the second world war, Liccio Gelli was shrewd enough to start an escape route for Nazi war criminals, getting them to South America for a fee, giving them new identities, and complete cover. He kept in touch with them as they found jobs as organizers of the death squads, doing the same sort of things they did in the ’40s, only now they’re doing it for Ronald Reagan and the money is going into the Vatican Bank. Obviously you can’t run a church on just Hail Marys.
The only reason cocaine is illegal is because there’s so much money to be made out of it while it’s illegal. If it were legal, the prices would go way down.

DARE
So Nancy Reagan’s whole JUST SAY NO campaign is just a ploy to keep the prices up?

WILSON
Or sheer stupidity. There’s so much money in the cocaine business that a lot of Latin American governments depend on it for their survival. The CIA has been in the cocaine business for 20 or 30 years now, and it’s very useful for them to keep it illegal. That way they can use it as a form of currency that doesn’t leave any records. When you hear about big cocaine busts, those are just renegades, the entrepreneurs who were trying to work outside of the system.

DARE
You’ve painted a rather bleak picture of a conspiratorial world. Are there any positive actions we can take to change things?

WILSON
In my books, I’m trying to show people how to free their own minds. I think that’s the first step. People have got to become less mechanical and more aware. My books are all constructed as mindfucks, to get the readers to open their brains up, receive new signals, and come out of their conditioned patterns of thought and perceptions.
There are a lot of Utopian ideas in my books that I don’t think are impractical at all. I call them Utopian because they’re beyond anything the human race has achieved in the past, but we’re moving incredibly fast. I think there are changes right ahead of us that are even bigger than the industrial revolution. The human life span will be doubled by the year 2000 and quadrupled by 2010. One man flew the Atlantic in 1928, 200 million flew the Atlantic in 1978. Taking that fifty year time span as a model, people started going into space in the 1960s so by 2010 we should have 200 million going into space every year.

DARE
Are there any existing political systems you admire?

WILSON
Scandinavian socialism. I found the Scandinavians to be about the most admirable people in Europe – clean streets, a low crime rate, a general air of high civilization – luxuries for all and a total absence of slums, poverty, and ugliness. They seem very happy and productive, with one of the most way out futurist movements in the world. They’re the California of Europe.
I hate to sound like a Marxist, which I’m not, but the reason you haven’t heard about Scandinavian Socialism is because the media of this country is controlled by rich people who are scared shitless of socialism. They want Americans to think there’s only one type of socialism, Soviet Communism, which is the kind of place where dissident scientists get thrown in lunatic asylums, all of which is true. Americans are paranoid about Russians but Scandinavians regard them with amusement; they’re those backwards people who think that you can only have socialism by putting all the poets and painters in jail. The Scandinavians reward their poets and they don’t put anyone in jail for dissident political opinions.

DARE
Aren’t you scared of getting in trouble, of finally saying the one thing you shouldn’t have said?

WILSON
We’re all living in a world in which one cannot apply one’s highest ideals without getting into a lot of trouble. I’ve gotten in trouble, but I haven’t gone to jail, which shows I may have more common sense than Tim Leary. I certainly don’t claim to be more intelligent than him. He’s the most intelligent human being I’ve ever encountered.

DARE
Do you share his conclusions about LSD?

WILSON
LSD breaks up habitual circuits of the brain. It opens new circuits, breaks down old circuits, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that it destroys brain cells. LSD is very much a metaprogramming device, it changes the basic programs, that’s why it’s dangerous. It creates acute paranoid states in bureaucrats who’ve never used it.
To get the best out of it needs a scientific or religious approach, one or the other. People who are just tripping for the fun of it are more likely to imprint a whole new reality tunnel or personality on themselves that they weren’t looking for. If you’re going to do LSD, you should decide the changes you’re aiming at and structure the trip to lead to that kind of change.
There’s no doubt that you can change every part of your personality with LSD, that’s why Leary calls it a re-imprinting drug. It changes basic imprints which are much more rigid than conditioning. There’s no doubt that I am a different person than I am before I took it.
I was a statistical materialist before I started experimenting with LSD, that is I didn’t believe the laws of the universe were absolutely deterministic because I knew enough quantum mechanics to know that it broke them down. But I was still a statistical materialist, everything could be explained by the accidental permutations of little hunks of energy that solidify into matter. I was perfectly satisfied with that explanation of the universe, and I never realized that I was as dogmatic about it as any Catholic was about their faith. After LSD impacted on me, I became a total agnostic, and I’m not dogmatic about anything anymore. I know that every system I make up is my own brain making up a system. None of the systems is big enough to include the whole universe, so all of my beliefs are only relatively true. Some are undoubtedly wrong because I’m not that brilliant that I never make a mistake.
There are a lot of people who don’t realize how conceited they are. By asserting with such certitude the things they believe in, they don’t realize that they’re saying “I’m the smartest person in the world, I can answer all the questions.” People like Carl Sagan. I just don’t know how he can be so sure of everything when, by and large, the more intelligent you get, the more you realize you can’t be sure of anything.

DARE
Since Newtonian physics don’t apply to sub-atomic particles, how can you apply logic on the quantum level to objective reality?

WILSON
There’s a lot of disagreement among quantum physicists on that subject, but I am very interested in, and almost believe, the school that includes David Bohm, who was driven out of the United States during the McCarthy era, and considered the most brilliant pupil of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
There is a non-locality principal in quantum mechanics, which means that things are correlated even if they’re not connected mechanically or by energy transmissions. Up until this was discovered, everything in physics could be explained by energy transfers. You hear me because sound waves move from my voice to your ear, and so on.
Then they discovered that there were things that were moving in harmony with each other, and that there was no way that energy could be getting between them. Energy can’t move faster than speed of light, and yet these actions were instantaneously correlated. There are several approaches towards understanding non-locality, but, as Schroedinger put it, the sum total of all minds is one. The appearance of separate egos is only a hallucination, like that of the flatness of the earth or the movement of the sun around the earth. These ideas have all been corrected, and the idea that we’re different from the animals has created mass hysteria. The appearance of separate egos is a hallucination. We are all facets of one mind.

DARE
But it’s a necessary hallucination. You can’t play chess with yourself.

WILSON
It’s necessary for the game on this planet that every organism have a sense of self and a sense of the hive, the pack, it’s us against the rest of them out there. Antland Uber Alles is the song the ants sing in T.H. White’s Merlin stories, and every gene pool has that basic philosophy, just as every individual has it’s “self”. You can go through consciousness alterations by means of yoga, certain types of shamanic magic, and various drugs that teach you how to identify with the gene pool instead of your private ego. You can get beyond that and identify with the whole biosphere.

DARE
Can you actually affect your own genetic structure so that these structural changes can be passed on to other generations?

WILSON
I tend to believe in Sheldrake’s morpho-genetic field, in which he proposes that there’s a non-local connection in biology too. Biologists are denouncing him as a nut and a heretic. Though the first two experiments to check Sheldrake have tended to very strongly support him, they’ve been ruthlessly criticized.
It makes sense that if you’ve got non-local connections in physics that you could have them in biology too. Freud and Jung and Leary have all tried to account for racial memory or our ability to remember past lives. They’ve had to posit that somehow genes are carrying information from one organism to it’s descendants, but this part of modern psychology has always been rejected by biologists because there’s lots of evidence that genes can’t do that. Freud had racial memory, Jung had the collective unconscious, Leary has the neuro-genetic circuit, but there’s no way any of it can work mechanically, and that’s why biologists reject it. The only way it can work is with Sheldrake’s non-local morpho-genetic field, which, if it exists, would let me send signals that will be able to effect the genes of future generations, and not just those directly descended from me. I can control the direction of evolution through thought forms I’m putting out, and so can everybody else.
People can’t stay in their old reality tunnels any longer, they’ve got to start accelerating their brain activity. Very specifically, a world full of Islamic fundamentalists, Protestant fundamentalists, dogmatic Marxists, and Reaganite chauvinist Americans is moving us closer and closer to World War III, and the only thing that’s going to head that off is if people stop being Midwestern Methodist bankers or Shuto computer executives or Muslim heroin smugglers and develop a bigger identity. They’ve got to get out of these narrow little trips. Buckminster Fuller used to say that one of the consequences of the traditional game is nationalism. Planet earth is a spaceship with 150 independent and sovereign admirals all steering in different directions.

DARE
What is the next stage in evolution?

WILSON
The model I use is adapted from Leary. The oral-bio-survival circuit is what the amoebas operate on – taste everything. Babies operate on that too. That’s the circuit we go back to whenever we’re in danger, and depending on what we imprinted there, we will either attack or run away.
Then there’s Freud’s anal circuit, which has to do with claiming territory and status within it. That’s when we go through the mammalian rituals concerning who runs the family, outsmarting our brothers and sisters and trying to run the whole show, imprinting our domination and submission reflexes. It’s why people can hold jobs; their boss becomes a father substitute and they attach all their reflexes to him.
Next there’s the rational circuit in which we do our abstract reasoning with words and mathematics, and the socio-sexual circuit where we imprint the pattern of how we relate to people; with what degree of amity or sexuality. Everybody has a different imprint, and society has only one general set of rules, so everybody is a heretic as far as that circuit is concerned. Those four circuits are the natural child, the adoptive child, the adult, and the parent in Berne’s system.
Beyond that is the neuro-somatic circuit, where, through yoga or drugs or body work like Rolfing, one gimmick or another, you are able to turn on to your own body in a new way, and instead of just reacting to the conditioned and imprinted programs on the first four circuits, you are able to relax and go with the flow and enjoy life.
The sixth circuit is the neuro-genetic circuit, which has to do with morpho-genetic resonances, coming in contact with the experience and religious symbols of your ancestors, learning that they’ve been controlling you below the level of consciousness all your life. This is what Shamanism traditionally deals with. Jungian psychology was the first attempt to deal with it scientifically, now we’ve got dozens of others trying to bring people into harmony with archetypes of the collective unconscious or genetic heritage.
The next is the metaprogramming circuit, which is learning how the brain can work on the brain, how you can imprint different identities and reality tunnels as you go along. Before you get to that circuit, you have no idea what true freedom really is, you’re being manipulated all the time whether you know it or not. It’s the circuit where you develop true choice.

DARE
How do you get there?

WILSON
If you do a lot of work on the 5th and 6th circuits, the 7th tends to click on. First you get a lot of synchronicities, meaningful coincidences, accidental reinforcement from your environment, like someone coming by to loan you a book that’s exactly the one you were looking for. Jung found that his patient’s dreams had more and more symbols out of Greek and Egyptian and Hindu mythology as they progressed into that circuit, even without studying them consciously. They pulled them out of the collective unconscious, which I think is actually the morphogenetic field.
Above that there’s the non-local quantum circuit, which is the circuit in which we get true out of body experiences, cosmic identification with the whole of existence.
We’re learning so much about the latter four circuits, which Leary calls the extraterrestrial circuits, that we’re moving into a new stage of evolution. More people are on the fifth circuit than ever before in history, and there are growing sixth and seventh circuit minorities. It’s not an accident. We’re changing just as we have to change. These circuits were there, ready to be used, when we got to this point in evolution. Earlier, mankind could just coast along on the first four circuits, and only visionaries and mystics and poets ever turned on the higher circuits. Now everyone does it.

DARE
How to you teach people to turn on their higher circuits?

WILSON
You’ve got to teach with humor to make the pill palatable. Besides, humor is the essence of realizing our true situation in space and time. We are these tiny fallible beings crawling around on a relatively small planet, and anybody who pontificates dogmatically about anything is giving evidence that they are an idiot, even if you agree with them. They shouldn’t sound that certain. We think we’re so damn smart and we know so fucking little.

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Posted in Interviews

Notes from the Pop Underground

Posted on January 1, 1985 | 1 comment

Interview from Notes from the Pop Underground
edited by Peter Belsito, 1985

How would you describe yourself politically and how did you become that way?

RAW: I was born in Brooklyn in 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression. Until World War II, my father was several times unemployed and my childhood memories are of poverty and anxiety. I think this marked me permanently; although my temperament is individualistic in the extreme, I’ve always been a Left Libertarian rather than a Right Libertarian. I loathe Marxism because it is a religion and I detest religions and dogmas, but I find nothing pernicious in democratic socialism, even though I would prefer a syndicalist or anarchist or guild socialist system. If I were forced to choose between democratic Fabian socialism and capitalism (which thank Gott I am not) I would choose the democratic socialist system.

Why do you detest religions so much? Has that loathing led to anything particular about your style of writing?

RAW: I was educated in grammar school by nuns, who filled me with religious horror stories. I think this led directly to (a) my loathing for all religions and (b) my emphasis on horror in my fiction. I think I use horror, not to scare the reader (like Stephen King, for instance) but to transcend horror, by resolving it into satire and crazy humor. My books are never simply journeys into terror but journeys beyond terror, back to sunlight, a good laugh, and renewed optimism. To say it otherwise, I cannot leave the horrors out because they were imprinted on me when I was so young, but I am always looking beyond them. I agree with Sean O’Casey’s great line, “Life contains terrible things but life itself is not terrible.”

How much influence did your parents have on your development as a writer?

RAW: Parental influence? My mother was off her head part of the time during my childhood and I was what is now called a battered child. She gradually recovered after World War II came along and my father became full-time employed at a good salary again, but angry women still make me more nervous than angry men. I always feel I can handle an angry man, but I want to leave the room when a woman starts shrieking. This is probably why, although sympathetic to Feminism, I flee the scene when a Women’s Libber approaches. What about your father’s influence?

RAW: My father’s principle influence on me was saying many, many times, “Ah, God, the union is not what it used to be, but I’d never do without it. When there were no unions, the working man didn’t have a chance, not a chance, he got screwed every way.”

What were your primary interests as a teenager?

RAW: Teenage interests? My main interest was in getting laid, and I was not successful until I got out of my teens, partly because that was in the 1950s and partly because I was still myself recovering from Roman Catholic brainwashing.

When and how did you become interested in scientific theory?

RAW: As soon as motion was autarchic, I got out of the Catholic Church (aged fourteen) and majored in sciences, at Brooklyn Tech and later Brooklyn Polytech. Although I have worked mostly as an editor until age forty and have been a full-time freelance writer since then, I remain fascinated by the hard sciences and especially by Futurism–the attempt to forecast future technology and its effects on social behavior. Everything I write, whether published as fiction or not, is in a sense Science Fiction, an attempt to imagine vividly what science is doing and will be doing to our lives, our minds, our relationships. I feel that this is the most interesting field for a writer today, just as theology was for Dante circa 1300. We are living willy-nilly in a world science has made, and I keep trying to understand science better so I can understand that world better.

What did your parents think of your leaving the church?

RAW: My parents never objected to my leaving the RC Church; they were fairly lapsed Catholics themselves and sent me to a Catholic school only because they thought “it was good for chiddren.” [sic] What were your literary influences as an adolescent?

RAW: Major intellectual influences on my adolescence were Darwin, H.L. Mencken, Frazer’s Golden Bough, Clarence Darrow, Tom Paine, and Marx and Trotsky for a short while only.

What have been the continuing influences in your life?

RAW: Major continuing influences on my thought: Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics, R. Buckminster Fuller, and quantum mechanics, all of which impacted on me in my early twenties and continue to mold my way of seeing the world. Timothy Leary has been a major influence almost as long, since 1964. Much of what you write in your books seems to make light of culture and history. With that in mind what do you think the future will be like?

RAW: Although a lot of the ideas in my books are jokes, satires, provocations etc., I am serious about the idea that history is accelerating and I do expect more changes before 2000 A.D. than in ALL previous history. I think we will have life extension by then, and I think we will evade nuclear war but only at the cost of another major depression, more massive unemployment and some kind of gizmo close to world government or closer to world government than the present United Nations. That is, I think governments cannot borrow enough from the international banks to keep on Welfare the growing numbers of the unemployed, so the system will crack somewhere and a new system will emerge out of the chaos.

What is your association with the O.T.O., Golden Dawn and other occult orders?

RAW: Those are only two of the occult orders into which I have been initiated. For a while in the early ’70s I was going around to occult conventions the way some people go to every science-fiction con, and frequently members of one occult order would initiate the members of another order _en masse_. If I listed all my mystical titles, the catalog would be quite impressive (to those who are impressed by titles). Chiefly what I learned from all this hocus-pocus was that ritual can be a very effective method of brain-change or neurological reprogramming, but only if it contains a high element of symbolic drama and a certain carefully calculated shock. That is, the reason most church rituals accomplish nothing and are so bloody *dull* is that the drama and shock are missing. The real reason for the secrecy of occult orders (including the Freemasons) is that the drama and shock are most powerful if the candidate literally does not know what is about to happen next.

A true ritual, containing a neurological shock, can be as effective as many years of meditation or other yogic practices. Of course, it doesn’t always work; amateurs often botch their rituals and the effect then is like a syrupy Disney film that’s supposed to make you cry but just makes you squirm, or a comedy that doesn’t make you laugh, or a horror film that doesn’t scare you. But when a ritual is performed correctly, everybody feels the energy and knows they have entered a new level of reality.

The principal methods of altering consciousness are drugs, meditation, special breathing techniques like pranayama, and a heightening of shock or confusion. A good ritual creates that shock and confusion in which you begin to see with new clarity and hear what is being said. It opens you to experiences that your cultural conditioning has previously armored you against.

After a while, however, all ritual becomes vain repetition. There is no more to learn from it. I dropped out of all occult orders, with no hard feelings on any side, many years ago. My work on consciousness these days is involved only with meditation and yogic breathing. In my experience, those techniques never become repetitious or redundant. You learn more from them every year.

You had an article published in Science Digest in 1982 called “Mere Coincidence?”, which seemed to me to be stretching the limits of science to suit your own ends. At the same time, once I had read the article my interest in “coincidence” was so aroused that I began noticing several per day. Was your article on coincidence one of your jokes or do you defend this theory?

RAW: I’ve been studying this subject for over twenty years now, and still haven’t come to any final conclusions . . . except that it was worthy of further study. The basic question raised by synchronicities, or seeming synchronicities, is: how much of what we experience is created by our own minds? I think that is really the most important question in modern science. It is naive to think our minds are like typing paper and just register experience passively; this has been thoroughly refuted by cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, perception experiments, and dozens of other bits of clinical data. We do create part, maybe a great deal, of our experience. On the other hand, those who claim we create all our experience are asking us to believe an astonishing doctrine and I see no reason to go that far. So, we create a great deal of our experience, not necessarily all (did you create the universe?), and the Big Question (or the Wig Question) is: how much are you creating right now? Every synchronicity is like a Zen koan, forcing you to ask that question again and think about it deeply.

Freud noticed strange coincidences happening in psychotherapy long before Jung, although he never called them synchronicities. The reason these coincidences make us feel uncanny, Freud said, is because they are isomorphic to things in our unconscious. That is, a coincidence gets our attention, and makes us feel eerie (and nowadays gets called a synchronicity) only if it corresponds to something our unconscious is “trying to tell us” and we are trying to repress. Jung’s theory is that such congruencies indicate a connection across space-time between our minds and other minds, and between mind and matter, this does not seem at all implausible to me. There are very similar ideas in quantum mechanics-non-local connections, they are called, which act as if space-time were unreal. Physicists such as Dr. David Bohm, Dr. E. H. Walker, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, Dr. Fritjof Capra, and many others, have written extensively about such non-local connections, which seem to be mathematically necessary if quantum mechanics is valid. The question still remains when you notice a coincidence that moves you: Is this case an example of that non-local connectedness in nature, or is this case just the result of chance and is the meaning all in your own head? I can’t answer that question, but I think it is worth investigating the subject more and thinking about it.

Someone pointed out to me that your current home (Sandycove, Dublin, Ireland) was also the home of James Joyce, whom you use as a character in Masks of the Illuminati. Why did you move to Ireland, and why Sandycove in particular?

RAW: I always said that if Ronald Reagan were elected President, I would get the hell out of the country. He was elected, so I got the hell out of the country. As W.C. Fields said, “You must take the bull by the tail and look the facts in the face.”

Of all the places in Europe I could have settled, I picked Sandycove on the Dublin shore, because of its associations with James Joyce, my favorite writer. He was as fascinated by synchronicities as I am. In Finnegans Wake, he calls it the “coincidance” – the dance of coincidences that make life possible. Coincidentally enough, he was born on the same day as my mother, February 2, 1882. Eamon de Valera, the most influential man in Irish politics in this century, was born on that day too: February 2, 1882. Is that enough coincidences to make a synchronicity?

Are you aware of the Church of the SubGenius? Do you think the Church of the SubGenius was somewhat based upon your writing?

RAW: There’s a rumor going around that the Head of the Church, Bob Dobbs, is really me under an assumed name. I don’t think I should dignify such wild and irresponsible stories by commenting on them at all; but it is true, you know, that if you say “There’s no prob with Bob” a thousand times you’ll get exactly the same effect as if you had said “Hare Krishna” or “Twas brillig and the slithey toves” a thousand times. Really. You get the same effect from fifty “Our Fathers” and twenty-five “Hail Marys,” too. It’s called boredom.

A while ago I got a record to review in the mail by a group from the Boston area called Magic Mose and His Royal Rockers, featuring Blind Sam. One of the songs on the record, titled “Dating a Witch Beats Dating a Nun,” had your name in it. Did you ever hear it? I think they mention Aleister Crowley, the Bavarian Illuminati and a few other occult figures in the same song.

RAW: Never heard of it, but I’m delighted that somebody has put my name in a song. There was also a group a few years ago, called the Bavarian Illuminati, who had a picture of me on the jacket of one of their records, along with Crowley and George Washington and somebody who looked like King Lear. (Maybe that was Nostradamus?)

How would you describe your style of writing?

RAW: I change my style and perspective from book to book, or even from paragraph to paragraph–as Joyce did–because I am engaged in what I call guerrilla ontology. What e.e. cummings said about Ezra Pound is true of me, also: “The damned sadist is trying to force his readers to THINK!” Ramming dogmas into the reader’s head until the reader starts regurgitating some of them out of his or her mouth-the kind of thing that is called teaching in schools, or conversion in religious cults–doesn’t interest me at all. I try to present a phalanx of urgently exciting puzzles and possibilities, and offer two or three ways of organizing them into a pattern. Or a dozen ways of organizing them, or two dozen. Then the readers can either start thinking for themselves, or be left with all these annoying puzzles to haunt them forever. One of the reviews that pleased me most was by Jay Kinney; he said my books were deliberately annoying. Well, they are – for people who hate to think and want somebody else to do their thinking for them, That’s not my job. Why the hell should I do anybody else’s thinking; when it’s hard work already to do my own thinking? Besides, those who really can’t or won’t think just have to look around – there are hundreds of Perfectly Enlightened Masters who will be glad to do their thinking for them. A Perfectly Enlightened Master is ideal, if you want to become a Perfectly Benighted Slave.

I have a few disciples, despite the fact that I keep telling them I don’t want no bloody disciples. Some of them in Providence, the Providence Random Assembly, have a letterhead that says “Purveyors of Doubt and Choice Since 1976.” I like that. That’s what my books are doing – purveying doubt and choice.

Of course, that’s only the philosophical reason for my style; the real, pragmatic, gut reason that I don’t reveal the final answers is that I haven’t found any final answers yet. Every time I think I have a final answer, I turn it over and find another annoying question underneath it. I think this keeps me young, or at least curious. If I ever do find any final answers, however, I will gladly share them with the world, and they can elect me Pope or Ayatollah or whatever is fitting for a case like mine, but in the meanwhile all I’ve got to offer is–doubt and choice. As God said to Moses (at least in Illuminatus!), “Think for yourself, schmuck!”

Since Illuminatus! deals with anarchy, rock-‘n-‘roll, and youth culture, and predates Punk rock, do you think that your writing may have had an influence on the Punk scene?

RAW: I never thought of myself as an influence on Punk, but you may be right. I used to be an anarchist and a nihilist, but I had to drop out of that because the anarchists and nihilists had too many rules. I guess I’m still allied to anarchy and nihilism in that I don’t believe in any Authority that wants to tell me what’s true or false or what’s right or wrong; I want to decide for myself. In general – I could be wrong – I have the impression that there’s a lot of anger in Punk, and that’s not my bag at all. As some great philosopher of the ’60s said, “I used to be disgusted, but now I’m just amused.” When a nation of two hundred million allegedly sane people elects Ronald Reagan as President, the only choices are despair or just sitting down and laughing your head off. I prefer to sit down and laugh my head off. Why couldn’t they have picked the fat guy who played the police chief in Plan 9 From Outer Space? He’s just as funny as Reagan and maybe he can count past ten without taking his shoes off.

Is this idea Punk? My basic opinion, after more than fifty years on the planet, is that there is very little difference between wild primates in the jungle and the average domesticated primate in a large city. We are literally living on the Planet of the Apes. Once you realize that, there’s no point in being angry about it anymore. We’re in a zoo, and the biggest, ugliest, meanest baboons are always picked to lead the herd. If you look at the news and think that the incredible stupidities and brutalities you hear have been done by human beings (who are rational beings according to Aristotle) you can only despair or take to heroin, I guess. But if you realize these things are being done by primates–by apes dressed up in funny “customes” [sic], like chimps who drive motorcycles in circuses – then it all makes sense, and it’s quite astounding that the apes can handle the machinery and walk upright and so on. There have been damned few human beings; the human being is something that is evolving and about to happen, but has not happened yet.

Earlier you mentioned Futurism. The only Futurists that I’m aware of were the turn-of-the-century Italians who called their art movement Futurism. Could you explain further what you mean by Futurism?

RAW: Futurism, as I use the word, has nothing to do with the Italian art movement of 1909. Futurism, also called Future Studies or Futuremics, is a branch of sociology and social psychology that studies the effects of technology on society and attempts to project trajectories of where present trends are taking us. My Ph.D. was in psychology only because the university where I got it, Hawthorne, had no department of Futurism or Future Studies; my dissertation was pure Futurism actually. I’ve been studying that field since I was in high school, back in the 1940s. The books that opened me up were Manhood of Humanity and Science and Sanity, both by Alfred Korzybski, a mathematician who was obsessed with social problems. He had two great ideas, and a lot of others too of course, but his main ideas were, one, that information is increasing faster every generation, which leads to more and more rapid technological change, and two, that traditional education and religion both train us to assume certainty prematurely. That is, we are trained to be, or pretend to be, certain about things which just are not certain. The result of this, Korzybski said, is that the world is changing faster and faster, but our ideas aren’t changing and we are growing more and more disoriented. Now, a lot of people have noticed that since then, and many want to stop the acceleration of technology, but Korzybski thought this was impossible. He said language itself creates information–it I tell you a fact, and you tell me a fact, the very telling makes us suddenly discover a relationship between the two facts, which is a third fact. Korzybski also thought language creates a compulsion to communicate – people are in prisons, in fascist and Marxist states all over the world, because they just would not shut up, even when they knew talking would get them in trouble. In a sense, you could almost say Korzybski’s thesis was that we are transmitters created by language to spread information around the world faster and faster. We can’t stop this, he said, so we have to adjust to it, and we can only adjust to it by changing our brains – by taking out all the rigid reflexes that create false certainty, and by learning to think in a more flexible, agnostic way. Since this proposal goes directly against traditional education and religion, not to mention advertising and politics, it’s no surprise that few people have ever heard of Korzybski.

Another major Futurist who impacted on me in my youth was R. Buckminster Fuller. I first met him in 1954 and I interviewed him for Science Digest just shortly before his death in 1983. For over thirty years his ideas have been running around in my head, and meanwhile the world has changed rapidly, always in the ways Fuller had predicted. He has more successful predictions on record than any other Futurist. I believe in the argument of his last two books, Critical Path and Grunch of Giants, that we now have the technology and resources to abolish starvation and poverty world-wide and even to give everybody a living standard equal to that of the Rockefellers, and that the only thing preventing this is greed at the top level of society and stupidity at all levels. I think a lot of the rage and fury around these days-terrorism and revolution and coup d’etats and maybe even Punk in a way–is registering the fact that people, without knowing the specific facts about our planetary resources etc. are still able to intuit the general picture. They realize that most of the misery that’s going on is totally unnecessary and is not caused by lack of food to feed people or a lack of transportation to get the food delivered or any kind of real lack; it’s caused only by the greed and stupidity I just mentioned. Spaceship Earth, as Fuller called this planet, could now be a paradise, and instead the Giants (the multi-nationals and governments) are rapidly turning it into a hell. The world situation today is quite like two gangs of lunatics who are fighting and trying to murder each other over possession of a glass of water, in the middle of a rainstorm. To continue the metaphor, if they came out of their hypnotic hate state for even a second, they would wake up and notice that there is enough water falling for everybody to take thousands of gallons of it.

The big question in Future Studies is: will the peoples of the world wake up and see the rainstorm, the potential technological abundance around them, or will they remain fixated on the tiny glass of water (the visible energy) they started fighting over 6,000 years ago? Can they look critically, even momentarily, at their false dogmatic certainties, and see the statistical possibilities and probabilities? All the rage and alienation around us these days is caused by the hopeless feeling that the stupidities and brutalities on the news (every night will continue until they blow us away entirely. Future Studies gives one more hope, eventually, because the pattern emerging does show that information is getting around faster everywhere, so there must be some mental activity occurring behind the melodramatic facade of the two gangs of rival apes throwing sticks and stones at each other.

Gurdjieff said, “Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?” What he meant by the metaphor of sleeping is what I mean when I say there are many more apes among us than there are human beings. Most people are still controlled by the mammalian emotional-territorial circuits in the old back-brain. I think as the planetary emergency worsens, we as a species will mutate and begin to use the more human frontal lobe circuits. We are being drenched in information and information itself excites and provokes thought. It is even possible that by 1987 something remotely like the idea or a thought might penetrate even the skull of a clergyman or a high school principle.

Other Futurists who’ve influenced me include Marshall McLuhan, Alvin Toffler and Timothy Leary. McLuhan stressed how communication media create the tunnel-reality we perceive, and showed that the information explosion is accelerating even faster than Korzybski realized. Toffler points out that every major social change has happened, on the average, ten times faster than the major change before it. Leary keeps insisting, correctly I think, that if we survive until 2000 A.D., we will have a lot more space and time than humans ever had before – that is, space colonization and life extension are coming much faster than most people realize.

Nietzsche is a major influence, too. Every year I see more meaning in his famous lines, “What is Man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman – a bridge over an abyss.” The possibility of superhumanity is quite real now: we can live thousands of years, and roam among the stars, and become smarter as a species than we have ever been. But the abyss is quite real, too: we can use our technology and our old ape-psychology of territorial squabling to blow this planet right out of space-time. Despite the evening news, I am an optimist. I think intelligence of the species is greater than the intelligence of the individual; and the intelligence of the earth itself, the living biosphere, is greater than that of any species; and there are hierarchies of intelligence quite invisible to those who think that the abominations of politics are the important things happening on this planet.

(posted across UseNet by Dan Clore)

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Posted in Interviews

A New Writer: F.W. Nietzsche

Posted on October 1, 1984 | Comments Off

A New Writer: F.W. Nietzsche

by Robert Anton Wilson

from New Libertarian, October 1984

Borges has a story about an early 20th Century French writer who, by a tremendous effort of concentration, managed to re-create a few chapters of Don Quixote. These hard-won pages of Renaissance Spanish irony, Borges points out, are in all respects identical with the same pages in Cervantes’ original, but are much richer and more complex, simply because we know they are the work of a French intellectual contemporary with Freud and Lenin and Einstein.

Of course, we might – almost – be able to find the same meanings in Cervantes himself (since his text is identical with that of Borges’ imaginary Frenchman). But we could only do this and see Cervantes in that perspective if we first managed to brainwash ourselves and forget everything we know about Cervantes himself and the times in which he lived.

I have recently been trying to recreate Nietzsche in that way. Less heroic, or less demented, than Borges’ hero, I haven’t actually tried to clone chapters or even pages from the original German text, but just to read Nietzsche again as if I had never read him before, and as if he had lived my life along with me and was, in some sense, my psychological twin brother.

I see, from this perspective, that Nietzsche was very heavily influenced by the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s and also has read a great deal of Logical Positivism, General Semantics, Ethnomethodology and Sociobiology. He is, in fact, one of the best educated and most scientifically hip writers of the 1980s. I am also happy to note that he is a Discordian and a neo-pagan, just like me.

Thus, Nietzsche’s concept of Chaos makes perfect sense to me, as the natural conclusion of anybody who has experimented with LSD and also kept up with recent sociology and anthropology. Those who read Nietzsche before the 1980s, not understanding his warning that he would be born posthumously, could not comprehend this aspect of his philosophy. Chaos sounded nihilistic to them, and they did not understand how he could accept Chaos in one breath and denounce nihilism in the next; naturally, they accused him of being self-contradictory.

Actually, it is quite clear, now, that what Nietzsche meant by Chaos was not entropy – as if he believed the universe had already reached its theoretical Heat Death – but rather the infinite diversity of existence. There is not one principle that can explain this infinite diversity, he held, for the same reason that there is no Platonic Form or Kantian ding an sich behind it all. It is too rich and abundant to be nailed down under a formula. Becoming is real, but being is only a grammatical convention created by the subject-predicate structure of Indo-European languages. This is a much more elegant expression, I think, than Heidegger’s “existence precedes essence.”

Nietzsche’s analysis of the Will to Power shows equal semantic sophistication and neurological knowhow. The Will to Power is not the first principle of the world, he says specifically; “first principles” are just attenuated forms of “God” or Platonic idealism. The Will is not even a thing in the vernacular sense or in the Kantian ding an sich sense; the Will is just a description. When analyzed, he points out, it always resolves into the resultant of various other forces, and we are back to Chaos again – the evolutionary becoming which replaces all static Aristotelian categories in Nietzsche’s post-Darwinian universe.

When one transcends conditioned social-game consciousness and internalized grammatical conventions – whether with LSD or via meditation and yoga, or by whatever method – one experiences the dissolution of “real space,” “real time,” and “real bodies” “moving” in this “real space and real time,” etc. The Buddhists seem to be pretty hip in saying that if you regard what remains as One (the Hindic Atman, etc.), you have not gone far enough. If you go far enough, they say, you will see that the One also implodes, and only Void remains. That is all good enough, for c.400 B.C., but the void never seemed quite the right metaphor to me. I think Nietzsche is more contemporary by saying that what remains is Chaos, infinite meaning in infinite flux, and Will to Power, the spirit of abundance and creativity, which is not One, not a final principle or a God-in-disguise, but just the resultant of the forces that make up the mesh of Chaos.

The existentialists know that we create ourselves, but Nietzsche knows, like the sages of the Consciousness Movement, that we create our world, too. (“We are all better artists than we realize,” as he phrases it in one place.) The Will to Power, either functioning unconsciously [when we still believe in “real space,” “real time,” and “real objects”] or else functioning consciously [when we have experienced Chaos and learned that space, time and objects are just mind-constructs] always determines what reality-tunnel we are living in. The artist is Nietzsche’s model of the conscious Will to Power because he or she knows that he or she creates an appearance, an illusion, an ordering of the infinite flux. It almost sounds as if Nietzsche has been reading Don Juan (or Carlos Castaneda; or Harold Garfinkle, who was Castaneda’s sociology teacher and the possible original of Don Juan.)

Chaos, then, is Nietzsche’s poetic shorthand for the recognition that the universe is infinite Becoming rather than static Being; and the Will to Power is the resultant of all forces tending to creativity, innovation and the sheer joy of imposing one’s own meaning on this universal flux. Thus, Nietzsche’s notorious “I could only believe in a god who dances” and his attacks on “the spirit of gravity” are both expressions of the fundamental insight that we can not only survive the Death of God (the Absolute) but enjoy it. The existentialist experiences the collapse of the absolute, shudders, decides the universe is meaningless, and determines to be brave and impose a meaning on life anyway. Nietzsche experiences the collapse, laughs joyously, decides the universe contains all possible meanings, and tells us to pick the meaning that will liberate our own Will to Power most totally.

In a sense, the existentialists’ nihilism (no meaning) and Nietzsche’s Chaos (all possible meanings) are logically similar; and both are heavily influenced by the world of scientific materialism out of which they grew. But Nietzsche and the existentialists are at opposite poles psycho-logically. You can see it in their styles. The existentialists whine, mutter and complain. Nietzsche laughs, jokes, flashes with wit and capers like a clown.

It is this Nietzschean humor (especially his sarcasm) that contains his ultimate “message.” The famous, or infamous, Nietzschean “style,” the vertigo of brilliant aphorisms and almost childish puns, is not at all a surface or an accident. The aim of his work, he tells us several times, is to destroy the rationalization of the Revenge motive, to lay bare every hidden resentment in every philosophy that provides justifications for intolerance and hatred. His bitter (but hilarious) onslaughts on dogmatic Christianity and Socialism are not just attacks on one specific religion and one specific political party, but are analytical paradigms showing how the Revenge motive can disguise itself as altruism, charity, humanitarianism and even as progress. To understand Nietzsche’s wit, his habit of sarcasm, is to understand the essence of his system of psychology. We are released from Revenge, he obviously feels, only when we see deeply enough into its disguises to laugh at them. A style that dances and plays with ideas is the only style to convey that perspective, the view (as Nietzsche said) from the mountaintops, looking down at human passions.

To live in the Nietzschean multi-varied universe, to pick one’s own values out of infinite possibilities, seems like painful choice to the existentialist, blasphemy to the Christian, monstrosity to the Objectivist; but it is actually only to become consciously an artist. All art begins with Chaos, with infinite vistas suddenly opening, and proceeds through play and permutation into new Creativity (the sublimated Will to Power, Nietzsche calls it) – going from the ridiculous to the sublime, as it were.

Or as Nietzsche sums it up in one lightning-like sentence, “One must have Chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”

The Overman (who has nothing in common with the Nazi vulgarization of Nietzsche) is he or she who contains enough Chaos to give birth to stars. Less poetically, it is he or she who, having reached the mountaintop and looked down at primate psychology, neither weeps nor despairs but laughs. Again, there is no understanding Nietzsche without accepting his humor as fundamental. H.L. Mencken, often regarded as another vulgarizer of Nietzsche by Certain Authorities in Academia, may have understood the ultimate Nietzsche best of all. Mencken, at least, also wrote very funny books; whereas those who write more “profoundly” about Nietzsche while still possessed by that spirit of gravity he despised, seems not to have understood him at all. —RAW

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