THE ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY PDF, EPUB, EBOOK

Robert Shea | 805 pages | 06 Oct 1998 | Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc | 9780440539810 | English | New York, United States ‘The Illuminatus! Trilogy’: Hivemind & Brian Taylor Conspire On Series – Deadline

Handing us a line. What would you say if this man so frightened his neighbors that they in turn were collecting weapons to protect themselves from him? What if this man spent ten times as much money on his expensive weapons as he did on the education of his children? What if one of his children criticized his hobby and he called that child a traitor and a bum and disowned it? And he took another child who had obeyed him faithfully and armed that child and sent it out into the world to attack neighbors? What would you say about a man who introduces poisons into the water he drinks and the air he breathes? What if this man not only is feuding with the people on his block but involves himself in the quarrels of others in distant parts of the city and even in the suburbs? Such a man would clearly be a paranoid schizophrenic, Mr. Flanagan, with homicidal tendencies. In order to learn, you have to be ignorant. Ignorance is a condition of learning. Pain is a condition of health. Passion is a condition of thought. Death is a condition of life When you start looking you find it everywhere. The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. Her hand cupped his cock and found it limp; her eyes opened and looked into his enquiringly. He kissed her lips quickly and moved his hand lower, inserting a ringer until he found the clitoris. But even when her breathing got deeper, he did not respond as usual, and her hand began massaging his cock more desperately. He slid down, kissing nipples and bellybutton on the way, and began licking her clitoris. As soon as she came, he cupped her buttocks, lifted her pelvis, got his tongue into her vagina and forced another quick orgasm, immediately lowering her slightly again and beginning a very gentle and slow return in spiral fashion back to the clitoris. But still he was flaccid. Stella giggled and kissed his mouth briefly. A freak. It was rugged. I had to have some defense, and somehow I picked honesty. I was always with older boys so I never won a fight. The only way I could feel superior, or escape total inferiority, was to be the most honest bastard on the planet earth. If you could only be a woman for a while, baby! You can't imagine what liars most men are. When it was at least half true. But it always sounded like play-acting to me, and I felt it sounded that way to the woman, too. This time it just came out, perfectly natural, no effort. Then her lips closed over his penis and he found that the words had loosened the knot: he was erect in a second. He closed his eyes to savor the sensation, then opened them to look down at her Afro hairdo, her serious dark face, his cock slipping back and forth between her lips. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom—in anarchy—such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor—raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is—and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws—the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U. The Aneristic Principle is that of order, the Eristic Principle is that of disorder. As George sets out to find his mentor and uncover the truth about an all-seeing secret society that seems to unify every insane, inane, and outlandish conspiracy theory ever told — from the JFK assassination, celebrity cabals and lost continents to UFOs, ancient gods and the truth about the New World Order — he finds himself drawn deeper into a war between two shadowy groups. On one side stand the Discordians, a clandestine band of chaos-loving guerrilla fighters led by the enigmatic modern-day pirate Hagbard Celine; and on the other, the Illuminati — elite authoritarians who secretly manipulate world events, ever expanding their wealth, influence, and physical power in a plot to escape the limitations of human existence. The company also has a February release date with Sony for Bloodshot, the Vin Diesel-starring adaptation of the cyborg assassin saga.. Hivemind has a first-look for event television at Amazon and is repped by UTA. Taylor is repped by Verve. Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy. All Rights reserved. You will be redirected back to your article in seconds. Read the full story. Powered by WordPress. Close the menu. Film Expand the sub-menu. TV Expand the sub-menu. The Illuminatus! Trilogy - Wikipedia

Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Illuminatus! Trilogy , please sign up. Is it satanism, I mean the illuminaty story, the eye of the pyramid, how true is the story because some staff we only dismiss as just stories? Angie Fiction. And it's Discordianism yes it does exist a deliberately ridiculous religion formed around the Greek Goddess of Discord Eris. See 1 question about The Illuminatus! Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of The Illuminatus! Shelves: modernfantasy , sf-f-h , humor , books-that-built-me , masterpieces , spirituality-and-woo- woo. I gave this book 5 stars. The Roberts nailed the experience of believing you're different and believing that what you want or experience is different and wanting to share it with the world. Much like it's worth seeing Monty Python even if you don't "get" the humor to understand the "code. A young person hiding their creativity and trying to be "serious" so they can make it through life will get a huge amount of value from this book. You have to forgive them for believing the viewpoint for a few years and then you have to forgive them for rejecting it for a few. In the end, they'll probably come to a happy medium, but they'll always be gratefull for getting that damned uncomfortable thing out of their butt. Oh yeah They're bad. But they're never referenced again well, until the last pages, which you really just skim looking for jokes , so skim them or skip them. You really don't need to start reading until the words "Egyptian Mouth-Breeder" appear on the page. Actually, that might be the simplest and best review of all: You really don't need to start reading until the words "Egyptian Mouth-Breeder" appear on the page. View all 8 comments. Apr 21, J. Keely rated it liked it Shelves: humor , america , science-fiction , reviewed , novel , philosophy , supernatural-horror , spy. A sprawling, many-faceted, satirical series, Illuminatus! There are so many aspects which one could address, so many points of divergence, ideas, philosophies, and influences, but at it's heart, it's a rollicking adventure story that, despite its many political and social themes, rarely takes itself too seriously. I can certainly say I liked it, but it's hard to say how much. Some parts were better than others, but there are many parts to be cons A sprawling, many-faceted, satirical series, Illuminatus! Some parts were better than others, but there are many parts to be considered. Unlike other reviewers, I did not find the numerous asides and allusions to be distracting. If one piqued my interest, I looked it up and more often than not, learned something entirely new. Some didn't intrigue me as much, and I was happy to let them be. I treated the book like I treat life: following those threads which seemed, to me, to be the most fruitful, and refusing to become bogged down in the fact that I can't know everything. If a reader tried to track down every reference, they'd be going to wikipedia three and four times per page and likely lose the thread of the story entirely. The sheer volume of research behind the book is an achievement in itself, sure to keep the attention of detail-obsessed trivial pursuit players of the internet generation. Others have also complained about the structure of the book, switching as it does in place, time, and character with no forewarning, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph. Certainly these switches can cause a moment's uncertainty, but they hardly make following the plot impossible. The authors could have put more line breaks in, it would be a minor change. So minor, in fact, that I find it difficult to take seriously any claim that the lack of such breaks somehow ruined the story. It was a deliberate effect by the authors, meant to impart information realistically and force the reader to take a more active role. In life, we are constantly inundated by information and it is up to us to decide what is important and where to make strict delineations. Likewise, in this book, the authors want us to take responsibility for our own parsing of data, refusing to spoon-feed it to us like so much propaganda. The authors, themselves went through huge amounts of data to combine all of these conspiracy theories into a grand ur-conspiracy, too large and detailed to be believed and too ridiculous to be doubted. I've never had much interest in such theories, so it was nice to have them all in one place where I could enjoy them as part of a fun spy story. I also admit a lack of interest in the beat poets, psychedelic culture, and World War II, so I'm glad to have gotten those all out of the way in the same fell swoop. This book is, at its heart, a chronicle of a certain point in American history, a certain mindset, a baroquely detailed conglomeration of the writings and ideas of the raucous sixties. The book is at its least effective when it is taking itself seriously, particularly in the appendices. When it seems to believe in its own conspiracies or Burroughs' bizarre understanding of history, it becomes a victim of its own joke. It is at its best when it takes nothing seriously, least of all itself. The authors were involved in the flowering of the Discordian Movement, which has been described as a religion disguised as a joke disguised as a religion. The movement plays a large role in the text and is analyzed from all sides, but basically boils down to religion as imagined by Mad Magazine. The revolutionary thing about Mad was not that it undermined authority, but that it simultaneously undermined itself. Its humor lay in the insight that only a fool would believe any one thing to be the source of wisdom, but that you were perfectly justified in mistrusting everything. Rather like the remarkable Sixties BBC series 'The Prisoner', the final message is that you must decide for yourself what is important, what is real, and what is misdirection. Also like 'The Prisoner', Illuminatus owes much to the spy genre of the sixties, from freewheeling sex to ultra-modern undersea bases and high- stakes secret missions. There is even an overt parody of the Bond franchise running through the books. Unfortunately, it also seems to fall into the Boys' Club atmosphere of spy stories. Though it switches between narrators, all of them are men, and the focused sexuality of the book is usually aimed at women. There are moments where bisexuality, homosexuality, and feminist sexual power dynamics are explored, but these tend to be mere intellectual exercises while the hot, sweaty moments are by and large men taking their pleasure from women. I can enjoy porn, but I wish it were as balanced as the rhetoric to which the authors pay lip service. Many male authors have shied away from writing female characters from the inside, despite having no compunction about getting inside them in other ways. I cannot reiterate enough the late Dan O'Bannon's insistence that the secret to writing women was writing men and then leaving out the penis. He scripted 'Alien' without gender markers, all characters being referred to by last name, and Sigourney Weaver's portrayal of Ellen Ripley has proven one of the most realistic and unaffected of any woman in film. It was a disappointment to see Shea and Wilson so fettered by gender while simultaneously spouting the latest feminist sound bites. In many ways, Illuminatus provides a bridge between the paranoid, conspiracy sci fi of Dick and the highly referential, multilayered stories of Cyberpunk. Conceptually, it represents a transition from Dick's characters--always unable to escape destruction at the hand of their vast, uncaring society--and Cyberpunk agonists who are able to adapt to their distant, heartless society and thrive where they can. The language of Illuminatus is flashier and cooler than Dick's, but has not yet reached the form-as-function linguistic data overload of Gibson or Stephenson. The writing is quite good: crisp, witty, evocative and mobile. Far from the accusations of being a text 'written on an acid trip', it is lucid and deliberate, even if it does take itself lightly. There certainly are those aspects which are inspired by psychedelic culture, including the free-wheeling structure. The authors invite comparison between moments, events, and characters which, in most other books, would be separated by the strict delineation of the page break. But then, the surest sign of genius is the ability to synthesize new data from the confluence of apparently disparate parts, as Da Vinci did one day while studying the eddies in a stream for a painting, finding himself suddenly struck by the notion that the heart would pump blood more efficiently by forming such swirling eddies in its chamber instead of working as a simple pump. In the the past decade, internal body scanners have proven the accuracy of his small corner sketch. By inviting you to make such comparisons and synthesize your own conclusions, the book respects the potential intelligence of its reader. But it is not all such conceptual exercises, and the lesson Cyberpunk authors learned was that a fast-paced, flashy shell can sugar even bitter pills. But what delighted me was the realization that at its heart, this is a story of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Outside of Lovecraft and Howard, very few of the stories set in that universe are even passable, but this one comports itself ably, taking to heart the notion that an overabundance of data can break the human mind, which dovetails nicely with the cautionary lesson of conspiracy theory: it seems vast, inexplicable beings of unimaginable power can also be human, and have cults just as Unaussprechlichen. Overall, the series is interesting, unique, informative, humorous, and entertaining. There are moments where it bogs down, but overall, it is well- structured and well written. There aren't many books where you get a fun spy story, a harrowing Cthulhu tale, and a rundown of the zeitgeist of an American era all in one, but there is at least one. Unless you're a teenager looking for a counterculture to believe in, the conspiracy mish-mash probably won't be a life-changing revelation, but it might be food for thought. But this book is not designed to be easy to digest. You are not meant to internalize its message thoughtlessly. It's funny, contradictory, and self-aware, and it's hard for people who take themselves seriously to get caught up in a book that, for the most part, doesn't. I could say this book deserves to be more than a cult classic, but at its heart, this book is a cult classic, and its cultural influence will continue to seep with or without grander acclaim. View all 4 comments. Jan 25, Ryan rated it it was amazing. I'm re-reading this now, and felt I should clarify my position on this book, as I often list it as one of my favorites. High Literature this is not. It is campy sci-fi, saturated with gratuitous sex scenes, psychedelia, conspiracy theories, counterculture etc. When I recommend this book, it's usually with the caveat that the authors are sort of bumbling about and finding their feet for the first 80 or so pages. When it finally does start moving along, the reader finds his- or her-self bombarded wi I'm re-reading this now, and felt I should clarify my position on this book, as I often list it as one of my favorites. When it finally does start moving along, the reader finds his- or her-self bombarded with multiple, conflicting realities and extremist, revolutionary politics from all points of the spectrum. The intended result is mind-expansion. This book invites the reader to become more skeptical, but also to start thinking about what he or she thinks about the world and why. The narrative is experimental; Wilson has an obvious admiration of Joyce that shows up not just here, but also in his lectures and more autobiographical books. As such, it jumps between characters, places, and times, sometimes mid-paragraph, sometimes entering stream-of-consciousness. This may make it difficult for readers who feel that whatever Wilson and Shea are getting at isn't worth the headache. You need to be on your toes, but it's probably best to just "roll with it" and not spend overlong trying to tie every piece together. In any case, re- readings can consistently reveal new interrelationships. Early on, one of the main protagonists comes across a painting bearing the message, "think for yourself, schmuck! View 2 comments. Dec 01, Danny rated it it was amazing. As these groups can be viewed as either terrorists or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view, so it is with this book. As is probably not ironic for a book considered to be the holy grail of conspiracy theory, it's definitely not difficult to perceive the Illuminatus Trilogy as an act of intellectual terrorism. This is not an easy book to read. Time, location, perspective, and identity can and do shift without warning in mid-paragraph, sometimes mid- sentence making an interesting model for the idea of the 'collective unconscious'. The best analogy I can think of for this book is that it's like reading someone else's acid trip, and that someone else is criminally schizophrenic and watching 15 televisions at the same time. It is definitely a product of it's generation. The copious drug use, and underlying philosophies are very typical of most of the underground cult classics of the '70s that I've read, but for the most part it's brilliantly insightful, and has many fantastic aphorisms that you'll probably want to repeat later. It's also beautifully self-satirical, which is probably a good thing because if this book took itself seriously it really might have been an act of intellectual terrorism. You will probably either love this book, loathe it utterly, or possibly even think it's totally ridiculous. If you're not up for a difficult read, you may not want to bother. But if you do find you like it, you might be happy to know that it's a hell of a lot easier to read the second time through. May 17, Tom Quinn rated it it was amazing. When I find myself in times of trouble The counterculture speaks to me: "The whole damn world's gone nutty, "Let it be. Jun 04, Elf M. Trilogy saved my life. It won't save yours. Since first reading it at age 13 the year it saved my life , I have dutifully re-read the entire trilogy really, it's not that long every five years since. But when I was 13, that was the jokes about Nixon, late 60s and early 70s rock bands, the coming of disco, the obscure neopagan nonsense that washed through every college campus in the late s, bizarre alternative histories and conspiracies theories, were hilarious and fas The Illuminatus! But when I was 13, that was the jokes about Nixon, late 60s and early 70s rock bands, the coming of disco, the obscure neopagan nonsense that washed through every college campus in the late s, bizarre alternative histories and conspiracies theories, were hilarious and fascinating. There's even a page from the Principia Discordia mentioned, and that too was life changing, because in tiny print in one corner it contained this quote: "When I was 8 or 9 years old I acquired my first split beaver magazine. You can imagine my disappointment when, upon examination with a microscope, I discovered all I could see was dots. Being 13 and finding someone like Robert Anton Wilson, who wrote so irreverantly about sex, morality, religion, politics-- all the things that do not make up polite dinner conversation-- does change a life, especially when that life had been constrained by a middle class conventionality wherein parents seethed with their own furtive excesses and failed to understand their SF-reading child. Trilogy really is a beast of its own time, and that time has passed. It is a historical oddity. The wacky conspiracy theories of Illuminatus! Our culture now has its own bugaboos-- we are a highly pornographic culture, with nearly-naked underage nymphs selling underwear on billboards and Disney promoting boy bands with lyrics about irresponsible lust and desire, yet at the same time we consider red-lettering for life any and every man who had sex in a public park at midnight or chatted up just the wrong person at the wrong moment. The Internet tightly wires our entire informational existence together which has had the effect of telling us what other people really think and feel-- and paradoxically led to the even stronger vehemence against those opposing worldviews because now we perceive just how many people hold to them. These habits of thought, these expectations, just do not live in Illuminatus! Jul 12, Gar rated it it was amazing. Honestly, the bury-the-needle rating on this is primarly from nostalgia and gratitude. The thing is, the book saved my soul. I say this because I read the Illuminatus! That's like getting injected with concentrated live-culture viruses af Honestly, the bury-the-needle rating on this is primarly from nostalgia and gratitude. That's like getting injected with concentrated live-culture viruses after your immune system has been taken out by heavy radiation blasts. But the Illuminatus! Who knows what abyss I would've fallen into otherwise? It also was instrumental in priming me to get right with "Bob" later in life. It couldn't fully open the Third Nostril, but it loosened things up in there for the eventual forceful blow. View all 5 comments. Mar 30, Naomi rated it did not like it Shelves: scifi-fantasy. The authors thought they were WAY more clever and intellectual than they really were. Mostly these books were pretentious and boring and a regurgitation of themes that had been explored numerous times in numerous other places. Not to mention the fact that the whole trilogy pretends to be building up to some huge world-altering event that never actually happens. It's like the authors finally realized after 3 books that they didn't really know what they were trying to say or where they wanted the The authors thought they were WAY more clever and intellectual than they really were. It's like the authors finally realized after 3 books that they didn't really know what they were trying to say or where they wanted the plot to go, so they just decided to end it. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom—in anarchy—such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor—raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is—and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws—the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U. The Aneristic Principle is that of order, the Eristic Principle is that of disorder. On the surface, the Universe seems to the ignorant to be ordered; this is the aneristic illusion. It is the job of the scientist, for example, to implement this principle in a practical manner and some are quite brilliant at it. To the Roman slave owners, Spartacus was not the hero and obedient slaves were not cowards. Spartacus was not a hero, and obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient slaves believed this also. The obedient always think about themselves as virtuous, rather than cowardly. If authority implies submission, liberation implies equality. Authority exists when one man obeys another, and liberty exists when one man do not obey other men. Thus, to say that authority exists is to say that class and cast exist, that submission and inequality exist. To say that the liberty exists is to say that classlessness exists, to say that brotherhood and equality exist. Authority, by dividing men into classes, creates dichotomy, disruption, hostility, fear, disunion. Liberty, by placing men to equal footing, creates association, amalgamation, union, security. The authors are utterly incompetent - no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors - whom I've never heard of - have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be sure I won't waste time reading such rubbish. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. The omnibus edition gave a new lease of life to flagging sales, and became the most commonly available form of the trilogy from then on. The trilogy was translated and published in German, again both as separate volumes the three covers of which formed a tryptych and an omnibus. The face of J. The Church was founded by Illuminatus! Trilogy covers a wide range of subjects throughout the book. These include discussions about mythology, current events, conspiracy theories and counterculture. Although the many conspiracy theories in the book are presumably imaginary, these are mixed in with enough truth to make them seem plausible. For example, the title of the first book, The Eye in the Pyramid , refers to the Eye of Providence , a mystical symbol which derives from the ancient Egyptian Eye of Horus and is rumored to be the symbol of the Bavarian Illuminati. Some of America's founding fathers are alleged by conspiracy theorists to have been members of this sect. The books are loaded with references to the Illuminati, the Argenteum Astrum, many and various world domination plans, conspiracy theories and pieces of gnostic knowledge. Many of the odder conspiracies in the book are taken from unpublished letters to Playboy magazine, where the authors were working as associate editors while they wrote the novels. Among the oddest, the suggestion that Adam Weishaupt , founder of the Bavarian Illuminati, killed George Washington and took on his identity as President of the United States is often noted in Illuminati-conspiracy discussion. The nonsense word fnord , invented by the writers of Principia Discordia , is given a specific and sinister meaning in the trilogy. It is a subliminal message technique, a word that the majority of the population since early childhood has been trained to ignore and, of course, trained to forget both the training and the fact that they are ignoring it , but which they associate with a vague sense of unease. Upon seeing the word, readers experience a panic reaction. They then subconsciously suppress all memories of having seen the word, but the sense of panic remains. They therefore associate the unease with the news story they are reading. Fnords are scattered liberally in the text of newspapers and magazines, causing fear and anxiety in those following current events. However, there are no fnords in the advertisements, thus encouraging a consumerist society. Fnord magazine equated the fnords with a generalized effort to control and brainwash the populace. To "see the fnords" would imply an attempt to wrestle back individual autonomy. The word makes its first appearance in The Illuminatus! Trilogy without any explanation during an acid trip by Dr. Only much later in the story is the secret revealed, when Malik is hypnotized by Hagbard Celine to recall suppressed memories of his first-grade teacher conditioning his class to ignore the fnords: "If you don't see the fnord it can't eat you, don't see the fnord, don't see the fnord Numerology is given great credence by many of the characters, with the Law of Fives in particular being frequently mentioned. Hagbard Celine states the Law of Fives in Appendix Gimmel: "All phenomena are directly or indirectly related to the number five. Burroughs as having discovered. It's connected with so many synchronicities and weird coincidences that it must mean something, I just haven't figured out yet what it means! The books were written at the height of the late s, and are infused with the popular counterculture ideas of that time. For instance, the New Age slogan " flower power " is referenced via its German form, Ewige Blumenkraft literally "eternal flower power" , described by Shea and Wilson as a slogan of the Illuminati, the enemies of the hippie ideal. The book's attitude to New Age philosophies and beliefs are ambiguous. Wilson explained in a later interview: "I'm some kind of antibody in the New Age movement. My function is to raise the possibility, hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit. The prevalence of kinky sex in the story reflects the hippy ideal of " free love "; characters are both liberal- minded and promiscuous. The authors are well aware that it also provides an excuse for mere titillation: in a typically self-referential joke, a character in the story suggests the scenes exist: "only to sell a bad book filled with shallow characters pushing a nonsense conspiracy". Similarly, the books espouse the use of mind-altering substances to achieve higher states of consciousness, in line with the beliefs of key counterculture figures like Timothy Leary , who is mentioned throughout the three novels. Leary himself called the trilogy "more important than Ulysses or Finnegans Wake , " two novels by author James Joyce - who appears as a character in The Illuminatus! Trilogy and is a favorite author of Robert Anton Wilson. This quote is blurbed on the covers or front page of its various printings. Every view of reality that is introduced in the story is later derided in some way, whether that view is traditional or iconoclastic. The trilogy is an exercise in cognitive dissonance , with an absurdist plot built of seemingly plausible, if unprovable, components. This style of building up a viable belief system, then tearing it down to replace it with another one, was described by Wilson as " guerrilla ontology ". This postmodern lack of belief in consensus reality is a cornerstone of the semi-humorous Chaos -based religion of Discordianism. Extracts from its sacred text, the Principia Discordia by Malaclypse the Younger , are extensively quoted throughout the trilogy. It incorporates and shares many themes and contexts from Illuminatus. The key Discordian practice known as " Operation Mindfuck " is exemplified in the character of Markoff Chaney a play on the mathematical random process called Markov chain. He is an anti-social dwarf who engages in subtle practical joking in a deliberate attempt to cause social confusion. One such joke involves the forging and placing of signs that are signed by "The Mgt. Maintain 50mph. There are several parts in the book where it reviews and jokingly deconstructs itself. The fictional journalist Epicene Wildeblood at one point is required to critique a book uncannily similar to The Illuminatus! Trilogy :. Several protagonists come to the realization that they are merely fictional characters, or at least begin to question the reality of their situation. George Dorn wonders early on if he "was in some crazy surrealist movie, wandering from telepathic sheriffs to homosexual assassins, to nympho lady Masons, to psychotic pirates, according to a script written in advance by two acid-heads and a Martian humorist". FUCKUP has been working all morning, correlating all the data on this caper and its historical roots, and I programmed him to put it in the form of a novel for easy reading. Considering what a lousy job he does at poetry, I suppose it will be a high-camp novel, intentionally or unintentionally. For a work of fiction, Illuminatus! This is partly because the characters themselves are involved in doing research, but it is also a trademark of Wilson's writing. There are also references to Thomas Pynchon 's The Crying of Lot 49 and his Gravity's Rainbow , an equally enormous experimental novel concerning liberty and paranoia that was published two years prior to Illuminatus! Wilson claims his book was already complete by the time he and Shea read Pynchon's novel which went on to win several awards , but they then went back and made some modifications to the text before its final publication to allude to Pynchon's work. Author H. Lovecraft is alluded to often, with many mentions of characters e. He even appears himself as a character, as does his aunt Annie Gamwell and one of his acquaintances, Hart Crane. Interest in Lovecraft reached new heights in , with two full-length biographies published in the same year as The Illuminatus! The Village Voice called it "The ultimate conspiracy book The Fortean Times was also enthusiastic, whilst acknowledging the difficulties many readers would have attempting to follow the convoluted plot threads:. In more recent years, it was complimented in the bibliography to the New Hackers Dictionary as a book that can help readers "understand the hacker mindset. Wilson and Robert Shea went on to become prolific authors. While Shea concentrated mainly on historical novels, Wilson produced over 30 works, mixing fictional novels with nonfiction. Although both authors' later work often elaborated on concepts first discussed in Illuminatus! The trilogy inspired a number of direct adaptations, including a stage play and a comic book series, and numerous indirect adaptations that borrowed from its themes. Wilson subsequently wrote a number of prequels , sequels and spin-offs based upon the Illuminatus! Many of Wilson's other works, fictional and nonfictional, also make reference to the Illuminati or the Illuminatus! Several of the characters from Illuminatus! The third book of the Cat trilogy, The Homing Pigeons , is actually mentioned as a sequel to Illuminatus! In , Wilson published an encyclopedia of conspiracy theories called Everything is Under Control , which explains the origins of many of the theories mentioned in Illuminatus! Wilson and Shea did plan to collaborate again on a true sequel, Bride of Illuminatus , taking place in It was rumored that it would feature a resurrected Winifred Saure the only female member of the American Medical Association exerting her influence through virtual reality. The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea

You will be redirected back to your article in seconds. Read the full story. Powered by WordPress. Close the menu. Film Expand the sub-menu. TV Expand the sub-menu. Awardsline Expand the sub-menu. Box Office Expand the sub-menu. Business Expand the sub-menu. International Expand the sub-menu. Video Expand the sub-menu. More Expand the sub-menu. Follow Us. They never reported a twinge. But, wait, here is another performer in our circus, and one of the most intelligent and decent in the lot-his name is unpronounceable, but you can call him Howard and he happens to have been born a dolphin. He's swimming through the ruins of Atlantis and it's April 10 already-time is moving; I'm not sure what Howard sees but it bothers him, and he decides to tell Hagbard Celine all about it. Not that I know, at this point, who Hagbard Celine is. Never mind; watch the waves roll and be glad there isn't much pollution out here yet. Look at the way the golden sun lights each wave with a glint that, curiously, sparkles into a silver sheen; and watch, watch the waves as they roll, so that it is easy to cross five hours of time in one second and find ourselves amid trees and earth, with even a few falling leaves for a touch of poetry before the horror. Where are we? Five hours away, I told you-five hours due west, to be precise, so at the same instant that Howard turns a somersault in Atlantis, Sasparilla Godzilla, a tourist from simcoe, Ontario she had the misfortune to be born a human being turns a neat nosedive right here and lands unconscious on the ground. She later said it was the heat. Much less sophisticated in important matters than Nkrumah Fubar, she didn't care to tell anybody, or even to remind herself, what had really knocked her over. Back in Simcoe, the folks always said Harry Godzilla got a sensible woman when he married Sasparilla, and it is sensible in Canada or the United States to hide certain truths. No, at this point I had better not call them truths. Let it stand that she either saw, or imagined she saw, a certain sinister kind of tight grin, or grimace, cross the face of the gigantic statue of Tlaloc, the rain god. Nobody from S'mcoe had ever seen anything like that before; indeed do many things come to pass. And, if you think the poor lady was an unusual case, you should examine the records of psychiatrists, both institutional and private, for the rest of the month. Reports of unusual anxieties and religious manias among schizophrenics in mental hospitals skyrocketed; and ordinary men and women walked in off the street to complain about eyes watching them, hooded beings passing through locked rooms, crowned figures giving unintelligible commands, voices that claimed to be God or the Devil, a real witch's brew for sure. But the sane verdict was to attribute all this to the aftermath of the Fernando Poo tragedy. The phone rang at A. Numbly, dumbly, mopingly, gropingly, out of the dark, I find and identify a body, a self, a task. I sleep naked sorry about that , and Fm putting on my drawers and trousers as I copy the address. She's naked, too, and that recalls very pleasant memories of a few hours earlier. I suppose some of you will be shocked when I tell you I'm past sixty and she's only twenty-five. It doesn't make it any better that we're married, I know. This isn't a bad body, for its age, and seeing Rebecca, most of the sheets thrown aside, reminds me just how good it is. In fact, at this point I don't even remember having been the ringmaster, or what echo I retain is confused with sleep and dream. I kiss her neck, unselfconsciously, for she is my wife and I am her husband, and even if I am an inspector on the Homicide Squad-Homicide North, to be exact- any notions about being a stranger in this body have vanished with my dreams into air. Into thin air. I washed my face somewhat, tired old man watching me from the mirror, and ran a brush through my hair. Just time enough to think that retirement was only a few years away and to remember a certain hypodermic needle and a day in the Catskills with my first wife, Sandra, back when they at least had clean air up there. Bombing and homicide. What a meshuganah world. Do you remember when you could at least drive in New York at three in the morning without traffic jams? Those days were gone; the trucks that were banned in the daytime were all making their deliveries now. Everybody was supposed to pretend the pollution went away before dawn. Papa used to say, "Saul, Saul, they did it to the Indians and now they're doing it to themselves. Goyische narrs. He seemed like a cynical old man to me then, and I seem like a cynical old man to others now. Is there any pattern or sense in any of it? The scene of the blast was one of those old office buildings with Gothic-and-gingerbread styling all over the lobby floor. In the dim light of the hour, it reminded me of the shadowy atmosphere of Charlie Chan in the Wax Museum. And a smell hit my nostrils as soon as I walked in. A patrolman lounging inside the door snapped to attention when he recognized me. Some freak of dynamics. Nothing else is damaged down here, but every fish tank went. That's the smell. A tough man, and nowhere as dumb as he liked to pretend, which was why he was head of the Bomb Squad. Nobody killed. The call went out to you because a clothier's dummy was burned on the eighteenth floor and the first car here thought it was a human body. Saul's face showed no reaction to the answer-but poker players at the Fraternal Order of Police had long ago given up trying to read that inscrutible Talmudic countenance. As Barney Muldoon, I knew how I would feel if I had the chance to drop this case on another department and hurry home to a beautiful bride like Rebecca Goodman. I smiled down at Saul-his height would keep him from appointment to the Force now, but the rules were different when he was young-and I added quietly, 'There might be something in it for you, though. All be said was, "Oh? The match went out, and shadows moved where nobody stirred. What have you got? It's kind of left-of-center, so this was probably a right-wing job and not a left-wing one. But the interesting thing is that we couldn't reach the editor, Joseph Malik, at his home, and when we called one of the associate editors, what do you think he told us? Malik disappeared three days ago. His landlord confirms it.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Those days were gone; the trucks that were banned in the daytime were all making their deliveries now. Everybody was supposed to pretend the pollution went away before dawn. Papa used to say, "Saul, Saul, they did it to the Indians and now they're doing it to themselves. Goyische narrs. He seemed like a cynical old man to me then, and I seem like a cynical old man to others now. Is there any pattern or sense in any of it? The scene of the blast was one of those old office buildings with Gothic-and-gingerbread styling all over the lobby floor. In the dim light of the hour, it reminded me of the shadowy atmosphere of Charlie Chan in the Wax Museum. And a smell hit my nostrils as soon as I walked in. A patrolman lounging inside the door snapped to attention when he recognized me. Some freak of dynamics. Nothing else is damaged down here, but every fish tank went. That's the smell. A tough man, and nowhere as dumb as he liked to pretend, which was why he was head of the Bomb Squad. Nobody killed. The call went out to you because a clothier's dummy was burned on the eighteenth floor and the first car here thought it was a human body. Saul's face showed no reaction to the answer-but poker players at the Fraternal Order of Police had long ago given up trying to read that inscrutible Talmudic countenance. As Barney Muldoon, I knew how I would feel if I had the chance to drop this case on another department and hurry home to a beautiful bride like Rebecca Goodman. I smiled down at Saul-his height would keep him from appointment to the Force now, but the rules were different when he was young-and I added quietly, 'There might be something in it for you, though. All be said was, "Oh? The match went out, and shadows moved where nobody stirred. What have you got? It's kind of left-of-center, so this was probably a right-wing job and not a left-wing one. But the interesting thing is that we couldn't reach the editor, Joseph Malik, at his home, and when we called one of the associate editors, what do you think he told us? Malik disappeared three days ago. His landlord confirms it. He's been trying to get hold of Malik himself because there's a no pets rule there and the other tenants are complaining about his dogs. So, if a man drops out of sight and then his office gets bombed, I kind of think the matter might come to the attention of the Homicide Department eventually, don't you? I'll check with Missing Persons in the morning, to see what they've got. The Egyptian mouth-breeders. Even Egyptian mouth-breeders," He noticed the expressions on the faces of the two detectives and added lamely, "If you don't collect fish, you wouldn't understand. But, believe me, an Egyptian mouth-breeder is pretty hard to get these days, and they're all dead in there. That's one of the great things about collecting fish: you get to appreciate the wonders of nature. I found it in the rubble, and it bad been blown partly open, so I looked inside. Weird as fits on a bishop. A long night, and a heavy case. He and Saul turned to the cafeteria, leaving the patrolman looking vaguely distressed. His name is James Patrick Hennessy and he's been on the Force three years. He doesn't come back into this story at all. Of course, many items on this wish list are no longer wishes, having come true during the intervening years. On a host of other issues, from gay rights to the decriminalization of marijuana, the authors shrewdly anticipated a future in which libertarian and authoritarian impulses have both managed to implement aspects of their conflicting agendas. But I do need to mention the literary merits of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, even if the work itself asks for evaluation on other grounds. In an era when sci-fi books pushed the boundaries and adopted many of the devices of highbrow fiction, few authors raised the stakes higher than Wilson and Shea. The shifts in chronology, perspective and tone are as dramatic as anything you will find in the most fashionable postmodern authors of the day. The clever and cryptic allusions to other works of fiction could keep scholars busy for years. Try counting the references to H. Lovecraft, for example—you might find a hundred or more in these pages. With the exception of Samuel R. In short, The Illuminatus! Trilogy ranks among the most ambitious works of the middle decades of the twentieth century, even as it resists categorization. Crazy and sane by turns, the work may best be represented by a symbol that recurs in its pages: the Ouroboros or serpent swallowing its own tail. In this instance, the reader is also asked to swallow a very tall tale. But the strangest part of this very strange story may be how much of it has come true. The Illuminatus! To purchase, click on image. Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at www. The State of the Art Ballard, J. The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard, J. Crash Ballard, J. The Crystal World Ballard, J. Childhood's End Clarke, Arthur C. Babel Delany, Samuel R. Dhalgren Delany, Samuel R. Nova Dick, Philip K. It's funny, contradictory, and self-aware, and it's hard for people who take themselves seriously to get caught up in a book that, for the most part, doesn't. I could say this book deserves to be more than a cult classic, but at its heart, this book is a cult classic, and its cultural influence will continue to seep with or without grander acclaim. View all 4 comments. Jan 25, Ryan rated it it was amazing. I'm re-reading this now, and felt I should clarify my position on this book, as I often list it as one of my favorites. High Literature this is not. It is campy sci-fi, saturated with gratuitous sex scenes, psychedelia, conspiracy theories, counterculture etc. When I recommend this book, it's usually with the caveat that the authors are sort of bumbling about and finding their feet for the first 80 or so pages. When it finally does start moving along, the reader finds his- or her-self bombarded wi I'm re-reading this now, and felt I should clarify my position on this book, as I often list it as one of my favorites. When it finally does start moving along, the reader finds his- or her-self bombarded with multiple, conflicting realities and extremist, revolutionary politics from all points of the spectrum. The intended result is mind-expansion. This book invites the reader to become more skeptical, but also to start thinking about what he or she thinks about the world and why. The narrative is experimental; Wilson has an obvious admiration of Joyce that shows up not just here, but also in his lectures and more autobiographical books. As such, it jumps between characters, places, and times, sometimes mid-paragraph, sometimes entering stream-of-consciousness. This may make it difficult for readers who feel that whatever Wilson and Shea are getting at isn't worth the headache. You need to be on your toes, but it's probably best to just "roll with it" and not spend overlong trying to tie every piece together. In any case, re-readings can consistently reveal new interrelationships. Early on, one of the main protagonists comes across a painting bearing the message, "think for yourself, schmuck! View 2 comments. Dec 01, Danny rated it it was amazing. As these groups can be viewed as either terrorists or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view, so it is with this book. As is probably not ironic for a book considered to be the holy grail of conspiracy theory, it's definitely not difficult to perceive the Illuminatus Trilogy as an act of intellectual terrorism. This is not an easy book to read. Time, location, perspective, and identity can and do shift without warning in mid-paragraph, sometimes mid-sentence making an interesting model for the idea of the 'collective unconscious'. The best analogy I can think of for this book is that it's like reading someone else's acid trip, and that someone else is criminally schizophrenic and watching 15 televisions at the same time. It is definitely a product of it's generation. The copious drug use, and underlying philosophies are very typical of most of the underground cult classics of the '70s that I've read, but for the most part it's brilliantly insightful, and has many fantastic aphorisms that you'll probably want to repeat later. It's also beautifully self-satirical, which is probably a good thing because if this book took itself seriously it really might have been an act of intellectual terrorism. You will probably either love this book, loathe it utterly, or possibly even think it's totally ridiculous. If you're not up for a difficult read, you may not want to bother. But if you do find you like it, you might be happy to know that it's a hell of a lot easier to read the second time through. May 17, Tom Quinn rated it it was amazing. When I find myself in times of trouble The counterculture speaks to me: "The whole damn world's gone nutty, "Let it be. Jun 04, Elf M. Trilogy saved my life. It won't save yours. Since first reading it at age 13 the year it saved my life , I have dutifully re-read the entire trilogy really, it's not that long every five years since. But when I was 13, that was the jokes about Nixon, late 60s and early 70s rock bands, the coming of disco, the obscure neopagan nonsense that washed through every college campus in the late s, bizarre alternative histories and conspiracies theories, were hilarious and fas The Illuminatus! But when I was 13, that was the jokes about Nixon, late 60s and early 70s rock bands, the coming of disco, the obscure neopagan nonsense that washed through every college campus in the late s, bizarre alternative histories and conspiracies theories, were hilarious and fascinating. There's even a page from the Principia Discordia mentioned, and that too was life changing, because in tiny print in one corner it contained this quote: "When I was 8 or 9 years old I acquired my first split beaver magazine. You can imagine my disappointment when, upon examination with a microscope, I discovered all I could see was dots. Being 13 and finding someone like Robert Anton Wilson, who wrote so irreverantly about sex, morality, religion, politics-- all the things that do not make up polite dinner conversation-- does change a life, especially when that life had been constrained by a middle class conventionality wherein parents seethed with their own furtive excesses and failed to understand their SF-reading child. Trilogy really is a beast of its own time, and that time has passed. It is a historical oddity. The wacky conspiracy theories of Illuminatus! Our culture now has its own bugaboos-- we are a highly pornographic culture, with nearly-naked underage nymphs selling underwear on billboards and Disney promoting boy bands with lyrics about irresponsible lust and desire, yet at the same time we consider red-lettering for life any and every man who had sex in a public park at midnight or chatted up just the wrong person at the wrong moment. The Internet tightly wires our entire informational existence together which has had the effect of telling us what other people really think and feel-- and paradoxically led to the even stronger vehemence against those opposing worldviews because now we perceive just how many people hold to them. These habits of thought, these expectations, just do not live in Illuminatus! Jul 12, Gar rated it it was amazing. Honestly, the bury-the-needle rating on this is primarly from nostalgia and gratitude. The thing is, the book saved my soul. I say this because I read the Illuminatus! That's like getting injected with concentrated live-culture viruses af Honestly, the bury-the- needle rating on this is primarly from nostalgia and gratitude. That's like getting injected with concentrated live-culture viruses after your immune system has been taken out by heavy radiation blasts. But the Illuminatus! Who knows what abyss I would've fallen into otherwise? It also was instrumental in priming me to get right with "Bob" later in life. It couldn't fully open the Third Nostril, but it loosened things up in there for the eventual forceful blow. View all 5 comments. Mar 30, Naomi rated it did not like it Shelves: scifi-fantasy. The authors thought they were WAY more clever and intellectual than they really were. Mostly these books were pretentious and boring and a regurgitation of themes that had been explored numerous times in numerous other places. Not to mention the fact that the whole trilogy pretends to be building up to some huge world-altering event that never actually happens. It's like the authors finally realized after 3 books that they didn't really know what they were trying to say or where they wanted the The authors thought they were WAY more clever and intellectual than they really were. It's like the authors finally realized after 3 books that they didn't really know what they were trying to say or where they wanted the plot to go, so they just decided to end it. A huge, utter, complete waste of time. View all 3 comments. Jun 23, Greg rated it it was amazing Shelves: sf-fantasy-and-other-dorky-shit , fiction , conspiracies-ohmy. Maybe I'm destroying the integrity of my reading list and goals for the year by rating this along with the three individual novels. I have thus only read either three books instead of four, or one instead of four if I want to think of the books I've read as something closer to the books I've bought, since I don't own old mass market copies of the three books, and thus only 'read' from one book. I think in the spirit of this book it's most appropriate to add four books to my reading list Without having to use the crazy logic of this book to support this decision, the real reason I'm rating this alongside the three books that make it up is that the whole here is greater than the parts. Each individual book I only gave four stars to, but as a whole, it's definitely deserving of five stars. It's right up there with Gravity's Rainbow for me. I don't know if it's a good thing or not that it took me twenty years or so to finally getting around to reading this as a note: I haven't owned the book for 20 years, I actually bought it right before I started reading it, but it had been something I had felt I 'should' read on and off for the past two decades. If I'd read it twenty years ago I might be able to say that this book was a huge influence. I didn't and it wasn't. Instead, there is an awful lot in this book that politically, at least, and maybe ontologically felt like Oh My God! I have no idea what this says about me. Anyway, five stars, and now back to my regularly scheduled reading regiment, where I go and re-read a book that I didn't enjoy the first time reading but which other people love, and which I'm hoping to enjoy more the second time around. View all 10 comments. Jan 01, Alvin rated it liked it. At 15 I found this psychedelic tour de force mind-blowing. Rereading it just now, 42 years later, I found it amusing, annoying, original, dated, clever, sophomoric, occasionally insightful, often boring, and very, very long. Structurally, the books are a mess, with the narrative POVs shifting frequently, sometimes paragraph by paragraph or even sentence my sentence. Adding to the confusion are numerous contradictory conspiracy theories and alternate histories. If one doesn't try too hard to keep At 15 I found this psychedelic tour de force mind-blowing. If one doesn't try too hard to keep track of the storyline s , one can enjoy the book as a font of fun thought experiments and interesting conjectures. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't have a fascination with the New Left, occult mysticism, or the paranoid style in American politics. Jan 01, Tim Pendry rated it really liked it Shelves: consciousness , esoteric , north-american , popular-culture , pr-propaganda , psychology , sexuality-erotica , religion-spiritual , alternative-histories , cultural-studies. This book meant a great deal to him. It is so deliberately occult in places as to become occasionally and ironically a bit pompous, much like its 'hero' H [ This review is dedicated to the anarchist and occasional friend Steve Ash who sadly died last year. It is so deliberately occult in places as to become occasionally and ironically a bit pompous, much like its 'hero' Hagbard Celine, the Captain Nemo of the story. The satire is somewhat jaded and the three novels taken together are too long and sometimes over-written. But, having said this, the book is mostly a great deal of fun and, once you get used to the technique of having apparently disconnected tales flow into each other without any clear sign that the narrator has changed, easy enough to get through. It is a classic text because it introduced into popular culture an entire alternative way of thinking about the world which, though sometimes as absurd as the 'morning of the magicians', is genuinely liberatory and, ultimately, 'true' or 'as true' as anything else. We have to remember the time when it was written - the depressingly reactionary period in early s America that emerged in response to the counter-cultural liberatory aspects of the s. Yes, the s were an era of unorganised narcissism whose final result was Hillary Clinton but, in that specific context, Shea and Anton Wilson provide us with a cogent popular explanation of why anarchic narcissism may be the only appropriate response to authority. The themes in these book - Lovecraftian, erotic, science fiction, conspiracy, new age - have, for better or worse, embedded themselves in the minds of those who will not accept that state authority is anything other than oppressive. In this respect, the seeds laid by Shea and Anton Wilson in the s act as counterpoint to those laid by Saul Alinsky, as alternative democratic sub-socialist and anarchic sub-libertarian responses to Leviathan, the State - or rather to Man's determination to submit. The dominant model of political organisation in relation to the American State on the American Left is a sort of 'femininised' or beta male baring of the arse in order to be buggered in the hope that eventually the old beast will die and the buggered beast will inherit. The anarcho-libertarian model seems to abandon all notions of Right or Left which confuses the traditionalists of the Left and laud the trickster, freethinker, pirate and even criminal against the very notion of order. It is a view of human nature as good in the very end - or at least as less bad than when it is in under orders. The politics may be questionable but the psychological and philosophical insights are less so, even if presented in quasi-Zen parables and obfuscatory occultism. The Trilogy and the 'serious' Appendices, with no more 'truth' in them than any other part of the books offers us versions of a number of theories questioning the reality that we create out of our sense perceptions and, in particular, social reality. This questioning of social reality will last far longer than the political satire and the book's somewhat stock appropriation of cultural memes, such as Lovecraftian monsters and Nazis waiting to rise to make blood sacrifices to 'immanentize the eschaton'. The book is justified by its bringing these thoughts about social reality subliminally to thousands of young people in every generation although, sadly, for every one who gets it, ten or a hundred will not and cease to be as functional in their own interest as they might. Many observers have not noted that, as a book of constant paradox, the Trilogy, with its twists and turns has inherent fascistic aspects too - the elite eroticism, the leadership principle underpinning Hagbard, the cyclical views of history, the appropriation of traditionalism. There is also implicit in the vision a disturbing sense of history as elites manipulating masses but without any real outrage being expressed - the Discordians seem simply to wish to play in the game on equal terms, disrupting the forces of order to restore 'balance'. In this world view, there is still a hierarchical view of humanity. The masses could have their eyes open, and the Discordians devoutly wish that this would happen, yet a deep conservative pessimism in the game players leads them to accept that it will not. The clever trick played in the book is that the naive reader who thinks he has 'got it' is really being manipulated into the false belief that, because he has 'got it', he is now part of the same elite that gave 'it' to him. He is not. The authors warn but not directly. Look hard and there is a paragraph in the Appendices where an argument for human sacrifice of a most primitive type is made too plausible to be ironical, a nod perhaps to Evola, yet contrasted with horror at the mass immolations of war and that s preoccupation, the Holocaust. This is where the s Generation can be seen to be bifurcating into an authoritarian and ideological optimism on the one side and a tendency to inverted rage and pessimism. The slave now adopts guerrilla tactics to undermine what cannot be destroyed frontally. Magick and the occult in particular are the tools of the frustrated and the outsider and this book is heavily imbued with magical thinking. Contemporary anarchism, Goth culture, popular horror, fantasy and the occult are now very much combined as a model for libertarian resistance to Leviathan - and the fantastic aspects do not stop police raids even today on those who withdraw from the system and wear black. Culturally this is an important book, a tour de force in terms of its organisation of literary references and even plot. Its weaknesses are those of its time and we can only understand it by referring back to that time. Beyond the politics, the book must be marked out as a text that introduced radically new ways of thinking to a mass audience - even if its subtleties have bypassed and will bypass those who read the New York Times and the Guardian and think they represent reality. View all 9 comments. Sep 25, rachelm rated it really liked it Shelves: fiction. As I'm having trouble summarizing this book myself, I've decided to quote the meta-review of their book which the authors wrote into the novel: "'It's a dreadfully long monster of a book,' Wildeblood says pettishly, 'and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent--no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most As I'm having trouble summarizing this book myself, I've decided to quote the meta-review of their book which the authors wrote into the novel: "'It's a dreadfully long monster of a book,' Wildeblood says pettishly, 'and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors--whom I've never heard of--have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. If you either like science fiction or are skeptical of privilege and politics, you should read it. If you don't see the fnords, they can't eat you. Mar 26, Robyn rated it it was amazing Shelves: reviewed , religion-and-spirituality. Be careful if you're going to pick up this book. This is not the kind of story that hands everything to you, or wraps up every element of the plot in a neat little bow. This book demands a lot of you, it moves fast, and not always in the way you expect, and you just have to keep up. Yes, there are plenty of places where you are going to have NO IDEA just what is going on, you are going to have to go back and re read passages to understand them, and you do need to read all of the appendices if yo Be careful if you're going to pick up this book. Yes, there are plenty of places where you are going to have NO IDEA just what is going on, you are going to have to go back and re read passages to understand them, and you do need to read all of the appendices if you want to fully get it. That being said, this book has great rewards to offer. I can't even begin to try to explain the way that this book changed the way I think, and the way I see the world. I'm not the only person in this world for whom this book was an utter revelation, if you don't believe me, just google it. This book has pretty much everything that I could want from a book, conspiracies and plots, philosophy, romance, action. My boy friend reminds me that this book is also Hilarious, on so many levels, whether you have a taste for goofiness, dark humor, or dry irony, there is something to laugh at. And if course, when you're reading it, it's perfectly acceptable, even encouraged, to laugh at anything you aren't sure about. This is one of those books I think Everyone should read. So, get yourself a copy, and strap in for the ride. Jan 10, Ray rated it it was amazing Shelves: novels , spirit , ra-wilson , junkie-lit , audio , conspiracy , metafic. Hail Eris! Hail Discordia! Every so many years or so, the world becomes and unrecognizably strange place and I am drawn to Illuminatus! This current misinformational and confusingly conspiritorial age isn't quite what RAW may have predicted, but at least he tried to go there. Oh how he and Shea went there. On so many levels. The tale of Hagbard Celine and all the contradictory theories of just what the hell is really going on, and what a ride it is. Hmm I do wonder how it would play o Hail Eris! Hmm I do wonder how it would play out if written today

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