ILLUMINATI ( PART I )

SOURCE OF :
Illuminatus! Trilogy
Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
Copyright 1975
Ebook ver. 1.1
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
The Eye In The Pyramid
Book One: Verwirrung
The First Trip, or Kether
The Second Trip, or Chokmah
The Third Trip, or Binah
Book Two: Zweitracht
The Fourth Trip, or Chessed
The Fifth Trip, or Geburah
The Golden Apple
Book Three: Unordnung
The Sixth Trip, or Tipareth
The Seventh Trip, or Netzach
Book Four: Beamtenherrschaft
The Eighth Trip, or Hod
Leviathan
Book Four: Beamtenherrschaft Continued
The Ninth Trip, or Yesod
Book Five: Grummet
The Tenth Trip, or Malkuth
The Appendices
Appendix Aleph: George Washington's Hemp Crop
Appendix Beth: The Illuminati Cyphers, Codes, and Calendars
Appendix Gimmel: The Illuminati Theory of History
Appendix Daleth: Hassan i Sabbah and Alamount Black
Appendix Tzaddi: 23 Skidoo
Appendix Vau: Flaxscrip and Hempscrip
Appendix Zain: Property and Priviledge
Appendix Cheth: Hagbard's Abdication
Appendix Lamed: The Tactics of Magick
Appendix Yod: Operation Mindfuck
Appendix Kaph: The Rosy Double-Cross
Appendix Teth: Hagbard's Booklet
Appendix Mem: Certain Questions That May Still Trouble Some
Appendix Nun: Additional Information About Some of the Characters


The Eye In The Pyramid
BOOK ONE: VERWIRRUNG
The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies.
-Ishmael Reed, Mumbo-Jumbo
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 1 von 470
THE FIRST TRIP, OR KETHER
From Dealey Plaza To Watergate ...
The Purple Sage opened his mouth and moved his tongue and so spake to them and he
said:
The Earth quakes and the Heavens rattle; the beasts of nature flock together and the
nations of men flock apart; volcanoes usher up heat while elsewhere water becomes ice
and melts; and then on other days it just rains. Indeed do many things come to pass.
-Lord Omar Khayaam Ravenhurst, K.S.C., "The Book of Predications." The Honest
Book of Truth
It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton. On April 1, the world's great powers
came closer to nuclear war than ever before, all because of an obscure island named Fernando Poo.
By the time international affairs returned to their normal cold-war level, some wits were calling it the
most tasteless April Fool's joke in history. I happen to know all the details about what happened, but
I have no idea how to recount them in a manner that will make sense to most readers. For instance, I
am not even sure who' I am, and my embarrassment on that matter makes me wonder if you will
believe anything I reveal. Worse yet, I am at the moment very conscious of a squirrel-in Central
Park, just off Sixty-eighth Street, in New York City-that is leaping from one tree to another, and I
think that happens on the night of April 23 (or is it the morning of April 24?), but fitting the squirrel
together with Fernando Poo is, for the present, beyond my powers. I beg your tolerance. There is
nothing I can do to make things any easier for any of us, and you will have to accept being addressed
by a disembodied voice just as I accept the compulsion to speak out even though I am painfully
aware that I am talking to an invisible, perhaps nonexistent, audience. Wise men have regarded the
earth as a tragedy, a farce, even an illusionist's trick; but all, if they are truly wise and not merely
intellectual rapists, recognize that it is certainly some kind of stage in which we all play roles, most
of us being very poorly coached and totally unrehearsed before the curtain rises. Is it too much if I
ask, tentatively, that we agree to look upon it as a circus, a touring carnival wandering about the sun
for a record season of four billion years and producing new monsters and miracles, hoaxes and
bloody mishaps, wonders and blunders, but never quite entertaining the customers well enough to
prevent them from leaving, one by one, and returning to their homes for a long and bored winter's
sleep under the dust? Then, say, for a while at least, that I have found an identity as ringmaster; but
that crown sits uneasily on my head (if I have a head) and I must warn you that the troupe is small
for a universe this size and many of us have to double or triple our stints, so you can expect me back
in many other guises. Indeed do many things come to pass.
For instance, right now, I am not at all whimsical or humorous. I am angry. I am in Nairobi, Kenya,
and my name is, if you will pardon me, Nkrumah Fubar. My skin is black (does that disturb you? it
doesn't me), and I am, like most of you, midway between tribalism and technology; to be more blunt,
as a Kikuyu shaman moderately adjusted to city life, I still believe in witchcraft-I haven't, yet, the
folly to deny the evidence of my own senses. It is April 3 and Fernando Poo has ruined my sleep for
several nights running, so I hope you will forgive me when I admit that my business at the moment is
far from edifying and is nothing less than constructing dolls of the rulers of America, Russia, and
China. You guessed it: I am going to stick pins in their heads every day for a month; if they won't let
me sleep, I won't let them sleep. That is Justice, in a sense.
In fact, the President of the United States had several severe migraines during the following weeks;
but the atheistic rulers of Moscow and Peking were less susceptible to magic. They never reported a
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 2 von 470
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. This is the outdoor
extension of the Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec Park, Mexico, D.F., and the other tourists
are rather upset about the poor lady's collapse. 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 Simcoe 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 2:30 A.M. the morning of April 24. Numbly, dumbly, mopingly, gropingly, out of
the dark, I find and identify a body, a self, a task. "Goodman," I say into the receiver, propped up on
one arm, still coming a long way back.
"Bombing and homicide," he electrically eunuchoid voice in the transmitter tells me. I sleep naked
(sorry about that), and I'm putting on my drawers and trousers as I copy the address. East Sixtyeighth
Street, near the Council on Foreign Relations. "Moving," I say, hanging up.
"What? Is?" Rebecca mumbles from the bed. 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.
"What?" Rebecca repeats, still more asleep than awake.
"Damned fool radicals again," I say, pulling on my shirt, knowing any answer is as good as another
in her half-conscious state.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 3 von 470
"Um," she says, satisfied, and turns over into deep sleep again.
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 . . . socks, shoes, tie, fedora . . . and you never stop mourning, as much as I loved
Rebecca I never stopped mourning Sandra. 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 left Russia to escape the pogrom of 1905, but I guess he saw a lot before he got out. 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. "Took out the
seventeenth floor and part of the eighteenth," he said. "Also a pet shop here on the ground level.
Some freak of dynamics. Nothing else is damaged down here, but every fish tank went. That's the
smell."
Barney Muldoon, an old friend with the look and mannerisms of a Hollywood cop, appeared out of
the shadows. A tough man, and nowhere as dumb as he liked to pretend, which was why he was head
of the Bomb Squad.
"Your baby, Barney?" I asked casually.
"Looks that way. 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."
(Wait: George Dorn is screaming....)
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 inscrutable 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."
The fedora ducked as Saul took out his pipe and started to fill it. All he said was, "Oh?"
"Right now," I went on, "we're just notifying Missing Persons, but if what I'm afraid of is right, it'll
end up on your desk after all."
He struck a match and started puffing. "Somebody missing at this hour . . . might be found among
the living ... in the morning," he said between drags. The match went out, and shadows moved where
nobody stirred.
"And he might not, in this case," Muldoon said. "He's been gone three days now."
"An Irishman your size can't be any more subtle than an elephant," Saul said wearily. "Stop
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 4 von 470
tantalizing me. What have you got?"
"The office that was hit," Muldoon explained, obviously happy to share the misery, "was a magazine
called Confrontation. It's kind of left-of-center, so this was probably a right-wing job and not a leftwing
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?"
Saul grunted. "Might and might not," he said. "I'm going home. I'll check with Missing Persons in
the morning, to see what they've got."
The patrolman spoke up. "You know what bothers me most about this? The Egyptian mouthbreeders."
"The what?" Saul asked.
"That pet shop," the patrolman explained, pointing to the other end of the lobby. "I looked over the
damage, and they had one of the best collections of rare tropical fish in New York City. 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 mouthbreeder
is pretty hard to get these days, and they're all dead in there."
"Mouth-breeder?" Muldoon asked incredulously.
"Yes, you see they keep their young in their mouths for a couple days after birth and they never,
never swallow them. That's one of the great things about collecting fish: you get to appreciate the
wonders of nature."
Muldoon and Saul looked at each other. "It's inspiring," Muldoon said finally, "to have so many
college graduates on the Force these days."
The elevator door opened, and Dan Pricefixer, a redheaded young detective on Muldoon's staff,
emerged, carrying a metal box.
"I think this is important, Barney," he began immediately, with just a nod to Saul. "Damned
important. I found it in the rubble, and it had been blown partly open, so I looked inside."
"And?" Muldoon prompted.
"It's the freakiest bunch of interoffice memos I ever set eyes on. Weird as tits on a bishop."
This is going to be a long night, Saul thought suddenly, with a sinking feeling. A long night, and a
heavy case.
"Want to peek?" Muldoon asked him maliciously.
"You better find a place to sit down," Pricefixer volunteered. "It'll take you awhile to go through
them."
"Let's use the cafeteria," Saul suggested.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 5 von 470
"You just have no idea," the patrolman repeated. "The value of an Egyptian mouth-breeder."
"It's rough for all nationalities, man or fish," Muldoon said in one of his rare attempts to emulate
Saul's mode of speech. 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. He had a five-year-old retarded son whom he loved helplessly; you see a
thousand faces like his on the street every day and never guess how well they are carrying their
tragedies . . . and George Dorn, who once wanted to shoot him, is still screaming. . . . But Barney and
Saul are in the cafeteria. Look around. The transition from the Gothic lobby to this room of
laminated functional and glittering plastic colors is, one might say, trippy. Never mind the smell;
we're closer to the pet shop here.
Saul removed his hat and ran a hand through his gray hair pensively, as Muldoon read the first two
memos in one quick scan. When they were passed over, he put on his glasses and read more slowly,
in his own methodical and thoughtful way. Hold onto your hats. This is what they said:
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #1
7/23
J.M.:
The first reference I've found is in Violence by Jacques Ellul (Seabury Press, New York,
1969). He says (pages 18-19) that the Illuminated Ones were founded by Joachim of
Floris in the llth century and originally taught a primitive Christian doctrine of poverty
and equality, but later under the leadership of Fra Dolcino in the 15th century they
became violent, plundered the rich and announced the imminent reign of the Spirit. "In
1507," he concludes, "they were vanquished by the 'forces of order'-that is, an army
commanded by the Bishop of Vercueil." He makes no mention of any Illuminati
movement in earlier centuries or in more recent times. I'll have more later today.
Pat
P.S. I found a little more about Joachim of Floris in the back files of the National
Review, William Buckley and his cronies think Joachim is responsible for modern
liberalism, socialism and communism; they've condemned him in fine theological
language. He committed the heresy, they say, of "immanentizing the Christian
Eschaton." Do you want me to look that up in a technical treatise on Thomism? I think it
means bringing the end of the world closer, sort of.
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #2
7/23
J.M.:
My second source was more helpful: Akron Daraul, A History of Secret Societies
(Citadel Press, New York, 1961).
Daraul traces the Illuminati back to the 11th century also, but not to Joachim of Floris.
He sees the origin in the Ishmaelian sect of Islam, also known as the Order of Assassins.
They were vanquished in the 13th century, but later made a comeback with a new, less-
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 6 von 470
violent philosophy
and eventually became the Ishmaelian sect of today, led by the Aga Khan. However, in
the 16th century, in Afghanistan, the Illuminated Ones (Roshinaya) picked up the
original tactics of the Order of Assassins. They were wiped out by an alliance of the
Moguls and Persians (pages 220-223). But, "The beginning of the seventeenth century
saw the foundation of the Illuminated Ones of Spain-the Allumbrados, condemned by an
edict of the Grand Inquisition in 1623. In 1654, the 'illuminated' Guerinets came into
public notice in France." And, finally-the part you're most interested in- the Bavarian IIluminati
was founded on May Day, 1776, in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, by Adam Weishaupt, a
former Jesuit. "Documents still extant show several points of resemblance between the
German and Central Asian Illuminists: points that are hard to account for on grounds of
pure coincidence" (page 255). Weishaupt's Illuminati were suppressed by the Bavarian
government in 1785; Daraul also mentions the Illuminati of Paris in the 1880s, but
suggests it was simply a passing fad. He does not accept the notion that the Illuminati
still exist today.
This is beginning to look big. Why are we keeping the details from George?
Pat
Saul and Muldoon exchanged glances. "Let's see the next one," Saul said. He and Muldoon read
together:
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #3
7/24
J.M.:
The Encyclopedia Britannica has little to say on the subject (1966 edition, Volume 11,
"Halicar to Impala," page 1094):
Illuminati, a short-lived movement of republican free thought founded on May Day
1776 by Adam Weishaupt, professor of canon law at Ingolstadt and a former Jesuit. . . .
From 1778 onward they began to make contact with various Masonic lodges where,
under the impulse of A. Knigge (q.v.) one of their chief converts, they often managed to
gain a commanding position. . . .
The scheme itself had its attractions for literary men like Goethe and Herder, and even
for the reigning dukes of Gotha and Weimar....
The movement suffered from internal dissention and was ultimately banned by an edict
of the Bavarian government in 1785.
Pat
Saul paused. "I'll make you a bet, Barney," he said quietly. "The Joseph Malik who vanished is the
J.M. these memos were written for."
"Sure," Muldoon replied scornfully. "These Illuminati characters are still around, and they got him.
Honest to God, Saul," he added, "I appreciate the way your mind usually pole-vaults ahead of the
facts. But you can ride a hunch just so far when you're starting from nothing."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 7 von 470
"We're not starting from nothing," Saul said softly. "Here's what we've got to start with. One"-heheld
up a finger-"a building is bombed. Two"-another finger- "an important executive disappeared
three days before the bombing. Already, there's an inference, or two inferences: something got him,
or else he knew something was coming for him and he ducked out. Now, look at the memos. Point
three" -he held up another finger-"a standard reference work, the Encyclopedia Britannica, seems to
be wrong about when the Illuminati came into existence. They say eighteenth-century Germany, but
the other memos trace it back to-let's see-Spain in the seventeenth century, France in the seventeenth
century, then in the eleventh century back to Italy and halfway across the world to Afghanistan. So
we've got a second inference: if the Britannica is wrong about when the thing started, they may be
wrong about when it ended. Now, put these three points and two inferences together-"
"And the Illuminati got the editor and blew up his office. Nutz. I still say you're going too fast."
"Maybe I'm not going fast enough," Saul said. "An organization that has existed for a couple of
centuries minimum and kept its secrets pretty well hidden most of that time might be pretty strong by
now." He trailed off into silence, and closed his eyes to concentrate. After a moment, he looked at
younger man with a searching glance.
Muldoon had been thinking too. "I've seen men land on the moon," he said. "I've seen students break
into administration offices and shit in the dean's waste basket. I've even seen nuns in mini-skirts. But
this international conspiracy existing in secret for eight hundred years, it's like opening a door in
your own house and finding James Bond and the President of the United States personally shooting it
out with Fu Manchu and the five original Marx Brothers."
"You're trying to convince yourself, not me. Barney, it sticks out so far that you could break it into
three pieces and each one would be long enough to goose somebody up in the Bronx. There is a
secret society that keeps screwing up international politics. Every intelligent person has suspected
that at one time or another. Nobody wants war any more, but wars keep happening-why? Face it,
Barney-this is the heavy case we've always had nightmares about. It's cast iron. If it were a corpse,
all six pallbearers would get double hernias at the funeral. Well?" Saul prompted.
"Well, we're either going to have to do something or get off the pot, as my sainted mother used to
say."
It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton. On April 1 the world's great powers
came closer to nuclear war than ever before, all because of an obscure island named Fernando Poo.
But, while all other eyes turned to the UN building in apprehension and desperate hope, there lived
in Las Vegas a unique person known as Carmel. His house was on Date Street and had a magnificent
view of the desert, which he appreciated. He liked to spend long hours looking at the wild cactus
wasteland although he did not know why. If you told him that he was symbolically turning his back
upon mankind, he would not have understood you, nor would he have been insulted; the remark
would be merely irrelevant to him. If you added that he himself was a desert creature, like the gila
monster and the rattlesnake, he would have grown bored and classified you as a fool. To Carmel,
most of the world were fools who asked meaningless questions and worried about pointless issues;
only a few, like himself, had discovered what was really important-money- and pursued it without
distractions, scruples, or irrelevancies. His favorite moments were those, like this night of April 1,
when he sat and tallied his take for the month and looked out his picture window occasionally at the
flat sandy landscape, dimly lit by the lights of the city behind him. In this physical and emotional
desert he experienced happiness, or something as close to happiness as he could ever find. His girls
had earned $46,000 during March, of which he took $23,000; after paying 10 percent to the
Brotherhood for permission to operate without molestation by Banana-Nose Maldonado's soldiers,
this left a tidy profit of $20,700, all of it tax free. Little Carmel, who stood five feet two and had the
face of a mournful weasel, beamed as he completed his calculations; his emotion was as
inexpressible, in normal terms, as that of a necrophile who had just broken into the town morgue. He
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 8 von 470
had tried every possible sexual combination with his girls; none gave him the frisson of looking at a
figure like that at the end of a month.
He did not know that he would have another $5 million, and incidentally become the most important
human being on earth, before May 1. If you tried to explain it to him, he would have brushed
everything else aside and asked merely, "The five million-how many throats do I hafta cut to get my
hands in it?"
But wait: Get out the Atlas and look up Africa. Run your eyes down the map of the western coast of
that continent until you come to Equatorial Guinea. Stop at the bend where part of the Atlantic Ocean
curves inward and becomes the Bight of Biafra. You will note a chain of small islands; you will
further observe that one of these is Fernando Poo. There, in the capital city of Santa Isobel, during
the early 1970s, Captain Ernesto Tequilla y Mota carefully read and reread Edward Luttwak's Coup
d'Etat: A Practical Handbook, and placidly went about following Luttwak's formula for a perfect
coup d'etat in Santa Isobel. He set up a timetable, made his first converts among other officers,
formed a clique, and began the slow process of arranging things so that officers likely to be loyal to
Equatorial Guinea would be on assignment at least forty-eight hours away from the capital city when
the coup occurred. He drafted the first proclamation to be issued by his new government; it took the
best slogans of the most powerful left-wing and right -wing groups on the island and embedded them
firmly in a tapioca-like context of bland liberal-conservatism. It fit Luttwak's prescription
excellently, giving everybody on the island some small hope that his own interests and beliefs would
be advanced by the new regime. And, after three years of planning, he struck: the key officials of the
old regime were quickly, bloodlessly, placed under house arrest; troops under the command of
officers in the cabal occupied the power stations and newspaper offices; the inoffensively fascistconservative-
liberal-communist proclamation of the new People's Republic of Fernando Poo went
forth to the world over the radio station in Santa Isobel. Ernesto Tequilla y Mota had achieved his
ambition-promotion from captain to generalissimo in one step. Now, at last, he began wondering
about how one went about governing a country. He would probably have to read a new book, and he
hoped there was one as good as Luttwak's treatise on seizing a country. That was on March 14.
On March 15, the very name of Fernando Poo was unknown to every member of the House of
Representatives, every senator, every officer of the Cabinet, and all but one of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. In fact, the President's first reaction, when the CIA report landed on his desk that afternoon,
was to ask his secretary, "Where the hell is Fernando Poo?"
Saul took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief, conscious of his age and suddenly
more tired than ever. "I outrank you, Barney," he began.
Muldoon grinned. "I know what's coming."
Methodically, Saul went on, "Who, on your staff, do you think is a double agent for the CIA?
"Robinson I'm sure of, and Lehrman I suspect."
"Both of them go. We take no chances."
"I'll have them transferred to the Vice Squad in the morning. How about your own staff?"
"Three of them, I think, and they go, too."
"Vice Squad'll love the increase in manpower."
Saul relit his pipe. "One more thing. We might be hearing from the FBI."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 9 von 470
"We might indeed."
'They get nothing."
"You're really taking me way out on this one, Saul."
"Sometimes you have to follow your hunches. This is going to be a heavy case, agreed?"
"A heavy case," Muldoon nodded.
"Then we do it my way."
"Let's look at the fourth memo," Muldoon said tonelessly. They read:
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #4
7/24
J.M.:
Here's a letter that appeared in Playboy a few years ago ('The Playboy Advisor,"
Playboy, April, 1969, pages 62-64):
I recently heard an old man of right-wing views-a friend of my grandparents-assert that
the current wave of assassinations in America is the work of a secret society called the
Illuminati. He said that the Illuminati have existed throughout history, own the
international banking cartels, have all been 32nd-degree Masons and were known to lan
Fleming, who portrayed them as Spectre in his James Bond books-for which the
Illuminati did away with Mr. Fleming. At first all this seemed like a paranoid delusion to
me. Then I read in The New Yorker that Allan Chapman, one of Jim Garrison's
investigators in the New Orleans probe of the John Kennedy assassination, believes that
the Illuminati really exist....
Playboy, of course, puts down the whole idea as ridiculous and gives the standard
Encyclopedia Britannica story that the Illuminati went out of business in 1785.
Pat
Pricefixer stuck his head in the cafeteria door. "Minute?" he asked.
"What is it?" Muldoon replied.
"Peter Jackson is out here. He's the associate editor I spoke to on the phone. He just told me
something about his last meeting with Joseph Malik, the editor, before Malik disappeared."
"Bring him in," Muldoon said.
Peter Jackson was a black man-truly black, not brown or tan. He was wearing a vest in spite of the
spring weather. He was also very obviously wary of policemen. Saul noted this at once, and began
thinking about how to overcome it-and at the same time he observed an increased blandness in
Muldoon's features, indicating that he, too, had noted it and was prepared to take umbrage.
"Have a seat," Saul said cordially, "and tell us what you just told the other officer." With the nervous
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 10 von 470
ones it
was sound policy to drop the policeman role at first, and try to sound like somebody else-somebody
who, quite naturally, asks a lot of questions. Saul began slipping into the personality of his own
family physician, which he usually used at such times. He made himself feel a stethoscope hanging
about his neck.
"Well," Jackson began in a Harvard accent, "this is probably not important. It may be just a
coincidence."
"Most of what we hear is just unimportant coincidence," Saul said gently. "But it's our job to listen."
"Everybody but the lunatic fringe has given up on this by now," Jackson said. "It really surprised me
when Joe told me what he was getting the magazine into." He paused and studied the two impassive
faces of the detectives; finding little there, he went on reluctantly. "It was last Friday. Joe told me he
had a lead that interested him, and he was putting a staff writer on it. He wanted to reopen the
investigation of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers."
Saul carefully didn't look at Muldoon, and just as carefully moved his hat to cover the memos on the
table. "Excuse me a moment," he said politely and left the cafeteria.
He found a phone booth in the lobby and dialed his home. Rebecca answered after the third ring; she
obviously had not gotten back to sleep after he left. "Saul?" she asked, guessing who would be
calling at this hour. "It's going to be a long night," Saul said. "Oh, hell."
"I know, baby. But this case is a son-of-a-bitch!" Rebecca sighed. "I'm glad we had a little ball
earlier this evening. Otherwise, I'd be furious."
Saul thought, suddenly, of how this conversation would sound to an outsider. A sixty-year-old man
and a twenty-five-year-old wife. And if they knew she was a whore and a heroin addict when I first
met her . ..
"Do you know what I'm going to do?" Rebecca lowered her voice. "I'm going to take off my
nightgown, and throw the covers to the foot of the bed, and lie here naked, thinking about you and
waiting."
Saul grinned. "A man my age shouldn't be able to respond to that, after doing what I did earlier."
"But you did respond, didn't you?" Her voice was confident and sensual.
"I sure did. I won't be able to leave the phone booth for a couple of minutes."
She chuckled softly and said, "I'll be waiting. . . ."
"I love you," he said, surprised (as always) at the simple truth of it in a man his age. I won't be able
to leave the phone booth at all if this keeps up, he thought. "Listen," he added hurriedly, "let's change
the subject before I start resorting to the vices of a high school boy. What do you know about the
Illuminati?" Rebecca had been an anthropology major, with a minor in psychology, before the drug
scene had captured her and she fell into the abyss from which he had rescued her; her erudition often
astonished him.
"It's a hoax," she said.
"A what?"
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 11 von 470
"A hoax. A bunch of students at Berkeley started it back around sixty-six or sixty-seven."
"No, that's not what I'm asking. The original Illuminati in Italy and Spain and Germany in the
fifteenth to eighteenth centuries? You know?"
"Oh, that's the basis of the hoax. Some right-wing historians think the Illuminati still exist, you see,
so these students opened an Illuminati chapter on the campus at Berkeley and started sending out
press releases on all sorts of weird subjects, so people who want to believe in conspiracies would
have some evidence to point to. That's all there is to it. Sophomore humor."
I hope so, Saul thought. "How about the Ishmaelian sect of Islam?"
"It has twenty-three divisions, but the Aga Khan is the leader of all of them. It was founded aroundoh-
1090 A.D., I think, and was originally persecuted, but now it's part of the orthodox Moslem
religion. It has some pretty weird doctrines. The founder, Hassan i Sabbah, taught that nothing is true
and everything is permissible. He lived up to that idea-the word 'assassin' is a corruption of his
name."
"Anything else?"
"Yes, now that I think of it. Sabbah introduced marijuana to the Western world, from India. The
word 'hashish' also comes from his name."
"This is a heavy case," Saul said, "and now that I can walk out of the phone booth without shocking
the patrolman
in the hall, I'll get back to work on it. Don't say anything that'll get me aroused again. Please."
"I won't. I'll just lie here naked and . . ."
"Good-bye."
"Good-bye," she said, laughing.
Saul hung up frowning. Goodman's intuition, the other detectives call it. It's not intuition; it's a way
of thinking beyond and between the facts, a way of sensing wholes, of seeing that there must be a
relationship between fact number one and fact number two even if no such relationship is visible yet.
And I know. There is an Illuminati, whether or not those kids at Berkeley are kidding.
He came out of his concentration and realized where he was. For the first time, he noticed a sticker
on the door:
THIS PHONE BOOTH RESERVED FOR CLARK KENT
He grinned: an intellectual's kind of joke. Probably somebody on the magazine.
He walked back to the cafeteria, reflecting. "Nothing is true. Everything is permissible." With a
doctrine like that, people were capable of ... He shuddered. Images of Buchenwald and Belsen, of
Jews who might have been him. . . .
Peter Jackson looked up as he reentered the cafeteria. An intelligent, curious black face. Muldoon
was as impassive as the faces on Mount Rushmore. "Mad Dog, Texas, was the town where Malik
thought these . . . assassins . . . had their headquarters," Muldoon said. "That's where the staff writer
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 12 von 470
was sent"
"What was the staff writer's name?" Saul asked.
"George Dorn," Muldoon said. "He's a young kid who used to be in SDS. And he was once rather
close to the Weatherman faction."
Hagbard Celine's gigantic computer, FUCKUP-First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic-Ultramicro-
Programmer- was basically a rather sophisticated form of the standard self-programming algorithmic
logic machine of the time; the name was one of his whimsies. FUCKUP's real claim to uniqueness
was a programmed stochastic process whereby it could "throw" an I Ching hexagram, reading' a
random open circuit as a broken (yin) line and a random closed circuit as a full (yang) line until six
such "lines" were round. Consulting its memory banks, where the whole tradition of 1 Ching
interpretation was stored, and then cross-checking its current scannings of that day's political,
economic, meteorological, astrological, astronomical, and technological eccentricities, it would
provide a reading of the hexagram which, to Hagbard's mind, combined the best of the scientific and
occult methods for spotting oncoming trends. On March 13, the stochastic pattern spontaneously
generated Hexagram 23, "Breaking Apart." FUCKUP then interpreted:
This traditionally unlucky sign was cast by Atlantean scientist-priests shortly before the
destruction of their continent and is generally connected with death by water. Other
vibrations link it to earthquakes, tornadoes and similar disasters, and to sickness, decay,
and morbidity as well.
The first correlation is with the unbalance between technological acceleration and
political retrogression, which has proceeded earth-wide at ever widening danger levels
since 1914 and especially since 1964. The breaking apart is fundamentally the schizoid
and schismatic mental fugue of lawyer-politicians attempting to administrate a
worldwide technology whose mechanisms they lack the education to comprehend and
whose gestalt trend they frustrate by breaking apart into obsolete Renaissance nationstates.
World War III is probably imminent and, considering the advances in chemical
biological warfare in conjunction with the sickness vibrations of Hexagram 23, the
unleashing of plague or nerve gas or both is as probable as thermonuclear overkill.
General prognosis: many megadeaths.
There is some hope for avoidance of the emerging pattern with prompt action of correct
nature. Probability of such avoidance is 0.17 ± 0.05.
No blame.
"My ass, no blame," Hagbard raged; and rapidly reprogrammed FUCKUP to read off to him its
condensed psychobiographies of the key figures in world politics and the key scientists in
chemobiological warfare.
The first dream came to Dr. Charles Oceangoing on February 2-more than a month before
FUCKUP picked up the vibrations. He was, as usual with him, aware that he was dreaming, and the
vision of a gigantic pyramid which seemed to walk or lumber' about meant nothing and quickly
vanished. Now he seemed to be looking at an enlargement of the DNA double helix; it was so
detailed that he began searching it for the bonding irregularities at every 23rd Angstrom. To his
surprise, they were missing; instead, there were other irregularities at each 17th Angstrom. "What
the devil . . . ?" he asked-and the pyramid returned seeming to speak and saying, "Yes, the devil." He
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 13 von 470
jolted awake, with a new concept, Anthrax-Leprosy-Mu, coming into consciousness, and began
jotting in his bedside pad.
"What the hell is this Desert Door project?" the President had asked once, scrutinizing the budget.
"Germ warfare," an aide explained helpfully. "They started with something called Anthrax Delta and
now they've worked their way up to something called Anthrax Mu and . . . " His voice was drowned
out by the rumble of paper shredders in the next room. The President recognized the characteristic
sound of the "cesspool cleaners" hard at work. "Never mind," he said. "Those things make me
nervous." He scribbled a quick "OK" next to the item and went on to "Deprived Children," which
made him feel better. "Here," he said, "this is something we can cut"
He forgot everything about Desert Door, until the Fernando Poo crises. "Suppose, just suppose," he
asked the Joint Chiefs on March 29, I go on the tube and threaten all-out thermonuclear heck, and the
other side doesn't blink. Have we got something that'll scare them even more?"
The J.C.'s exchanged glances. One of them spoke tentatively. "Out near Las Vegas," he said, "we
have this Desert Door project that seems to be way ahead of the Comrades in b-b and b-c-"
"That's biological-bacteriological and biological -chemical," the President explained to the Vice-
President, who was frowning. "It has nothing to do with B-B guns." Turning his attention back to the
military men, he asked, "What have we got specifically that will curdle Ivan's blood?"
"Well, there's Anthrax-Leprosy-Mu. . . . It's worse than any form of anthrax. More deadly than
bubonic and anthrax and leprosy all in one lump. As a matter of fact," the General who was speaking
smiled grimly at the thought, "our evaluation suggests that "with death being so quick, the
psychological demoralization of the survivors-if there are any survivors-will be even worse than in
thermonuclear exchange with maximum 'dirty' fallout."
"By golly," the President said. "By golly. We won't use that out in the open. My speech'll just talk
Bomb, but we'll leak it to the boys in the Kremlin that we've got this anthrax gimmick in cold
storage, too. By gosh, you just wait and see them back down." He stood up, decisive, firm, the image
he always projected on television. "I'm going to see my speech writers right now. Meanwhile,
arrange that the brain responsible for this Anthrax-Pi gets a raise. What's his name?" he asked over
his shoulder going out the door.
"Mocenigo. Dr. Charles Mocenigo."
"A raise for Dr. Charles Mocenigo," the President called from the hallway.
"Mocenigo?" the Vice-President asked thoughtfully. "Is he a wop?"
"Don't say wop," the President shouted back. "How many times do I have to tell you? Don't say wop
or kike or any of those words anymore." He spoke with some asperity, since he lived daily with the
dread that someday the secret tapes he kept of all" Oval Room transactions would be released to the
public. He had long ago vowed that if that day ever came, the tapes would not be full of "(expletive
deleted)" or "(characterization deleted)." He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was,
in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five
years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle
intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the
most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that
ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site
of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor,
despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for
nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 14 von 470
minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the
result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took
tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes
bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip
on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of Russia and China.
In Central Park, the squirrel woke again as a car honked loudly in passing. Muttering angrily, he
leaped to another tree and immediately went back to sleep. At the all-night Bickford's restaurant on
Seventy-second Street, a young man named August Personage left a phone booth after making an
obscene call to a woman in Brooklyn; he left behind one of his THIS PHONE BOOTH RESERVED
FOR CLARK KENT stickers. In Chicago, one hour earlier on the clock but the same instant, the
phone booth closed, a rock group called Clark Kent and His Supermen began a revival of "Rock
Around the Clock": their leader, a tall black man with a master's degree in anthropology, had been
known as El Hajj Starkerlee Mohammed during a militant phase a few years earlier, and his birth
certificate said Robert Pearson on it. He was observing his audience and noted that bearded young
white cat, Simon, was with a black woman as usual-a fetish Pearson-Mohammed-Kent could
understand by reverse psychology, since he preferred white chicks himself. Simon, for once, was not
entranced by the music; instead, he was deep in conversation with the girl and drawing a diagram of
a pyramid on the table to explain what he meant. "Crown Point," Pearson heard him say over the
music. And listening to "Rock Around the Clock" ten years earlier, George Dorn had decided to let
his hair grow long, smoke dope and become a musician. He had succeeded in two of those ambitions.
The statue of Tlaloc in the Museum of Anthropology, Mexico, D.F., stared inscrutably upward,
toward the stars . . . and the same stars glittered above the 'Carribean where the porpoise named
Howard sported in the waves.
The motorcade passes the Texas School Book Depository and moves slowly toward the Triple
Underpass. At the sixth-floor window, Lee Harvey Oswald sights carefully through the Carcano-
Mannlicher: his mouth is dry, desert dry. But his heartbeat is normal; and no sweat stands out on his
forehead. This is the moment, he is thinking, the one moment transcending time and hazard, heredity
and environment, the final test and proof of free will and of my right to call myself a man. In this
moment, now, as I tighten the trigger, the Tyrant dies, and with him all the lies of a cruel,
mendacious epoch. It is a supreme exaltation, this moment and this knowledge: and yet his mouth is
dry, dust-dry, dry as death, as if his salivary glands alone rebelled against the murder which his
intellect pronounced necessary and just. Now: He recalls the military formula BASS: Breathe, Aim,
Slack, Squeeze. He breathes, he aims, he slacks, he starts to squeeze, as a dog barks suddenly-
And his mouth falls open in astonishment as three shots ring out, obviously from the direction of the
Grassy Knoll and Triple Underpass.
"Son-of-a-bitch," he said, softly as a prayer. And he began to grin, a rictus not of omnipotence such
as he had expected but of something different and unexpected and therefore better-omniscience. That
smirk appeared in all the photos during the next day and a half, before his own death, a sneering
smile that said so clearly that none dared to read it: I know something you don't know. That grimace
only faded Sunday morning when Jack Ruby pumped two bullets into Lee's frail fanatic body, and its
secret went with him to the grave. But another part of the secret had already left Dallas on Friday
afternoon's TWA Whisperjet to Los Angeles, traveling behind the business suit, gray hair, and only
moderately sardonic eyes of a little old man who was listed on the flight manifest as "Frank
Sullivan."
This is serious, Peter Jackson was thinking; Joe Malik wasn't on a paranoid trip at all. The
noncommittal expressions of Muldoon and Goodman did not deceive him at all-he had long ago
learned the black art of surviving in a white world, which is the art of reading not what is on a face
but what is behind the face. The cops were worried and excited, like any hunters on the track of
something both large and dangerous. Joe was right about the assassination plot, and his
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 15 von 470
disappearance and the bombing were part of it. And that meant George Dorn was in danger, too,
and Peter liked George even if he was a snotty kid in some ways and an annoying ass-kisser about
the race thing like most young white radicals. Mad Dog, Texas, Peter thought: that sure sounds like
a bad place to be in trouble.
(Almost fifty years before, a habitual bank robber named Harry Pierpont approached a young convict
in Michigan City Prison and asked him, "Do you think there might be a true religion?")
But why is George Dorn screaming while Saul Goodman is reading the memos? Hold on for another
jump, and this one is a shocker. Saul is no longer human; he's a pig. All cops are pigs. Everything
you've ever believed is probably a lie. The world is a dark, sinister, mysterious and totally
frightening place. Can you digest all that quickly? Then, walk into the mind of George Dorn for the
second time, five hours before the explosion at Confrontation (four hours before, on the clock) and
suck on the joint, suck hard and hold it down. ("One o'clock . . . two o'clock . . . three o'clock . . .
ROCK!"). You are sprawled on a crummy bed in a rundown hotel, and a neon light outside is
flashing pink and blue patterns into your room. Exhale slowly, feel the hit of the weed and see if the
wallpaper looks any brighter yet, any less Unintentional Low Camp. It's hot, Texas-dry hot, and you
push your long hair back from your forehead and haul out your diary, George Dorn, because reading
over what you wrote last sometimes helps you to learn what you're really getting into. As the neon
splotches the page with pink and blue, read this:
April 23
How do we know whether the universe is getting bigger or the objects in it are getting
smaller? You can't say that the universe is getting bigger in relation to anything outside
it, because there isn't any outside for it to relate to. There isn't any outside. But if the
universe doesn't have an out-side, then it goes on forever. Yeah, but, its inside doesn't go
on forever. How do you know it doesn't, shithead? You're just playing with words, man.
-No I'm not. The universe is the inside without an outside, the sound made by one
There was a knock at the door.
The Fear came over George. Whenever he was high, the least little detail wrong in his world would
bring the Fear, irresistible, uncontrollable. He held his breath, not to contain the smoke in his lungs,
but because terror had paralyzed the muscles in his chest. He dropped the little notebook in which he
wrote his thoughts daily and clutched at his penis, a habitual gesture in moments of panic. The hand
holding the roach drifted, automatically, over the hollowed-out copy of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't
Happen Here, which lay beside him on the bed, and he dropped the half-inch twist of paper and
marijuana on top of the plastic Baggie full of green grains. Instantly a brown smoldering dime-sized
hole opened up on the bag, and the pot near the coal started to smoke.
"Stupid," said George, as his thumb stabbed the smoking coal to crush it, and he drew back his lips in
a grim-ace of pain.
A short fat man walked into the room, Law Officer written in every mean line of his crafty little face.
George shrank back and started to close It Can't Happen Here; like lightning, three stiff, concretehard
fingers drove into his forearm. He screamed and the book jumped out of his hand, spilling pot
all over the bedspread.
"Don't touch that," said the fat man. "An officer will be in to gather it up for evidence. I went easy
with that karate punch. Otherwise you'd be nursing a compound fracture of the left arm in Mad Dog
County Jail tonight, and no right-thinking doctor likely to have a mind to come out and treat you."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 16 von 470
"You got a warrant?" George tried to sound defiant.
"Oh, you think you have cojones." The fat man's breath stank of bourbon and cheap cigars. "Rabbit
cojones. I have terrified you unto death, boy, and you know it and I know it, yet you find it in your
heart to speak of warrants. Next you'll want to see the American Civil Liberties Union." He pulled
aside the jacket of an iridescent gray summer suit that might have been new when Heartbreak Hotel
was the top of the hit parade. A silver five-pointed star decorated his pink shirt pocket and a .45
automatic stuck in his pants-top dented the fat of his belly. "That is all the law I need when dealing
with your type in Mad Dog. Walk careful with me, son, or you won't have nothing to grab onto next
time one of us pigs as you choose to call us in your little articles, busts in on you. Which is not likely
to happen in the next forty years, while you rot and grow old in our state prison." He seemed
immensely pleased with his own oratorical style, like one of Faulkner's characters. George thought:
It is forbidden to dream again; We maim our joys or hide them; Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
He said, "You can't hit me with forty years for possession. And grass is legal in most other states.
This law is archaic and absurd."
"Shit and onions, boy, you got too much of the killer weed there to call it mere possession. I call it
possession with intent to sell. And the laws of this state are stern, and they are just and they are our
laws. We know what that weed can do. We remember the Alamo and Santa Anna's troops losing all
fear because they were high on Rosa Maria, as they called it in those days. Get on your feet. And
don't ask to talk to a lawyer, neither."
"Can I ask who you are?"
"I am Sheriff Jim Cartwright, nemesis of all evil in Mad Dog and Mad Dog County."
"And I'm Tiny Tim," said George, immediately saying to himself, Shut the fuck up, you're too
goddamn high. And he went right on and said, "Maybe your side would have won if Davy Crockett
and Jim Bowie got stoned, too. And, by the way, Sheriff, how did you know you could catch me with
pot? Usually an underground journalist would make it a point to be clean when he comes into this
godforsaken part of the country. It wasn't telepathy that told you I had pot on me."
Sheriff Cartwright slapped his thigh. "Oh, but it was. It was telepathy. Now just what made you think
it wasn't telepathy brung me here?" He laughed, seized George's arm in a grip of iron, and pushed
him toward the hotel-room door. George felt a bottomless terror as if the pit of hell were opening
beneath his feet and Sheriff Jim Cartwright were about to pitchfork him into the bubbling sulfur. And
I must admit that was more or less the case; there are periods of history when the visions of madmen
and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to
the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.
("Keep on hanging out with those wild boys from Passaic and you'll end up in jail," George's mother
said. "You mark my words, George." And, another time, at Columbia, after a very late meeting, Mark
Rudd said soberly, "A lot of us are going to spend some time in the Man's jails before this shit-storm
is over"; and George, together with the others, nodded glumly but bravely. The marijuana he had
been smoking was raised in Cuernavaca by a farmer named Arturo Jesus Maria Ybarra y Mendez,
who had sold it in bulk to a young Yanqui named Jim Riley, the son of a Dayton, Ohio, police
officer, who in turn smuggled it through Mad Dog after paying a suitable bribe to Sheriff Jim
Cartwright. After that it was resold to a Times Square dealer called Rosetta the Stoned and a Miss
Walsh from Confrontation's research department bought ten ounces from her, later reselling five
ounces to George, who then carried it back to Mad Dog without any suspicion that he was virtually
completing a cycle. The original seed was part of that strain recommended by General George
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 17 von 470
Washington in the famous letter to Sir John Sinclair in which he writes, "I find that, for all purposes,
the Indian hemp is in every way superior to the New Zealand variety previously cultivated here." In
New York, Rebecca Goodman, deciding that Saul will not be home tonight, slips out of bed, dons a
robe and begins to browse through her library. Finally she selects a book on Babylonian mythology
and begins to read: "Before all of the gods, was Mummu, the spirit of Pure Chaos. . . ," In Chicago,
Simon and Mary Lou Servix sit naked on her bed, legs intertwined in the yabyum lotus position.
"No," Simon is saying, "You don't move, baby; you wait for u to move you." Clark Kent and His
Supermen swing into a reprise: "We're gonna rock around the clock tonight . . . We're gonna ROCK
ROCK ROCK till broad day light.")
George's cell mate in Mad Dog County Jail had a skull-like face with large, protruding front teeth.
He was about six and a half feet tall and lay curled up on his cell bunk like a coiled python.
"Have you asked for treatment?" George asked him.
"Treatment for what?"
"Well, if you think you're an assassin-"
"I don't think, baby brother. I've killed four white men and two niggers. One in California, the rest
down here. Got paid for every one of them."
"Is that what you're in for?" My God, they don't stick murderers in the same cell with potheads, do
they?
"I'm in for vagrancy," said the man scornfully. "Actually, I'm just here for safekeeping, till they give
me my orders. Then it's good-bye to whoever-President, civil rights leader, enemy of the people.
Someday I'll be famous. I'm gonna write a book about myself someday, Ace. Course, I'm no good at
writing. Look, maybe we can do a deal. I'll have Sheriff Jim bring you some writing paper if you'll
write about my life. They gonna keep you here forever, you know. I'll come and visit you between
assassinations, and you'll write the book, and Sheriff Jim'11 keep it safe till I retire. Then you have
the book published and you'll make a lot of money and be real comfortable in jail. Or maybe you can
even hire a lawyer to get you out."
"Where will you be?" said George. He was still scared, but he was feeling sleepy, too, and he was
deciding that this was all bullshit, which had a calming effect on his nerves. But he'd better not go to
sleep in the cell while this guy was awake. He didn't really believe this assassin talk, but it was safe
to assume that anybody you met in prison was homosexual.
As if reading his mind, his cell mate said, "How'd you like to let a famous assassin shove it up to
you? How would that be, huh, Ace?"
"Please," said George. "That's not my bag, you know? I really couldn't do it."
"Shit, piss, and corruption," said the assassin. He suddenly uncoiled and slid off the bunk. "I been
wasting my time with you. Now bend the hell over and drop your pants. You are getting it, and there
ain't no further way about it." He stepped toward George, fists clenched.
"Guard! Guard!" George yelled. He grabbed the cell door in both hands and began rattling it
frantically.
The man caught George a cuff across the face. Another blow to the jaw knocked George against the
wall.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 18 von 470
"Guard!" he screamed, his head spinning with pot and panic.
A man in a blue uniform came through the door at the end of the corridor. He seemed miles away
and vastly disinterested, like a god who had grown bored with his creations.
"Now, what the hell is all this yelling about in here?" he asked, his hand en the butt of his revolver,
his voice still miles away.
George opened his mouth, but his cell mate spoke first 'This little long-haired communist freak won't
drop his pants when I tell him. Ain't you supposed to make sure I'm happy in here?" The voice
shifted to a whine. "Make him do what I say."
"You've got to protect me," said George. "You've got to get me out of this cell."
The god-guard laughed. "Well, now, you might say this is a very enlightened prison we have here.
You come down from New York and you probably think we're pretty backward. But we ain't. We got
no police brutality. Now, if I interfered between you and Harry Coin here, I might have to use force
to keep him away from your young ass. I know you people believe all cops ought to be abolished.
Well, in this here situation I hereby abolish myself. Furthermore, I know you people believe in
sexual freedom, and I do, too. So Harry Coin gonna have his sexual freedom without any
interference or brutality from me." His voice was still distant and disinterested, almost dreamy.
"No," said George.
The guard drew his pistol. "Now, sonny. You take down your pants and bend over. You are gonna
get it up the ass from Harry Coin here, and no two ways about it And I am gonna watch and see that
you let him do it right. Otherwise, you get no forty years. You get killed, right now. I put a bullet in
you and I say you are resisting arrest. Now make up your mind what it's gonna be. I really will kill
you if you don't do like he tells you to. I really will. You are totally expendable and he ain't. He's a
very important man, and it's my job to keep him happy."
"And I'll fuck you either way, dead or alive," the demented Coin laughed, like an evil spirit. "So
there's no way you can escape it, Ace."
The door at the end of the corridor clanged, and Sheriff Jim Cartwright and two blue-uniformed
policemen strode down to the cell. "What's going on here?" said the Sheriff.
"I caught this queer punk George Dorn here trying to commit homosexual rape on Harry," said the
guard. "Had to draw my pistol to stop him."
George shook his head. "You guys are unbelievable. If you're acting out this little game for my
benefit, you can quit now, because you're certainly not fooling each other, and you're not fooling
me."
"Dorn," said the Sheriff, "you've been attempting unnatural acts in my jail, acts forbidden by the
Holy Bible and the laws of this state. I don't like that. I don't like it one little bit. Come on out here. I
wanna have a little talk with you. We goin' to the main interrogation room for some speakin'
together."
He unlocked the cell door and motioned George to precede him. He turned to the two policemen who
had accompanied him. "Stay behind and take care of that other little matter." The last words were
strangely emphasized.
George and the Sheriff walked through a series of corridors and locked doors until at last they came
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 19 von 470
to a room whose walls were made of embossed sheet tin painted bottle-green. The Sheriff told
George to sit on one chair, while he straddled the back of the chair facing him.
"You're a bad influence on my prisoners," he said. "I got a good mind to see that some kind of
accident happens to you. I don't want to see you corrupting prisoners in my jail-mine or anyone's-for
forty years."
"Sheriff," said George. "What do you want from me? You got me on a pot charge. What more do you
want? Why did you stick me in that cell with that guy? What's all this scare stuff and threats and
questioning for?"
"I wanna know some things," said the Sheriff. "I want to find out everything you can tell me about
certain matters. So, from this moment be prepared to tell me only the truth. If you do, maybe things
will go easier on you, after."
"Yes, Sheriff," said George. Cartwright squinted at him. He really does look like a pig, thought
George. Most do. Why do so many of them get so fat and have such little eyes?
"Well, then," said the Sheriff. "What was your purpose in coming down here from New York?"
"I'm simply on an assignment from Confrontation, the magazine-"
"I know it. It is a smutty magazine, and a communist magazine. I have read it"
"You're using loaded words. It's a left-wing libertarian magazine, to be exact"
"My pistol is loaded, too, boy. So talk straight All right Tell me what you came down here to write
about"
"Sure. You ought to be as interested in this as I am, if you're really interested in law and order. There
have been rumors circulating throughout the country for more than a decade now that all the major
political assassinations in America-Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers, Medgar Evers, King, Nixon,
maybe even George Lincoln Rockwell-are the work of a single, conspiratorial, violence-oriented
right-wing organization, and that this organization has its base right here in Mad Dog. I came down
to see what I could find out about this group."
"That's what I figured," said the Sheriff. "You poor, sad little turd. You come down here with your
long hair and you expect to get, as you put it, a line on a right-wing organization. Why, it's lucky for
you you didn't meet any of our real right-wingers, like God's Lightning for instance. The ones around
here would have tortured you to death by this tune, boy. You really are dumb. OK, I'm not gonna
waste any more of my time with you. Come on, I'll take you back to your cell. You might as well get
used to looking at the moon through bars."
They walked back the same way they had come. At the entrance to the corridor where George's cell
was, the Sheriff opened the door and yelled, "Come and get him, Charley."
George's guard, his face pale and his mouth set in a lipless line, took George by the arm. The corridor
door clanged shut behind the Sheriff. Charley took George to his cell and pushed him in wordlessly.
But at least he was three-dimensional now and less like a marijuana phantom.
Harry Coin wasn't there. The cell was empty. George became aware of a shadow in the corner of his
vision. Something in the cell next to him. He turned: His heart stopped. There was a man hanging
from a pipe on the ceiling. George went over and stared through the bars. The body was swaying
slightly. It was attached to the pipe by a leather belt which was buckled around the neck. The face,
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 20 von 470
with the staring eyes, was that of Harry Coin. George's glance went lower. Something was coming
out of
Harry Coin's midsection and was dangling down to the floor. It wasn't suicide. They had
disemboweled Harry Coin, and someone had thoughtfully moved a shit-can under him for his bloody
intestines to dangle into.
George screamed. There was no one around to answer him. The guard had vanished like Hermes.
(But in Cherry Knolls mental hospital in Sunderland, England, where it was already eleven the
following morning, a schizophrenic patient who hadn't spoken in ten years abruptly began exhorting
a ward attendant: "They're all coming back-Hitler, Goering, Streicher, the whole lot of them. And,
behind them, the powers and persons from the other spheres who control them. . . ." But Simon
Moon in Chicago still calmly and placidly retains the lotus position and instructs Mary Lou sitting in
his lap: "Just hold it, hold it with your vaginal wall like you'd hold it with your hand, gently, and feel
its warmth, but don't think about orgasm, don't think about the future, not even a minute ahead, think
about the now, the only now, the only now, the only now that we'll ever have, just my penis in your
vagina now and the simple pleasure of it, not a greater pleasure to work toward. . . ." "My back
hurts," Mary Lou said.)
WE'RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TO NIGHT
There are Swedish and Norwegian kids, Danes, Italian and French kids, Greeks, even Americans.
George and Hagbard move through the crowd trying to estimate its number-200,000? 300,000?
500,000? Peace symbols dangling about every neck, nudes with body paint, nudes without body
paint, long and dangling hair on boys and girls alike, and over all of it the hypnotic and unending
beat. "Woodstock Europa," Hagbard says dryly. "The last and final Walpurgisnacht and Adam
Weishaupt's Erotion finally realized."
WE'RE GONNA ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT
"It's a League of Nations," George says, "a young people's League of Nations." Hagbard isn't
listening. "Up there," he points, "to the Northwest is the Rhine, where die Lorelei was supposed to sit
and sing her deadly songs. There will be deadlier music on the Danube tonight."
WE'RE GONNA ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TONIGHT
(But that was still seven days in the future, and now
George lies unconscious in Mad Dog County Jail. And it began-that phase of the operation, as
Hagbard called it-over thirty years before when a Swiss chemist named Hoffman climbed on his
bicycle and pedaled down a country road into new dimensions.)
"And will they all come back?" George asked.
"All of them," Hagbard answered tightly. "When the beat reaches the proper intensity . . . unless we
can stop it."
("Now I'm getting it," Mary Lou cried. "It's not what I expected. It's different from sex, and better."
Simon smiled benignly. "It is sex, baby," he said. "What you've had before wasn't sex. Now we can
start moving . . . but slowly ... the Gentle Way ... the Way of Tao. . . ." They're all coming back; they
never died-the lunatic raved at the startled attendant-You wait, guvnor. You just wait. You'll see it.)
The amplifiers squealed suddenly. There was too much feedback, and the sound went off into a pitch
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 21 von 470
beyond endurance. George winced, and saw others hold their ears. ROCK, ROCK, ROCK,
AROUND THE CLOCK. The key missed the lock, turned and cut Muldoon's hand. "Nerves," he said
to Saul. "I always feel like a burglar when I do this."
Saul grunted. "Forget burglary," he said. "We might be hanged for treason before this is over. If we
don't become national heroes."
"A fanfuckingtastic case," Muldoon grinned. He tried another way.
They were in an old brownstone on Riverside Drive, trying to break into the apartment of Joseph
Malik. And they were not merely looking for evidence, both tacitly admitted-they were hiding from
the FBI.
The call had come from headquarters just as they were finishing the questioning of associate editor
Peter Jackson. Muldoon had gone out to his car to take it, while Saul finished getting a full physical
description of both Malik and George Dorn. Jackson had just left and Saul was picking up the fifth
memo, when Muldoon returned, looking as if his doctor had just told him his Wasserman was
positive.
"Two special agents from the FBI are coming over to help us," he said woodenly.
"Still ready to play a hunch?" Saul asked calmly, pushing all the memos back in the metal box.
Muldoon merely called Pricefixer back into the cafeteria and told him, "Two feds will be here in a
few minutes. Tell them we went back to headquarters. Answer any question they ask, but don't tell
them about this box."
Pricefixer looked at the two older officers carefully and then said to Muldoon, "You're the boss."
He's either awfully dumb and trusting, Saul had thought, or he's so damned smart he's going to be
dangerous someday.
"Now," he asked Muldoon nervously, "is that the last key?"
"No, I've got five more beauties here and one of them will-here it is!" The door opened smoothly.
Saul's hand drifted toward his revolver as he stepped into the apartment and felt for a light switch.
Nobody was revealed when the light came on, and Saul relaxed. "You look around for the dogs." he
said. "I want to sit down and go over the rest of these memos."
The room was used for work as well as living and was untidy enough to leave no room for doubt that
Malik had been a bachelor. Saul pushed the typewriter back on the writing desk, set down the memo
box and then noticed something odd. The whole wall, on this side of the room, was covered with
pictures of George Washington. Standing to examine them more closely, he saw that each had a
label-half of them saying "G.W." and the others, "A.W."
Odd-but the whole case had overtones that smelled as fishy as those dead Egyptian mouth-breeders.
Saul sat down and took a memo from the box.
Muldoon came back into the living room and said, "No dogs. Not a goddam dog anywhere in the
whole apartment."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 22 von 470
"That's interesting," Saul remarked thoughtfully. "You say the landlord had complaints from several
other tenants about the dogs?" ;
"He said everybody in the building was complaining. The rule is no pets and he enforced it. People
wanted to know why they had to get rid of their kittens when Malik could have a whole pack of dogs
up here. They said there must have been ten or twelve from the noise they made."
"He sure must love those animals, if he took them all with him when he went into hiding," Saul
mused. The pole vaulter in his unconscious was jumping again. "Let's look in the kitchen," he
suggested mildly.
Barney followed as Saul methodically ransacked the refrigerator and cupboards, finishing up with a
careful examination of the garbage.
"No dog food," Saul said finally.
"I noticed."
"And no dog dishes either. And no empty dog-food tins in the garbage."
"What wild notion are you following now?"
"I don't know," Saul said thoughtfully. "He doesn't mind the neighbors hearing the dogs-probably
he's the land of left-wing individualist who likes nothing better than quarreling with his landlord and
the other tenants about some issue like the no-pets rule. So he wasn't hiding anything until he ducked
out And then he not only took the dogs but hid all evidence that they'd ever been here. Even though
he must have known that the neighbors would all talk about them."
"Maybe he was feeding them human flesh," Muldoon suggested ghoulishly.
"Lord, I don't know. You look around for anything of interest. I'm going to read those Illuminati
memos." Saul returned to the living room and began:
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #5
7/26
J.M.:
Sometimes you find things in the damnedest places. The following is from a girl's
magazine ('The Conspiracy" by Sandra Glass, Teenset, March 1969, pages 34-40).
Simon proceeded to tell me about the Bavarian Illuminati. The nightmarish story begins
in 1090 A.D. in the Middle East when Hassan i Sabbah founded the Ismaelian Sect, or
Hashishism, so called because of their use of hashish, a deadly drug derived from the
hemp plant which is better known as the killer weed marijuana. . . . The cult terrorized
the Moslem world until Genghis Khan's Mongols brought law and order to the area.
Cornered in their mountain hideaway, the Hashishism dope fiends proved no match for
the clean-living Mongol warriors, their fortress was destroyed, and their dancing girls
shipped
to Mongolia for rehabilitation. The heads of the cult fled westward. . . .
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 23 von 470
"The Illuminati surfaced next in Bavaria in 1776," Simon told me. . . . "Adam
Weishaupt, a student of the occult, studied the teachings of Hassan i Sabbah and grew
hemp in his backyard. On February 2, 1776, Weishaupt achieved illumination.
Weishaupt officially founded the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria on May 1st,
1776. Their slogan was 'Ewige Blumenkraft.' . . . They attracted many illustrious
members such as Goethe and Beethoven. Beethoven tacked up an Ewige Blumenkraft
poster on the top of the piano on which he composed all nine of his symphonies."
The last paragraph of the article is, however, the most interesting of all:
Recently I saw a documentary film on the Democratic Convention of 1968, and I was
struck by the scene in which Senator Abraham Ribicoff made a critical remark
provoking the anger of the Mayor of Chicago. In the ensuing tumult it was impossible to
hear the Mayor's shouted retort, and there has been much speculation about what he
actually said. To me it seemed his lips were forming the words that by this time become
frighteningly familiar: "Ewige Blumenkraft!"
The further I dig, the wilder the whole picture looks. When are we going to tell George
about it?
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #6
7/26
J.M.:
The John Birch Society has looked into the subject and they have a theory of their own.
The first source I've found on this is a pamphlet "CFR: Conspiracy to Rule the World"
by Gary Alien, associate editor of the Birchers' magazine, American Opinion. Alien's
thesis is that Cecil Rhodes created a secret society to establish English domination of the
world in 1888. This society acts through Oxford University, the Rhodes Scholarships
and-hold your breath-the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit foundation for the
study of International Affairs headquartered right here on Sixty-eighth Street in New
York. Seven out of nine of our last Secretaries of State were recruited from the CFR,
Alien points out, and dozens of other leading politicians as well-including Richard
Nixon. It is also implied, but not directly stated, that William Buckley, Jr. (an old enemy
of the Birchers) is another tool of the CFR; and the Morgan and Rothschild banking
interests are supposed to be financing the whole thing.
How does this tie in with the Illuminati? Mr. Alien merely drops hints, linking Rhodes
to John Ruskin, and Ruskin to earlier internationalists, and finally stating that "the
originator on the profane level of this type of secret society" was Adam Weishaupt,
whom he calls "the monster who founded the Order of the Illuminati on May 1, 1776."
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #7
7/27
J.M.:
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 24 von 470
This is from a small left-wing newspaper in Chicago (The RogerSPARK Chicago, July
1969, Vol. 2, No. 9: "Daley Linked With Illuminati," no author's name given):
No historian knows what happened to Adam Weishaupt after he was exiled from
Bavaria in 1785, and entries in "Washington's" diary after that date frequently refer to
the hemp crop at Mount Vernon.
The possibility that Adam Weishaupt killed George Washington and took his place,
serving as our first President for two terms, is now confirmed. . . . The two main colors
of the American flag are, excluding a small patch of blue in one corner, red and white:
these are also the official colors of the Hashishism. The flag and the Illuminati pyramid
both have thirteen horizontal divisions: thirteen is, of course, the traditional code for
marijuana . . . and is still used in that sense by Hell's Angels among others.
Now, "Washington" formed the Federalist party.
The other major party in those days, The Democratic Republicans, was formed by
Thomas Jefferson [and] there are grounds for accepting the testimony of the Reverend
Jedediah Morse of Charleston, who accused Jefferson of being an Illuminati agent.
Thus, even at the dawn of our government, both parties were IIluminati fronts. ...
This story later repeats the Teenset report that Mayor Daley used the phrase "Ewige
Blumenkraft" during his incoherent diatribe against Abe Ribicoff.
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #8
7/27
J.M.: More on the Washington-Weishaupt theory:
In spite of the fact that his face appears on billions of stamps and dollar bills, and his
portrait hangs in every public building in the country, no one is quite sure what
Washington looks like. A "Project 20" script, "Meet George Washington" will be seen
tonight at 7:30 on Channel (fill in by local stations). The program offers contemporary
portraits of the first President, some of which do not even seem to be the same man.
This is a press release sent out by NEC on April 24, 1969. Some of the portraits can be
found in Encyclopedia Britannica and the resemblance to portraits of Weishaupt is
undeniable.
Incidentally, Barbara called my attention to this: the letter in Playboy asking about the
Illuminati was signed "R.S., Kansas City, Missouri." According to the Kansas City
newspapers, a Robert Stanton of that city was found dead on March 17, 1969 (about a
week after the April Playboy appeared on the newsstands) with his throat torn as if by
the talons of some enormous beast. No animal was reported missing from any of the
local zoos.
Pat
Saul looked up at the pictures of Washington on the wall. For the first time, he noticed the strange
half-smile on the most famous of them all, the one by Gilbert Stuart that appears on one-dollar bills.
"As if by the talons of some enormous beast," he quoted to himself, thinking again of Malik's
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 25 von 470
disappearing dogs.
"What the hell are you grinning about?" he asked sourly.
Congressman Koch, he remembered suddenly, in a speech years and years ago when marijuana was
illegal everywhere, said something about Washington's hemp crop. What was it? Yes: it was about
the entries in the General's diary-they showed that he separated the female hemp plants from the
males before fertilization. That was botanically unnecessary if he was growing the crop for rope, but
it was standard practice in cultivating hemp for marijuana, Koch pointed out.
And "illumination" was one of the words hippies were always using to describe the experience one
obtains from the highest grade of grass. Even the more common term, "turning on," had the same
meaning as "illumination," when you stopped to think about. Wasn't that what the crown of light
around Jesus' head in Catholic art was supposed to mean? And Goethe-if he was really part of thismight
have been referring to the experience in his last words, as he lay dying: "More light!"
I should have become a rabbi, like my father wanted, Saul thought bemusedly. Police work is getting
to be too much for me.
In a few minutes I'll be suspecting Thomas Edison.
ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT
Slowly, Mary Lou Servix swam back to consciousness, like a shipwreck victim reaching a raft.
"Good Lord," she breathed softly.
Simon kissed her neck. "Now you know," he whispered.
"Good Lord," she repeated. "How many times did I come?"
Simon smiled. "I'm not an anal-compulsive type-I wasn't counting. Ten or twelve, something like
that, I guess."
"Good Lord. And the hallucinations. Was that what you were doing to my nervous system, or was it
the grass?"
"Just tell me about what you saw."
"Well, you got a halo around you, sort of. A big blue halo. And then I saw that it was around me, too,
and that
it had all sorts of little blue dots dancing in sort of whorls inside it. And then there wasn't even that
anymore. Just light. Pure white light."
"Suppose I told you I have a friend who's a dolphin and he exists in that kind of limitless light all the
time."
"Oh, don't start jiving me. You've been so nice, until now."
"I'm not jiving you. His name is Howard. I might arrange for you to meet him."
"A fish?"
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 26 von 470
"No, baby. A dolphin is a mammal. Just like you and me."
"You are either the world's greatest brain or the world's craziest motherfucker, Mr. Simon Moon. I
mean it. But that light. . . My God, I will never forget that light."
"And what happened to your body?" Simon asked casually.
"You know, I didn't know where it was. Even in the middle of my orgasms I didn't know where my
body was. Everything was just. . . the light. . . ."
ROCK ROCK ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TONIGHT
And leaving Dallas that much-discussed November 22 afternoon in 1963, the man using the name
"Frank Sullivan" brushes past McCord and Barker at the airport, but no foreshadowing of Watergate
darkens his mind.. (Back at the Grassy Knoll, Howard Hunt's picture is being snapped and will later
turn up in the files of New Orleans D.A. Jim 'The Jolly Green Giant" Garrison: not that Garrison ever
came within light years of the real truth. . . .)
"Here, kitty-kitty-kitty,"Hagbard calls.
But now we are going back, again, to April 2 and Las Vegas; Sherri Brandi (nee Sharon O'Farrell)
arriving home finds Carmel in her living room at four in the morning. It doesn't surprise her; he often
made these unexpected visits. He seems to enjoy invading other people's territory like some kinda
creepy virus. "Darling," I cried, rushing to kiss him as he expected. I wish the creep would drop
dead, I thought as our mouths met.
"An all-night John?" he asked casually.
"Yeah. One of those scientists who works at that place out in the desert we're all supposed to pretend
we don't know about. A freak."
"He wanted something special?" Carmel asked quickly. "You charged him extra?" At times I thought
I could really see dollar signs in his eyes.
"No," I said, "he just wanted a lay. But afterward he wouldn't let me go. Just kept jawing." I yawned,
looking around at the nice furniture and the nice paintings; I had managed to get everything in shades
of pink and lavender, really beautiful, if that creep hadn't been sitting there on the couch looking like
a hungry dead rat. I always wanted pretty things and I think I could have been some kind of artist or
designer if all my luck wasn't always lousy. Christ, who ever told Carmel a blue turtleneck would go
with a brown suit? If it wasn't for women, in my honest-to-Pete opinion, men would all go around
looking like that. That's what I think. Insensitive. A bunch of cavemen, or Meander Thralls, or
whatever you call them. "This John had a lot on his mind," I said before old candy-bar could start
cross examining me about something else. "He's against fluorides in drinking water and the Catholic
church and faggots and he thinks the new birth-control pill is as bad as the old one and I should use a
diaphragm instead. Christ, he's got the inside dope on everything under the sun, he thinks, and I
hadda listen to it all. That kind of John."
Carmel nodded. "Scientists are schmucks," he said.
I pulled the dress over my head and hung it in the closet (it was the nice green one with the spangles
and the new style where my nipples stick out through little holes, which is a pain in the ass because
they're always rubbing against something and getting raw, but it really turns on the Johns, and, like I
always say, that's the name of the game, in this sonofabitching town with all the lousy luck, the only
way to heavy scratch is go out there, girl, and sell your snatch) and then I grabbed my robe quick
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 27 von 470
before old blow-job bobo decided it was time for his weekly Frenching. "He's got a nice house,
though," I said to distract the creep. "He doesn't have to live out there on the base, he's too important
for rules and regularities. Nice to look at, I mean. Redwood walls and burnt orange decor, you know?
Pretty. He hates it, though. Acts as if he thinks it's haunted by Count Frankenstein or somebody.
Keeps jumping up and walking around like he's looking for something. Something that'll bite his
head off in one gulp if he finds it." I decided to let the top of the robe hang open a little. Carmel was
either horny or he wanted something else, and something else with him generally means he thinks
you've been holding back some cash. Him and his damned belt. Of course, sometimes with that I go
queer all over for a flash and I guess that's like the come that men have, the orgasm, but it ain't worth
the pain, believe me. I wonder if it's true some women get it in intercourse? Really get it? I don't
think so. I've never known anybody in the business who gets it, from a man, only from Rosy Palm
and her five sisters, sometimes, and if none of us do, how could some straight nicey-nicey get it?
"Bugs," Carmel said, looking shrewd and clever, off on his usual shtick of proving he was more hip
to everything than anybody else on God's green earth. I didn't know what the hell he was talking
about.
"What do you mean, bugs?" I asked. It was better than talking about money.
"The John," he said with a know-it-all grin. "He's important, you said. So his house has bugs. He
probably keeps taking them out, and the FBI keeps coming back and putting in new ones. I bet he
was very quiet when he was making it with you, right?" I nodded, remembering. "See. He couldn't
stand the thought of those Feds eavesdropping on the other end of the wire. Just like Mal- like a guy
I know in the Syndicate. He's so afraid of bugs he won't hold a business talk anywhere but the
bathroom in his hotel suite with all four faucets going full blast and both of us whispering. Running
water screws up a bug more than playing loud music on the radio, for some scientific reason."
"Bugs," I said suddenly. "That's it." The other kind of bugs. I was remembering Charley raving about
fluoridation: "And we're all classified as mental cases, because a few right-wing nuts fifteen or
twenty years ago who said fluoridation was a communist plot to poison us. Now, anybody who
criticizes fluoridation is supposed to be just as bananas as God's Lightning. Good Lord, if anybody
wants to do us in without firing a shot, I could-" and he caught himself, hid something that almost
showed on his face, and ended like his brain was walking on one foot, "I could point to a dozen
things in any chemistry book more effective than fluoride." But he wasn't thinking of chemicals, he
was thinking of those little bugs, microbes is the word, and that's what he was working on. I could
feel that flash I always get when I read something in a John, like if he had more money than he let
on, or he'd caught his wife spreading for the milkman and was doing it to get even, or he was really a
faggola and was just proving to himself that he wasn't completely a faggola.
"My God," I said, "Carmel, I read about those microbe bugs in the Enquirer, If they have an accident
out there, this whole town goes, and the state with it, and God knows how many other states. Jesus,
no wonder he keeps washing his hands!"
"Germ warfare?" Carmel said, thinking fast. "God, I'll bet this town is crawling with Russian spies
trying to find out what's going on out there. And I've got a direct lead for them. But how the hell do
you meet a Russian spy, or a Chinese spy for that matter? You can't just advertise in a newspaper.
Hell. Maybe if I went down to the university and talked to some of those freaking commie students.
..."
I was shocked. "Carmel! You can't sell your own country like that!"
"The hell I can't. The Statue of Liberty is just another broad, and I'll take what I can get for her. Don't
be a fool." He reached in his jacket pocket and took out a caramel candy like he always did when he
was excited. "I'll -bet somebody in the Mob will know. They know everything. Jesus, there has to be
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 28 von 470
some way of cashing in on this."
The Presidents actual television broadcast was transmitted to the world at 10:30 P.M. EST, March
31. The Russians and Chinese were given twenty-four hours to get out of Fernando Poo or the skies
over Santa Isobel would begin raining nuclear missiles: "This is darn serious," the Chief Executive
said, "and America will not shirk its responsibility to the freedom-loving people of Fernando Poo!"
The broadcast concluded at 11 P.M. EST, and within two minutes people attempting to get
reservations on trains, planes, busses or car pools to Canada had virtually every telephone wire in the
country overloaded.
In Moscow, where it was ten the next morning, the Premier called a conference and said crisply,
"That character in Washington is a mental lunatic, and he means it. Get our men out of Fernando Poo
right away, then find out who authorized sending them in there in the first place and transfer him to
be supervisor of a hydroelectric works in Outer Mongolia."
"We don't have any men in Fernando Poo," a commissar said mournfully. 'The Americans are
imagining things again."
"Well, how the hell can we withdraw men if we don't have them there in the first place?" the Premier
demanded.
"I don't know. We've got twenty-four hours to figure that out, or-" the commissar quoted an old
Russian proverb which means, roughly, that when the polar bear excrement interferes with the fan
belts, the machinery overheats.
"Suppose we just announce that our troops are coming out?" another commissar suggested. "They
can't say we're lying if they don't find any of our troops there afterward."
"No, they never believe anything we say. They want to be shown," the premier said thoughtfully.
"We'll have to infiltrate some troops surreptitiously and then withdraw them with a lot of fanfare and
publicity. That should do it."
"I'm afraid it won't end the problem," another pommissar said funereally. "Our intelligence indicates
that there are Chinese troops there. Unless Peking backs down, we're going to be caught in the
middle when the bombs start flying and-" he quoted a proverb about the man in the intersection when
two manure trucks collide.
"Damn," the Premier said. "What the blue blazes do the Chinese want with Fernando Poo?"
He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of
dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by
the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the
world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was
also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved
children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National
Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and
although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm
in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going
on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in
a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that
his detachment sometimes bordered on schizophrenia; but most of the time his innate shrewdness
gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of America and China.
And, banishing Thomas Edison and his light bulbs from mind, Saul Goodman looks back over the
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 29 von 470
first eight memos briefly, using the conservative and logical side of his personality, rigidly holding
back the intuitive functions. It was a habitual exercise with him, and he called it expansion-andcontraction:
leaping in the dark for the connection that must exist between fact one and fact two, then
going back slowly to check on himself.
The names and phrases flow past, in review: Fra Dol-cino-1508-Roshinaya-Hassan i Sabbah-1090-
Weis-haupt-assassinations-John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King-Mayor Daley-Cecil
Rhodes-1888 -George Washington....
Choices: (1) it is all true, exactly as the memos suggest; (2) it is partly true, and partly false; (3) it is
all false, and there is no secret society that has endured from 1090 A.D. to the present.
Well, it isn't all true. Mayor Daley never said "Ewige Blumenkraft" to Senator Ribicoff. Saul had
read, in the Washington Post, a lip-reader's translation of Daley's diatribe and there was no German
in it, although there was obscenity and anti-Semitism. The Weishaupt-Washington impersonation
theory also had some flaws-in those days, before plastic surgery, such an undetected assumption of
the identity of a well-known figure was especially hard to credit, despite the circumstantial evidence
quoted in the memos-two strong arguments against choice one. The memos are not all true.
How about choice three? The Illuminati might not be a straight unbroken line from the first recruit
gathered by old Hassan i Sabbah to the person who bombed Confrontation-it might have died and
lain dormant for a term, like the Ku Klux Klan between 1872 and 1915; and it might have gone
through such breakups and resurrections more than once in eight centuries-but linkages of some sort,
however tenuous, reached from the eleventh century to the twentieth, from the Near East to Europe
and from Europe to America. Saul's dissatisfaction with official explanations of recent
assassinations, the impossibility of making any rational sense out of current American foreign policy,
and the fact that even historians who vehemently distrusted all "conspiracy theories" acknowledged
the pivotal role of secret Masonic lodges in the French Revolution: all these added weight to the
rejection of choice 3. Besides, the Masons were the first group, according to at least two of the
memos, infiltrated by Weishaupt.
Choice 1 is definitely out, then, and choice 3 almost certainly equally invalid; choice 2, therefore, is
most probably correct. The theory in the memos is partly true and partly false. But what, in essence,
is the theory-and which part of it is true, which part false?
Saul lit his pipe, closed his eyes, and concentrated.
The theory, in essence, was that the Illuminati recruited people through various "fronts," turned them
on to some sort of illuminizing experience through marijuana (or some special extract of marijuana)
and converted them into fanatics willing to use any means necessary to "illuminize" the rest of the
world. Their aim, obviously, is nothing less than the total transformation of humanity itself, along the
lines suggested by the film 2007, or by Nietzsche's concept of the Superman. In the course of this
conspiracy the Illuminati, according to Malik's hints to Jackson, were systematically assassinating
every popular political figure who might interfere with their program.
Saul thought, suddenly, of Charlie Manson, and of the glorification of Manson by the Weatherman
and Morituri bombers. He thought of the popularity of pot smoking and of the slogan "by any means
necessary" with contemporary radical youth, even outside Weatherman. And he thought of
Neitzsche's slogans, "Be hard. . . . Whatever is done for love is beyond good and evil. . . . Above the
ape is man, and above man, the Superman. . . . Forget not thy whip. ..." In spite of his own logic,
which had proved that Malik's theory was only partly true, Saul Goodman, a lifelong liberal,
suddenly felt a pang of typically right-wing terror toward modern youth.
He reminded himself that Malik seemed to think the conspiracy emanated chiefly from Mad Dog-and
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 30 von 470
that was God's Lightning country down there. God's Lightning had no fondness for marijuana, or for
youth, or for the definitely anti-Christian overtones of the Illuminati philosophy.
Besides, Malik's sources were only partly trustworthy.
And there were other possibilities: the Shriners, for instance, were part of the Masonic movement,
were generally right-wing, had their own hidden rites and secrets, and used Arabic trappings that
might well derive from Hassan i Sabbah or the Roshinaya of Afghanistan. Who could say what
secret plots were hatched at Shriner conventions?
No, that was the intuitive pole vaulter in the right lobe at work again; and right now Saul was
concerned with the plodding logician in the left lobe.
The key to the mystery was in getting a clearer definition of the purpose of the Illuminati. Identify
the change they were trying to accomplish-in man and in his society-and then you would be able to
guess, at least approximately, who they were.
Their aim was English domination of the world, and they were Rhodes Scholars-according to the
Birchers. That idea, obviously, belonged with Saul's own whimsey about a worldwide Shriner
conspiracy. What then? The Italian llluminati, under Fra Dolcino, wanted to redistribute the wealthbut
the International Bankers, mentioned in the Playboy letter, presumably wanted to hold onto their
wealth. Weishaupt was a "freethinker" according to the Britannica, and so were Washington and
Jefferson- but Sabbah and Joachim of Florence were evidently heretical mystics of the Islamic and
Catholic traditions respectively.
Saul picked up the ninth memo, deciding to get more facts (or pretended facts) before analyzing
further-and then it hit him.
Whatever the Illuminati were aiming at had not been accomplished. Proof: If it had, they would not
still be conspiring in secret.
Since almost everything has been tried in the course of human history, find out what hasn't been tried
(at least not on a large scale)-and that will be the condition to which the Illuminati are trying to move
the rest of mankind.
Capitalism had been tried. Communism has been tried. Even Henry George's Single Tax has been
tried, in Australia. Fascism, feudalism and mysticism have been tried. Anarchism has never been
tried.
Anarchism was frequently associated with assassinations. It had an appeal for freethinkers, such as
Kropotkin and Bakunin, but also for religious idealists, like Tolstoy and Dorothy Day of the Catholic
Worker movement. Most anarchists hoped, Joachim-like, to redistribute the wealth, but Rebecca had
once told him about a classic of anarchist literature, Max Stirner's The Ego and His Own, which had
been called "the Billionaire's Bible" because it stressed the advantages the rugged individualist
would gain in a stateless society-and Cecil Rhodes was an adventurer before he was a banker. The
Illuminati were anarchists.
It all fit: the pieces of the puzzle slipped together smoothly.
Saul was convinced. He was also wrong.
"We'll just get our troops out of Fernando Poo," the Chairman of the Chinese Communist party said
on April 1. "A place that size isn't worth world war."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 31 von 470
"But we don't have any troops there," an aide told him, "it's the Russians who do."
"Oh?" the Chairman quoted a proverb to the effect that there was urine in the rosewater. "I wonder
what the hell the Russians want with Fernando Poo?" he added thoughtfully.
He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of
dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by
the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the
world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was
also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved
children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National
Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and,
although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm
in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going
on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in
a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that
his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness
gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of America and Russia.
("And it's not only a sin against God," Mr. Mocenigo shouts, "but it gives you germs, too." It is 1950,
early spring on Mulberry Street, and young Charlie Mocenigo raises terrified eyes. "Look, look," Mr.
Mocenigo goes on angrily, "don't believe your own father. See what the dictionary says. Look, look
at the page. Here, see. 'Masturbation: self-pollution.' Do you know what self-pollution means? Do
you know how long those germs last?" And in another spring, 1955, Charles Mocenigo, a pale,
skinny, introverted genius, registers for his first semester at MIT and, coming to the square on the
form that says "Religion," writes in careful block capitals, ATHEIST. He has read Kinsey and
Hirschfeld and almost all the biologically oriented sexological treatises by this time-studiously
ignoring psychoanalysts and such unscientific types-and the only visible remnant of that early
adolescent terror is a habit of washing his hands frequently when under tension, which earns him the
nickname "Soapy.")
General Talbot looks at Mocenigo pityingly and raises his pistol to the scientist's head. . . .
On August 6, 1902, the world produced its usual crop of new humans, all programmed to act more or
less 'alike, all containing minor variations of the same basic DNA blueprint; of these, approximately
51,000 were female and 50,000 were male; and two of the males, born at the same second, were to
play a large role in our story, and to pursue somewhat similar and anabatic careers. The first, born
over a cheap livery stable in the Bronx, New York, was named Arthur Flegenheimer and, at the other
end of his life, spoke very movingly about his mother (as well as about bears and sidewalks and
French Canadian Bean Soup); the second, born in one of the finest old homes on Beacon Hill in
Boston, was named Robert Putney Drake and, at the other end of his life, thought rather harshly of
his mother . . . but when the paths of Mr. Flegenheimer and Mr. Drake crossed, in 1935, one of the
links was formed which led to the Fernando Poo Incident.
And, in present time, more or less, 00005 was summoned to meet W. in the headquarters of a certain
branch of British Intelligence. The date was March 17, but being English, neither 00005 nor W. gave
a thought to blessed Saint Patrick; instead, they spoke of Fernando Poo.
"The Yanks," W. said crisply, "are developing evidence that the Russians or the Chinese, or both of
them, are behind this Tequilla y Moto swine. Of course, even if that were true, it wouldn't matter a
damn to Her Majesty's government; what do we care if a speck of an island that size turns Red? But
you know the Yanks, 00005-they're ready to go to war over it, although they haven't announced that
publicly yet."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 32 von 470
"My mission," 00005 asked, the fault lines of cruelty about his mouth turning into a most engaging
smile, "is to hop down to Fernando Poo and find out the real politics of this Tequilla y Mota bloke
and if he is Red overthrow him before the Yanks blow up the world?"
"That's the assignment. We can't have a bloody nuclear war just when the balance of payments is
almost straightened out and the Common Market is finally starting to work. So, hop to it,
straightaway. Naturally, if you're captured, Her Majesty's government will have to disavow any
knowledge of your actions."
"It always seems to work out that way," 00005 said ironically. "I wish for once you'd give me a
mission where Her Majesty's bleeding government would stand behind me in a tight spot."
But 00005, of course, was merely being witty; as a loyal subject, he would follow orders under any
circumstances, even if it required the death of every soul on Fernando Poo and himself as well. He
rose, in his characteristic debonair fashion, and headed for his own office, where he began his
preparations for the Fernando Poo mission. His first step was to check his personal worldwide travel
notebook, seeking the bar in Santa Isobel which came closest to serving a suitable martini and the
restaurant most likely to prepare an endurable lobster Newburg. To his horror, there was no such bar
and no such restaurant. Santa Isobel was bereft of social graces.
"I say," 00005 muttered, "this is going to be a bit thick."
But he cheered up quickly, for he knew that Fernando Poo would be equipped at least with a bevy of
tawny-skinned or coffee -colored females, and such women were the Holy Grail to him. Besides, he
had already formed his own theory about Fernando Poo: he was convinced that BUGGERBlowhard's
Unreformed Gangsters, Goons, and Espionage Renegades, an international conspiracy of
criminals and double agents, led by the infamous and mysterious Eric "the Red" Blowhard-was
behind it all. 00005 had never heard of the Illuminati.
In fact, 00005, despite his dark hair combed straight back, his piercing eyes, his cruel and handsome
face, his trim athlete's body, and his capacity to penetrate any number of females and defenestrate
any number of males in the course of duty, was not really an ideal intelligence agent. He had grown
up reading Ian Fleming novels and one day, at the age of twenty-one, looked in the mirror, decided
he was everything a Fleming hero should be, and started a campaign to get into the spy game. After
fourteen years in bureaucratic burrowing, he finally arrived in one of the intelligence services, but it
was much more the kind of squalid and bumbling organization in which Harry Palmer had toiled his
cynical days away than it was a berth of Bondage. Nevertheless, 00005 did his best to refurbish and
glamorize the scene and, perhaps because God looks after fools, he hadn't managed to get himself
killed in any of the increasingly bizarre missions to which he was assigned. The missions were all
weird, at first, because nobody took them seriously-they were all based on wild rumors that had to be
checked out just in case there be some truth in them-but later it was realized that 00005's peculiar
schizophrenia was well suited to certain real problems, just as the schizoid of the more withdrawn
type is ideal for a "sleeper" agent since he could easily forget what was conventionally considered
his real self. Of course, nobody at any time ever took BUGGER seriously, and, behind his back,
00005's obsession with this organization was a subject of much interdepartmental humor.
"Wonderful as it was," Mary Lou said, "some of it was scary."
'Why?" Simon asked.
"All those hallucinations. I thought I might be losing my mind."
Simon lit another joint and passed it over to her. "What makes you think, even now, that it was just
hallucinations?" he asked.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 33 von 470
ROCK ROCK ROCK TILL BROAD DAYLIGHT
"If that was real," Mary Lou said firmly, "everything else in my life has been a hallucination."
Simon grinned. "Now," he said calmly, "you're getting the point."
THE SECOND TRIP, OR CHOKMAH
Hopalong Horus Rides Again
Hang on for some metaphysics. 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. Actually, what order is "there" is
imposed on primal chaos in the same sense that a person's name is draped over his actual
self. It is the job of the scientist, for example, to implement this principle in a practical
manner and some are quite brilliant at it. But on closer examination, order dissolves into
disorder, which is the ERISTIC ILLUSION.
-Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., Principia Discordia
And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit
about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any
motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom
and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled
waiting for the next order from above. In Las Vegas, Dr. Charles Mocenigo woke from another
nightmare and went to the toilet to wash his hands. He thought of his date the next night with Sherri
Brandi and, quite mercifully, had no inkling that it would be his last contact with a woman. Still
seeking calm, he went to the window and looked at the stars-being a specialist, with no interest
beyond his own field, he imagined he was looking up rather than out at them. In New Delhi aboard
the afternoon TWA flight for Hong Kong, Honolulu, and Los Angeles, R. Buckminster Fuller, one of
the few people to be aware that he lived on a spaceship, glanced at his three watches, showing local
time (5:30 P.M.), time at Honolulu, his point of destination (2:30 A.M. the next morning) and present
time in his home at Carbondale, Illinois (3:30 A.M. the previous morning.) In Paris, the noon crowds
were jostled by hordes of young people distributing leaflets glowingly describing the world's greatest
Rock Festival and Cosmic Love Feast to be celebrated on the shores of Lake Totenkopf near
Ingolstadt at the end of the month. At Sunderland, England, a young psychiatrist left his lunch to
rush to the chronic ward and listen to weird babble proceeding from a patient who had been decadesilent:
"On Walpurgasnacht it's coming. That's when His power is strongest. That's when you'll see
Him. Right at the very stroke of midnight." In the middle of the Atlantic, Howard the porpoise,
swimming with friends in the mid-morning sun, encountered some sharks and had a nasty fight. Saul
Goodman rubbed tired eyes in New York City as dawn crept over the windowsill, and read a memo
about Charlemagne and the Courts of the Illuminated; Rebecca Goodman, meanwhile, read how the
jealous priests of Bel-Marduk betrayed Babylon to the invading army of Cyrus because their young
king, Belshazzar, had embraced the love-cult of the goddess Ishtar. In Chicago, Simon Moon was
listening to the birds begin to sing and waiting for the first cinnamon rays of dawn, as Mary Lou
Servix slept beside him; his mind was active, thinking about pyramids and rain-gods and sexual yoga
and fifth-dimensional geometries, but thinking mostly about the Ingolstadt Rock Festival and
wondering if it would all happen as Hagbard Celine had predicted.
(Two blocks north in space and over forty years back in time, Simon's mother heard pistol shots as
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 34 von 470
she left Wobbly Hall-Simon was a second-generation anarchist-and followed the crowd to gather in
front of the Biograph Theatre where a man lay bleeding to death in the alley. And the next morning-
July 23, 1934-Billie Freschette, in her cell at Cook County Jail, got the news from a matron. In this
White Man's Country, I am the lowliest of the lowly, subjugated because I am not white, and
subjugated again because I am not male. I am the embodiment of all that is rejected and scorned-the
female, the colored, the tribe, the earth-all that has no place in this world of white male technology. I
am the tree that is cut down to make room for the factory that poisons the air. I am the river filled
with sewage. I am the Body that the Mind despises. I am the lowliest of the lowly, the mud beneath
your feet. And yet of all the world John Dillinger picked me to be his bride. He plunged within me,
into the very depths of me. I was his bride, not as your Wise Men and Churches and Governments
know marriage, but we were truly wed. As the tree is wed to the earth, the mountain to the sky, the
sun to the moon. I held his head to my breast, and tousled his hair as if it were sweet as fresh grass,
and I called him "Johnnie." He was more than a man. He was mad but not mad, not as a man may go
mad when he leaves his tribe and lives among hostile strangers and is mistreated and scorned. He
was not mad as all other white men are mad because they have never known a tribe. He was mad as a
god might be mad. And now they tell me he is dead. 'Well," the matron asked finally, "aren't you
going to say anything? Aren't you Indians human?" She had a real evil shine in her eye, like the eye
of the rattlesnake. She wants to see me cry. She stands there and waits, watching me through the
bars. "Don't you have any feelings at all? Are you some kind of animal?" I say nothing. I keep my
face immobile. No white shall ever see the tears of a Menominee. At the Biograph Theatre, Molly
Moon turns away in disgust as souvenir hunters dip their handkerchiefs in the blood. I turn away
from the matron and look up, out the barred window, to the stars, and the spaces between them seem
bigger than ever. Bigger and emptier. Inside me there is a space like that now, big and empty, and it
will never be filled again. When the tree is torn out by its roots, the earth must feel that way. The
earth must scream silently, as I screamed silently.) But she understood the sacramental meaning of
the handkerchiefs dipped in blood; as Simon understands it.
Simon, in fact, had what can only be called a funky education. I mean, man, when your parents are
both anarchists the Chicago public school system is going to do your head absolutely no good at all.
Feature me in a 1956 classroom with Eisenhower's Moby Dick face on one wall and Nixon's Captain
Ahab glare on the other, and in between, standing in front of the inevitable American rag, Miss Doris
Day or her older sister telling the class to take home a leaflet explaining to their parents why it's
important for them to vote.
"My parents don't vote," I say.
"Well, this leaflet will explain to them why they should," she tells me with the real authentic Doris
Day sunshine and Kansas cornball smile. It's early in the term and she hasn't heard about me from the
last-semester teacher.
"I really don't think so," I say politely. "They don't think it makes any difference whether Eisenhower
or Stevenson is in the White House. They say the orders will still come from Wall Street."
It's like a thundercloud. All the sunshine goes away. They never prepared her for this in the school
where they turn out all these Doris Day replicas. The wisdom of the Fathers is being questioned. She
opens her mouth and closes it and opens and closes it and finally takes such a deep breath that every
boy in the room (we're all on the cusp of puberty) gets a hard-on from watching her breasts heave up
and slide down again. I mean, they're all praying (except me, I'm an atheist, of course) that they
won't get called on to stand up; if it wouldn't attract attention, they'd be clubbing their dicks down
with their geography books. "That's the wonderful thing about this country," she finally gets out,
"even people with opinions like that can say what they want without going to jail."
"You must be nuts," I say. "My dad's been in and out of jail so many times they should put in a
special revolving door just for him: My mom, too. You oughta go out with subversive leaflets in this
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 35 von 470
town and see what happens."
Then, of course, after school, a gang of patriots, with the odds around seven-to-one, beat the shit out
of me and make me kiss their red-white-and-blue totem. It's no better at home. Mom's an anarchopacifist,
Tolstoy and all that, and she wants me to say I didn't fight back. Dad's a Wobbly and wants
to be sure that I hurt some of them at least as bad as they hurt me. After they yell at me for a half
hour, they yell at each other for two. Bakunin said this and Kropotkin said that and Gandhi said the
other and Martin Luther King is the savior of America and Martin Luther King is a bloody fool
selling his people an opium Utopia and all that jive. Go down to Wobbly Hall or Solidarity
Bookstore and you'll still hear the same debate, doubled, redoubled, in spades, and vulnerable.
So naturally I start hanging out on Wall Street and smoking dope and pretty soon I'm the youngest
living member of what they called the Beat Generation. Which does not improve my relations with
school authorities, but at least it's a relief from all that patriotism and anarchism. By the time I'm
seventeen and they shot Kennedy and the country starts coming apart at the seams, we're not beatniks
anymore, we're hippies, and the thing to do is go to Mississippi. Did you ever go to Mississippi? You
know what Dr. Johnson said about Scotland-"The best thing you can say for it is that God created it
for some purpose, but the same is true of Hell." Blot Mississippi; it's not part of this story anyway.
The next stop was Antioch in dear old Yellow Springs where I majored in mathematics for reasons
you will soon guess. The pot there grows wild in acres and acres of beautiful nature preserve kept up
by the college. You can go out there at night, pick your own grass for the week from the female of
the hemp species and sleep under the stars with a female of your own species, then wake up in the
morning with birds and rabbits and the whole lost Thomas Wolfe America scene, a stone, a leaf, and
unfound door and all of it, then make it to class really feeling good and ready for an education. Once
I woke up with a spider running across my face, and I thought, "So a spider is running across my
face," and brushed him off gently, "it's his world, too." In the city, I would have killed him. What I
mean is Antioch is a stone groove but that life is no preparation for coming back to Chicago and
Chemical Warfare. Not that I ever got maced before '68, but I could read the signs; don't let anybody
tell you it's pollution, brothers and sisters. It's Chemical Warfare. They'll kill us all to make a buck.
I got stoned one night and went home to see what it would be like relating to Mom and Dad in that
condition. It was the same but different. Tolstoy coming out of her mouth, Bakunin out of his. And it
was suddenly all weird and super-freaky, like Goddard shooting a Kafka scene: two dead Russians
debating with each other, long after they were dead and buried, out of the mouths of a pair of
Chicago Irish radicals. The young frontal-lobe-type anarchists in the city were in their first surrealist
revival just then and I had been reading some of their stuff and it clicked.
"You're both wrong," I said. "Freedom won't come through Love, and it won't come through Force. It
will come through the Imagination." I put in all the capital letters and I was so stoned that they got
contact-high and heard them, too. Their mouths dropped open and I felt like William Blake telling
Tom Paine where it was really at. A Knight of Magic waving my wand and dispersing the shadows
of Maya.
Dad was the first to recover. "Imagination," he said, his big red face crinkling in that grin that always
drove the cops crazy when they were arresting him. "That's what comes of sending good workingclass
boys to rich people's colleges. Words and books get all mixed up with reality in their heads.
When you were in that jail in Mississippi you imagined yourself through the walls, didn't you? How
many times an hour did you imagine yourself through the walls? I can guess. The first time I was
arrested, during the GE strike of thirty-three, I walked through those walls a million times. But every
time I opened my eyes, the walls and the bars were still there. What got me out finally? What got you
out of Biloxi finally? Organization. If you want big words to talk to intellectuals with, that's a fine
big word, son, just as many syllables as imagination, and it has a lot more realism in it."
That's what I remember best about him, that one speech, and the strange clear blue of his eyes. He
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 36 von 470
died that year, and I found out that there was more to the Imagination than I had known, for he didn't
die at all. He's still around, in the back of my skull somewhere, arguing with me, and that's the truth.
It's also the truth that he's dead, really dead, and part of me was buried with him. It's uncool to love
your father these days, so I didn't even know that I loved him until they closed the coffin and I heard
myself sobbing, and it comes back again, that same emptiness, whenever I hear "Joe Hill":
"The copper bosses lulled you, Joe."
"I never died," said he.
Both lines are true, and mourning never ends. They didn't shoot Dad the clean way, like Joe Hill, but
they ground him down, year after year, burning out his Wob fires (and he was Aries, a real fire sign)
with their cops, their courts, their jails, and their taxes, their corporations, their cages for the spirit
and cemeteries for the soul, their plastic liberalism and murderous Marxism, and even as I say that I
have to pay a debt to Lenin for he gave me the words to express how I felt when Dad was gone.
"Revolutionaries," he said, "are dead men on furlough." The Democratic Convention of '68 was
coming and I knew that my own furlough might be much shorter than Dad's because I was ready to
fight them in the streets. All spring Mom was busy at the Women for Peace center and I was busy
conspiring with surrealists and Yippies. Then I met Mao Tsu-hsi.
It was April 30, Walpurgasnacht (pause for thunder on the soundtrack), and I was rapping with some
of the crowd at the Friendly Stranger. H.P. Lovecraft (the rock group, not the writer) was conducting
services in the back room, pounding away at the door to Acid Land in the gallant effort, new and
striking that year, to break in on waves of sound without any chemical skeleton key at all and I am in
no position to evaluate their success objectively since I was, as is often the case with me, 99 and
44/100ths percent stoned out of my gourd before they began operations. I kept catching this uniquely
pensive Oriental face at the next table, but my own gang, including the weird faggot-priest we
nicknamed Padre Pederastia, had most of my attention. I was laying it on them heavy. It was my
Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade period.
"The head-trip anarchists are as constipated as the Marxists," I was giving forth; you recognize the
style by now. "Who speaks for the thalamus, the glands, the cells of the organism? Who sees the
organism? We cover it with clothes to hide its apehood. We won't have liberated ourselves from
servitude until people throw all their clothes in the closet in spring and don't take them out again
winter. We won't be human beings, the way apes are apes and dogs are dogs, until we fuck where
and when we want to, like any other mammal. Fucking in the streets isn't just a tactic to blow minds;
it's recapturing our own bodies. Anything less and we're still robots possessing the wisdom of the
straight line but not the understanding of the organic curve." And so on. And so forth. I think I found
a few good arguments for rape and murder while I was at it.
"The next step beyond anarchy," somebody said cynically. "Real chaos."
"Why not?" I demanded. "Who works at a straight job here?" None of them did, of course; I deal
dope myself. "Will you work at a straight job for something that calls itself an anarchist syndicate?
Will you run an engine lathe eight unfucking hours a day because the syndicate tells you the people
need what the lathe produces? If you will, the people just becomes a new tyrant."
"To hell with machines," Kevin McCool, the poet, said enthusiastically. "Back to the caves!" He was
as stoned as me.
The Oriental face leaned over: she was wearing a strange headband with a golden apple inside a
pentagon. Her black eyes somehow reminded me of my father's blue eyes. "What you want is an
organization of the imagination?" she asked politely.
I flipped. It was too much, hearing those words just then.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 37 von 470
"A man at the Vedanta Society told me that John Dillinger walked through the walls when he made
his escape from Crown Point Jail," Miss Mao went on in a level tone. "Do you think that is
possible?"
You know how dark coffee houses are. The Friendly Stranger was murkier than most. I had to get
out. Blake talked to the Archangel Gabriel every morning at breakfast, but I wasn't that heavy yet.
"Hey, where you going, Simon?" somebody called. Miss Mao didn't say anything, and I didn't look
back at that polite and pensive face-it would have been much easier if she looked sinister and
inscrutable. But when I hit Lincoln and started toward Fullerton, I heard steps behind me. I turned
and Padre Pederastia touched my arm gently.
"I asked her to come and listen to you," he said. "She was to give a signal if she thought you were
ready. The signal was more dramatic than I expected, it seems. A conversation out of your past that
had some heavy emotional meaning to you?"
"She's a medium?" I asked numbly.
"You can name it that." I looked at him in the light from the Biograph marquee and I remembered
Mom's story about the people dipping their handkerchiefs in Dillinger's blood and I heard the old
hymn start in my head ARE YOU WASHED are you washed ARE you WASHED in the BLOOD of
the Lamb and I remembered how we all thought he hung out with us freaks in the hope of leading us
back to the church holy Roman Catholic and apostolic as Dad called it when he was drunk and bitter.
It was obvious that whatever the Padre was recruiting for had little to do with that particular
theological trade union.
"What is this?" I asked. "And who is that woman?"
"She's the daughter of Fu Manchu," he said. Suddenly, he threw his head back and laughed like a
rooster crowing. Just as suddenly, he stopped and looked at me. Just looked at me.
"Somehow," I said slowly, "I've qualified for a small demonstration of whatever you and she are
selling. But I don't qualify for any more until I make the right move?" He gave the faintest hint of a
nod and went on watching me.
Well, I was young and ignorant of everything outside ten million books I'd gobbled and guiltyunsure
about my imaginative flights away from my father's realism and of course stoned of course
but I finally understood why he was watching me that way, it was (this part of it) pure Zen, there was
nothing I could do consciously or by volition that would satisfy him and I had to do exactly that
which I could not not do, namely be Simon Moon. Which led to deciding then and there without any
time to mull it over and rationalize it just what the hell being Simon Moon or, more precisely
SimonMooning, consisted of, and it seemed to be a matter of wandering through room after room of
my brain looking for the owner and not finding him anywhere, sweat broke out on my forehead, it
was becoming desperate because I was running out of rooms and the Padre was still watching me.
"Nobody home," I said finally, sure that the answer wasn't good enough.
"That's odd," he said. "Who's conducting the search?"
And I walked through the walls and into the Fire.
Which was the beginning of the larger and funkier part of my (Simon's) education, and where we
cannot, as yet, follow him. He sleeps now, a teacher rather than a learner, while Mary Lou Servix
awakes beside him and tries to decide whether it was just the pot or if something really spooky
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 38 von 470
happened last night. Howard sports in the Atlantic; Buckminster Fuller, flying above the Pacific,
crosses the international date line and slips back into April 23 again; it is dawn in Las Vegas and
Mocenigo, the nightmares and anxieties of night forgotten, looks forward cheerfully to the
production of the first live cultures of Anthrax-Leprosy-Pi, which will make this a memorable day in
more ways than he expects; and George Dorn, somewhere outside this time system, is writing in his
journal. Each word, however, seems magically to appear by itself as if no volition on his part were
necessary to its production. He read the words his pencil scrawled, but they appeared the
communications of another intelligence. Yet they picked up where he had left off in his hotel room
and they spoke with his private idiom:
. . . the universe is the inside without any outside, the sound made by one eye opening. In fact, I don't
even know that there is a universe. More likely, there are many multiverses, each with its own
dimensions, times, spaces, laws and eccentricities. We wander between and among these
multiverses, trying to convince others and ourselves that we all walk together in a single public
universe that we can share. For to deny that axiom leads to what is called schizophrenia.
Yeah, that's it: every man's skin is his own private multiverse, just like every man's home is supposed
to be his castle. But all the multiverses are trying to merge, to create a true universe such as we have
only imagined previously. Maybe it will be spiritual, like Zen or telepathy, or maybe it will be
physical, one great big gang-fuck, but it has to happen: the creation of a universe and the one great
eye opening to see itself at last. Aum Shiva!
-Oh, man, you're stoned out of your gourd. You're writing gibberish.
No, I'm writing with absolute clarity, for the first time in my life.
-Yeah? Well what was that business about the universe being the sound of one eye opening?
Never mind that. Who the hell are you and how did you get into my head?
"Your turn now, George."
Sheriff Cartwright stood in the door, a monk in a strange red and white robe beside him, holding
some kind of wand the deep color of a fire engine.
"No-no-" George started to stammer. But he knew.
"Of course you know," the Sheriff said kindly-as if he were suddenly sorry about it all. "You knew
before you left New York and came down here."
They were at the foot of the gallows. ". . . each with its own times, spaces, laws and eccentricities,"
George was thinking wildly. Yes: if the universe is one big eye looking at itself, then telepathy is no
miracle, for anyone who opens his own eyes fully can then look through all other eyes. (For a
moment, George looks through the eyes of John Ehrlichman as Dick Nixon urges lewdly, "You can
say I don't remember. You can say I can't recall. I can't give any answer to that that I can recall." I
can't give any answer to that that I can recall) "All flesh will see it in one instant": who wrote that?
"Gonna miss you, boy," the Sheriff said, offering an embarrassed handshake. Numbly, George
clasped the man's hot, reptilian palm.
The monk walked beside him up the gallows' steps. Thirteen, George was thinking, there are always
thirteen steps on a gallows. . . . And you always cream in your jeans when your neck breaks. It has
something to do with the pressure on the spinal cord being transmitted through the prostate gland.
The Orgasm-Death Gimmick, Burroughs calls it.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 39 von 470
At the fifth step, the monk said suddenly: "Hail Eris."
George stared at the man dumbfounded. Who was Eris? Somebody in Greek mythology, but
somebody very important. . . .
"It all depends on whether the fool has wisdom enough to repeat it."
"Quiet, idiot-he can hear us!"
I got some bad pot, George decided, and I'm still back on the hotel bed, hallucinating all this. But he
repeated, uncertainly: "Hail Eris."
Immediately, just like his one and only acid trip, dimension began to alter. The steps grew larger,
steeper-ascending them seemed as perilous as climbing Mount Everest. The air was suddenly lit with
reddish flame- Definitely, George thought, some weird and freaky pot. ...
And then, for some reason, he looked upward.
Each step was now higher than an ordinary building. He was near the bottom of a pyramidal
skyscraper of thirteen colossal levels. And at the top. . . . And at the top....
And at the top One Enormous Eye-a ruby and demonic orb of cold fire, without mercy or pity or
contempt -looked at him and into him and through him.
The hand reaches down, turns on both bathtub faucets full-power, then reaches upward to do the
same to the sink faucets. Banana-Nose Maldonado leans forward and whispers to Carmel, "Now you
can talk."
(The old man using the name "Frank Sullivan" was met, at Los Angeles International Airport,
November 22, 1963, by Mao Tsu-Hsi, who drove him to his bungalow on Fountain Avenue. He gave
his report in terse, unemotional sentences. "My God," she said when he finished, "what do you make
of it?" He thought carefully and grunted, "It beats the hell out of me. The guy on the triple underpass
was definitely Harry Coin. I recognized him through my binoculars. The guy in the window at the
Book Depository very likely was this galoot Oswald that they've arrested. The guy on the grassy
knoll was Bernard Barker from the CIA Bay of Pigs gang. But I didn't get a good look at the gink on
the County Records building. One thing I'm sure of: we can't keep all this to ourselves. At the very
least, we pass the word on to ELF. It might alter their plans for OM. You've heard of OM?" She
nodded, saying, "Operation Mindfuck. It's their big project for the next decade or so. This is a bigger
Mindfuck than anything they had planned.")
"Red China?" Maldonado whispers incredulously. "You musta been reading the Readers Digest. We
get all our horse from friendly governments like Laos. The CIA would have our ass otherwise."
Straining to be heard over the running water, Carmel asks despondently, "Then you don't know how
I could meet a Communist spy?"
Maldonado stares at him levelly. "Communism doesn't have a good image right now," he says icily;
it is April 3, two days after the Fernando Poo Incident.
Bernard Barker, former servant of both Batista and Castro, dons his gloves outside the Watergate; in
a flash of memory he sees the grassy knoll, Oswald, Harry Coin, and, further back, Castro
negotiating with Banana-Nose Maldonado.
(But this present year, on March 24, Generalissimo Tequilla y Mota finally found the book he was
looking for, the one that was as precise and pragmatic about running a country as Luttwak's Coup
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 40 von 470
d'Etat had been about seizing one. It was called The Prince and its author was a subtle Italian named
Machiavelli; it told the Generalissimo everything he wanted to know-except how to handle American
hydrogen bombs, which, unfortunately, Machiavelli had lived too soon to foresee.)
"It is our duty, our sacred duty to defend Fernando Poo," Atlanta Hope was telling a cheering crowd
in Cincinnati that very day. "Are we to wait until the godless Reds are right here in Cincinnati?" The
crowd started to scream their unwillingness to wait that long-they had been expecting the godless
Reds to arrive in Cincinnati since about 1945 and were, by now, convinced that the dirty cowards
were never going to come and would have to be met on their own turf-but a group of dirty,
longhaired, freaky-looking students from Antioch College began to chant, "I Don't Want to Die for
Fernandoo Poo." The crowd turned in fury: at last, some real reds to fight. . . . Seven ambulances and
thirty police cars were soon racing to scene....
(But only five years earlier Atlanta had a different message. When God's Lightning was first
founded, as a splinter off Women's Liberation, it had as its slogan "No More Sexism," and its
original targets were adult bookstores, sex-education programs, men's magazines, and foreign
movies. It Was only after meeting "Smiling Jim" Trepomena of Knights of Christianity United in
Faith that Atlanta discovered that both male supremacy and orgasms were part of the International
Communist Conspiracy. It was at that point, really, that God's Lightning and orthodox Women's Lib
totally parted company, for the orthodox faction, just then, were teaching that male supremacy and
orgasms were part of the International Kapitalist Conspiracy.)
"Fernando Poo," the President of the United States told reporters even as Atlanta was calling for allout
war, "will not become another Laos, or another Costa Rica."
"When are we going to get our troops out of Laos?" a reporter from the New York Times asked
quickly; but a man from the Washington Post asked just as rapidly, "And when are we going to get
our troops out of Costa Rica?"
"Our Present Plans for Withdrawal are going Forward according to an Orderly Schedule," the
President began; but in Santa Isabel itself, as Tequilla y Mota underlined a passage in Machiavelli,
00005 concluded a shortwave broadcast to a British submarine lying 17 miles off the coast of the
island: "The Yanks have gone absolutely bonkers, I'm afraid. I've been here nine days now and I am
absolutely convinced there is not one Russian or Chinese agent in any way involved with
Generalissimo Tequilla y Mota, nor are there any troops of either of those governments hiding
anywhere in the jungles. However, BUGGER is definitely running a heroin smuggling ring here, and
I would like permission to investigate that." (The permission was to be denied; old W., back at
Intelligence HQ in London, knew that 00005 was a bit bonkers about BUGGER himself and
imagined that it was involved in every mission he undertook.)
At the same time, in a different hotel, Tobias Knight, on special loan from the FBI to the CIA,
concluded his nightly shortwave broadcast to an American submarine 23 miles off the coast: "The
Russian troops are definitely engaged in building what can only be a rocket-launching site, and the
Slants are constructing what seems to be a nuclear installation. . . ."
And Hagbard Celine, lying 40 miles out in the Bight of Biafra in the Lief Erickson, intercepted both
messages, and smiled cynically, and wired P. in New York: ACTIVATE MALIK AND PREPARE
DORN.
(While the most obscure, seemingly trivial part of the whole puzzle appeared in a department store in
Houston. It was a sign that said:
NO SMOKING. NO SPITTING.
THE MGT.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 41 von 470
This replaced an earlier sign that had hung on the main showroom wall for many years, saying only
NO SMOKING
THE MGT.
The change, although small, had subtle repercussions. The store catered only to the very wealthy,
and this clientele did not object to being told that they could not smoke. The fire hazard, after all,
was obvious. On the other hand, that bit about spitting was somehow a touch offensive; they most
certainly were not the sort of people who would spit on somebody's floor-or, at least, none of them
had done such a thing at any time since about one month or at most one year after they became
wealthy. Yes, the sign was definitely bad diplomacy.
Resentment festered. Sales fell off. And membership in the Houston branch of God's Lightning
increased. Wealthy, powerful membership.
(The odd thing was that the Management had nothing at all to do with the sign.)
George Dorn awoke screaming.
He lay on the floor of his cell in Mad Dog County Jail. His first frantic, involuntary glance told him
that Harry Coin had vanished completely from the adjoining cell. The shit-pot was back in its corner
and he knew, without being able to check, that there would be no human intestines in it.
Terror tactics, he thought They were out to break him-a task which was beginning to look easy-but
they were covering up the evidence as they went along.
There was no light through the cell window; it was, therefore, still night. He hadn't slept but merely
fainted.
Like a girl.
Like a long-haired commie faggot. Oh, shit and prune juice, he told himself sourly, cut it out. You've
known for years that you're no hero. Don't take that particular sore out and rub sandpaper on it now.
You're not a hero, but you're a goddam stubborn, pigheaded, and determined coward. That's why
you've stayed alive on assignments like this before.
Show these redneck mammyjammers just how stubborn, pig-headed, and determined you can be.
George started with an old gimmick. A piece torn off the tail of his shirt gave him a writing.tablet.
The point of his shoelace became a temporary pen. His own saliva, spat onto the polish of the shoes
themselves, created a substitute ink.
Laboriously, after a half hour, be had his message written:
WHOEVER FINDS THIS $50 TO CALL JOE MALIK, NEW YORK CITY, AND
TELL HIM GEORGE DORN HELD WITHOUT LAWYER MAD DOG COUNTY
JAIL
The message shouldn't land too close to the jail, so George began looking for a weighted object. In
five minutes, he decided on a spring from the bunk mattress; it took him seventeen minutes more to
pry it loose.
After the missile was hurled out toe window-probably, George knew, to be found by somebody who
would immediately turn it over to Sheriff Jim Cartwright-he began thinking of alternate plans.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 42 von 470
He found, however, that instead of devising schemes for escape or deliverance, his mind insisted on
going off in an entirely different direction. The face of the monk from his dream pursued him. He
had seen that face somewhere before, he knew; but where? Somehow, the question was important.
He began trying in earnest to re-create the face and identify it-James Joyce, H. P. Lovecraft, and a
monk in a painting by Fra Angelico all came to mind. It was none of them, but it looked somehow a
little like each of them.
Suddenly tired and discouraged, George slouched back on the bunk and let his hand lightly clutch his
penis through his trousers. Heroes of fiction don't jack off when the going gets rough, he reminded
himself. Well, hell, he wasn't a hero and this wasn't fiction. Besides, I wasn't going to jack-off (after
all, They might be watching through a peephole, ready to use this natural jailhouse weakness to
humiliate me further and break my ego). No, I definitely wasn't going to jack-off: I was just going to
hold it, lightly, through my trousers, until I felt some life-force surging back into my body and
displacing fear, exhaustion and despair. Meanwhile, I thought about Pat back in New York. She was
wearing nothing but her cute black lace bra and panties, and her nipples are standing up pointy and
hard. Make it Sophia Loren, and take the bra off so I can see the nipples directly. Ah, yes, and now
try it the other way: she (Sophia, no make it Pat again) is wearing the bra but the panties are off
showing the pubic bush. Let her play with it, get her fingers in there, and the other hand on a nipple,
ah, yes, and now she (Pat-no, Sophia) is kneeling to unzipper my fly. My penis grew harder and her
mouth opened in expectation. I reached down and cupped her breast with one hand, taking the nipple
she had been caressing, feeling it harden more. (Did James Bond ever do this in Doctor No's
dungeon?) Sophia's tongue (not my hand, not my hand) is busy and hot, sending pulsations through
my entire body. Take it, you cunt. Take it, O God, a flash of the Passaic and the gun at my forehead,
and you can't call them cunts nowadays, ah, you cunt, you cunt, take it, and it is Pat, it's that night at
her pad when we were both zonked on hashish and I never never never had a blow-job like that
before or since, my hands were in her hair, gripping her shoulders, take it, suck me off (get out of my
head, mother), and her mouth is wet and rhythmic and my cock is just as sensitive as that night
zonked on the hash, and I pulled the trigger and then the explosion came just as I did (pardon the
diction) and I was on the floor coughing and bouncing, my eyes watering. The second blast lifted me
again and threw me with a crunch against the wall.
Then the machine-gun fire started.
Jesus H. Particular Christ on a crutch, I thought frantically, whatever it is that's happening they're
going to find me with come on the front of my trousers.
And every bone in my body broken, I think.
The machine gun suddenly stopped stuttering and I thought I heard a voice cry "Earwicker, Bloom
and Craft."-I've still got Joyce on my mind, I decided. Then the third explosion came, and I covered
my head as parts of the ceiling began falling on me.
A key suddenly clanked against his cell door. Looking up, I saw a young woman in a trench coat,
carrying a tommy gun, and desperately trying one key after another in the lock.
From somewhere else in the building there came a fourth explosion.
The woman grinned tensely at the sound. "Commie motherfuckers," she muttered, still trying keys.
"Who the hell are you?" I finally asked hoarsely.
"Never mind that now," she snapped. "We've come to rescue you-isn't that enough?"
Before I could think of a reply, the door swung open.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 43 von 470
"Quick," she said, "this way."
I limped after her down the hall. Suddenly she stopped, studied the wall a moment, and pressed
against a brick. The wall slid smoothly aside and we entered what appeared to be a chapel of some
sort.
Good weeping Jesus and his brother Irving, I thought, I'm still still dreaming.
For the chapel was not anything that a sane man would expect to find in Mad Dog County Jail.
Decorated entirely in red and white-the colors of Hassan i Sabbah and the Assassins of Alamout, I
remembered incredulously-it was adorned with strange Arabic symbols and slogans in German:
"Heute die Welt, M or gens das Sonnensystem," "Ewige Blumenkraft Und Ewige Schlangekraft!"
"Gestern Hanf, Heute Hanf, Immer Hanf."
And the altar was a pyramid with thirteen ledges-with a ruby-red eye at the top.
This symbol, I now recalled with mounting confusion, was the Great Seal of the United States.
"This way," the woman said, motioning with her tommy gun.
We passed through another sliding wall and found ourselves in an alley behind the jail.
A black Cadillac awaited us. "Everybody's out!" the driver shouted. He was an old man, more than
sixty, but hard and shrewd-looking.
"Good," the woman said. "Here's George."
I was pushed into the back seat-which was already full of grim-looking men and grimmer-looking
munitions of various sorts-and the car started at once.
"One for good measure," the woman in the trench coat shouted and threw another plastic bomb back
at the jail.
"Right," the driver said. "It fits, too-that makes ft five."
"The Law of Fives," another passenger chuckled bitterly. "Serves the commie bastards right. A taste
of their own medicine."
I could restrain myself no longer.
"What the hell is going on?" I demanded. "Who are you people? What makes you think Sheriff
Cartwright and his police are communists? And where are you taking me?"
"Shut up," said the woman who had unlocked my cell, nudging me none too affectionately with her
machine gun. "We'll talk when we're ready. Meanwhile, wipe the come off your pants."
The car sped into the night.
(In a Bentley limousine, Fedrico "Banana Nose" Mal-donado drew on his cigar and relaxed as his
chauffeur drove him toward Robert Putney Drake's mansion in Blue Point, Long Island. In back of
his eyes, almost forgotten, Charlie "The Bug" Workman, Mendy Weiss, and Jimmy the Shrew listen
soberly, on October 23, 1935, as Banana Nose tells them: "Don't give the Dutchman a chance.
Cowboy the son of a bitch." The three guns nod stolidly; cowboying somebody is messy, but it pays
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 44 von 470
well. In an ordinary hit, you can be precise, even artistic, because after all the only thing that matters
is that the person so honored should be definitely dead afterwards. Cowboying, in the language of the
profession, leaves no room for personal taste or delicacy: the important thing is that there should be a
lot of lead in the air and the victim should leave a spectacularly gory corpse for the tabloids, as
notification that the Brotherhood is both edgy and short-tempered and everybody better watch his
ass. Although it wasn't obligatory, it was considered a sign of true enthusiasm on a cowboy job if the
guest of honor took along a few innocent bystanders, so everybody would understand exactly how
edgy the Brotherhood was feeling. The Dutchman took two such bystanders. And in a different
world that is still this world, Albert "The Teacher" Stern opens his morning paper on July 23, 1934,
and reads FBI SHOOTS DILLINGER, thinking wistfully If I could kill somebody that important, my
name would never be forgotten. Further back, back further: February 7, 1932, Vincent "Mad Dog"
Coll looks through the phone-booth door and sees a familiar face crossing the drugstore and a
tommy-gun in the man's hand. "The god-damned pig-headed Dutchman," he howled, but nobody
heard him because the Thompson gun was already systematically spraying the phone-booth up and
down, right and left, left and right, and up and down again for good measure . . . But tilt the picture
another way and-this emerges: On November 10, 1948, the "World's Greatest Newspaper," the
Chicago Tribune announced the election to the Presidency of the United States of America of
Thomas Dewey, a man who not only was not elected but would not even have been alive if Banana
Nose Maldonado had not given such specific instructions concerning the Dutchman to Charlie the
Bug, Mendy Weiss and Jimmy the Shrew.)
Who shot you? the police stenographer asked. Mother is the best bet, Oh mama mama mama. I want
harmony. 1 don't want harmony, is the delirious answer. Who shot you? the question is repeated. The
Dutchman still replies: Oh mama mama mama. French Canadian bean soup.
We drove till dawn. The car stopped on a road by a beach of white sand. Tall, skinny palm trees
stood black against a turquoise sky. This must be the Gulf of Mexico, I thought. They could now
load me with chains and drop me in the gulf, hundreds of miles from Mad Dog, without involving
Sheriff Jim. No, they had raided Sheriff Jim's jail. Or was that a hallucination? I was going to have to
keep more of an eye on reality. This was a new day, and I was going to know facts hard and sharpedged
in the sunlight and keep them straight.
I was stiff and sore and tired from a night of driving. The only rest I'd gotten was fitful dozing in
which cyclopean ruby eyes looked at me till I awoke in terror. Mavis, the woman with the tommy
gun, had put her arms around me several times when I screamed. She would murmur soothingly to
me, and once her lips, smooth, cool and soft, had brushed my ear.
At the beach, Mavis motioned me out of the car. The sun was as hot as the bishop's jock strap when
he finished his sermon on the evils of pornography. She stepped out behind me and slammed the
door.
"We wait here," she said. "The others go back."
"What are we waiting for?" I asked. Just then the driver of the car gunned the motor. The car swung
round in a wide U-turn. In a minute its rear end had disappeared beyond a bend in the Gulf highway.
We were alone with the rising sun and the sand-strewn asphalt.
Mavis motioned me to walk down the beach with her. A little ways ahead, far back from the water,
was a small white-painted frame cabana. A woodpecker landed wearily on its roof like he had flown
more missions than Yossarian and never intended to go up again.
"What's the plan, Mavis? A private execution on a lonely beach in another state so Sheriff Jim can't
get blamed?"
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 45 von 470
"Don't be a dummy, George. We blew up that commie bastard's jail."
"Why do you keep calling Sheriff Cartwright a commie? If ever a man had KKK written all over his
forehead, it was that reactionary redneck prick."
"Don't you know your Trotsky? 'Worse is better.' Slobs like Cartwright are trying to discredit
America to make it ripe for a left-wing takeover."
"I'm a left-winger. If you're against commies, you've got to be against me." I didn't care to tell her
about my other friends in Weatherman and Morituri.
"You're just a liberal dupe."
"I'm not a liberal, I'm a militant radical."
"A radical is nothing but a liberal with a big mouth. And a militant radical is nothing but a bigmouthed
liberal with a Che costume. Balls. We're the real radicals, George. We do things, like last
night Except for Weatherman and Morituri, all the militant radicals in your crowd ever do is take out
the Molotov cocktail diagram that they carefully clipped from The New York Review of Books, hang
it on the bathroom door and jack-off in connection with it. No offense meant." The woodpecker
turned his head and watched us suspiciously like a paranoid old man.
"And what are your politics, if you're such a radical?" I asked.
"I believe that government governs best of all that governs least of all. Preferably not at all. And I
believe in the laissez faire capitalist economic system."
"Then you must hate my politics. Why did you rescue me?"
"You're wanted," she said.
"By whom?"
"Hagbard Celine."
"And who is Hagbard Celine?" We had reached the cabana and were standing beside it, facing each
other, glaring at each other. The woodpecker turned his head and looked at us with the other eye.
"What is John Guilt?" Mavis said. I might have guessed, I thought, a Hope fiend. She went on, "It
took a whole book to answer that one. As for Hagbard, you'll learn by seeing. Enough for now that
you know that he's the man who requested that we rescue you."
"But you personally don't like me and would not have gone out of your way to help me?"
"I don't know about not liking you. That splotch of come on your trousers has had me horny ever
since Mad Dog. Also the excitement of the raid. I've got some tension to burn off. I'd prefer to save
myself for a man who completely meets the criteria of my value system. But I could get awfully
horny waiting for him. No regrets, no guilt, though. You're all right. You'll do." "What are you
talking about?" "I'm talking about your fucking me, George." "I never knew a girl-I mean womanwho
believed in the capitalist system who was any kind of a good fuck."
"What has your pathetic circle of acquaintances got to do with the price of gold? I doubt you ever
met a woman who believed in the real laissez faire capitalist system. Such a woman is not likely to
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 46 von 470
be caught traveling in your left-liberal circles." She took me by the hand and led me into the cabana.
She shrugged out of her trench coat and spread it carefully on the floor. She was wearing a black
sweater and a pair of blue jeans, both tight-fitting. She pulled the sweater off over her head. She was
wearing no bra, and her breasts were apple-sized cherry-tipped cones. There was some sort of dark
red birthmark between them.
"Your kind of capitalist woman was a Nixonette in 1972, and she believes in that half-ass corporate
socialist bastard fascist mixed economy Frank Roosevelt blessed these United States with." She
unbuckled her wide black belt and unzipped her jeans. She tugged them down over her hips. I felt my
hardon swelling up inside my pants. "Libertarian women are good fucks, because they know what
they want, and what they want they like a lot." She stepped out of her jeans to reveal, of all things,
panties made of some strange metallic-looking synthetic material that was gold in color.
How can I know facts hard and sharp-edged in the sunlight and keep them straight when this
happens? "You really want me to fuck you right now on this public beach in broad daylight?" The
woodpecker went to work above us just then, banging away like a rock drummer, I suddenly
remembered from high school:
The Woodpecker pecked on the out-house door; He pecked and he pecked till his pecker was sore....
"George, you're too serious. Don't you know how to play? Did you ever think that life is maybe a
game? There is no difference between life and a game, you know. When you play, for instance,
playing with a toy, there is no winning or losing. Life is a toy, George, I'm a toy. Think of me as a
doll. Instead of sticking pins in me, you can stick your thing in me. Fm a magic doll, like a voodoo
doll. A doll is a work of art. Art is magic. You make an image of the thing you want to possess or
cope with, so you can cope with it. You make a model, so you have it under control. Dig? Don't you
want to possess me? You can, but just for a moment."
I shook my head. "I can't believe you. The way you're talking-it's not real."
"I always talk like this when I'm horny. It happens that at such times I'm more open to the vibrations
from outer space. George, are unicorns real? Who made unicorns? Is a thought about unicorns a real
thought? How is it different from the mental picture of my pussy-which you've never seen-that
you've got in your head at this minute? Does the fact that you can think of fucking me and I can think
of fucking with you mean we are going to fuck? Or is the universe going to surprise us? Wisdom is
wearying, folly is fun. What does a horse with a single long horn sticking straight out of its head
mean to you?"
My eyes went from the pubic bulge under her gold panties, where they'd strayed when she said
"pussy," to the mark between her breasts.
It wasn't a birthmark. I felt like a bucket of ice water hit my groin.
I pointed. "What does a red eye inside a red-and-white triangle mean to you?"
Her open hand slammed against my jaw. "Motherfucker! Never speak to me about that!"
Then she bowed her head. "I'm sorry, George. I had no right to do that. Hit me back, if you want."
"I don't want. But I'm afraid you've turned me off sexually."
"Nonsense. You're a healthy man. But now I want to give you something without taking anything
from you." She knelt before me on her trench coat, her knees parted, unzipped my fly, reached in
with quick, tickling fingers, and pulled my penis out. She slipped her mouth around it. It was my jail
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 47 von 470
fantasy coming true.
"What are you doing?"
She took her lips away from my penis, and I looked down and saw that the head was shiny with
saliva and swelling visibly in rapid throbs. Her breasts-my glance avoided the Masonic tattoo-were
somewhat fuller, and the nipples stuck out erect.
She smiled. "Don't whistle while you're pissing, George, and don't ask questions when you're getting
blowed. Shut up and get hard. This is just quid pro quo."
When I came I didn't feel much juice jetting out through my penis; I'd used a lot up whacking off in
jail. I noted with pleasure that what there was of it she didn't spit out. She smiled and swallowed it.
The sun was higher and hotter in the sky and the woodpecker celebrated by drumming faster and
harder. The Gulf sparkled like Mrs. Aster's best diamonds. I peered out at the water: just below the
horizon there was a flash of gold among the diamonds.
Mavis suddenly struck her legs out in front of her and dropped onto her back. "George! I can't give
without taking. Please, quick, while it's still hard, get down here and slip it to me."
I looked down. Her lips were trembling. She was tugging the gold panties away from her blackescutcheoned
crotch. My wet cock was already beginning to droop. I looked down at her and
grinned.
"No," I said. "I don't like girls who slap you one minute and get the hots for you the next minute.
They don't meet the criteria of my value system. I think they're nuts." Carefully and deliberately I
stuffed my pecker back into my trousers and stepped away from her. It was sore anyway, like in the
rhyme.
"You're not such a schmuck after all, you bastard," she said through gritted teeth. Her hand was
moving rapidly between her legs. In a moment she arched her back, eyes clenched tight, and emitted
a little scream, like a baby seagull out on its first flight, a strangely virginal sound.
She lay relaxed for a moment, then picked herself up off the cabana floor and started to dress. She
glanced out at the water and I followed her eyes. She pointed at the distant glint of gold.
"Hagbard's here."
A buzzing sound floated across the water. After a moment, I spotted a small black motorboat coming
toward us. We watched in silence as the boat grounded its bow on the white beach. Mavis motioned
at me, and I followed her down the sand to the water's edge. There was a man in a black turtleneck
sweater sitting in the stern of the boat. Mavis climbed in the bow and turned to me with a questioning
look. The woodpecker felt bad vibes and took off with a flapping and cawing like the omen of
Doom.
What the hell am I getting into, and why am I so crazy as to go along? I tried to see what it was out
there that the motorboat had come from, but the sun on the gold metal was flashing blindingly and I
couldn't make out a shape. I looked back at the black motorboat and saw that there was a circular
gold object painted on the bow and there was a little black flag flying at the stern with the same gold
object in its center. I pointed at the emblem on the bow.
"What's that?"
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 48 von 470
"An apple," said Mavis.
People who chose a golden apple as their symbol couldn't be all bad. I jumped into the boat, and its
pilot used an oar to push off. We buzzed over the smooth water of the Gulf toward the golden object
on the horizon. It was still blinding from reflected sunlight, but I was now able to make out a long,
low silhouette with a small tower in the center, like a matchbox on top of a broomstick. Then I
realized that I had my judgment of distances wrong. The ship, or whatever it was, was much more
distant than I'd first realized.
It was a submarine-a golden submarine-and it appeared to be the equivalent of five city blocks long,
as big as the biggest ocean liner I had ever heard of. The conning tower was about three stories high.
As we drew up beside it I saw a man on the tower waving to us. Mavis waved back. I waved
halfheartedly, supposing somehow that it was the thing to do. I was still thinking about that Masonic
tattoo.
A hatch opened in the submarine's side, and the little motorboat floated right in. The hatch closed,
the water drained out, and the boat settled into a cradle. Mavis pointed to a door that looked like an
entrance to an elevator.
"You go that way," she said. "I'll see you later, maybe."
She pressed a button and the door opened, revealing a carpeted gilt cage. I stepped in and was
whisked up three stories. The door opened and I stepped out into a small room where a man was
waiting, standing with a grace that reminded me of a Hindu or an American Indian. I thought at once
of Metternich's remark about Talleyrand: "If somebody kicked him in the backside, not a muscle
would move in his face until he decided what to do."
He bore a striking resemblance to Anthony Quinn; he had thick black eyebrows, olive skin, and a
strong nose and jaw. He was big and burly, powerful muscles bulging under his black-and-green
striped nautical sweater. He held out his hand.
"Good, George. You made it. I'm Hagbard Celine."
We shook hands; he had a grip like King Kong. "Welcome aboard the Lief Erickson, named after the
first European to reach America from the Atlantic side, may my Italian ancestors forgive me.
Fortunately, I have Viking ancestors, as well. My mother is Norwegian. However, blond hair, blue
eyes, and fair skin are all recessive. My Sicilian father creamed my mother in the genes."
"Where the hell did you get this ship? I wouldn't have believed a submarine like this could exist
without the whole world knowing about it."
"The sub's my creation, built in accordance with my design in a Norwegian fjord. This is what the
liberated mind can do. I am the twentieth-century Leonardo, except that I'm not gay. I've tried it, of
course, but women interest me more. The world has never heard of Hagbard Celine. That is because
the world is stupid and Celine is very smart. The submarine is radar and sonar transparent. It is
superior to the best either the American or Russian government even has on the drawing board. It can
go to any depth in any ocean. We've sounded the Atlantic Trench, the Mindinao Deep, and a few
holes in the floor of the sea that no one's ever heard of or named. Lief Erickson is capable of meeting
the biggest, most ferocious, and smartest monsters of the deep, of which we've found God's plenty.
I'd even risk her in battle with Leviathan himself, though I'm just as pleased that we've only seen him
from afar hitherto."
"You mean whales?"
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 49 von 470
"I mean leviathan, man. That fish-if fish it be-that is to your whale what your whale is to your
meanest guppy. Don't ask me what Leviathan is-I haven't even gotten close enough to tell you his
shape. There's only one of him, her, or it in all that world that's water. I don't know how it
reproduces-maybe it doesn't have to reproduce-maybe it's immortal. It may be neither plant nor
animal for all I know, but it's alive, and it's the biggest living thing there is. Oh, we've seen monsters,
George. We've seen, in Lief Erickson, the sunken ruins of Atlantis and Lemuriaor Mu, as it's known
to keepers of the Sacred Chao."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" I asked, wondering if I 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.
"I'm talking about adventure, George. I'm talking about seeing things and being with people that will
really liberate your mind-not just replacing liberalism with Marxism so you can shock your parents.
I'm talking about getting altogether off the grubby plane you live on and taking a trip with Hagbard
to a transcendental universe. Did you know that on sunken Atlantis there is a. pyramidal structure
built by ancient priests and faced with a ceramic substance that has withstood thirty thousand years
of ocean burial so that the pyramid is clean and white as polished ivory-except for the giant red
mosaic of an eye at its top?"
"I find it hard to believe that Atlantis ever existed," I said. "In fact"-I shook my head angrily-"you're
conning me into qualifying that. The fact is I simply don't believe Atlantis ever existed. This is pure
bullshit."
"Atlantis is where we're going next, friend. Do you trust the evidence of your senses? I hope so,
because you'll see Atlantis and the pyramid, just as I said. Those bastards, the Illuminati, are trying to
get gold to further their conspiracies by looting an Atlantean temple. And Hagbard is going to foil
them by robbing it first. Because I fight the Illuminati every chance I get. And because I'm an
amateur archeologist. Will you join us? You're free to leave right now, if you wish. I'll put you
ashore and even supply you with money to get back to New York."
I shook my head. "I'm a writer. I write magazine articles for a living. And even if ninety percent of
what you say is bullshit, moonshine, and the most elaborate put-on since Richard Nixon, this is the
best story I've ever come across. A nut with a gigantic golden submarine whose followers include
beautiful guerrilla women who blow up southern jails and take out the prisoners. No, I'm not leaving.
You're too big a fish to let get away."
Hagbard Celine slapped me on the shoulder. "Good man. You've got courage and initiative. You
trust only the evidence of your eyes and believe what no man tells you. I was right about you. Come
on down to my stateroom." He pressed a button and we entered the golden elevator and sank rapidly
till we came to an eight-foot-high archway barred by a silver gate. Celine pressed a button and the
elevator door and the gate outside both slid back. We stepped out into a carpeted room with a lovely
black woman sitting at one end under an elaborate emblem concocted of anchors, seashells, Viking
figureheads, lions, ropes, octopi, lightning bolts, and, occupying the central position, a golden apple.
"Kallisti," said Celine, saluting the girl.
"All hail Discordia," she answered.
"Aum Shiva," I contributed, trying to enter the spirit of the game.
Celine led me down a long corridor, saying, "You'll find this submarine is opulently furnished. I have
no need to live in monklike surroundings like those masochists who become naval officers. No
Spartan simplicity for me. This is more like an ocean liner or a grand European hotel of the
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 50 von 470
Edwardian era. Wait till you see my suite. You'll like your stateroom, too. To please myself, I built
this thing on the grand scale. No finicky naval architects or parsimonious accountants in my
business. I believe you've got to spend money to make money and spend the money you make to
enjoy money. Besides, I have to live in the damned thing."
"And what precisely is your business, Mr. Celine?" I asked. "Or should I call you Captain Celine?"
"You should certainly not. No bullshit authority titles for me. I'm Freeman Hagbard Celine, but the
conventional Mister is good enough. I'd prefer you called me by my first name. Hell, call me
anything you want to. If I don't like it, I'll punch you in the nose. If there were more bloody noses,
there'd be fewer wars. I'm in smuggling mostly. With a spot of piracy, just to keep ourselves on our
toes. But that only against the Illuminati and their communist dupes. We aim to prove that no state
has the right to regulate commerce in any way. Nor can it, when it is up against free men. My crew
are all volunteers. We have among us liberated sailors who were indentured to the navies of
America, Russia, and China. Excellent fellows. The governments of the world will never catch us,
because free men are always cleverer than slaves, and any man who works for a government is a
slave."
"Then you're a gang of Objectivists, basically? I've got to warn you, I come from a long line of labor
agitators and Reds. You'll never convert me to a right-wing position."
Celine reared back as if I had waved offal under his nose. "Objectivists?" he pronounced the word as
if I had accused him of being a child-molester. "We're anarchists and outlaws, goddam it. Didn't you
understand that much? We've got nothing to do with right-wing, left-wing or any other half-assed
political category. If you work within the system, you come to one of the either/or choices that were
implicit in the system from the beginning. You're talking like a medieval serf, asking the first
agnostic whether he worships God or the Devil. We're outside the system's categories. You'll never
get the hang of our game if you keep thinking in flat-earth imagery of right and left, good and evil,
up and down. If you need a group label for us, we're political non-Euclideans. But even that's not
true. Sink me, nobody of this tub agrees with anybody else about anything, except maybe what the
fellow with the horns told the old man in the clouds: Non serviam."
"I don't know Latin," I said, overwhelmed by his outburst.
"'I will not serve,'" he translated. "And here's your room."
He threw open an oaken door, and I entered a living room furnished in handsome teak and rosewood
Scandinavian, upholstered in bright solid colors. He hadn't been exaggerating about the scale: you
could have parked a Greyhound bus in the middle of the carpet and the room would still seem
uncluttered. Above an orange couch hung a huge oil painting in an elaborate gilt frame easily a foot
deep on all sides. The painting was essentially a cartoon. It showed a man in robes with long,
flowing white hair and beard standing on a mountaintop staring in astonishment at a wall of black
rock. Above his head a fiery hand traced flaming letters with its index finger on the rock. The words
it wrote were:
THINK FOR YOURSELF, SCHMUCK!
As I started to laugh, I felt, through the soles of my feet, an enormous engine beginning to throb.
And, in Mad Dog, Jim Cartwright said into a phone with a scrambler device to evade taps, "We let
Celine's crowd take Dorn, according to plan, and, Harry Coin is, ah, no longer with us."
"Good," said Atlanta Hope. 'The Four are heading for Ingolstadt. Everything is GO." She hung up
and dialed again at once, reaching Western Union. "I want a flat rate telegram, same words, twenty-
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 51 von 470
three different addresses," she said crisply. "The message is, 'Insert the advertisement in tomorrow's
newspapers.' Signature, 'Atlanta Hope.'" She then read off the twenty-three addresses, each located in
a large city in the United States, each a regional headquarters of God's Lightning. (The following
day, April 25, the newspapers in those cities ran an obscure ad in the personals columns; it said "In
thanks to Saint Jude for favors granted. A.W." The plot, accordingly, thickened.)
And then I sat back and thought about Harry Coin. Once I imagined I could make it with him: there
was something so repulsive, so cruel, so wild and psychopathic there . . . but, of course, it hadn't
worked. The same as every other man. Nothing. "Hit me," I screamed. "Bite me. Hurt me. Do
something." He did everything, the most agreeable sadist in the world, but it was the same as if be
had been the gentlest, most poetic English instructor at Antioch. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
. . . The closest miss was that strange banker, Drake, from Boston. What a scene. I'd gotten into his
office on Wall Street, seeking a contribution for God's Lightning. Old white-haired buzzard, between
sixty and seventy: typical of our wealthier members, I thought. I started the usual spiel, communism,
sexism, smut, and all the time his eyes were bright and hard as a snake's. It finally hit me that he
didn't believe a word of it, so I started to cut it off, and then he pulled out his checkbook and wrote
and held it up so I could see it. Twenty thousand dollars. I didn't know what to say, and I started
something about how all true Americans would appreciate this great gesture and so on, and he said,
"Rubbish. You're not rich but you're famous. I want to add you to my collection. Deal?" The coldest
bastard I ever met, even Harry Coin was human by comparison, yet his eyes were such a clear blue I
couldn't believe they could be so frightening, a real madman in a perfectly sane way, not even a
psychopath but something they don't have a name for, and it clicked, the humiliation of whoredom
and the predatory viciousness in his face plus the twenty grand; I nodded. He took me into a private
suite off of his business office and he touched one button, the lights dimmed, another button, down
came a movie screen, a third button, and I was watching a pornographic movie. He didn't approach
me, just watched, and I tried to get excited, wondering if the actress was really making it or just
faking it, and then a second film began, four of them this time in permutations and combinations, he
led me to the couch, every time I opened my eyes I could still see the film over his shoulder, and it
was the same, the same, as soon as he got his thing inside me, nothing, nothing, nothing, I kept
looking at the actors trying to feel something, and then, as he came, be whispered in my ear, "Heute
die Welt, Morgans das Sonnen-system!" That was the only time I almost made it Sheer terror that this
maniac knew. . . .
Later, I tried to find out about him, but nobody above me in the Order would say a word, and those
below me didn't know anything. But I finally found out: he was very big in the Syndicate, maybe the
top. And that's how I figured out that the old rumor was true, the Syndicate was run by the Order,
too, just like everything else. . . .
But that cold sinister old man never said another word about it. I kept waiting while we dressed,
when he gave me the check, when he escorted me to the door, and even his expression seemed to
deny that he had said it or knew what it meant. When he opened the door for me, he put an arm on
my shoulder and spoke, so his secretary could hear it, "May your work hasten the day when America
returns to purity." Even his eyes weren't mocking and his voice sounded completely sincere. And yet
he had read me to the core, knew I was faking, and guessed that terror alone could unlock my
reflexes: maybe he even knew that I had already tried physical sadism and it hadn't worked. Out on
Wall Street in the crowd, I saw a man with a gas mask- they were still rare that year- and I felt the
whole world was moving faster than I could understand and that the Order wasn't telling me nearly
as much as I needed to know.
Brother Beghard, who is actually a politician in Chicago under his "real" name, once explained the
Law of Fives to me in relation to the pyramid-of-power principle. Intellectually, I understand: it's the
only way we can work, each group a separate vector so that the most any infiltrator can learn is a
small part of the design. Emotionally, though, it does get frightening at times: do the Five at the top
really have the whole picture? I don't know, and I don't see how they can predict a man like Drake or
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 52 von 470
guess what he's planning next There's a paradox here, I know:
I joined the Order seeking power, and now I am more a tool, an object, than ever before. If a man
like Drake ever thought that, he might tear the whole show apart.
Unless the Five really do have the powers they claim; but I'm not gullible enough to believe that bull.
Some of it's hypnotism, and some is plain old stage magic, but none of it is really supernatural.
Nobody has sold me on a fairy tale since my uncle got into me when I was twelve with his routine
about stopping the bleeding. If my parents had only told me the truth about menstruation in
advance ...
Enough of that. There was work to be done. I hit the buzzer on my desk and my secretary, Mr.
Mortimer, came in. As I'd guessed, it was past nine o'clock and he'd been out there in the reception
area straightening up and worrying about my mood for God knows how long, while I was
daydreaming. I studied my memo pad, while he waited apprehensively. Finally, I noticed him and
said, "Be seated." He sank into the dictation chair, putting his head right under the point of the
lightning bolt on the wall- an effect I always enjoyed- and opened his pad.
"Call Zev Hirsch in New York," I said watching his pencil fly to keep up with my words. "The Foot
Fetishist Liberation Front is having a demonstration. Tell bun to cream them; I won't be satisfied
unless a dozen of the perverts are put in the hospital, and I don't care how many of our people get
arrested doing it The bail fund is available, if they need it. If Zev has any objections, I'll talk to him,
but otherwise you handle it. Then make up the standard number-two press release, where I deny any
knowledge of illegal activities-by that chapter and promise we will investigate and expel anybody
guilty of mob action— have that ready for release this afternoon. Then get me the latest sales figures
on Telemachus Sneezed. . . ." Another busy day at the national headquarters of God's Lightning was
started; and Hagbard Celine, feeding Mavis's report on George's sexual and other behavior into
FUCKUP, came out with a coding of C-1472-B-2317A, which caused him to laugh immoderately.
"What's so damned funny?" Mavis asked.
"From out of the west come the thundering hooves of the great horse, Onan," Hagbard grinned. "The
lonely stranger rides again!"
"What the hell does all that mean?"
"We've got sixty-four thousand possible personality types," Hagbard explained, "and I've only seen
that reading once before. Guess who it was?"
"Not me," Mavis said quickly, beginning to color.
"No, not you." Hagbard laughed again. "It was Atlanta Hope."
Mavis was startled. "That's impossible. She's frigid for one thing."
"There are many kinds of frigidity," Hagbard said. "It fits, believe me. She joined women's liberation
at the same age George joined Weatherman, and they both split after a few months. And you'd be
surprised how similar their mothers were, or how the successful careers of their older brothers annoy
them—"
"But George is a nice guy, underneath it all."
Hagbard Celine knocked an ash off his long Italian cigar. "Everybody is a nice guy, underneath it
all," he said. "What we become when the world is through messing us over is something else."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 53 von 470
At Chateau Thierry, in 1918, Robert Putney Drake looked around at the dead bodies, knew he was
the last man alive in the platoon, and heard the Germans start to advance. He felt the cold wetness on
his thighs before he realized he was urinating in his pants; a shell exploded nearby and he sobbed. "O
God, please, Jesus. Don't let them kill me. I'm afraid to die. Please, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . ."
Mary Lou and Simon are eating breakfast in bed, still naked as Adam and Eve. Mary Lou spread jam
on toast and asked, "No, seriously: which part was hallucination and which part was real?"
Simon sipped at his coffee. "Everything in life is a hallucination," he said simply. "Everything in
death, too," he added. "The universe is just putting us on. Handing us a line."
THE THIRD TRIP, OR BINAH
The Purple Sage cursed and waxed sorely pissed and cried out in a loud voice: A pox
upon the accursed Illuminati of Bavaria; may their seed take no root.
May their hands tremble, their eyes dim and their spines curl up, yea, verily, like unto
the backs of snails; and may the vaginal orifices of their women be clogged with Brillo
pads.
For they have sinned against God and Nature; they have made of life a prison; and they
have stolen the green from the grass and the blue from the sky.
And so saying, and grimacing and groaning, the Purple Sage left the world of men and
women and retired to the desert in despair and heavy grumpiness.
But the High Chapperal laughed, and said to the Erisian faithful: Our brother torments
himself with no cause, for even the malign Illuminati are unconscious pawns of the
Divine Plane of Our Lady.
—Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S.,
"The Book of Contradictions," Liber 555
October 23, 1970, was the thirty-fifth anniversary of the murder of Arthur Flegenheimer (alias "The
Dutchman," alias "Dutch Schultz"), but this dreary lot has no intention of commemorating that
occasion. They are the Knights of Christianity United in Faith (the group in Atlantis were called
Mauls of Lhuv-Kerapht United for the Truth; see what I mean?) and their president, James J.
(Smiling Jim) Treponema, has noted a bearded and therefore suspicious young man among the
delegates. Such types were not likely to be KCUF members and might even be dope fiends. Smiling
Jim told the Andy Frain ushers to keep a watchful eye on the young man so no "funny business"
could occur, and then went to the podium to begin his talk on "Sex Education: Communist Trojan
Horse in Our Schools." (In Atlantis, it was "Numbers: Nothingarian Squid-Trap in Our Schools."
The same drivel eternally.) The bearded young man, who happened to be Simon Moon, adviser to
Teenset magazine on II-luminati affairs and instructor in sexual yoga to numerous black young
ladies, observed that he was being observed (which made him think of Heisenberg) and settled back
in his chair to doodle pentagons on his note pad. Three rows ahead, a crew-cut middle-aged man,
who looked like a suburban Connecticut doctor, also settled back comfortably, awaiting his
opportunity: the funny business that he and Simon had in mind would be, he hoped, very funny
indeed.
WE SHALL NOT WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 54 von 470
There is a road going due east from Dayton, Ohio, toward New Lebanon and Brookville, and on a
small farm off that road lives an excellent man named James V. Riley, who is a sergeant on the
Dayton police force. Although he grieves the death of his wife two years back in '67 and worries
about his son, who seems to be in some shady business involving frequent travel between New York
City and Cuernavaca, the sergeant is basically a cheerful man; but on June 25, 1969, he was a bit out
of sorts and generally not up to snuff because of his arthritis and the seemingly endless series of
pointless and peculiar questions being asked by the reporter from New York. It didn't make sensewho
would want to publish a book about John Dillinger at this late date? And why would such a
book deal with Dillinger's dental history?
"You're the same James Riley who was on the Mooresville, Indiana, Force when Dillinger was first
arrested, in 1924?" the reporter had begun.
"Yes, and a smart-alecky young punk he was. I don't hold with some of these people who've written
books about him and said the long sentence he got back then is what made him bitter and turned him
bad. He got the long sentence because he was so snotty to the judge. Not a sign of repentence or
remorse, just wisecracks and a know-it-all grin spread all over his face. A bad apple from the start.
And always hellbent-for-leather. In a hurry to get God knows where. Sometimes folks used to joke
that there were two of him, he'd go through town so fast.
Rushing to his own funeral. Young punks like that never get long enough sentences, if you want my
opinion. Might slow them down a bit"
The reporter— what was his name again? James Mallison, hadn't he said?—was impatient. "Yes,
yes, I'm sure we need stricter laws and harsher penalties. But what I want to know was where was
Dillinger's missing tooth— on the right side or the left side of his face?"
"Saints in Heaven! You expect me to remember that after all these years?"
The reporter dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief— very nervous he seemed to be. "Look,
Sergeant, some psychologists say we never forget anything, really; it's all stored somewhere inside
our brain. Now, just try to picture John Dillinger as you remember him, with that know-it-all grin as
you called it Can you get the picture into focus? Which side is the missing tooth on?"
"Listen, I'm due to go on duty in a few minutes and I can't be—"
Mallison's faced changed, as if in desperation which he was trying to conceal. "Well, let me ask you
a different question. Are you a Mason?"
"A Mason? Bejesus, no—I've been a Catholic all my life, I'll have you know."
"Well, did you know any Masons in Mooresville? I mean, to talk to?"
"Why would I be talking to the likes of them, with the terrible things they're always saying about the
church?"
The reporter plunged on, "All the books on Dillinger say that the intended victim of that first
robbery, the grocer B. F. Morgan, summoned help by giving the Masonic signal of distress. Do you
know what that is?"
"You'd have to ask a Mason, and I'm sure they wouldn't be telling. The way they keep their secrets,
by the saints, I'm sure even the FBI couldn't find out."
The reporter finally left, but Sergeant Riley, a methodical man, filed his name in memory: James
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 55 von 470
Mallison — or had he said Joseph Mallison? A strange book he claimed to be writing about
Dillinger's teeth and the bloody atheistic Freemasons. There was more to this than met the eye,
obviously.
LIKE A TREE THAT'S PLANTED BY THE WATER WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED
Miskatonic University, in Arkham, Massachusetts, is not a well-known campus by any means, and
the few scholarly visitors who come there are an odd lot, drawn usually by the strange collection of
occult books given to the Miskatonic Library by the late Dr. Henry Armitage. Miss Doris Horus, the
librarian, had never seen quite such a strange visitor though, as this Professor J. D. Mallison who
claimed to come from Dayton, Ohio, but spoke with an unmistakable New York accent. Considering
his fur-tiveness, she found it no surprise that he spent the whole day (June 26, 1969) pouring over the
rare copy of Dr. John Dee's translation of the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred. That was the book
most of the queer ones went for; that or The Book of Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage.
Doris didn't like the Necronomicon, although she considered herself an emancipated and freethinking
young woman. There was something sinister, or to be downright honest about it, perverted
about that book and not in a nice, exciting way, but in a sick and frightening way. All those strange
illustrations, always with five-sided borders just like the Pentagon in Washington, but with those
people inside doing all those freaky sex acts with those other creatures who weren't people at all. It
was frankly Doris's opinion that old Abdul Alhazred had been smoking some pretty bad grass when
he dreamed up those things. Or maybe it was something stronger than grass: she remembered one
sentence from the text: "Onlie those who have eaten a certain alkaloid herb, whose name it were wise
not to disclose to the unilluminated, maye in the fleshe see a Shoggothe." I wonder what a
"Shoggothe" is, Doris thought idly; probably one of those disgusting creatures that the people in the
illustrations are doing those horny things with. Yech.
She was glad when J. D. Mallison- finally left and she could return the Necronomicon to its position
on the closed shelves. She remembered the brief biography of crazy old Abdul Alhazred that Dr.
Armitage had written and also given to the library: "Spent seven years in the desert and claimed to
have visited Irem, the city forbidden in the Koran, which Alhazred asserted was of pre-human origin.
. . ." Silly! Who was around to build cities before there were people? Those Shoggothes? "An
indifferent Moslem, he worshipped beings whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu."
And that insidious line: "According to contemporary historians, Alhazred's death was both tragic and
bizarre, since it was asserted that he was eaten alive by an invisible monster in the middle of the
market-place." Dr. Armitage had been such a nice old man, Doris remembered, even if his talk about
cabalistic numbers and Masonic symbols was a little peculiar at times; why would he collect such
icky books by creepy people?
The Internal Revenue Service knows this much about Robert Putney Drake: during the last fiscal
year, he earned $23,000,005 on stocks and bonds in various defense corporations, $17,000,523 from
the three banks he controlled, and $5,807,400 from various real-estate holdings. They did not know
that he also banked (in Switzerland) over $100,000,000 from prostitution, an equal amount from
heroin and gambling, and $2,500,000 from pornography. On the other hand, they didn't know either
about certain legitimate business expenses which he had not cared to claim, including more than
$5,000,000 in bribes to various legislators, judges and police officials, in all 50 states in order to
maintain the laws which made men's vices so profitable to him, and $50,000 to Knights of
Christianity United in Faith as a last-ditch effort to stave off total legalization of pornography and
the collapse of that part of his empire.
"What the deuce do you make of this?" Barney Muldoon asked. He was holding an amulet in his
hand. "Found it in the bedroom," he explained, holding it for Saul to examine the strange design:
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 56 von 470
"Part of it is Chinese," Saul said thoughtfully. "The basic design— two interlocking commas, one
pointing up and the other down. It means that opposites are equal."
"And what does that mean?" Muldoon asked sarcastically. "Opposites are opposite, not equal. You'd
have to be a Chinaman to think otherwise."
Saul ignored the comment. "But the pentagon isn't in the Chinese design— and neither is the apple
with the K in it. . . ." Suddenly, he grinned. "Wait, I'll bet I know what that is. It's from Greek
mythology. There was a banquet on Olympus, and Eris wasn't invited, because she was the Goddess
of Discord and always made trouble. So, to get even, she made more trouble: she created a beautiful
golden apple and wrote on it Kallisti. That means 'for the prettiest one' in Greek. It's what the K
stands for, obviously. Then she rolled it into the banquet hall, and, naturally, all the goddesses there
immediately claimed it, each one saying that she was 'the prettiest one.' Finally, old man Zeus
himself, to settle the squabble, allowed Paris to decide which goddess was the prettiest and should
get the apple. He chose Aphrodite, and as a reward she gave him an opportunity to kidnap Helen,
which led to the Trojan War."
"Very interesting," Muldoon said. "And does that tell us what Joseph Malik knew about the
assassinations of the Kennedys and this Illuminati bunch and why his office was blown up? Or where
he's disappeared to?"
"Well, no," Saul said, "but it's nice to find something in this case that I can recognize. I just wish I
knew what the pentagon means, too. . . ."
"Let's look at the rest of the memos," Muldoon suggested.
The next memo, however, stopped them cold:
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #9
7/28
J.M.:
The following chart appeared in the East Village Other, June 11, 1969, with the label
"Current Structure of the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy and the Law of Fives":
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 57 von 470
The chart hangs at the top of the page, the rest of which is empty space— as if the
editors originally intended to publish an article explaining it, but decided (or were
persuaded) to suppress all but the diagram itself.
Pat
"This one has to be some damned hippie or yippie hoax," Muldoon said after a long pause. But he
sounded uncertain.
"Part of it is," Saul said thoughtfully keeping certain thoughts to himself. "Typical hippie
psychology: mixing truth and fantasy to blow the fuses of the Establishment. The Elders of Zion
section is just a parody of Nazi ideology. If there really was a Jewish conspiracy to run the world, my
rabbi would have let me in on it by now. I contribute enough to the schule."
"My brother's a Jesuit," Muldoon added, pointing at the Society of Jesus square, "and he never
invited me into any worldwide conspiracy."
"But this part is almost plausible," Saul said, pointing to the Sphere of Aftermath. "Aga Khan is the
head of the Ishmaelian sect of Islam, and that sect was founded by Hassan i Sabbah, the 'old man of
the mountains' who led the Hashishism in the eleventh century. Adam Weishaupt is supposed to have
originated the Bavarian Illuminati after studying Sabbah, according to the third memo, so this part
fits together— and Hassan i Sabbah is supposed to be the first one to introduce marijuana and
hashish to the Western world, from India. That ties in with Weishaupt's growing hemp and
Washington's having a big hemp crop at Mount Vernon."
"Wait a minute. Look at how the whole design revolves around the pentagon. Everything else sort of
grows out of it"
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 58 von 470
"So? You think the Defense Department is the international hub of the Illuminati conspiracy?"
"Let's just read the rest of the memos," Muldoon suggested.
(The Indian Agent at the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin knows this: from the time Billie
Freschette returned there until her death in 1968, she received mysterious monthly checks from
Switzerland. He thinks he knows the explanation; despite all stories to the contrary, Billie did help to
betray Dillinger and this is the payoff. He is convinced of this. He is also quite wrong.)
". . . children seven and eight years old," Smiling Jim Trepomena is telling the KCUF audience, "are
talking about penises and vaginas—and using those very words! Now, is this an accident? Let me
quote you Lenin's own words...." Simon yawns.
Banana-Nose Maldonado evidently had his own brand of sentimentality or superstition, and in 1936
he ordered his son, a priest, to say one hundred masses for the salvation of the Dutchman's soul.
Even years afterward, he would defend the Dutchman in conversation: "He was OK, Dutch was, if
you didn't cross him. If you did, forget it; you were finished. He was almost a Siciliano about that.
Otherwise, he was a good businessman, and the first one with a real CPA mind in the whole
organization. If he hadn't gotten that crazy-head idea about gunning down Tom Dewey, he'd still be a
big man. I told him myself. 'You kill Dewey,' I said, 'and the shit hits the fan everywhere. The boys
won't take the risk; Lucky and the Butcher want to cowboy you right now.' But he wouldn't listen.
'Nobody fucks with me,' he said. 'I don't care if his name is Dewey, Looey, or Phooey. He dies' A
real stubborn German Jew. You couldn't talk to him. I even told him how Capone helped set up
Dillinger for the Feds just because of the heat those bank-heists were bringing down.
You know what he said? He said: 'You tell Al that Dillinger was a lone wolf. I have my own pack.'
Too bad, too bad, too bad. I'll light another candle for him at church Sunday."
HAND IN HAND TOGETHER WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED
Rebecca Goodman closes her book wearily and stares into space, thinking about Babylon. Her eyes
focus suddenly on the statue Saul had bought her for her last birthday: the mermaid of Copenhagen.
How many Danes, she wonders, know that this is one form of representation of the Babylonian sex
goddess Ishtar? (In Central Park, Perri the squirrel is beginning to hunt for the day's food. A French
poodle, held on a leash by a mink-coated lady, barks at him, and he runs three times around a tree.)
George Dorn looks at the face of a corpse: it is his own face. "In Wyoming, after one sex-education
class in a high school, the teacher was raped by seventeen boys. She said later she would never teach
sex in school again." Making sure he is alone in the Meditation Room of the UN building, the man
calling himself Frank Sullivan quickly moves the black plinth aside and descends the hidden stairs
into the tunnel. He is thinking, whimsically, that hardly anybody realizes that the shape of the room
is the same as the truncated pyramid on the dollar bill, or guesses what that means. "In Wilmette,
Illinois, an 8-year-old boy came home from a sensitivity training class and tried to have intercourse
with his 4-year-old sister." Simon gave up on his pentagons and began doodling pyramids instead.
Above, beyond Joe Malik's window, Saul Goodman gave up on the line of thought which had led
him to surmise that the Illuminati were a front for the International Psychoanalytical Society,
conspiring to drive everyone paranoid, and turned back to the desk and the memos. Barney Muldoon
came in from the bedroom, carrying a strange amulet, and asked, "What do you make of this?" Saul
looked at a design of an apple and a pentagon . . . and, several years earlier, Simon Moon looked at
the same medallion.
"They call it the Sacred Chao," Padre Pederastia said. They sat alone at a table pulled off to the
corner; the Friendly Stranger was the same as ever, except that a new group, the American Medical
Association (consisting, naturally, of four kids from Germany), had replaced H. P. Lovecraft in the
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 59 von 470
back room. (Nobody knew that the AMA was going to become the world's most popular rock group
within a year, but Simon already thought they were superheavy). Padre Pederastia was, as on the
night Simon met Miss Mao, very serious and hardly camping at all.
"Sacred Cow?" Simon asked.
"It's pronounced that way, but you spell it c-h-a-o. A chao is a single unit of chaos, they figure." The
Padre smiled.
"Too much, they're nuttier than the SSS," Simon objected.
"Never underestimate absurdity, it is one door to the Imagination. Do I have to remind you of that?"
"We have an alliance with them?" Simon asked.
"The JAMs can't do it alone. Yes, we have an alliance, as long as it profits both parties. John— Mr.
Sullivan himself authorized this."
"OK. What do they call themselves?"
"The LDD." The Padre permitted himself a smile. "New members are told the initials stand for
Legion of Dynamic Discord. Later on, quite often, the leader, a most fetching scoundrel and madman
named Celine, sometimes tells them it really stands for Little Deluded Dupes. That's the pans
asinorum, or an early pans asinorum, in Celine's System. He judges them by how they react to that."
"Celine's System?" Simon asked warily.
"It leads to the same destination as ours— more or less— by a somewhat wilder and woollier path."
"Right-hand or left-hand path?"
"Right-hand," the priest said. "All absurdist systems are right-hand. Well, almost all. They don't
invoke You-Know-Who under any circumstances. They rely on Discordia... do you remember your
Roman myths?
"Enough to know that Discordia is just the Latin equivalent of Eris. They're part of the Erisian
Liberation Front, then?" Simon was beginning to wish he were stoned; these conspiratorial
conversations always made more sense when he was slightly high. He wondered how people like the
President of the U.S. or the Chairman of the Board of GM were able to plot such intricate games
without being on a trip at the time. Or did they take enough tranquilizers to produce a similar effect?
"No," the priest said flatly. "Don't ever make that mistake. ELF is a much more, um, esoteric outfit
than the LDD. Celine is on the activist side, like us. Some of his capers make Morituri or God's
Lightning look like Trappists by comparison. No, ELF will never get on Mr. Celine's trip."
"He's got an absurdist yoga and an activist ethic?" Simon reflected. "The two don't mix."
"Celine is a walking contradiction. Look at his symbol again."
"I've been looking at it and that pentagon worries me. Are you sure he's on our side?"
The American Medical Association came to some kind of erotic or musical climax and the priest's
answer was drowned out. "What?" Simon asked, after the applause died down.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 60 von 470
"I said," Padre Pederastia whispered, "that we're never sure anybody is on our side. Uncertainty is the
name of the game."
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #10
7/28
J.M.:
On the origin of the pyramid-and-eye symbol, test your credulity on the following yarn
from Flying Saucers in the Bible by Virginia Brasington (Saucerian Books, 1963, page
43.):
The Continental Congress had asked Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John
Adams to arrange for a seal for the United States of America. . . . None of the designs
they created or which were submitted to them, were suitable. . . .
Fairly late at night, after working on the project all day, Jefferson walked out into the
cool night air of the garden to clear his mind. In a few minutes he rushed back into the
room, crying, jubilantly: "I have it! I have it!" Indeed, he did have some plans in his
hands. They were the plans showing the Great Seal as we know it today.
Asked how he got the plans, Jefferson told a strange story. A man approached him
wearing a black cloak that practically covered him, face and all, and told him that he (the
stranger) knew they were trying to devise a Seal, and that he had a design which was
appropriate and meaningful. . . .
After the excitement died down, the three went into the garden to find the stranger, but
he was gone. Thus, neither these Founding Fathers, nor anybody else, ever knew who
really designed the Great Seal of the United States!
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO
7/29
J.M.:
The latest I've found on the eye-and-pyramid is in a San Francisco underground paper
(Planet, San Francisco, July 1969, Vol. I, No.4.), suggesting it as a symbol for Timothy
Leary's political party when he was running for governor of California instead of just
running:
The emblem is a tentative design for the Party's campaign button. One wag suggests that
everyone cut out the circle from the back of a dollar bill and send the wholly dollar to
Governor Leary so he can wallpaper his office with them. Then paste the emblem on
your front door to signify your membership in the party.
Translations: The year of the beginning New Secular Order
Both translations are wrong, of course. Annuit Coeptis means "he blesses our beginning"
and Novus Ordo Se~ clorem means "a new order of the ages." Oh, well, scholarship was
never the hippies' strong point. But — Tim Leary an Illuminatus?
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 61 von 470
And pasting the Eye on the door — I can't help but think of the Hebrews marking their
doorways with the blood of a lamb so that the Angel of Death would pass by their
houses.
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #12
8/3
J.M.:
I've finally found the basic book on the Illuminati: Proofs of a Conspiracy by John
Robison (Christian Book Club of America, Hawthorn, California, 1961; originally
published in 1801). Robison was an English Mason who discovered through personal
experience that the French Masonic lodges— such as the Grand Orient— were
Illuminati fronts and were the main instigators of the French Revolution, His whole
book is very explicit about how Weishaupt worked: every infiltrated Masonic group
would have several levels, like an ordinary Masonic lodge, but as candidates advanced
through the various degrees they would be told more about the real purposes of the
movement. Those at the bottom simply thought they were Masons; in the middle levels,
they knew they were engaged in a great project to change the world, but the exact nature
of the change was explained to them according to what the leaders thought they were
prepared to know. Only those at the top knew the secret, which— according to
Robison— is this: the Illuminati aims to overthrow all government and religion, setting
up an anarcho-communist free-love world, and, because "the end justifies the means" (a
principle Weishaupt acquired from his Jesuit youth), they didn't care how many people
they killed to accomplish that noble purpose. Robison knows nothing of earlier
Illuminati movements, but does say specifically that the Bavarian Illuminati was not
destroyed by the government's crackdown in 1785 but was, in fact, still active, both in
England and France and possibly elsewhere, when he wrote, in 1801. On page 116,
Robison lists their existing lodges as follows: Germany (84 lodges); England (8 lodges);
Scotland (2); Warsaw (2); Switzerland (many); Rome, Naples, Ancona, Florence,
France, Holland, Dresden (4); United States of America (several). On page 101, he
mentions that there are 13 ranks in the Order; this may account for the 13 steps on their
symbolic pyramid. Page 84 gives the code name of Weishaupt, which was Spartacus; his
second-in-command, Freiherr Knigge, had the code name Philo (page 117); this is
revealed in papers seized by the Bavarian government in a raid on the home of a lawyer
named Zwack, who had the code name Cato. Babeuf, the French revolutionary,
evidently took the name Gracchus in imitation of the classical style of these titles.
Robison's conclusion, page 269, is worth quoting:
Nothing is as dangerous as a mystic Association. The object remaining a secret in the
hands of the managers, the rest simply put a ring in their own noses, by which they may
be led about at pleasure; and still panting after the secret they are the more pleased the
less they see.
Pat
At the bottom of the page was a note in pencil, scrawled with a decisive masculine hand. It said: "In
the beginning was the Word and it was written by a baboon."
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #13
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 62 von 470
8/5
J.M.:
The survival of the Bavarian Illuminati throughout the nineteenth century and into the
twentieth is the subject of World Revolution by Nesta Webster (Constable and
Company, London, 1921). Mrs. Webster follows Robison fairly closely on the early
days of the movement, up to the French Revolution, but then veers off and says that the
Illuminati never intended to create their Utopian anarcho-communist society: that was
just another of their masks. Their real purpose was dictatorship over the world, and so
they soon formed a secret alliance with the Prussian government. All subsequent
socialist, anarchist, and communist movements are mere decoys, she argues, behind
which the German General Staff and the Illuminati are plotting to overthrow other
governments, so Germany can conquer them. (She wrote right after England fought
Germany in the First World War). I see no way of reconciling this with the Birchers""
thesis that the Illuminati has become a front for the Rhodes Scholars to take over the
world for English domination. Obviously— as Robison states— the Illuminati say
different things to different people, to get them into the conspiracy. As for the links with
modern communism, here are some passages from her pages 234-45:
But now that the (First) Internationale was dead it became necessary for the secret
societies to reorganize, and it is at this crisis that we find that "formidable sect"
springing to life again—the original llluminati of Weishaupt. . . . What we do know
definitely is that the society was refounded in Dresden in 1880. . . . That it was
consciously modelled on its eighteenth century predecessor is clear from the fact that its
chief, one Leopold Engel, was the author of a lengthy panegyric on Weishaupt and his
Order, entitled Geschichte des Illuminaten Ordens (published in 1906). . . .
... In London a lodge called by the same name . . . carried on the rite of Memphis—
founded, it is said, by Cagliostro on Egyptian models— and initiated adepts into
illuminized Freemasonry. . . .
Was it ... a mere coincidence that in July 1889 an International Socialist Congress
decided that May 1, which was the day on which Weishaupt founded the Illuminati,
should be chosen for an annual International Labour demonstration?
Pat
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #14
8/6
J.M.:
And here's still another version of the origin of the Illuminati, from the Cabalist Eliphas
Levi (The History of Magic by Eliphas Levi, Borden Publishing Company, Los Angeles,
1963, page 65). He says there were two Zoroasters, a true one who taught white "right
hand" magic and a false one who taught black "left hand" magic. He goes on:
To the false Zoroaster must be referred the cultus of material fire and that
impious doctrine of divine dualism which produced at a later period the
monstrous Gnosis of Manes and the false principles of spurious Masonry.
The Zoroaster in question was the father of that materialized Magic which
led to the massacre of the Magi and brought their true doctrine at first into
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 63 von 470
proscription and then oblivion. Ever inspired by the spirit of truth, the
Church was forced to condemn— under the names of Magic,
Manicheanism, Illuminism and Masonry— all that was in kinship, remote
or approximate, with the primitive profanation of the mysteries. One signal
example is the history of the Knights Templar, which has been
misunderstood to this day.
Levi does not elucidate that last sentence; it is interesting, however, that Nesta Webster
(see memo 13) also traced the Illuminati to the Knights Templar, whereas Daraul and
most other sources track them Eastward to the Hashishim. Is all this making me
paranoid? I'm beginning to get the impression that the evidence has not only been
hidden in obscure books but also made confusing and contradictory to discourage the
researcher. . . .
Pat
Scrawled on the bottom of this memo was a series of jottings in the same masculine hand (Malik's,
Saul guessed) that had jotted the baboon reference on memo 12. The jottings said:
Check on Order of DeMolay
Eleven-fold DeMolay Cross. Eleven intersections, therefore 22 lines. The 22 Atus of
Tahuti? Why not 237?
TARO = TORA = TROA = ATOR = ROTA !?????
Abdul Alhazred = A:.A:.??!
"Oh, Christ," Barney groaned. "Oh, Mary and Joseph. Oh, shit. We'll end up either become mystics
or going crazy before this case is over. If there's any difference."
"The Order of DeMolay is a Masonic society for boys," Saul commented helpfully. "I don't know
what the Atus of Tahuti are, but that sounds Egyptian. Taro, usually spelled t-a-r-o-t, is the deck of
cards Gypsy fortune tellers use— and the word 'Gypsy' means Egyptian. Tora is the Law, in Hebrew.
We keep coming back to something that has roots in both Jewish mysticism and Egyptian magic. . .
."
"The Knights Templar were kicked out of the church," Barney said, "for trying to combine Christian
and Moslem ideas. Last year, my brother— the Jesuit— gave a lecture about how modern ideas are
just old heresies from the Middle Ages warmed over. I had to go for politeness' sake. I remember
something else he said about the Templars. They were engaged in what he called 'unnatural sex acts.'
In other words, they were faggots. Do you get the impression that all these groups related to the
Illuminati are all male? Maybe the big secret they're hiding so fanatically is that they're all some vast
worldwide homosexual plot. I've heard show-biz people complain about what they call the
'homintern,' a homo organization that tries to keep all the best jobs for other fruits. How does that
sound?"
"It sounds plausible," Saul said ironically. "But it also sounds plausible to say the Illuminati is a
Jewish conspiracy, a Catholic conspiracy, a Masonic conspiracy, a communist conspiracy, a banker's
conspiracy, and I suppose we'll eventually find evidence to suggest it's an interplanetary scheme
masterminded from Mars or Venus. Don't you see, Barney? Whatever they're really up to, they keep
creating masks so all sorts of scapegoat groups will get the blame for being the 'real' Illuminati." He
shook his head dismally. "They're smart enough to know they can't operate indefinitely without a few
people eventually realizing something's there, so they've taken that into account and arranged for an
inquisitive outsider to get all sorts of wrong ideas about who they are."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 64 von 470
"They're dogs," Muldoon said. "Intelligent talking dogs from the dog star, Sirius. They came here
and ate Malik. Just like they ate that guy in Kansas City, except that time they didn't get to finish the
job." He turned back and read from memo 8: "'. . . with his throat torn as if by the talons of some
enormous beast. No animal was reported missing from any of the local zoos.'" He grinned. "Lord
God, I'm almost ready to believe it."
"They're werewolves." Saul answered, grinning also. "The pentagon is the symbol of the werewolf.
Look at the Late Late Show some tune."
"That's the pentagram, not the pentagon." Barney lit a cigarette, adding. "This is really getting on our
nerves, isn't it?"
Saul looked up wearily and glanced around the apartment almost as if he were looking for its absent
owner. "Joseph Malik," he said aloud, "what can of worms have you opened? And how far back does
it go?"
WE SHALL NOT
WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED
In fact, for Joseph Malik the beginning was several years earlier, in a medley of teargas, hymn
singing, billy clubs, and obscenity, all of which were provoked by the imminent nomination for
President of a man named Hubert Horatio Humphrey. It began in Lincoln Park on the night of
August 25, 1968, while Joe was waiting to be teargassed. He did not know then that anything was
beginning; he was only conscious, in an acid, gut-sour way, of what was ending: his own faith in the
Democratic party.
He was sitting with the Concerned Clergymen under the cross they had erected. He was thinking,
bitterly, that they should have erected a tombstone instead. It should have said: Here lies the New
Deal.
Here lies the belief that all Evil is on the other side, among the reactionaries and Ku Kluxers. Here
lies twenty years of the hopes and dreams and sweat and blood of Joseph Wendall Malik. Here lies
American Liberalism, clubbed to death by Chicago's heroic peace officers.
"They're coming," a voice near him said suddenly. The Concerned Clergymen immediately began
singing, "We shall not be moved."
"We'll be moved, all right," a dry sardonic, W.C. Fields voice said quietly. "When the teargas hits,
we'll be moved." Joe recognized the speaker: it was novelist William Burroughs with his usual poker
face, utterly without anger or contempt or indignation or hope or faith or any emotion Joe could
understand. But he sat there, making his own protest against Hubert Horatio Humphrey by placing
his body in front of Chicago's police, for reasons Joe could not understand.
How, Joe wondered, can a man have courage without faith, without belief? Burroughs believed in
nothing, and yet there he sat stubborn as Luther. Joe had always had faith in something—Roman
Catholicism, long ago, then Trotskyism at college, then for nearly two decades mainstream
liberalism (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, "Vital Center") and now, with that dead, he was trying
desperately to summon up faith in the motley crowd of dope-and-as-trology-obsessed Yippies, Black
Maoists, old-line hardcore pacifists, and arrogantly dogmatic SDS kids who had come to Chicago to
protest a rigged convention and were being beaten and brutalized unspeakably for it.
Alien Ginsberg— sitting amid a huddle of Yippies off to the right— began chanting again, as he had
all evening: "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare. . . ." Ginsberg believed; he
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 65 von 470
believed in everything— in democracy, in socialism, in communism, in anarchism, in Ezra Pound's
idealistic variety of fascist economics, in Buckminster Fuller's technological Utopia, in D. H.
Lawrence's return to preindustrial pastoralism, and in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity,
Voodoo, astrology magic; but, above all, in the natural goodness of man.
The natural goodness of man . . . Joe hadn't fully believed in that, since Buchenwald was revealed to
the world in 1944, when he was seventeen.
"KILL! KILL! KILL!" came the chant of the police,—exactly like the night before, the same
neolithic scream of rage that signaled the beginning of the first massacre. They were coming, clubs
in hand, spraying the teargas before them. "KILL! KILL! KILL!"
Auschwitz, U.S.A., Joe thought, sickened. If they had been issued Zyklon B along with the teargas
and Mace, they would be using it just as happily.
Slowly, the Concerned Clergymen came to their feet, holding dampened handkerchiefs to their faces.
Unarmed and helpless, they prepared to hold their ground as long as possible before the inevitable
retreat. A moral victory, Joe thought bitterly: All we ever achieve are moral victories. The immoral
brutes win the real victories.
"All hail Discordia," said a voice among the clergymen— a bearded young man named Simon, who
had been arguing in favor of anarchism against some SDS Maoists earlier in the day.
And that was the last sentence Joe Malik remembered clearly, for it was gas and clubs and screams
and blood from then on. He had no way of guessing, at the time, that hearing that sentence was the
most important thing that happened to him in Lincoln Park.
(Harry Coin curls his long body into a knot of tension, resting on his elbows and sighting the
Remington rifle carefully, as the motorcade passes the Book Depository and heads toward his perch
on the triple underpass. He could see Bernard Barker from the CIA down on the grassy knoll. If he
carried this off right, they promised him more jobs; it would be the end of petty crime for him, the
beginning of big-time money. In a way he was sorry: Kennedy seemed like a nice enough young
fellow—Harry would like to make it with both him and that hot-looking wife of his at the same
tune— but money talks and sentiment is only for fools. He released the bolt action, ignoring the
sudden barking of a dog, and took aim— just as the three shots resounded from the grassy knoll.
"Jesus Motherfuckin' Christ," he said; and then he caught the glint of the rifle in the Book Depository
window. Great God Almighty, how the fuck many of us are there here?" he cried out, scampering to
his feet and starting to run.)
It was almost a year after being clubbed—June 22, 1969—that Joe returned to Chicago, to witness
another rigged convention, to suffer further disillusionment, to meet Simon once more and to hear
the mysterious phrase "All hail Discordia" again.
The convention this time was the last ever held by the Students for a Democratic Society, and from
the first hour after it opened, Joe realized that the Progressive Labor faction had stacked all the cards
in advance. It was the Democratic party all over again— and it would have been equally bloody if
the PL boys had their own police force to "deal with" the dissenters known then as RYM-I and
RYM-II. Lacking that factor, the smoldering violence remained purely verbal, but when it was all
over another part of Joe Malik was dead and his faith in the natural goodness of man was eroded still
further. And so he found himself, aimlessly searching for something that was not totally corrupt,
attending the Anarchist Caucus at the old Wobbly Hall on North Halsted Street.
Joe knew nothing about anarchism, except that several famous anarchists—Parsons and Spies of
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 66 von 470
Chicago's Hay-market riot in 1888, Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts, and the Wobbly's own
poet-laureate, Joe Hill— had been executed for murders which they apparently hadn't really
committed. Beyond that, anarchists wanted to abolish government— a proposition so evidently
absurd that Joe had never bothered to read any of their theoretical or polemical works. Now,
however, eating the maggoty meat of his growing disillusionment with every conventional approach
to politics, he began to listen to the Wobblies and other anarchists with acute curiosity. After all, the
words of his favorite fictional hero, "When you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever
remains, however improbable, must be true."
The anarchists, Joe found, were not going to quit SDS—"We'll stay in and do some righteous asskicking,"
one of them said, to the applause and cheers of the others.
Beyond that, however, they seemed to be in a welter of ideological disagreement. Gradually, he
began to identify the conflicting positions expressed: the individualist-anarchists, who sounded like
right-wing Republicans (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); the
anarcho-syndicalists and Wobblies, who sounded like Marxists (except that they wanted to get rid of
all functions of government); the anarcho-pacifists, who sounded like Gandhi and Martin Luther
King (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); and a group who were
dubbed, rather affectionately, "the Crazies"—whose position was utterly unintelligible. Simon was
among the Crazies.
In a speech that Joe followed only with difficulty, Simon declared that "cultural revolution" was
more important than political revolution; that Bugs Bunny should be adopted as the symbol of
anarchists everywhere; that Hoffman's discovery of LSD in 1943 was a manifestation of direct
intervention by God in human affairs; that the nomination of the boar hog Pigasus for President of
the United States by the Yippies had been the most "transcendentally lucid" political act of the
twentieth century; and that "mass orgies of pot-smoking and fucking, on every street-corner" was the
most practical next step in liberating the world from tyranny. He also urged deep study of the tarot,
"to fight the real enemy with their own weapons," whatever that meant. He was launching into a
peroration about the mystic significance of the number 23— pointing out that 2 plus 3 equals 5, the
pentad within which the Devil can be invoked "as for example in a pentacle or at the Pentagon
building in Washington," while 2 divided by 3 equals 0.666, "the Number of The Beast, according to
that freaked-out Revelation of Saint John the Mushroom-head," that 23 itself was present esoterically
"because of its conspicuous exoteric absence" in the number series represented by the Wobbly Hall
address, which was 2422 North Halsted— and that the dates of the assassinations of John F.
Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, November 22 and 24, also had a conspicuous 23 absent in
between them— when he finally was shouted down, the conversation returned to a more mundane
level.
Half in whimsy and half in despair, Joe decided to perform one of his chronic acts of faith and
convince himself, at least for a while, that there was some kind of meaning in Simon's ramblings. His
equally chronic skepticism, he knew, would soon enough reassert itself.
"What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crises," Simon had said, "and insanity
is the only viable alternative." That was a paradox worth some kind of consideration.
"About that 23," Joe said, approaching Simon tentatively after the meeting broke up.
"It's everywhere," was the instant reply. "I just started to scratch the surface. All the great anarchists
died on the 23rd day of some month or other—Sacco and Vanzetti on August 23, Bonnie Parker and
Clyde Barrow on May 23, Dutch on October 23—and Vince Coll was 23 years old when he was shot
on 23rd Street—and even though John Dillinger died on the 22nd of July, if you look it up, like I did,
in Toland's book, The Dillinger Days, you'll find he couldn't get away from the 23 Principle, because
23 other people died that night in Chicago, too, all from heat prostration. 'Nova heat moving in,' dig?
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 67 von 470
And the world began on October 23, in 4004 B.C., according to Bishop Usher, and the Hungarian
Revolution started on October 23, too, and Harpo Marx was born on November 23, and—"
There was more of it, much more, and Joe patiently listened to all of it, determined to continue his
experiment in applied schizophrenia at least for this one evening. They retired to a nearby restaurant,
the Seminary, on Fullerton Street, and Simon rambled on, over beers, proceeding to the mystic
significance of the letter W—23rd in the alphabet— and its presence in the words "woman" and
"womb" as well as in the shape of the feminine breasts and spread-eagle legs of the copulating
female. He even found some mystic meaning in the W in Washington, but was strangely evasive
about explicating this.
"So, you see," Simon was explaining when the restaurant was starting to close, "the whole key to
liberation is magic. Anarchism remains tied to politics, and remains a form of death like all other
politics, until it breaks free from the defined 'reality' of capitalist society and creates its own reality.
A pig for President. Acid in the water supply. Fucking in the streets. Making the totally impossible
become the eternally possible. Reality is thermoplastic, not thermosetting, you know: I mean you can
reprogram it much more than people realize. The hex hoax— original sin, logical positivism, those
restriction and constriction myths— all that's based on a thermosetting reality. Christ, man, there are
limits, of course— nobody is nutty enough to deny that—but the limits are nowhere near as rigid as
we've been taught to believe. It's much closer to the truth to say there are no practical limits at all and
reality is whatever people decide to make it. But we've been on one restriction kick after another for
a couple thousand years now, the world's longest head-trip, and it takes real negative entropy to
shake up the foundations. This isn't shit; I've got a degree in mathematics, man."
"I studied engineering myself, a long time ago." Joe said. "I realize that part of what you say is true. .
. ."
"It's all true. The land belongs to the landlords, right now, because of magic. People worship the
deeds in the government offices, and they won't dare move onto a square of ground if one of the
deeds says somebody else owns it. It's a head-trip, a kind of magic, and you need the opposite magic
to lift the curse. You need shock elements to break up and disorganize the chains of command in the
brain, the 'mind-forg'd manacles' that Blake wrote about. That's the unpredictable elements, dads: the
erratic, the erotic, the Eristic. Tim Leary said it: 'People have to go out of their minds before they can
come to their senses.' They can't feel and touch and smell the real earth, man, as long as the manacles
in the cortex tell them it belongs to somebody else. If you don't want to call it magic, call it counterconditioning,
but the principle is the same. Breaking up the trip society laid on us and starting our
own trip. Bringing back old realities that are supposed to be dead. Creating new realities. Astrology,
demons, lifting poetry off of the written page into the acts of your daily life. Surrealism, dig?
Antonin Artaud and Andre Breton put it in a nutshell in the First Surrealist Manifesto: 'total
transformation of mind, and all that resembles it.' They knew all about the Illuminated Lodge,
founded in Munich in 1923, and that it controlled Wall Street and Hitler and Stalin, through
witchcraft. We gotta get into witchcraft ourselves to undo the hex they've cast on everybody's mind.
All hail Discordia! Do you read me?"
When they finally parted, and Joe headed back for his hotel, the spell ended. I've been listening to a
spaced-out acid-head all night, Joe thought in his cab headed south toward the Loop, and almost
managing to believe him. If I keep on with this little experiment, I will believe him. And that's how
insanity always begins: you find reality unbearable and start manufacturing a fantasy alternative.
With an effort of will, he forced himself back into his usual framework; no matter how cruel reality
was, Joe Malik would face it and would not follow the Yippies and Crazies in the joy ride to Cloud
Cuckoo Land.
But when he arrived at his hotel door, and noticed for the first time that he had Room 23, he had to
fight the impulse to call Simon on the phone and tell him about the latest invasion of surrealism into
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 68 von 470
the real world.
And he lay awake in his bed for hours remembering 23s that had occurred in his own life . . . and
wondering about the origin of that mysterious bit of 1929 slang, "23 Skidoo. ..."
After being lost for an hour in Hitler's old neighborhood, Clark Kent and His Supermen finally found
Ludwigstrasse and got out of Munich. "About forty miles and we'll be in Ingolstadt," Kent-
Mohammed-Pearson said. "At last," one of the Supermen groaned. Just then a tiny Volkswagen
inched past their VW bus, like an infant running ahead of its mother, and Kent looked bemused. "Did
you check out that cat at the wheel? I saw him once before, and never forgot it because he was acting
so weird. It was in Mexico City. Funny seeing him again, halfway around the world and umpteen
years later." "Go catch him," another Superman commented. "With the AMA and the Trashers and
other heavy groups we're going to get buried alive. Let's make sure that at least he knows we were in
Ingolstadt for this gig."
JUST LIKE A TREE THAT'S STANDING BY THE WAAAAA-AATER
The morning after the Wobbly meeting Simon telephoned Joe.
"Listen," he asked, "do you have to fly back to New York today? Can you possibly stay over a night?
I've got something I'd like you to see. It's time we started reaching people in your generation and
really showing you instead of just telling you. Are you game?"
And Joe Malik—ex-Trotskyist, ex-engineering student, ex-liberal, ex-Catholic—heard himself
saying, "Yes." And heard a louder voice, unspeaking, uttering a more profound "yes" deep inside
himself. He was game— for astrology, for I Ching, for LSD, for demons, for whatever Simon had to
offer as an alternative to the world of sane and rational men who were sanely and rationally plotting
their course toward what could only be the annihilation of the planet.
(WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED)
"God is dead," the priest chanted.
"God is dead," the congregation repeated in chorus.
"God is dead: we are all absolutely free," the priest intoned more rhythmically.
"God is dead," the congregation picked up the almost hypnotic beat, "we are all absolutely free."
Joe shifted nervously in his chair. The blasphemy was exhilarating, but also strangely disturbing. He
wondered how much fear of Hell still lingered in the back corridors of his skull, left over from his
Catholic boyhood.
They were in an elegant apartment, high above Lake Shore Drive—"We always meet here," Simon
had explained, "because of the acrostic significance of the street name"—and the sounds of the
automobile traffic far below mingled strangely with the preparations for what Joe already guessed
was a black Mass.
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," the priest chanted.
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," Joe repeated with the rest of the congregation.
The priest— who was the only one who had not removed his clothes before the beginning of the
ceremony— was a slightly red-faced middle-aged man in a Roman collar, and part of Joe's
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 69 von 470
discomfort derived from the fact that he looked so much like every Catholic priest he had known in
his childhood, It had not helped matters that he had given his name, when Simon introduced Joe to
him, as "Padre Pederastia"—which he pronounced with a very campy inflection, looking flirtatiously
directly in Joe's eyes.
The congregation divided, in Joe's mind, into two easily distinguishable groups: poor full-time
hippies, from the Old Town area, and rich part-time hippies, from Lake Shore Drive itself and, no
doubt, also from the local advertising agencies on Michigan Avenue. There were only eleven of
them, however, including Joe, and Padre Pederastia made twelve— where was the traditional
thirteenth?
"Prepare the pentad," Padre Pederastia commanded.
Simon and a rather good-looking young female, both quite unselfconscious in their nakedness, arose
and left the group, walking toward the door which Joe had assumed led to the bedroom area. They
stopped to take some chalk from a table on which hashish and sandal-wood incense were burning in
a goats-head taper, then squatted to draw a large pentagon on the blood-red rug. A triangle was then
added to each side of the pentagon, forming a star— the special kind of star, Joe knew, which was
known as pentagram, symbol of werewolves and also of demons. He found himself remembering the
corny old poem from the Lon Chancy, Jr., movies, but it suddenly didn't sound like kitsch anymore:
Even a man who is pure of heart
And says his prayers by night
Can turn to a wolf when the wolf bane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright
"I-O," the priest chanted raptly.
"I-O," the chorus came.
"I-O, E-O, Evoe," the chant rose weirdly.
"I-O, E-O, Evoe," the rhythmic reply came in cadence.
Joe felt a strange, ashy, acrid taste gathering in his mouth, and a coldness creeping into his toes and
fingers. The air, too, seemed suddenly greasy and unpleasantly, mucidly moist.
"I-O, E-O, Evoe, HE!" the priest screamed, in fear or in ecstasy.
"I-O, E-O, Evoe, HEr Joe heard himself joining the others. Was it imagination, or were all their
voices subtly changing, in a bestial and pongoid fashion?
"Ol sonuf vaoresaji," the priest said, more softly.'
"Ol sonuf vaoresaji," they chorused.
"It is accomplished," the priest said. "We may pass the Guardian."
The congregation arose and moved toward the door. Each person, Joe noticed, was careful to step
into the pentagram and pause there a moment gathering strength before actually approaching the
door. When it was his turn, he discovered why. The carving on the door, which had seemed merely
obscene and ghoulish from across the room, was more disturbing when you were closer to it. It was
not easy— to convince yourself that those eyes were just a trick of trompe I'oeil. The mind insisted
on feeling that they very definitely looked at you, not affectionately, as you passed.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 70 von 470
This—thing—was the Guardian which had to be pacified before they could enter the next room.
Joe's fingers and toes were definitely freezing, and auto-suggestion didn't seem a very plausible
explanation. He seriously wondered about the possibility of frostbite. But then he stepped into the
pentagram and the cold suddenly decreased, the eyes of the Guardian were less menacing, and a
feeling of renewed energy flowed through his body, such as he had experienced in a sensitivitytraining
session after he had been cajoled by the leader into unleashing a great deal of pent-up
anxiety and rage by kicking, screaming, weeping, and cursing.
He passed the Guardian easily and entered the room where the real action would occur.
It was as if he had left the twentieth century. The furnishings and the very architecture were Hebraic,
Arabic, and medieval European, all mixed together in a most disorienting way, and entirely
unrelieved by any trace of the modern or functional.
A black-draped altar stood in the center, and upon it lay the thirteenth member of the coven. She was
a woman with red hair and green eyes— the traits which Satan supposedly relished most in mortal
females. (There had been a time, Joe remembered, when any woman having those features was
automatically suspected of witchcraft.) She was, of course, naked, and her body would be the
medium through which this strange sacrament would be attempted.
What am I doing here? Joe thought frantically. Why don't 1 leave these lunatics and get back to the
world I know, the world where all the horrors are, after all, merely human?
But he knew the answer.
He could not— literally could not —attempt to pass the Guardian until all those present gave their
consent.
Padre Pederastia was speaking. "This part of the ceremony," he said, camping outrageously, "is very
distasteful to me, as you all know. If only Our Father Below would allow us to substitute a boy on
the altar when I'm officiating —but, alas, He is, as we all know, very rigid about such things. As
usual, therefore, I will ask the newest member to take my place for this rite."
Joe knew, from the Malleus malificarum and other grimoires, what the rite was, and he was both
excited and frightened.
He approached the altar nervously, noting the others forming a pentagon around the nude woman and
himself. She had a lovely body with large breasts and fine nipples, but he was still too nervous to
become aroused physically.
Padre Pederastia handed him the Host. "I stole this from the church myself," he whispered. "You can
be sure it is fully consecrated and completely potent. You know what to do?"
Joe nodded, unable to meet the priest's lascivious eyes.
He took the Host and spat upon it quickly.
The greasiness and electrically charged quality of the air seemed to increase sharply. The light
seemed harsher, like the glint of a sword, just as schizophrenics often described light as a hostile or
destructive force.
He stepped forward and placed the Host upon the thighs of the Bride of Satan.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 71 von 470
Immediately, she moaned softly, as if the simple touch were more erotic than one momentary contact
could possibly be. Her legs spread voluptuously and the middle of the Host crumpled as it sunk
slightly into her red pubic hair. The effect was, at once, powerful; her whole body shuddered and the
Host was drawn farther into her obviously moist cunt. Using his ringer, Joe pushed it the rest of the
way in, and she began breathing in a hoarse staccato rhythm.
Joe Malik knelt to complete the rite. He felt like a fool and a pervert; he had never performed oral
sex, or any kind of sex, in front of an audience before. He wasn't even turned on erotically. He went
ahead just to find out if there was any real magic in this revolting lunacy.
As soon as his tongue entered her, she began heaving and he knew her first orgasm would arrive
rapidly. His penis finally began swelling; he began licking the Host caressingly. Inside his temple, a
drum seemed to be beating hollowly; he hardly noticed it when she came. His senses spun and he
licked more, aware only that she flowed more heavily and thickly than any woman he had known.
He put his thumb in her anus, and his middle finger in her vagina, keeping his tongue in the clitoral
area, doing it up right— this was the technique occultists call the Rite of Shiva. (Irreverently, he
remembered that swingers call it the One-Man Band.) He felt an unusual electrical quality in her
pubic hair and was aware of a heaviness and tension in his penis more powerful than he had ever
known in his life, but all else was drowned out by the drumming in his head, the cunt-taste, cuntsmell,
cunt-warmth. . . . She was Ishtar, Aphrodite, Venus; the experience was so intense he began to
feel a real religious dimension to it. Hadn't some nineteenth century anthropologist argued that cuntworship
was the earliest religion? He didn't even know this woman and yet he had an emotion
beyond love: true reverence. Trippy, as Simon would say.
How many times she came, he never knew; he came himself, without once touching his penis, when
the Host was finally dissolved.
He staggered back dizzily, and the air now seemed as resistant to motion as brackish water.
"Yogge Sothothe Neblod Zin," the priest began chanting. "By Ashtoreth, by Pan Pangenitor, by the
Yellow Sign, by the gifts I have made and the powers I have purchased, by He Who Is Not to Be
Named, by Rabban and by Azathoth, by Samma-El, by Amon and Ra, vente, vente, Lucifer, lux fiat!"
Joe never saw it: he felt it— and it was like chemical Mace, blinding and numbing him at once.
"Come not in that form!" the priest screamed. "By Jesu Elohim and the Powers that You fear, I
command thee: come not in that form! Yod He Vah He—come not in that form."
One of the women began weeping in fear.
"Quiet, you fool," Simon shouted at her. "Don't give it more Power."
"Your tongue is bound, until I release it," the priest said to her— but the distraction of his attention
had its cost; Joe felt It growing in potency again, and so did the others, judging from their sudden
involuntary gasps.
"Come not in that form!" the priest shouted. "By the Cross of Gold, and by the Rose of Ruby, and by
Mary's Son, I command and demand it of thee: come not in that form! By thy Master, Chronzon! By
Pangenitor and Panphage, come not in that form!"
There was a hiss, like air pouring into a vacuum, and the atmosphere began to clear— but it also
dropped abruptly in temperature.
MASTER, CALL NO MORE UPON THOSE NAMES. I MEANT NOT TO ALARM THEE.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 72 von 470
The Voice was the most shocking experience of the night for Joe. It was oily, flattering, obscenely
humble, but there was still within it a secret strength that revealed all too well that the priest's power
over it, however obtained, was temporary, that both of them knew it, and that the price of that power
was something it longed to collect
"Come not in that form either," said the priest, more stern and more confident. "Ye know full well
that such tones and manners are also intended to frighten, and I like not such jokes. Come in this
form which thou habitually wearest in thy current earthly activities, or I shall banish thee back to that
realm of which you like not to imagine. I command. I command. I command." There was nothing
campy about the Padre now.
It was just a room again— an odd, medieval, mideastern room, but just a room. The figure that stood
among them could not have looked less like a demon.
"OK," it said in a pleasant American voice, "we don't have to get touchy and hostile with each other
over a little theatrics, do we? Just tell me what sort of business 'transaction you went and dragged me
here for, and I'm sure we can work out all the details in a down-home, businesslike, cards-on-thetable
fashion, with no hard feelings and mutual satisfaction all around."
It looked like Billy Graham.
("The Kennedys? Martin Luther King? You are fantastically naive still, George. It goes back much,
much farther." Hagbard was relaxing with some Alamout Black hash, after the Battle of Atlantis.
"Look at the pictures of Woodrow Wilson in his last months: The haggard look, the vague eyes, and,
in fact, symptoms of a certain slow-acting and undetectable poison. They slipped it to him at
Versailles. Or look into the Lincoln caper. Who opposed the greenback plan— the closest thing to
flaxscript America ever had? Stanton the banker. Who ordered all roads out of Washington closed,
except one? Stanton the banker. And Booth went straight for that road. Who got ahold of Booth's
diary afterward? Stanton the banker. And turned it over to the Archives with seventeen pages
missing? Stanton the banker. George, you have so much to learn about real history. . . .")
The Reverend William Helmer, religious columnist for Confrontation, stared at the telegram. Joe
Malik was supposed to be in Chicago covering the SDS convention; what was he doing in
Providence, Rhode Island, and what was he involved in that could provoke such an extraordinary
communication? Helmer reread the telegram carefully:
Drop next month's column. Will pay large bonus for prompt answers to these questions. First, trace
all movements of Reverend Billy Graham during last week and find out if he could possibly have
gotten to Chicago surreptitiously. Second, send me a list of reliable books on Satanism and
witchcraft in the modern world. Tell nobody else on the magazine about this. Wire me c/o Jerry
Mallory, Hotel Benefit, Providence, Rhode Island. P.S. find out where The John Dillinger Died for
You Society has its headquarters. Joe Malik.
Those SDS kids must have turned him on with acid, Helmer decided. Well, he was still the boss, and
he paid nice bonuses when he was pleased. Helmer reached for the phone.
(Howard, the dolphin, was singing a very satirical song about sharks, as he swam to meet the Lief
Erikson at Peos.)
James Walking Bear had no great love for palefaces most of the time, but he had just dropped six
peyote buttons before this Professor Mallory arrived and he was feeling benevolent and forgiving.
After all, the Road Chief once said at a very sacred midsummer peyote festival that the line about
forgiving those who trespass against us had a special meaning for Indians. Only when we all forgave
the whites, he had said, would our hearts be totally pure, and when our hearts were pure the Curse
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 73 von 470
would be lifted— the white men would cease to trespass, go home to Europe, and vex one another
instead of persecuting us. James tried to forgive the professor for being white and found, as usual,
that peyote made forgiveness easier.
"Billie Freschette?" he said. "Hell, she died back in sixty-eight."
"I know that," the professor said. "What I'm looking for is any photographs she may have left."
Sure. James knew what kind of photographs.
"You mean ones that had Dillinger in them?"
"Yes, she was his mistress, virtually his common-law wife, for a long time, and—"
"No soap. You're years too late. Reporters bought up everything she had that showed even the back
of Dillinger's head, way back, long before she came here to the reservation to die."
"Well, did you know her?"
"Sure." James was careful not be spiteful and didn't add: all Menominee Indians know one another,
in a way you whites can't understand "knowing."
"Did she ever converse about Dillinger?"
"Of course. Old women always talk about their dead men. Always say the same thing, too: never was
another man as good as him. Except when they say there never was another man as bad as him. They
only say that when they're drunk, though."
The paleface kept turning colors, the way people do when you're on peyote. Now he looked almost
like an Indian. That made it easier to talk to him.
"Did she ever say anything about John's attitude toward the Masons?"
Why shouldn't people turn colors? All the trouble in world came from the fact that they usually
stayed the same color. James nodded profoundly. As usual, peyote had brought him a big Truth. If
whites and blacks and Indians were turning colors all the time, there wouldn't be any hate in the
world, because nobody would know which people to hate.
"I said, did she ever mention John's attitude toward the Masons?"
"Oh. Oh, yes. Funny you should ask that." The man had a halo around his head now, and James
wondered what that meant. Every time he took peyote alone things like that would happen, and he'd
end up wishing there were a Road Chief or some other priest around to explain these signs properly.
But what about the Masons? Oh, yes. "Billie said the Masons were the only people John Dillinger
really hated. He said they railroaded him to prison the first time, and they owned all the banks, so he
was getting even by robbing them."
The professor's mouth dropped open in surprise and delight— and James thought it was kind of
funny to see that, especially with the halo turning from pink to blue to pink to blue to pink again at
the same time.
("A big mouth, a tiny brain/He only thinks of blood and pain," Howard sang.)
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 74 von 470
Notes found by a TWA stewardess in a seat vacated by a Mr. "John Mason" after a Madison,
Wisconsin, to Mexico City flight June 29, 1969: one week after the last SDS convention of all time:
"We only robbed from the banks what the banks robbed from the people"—Dillinger, Crown Point
Jail, 1934. Could have come from any anarchist text.
Lucifer— bringer of light.
Weishaupt's "illumination" & Voltaire's "enlightenment": from the Latin "lux" meaning light.
Christianity all in 3s (Trinity, etc.) Buddhism in 4s. Illuminism in 5s. A progression?
Hopi teaching: all men have 4 souls now, but in future will have 5 souls. Find an anthropologist for
more data on this.
Who decided the Pentagon building should have that particular shape?
"Kick out the Jams"??? Cross-check.
"Adam," the first man; "Weis," to know; "haupt," chief or leader. "The first man to be a leader of
those who know." Assumed name from the beginning?
lok-Sotot in Pnakotic manuscripts. Cd. be Yog-Sothoth?
D.E.A.T.H.—Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn. Does Pynchon know?
Must get Simon to explain the Yellow Sign and the Aklo chants. Might need protection.
C. says the h. neophobe type outnumbers us 1000-to-l. If so, all this is hopeless.
What gets me is how much has been out in the open for so long. Not just in Lovecraft, Joyce,
Melville, etc., or in the Bugs Bunny cartoons but in scholarly works that pretend to explain. Anybody
who wants to go to the trouble can find out, for instance, that the "secret' of the Eleusinian Mysteries
was the words whispered to the novice after he got the magic mushroom: "Osiris is a black God!"
Five words (of course!) but no historian, archeologist, anthropologist, folklorist, etc. has understood.
Or, those who did understand, didn't care to admit it. Can I trust C.? For that matter, can I trust
Simon?
This matter of Tlaloc should convince me, one way or the other.
("He only thinks of blood and slaughter/The shark should live on land not water.")
("To hell with the shark and all his kin/And fight like hell when you see his fin.")
When Joe Malik got off the plane at Los Angeles International Airport, Simon was waiting for him.
"We'll talk in your car," Joe said briefly.
The car, being Simon's, was naturally a psychedelic Volkswagen. "Well?" he asked as they drove out
of the airport onto Central Avenue.
"It all checks out," Joe said with an odd calm. "It did rain blue cats when they dug up Tlaloc. Mexico
City has had unusual and unseasonable rains ever since. The missing tooth was on the right, and the
corpse at the Biograph Theatre had a missing tooth on the left. Billy Graham couldn't have gotten to
Chicago by any normal means, so that was either the best damned makeup job in the history of show
business and plastic surgery or I witnessed a genuine miracle. And all the rest of it, the law of Fives
and all. I'm sold. I no longer claim membership in the liberal intellectual guild. You behold in me a
horrible example of creeping mysticism."
"Ready to try acid?"
"Yes," Joe said. "I'm ready to try acid. I only regret that I have but one mind to lose for my
Shivadarshana."
"Right on! First, though, you'll meet him. I'll drive right to his bungalow— it's not far from here."
Simon began humming as he drove; Joe recognized the tune as the Fugs' "Rameses II Is Dead, My
Love."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 75 von 470
They drove for a while in silence, and Joe finally asked, "How old is . . . our little group . . .
exactly?"
"Since 1888." Simon said. "That's when Rhodes horned in and they 'kicked out the Jams,' like I told
you in Chicago after the Sabbath."
"And Karl Marx?"
"A schmuck. A dupe. A nebbish from the word Go." Simon made an abrupt turn. "Here we are at his
house. The greatest headache they had since Harry Houdini knocked out their spiritualist fronts." He
grinned. "How do you think you'll feel talking to a dead man?"
"Weird," Joe said, "but I've felt weird for the last week and a half."
Simon parked the car and held the door open. "Just think," he said. "Hoover sitting there every day
with the death-mask on his desk, and half-suspecting, deep down in his bones, how we suckered
him."
They crossed the yard of the small, modest bungalow. "What a front, eh?" Simon chuckled. He
knocked.
A little old man— he was five foot seven exactly, Joe remembered from the FBI files— opened the
door.
"Here's our new recruit," Simon said simply.
"Come in," John Dillinger said, "and tell me how an asshole egghead like you can help us beat the
shit out of those motherfucking Illuminati cocksuckers."
("They fill their books with obscene words, claiming that this is realism," Smiling Jim shouted to the
KCUF assembly. "It's not my idea of realism. I don't know anybody who talks in that gutter language
they call realism. And they describe every possible perversion, acts against nature that are so
outrageous I wouldn't sully this audiences' ears by even mentioning their medical names. Some of
them even glorify the criminal and the anarchist. I'd like to see one of these hacks come up to me and
look me in the eye and say, 'I didn't do it for money. I was honestly trying to tell a good, honest story
that would teach people something of value.' They couldn't say that. The lie would stick in their
throats. Who can doubt where they get their orders from? What person in this audience needs to be
told what group is behind this overflowing sewer of smut and filth?")
"May storms and rains and typhoons beat them," Howard sang on. "May Great Cthulhu rise and eat
them"
"I got into the JAMs in Michigan City Prison," Dillinger, much relaxed and less arrogant, was saying
as he, Simon, and Joe sat in his living room drinking Black Russians.
"And Hoover knew, from the beginning?" Joe asked.
"Of course. I wanted the bastard to know— him and every other high-ranking Mason and
Rosicrucian and Illuminati front-man in the country." The old man laughed harshly; except for his
unmistakable eyes, which still held the strange blend of irony and intensity that Joe had noted in the
1930s photos, he was indistinguishable from any other elderly fellow who had come to California to
enjoy his last years in the sun. "The first bank job I pulled off, in Daleville, Indiana, I used the line
that I always repeated: 'Lie down on the floor and keep calm.' Hoover couldn't miss it. That's been
the motto of the JAMs ever since Diogenes the Cynic. He knew no ordinary bank robber would be
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 76 von 470
quoting an obscure Greek philosopher. The reason I repeated it on every heist was just to rub it in
and let him know I was taunting him."
"But going back to Michigan City Prison . . ." Joe prompted, sipping his drink.
"Pierpont was the one who initiated me. He'd been with the JAMs for years by then. I was just a kid,
you know— in my early twenties— rand I had only pulled one job, a real botch. I couldn't
understand why I got such a stiff sentence, after the D.A. promised me clemency if I'd plead guilty,
and I was kind of bitter. But old Harry Pierpont saw my potential.
"At first I thought he was just another big-house faggot, when he started tracking me around and
asking me all sorts of personal questions. But he was what I wanted to become —a successful bankrobber
—so I played along. To tell you the truth, I was so horny it wouldn't have mattered if he was a
faggot. You have no idea how horny a man gets in prison. That's why Baby-Face Nelson and a lot of
other guys preferred to die rather than go back to the big house again. Hell, if you haven't been there,
you can't understand. You just don't know what being horny is.
"Well, anyway, after a lot of bull about Jesus and Jehovah and the Bible and all that, Harry just asked
me point-blank one day in the prison yard: 'Do you think it's possible there might be a true religion?'
I was about to say, 'Bullshit— like there might be an honest cop,' but something stopped me. I
realized he was dead serious, and a lot might depend on my answer. So I was cautious. I said, 'If
there is, I haven't heard about it.' And he just came back, real quiet, 'Most people haven't.'
"It was a couple of days afterward that he brought the subject up again. Then, he went right on with
it, showed me the Sacred Chao and everything. It took my breath away." The old man's voice trailed
off, as he sank into silent memories.
"And it really does go back to Babylon?" Joe prompted.
"I'm not much of an intellectual," Dillinger replied. "Action is my arena. Let Simon tell you that
part."
Simon was eager to leap into the breach. "The basic book to confirm our tradition," he said, "is The
Seven Tablets of Creation, which is dated at about 2500 B.C. the time of Sargon. It describes how
Tiamat and Apsu, the first gods, were coexisting in Mummu, the primordial chaos. Von Junzt, in his
Unausprechlichen Kulten, tells how the Justified Ancients of Mummu originated, just about the time
the Seven Tablets were inscribed. You see, under Sargon, the chief deity was Marduk. I mean, that
was what the high priests gave out to the public— in private, of course, they worshipped lok-Sotot,
who became the Yog-Sothoth of the Necronomicon. But maybe I'm going too fast. Getting back to
the official religion of Marduk, it was based on usury. The priests monopolized the medium of
exchange and were able to extract interest for lending it. They also monopolized the land, and
extracted tribute for renting it. It was the beginning of what we laughingly call civilization, which
has always rested on rent and interest. The old Babylonian con.
"The official story was that Mummu was dead, killed in the war between the gods. When the first
anarchist group arose, they called themselves Justified Ancients of Mummu. Like Lao-Tse and the
Taoists in China, they wanted to get rid of usury and monopoly and all the other pigshit of
civilization and go back to a natural way of life. So, grok, they took the supposedly dead god,
Mummu, and claimed he was still alive and was actually stronger than all the other gods. They had a
good argument 'Look around,' they'd say, "what do you see most of? Chaos, right? Therefore, the god
of Chaos is the strongest god, and is still alive.'
"Of course, we got our ass whipped good. We were just no match for the Illuminati in those days.
Didn't have a clue, about how they performed their 'miracles,' for instance. So we got our asses
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 77 von 470
whipped again, in Greece, when the JAMs got started again, as part of the Cynic movement. By the
tune the whole thing was happening again in Rome— usury and monopoly and the whole bag of
tricks— the truce took place. The Justified Ancients became part of the Illuminati, a special group
still keeping our own name, but taking orders from the Five. We thought we'd humanize them, like
the anarchists who stayed in SDS after last year. And so it went until 1888. Then Cecil Rhodes
started the Circle of Initiates and the big schism occurred. Every meeting would have a faction of
Rhodes boys carrying signs that said 'Kick out the JAMs!' It was the parting of the ways. They just
didn't trust us— or maybe they were afraid of being humanized.
"But we had learned a lot by our long participation in the Illuminati conspiracy, and now we know
how to fight them with their own weapons."
"Fuck their weapons," Dillinger interrupted. "I like to fight them with my weapons."
"You are behind the big unsolved bank robberies of the last few years—"
"Sure. Just in the planning, though. I'm too old to vault over tellers' cages and carry on like I did back
in the thirties."
"John is also fighting on another front," Simon interjected.
Dillinger laughed. "Yes," he said. "I'm the president of Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Inc. You've
seen them— 'If it's not an LBJP it's NOT an L.P.'?
"Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus?" Joe exclaimed. "My God, you put out the best rock in the
country! The only rock a man my age can listen to without wincing."
"Thanks," Dillinger said modestly. "Actually, the Illuminati own the companies that put out most of
the rock. We started Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus to counterattack. We were ignoring that front
until they got the MC-5 to cut a disc called 'Kick Out The Jams' just to taunt us with old, bitter
memories. So we came back with our own releases, and the next thing I knew I was making bales of
money from it. We've also fed information, through third parties, to Christian Crusade in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, so they could expose some of what the Illuminati are doing in the rock field. You've seen
the Christian Crusade publications—Rhythm, Riots and Revolution, and Communism, Hypnotism and
the Beatles, and so forth?"
"Yes," Joe said absently. "I thought it was nut literature. It's so hard," he added, "to grasp the whole
picture."
"You'll get used to it," Simon smiled. "It just takes awhile to sink in."
"Who really did shoot John Kennedy?" Joe asked.
"I'm sorry," Dillinger said. "You're only a private in our army right now. Not cleared for that kind of
information yet. I'll just tell you this much: his initials are H.C.—so don't trust anybody with those
initials, no matter where or how you meet him."
"He's being fair," Simon told Joe. "You'll appreciate it later."
"And advancement is rapid," Dillinger added, "and the rewards are beyond your present
understanding."
"Give him a hint, John," Simon suggested with an anticipatory grin. "Tell him how you got out of
Crown Point Jail."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 78 von 470
"I've read two versions of that," Joe said. "Most of the sources claim you carved a fake gun out of
balsa wood and dyed it black with your shoe polish. Toland's book says that you made that story up
and leaked it out to protect the man who really managed the break for you —a federal judge that you
bribed to smuggle in a real gun. Which was it?"
"Neither," Dillinger said. "Crown Point was known as the 'escape-proof jail' before I crashed out of
it, and, believe me, it deserved the name. Do you want to know how I did it? I walked through the
walls. Listen. . . ."
HARE KRISHNA HARE HARE
The sun beat down on the town of Daleville on July 17, 1933, like a rain of fire.
Motoring down the main street, John Dillinger felt the perspiration on his neck. Although he had
been paroled three weeks earlier, he was still pale from his nine years in prison, and the sunlight
was cruel on his almost albino-tinted skin.
I'm going to have to walk through that door all by myself, he thought. All alone.
And fighting every kind of fear and guilt that has been beaten into me from childhood on.
'The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology," Pierpont had said. "Remember
that. We've got the Second Law of Thermodynamics on our side. Chaos steadily increases, all over
the universe. All 'law and order' is a kind of temporary accident."
But I've got to walk through that door all alone. The Secret of the Five depends on it. This time it's
my turn to be the goat.
Pierpont and Van Meter and the others were still back in Michigan City Prison. It was all in his
hands—being the first one paroled, he had to raise the money to finance the jail-break that would get
the others out. Then, having proved himself, he would be taught the JAM "miracles."
The bank suddenly loomed before him. Too suddenly. His heart skipped a beat.
Then, calmly, he drove his Chevrolet coupe over to the curb and parked.
I should have prepared better. This car should be souped-up like the ones Clyde Barrow uses. Well,
I'll know that the next time.
He left his hands on the steering wheel and squeezed, hard. He took a deep breath and repeated the
Formula: "23 Skidoo."
It helped a little— but he still wanted to get the hell out of there. He wanted to drive straight back to
his father's farm in Mooresville and find a job and learn all the straight things again, how to kiss a
boss's ass and how to look the parole officer straight in the eye and be like everybody else.
But everybody else was an Illuminati puppet and didn't know it. He did know it and was going to
liberate himself.
Hell, that's what a younger John Dillinger thought back in 1924—except that he hadn't known about
the Illuminati or the JAMs, then— but he was trying to liberate himself, in his own way, when he
held up that grocer. And what did it lead to? Nine years of misery and monotony and almost going
mad with horniness in a stinking cell.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 79 von 470
It'll be nine years more if I fuck up today.
"The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology."
He got out of the car and forced his feet and legs to move and he walked straight for the bank door.
"Fuck it," he said, "23 Skidoo."
He walked through the do or—and then he did the thing the bank tellers remembered after and told
the police. He reached up and adjusted his straw hat to the most dapper and debonair angle— and he
grinned.
"All right, this is a stick-up," he said clearly, taking out his pistol. "Everybody lie down on the floor
and keep calm. None of you will get hurt."
"Oh, God," a female teller gasped, "don't shoot. Please don't shoot."
"Don't worry, honey," John Dillinger said easily, "I don't want to hurt anybody. Just open the vault."
LIKE A TREE THAT'S PLANTED BV THE WATER
"That afternoon," the old man said, "I met Calvin Coolidge in the woods near my father's farm at
Mooresville. I gave him the haul —twenty thousand dollars— and it went into the JAM treasury. He
gave me twenty tons of hempscript."
"Calvin Coolidge?" Joe Malik exclaimed.
"Well, of course, I knew it wasn't really Calvin Coolidge. But that was the form he chose to appear
in. Who or what he really is, I haven't learned yet."
"You met him in Chicago," Simon added gleefully. "He appeared as Billy Graham that time."
"You mean the Dev—"
"Satan," Simon said simply "is just another of the innumerable masks he wears. Behind the mask is a
man and behind the man is another mask. It's all a matter of merging multiverses, remember? Don't
look for an Ultimate Reality. There isn't any."
"Then this person— this being—" Joe protested, "really is supernatural—"
"Supernatural, schmupernatural," Simon grimaced. "You're still like the people in that mathematical
parable about Flatland. You can only think in categories of right and left, and I'm talking about up
and down, so you say 'supernatural.' There is no 'supernatural'; there are just more dimensions than
you are accustomed to, that's all. If you were living in Flatland and I stepped out of your plane into a
plane at a different angle, it would look to you as if I vanished 'into thin air.' Somebody looking
down from our three-dimensional viewpoint would see me going off at a tangent from you, and
would wonder why you were acting so distressed and surprised about it."
"But the flash of light—"
"It's an energy transformation," Simon explained patiently. "Look, the reason you can only think
three-dimensionally is because there are only three directions in cubical space. That's why the
Illuminati— and some of the kids they've allowed to become partially illuminized lately— refer to
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 80 von 470
ordinary science as 'square.' The basic energy-vector coordinates of Universe are five-dimensional —
of course— and can best be visualized in terms of the five sides of the Illuminati Pyramid of Egypt."
"Five sides?" Joe objected. "It only has four."
"You're ignoring the bottom."
"Oh. Go on."
"Energy is always triangular, not cubical. Bucky Fuller has a line on this, by the way: he's the first
one outside the Illuminati to discover it independently. The basic energy transformation we're
concerned with is the one Fuller hasn't discovered yet, although he's said he's looking for it— the one
that ties Mind into the matter-energy continuum. The pyramid is the key. You take a man in the lotus
position and draw lines from his pineal gland— the Third Eye, as the Buddhists call it— to his two
knees, and from each knee to the other, and this is what you get. . . ." Simon sketched rapidly in his
notepad and passed it over to Joe:
"When the Pineal Eye opens —after fear is conquered; that is, after your first Bad Trip— you can
control the energy field entirely," Simon went on. "An Irish Illuminatus of the ninth century, Scotus
Ergina, put it very simply— in five words, of course —when he said Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt:
'All things that are, are lights.' Einstein also put it into five symbols when he wrote e = mc2?. The
actual transformation doesn't require atomic reactors and all that jazz, once you learn how to control
the mind vectors, but it always lets off one hell of a flash of light, as John can tell you."
"Damn near blinded me and knocked me on my ass, that first time in the woods," Dillinger agreed.
"But I was sure glad to know the trick. I was never afraid of being arrested after that, 'cause I could
always walk out of any jail they put me in. That's why the Feds decided to kill me, you know. It was
embarrassing to always find me wandering around loose again a few days after they locked me up.
You know the background to the Biograph Theatre scam— they killed three guys in Chicago,
without giving them a chance to surrender, because they thought I was one of them. Well, those three
were all wanted in New York for armed robbery, so nobody criticized the cops much for that caper.
But then up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, they shot three very respectable businessmen, and one of
them went and died, and Hoover's Heroes caught all sorts of crap from the newspapers. So I knew
where it was at; I could never again surrender and walk away a few days later. We had to produce a
body for them." The old man looked suddenly sad. "There was one possibility that we hated to think
about. . . . But, luckily it didn't come to that. The gimmick we finally worked out was perfect."
"And everything really follows the Fives' law?" Joe asked.
"More than you guess," Dillinger remarked blandly.
"Even when you're dealing with social fields," Simon added. "We've run studies of cultures where
the Illuminati were not in control, and they still follow Weishaupt's five-stage pattern: Verwirrung,
zweitracht, Unordnung, Beamtenherrschaft and Grummet. That is: chaos, discord, confusion,
bureaucracy, and aftermath. America right now is between the fourth and fifth stages. Or you might
say that the older generation is mostly in Beamtenherrschaft and the younger generation is moving
into Grummet rapidly."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 81 von 470
Joe took another stiff drink and shook his head. "But why do they leave so much of it out in the
open? I mean, not merely the really shocking things you told me about the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but
putting the pyramid on the dollar bill where everybody sees it almost every day—"
"Hell," Simon said, "look what Beethoven did when Weishaupt illuminated him. Went right home
and wrote the Fifth Symphony. You know how it begins: da-da-da-DUM. Morse code for V—the
Roman numeral for five. Right out in the open, as you say. It amuses the devil out of them to confirm
their low opinion of the rest of humanity by putting things up front like that and watching how
almost everybody misses it. Of course, if somebody doesn't miss something, they recruit him right
away. Look at Genesis: 'lux fiat' —right on the first page. They do it all the time. The Pentagon
Building. '23 Skidoo.' The lyrics of rock songs like 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'— how obvious
can you get? Melville was one of the most outrageous of the bunch; the very first sentence of Moby
Dick tells you he's a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah, but you cant find a single Melville scholar who has
followed up that lead— in spite of Ahab being a truncated anagram of Sabbah. He even tells you,
again and again, directly and indirectly, that Moby Dick and Leviathan are the same creature, and
that Moby Dick is often seen at the same time in two different parts of the world, but not one reader
in a million groks what he's hinting at. There's a whole chapter on whiteness and why white is really
more terrifying than black; all the critics miss the point"
" 'Osiris is a black god,' " Joe quoted.
"Right on! You're going to advance fast," Simon said enthusiastically. "In fact, J think it's time for
you to get off the verbal level and really confront your own 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' —your
own lady Isis."
"Yes," Dillinger said. "The Leif Erikson is laying offshore near California right now; Hagbard is
running some hashish to the students at Berkeley. He's got a new black chick in his crew who plays
the Lucy role extremely well. We'll have him send her ashore for the Rite. I suggest that you two
drive up to the Norton Lodge in Frisco and I'll arrange for her to meet you there."
"I don't like dealing with Hagbard," Simon said. "He's a right-wing nut, and so is his whole gang."
"He's one of the best allies we have against the Illuminati," Dillinger said. "Besides, I want to
exchange some hempscript for some of his flaxscript. Right now, the Mad Dog bunch won't accept
anything but flaxscript —they think Nixon is really going to knock the bottom out of the hemp
market. And you know what they do with Federal Reserve notes. Every time they get one, they burn
it. Instant demurrage, they call it."
"Puerile," Simon pronounced. "It will take decades to undermine the Fed that way."
"Well," Dillinger said, "Those are the kinds of people we have to deal with. The JAMs can't do it all
alone, you know."
"Sure," Simon shrugged. "But it bugs me." He stood up and put his drink on the table.
"Let's go," he said to Joe. "You're going to be illuminized."
Dillinger accompanied them to the door, then leaned close to Joe and said, "A word of advice about
the Rite."
"Yes?"
Dillinger lowered his voice. "Lie down on the floor and keep calm," he said, and his old, impudent
grin flashed wickedly.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 82 von 470
Joe stood there looking at the mocking bandit, and it seemed to him a freeze and a frieze in time: a
moment that would linger, as another stage of illumination, forever in his mind. Sister Cecilia, back
in Resurrection School, spoke out of the abyss of memory: "Stand in the corner, Joseph Malik!" And
he remembered too, the chalk that he crumbled slowly between his fingers, the feeling of needing to
urinate, the long wait, and then Father Volpe entering the classroom, his voice like thunder: "Where
is he? Where is the boy who dared to disagree with the good Sister that God sent to instruct him?"
And the other children, led out of the classroom and across the street to the church to pray for his
soul, while the priest harangued him: "Do you know how hot hell is? Do you know how hot the
worst part of hell is? That's where they send people who have the good fortune to be born into the
church and then rebel against it, misled by Pride of Intellect." And five years later, those two faces
came back: the priest, angry and dogmatic, demanding obedience, and the bandit, sardonic,
encouraging cynicism, and Joe understood that he might someday have to kill Hagbard Celine. But
more years had to pass, and the Fernando Poo incident had to pass, and Joe had to plan the
bombing of his own magazine with Tobias Knight before he knew that he would, in fact, kill Celine
without compunction if it were necessary. . .
But on March 31, in that year of fruition for all the Illuminati's plans, while the President of the
United States went on the air to threaten "all-out thermonuclear heck," a young lady named
Concepcion Galore lay nude on a bed in the Hotel Durrutti in Santa Isobel and said, "It's a lloigor."
"What's a lloigor?" asked her companion, an Englishman named Fission Chips, who had been born
on Hiroshima Day and named by a father who cared more for physics than for the humanities.
The room was in the luxury suite of the Hotel Durrutti, which meant that it was decorated in
abominable Spanish-Moorish decor, the sheets were changed daily (to a less luxurious suite), the
cockroaches were minimal, and the plumbing sometimes worked. Concepcion contemplated the
bullfight mural on the opposite wall, Manolete turning an elegant Veronica on an unconvincingly
drawn bull, and said thoughtfully, "Oh, a lloigor is a god of the black people. The natives. A very
bad god."
Chips glanced at the statue again and said, more to himself than to the peasant girl, "Looks vaguely
like Tlaloc in Mexico City, crossed with one of those Polynesian Cthulhu tikis."
"The Starry Wisdom people are very interested in these statues," Concepcion said, just to be making
conversation, since it was obvious that Chips wasn't going to be ready to prong her again for at least
another half hour.
"Indeed?" Chips said, equally bored. "Who are the Starry Wisdom people?"
"A church. Down on Tequilla y Mota Street. What used to be Lumumba Street and was Franco Street
when I was a girl. Funny church." The girl frowned, thinking about them. "When I worked in the
telegraph office I was always seeing their telegrams. All in code. And never to another church.
Always to banks all over Europe and North and South America."
"You don't say," drawled Chips, no longer bored but trying to sound casual; his code number in
British Intelligence was, of course, 00005. "Why are they interested in these statues?" He was
thinking that statues, properly hollowed out, could transport heroin; he was already sure that Starry
Wisdom was a front for BUGGER.
(In 1933, at Harvard, Professor Tochus told his Psychology 101 class, "Now, the child feels
frightened and inferior, according to Adler, because he is, in fact, physically smaller and weaker than
the adult. Thus, he knows he has no chance of successful rebellion, but nevertheless he dreams about
it. This is the origin of the Oedipus Complex in Adler's system: not sex, but the will to power itself.
The class will readily see the influence of Neitzsche . . ." Robert Putney Drake, glancing around the
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 83 von 470
room, was quite sure that most of the students would not readily see anything; and Tochus himself
didn't really' see either. The child, Drake had decided—it was the cornerstone of his own system of
psychology —was not brainwashed by sentimentality, religion, ethics, and other bullshit. The child
saw clearly that, in every relationship, there is a dominant party and a submissive party. And the
child, in its quite correct egotism, determined to become the dominant party. It was that simple;
except, of course, that the brainwashing takes effect eventually in most cases and, by about this time,
the college years, most of them were ready to become robots and accept the submissive role.
Professor Tochus droned on; and Drake, serene in his lack of superego, continued to dream of how
he would seize the dominant role. ... In New York, Arthur Flegenheimer, Drake's psychic twin, stood
before seventeen robed figures, one wearing a goats-head mask, and repeated, "I will forever hele,
always conceal, never reveal, any art or arts, part or parts. . . .")
You look like a robot, Joe Malik says in a warped room in a skewered time in San Francisco. I mean,
you move and walk like a robot.
Hold onto that, Mr. Wabbit, says a bearded young man with a saturnine smile. Some trippers see
themselves as robots. Others see the guide as a robot. Hold that perspective. Is it a hallucination, or
is a recognition of something we usually black out?
Wait, Joe says. Part of you is like a robot. But part of you is alive, like a growing thing, a tree or a
plant.. ..
The young man continues to smile, his face drifting above his body toward the mandala painted on
the ceiling. Well? he asks. Do you think that might be a good poetic shorthand: that part of me is
mechanical, like a robot, and part of me is organic, like a rosebush? And what's the difference
between the mechanical and the organic? Isn't a rosebush a kind of machine used by the DNA code
to produce more rosebushes?
No, Joe says. Everything is mechanical, but people are different. A cat has a grace that we've lost, or
partly lost.
How do you think we've lost it?
And Joe sees the face of Father Volpe and hears the voice screaming about submission. . . .
The SAC bases await the presidential order to take off for Fernando Poo, Atlanta Hope addresses a
rally in Atlanta, Georgia, protesting the gutless appeasement of the comsymp administration in not
threatening to bomb Moscow and Peking the same time as Santa Isobel, the Premier of Russia
rereads his speech nervously as the TV cameras are set up in his office ("and, in socialist solidarity
with the freedom-loving people of Fernando Poo"), the Chairman of the Chinese Communist party,
having found the thought of Chairman Mao of little avail, throws the I Ching sticks and looks
dismally at Hexagram 23, and 99 percent of the peoples of the world wait for their leaders to tell
them what to do; but in Santa Isobel itself, three locked doors across the suite from the now-sleeping
Concepcion, Fission Chips says angrily into his shortwave,
"Repeat none. Not one Russian or Chinese anywhere on the bloody island. I don't care what
Washington says. I'm telling you what I have seen. Now, about the BUGGER heroin ring here—"
"Sign off," the submarine tells him. "HQ is not interested in BUGGER or heroin right now."
"Damn and blast!" Chips stares at the shortwave set. That bloody well tore it. He would just have to
proceed on his own, and show those armchair agents back in London, especially that smug W., how
little they actually knew about the real problem in Fernando Poo and the world.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 84 von 470
Storming, he charged back to the bedroom. I'll just get dressed, he thought furiously, including my
smoke bombs and Luger and laser ray, and toddle over to this Starry Wisdom church and see what I
can nose out. But when he tore open the bedroom door he stopped, momentarily stunned.
Concepcion still lay in the bed but she was no longer sleeping. Her throat was neatly cut and a
curious dagger with a flame design on it stuck into the pillow beside her.
"Damn, blast and thunder!" cried 00005. "Now that absolutely does tear it. Every time I find a good
piece of ass those fuckers from BUGGER come along and shaft her!"
Ten minutes later, the GO signal came from the White House, a fleet of SAC bombers headed for
Santa Isobel with hydrogen bombs, and Fission Chips, fully dressed, toddled over to the Starry
Wisdom church where he encountered, not BUGGER, but something on an entirely different plane.
BOOK TWO: ZWEITRACHT
"It must have a 'natural' cause."
"It must have a 'supernatural' cause."
Let these two asses be set to grind corn.
—Frater Perdurabo, O.T.O., "Chinese Music," The Book of Lies
THE FOURTH TRIP, OR CHESED
Jesus Christ On A Bicycle
Mister Order, he runs at a very good pace
But old Mother Chaos is winning the race
—Lord Omar Khayaam Ravenhurst, K.S.C., "The Book of Advice," The Honest Book of
Truth
Among those who knew that the true faith of Mohammed was contained in the Ishmaelian teachings,
most were sent out into the world to seek positions in the governments of, the Near East and Europe.
Since it pleased Allah to decree this task for them, they obeyed willingly; many served thus for their
whole lives. Some, however, after five or ten or even twenty years of such fealty to a given shah or
caliph or king, would receive, through surreptitious channels, a parchment bearing the symbol:
That night, the servant would strike, and disappear like smoke; and the master would be found in
the morning, throat cut, with the emblematic Flame Dagger of the Ishmaelians lying beside him.
Others were chosen to serve in a different manner, maintaining the palace of Hassan i Sabbah
himself at Alamout. These were especially fortunate, for it was their privilege to visit more often
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 85 von 470
than others the Garden of Delights, in which the Lord Hassan himself would, through his command
of magic chemicals, transfer them into heaven while they still lived in the body. One day in the year
470 (known to the uncircumcised Christian dogs as 1092 A.D.) another proof of the Lord Hassan's
powers was given to them, for they were all summoned to the throne room and there sat the Lord
Hassan in all his glory, while before him on the floor lay a plate bearing the head of the disciple Ibn
Azif.
"This deluded one," the Lord Hassan declared, "has disobeyed a command— the one crime that
cannot be forgiven in our Sacred Order. I show you his head to remind you of the fate of traitors in
this world. More; I will instruct you on the fate of such dogs in the next world." So saying, the good
and wise Lord Hassan rose from his throne, walking with his characteristic lurching gait, and
approached the head. "I command thee," he said. "Speak."
The mouth opened and the head emitted a scream such that all the faithful covered their ears and
turned their eyes away, many of them muttering prayers.
"Speak, dog!" the wise Lord Hassan repeated. "Your whine is of no interest to us. Speak!"
"The flames," the head cried. "The terrible flames. Allah, the flames . . ." it babbled on as a soul will
in extreme agony. "Forgiveness," it begged. "Forgiveness, O mighty Lord."
"There is no forgiveness for traitors," said the all-wise Hassan. "Return to hell!" And the head
immediately silenced. All bowed down and prayed to Hassan and Allah alike; of the many miracles
they had seen this was certainly the greatest and most terrible.
The Lord Hassan then dismissed everyone, saying, "Forget not this lesson. Let it stay in your hearts
longer than the names of your fathers."
("We want to recruit you," Hagbard said, 900-odd years later, "because you are so gullible. That is,
gullible in the right way.")
Jesus Christ went by on a bicycle. That was my first warning that I shouldn't have taken acid before
coming down to Balbo and Michigan to see the action. But it really seemed right, on another level:
acid was the only way to relate to that whole Kafka-on-a-bummer example of quote democratic
process in action unquote. I found Hagbard in Grant Park, cool as usual, with a bucket of water and a
pile of handkerchiefs for the teargas victims. He was near the General Logan statue, watching the
more violent confrontations across the street at the Hilton, sucking one of his Italian cigars and
looking like Ahab finally finding the whale . . . Hagbard, in fact, was remembering Professor
Tochus at Harvard: "Damn it, Celine, you can't major in naval engineering and law both. You're not
Leonardo da Vinci, after all." "But I am," he had replied, poker-faced. "I recall all my past
incarnations in detail and Leonardo was one of them." Tochus almost exploded: "Be a wise-ass, then!
When you start flunking half your subjects, perhaps you'll come back to reality." The old man had
been terribly disappointed to see the long row of As. Across the street, the demonstrators advanced
toward the Hilton and the police charged again, clubbing them back; Hagbard wondered if Tochus
had ever realized that a professor is a policeman of the intellect. Then he saw the Padre's new
disciple, Moon, approaching. . . . "You haven't been clubbed yet," I said, thinking that in a sense
Jarry's old presurrealist classic, "The Crucifixion of Christ Considered as an Uphill Bike Race," was
really the best metaphor for the circus Daley was running. "Neither have you, I'm glad to see,"
Hagbard replied: "Judging from your eyes, though; you got teargassed in Lincoln Park last night." I
nodded, remembering that I had been thinking of him and his weird Discordian yoga when it
happened. Malik, the dumb social-democratic-liberal that John wanted to recruit soon, was only a
few feet away, and Burroughs and Ginsberg were near me on the other side. I could see, suddenly,
that we were all chessmen, but who was the chessmaster moving us? And how big was the board?
Across the street, a rhinoceros moved ponderously, turning into a jeep with a barbed-wire crowd-
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 86 von 470
sticker on the front of it. "My head's leaking," I said.
"Do you have any idea who's picking it up?" Hagbard asked. He was remembering a house lease in
Professor Orlock's class. "What it amounts to, in English," Hagbard had said, "is that the tenant has
no rights that can be successfully defended in court, and the landlord has no duties on which he
cannot, quite safely, default." Orlock looked pained, and several students were shocked, as if
Hagbard had suddenly jumped up and exposed his penis in front of the class. "That's putting it too
baldly," Orlock said finally. . . . "It might be somebody years in the future," I said, "or the past." I
wondered if Jarry was picking it up, in Paris, half a century before; that would account for the
resemblance. Abbie Hoffman went by just then, talking to Apollonius of Tyana. Were we all in
Jarry's mind, or Joyce's? We even have a Sheriff Wood riding herd on us and Rubin's horde of Jerry
men. . . . "Fuller's car is a stunt, a showpiece," Professor Caligari fumed, "and, anyway, it has
nothing to do with naval architecture." Hagbard looked at him levelly and said, "It has everything to
do with naval architecture." As in law school, the other students were disturbed. Hagbard began to
understand: they are not here to learn, they are here to acquire a piece of paper that would make them
eligible for certain jobs....
"There are only a few more memos." Saul said to Mul-doon. "Let's skim them and then call
headquarters to see if Danny found this 'Paf who wrote them,"
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #15
8/6
J.M.:
Here's the weirdest version of the Illuminati history that I've found so far. It's from a
publication written, edited and published by somebody named Philip Campbell Argyle-
Stuart, who holds that the conflicts in the world are due to an age-old war between
Semitic "Khazar" peoples and Nordic "Faustian" peoples. This is the essence of his
thinking:
My theory is that an extremely devilish imposed overcrust was added to the Khazar
population consisting of humanoids who arrived by flying saucer from the planet
Vulcan, which I assume to be not in intra-Mercurial orbit around the sun, but rather in
the earth's orbit, behind the Sun, forever out of sight to earthlings, always six months
behind or ahead of the earth in orbital travel....
Likewise for the Gothic Faustian Western Culture. The previously comparatively inert
and purposeless migrating population streams known as Franks, Goths, Angles, Saxons,
Danes, Swabians, Alemani, Lombards, Vandals, and Vikings suddenly had an overcrust
added consisting of Norman-Martian-Varangians, arriving from Saturn by way of Mars
in flying saucers. . . .
After 1776 it (the Khazar-Vulcanian conspiracy) used the Illuminati and Grand Orient
Masons. After 1815 it used the financial machinations of the House of Rothschild and
after 1848 the Communist movement and after 1895 the Zionist movement. . . .
One more thing needs to be mentioned. Mrs. Helena Petrovna Blavatski (nee Hahn in
Germany), 1831-1891, founder of Theosophy . . . was both hypocritical and devilish, a
true witch of great evil power allied with Illuminati, Grand Orient Masons, Russian
Anarchists, British Israel Theorists, Proto-Zionists, Arabian Assassins and Thuggi from
India.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 87 von 470
Source: The High I.Q. Bulletin, Vol. IV, No. 1, January 1970. Published by Philip
Campbell Argyle-Stuart, Colorado Springs, Colorado. I
Pat
"What was that word?" Private Celine asked eagerly.
"SNAFU," Private Pearson told him. "You mean to say you never heard it before?" He sat up in his
bunk and stared.
"I'm a naturalized citizen," Hagbard said. "I was born in Norway." He pulled his shirt away from his
back again; the Fort Benning summer was much too hot for the Nordic half of his genes. "Situation
Normal, All Fucked Up," he repeated. "That really sums it up. That really says it."
"Wait'll you've been in This Man's Army a little longer," the black man told him vehemently. "Then
you'll really appreciate the application of that word, dads. Oh, man, will you appreciate it."
"It's not just the army," Hagbard said thoughtfully. "It's the whole world."
Actually, after they immanentized the Eschaton, I found out where my head was leaking that night
(and a few other nights, too.) Into poor George Dorn. The leak almost gave him water on the brain.
He kept wondering where all that Joyce and surrealism was coming from. I'm seven years older than
he is, that we're on the same valence because of similar grammar school experiences and
revolutionary fathers. That's why Hagbard never really understood either of us, fully: he had private
tutors until he hit college, and by that stage Official Education is beginning to make some partial
concessions to reality so the victims have at least a chance of surviving on the outside. But I didn't
know any of that in Grant Park that night or how the Army helped Hagbard understand college,
because I was working out this new notion of the total valence of the set remaining constant. It
would mean that I would have to leave when George came on, or say, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne
Mansfield had to do the pill or auto-wreck shticks before there was room for Racquel Welch's vibes.
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #16
8/7
J.M.:
I think I've found the clue as to how Zoroaster, flying saucers and all that lunatic-fringe
stuff fits into the Illuminati puzzle. Dig this, boss-man:
The Nazi Party was founded as the political appendage of the Thule Society, an
extremist fringe of the Illuminated Lodge of Berlin. This lodge, in turn, was made up of
Rosicrucians -high Freemasons— and its preoccupation was mourning the death of the
feudal system. Masons of this time were, like the Federalist Party in post-revolutionary
America, working diligently to prevent "anarchy" and preserve the old values by
bringing about Christian Socialism. Indeed, the Aaron Burr conspiracy, which Professor
Hofstadter notes was allegedly Masonic in origin, was an American prototype of
German intrigues of a century later. To their external scientific socialism these Masons
added mystic concepts which were thought to be "gnostic" in origin. One of these was
the concept of "Gnosticism" itself, called Illumination— which held that heavenly
beings directly or indirectly gave humanity its great ideas and would come back to Earth
after mankind had achieved sufficient progress. Illumination was a brand of
Pentecostalism which was persecuted by orthodox Christianity for centuries and had
become lodged in Freemasonry through a complex historical process which is
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 88 von 470
impossible to explain without a major digression. It is sufficient to say that the Nazis,
being "Illuminated," felt themselves to be divinely inspired and therefore felt justified in
rewriting the rules of good and evil to suit their own purposes.
(According to Nazi theory) the heavenly beings, before the present Moon was captured,
had lived on the highest ground, in Peru, Mexico, Condor (Ethiopia), Himalaya, Atlantis
and Mu, forming the Uranian Confederation. This was taken quite seriously and British
intelligence actually combated it with the Tolkien fantasy called the "Silmarillion," basis
for the famous "Hobbit" books. . . .
Both J. Edgar Hoover and Congressman Otto Passman are high-ranking Masons and
both, significantly, reflect this philosophy and its Manichean attitude. The chief danger
in Masonic thinking aside from the "divine right of government" is, of course,
Manicheanism, the belief that your opponent is opposing God's will and is therefore an
agent of Satan. This is the extreme application and Mr. Hoover usually reserves it for
"Godless Communism" but it is almost always present to some degree.
Source: "The Nazi Religion: Views on Religious Statism in Germany and America" by
J. F. C. Moore, Libertarian American, Vol. III, No. 3, August 1969.
Pat
They were using Mace now, and I saw one photographer snapping a picture of a cop while the cop
was still Macing him (Heisenberg rides again! From out of the west come the thundering hooves of
the great hearse, Joint Phenomenon! Except that I was on acid; if I'd been on weed, then it would
really, royally, be a Joint Phenomenon). And I heard later that the photographer got an award for that
shot. Right then, he didn't look like he was getting an award. He looked like they had just taken off
his skin and touched each raw nerve with a dentist's drill. "Christ," I said to Hagbard, "look at that
poor bastard. I hope I come out of this with just another teargassing or two. I don't want any of that
Mace." But acid is placid, you know, and a minute later I was on Joyce's juices again and thinking of
a drama called 'Their Mace and My Gripes." I made the first line fruity, in honor of Padre Pederastia:
"What a botch of a pair to plumb this hour's gripes."
"Bism'allah," Hagbard said. "Our karma is made by our deeds, not by our prayers. You're on the set,
so you take the action as it comes."
"Oh, cut out that Holy Man craperoo and stop reading my mind," I protested. "You don't have to go
on impressing me." But I was off on another tangent, which went something like this: If this set is
Mayor Daley's circus, then Mayor Daley is the ringmaster. If the things below are the things above,
as Hermes hermetically hinted, then this set is the bigger set. Mr. Microcosm, meet Mr. Macrocosm.
"Hi, Mike!" "Hi, Mac." Conclusion: Mayor Daley, in a small way, is what Krishna is, in a large way.
QED.
Just then some SDS kids who'd been teargassed across the street came running our way, and Hagbard
got busy handing out wet handkerchiefs. They needed them: they were half-blind, like Joyce splitting
his Adam into wise hopes. And I wasn't much help, because I was tod busy crying myself.
"Hagbard," I gasped in ecstasy. "Mayor Daley is Krishna."
"Worse luck for him," he said curtly, distributing the handkerchiefs. "He doesn't suspect it."
I thought, suddenly:
Hubert the Hump has coughed and hawked And spat on the streets that Lincoln walked
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 89 von 470
The water turned to blood (Hagbard was a joking jolting Jesus: you expected wine maybe?) and I
remembered my mother's story about Dillinger at the Biograph. We all sit there, like him, in the
Biograph Theatre, dreaming the drama of our lives, then walk outside to the grandmotherly kindness
of the lead kisses that wake us back to our slipping beatitude. Except that he found a way to come
back. What was it Charley Mordecai said: "First as tragedy, then as farce?" Marxism-Lennonism: Ed
Sanders of the Fugs, the night before, talking about fucking in the streets as if he had read my mind
(or had I read his?) and Lennon's "Why Don't We Do It in the Road" was recorded a year in the
future. The Marx and our groupies. The bloody handkerchiefs dipped into water, or wine, and the
mass rite went on, the mass went Right On, the Mace they rowed. Capone set it up for the Feds, but
John was fed up and left the set, so an extra named Frank Sullivan got the bullets. The Autobiograph
Theatre, a drama house and a trauma, yes. I maybe should have taken only half a tab instead of the
full 500 mikes, because at that point the SDS kids, all of them siding with RYM-I at the split next
year, looked like they had altarboy robes on and I thought Hagbard was distributing communion
wafers, not handkerchiefs. He looked at me, suddenly, with that hawk-faced Egyptian glare, and I
observed that he had observed, Hopalong Horus Heisenberg, just where I was at You don't have to be
a waterman, I thought, to know which way my mind is blowing.
There was a sound from the crowd, like a subway opening all its doors with a suck of air, and I saw
the police coming, crossing the street to clear the park.
"Here we go again," I said. "All hail Discordia,"
"Snafu ueber alles," Hagbard grinned, starting to trot beside me.
We headed North, figuring that the ones who retreated eastward would get trapped against the wall
and creamed. "Democracy in action," I said, panting along.
'There thou might'st behold the very image of Authority," he quoted, shifting his water bucket to
keep it in balance. I caught the Shakespearean reference and looked back: my mind had already: each
policeman indeed looked like Shakespeare's dog. I remembered the frantic semantics at the LBJ antibirthday
party, when Burroughs insisted Chicago Cops were more like dogs than pigs, in
contradiction to the SDS rhetoric. Terry Southern, taking his usual maniacal middle course, claimed
they were more akin to the purple-assed mandrill, most surly of the baboon family. But most of them
hadn't discovered writing yet.
"Authority?" I asked, realizing I'd lost something along the way. We were slowing to a walk, the
action was behind us.
"A is not A," Hagbard explained with that tiresome patience of his. "Once you accept A is A, you're
hooked. Literally hooked, addicted to the System."
I caught the references to Aristotle, the old man of the tribe with his unfortunate epistemological
paresis, and also to that feisty little lady I always imagine is really the lost Anastasia, but I still didn't
grok. "What do you mean?" I asked, grabbing a wet handkerchief as some of the teargas started to
drift to our end of the park.
"Chairman Mao didn't say half of it," Hagbard replied holding a handkerchief to his own face. His
words came through muffled: "It isn't only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So
does a whole definition of reality. A set. And the action that has to happen on that particular set and
on none other."
"Don't be so bloody patronizing," I objected, looking around a corner in time and realizing this was
the night I would be Maced. "That's just Marx: the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ideology
of the whole society."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 90 von 470
"Not the ideology. The Reality." He lowered his handkerchief. "This was a public park until they
changed the definition. Now, the guns have changed the Reality. It isn't a public park. There's more
than one kind of magic."
"Just like the Enclosure Acts," I said hollowly. "One day the land belonged to the people. The next
day it belonged to the landlords."
"And like the Narcotics Acts," he added. "A hundred thousand harmless junkies became criminals
overnight, by Act of Congress, in nineteen twenty-seven. Ten years later, in thirty-seven, all the potheads
in the country became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. And they really were
criminals, when the papers were signed. The guns prove it. Walk away from those guns, waving a
joint, and refuse to halt when they tell you. Their Imagination will become your Reality in a second."
And I had my answer to Dad, finally, just as a cop jumped out of the darkness screaming something
about freaking motherfucking fag commies and Maced me, as was certain to happen (I knew it as I
crumbled in pain) on that set.
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #16
8/7
J.M.:
Here's some more info on how Blavatsky, theosophy and the motto under the great
pyramid on the U.S. Seal fit into the Illuminati picture (or don't fit into the picture. It's
getting more confusing the further I dig into it!) This is an article defending Madame
Blavatsky, after Truman Capote had repeated the John Birch Society's charge that Sirhan
Sirhan was inspired to murder Robert Kennedy by reading Blavatsky's works: "Sirhan
Blavatsky Capote" by Ted Zatlyn, Los Angeles Free Press, July 26, 1968:
Birchers that attack Madame Blavatsky, though smaller in number and as crazy as ever,
find a new home in an atmosphere of suspicion and violence. Truman Capote takes them
seriously. . . .
Does Mr. Capote know that the Illuminati (according to sacred Birch doctrine) began in
the Garden of Eden when Eve made it with the snake and gave birth to Cain? That all
the descendants of snake-man Cain belong to a super-secret group known as the
Illuminati, dedicated to absolutely nothing but the meanest low down evil imagined in
the Satanic mind of man?
Anti-Illuminati John Steinbacher writes in his unpublished book, Novus Ordo Seclorum
(The New Order of the Ages): "Today in America, many otherwise talented people are
flirting with disaster by associating with those same evil forces . . . Madame Blavatsky's
doctrine was strikingly similar to that of Weishaupt. . . ."
The author also gives his version of the Bircher's version of what the Illuminati are
actually trying to accomplish:
Their evil goal is to transcend materiality, and to bring about one world, denying the
sovereignty of nations and the sanctity of private property.
I don't think I can believe, or even understand, this, but at least it explains how both the
Nazis and the Communists can be pawns of the Illuminati. Or does it?
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 91 von 470
Pat
"Property is theft," Hagbard said, passing the peace pipe.
"If the BIA helps those real estate developers take our land," Uncle John Feather said, "that will be
theft. But if we keep the land, that is certainly not theft."
Night was falling in the Mohawk reservation, but Hagbard saw Sam Three Arrows nod vigorously in
the gloom of the small cabin. He felt, again, that American Indians were the hardest people in the
world to understand. His tutors had given him a cosmopolitan education, in every sense of the word,
and he usually found no blocks in relating to people of any culture, but the Indians did puzzle him at
times. After five years of specializing in handling the legal battles of various tribes against the
Bureau of Indian Affairs and the land pirates it served, he was still conscious that these people's
heads were someplace he couldn't yet reach. Either they were the simplest, or the most sophisticated,
society on the planet; maybe, he thought, they were both, and the ultimate simplicity and the ultimate
sophistication are identical.
"Property is liberty," Hagbard said. "I am quoting the same man who said property is theft. He also
said property is impossible. I speak from the heart. I wish you to understand why I take this case. I
wish you to understand in fullness."
Sam Three Arrows drew on the pipe, then raised his dark eyes to Hagbard's. "You mean that justice
is not known like a dog who barks in the night? That it is more like the unexpected sound in the
woods that must be identified cautiously after hard thinking?"
There it was again: Hagbard had heard the same concreteness of imagery in the speech of the
Shoshone at the opposite end of the continent. He wondered, idly, if Ezra Pound's poetry might have
been influenced by habits of speech his father acquired from the Indians—Homer Pound had been
the first white man born in Idaho. It certainly went beyond the Chinese. And it came, not from books
on rhetoric, but from listening to the heart— the Indian metaphor he had himself used a minute ago.
He took his time about answering: he was beginning to acquire the Indian habit of thinking a long
while before speaking.
"Property and justice are water," he said finally. "No man can hold them long. I have spent many
years in courtrooms, and I have seen property and justice change when a man speaks, change as the
caterpillar changes to the butterfly. Do you understand me? I thought I had victory in my hands, and
then the judge spoke and it went away. Like water running through the fingers."
Uncle John Feather nodded. "I understand. You mean we will lose again. We are accustomed to
losing. Since George Washington promised us these lands 'as long as the mountain stands and the
grass is green,' and then broke his promise and stole part of them back in ten years— in ten years, my
friend!— we have lost, always lost. We have one acre left of each hundred promised to us then."
"We may not lose," Hagbard said. "I promise you, the BIA will at least know they have been in a
fight this time. I learn more tricks, and get nastier, each time I go into a courtroom. I am very tricky
and very nasty by now. But I am less sure of myself than I was when I took my first case. I no longer
understand what I am fighting. I have a word for it— the Snafu Principle, I call it— but I do not
understand what it is."
There was another pause. Hagbard heard the lid on the garbage can in back of the cabin rattling: that
was the raccoon that Uncle John Feather called Old Grandfather come to steal his evening dinner.
Property was theft, certainly, in Old Grandfather's world, Hagbard thought.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 92 von 470
"I am also puzzled," Sam Three Arrows said finally. "I worked, long ago, in New York City, in
construction, like many young men of the Mohawk Nation. I found that whites were often like us,
and I could not hate them one at a time. But they do not know the earth or love it. They do not speak
from the heart, usually. They do not act from the heart. They are more like the actors on the movie
screen. They play roles. And their leaders are not like our leaders. They are not chosen for virtue, but
for their skill at playing roles. Whites have told me this, in plain words. They do not trust their
leaders, and yet they follow them. When we do not trust a leader, he is finished. Then, also, the
leaders of the whites have too much power. It is bad for a man to be obeyed too often. But the worst
thing is what I have said about the heart. Their leaders have lost it and they have lost mercy. They
speak from somewhere else. They act from somewhere else. But from where? Like you, I do not
know. It is, I think, a kind of insanity." He looked at Hagbard and added politely. "Some are
different."
It was a long speech for him, and it stirred something in Uncle John Feather. "I was in the army," he
said. "We went to fight a bad white man, or so the whites told us. We had meetings that were called
orientation and education. There were films. It was to show us how this bad white man was doing
terrible things in his country. Everybody was angry after the films, and eager to fight. Except me. I
was only there because the army paid more than an Indian can earn anywhere else. So I was not
angry, but puzzled. There was nothing that this white leader did that the white leaders in this country
do not also do. They told us about a place named Lidice. It was much like Wounded Knee. They told
us of families moved thousands of miles to be destroyed. It was much like the Trail of Tears. They
told us of how this man ruled his nation, so that none dared disobey him. It was much like the way
white men work in corporations in New York City, as Sam has described it to me. I asked another
soldier about this, a black white man. He was easier to talk to than the regular white man. I asked
him what he thought of the orientation and education. He said it was shit, and he spoke from the
heart! I thought about it a long time, and I knew he was right. The orientation and education was shit.
When the men from the BIA come here to talk, it is the same. Shit. But let me tell you this: the
Mohawk Nation is losing its soul. Soul is not like breath or blood or bone and it can be taken in ways
no man understands. My grandfather had more soul than I have, and the young men have less than
me. But I have enough soul to talk to Old Grandfather, who is a raccoon now. He thinks as a raccoon
and he is worried about the raccoon nation, more than I am worried about the Mohawk Nation. He
thinks the raccoon nation will die soon, and all the nations of the free and wild animals. That is a
terrible thing and it frightens me. When the nations of the animals die, the earth will also die. That is
an old teaching and I cannot doubt it. I see it happening, already. If they steal more of our land to
build that dam, more of our soul will die, and more of the souls of the animals will die! The earth
will die, and the stars will no longer shine! The Great Mother herself may die!" The old man was
crying unashamedly. "And it will be because men do not speak words but speak shit!"
Hagbard had turned pale beneath his olive skin. "You're coming into court," he said slowly, "and
you're going to tell the judge that, in exactly those words."
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #17
8/8
J.M.: You may remember that the East Village Other's chart of the Illuminati
Conspiracy (Memo #9) listed "The Holy Vehm" as an Illuminati front. I have finally
found out what The Holy Vehm is (or, rather was). My source is Eliphas Levy's History
of Magic, op. cit., pages 199-200:
They were a kind of secret police, having the right of life and death. The mystery which
surrounded their judgments, the swiftness of their executions, helped to impress the
imagination of people still in barbarism. The Holy Vehm assumed gigantic proportions;
men shuddered in describing apparitions of masked persons, of summonses nailed to the
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 93 von 470
doors of nobles in the very midst of their watch-guards and their orgies, of brigand
chiefs found dead with the terrible cruciform dagger in their breasts and on the scroll
attached thereto an extract from the sentence of the Holy Vehm. The Tribunal affected
most fantastic forms of procedure: the guilty person, cited to appear at some discredited
cross-road, was taken to the assembly by a man clothed in black, who bandaged his eyes
and led him forward in silence. This occurred invariably at some unseemly hour of the
night, for judgment was never pronounced except at midnight. The criminal was carried
into a vast underground vault, where he was questioned by one voice. The hoodwink
was removed, the vault was illuminated in all its depth and height, and the Free Judges
sat masked and wearing black vestures.
The Code of the Vehmic Court was found in the ancient archives of Westphalia and has
been printed in the Reichstheater of Muller, under the following title: "Code and Statutes
of the Holy Secret Tribunal of Free Courts and Free Judges of Westphalia, established in
the. year 772 by the Emperor Charlemagne and revised in 1404 by King Robert, who
made those alterations and additions requisite for the administration of justice in the
tribunals of the illuminated, after investing them with his own authority."
A note on the first page forbade any profane person to glance at the book under penalty
of death. The word "illuminated", here given to the associates of the Secret Tribunal,
unfolds their entire mission: they had to track down in the shadows those who
worshipped the darkness; they counterchecked mysteriously those who conspired
against society in favour of mystery; but they were themselves the secret soldiers of
light, who cast the light of day on criminal plottings, and it is this which was signified
by a sudden splendour illuminating the Tribunal when it pronounced sentence.
So now we have to add Charlemagne to the list of the Illuminated— along with
Zoroaster, Joachim of Floris, Jefferson, Washington, Aaron Burr, Hitler, Marx, and Madame
Blavatsky. Could this all be a hoax?
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #18
8/9
J.M.:
My last memo may have been too hasty in using the past tense in speaking about the
Holy Vehm. I find that Darual thinks they may still exist (History of Secret Societies, op.
cit., p. 211):
These terrible courts were never formally abolished. They were reformed by various
monarchs, but even in the nineteenth century it was said that they still existed, though
very much underground. The Nazi werewolves and resistance organizations fighting the
Communist occupation of East Germany claimed that they were carrying on the tradition
of the "Chivalrous and Holy Vehm." Perhaps they still are.
Pat
Federal Court for the 17th District of New York State. Plaintiffs: John Feather, Samuel Arrows, et al.
Defendants: Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior, and President of the United States.
For plaintiffs: Hagbard Celine. For the defendants: George Kharis, John Alucard, Thomas Moriarity,
James Moran. Presiding: Justice Quasimodo Immhotep.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 94 von 470
MR. FEATHER (concluding): And it will be because men do not speak words but speak shit!
MR. KHARIS: Your honor, I move that the last speech be stricken from the record as irrelevant and
immaterial. We are dealing here with a practical question, the need of the people of New York for
this dam, and Mr. Feather's superstitions are totally beside the point.
MR. CELINE: Your honor, the people of New York have survived a long time without a dam in that
particular place. They can survive longer without it. Can anything survive, anything worth having, if
our words become, as Mr. Feather says, excrement? Can anything we can reasonably call American
Justice survive, if the words of our first President, if the sacred honor of George Washington is
destroyed, if his promise that the Mohawk could keep these lands "as long as the mountain stands
and the grass is green," if all that becomes nothing but excrement?
MR. KHARIS: Counsel is not arguing. Counsel is making speeches.
MR. CELINE: I am speaking from the heart. Are you— or are you speaking excrement that you are
ordered to speak by your superiors?
MR. ALUCARD: More speeches.
MR. CELINE: More excrement
JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Control yourself, Mr. Celine.
MR. CELINE: I am controlling myself. Otherwise, I would speak as frankly as my client and say that
most of the speeches here are plain old shit. Why do I say "excrement" at all, if it isn't, tike you
people, to disguise a little what we are all doing? It's shit. Plain shit.
JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Mr. Celine, you are coming very close to contempt of court. I warn you.
MR. CELINE: Your honor, we speak the tongue of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Melville. Must we go
on murdering it? Must we tear it away from its last umbilical connection with reality? What is going
on in this room, actually? Defendants, the U.S. government and its agents, want to steal some land
from my clients. How long do we have to argue that they have no justice, no right, no honor, in their
cause? Why can't we say highway robbery is highway robbery, instead of calling it eminent domain?
Why can't we say shit is shit, instead of calling it excrement? Why do we never use language to
convey meaning? Why must we always use it conceal meaning? Why do we never speak from the
heart? Why do we always speak words programmed into us, like robots?
JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Mr. Celine, I warn you again.
MR. FEATHER: And I warn you. The world will die. The stars will go out. If men and women
cannot trust the words spoken, the earth will crack, like a rotten pumpkin.
MR. KHARIS: I call for a recess. Plaintiff and their counsel are both in no emotional state to
continue at this time.
MR. CELINE: You even have guns. You have men with guns and clubs, who are called marshals,
and they will beat me if I don't shut up. How do you differ from any other gang of bandits, then,
except in using language that conceals what you are doing? The only difference is that the bandits
are more honest. That's the only difference. The only difference.
JUSTICE IMMHOTEP : Mr. Marshal, restrain the counsel.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 95 von 470
MR. CELINE: You're stealing what isn't yours. Why can't you talk turkey for just one moment?
Why—
JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Just hold him, Marshal. Don't use unnecessary force. Mr. Celine, I am
tempted to forgive you, considering that you are obviously much involved with your clients,
emotionally. However, such mercy on my part would encourage other lawyers to believe they could
follow your example. I have no choice. I find you guilty of contempt of court. Sentencing will take
place when court reconvenes after a fifteen-minute recess. You may speak at that time, but only on
any mitigating grounds that should lighten the degree of your sentence. I will not hear the United
States government called bandits again. That is all.
MR. CELINE: You steal land, and you will not hear yourselves called bandits. You order men with
guns and clubs to hold us down, and you will not hear yourselves called thugs. You don't act from
the heart; where the hell do you act from? What in God's name does motivate you?
JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Restrain him, Marshal.
MR. CELINE: (Indistinguishable.)
JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: Fifteen-minute recess.
BAILIFF: All rise.
ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #19
8/9
J.M.:
I wish you would explain to me how your interest in the numbers 5 and 23 fit in with
this Illuminati project.
This is all I've been able to unearth so far on the number mystery, and I hope you find it
enlightening. It's from a book of mathematical and logical paradoxes: How to Torture
Your Mind, edited by Ralph L. Woods, Funk and Wagnalls, New York, 1969, page 128.
2 and 3 are even and odd;
2 and 3 are 5;
Therefore, 5 is both even and odd.
The damned book, by the way, provides no solutions to the paradoxes. I could sense the
fallacy in that one right away, but it took me hours (and a headache) before I could state
it in precise words. Hope this helps you. Anyway, for me, it was a relief from the really
frightening stuff I've been tracking down lately.
Pat
There were two further memos in the box, on different stationeries and by different typewriters. The
first was brief:
April 4
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 96 von 470
RESEARCH DEPARTMENT:
I am seriously concerned about Pat's absence from the office, and the fact that she
doesn't answer the phone when we call her. Would you send somebody to her apartment
to talk to the landlord and try to find out what has happened to her?
Joe Malik Editor
The last memo was the oldest in the lot and already yellowing at the edges. It said:
Dear Mr. "Mallory:"
The information and books, you requested are enclosed, at length. In case you are
rushed, here is a quick summary.
1. Billy Graham was in Australia, making public appearances all through last week.
There is no way he could have gotten to Chicago.
2. Satanism and witchcraft both still exist in the modern world. The two are often
confused by orthodox Christian writers, but objective observers agree that there is a
difference. Satanism is a Christian heresy— the ultimate heresy, one might say— but
witchcraft is pre-Christian in origin and has nothing to do with the Christian God or the
Christian Devil. The witches worship a goddess called Dana or Tana (who goes back to
the Stone Age probably).
3. The John Dillinger Died For You Society has its headquarters in Mad Dog, Texas, but
was founded in Austin, Texas several years ago. It's some kind of poker-faced joke and
is affiliated with the Bavarian Illuminati, another bizarre bunch at the Berkeley campus
of the University of California. The Illuminati pretend to be a cabal of conspirators who
run the whole world behind the scenes. If you suspect either of these groups of being
involved in something sinister, you have probably just fallen for one of their put-ons.
W.H.
"So this thing was already linked to Mad Dog several years ago," Saul said thoughtfully. "And Malik
was already assuming an alternative identity, since the letter is obviously addressed to him. And, also
as I've begun to suspect as we read this stuff, the Illuminati have their own brand of humor."
"Deduce me one more deduction," Barney said. "Who the hell is this W.H.?"
"People have been asking that for three hundred years," Saul said absently.
"Huh?"
"I'm being whimsical. Shakespeare's sonnets are dedicated to a Mr. W.H., but I don't think we have
to worry that this is the same one. This case is as nutty as a-squirrel's dinner, but I don't really think
it's that nutty." He added, "We can be grateful for one thing at least: the Illuminati doesn't really run
the world. They're just trying."
Barney frowned, perplexed. "How did you make that one?"
"Simple. Same way I know they're a right-wing organization, not left-wing."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 97 von 470
"We're not all geniuses," Barney said. "Take it a step at a time, will you?"
"How many contradictions did you spot in these memos? I counted thirteen. This researcher, Pat,
saw it, too: the evidence is deliberately warped and twisted. All of it— not just that East Village
Other chart— is a mixture of fact and fiction." Saul lit his pipe and settled back in his chair (in 1921,
reading Arthur Conan Doyle, he first began playing these scenes, in imagination).
"In the first place, either the Illuminati want publicity or they don't. If they control everything, and
want publicity, they'd be on billboards more often than Coca-Cola and on TV more often than
Lucille Ball. On the other hand, if they control everything, and don't want publicity, none of these
magazines and books would have survived— they would have disappeared from libraries, book
stores and publisher's warehouses. This researcher, Pat, never would have found them.
"In the second place, if you want to recruit people into a conspiracy, besides idealism and whatever
other noble motives you might exploit in them, you would always exploit hope. You would
exaggerate the size and power of the conspiracy, because most people want to join the winning side.
Therefore, all assertions about the actual strength of the Illuminati should be regarded, a fortiori, as
suspect, like the voters' polls released by candidates before elections.
"Finally, it always pays to frighten the opposition. Therefore a conspiracy will exhibit the same
behavior that ethnologists have observed in animals under attack: it will puff itself up and try to look
bigger. In short, potential or actual recruits and potential and actual enemies will both be given the
same false impression: that the Illuminati is twice, or ten times, or a hundred times, its actual size.
This is logical, but my first point was empirical— the memos do exist— and therefore logic and
empiricism confirm each other: the Illuminati are not able to control everything. What then? They've
been around a long time and they are as tireless as the Russian mathematician who worked out pi to
the one-thousandth place. The probability, then, is that they control some things and influence a hell
of a lot more. This probability increases as you think back over the memos. The two chief Arabic
branches— the Hashishim and the Roshinaya— were both wiped out; the Italian Illuminati were
'crushed' in 1507; Weishaupt's order was suppressed by the Bavarian government in 1785; and so
forth. If they were behind the French Revolution, they influenced rather than controlled, because
Napoleon undid everything the Jacobins started. That they had a hand in both Soviet Communism
and German Fascism is plausible, considering the many similarities between the two; but if they
controlled both, why did the two take opposite sides in the Second World War? And, if they ran both
the Federalist party, through Washington, and the Democratic Republicans, through Jefferson, what
was the purpose of the Aaron Burr counterrevolution, which they are also supposed to be behind?
The picture I get is not a grand Puppet Master moving everybody on invisible strings, but some sort
of million-armed octopus —a millepus, let's call it— constantly reaching out tentacles, and often
drawing back nothing but a bloody stump, crying, 'Foiled again!'
"But the millepus is very busy and quite resourceful. If it controlled the planet, it could choose either
operating in the open or retaining secrecy, but since it doesn't have that omnipotence yet, it must
choose to be as anonymous as possible. Therefore, many of its tentacles will be probing around in
the areas of publication and communications. It wants to know when somebody is investigating it or
getting ready to publicize an investigation he has already completed. Finding such a person, it then
has two choices: kill him or neutralize him. Killing may be resorted to in certain emergencies, but
will be avoided when possible: you never know when a person of that sort has stashed extra copies of
his documents in various unexpected places to be released in the event of his death. Neutralization is
best, almost always."
Saul paused to relight his pipe, and Muldoon thought, The most unrealistic aspect of Doyle's stories
is Watson's admiration at these moments. I'm just irritated, because he makes me feel like a chump
for not seeing it myself. "Go ahead," he said gruffly, saving his own deductions until Saul was
finished.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 98 von 470
"The best form of neutralization is recruitment, of course. But any crude and hurried effort at
recruitment is known as 'taking your pants down" in the espionage business because it makes you
more vulnerable. The safest approach is gradual recruitment, disguised as something else. The best
disguise, of course, is the pretense of helping the subject in his investigation. This also opens the
second, and preferable, option, which is leading him on a wild goose chase. Sending him looking for
Illuminati in organizations which they have never really infiltrated. Feeding him balderdash like that
stuff about the Illuminati coming from the planet Vulcan or being descended from Eve and the
Serpent. Best of all, though, is telling him the purpose of the conspiracy is something other than it
actually is, especially if the story you sell him is in keeping with his own ideals, since this can then
shade over into recruitment.
"Now, the sources this Pat unearthed mostly seem to come to one of two conclusions: the Illuminati
doesn't exist anymore, or the Illuminati is virtually identical with Russian Communism. The first I
reject because Malik and Pat have both disappeared and two buildings, one here in New York and
one way down in Mad Dog, have been bombed in a series palpably linked with an investigation of
the Illuminati. You've already accepted that, but the next step is just as obvious. If the Illuminati tries
to distort whatever publicity cannot be avoided, then we should look at the idea that the Illuminati is
communist-oriented as skeptically as we look at the idea that they don't even exist.
"So, let's look at the opposite hypothesis. Could the Illuminati be a far-right or fascist group? Well, if
Malik's information was in any way accurate, they seem to have some kind of special headquarters or
central office in Mad Dog— and that's Ku Klux and God's Lightning territory. Also, whatever their
history before Adam Weishaupt, they seem to have gone through some reformation and revitalization
under his leadership. He was a German and an ex-Catholic, just like Hitler. One of his Illuminated
Lodges survived long enough to recruit Hitler in 1923, according to a memo that might be the most
accurate one in the lot for all we know. Considering the proclivities of the German character,
Weishaupt could likely be an anti-Semite. Most historians I've read on Nazi Germany agree to at
least the possibility that there was a 'secret doctrine' which only the top Nazis shared among
themselves and didn't tell the rest of the party. That doctrine might be pure Illuminism. Take up the
many links between Illuminism and Freemasonry, and the known anti-Catholicism of the Masonic
movement— add in the fact that ex-Catholics are frequently bitter against the church, and both
Weishaupt and Hitler were ex-Catholics—and we get a hypothetical anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, semimystical
doctrine that
would sell equally well in Germany and in parts of America. Finally, while some left-extremists
might want to kill the Kennedys and Reverend King, all three were more likely targets for rightwingers;
and the Kennedys would be especially abhorrent to anti-Catholic rightists.
"A last point," Saul said. "Consider the left-wing orientation of Confrontation, The editor, Malik,
would probably not give much credence to most of the sources quoted in the memos, since the
majority are from rightist publications, and most of them allege that the Illuminati is a leftist plot.
His most probable reaction would be to dismiss this as another right-wing paranoia, unless he had
other sources besides his own Research Department. Notice how cagey he is. He doesn't tell his
associate editor, Peter Jackson, anything about the Illuminati itself— just that he wants a new
investigation of the last decade's assassinations. The bottom memo is so old and yellow it suggests he
got his first clue several years ago, but didn't act. Pat asks him why he's hiding all this from the
reporter, George Dorn. Finally, he disappears. He was getting information from some place else, and
it revealed a plot he could believe in and really fear. That would probably be a Fascist plot, anti-
Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-Negro."
Muldoon grinned. For once I don't have to play Watson, he thought. "Brilliant," he said. "You never
cease to amaze me, Saul. Would you glance at this, though, and tell me how it fits in?" He handed
over a piece of paper. "I found it in a book on Malik's bedside table."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 99 von 470
The paper was a brief scrawl in the same handwriting as the occasional jottings on the bottoms of
Pat's memos:
Pres. Garfield, killed by Charles Guiteau, a Roman Catholic. Pres. McKinley, ditto by
Leon Czolgosz, a Roman Catholic. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, attempted assassination
by John Shrank, a Roman Catholic. Pres. Franklin Roosevelt, attempted assassination by
Giuseppe Zangara, a Roman Catholic. Pres. Harry Truman, attempted assassination by
Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo, two Roman Catholics. Pres. Woodrow Wilson,
somewhat mysterious death while tended by a Roman Catholic nurse. Pres. Warren
Harding, another mysterious death (one rumor: it was suicide), also attended by a
Catholic nurse. Pres. John Kennedy, assassination inadequately explained. Head of CIA
then was John McCone, a Roman Catholic, who helped write the inconclusive and
contradictory Warren Report.
(House of Representatives, March 1, 1964—five Congressmen wounded by Lebron-
Miranda-Codero-Rod-riguez assassination squad, all Roman Catholics.)
When Saul looked up, Barney said pleasantly, "I found it in a book, like I said. The book was Rome's
Responsibility for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by General Thomas M. Harris. Harris points
out that John Wilkes Booth, the Suratt family, and all the other conspirators were Catholics, and
argues they are acting under orders from the Jesuits." Barney paused to enjoy Saul's expression and
went on, "It occurs to me that, using your principle that most of the memos are full of false leads, we
might question the idea that the Illuminati uses the Masons as a front to gather recruits. They would
probably need some similar organization, though— one that exists all over the world, has mysterious
rites and secrets, inner orders to which a select few are recruited, and a pyramidal authoritarian
structure compelling everybody to take commands from above whether they understand them or not.
One such organization is the Roman Catholic church."
Saul picked up his pipe from the floor. He didn't seem to remember having dropped it. "My turn to
say, 'brilliant,' " he murmured finally. "Are you going to stop going to Mass on Sunday? Do you
really believe it?"
Muldoon laughed. "After twenty years," he said, "I finally did it. I got one jump ahead of you. Saul,
you were standing face-to-face with the truth, eyeball-to-eyeball, nose-to-nose, mouth-to-mouth—
but you were so close that your eyes crossed and you saw it backward. No, it's not the Catholic
church. You made a good guess in saying it was anti-Catholic as well as anti-Jewish and anti-Negro.
But it's inside the Catholic church and always has been. In fact, the church's efforts to root it out have
given Holy Mother Rome a very unfortunate reputation for paranoia and hysteria. Its agents make a
special effort to enter the priesthood, in order to obtain holy objects for use in their own bizarre rites.
They also try to rise as high in the church as they can, to destroy it from within. Many times they
have recruited and corrupted whole parishes, whole orders of clergy, even whole provinces. They
probably got to Weishaupt when he was still a Jesuit— they've infiltrated that order several times in
history and the Dominicans even more. If caught in criminal acts, they make sure that their cover
Catholicism, and not their true faith, is publicized, just like this list of assassins. Their God is called
the Light-Bearer and that's probably where the word 'illumination' comes from. And Malik asked
about them a long time ago and was told by this W.H., quite correctly, that they still exist. I'm talking
about the Satanists, of course."
"Of course," Saul repeated softly, "of course. That pentagon that keeps popping up— it's the middle
of the pentacle for summoning the Devil. Fascism is only their political facet. Basically, they're a
theology— or an anti-theology, I guess. But what in hell— literally in hell— is their ultimate
objective, then?"
"Don't ask me," Barney shrugged. "I can follow my brother when he talks about the history of
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 100 von 470
Satanism, but not when he tries to explain its motivations. He uses technical theological terms about
'immanentizing the Eschaton,' but all I can understand is that it has something to do with bringing on
the end of the world."
Saul turned ashen. "Barney," he cried, "my God. Fernando Poo!"
"But that was settled—"
"That's just it. Their usual technique of the false front. The real threat is coming from somewhere
else, and they mean to do it this time."
Muldoon shook his head. "But they must be crazy!"
"Everybody is crazy," Saul said patiently, "if you don't understand his motives." He held up his tie.
"Imagine you arrive in a flying saucer from Mars— or from Vulcan, like the Illuminati did according
to one of our allegedly reliable sources. You see me get up this morning and for no clear reason wrap
this cloth around my neck, in spite of the heat. What explanation can you think of? I'm a fetishist— a
nut, in other words. Most human behavior is that sort, not oriented to survival but some symbolsystem
that people believe in. Long hair, short hair, fish on Friday, no pork, rising when the judge
enters the room— all symbols, symbols, symbols. Sure the Illuminati are crazy, from our point of
view. From their point of view, we're crazy. If we can find out what they believe, what their symbols
mean to them, we'll understand why they want to kill most of the rest of us, or all of the rest of us.
Barney, call your brother. Get him out of bed. I want to find out more about Satanism."
("The devil!" the President shouted on March 27. "Nuclear war over an insignificant place like
Fernando Poo? You must be mental. The American people are tired of our army policing the whole
world. Let Equatorial Guinea fish its own nuts out of the troubled waters, or whatever that expression
is." "Wait," said the Director of the CIA, "let me show you these aerial photographs . . .")
Back at the Watergate, G. Gordon Liddy carefully aims his pistol and shoots out the streetlight: in
memory, he is in an old castle at Millbrook, New York, eagerly searching for naked women and not
finding any. Beside him Professor Timothy Leary is saying with maddening serenity, "But science is
the most ecstatic kick of all. The intelligence of the galaxy is revealed in every atom, every gene,
every cell." We'll get him back, Liddy thinks savagely, if we have to assassinate the whole Swiss
government. That man is not going to remain free. Beside him, Bernard Barker shifts nervously as in
right-angular time a future president metamorphoses the plumbers into the cesspool cleaners: but
now, inside the Watergate, the Illuminati bug is unnoticed by those planting the CREEP bug,
although both were subsequently found by the technicians installing the BUGGER bug. "It's the
same Intelligence, making endlessly meaningful patterns," Dr. Leary goes on enthusiastically.
("Here, kitty-kitty," Hagbard repeats for the 109th time.)
"The devil?" Father James Augustine Muldoon repeated. "Well, that's a very complicated story. Do
you want me to go all the way back to Gnosticism?"
Saul, listening on the extension phone, nodded a vigorous affirmative.
"Go as far back as you have to," Barney said. "This is a complicated matter we're trying to untangle
here."
"OK, I'll try to remember you're not in my theology class at Fordham and keep this as brief as I can."
The priest's voice faded, then came back— probably he was shifting the phone as he got out of bed
and moved to a chair, Saul guessed.
"There were many approaches to Gnosticism," the voice went on in a moment, "all of them centered
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 101 von 470
on gnosis—direct experience of God— as distinguished from mere knowledge about God. The
search for gnosis, or illumination as it was sometimes called, took many odd forms, some of them
probably similar to Oriental yogas and some of them using the very same drugs that modern rebels
against the slow path of orthodox religion have rediscovered. Naturally, with such a variety of paths
to gnosis, different pilots would land at different ports, each insisting he had found the real New
Jerusalem. Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why
the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions
monasteries. But I digress.
"What you're interested in, I guess, is Cainism and Manicheanisra. The former regarded Cain as a
specially holy figure because he was the first murderer. You have to be a mystic yourself to
understand that kind of logic. The notion was that, by bringing murder into the world, Cain created
an opportunity for people to renounce murder. But, then, other Cainites went further— paradox
always seems to breed more paradox and heresy creates more heresy— and ended up glorifying
murder, along with all the other sins. The credo was that you should commit every sin possible, just
to give yourself a chance to win a really difficult redemption after repenting. Also, it gave God a
chance to be especially generous when He forgave you. Related ideas popped up in Tantric
Buddhism about the same time, and it's a great historical mystery which group of lunatics, East or
West, was influencing the other. Does any of this help you so far?"
"A bit," Barney said.
"About this gnosis," Saul asked, "is it the orthodox theological position that the illuminations or
visions were actually coming from the Devil and not from God?"
"Yes. That's where Manicheanism enters the picture," Father Muldoon said. "The Manicheans made
exactly the same charge against the orthodox church. According to their way of looking at it, the God
of orthodox Christianity and orthodox Judaism, was the Devil. The god they contacted through their
own peculiar rites was the real god. This, of course, is still the teaching of Satanists today."
"And," Saul asked, begining to intuit what the answer would be, "what has all this to do with atomic
energy?"
"With atomic energy? Nothing at all. . .at least, nothing that I can see. . . ."
"Why is Satan called the light-bringer?" Saul plunged on, convinced he was on the right track.
"The Manicheans reject the physical universe," the priest said slowly. "They say that the true god,
their god, would never lower himself to mess around with matter. The God who created the worldour
God, Jehovah— they call panurgia, which has the connotations of a kind of blind, stupid
blundering force rather than a truly intelligent being. The realm which their god inhabits is pure spirit
of pure light. Hence, he is called the light-bringer, and this universe is always called the realm of
darkness. But they didn't know about atomic energy in those days— did they?" The last sentence had
started as a statement and ended as a question.
"That's what I'm wondering," Saul said. "Atomic power releases a lot of light, doesn't it? And it sure
would immanentize the Eschaton if enough atomic power was unleashed at once, wouldn't it?"
"Fernando Poo!" the priest exclaimed. "Is this connected with Fernando Poo?"
"I'm beginning to think so," Saul said. "I'm also beginning to think we've stayed in one place a long
time, using a phone that is almost certainly tapped. We better get moving. Thanks, Father."
"You're quite welcome, although I'm sure I don't know what you're getting at," the priest said. "If you
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 102 von 470
think Satanists control the United States government a few priests would agree with you, especially
the Berrigan brothers, but I don't see how this can be a police matter. Does the New York Police
Department now maintain a bureau of holy inquisitions?"
"Don't mind him," Barney said softly. "He's very cynical about dogma, like most clergymen these
days."
"I heard that," the priest said. "I may be cynical but I really don't think Satanism is a joking matter.
And your friend's theory is very plausible, in its way. After all, the Satanist's motive in infiltrating
the church, in the old days, was to disgrace the institution thought to represent God on earth. Now
that the United States government makes the same claim, well. That may be a joke or a paradox on
my part, but it's the way their minds work, too. I am a professional cynic —a theologian must be,
these days, if he isn't going to seem a total fool to young people with their skeptical minds— but I'm
orthodox, or downright reactionary, about the Inquisitions. I've read all the rationalist historians, of
course, and there was certainly an element of hysteria in the church in those days, but, still, Satanism
is not any less frightening than cancer or plague. It is totally inimical to human life and, in fact, to all
life. The church had good reasons to be afraid of it. Just as people who are old enough to remember
have good reasons to be panicky at any hint of a revival of Hitlerism."
Saul thought of the cryptic, evasive phrases in Eliphas Levy: "the monstrous gnosis of Manes . . . the
cultus of material fire. . . ." And, nearly ten years ago, the hippies gathered at the Pentagon, hanging
flowers on the M.P.'s rifles, chanting "Out, demon, out!" . . . Hiroshima ... the White Light of the
Void. . . .
"Wait," Saul said. "Is there more to it than just ideas about killing? Isn't killing a mystical experience
to the Satanists?"
"Of course," the priest replied. "That's the whole point— they want gnosis, personal experience, not
dogma, which is somebody else's word. Rationalists are always attacking dogma for causing
fanaticism, but the worst fanatics start from gnosis. Modern psychologists are just beginning to
understand some of this. You know how people in explosive group-therapy sessions talk about
sudden bursts of energy occurring in the whole group at once? One can get the same effect with
dancing and drum-beating; that's what is called a 'primitive' religion. Use drugs, nowadays, and
you're a hippie. Do it with sex, and you're a witch, or one of the Knights Templar. Mass participation
in an animal sacrifice has the same effect. Human sacrifice has been used in many religions,
including the Aztec cult everybody has heard about, as well as in Satanism. Modern psychologists
say that the force released is Freud's libidinal energy. Mystics call it prajna or the Astral Light.
Whatever it is, human sacrifice seems to release more of it than sex or drugs or dancing or drumbeating
or any less violent method and mass human sacrifice unleashes a ton of it. Now do you
understand why I fear Satanism and half apologize for the Inquisition?"
"Yes," Saul said absently, "and I'm beginning to share your fear. ..." A song he hated was pounding
inside his skull: Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritz. . .
He realized that he was holding the phone and seeing scenes forty years ago in another country. He
jerked himself back to attention as Muldoon thanked his brother again and hung up. Saul raised his
eyes and the two detectives exchanged glances of mutual dread.
After a long pause, Muldoon said, "We can't trust anybody with this. We can hardly even trust each
other."
Before Saul could answer the phone rang. It was Danny Pricefixer at headquarters. "Bad news. There
was only one girl in research at Confrontation named Pat. Patricia Walsh to be exact, and—"
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 103 von 470
"I know," Saul said wearily, "she's disappeared, too."
"What are you going to do now? The FBI is still raising hell and demanding to know where you two
are and the Commissioner is having the shits, the fits, and the blind staggers."
'Tell them," Saul said succinctly "that we've disappeared." He hung up carefully and began stuffing
the memos back into the box.
"What now?" Muldoon asked.
"We go underground. And we stick to this until we crack it or it kills us."
("How long is this motherfucker?" George asked, gesturing at the Danube six stories below. He and
Stella were in their room at the Donau Hotel.
"You won't believe me," Stella replied, smiling. "It's exactly one thousand seven hundred and
seventy-six miles in length. One-seven-seven-six, George."
"The same as the date Weishaupt revived the Illuminati?"
"Exactly." Stella grinned. "We keep telling you. Synchronicity is as universal as gravity. When you
start looking you find it everywhere.")
"Here's the money," Banana-Nose Maldonado said generously, opening a briefcase full of crisp new
bills. (It is now November 23, 1963: they were meeting on a bench near Cleopatra's needle in Central
Park: the younger man, however, is nervous.) "I want to tell you that . . . my superior ... is very
pleased. This will definitely decrease Bobby's power in the Justice Department and stop a lot of
annoying investigations."
The younger man, Ben Volpe, gulps. "Look, Mr. Mal-donado, there's something I've got to tell you. I
know how the ... Brotherhood ... is when somebody fucks up and hides it."
"You didn't fuck up," Banana-Nose says, bewildered. "In fact, you lucked out amazingly. That
schmuck Oswald is going to fry for it. He came along at just the right time. It was a real Fortuna . . .
Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" Banana-Nose sits up straight as the thought hits him. "You mean . . . you
mean . . . Did Oswald really do it? Did he shoot before you?"
"No, no," Volpe is miserable. "Let me explain it as clearly as I can. I'm there on top of the Dallas
County Records Building like we planned, see? The motorcade turns onto Elm and heads for the
underpass. I use my magnifying sight, swinging the whole gun around to look through it, just to
make one last check that I have all the Feds spotted. When I face the School Book Depository, I
catch this rifle. That was Oswald, I guess. Then I check out the grassy knoll and, goddam, there's
another cat with a rifle. I just went cold. I couldn't figure it out. While I'm in this state, like a zombie,
a dog barks and just then the guy in the grassy knoll calm and cool as if he was at a shooting range
lays three of them right into the car. That's it," Volpe ends miserably. "I can't take the money. The . .
. Brotherhood . . . would have my ass if they ever found out the truth."
Maldonado sat silently, rubbing his famous nose as he did when making a hard decision. "You're a
good boy, Bennie. I give you ten percent of the money, just for being honest. We need more honest
young boys like you in the Brotherhood."
Volpe swallowed again, and said, "There's one more thing I oughta tell you. I went down to the
grassy knoll, after the cops run from there to the School Book Depository. I thought I might find the
guy who did the shooting still hanging around and tell you what he looked like. He was long gone,
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 104 von 470
though. But here's what so spooky. I ran into another galoot; who was sneaking down from the triple
underpass. Long, skinny guy with buck teeth, kind of reminded me of a python or some kind of
snake. He just looks at me and my umbrella and guesses what's in it
His mouth falls open. 'Jesus Christ and his black bastard brother Harry,' he says, 'how the fuck many
people does it take to kill a President these days?'"
("And they're teaching them about perversions as well," Smiling Jim was building toward his climax.
"Homosexuality and lesbianism are being taught in our schools and we're paying for it out of our tax
money. Now is that communism or isn't it?")
"Welcome to the Playboy Club," the beautiful blonde said, "I'm your bunny, Virgin."
Saul took his seat in the dark wondering if he had heard correctly. Virgin was an odd name for a
bunny; perhaps she had actually said Virginia. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
"How do you wish your steak, sir?" the bunny was asking. A stake through the heart, for a vampire.
"Medium well," Saul said, wondering why his mind was wandering in such odd directions. ("Odd
erections," somebody said in the nearby dark— or was it a distorted echo of his own voice?)
"Medium well," the bunny repeated, seemingly speaking to the wall. A medium wall, Saul thought.
Immediately the wall opened and Saul was looking into a combination kitchen and butcher shop. A
steer was standing not five feet from him, but before he could recover from this shock a male figure,
stripped to the waist and wearing the hood of a medieval executioner, caught his attention. With one
stroke of a huge hammer, this figure knocked the steer unconscious and it fell to the floor with a
crash. Immediately the executioner produced an axe and chopped its head off; blood gushed in a
crimson pool from its neck.
The wall closed, and Saul had the terrifying feeling that the whole scene had been a hallucination—
that he was losing his mind.
"All our lunches are educational today," the bunny said in his ear. "We believe every customer
should understand fully what's on the end of his fork and how it got there, before he takes a bite."
"Good God," Saul said, getting to his feet. This wasn't a Playboy Club, it was some den of lunatics
and sadists. He stumbled toward the door.
"No way out," a man at another table said softly as he passed.
"Saul, Saul," the maitre d' murmured politely, "why dost thou persecute me? Hab' rochmunas."
"It's a drug," Saul said thickly, "you've given me a drug." Of course, that was it— something like
mescaline or LSD—and they were guiding his hallucinations by providing proper stimuli. Perhaps
they were even faking some of the hallucinations. But how had he fallen into their hands? The last
thing he remembered, he was in Joe Malik's apartment with Barney Muldoon. . . . No, there was a
voice saying, "Now, Sister Victoria," as they came out the door onto Riverside Drive. . . .
"No man should marry a woman more than thirty years younger than himself," the maitre d' said
mournfully. How did they know about that? Had they investigated his whole life? How long had they
held him?
"I'm getting out of here," he shouted, pushing the maitre d' aside and bolting for the door.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 105 von 470
Hands grasped for him and missed (they weren't really trying, he realized: he was being allowed to
reach the door). When he plunged through the doorway, he realized why: he was not on the street but
in another room. This was the next ordeal.
A rectangle of light appeared on the wall; somewhere in the darkness there was a projector. A card,
light an old silent-movie caption, appeared in the rectangle. It said:
ALL JEW GIRLS LIKE TO BALL WITH BUCK NIGGERS
"Sons of bitches," Saul shouted back at them. They were still working on his feelings about Rebecca.
Well, that would get them nowhere: he had ample reason to trust her devotion to him, especially her
sexual devotion.
The card moved out of the rectangle, and a picture appeared in its place. It was Rebecca's, in her
nightgown, kneeling. Before her stood a naked and enormous black man, six feet six at least, with an
equally impressive penis which she held sensuously in her mouth. Her eyes were closed in bliss, like
a baby nursing.
"Motherfuckers," Saul screamed. "It's a fake. That's not Rebecca— it's an actress with makeup. You
forgot the mole on her hip." They could drug his senses but not his mind.
There was a nasty laugh in the darkness. 'Try this one, Saul," a voice said coldly.
A new picture slid into view: Adolph Hitler, in full Nazi uniform, and a naked Rebecca backing up to
him, taking his penis in her rectum. Her face showed both pain and pleasure— and the mole on her
hip was visible. Another fake— Rebecca was born years after Hitler died. But they hadn't produced
the slide in the thirty seconds after his shout, and that meant they knew her body, intimately. . . . And
they also knew how skeptical and quick his mind was, and were prepared to administer a series of
jolts until something got past his ability to doubt.
"No comment?" the voice asked mockingly.
"I don't believe a man who died thirty years ago would be buggering any woman today," Saul said
dryly. "Your tricks are kind of corny."
"Sometimes, with the vulgar, we must communicate vulgarly," the voice replied— and it was almost
gentle and pitying this time.
A new picture appeared— and this time, without doubt, it was Rebecca. But it was Rebecca three
years ago, when he first met her. She sat at a table in a cheap East Village pad, wearing the
emaciated and self-pitying look he remembered from those days; and she was preparing to inject a
needle in her arm. It was the real thing, but the terror was in its implications: they had been watching
him that long ago. Perhaps— it was hard to date the picture precisely, although he remembered her
apartment in those days— they even knew he would fall in love with her before he knew it himself.
No; more likely, a friend of hers in those days had taken the picture and they had somehow found it
when they became interested in him. Their resources must be fantastic.
A new card came on the screen;
ONCE A JUNKIE ALWAYS A JUNKIE
A new picture quickly followed: Rebecca, as she looked today, sitting in his kitchen— with the new
cafe curtains they had just hung last week— once again injecting a needle into her arm.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 106 von 470
"You're the vulgar ones, O mighty Illuminati," Saul said caustically. "I would have noticed the tracks
on her arm, if she was shooting up again."
The answer was nonverbal: the picture of Rebecca and the giant black man came back on the screen,
and was immediately followed by a close-up of her face, eyes closed, mouth open receiving the
penis. It was in perfect focus, the work of an artist with the camera, and he could see no sign of any
makeup that would help another woman to pass as Rebecca. He held to his memory that the mole on
her hip was missing, but, perversely, his mind tasted at last the other possibility— makeup can
change a face, and it can also hide a mole. ... If they wanted him to use his skepticism, so that they
could gradually destroy that, and, in the process, undermine his total psyche. . . . Another sign came
on the screen:
THAT WE CAN CALL THESE DELICATE CREATURES OURS BUT NOT THEIR
APPETITES
Saul remembered, all too well, Rebecca's passion in bed. "Shakespeare," he called hoarsely.
"Advertising your erudition at a time like this is worse than vulgarity. It's petit-bourgeois
pretentiousness."
The answer was brutal: a whole series of slides, maybe fifteen or twenty in all, cascaded across the
screen in such rapid succession that he couldn't examine them carefully, except that the central
character was Rebecca, always Rebecca, Rebecca with the black giant in other sexual positions,
Rebecca with another woman, Rebecca with Spiro Agnew, Rebecca with a little seven-year-old boy,
Rebecca, Rebecca, in a rising crescendo of perversion and abnormality, Rebecca with a Saint
Bernard dog— and a peppermint-colored sine-wave, part of the drug still working on him, cutting
across the scene. . . .
"The true sadist has style," Saul gasped fighting for control of his voice. "You people are about as
evil and frightening as a bad B-movie."
There was a whirring mechanical sound and a movie began in place of the slides. It was Rebecca and
the Saint Bernard, with several close-ups, and her expressions were the ones he knew. Could any
actress portray another woman's individual style of sexual response? Yes— if necessary, these
people would use hypnosis to get the effect letter-perfect.
The movie stopped abruptly and the projector had another message for him, held on the screen for
minutes:
ONLY THE MADMAN IS ABSOLUTELY SURE
When he realized that there would be no further progress until he spoke, Saul said coldly, "Very
entertaining. Where do I go to crumble into a bundle of neuroses?"
There was no answer. No sound. Nothing happened. He half-saw a latticework of red pentagons, but
that was the drug— and it helped identify which drug, for geometric patterns were characteristic of
the mescaline experience. As he considered that, the peppermint sine-waves appeared before the
pentagons and the screen gave him a new message:
HOW MUCH IS THE DRUG?
HOW MUCH IS OUR TRICKERY?
HOW MUCH IS REALITY?
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 107 von 470
Suddenly, Saul was in Copenhagen, on a cruise boat, passing the mermaid of the harbor. She turned
and looked at him. "This case is fishy," she said— and as she opened her mouth a school of guppies
swam out. "I'm a mouth-breeder," she explained.
Saul had a reproduction of that famous statue in his home (which must be the source of the
hallucination), yet he was strangely disturbed. Her punning words seemed to conceal a deeper
meaning than mere casual references to the Confrontation bombing . . . something that went back . . .
back through his whole life . . . and explained why he had purchased the statue in the first place.
I'm about to have one of those famous drug insights that hippies always talk about, he thought. But
the mermaid broke apart into pentagons of red, orange, yellow. . . .
And a unicorn winked at him. "Man," it said, "am I ever horny!"
Those sketches I made the other day, Saul thought. . . but the screen asked him:
IS THE THOUGHT OF A UNICORN A REAL THOUGHT?
... and he suddenly understood for the first time what the words "a real thought" meant; what Hegel
meant by defining the Absolute Idea as pure thought thinking about pure thought; what Bishop
Berkeley meant by denying the reality of the physical world in seeming contradiction of all human
experience and common sense; what every detective was secretly attempting to detect, although it
was always right out in the open; why he became a detective in the first place; why the universe itself
became; why everything; and then he forgot it; caught a fleeting glimpse of it again— it had
something to do with the eye at the top of the pyramid; and lost it again in visions of unicorns,
stallions, zebras, bars, bars, bars.
Now his whole visual field was hallucinatory . . . octagons, triangles, pyramids, organic shapes of
embryos and growing ferns. The drug was taking stronger hold on him. Criminals he had sent to jail
appeared— sullen, hating faces— and the screen said
GOODMAN IS A BAD MAN
He laughed to keep from crying. They had touched his deepest doubt about his job— his career, his
life's work— precisely at the time the drug also was leading him there, with those damnable accusing
faces. It was as if they could read his mind and see his hallucinations. No; it was just one lucky
coincidence, because among all their tricks one was statistically likely to occur in tandem with an
appropriate drug experience.
WHILE THERE IS A SOUL IN PRISON I AM NOT FREE
Saul laughed again, more wildly, almost hysterically; and knew, even more clearly than before, the
tears hiding behind the laughter. Prisons reform nobody; my life is wasted; I offer society a delusion
of security but not a real service. Worse yet, I have known it for years, and lied to myself. The sense
of total failure and utter bitterness that washed over Saul at that moment was, he knew, not produced
but only magnified by the drug. It had been with him a long, long time but always pushed aside,
brushed away from his attention by concentrating on something else; the drug merely allowed him
(forced him) to look at the emotion honestly and totally for a few wrenching moments.
A doorway suddenly lit up toward his right and a neon light came on above it, saying, "Absolution
and Redemption."
"OK," he said icily, "I'll play the next move." He opened the door.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 108 von 470
The room was tiny but furnished like the world's most expensive brothel. Above the four poster bed
was an illustration of Alice and a mushroom labeled "Eat Me." And on the bed, stripped of her
Playboy costume, pinkly and beautifully naked with legs spread in anticipation, was the blonde
bunny. "Good evening," she said speaking rapidly and fixing his eyes with her own stare, "I'm your
Virgin Bunny. Every man wants a Virgin Bunny, to eat on Easter to celebrate the miracle of the
Resurrection. Do you understand the miracle of the Resurrection, sir? Do you know that nothing is
true and everything is permissible and that a man who dares to break the robot conditioning of
society and commit adultery dies in the moment of orgasm with his whore and wakes resurrected to a
new life? Did they teach you that in shule? Or did they just fill you with a lot of monogamous
Yiddish horseshit?" Most hypnotists spoke slowly, but she was obtaining the same effect by talking
rapidly. "You thought you were going to eat a dead animal, which is disgusting even if this crazy
society accepts it as normal, but instead you're going to eat a desirable woman (and fuck her
afterward), which is normal even if this crazy society thinks of it as disgusting. You are one of the
Illuminated, Saul, but you never knew it. Tonight you are going to learn. You are going to find your
real self as you were before your mother and father conceived you. And I'm not talking about
reincarnation. I'm talking about something much more marvelous."
Saul found his voice. "Your offer is appreciated but declined," he said. "Frankly, I find your tawdry
mysticism even more adolescent than your sentimental vegetarianism and coarse lasciviousness. The
trouble with the Illuminati is that you have no sense of true drama and not even a patina of subtlety."
Her eyes widened as he spoke, but not with surprise at his resistance— either she was really alarmed,
and sorry for him, or she was a great actress. "Too bad," she said sadly. "You've refused Heaven, so
you must travel the harder path through the halls of Hell."
Saul heard a movement behind him, but before he could turn a sharp sensation pricked his neck: a
needle, another drug. Just as he was guessing they had given him a stronger psychedelic to escalate
the effect, he felt consciousness slipping away. It was a narcotic or a poison.
The wagon started with a jerk: we were off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of arse. What
was it Hagbard had said to me, the first time we met, about straight lines, courtrooms, and shit? I
couldn't remember, my mind drifted, Joseph K. opening the law books and finding pornographic
illustrations (Kafka knew where it was at), deSade keeping a precise mathematical tally in the
brothel, how many times he flogged the whores, how many times they flogged him, the Nazis
counting every gold filling in the corpses at Auschwitz, Shakespeare scholars debating about that
line in Macbeth (was it benches or banks of time?), the prisoner may approach the bench, you can
bank on it, buddy, bank on it ... PIGS EAT SHIT PIGS EAT SHIT . . . and Pound wrote "the
buggering bank," he rejected Freud, but even so he got a whiff of the real secret... how one homo
ominously loopses another....
"My God," the Englishman said. "When do we get out of the teargas area?"
"We're out of it," I told him wearily. "That's regular Chicago air now. Courtesy of Commonwealth
Edison and U.S. Steel over in Gary."
The McCarthy woman was weeping quietly, although the Mace had worn off by now. The rest of us
rode silently, a little caravan of dried snot and tears, the parmesan cheese odor of stale vomit, some
lingering acrid Mace fumes, the urine of somebody who had peed himself, and that high sulphur
dioxide and slaughterhouse aroma of Chicago's South Side. The quality of mercy is very strained; it
drippeth like the pus from chancre. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Chairman Mao appeared
and lectured us: "Ho is just a poetaster. Now, if you want to hear some real socialist verse, consider
my latest composition:
There was a young lady from Queens
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 109 von 470
Who gobbled a plateful of beans
The beans fermented
And she was tormented
By embarrassing sounds in her jeans!
Indicates the anal orientation of capitalist society," he explained, dwindling into a pool of blood on
the floor next to the kid with the broken arm.
(In 1923, Adolph Hitler stood beneath a pyramidal altar and repeated the words of a goat-headed
man: "Der Zweck heiligte die Mittel." James Joyce, in Paris, scrawled in crayon words that his
secretary, Samuel Beckett, would later type: "Pre-Austeric Man in Pursuit of Pan-Hysteric Woman."
In Brooklyn, New York, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, returning from a party at which Hart Crane had
been perfectly beastly— thereby confirming Mr. Lovecraft's prejudice against homosexuals— finds a
letter in his mailbox and reads with some amusement: "Some of the secrets revealed in your recent
stories would better be kept out of the light of print. Believe me, I speak as a friend, but there are
those who would prefer such half-forgotten lore to remain in its present obscurity, and they are
formidable enemies for any man. Remember what happened to Ambrose Bierce. . . ." And, in
Boston, Robert Putney Drake screams, "Lies, lies, lies. It's all lies. Nobody tells the truth. Nobody
says what he thinks. . . ." His voice trails off.
"Go on," Dr. Besetzung says, "you were doing fine. Don't stop."
"What the use?" Drake replies, drained of anger, turning on the couch to look at the psychiatrist. "To
you, this is just abreaction or acting-out or something clinical. You can't believe I'm right."
"Perhaps I can. Perhaps I agree more than you realize." The doctor looks up from his pad and meets
Drake's eye. "Are you sure you're not just assuming I'll react like everybody else you've tried to tell
this to?"
"If you agreed with me," Drake says carefully, "if you understood what I'm really saying, you'd
either be the head of a bank, out there in the jungle with my father, grabbing your own share of the
loot, or you'd be a bomb-throwing revolutionary, like those Sacco and Vanzetti fellows. Those are
the only choices that make sense."
"The only choices? One must go to one extreme or the other?"
Drake looks back at the ceiling and talks abstractly. "You had to get an M.D. long ago, before you
specialized. Do you know any case where germs gave up and went away because the man they were
destroying had a noble character or sweet sentiments? Did the tuberculosis bacilli leave John Keat's
lungs because he had a few hundred great poems still unwritten inside him? You must have read
some history, even if you were never at the front lines like me: do you recall any battle that refutes
Napoleon's aphorism about God always being on the side of the biggest cannons and the best
tacticians? This bolshie in Russia, Lenin, he has ordered the schools to teach chess to everybody.
You know why? He says that chess teaches the lesson that revolutionaries must learn: that if you
don't mobilize your forces properly, you lose. No matter how high your morality, no matter how
lofty your goal: fight without mercy, use every ounce of intelligence, or you lose. My father
understands that. The people who run the world have always understood it. A general who doesn't
understand it gets broken back to second lieutenant or worse. I saw a whole platoon wiped out,
exterminated like an anthill under a boot. Not because they were immoral or naughty or didn't
believe in Jesus. Because at that place, on that day, the Germans had superior fire power. That's the
law, the one true law, of the universe, and everything that contradicts it— everything they teach in
schools and churches— is a lie." He says the word listlessly now. "Just a lie."
"If you really believe that," the doctor asks, "why do you still have the nightmares and the
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 110 von 470
insomnia?"
Drake's blue eyes stare at the ceiling. "I don't know," he says finally. "That's why I'm here.")
"Moon, Simon," the Desk Sergeant called.
I stepped forward, seeing myself through his eyes: beard, army surplus clothes, stains all over (my
own mucus, somebody else's vomit). The archetypical filthy, dirty, disgusting, hippie-commie
revolutionary.
"Well," he said, "another bright red rose."
"I usually look neater," I told him calmly. "You get a bit messed over when you're arrested in this
town."
"The only way you get arrested in this town," he said, frowning, "is if you break the laws."
"The only way you get arrested in Russia is you break the laws," I replied cheerfully. "Or by
mistake," I added.
That didn't set well at all. "Wise guy," he said gently. "We like wise guys here." He consulted my
charge-slip. "Nice record for one night, Moon. Rioting, mob action, assaulting an officer, resisting
arrest, disturbing the peace. Nice."
"I wasn't disturbing the peace," I said. "I was disturbing the war." I stole that one-liner from Ammon
Hennacy, a Catholic Anarchist that Mom was always quoting. "The rest of the charges are all
bullshit, too."
"Say, I know you," he said suddenly. "You're Tim Moon's son. Well, well, well. A second-generation
anarchist. I guess we'll be locking you up as often as we locked him up."
"I guess so," I said. "At least until the Revolution. Afterward, we won't be locking you up, though.
We're going to establish nice camps in places like Wisconsin, and send you there free to learn a
useful trade. We believe that all policemen and politicians can be rehabilitated. But if you don't want
to go to the camp and learn a productive trade, you don't have to. You can live on Welfare."
"Well, well, well," he said. "Just like your old man. I suppose if I looked the other way, while some
of the boys took you in back and worked you over a bit, you'd come out still making wisecracks?"
"I'm afraid so," I smiled. "Irish national character, you know! We see the funny side of everything."
"Well," he said thoughtfully (he was awfully fond of that word), "I hope you can see the funny side
of what comes next. You're going to be arraigned before Judge Bushman. You'll find yourself
wishing you had fallen into a buzz saw instead. Give my regards to your father. Tell him Jim
O'Malley says hello."
"He's dead," I said.
He looked down at his charge-slips. "Sorry to hear it," he mumbled. "Nanetti, Fred," he bawled, and
the kid with the broken arm came forward.
A patrolman led me to the fingerprint room. This guy was a computer: "Right hand." I gave him my
right hand. "Left hand." I gave him my left hand. "Follow the officer." I followed the officer, and
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 111 von 470
they took my picture. We went down some halls to the night court, and in a lonely section the
patrolman suddenly hit me in the lower back with his club, the exact spot (he knew his business) to
give me liver problems for a month. I grunted but refused to say anything that would set him off and
get me another clout, so he spoke. "Yellow-bellied faggot," he said.
Just like Biloxi, Mississippi: one cop is nice, another is just impersonal, a third is a mean bastard—
and it doesn't really matter. They're all part of the same machine, and what comes out the end of the
gears and levers is the same product, whatever their attitude is. I'm sure Buchenwald was the same:
some of the guards tried to be as humane as possible, some of them just did their job, some of them
went out of their way to make it worse for the prisoners. It doesn't matter: the machine produces the
effect it was designed for.
Judge Bushman (we slipped him AUM two years later, but that's another story, coming up on
trip) gave me his famous King Kong scowl. "Here are the rules," he said. This is an arraignment.
You can enter a plea or stand mute. If you enter a plea, you retain the right to change it at your trial.
When I set bond, you can be released by paying ten percent to the bailiff. Cash only, no checks. If
you don't have the cash, you go to jail overnight. You people have the city tied up in knots and the
bail bondsmen are too busy to cover every courtroom, so by sheer bad luck you landed in a
courtroom they're not covering." He turned to the bailiff. "Charge sheet," he said. He read the record
of my criminal career as concocted by the arresting officer. "Five offenses in one night. You're bad
medicine, aren't you, Moon? Trial set for September fifteenth. Bail will be ten thousand dollars. Do
you have one thousand dollars?"
"No," I told him wondering how many times he'd made that speech tonight.
"Just a moment," said Hagbard, materializing out of the hallway. "I can make bail for this man."
MR. KHARIS: Does Mr. Celine seriously suggest that the United States Government is in need of a
guardian?
MR. CELINE: I am merely offering a way out for your client. Any private individual with a record
of such incessant murder and robbery would be glad to cop an insanity plea. Do you insist that your
client was in full possession of its reason at Wounded Knee? At Hiroshima? At Dresden?
JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: You become facetious, Mr. Celine.
MR. CELINE: I have never been more serious.
"What is your relationship to this young man?" Bushman asked angrily. He had been about to come
when the cop dragged me off to jail, and he was strangling in some kind of gruesome S-M equivalent
of coitus interruptus.
"He's my wife," Hagbard said calmly.
"What?"
"Common-law wife," Hagbard went on. "Homosexual marriage is not recognized in Illinois. But
homosexuality per se isn't a crime in this state, either, so don't try to make waves, your honor. Let me
pay and take him home."
It was too much. "Daddy," I said, camping like our friend the Padre. "You're so masterful."
Judge Bushman looked like he wanted to lay Hagbard out with a gavel upside of his head, but he
controlled himself. "Count the money," he told the bailiff. "Make sure he pays every penny. And
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 112 von 470
then," he told us, "I want the two of you out of this courtroom as quickly as possible. I'll see you
September fifteenth," he added, to me.
MR. KHARIS: And we believe we have demonstrated the necessity of this dam. We believe we have
shown that the doctrine of eminent domain is on sure constitutional grounds, and has been held to
apply in numerous similar cases. We believe we have shown that the resettlement plan offered by the
government will be no hardship for the plaintiffs. . . .
"Fuckin' faggots," the cop said as we went out the door.
"All hail Discordia," I told him cheerfully. "Let's get out of this neighborhood," I added to Hagbard.
"My car is right here," he said, pointing to a goddam Mercedes.
"For an anarchist, you sure live a lot like a capitalist," I commented as we got into that beautiful
machine crystallized out of stolen labor and surplus value.
"I'm not a masochist," Hagbard replied. "The world makes me uncomfortable enough. I see no reason
to make myself more uncomfortable. And I'm damned if I'll drive a broken-down jalopy that spends
half its time in a garage being repaired merely because that would make me seem more 'dedicated' to
you left-wing simpletons. Besides," he added practically, "the police never stop a Mercedes and
search it. How many times a week do you get stopped and harassed, with your beard and your
psychedelic Slaveswagon, you damned moralist?"
"Often enough," I admitted, "that I'm afraid to transport dope in it."
"This car is full of dope," he said blithely. "I'm making a big delivery to a dealer up in Evanston, on
the Northwestern campus, tomorrow."
"You're in the dope business, too?"
"I'm in every illegal business. Every time a government declares something verboten, two groups!
move in to service the black market created: the Mafia and the LDD. That stands for Lawless
Delicacy Dealers."
"I thought it stood for Little Deluded Dupes."
He laughed. "Score one for Moon. Seriously, I'm the worst enemy governments have, and the best
protection for the average person. The Mafia has no ethics, you know. If it wasn't for my group and
our years and years of experience, everything on the black market, from dope to Canadian furs,
would be shoddy and unreliable. We always give the customer his or her money's worth. Half the
dope you sell probably has passed through my agents on its way to you. The better half."
"What was that homosexual business? Just buggin' old Bushman?"
"Entropy. Breaking the straight line into a curve ball."
"Hagbard," I said, "what the hell is your game?"
"Proving that government is a hallucination in the minds of governors," he said crisply. We turned
onto Lake Shore Drive and sped north.
"Thou, Jubela, did he tell you the Word?" asked the goat-headed man.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 113 von 470
The gigantic black said, "I beat him and tortured him, but he would not reveal the Word."
"Thou, Jubelo, did he tell you the Word?"
The fishlike creature said, "I tormented and vexed his inner spirit, Master, but he would not reveal
the Word."
"And thou, Jubelum, did he tell you the Word?"
The hunchbacked dwarf said, "I cut off his testicles and he was mute. I cut off his penis and he was
mute. He did not tell me the Word."
"A fanatic," the goat-head said. "It is better that he is dead."
Saul Goodman tried to move. He couldn't twitch a single muscle: That last drug had been a narcotic,
and a powerful one. Or was it a poison? He tried to assure himself that the reason he was paralyzed
and laying in a coffin was because they were trying to break down his mind. But he wondered if the
dead might tell themselves similar fables, as they struggled to escape from the body before it rotted.
As he wondered, the goat-head leaned over and closed the top of the coffin. Saul was alone in
darkness.
"Leave first, Jubela."
"Yes, Master."
"Leave next, Jubelo."
"Yes, Master."
"Leave last, Jubelum."
"Yes, Master."
Silence. It was lonely and dark in the coffin, and Saul couldn't move. Let me not go mad, he thought.
Howard spotted the Lief Erikson ahead and sang: "Oh, groovy, groovy, groovy scene/Once again I'll
meet Celine." Maldonado's sleek Bentley edged up the drive to the home of "America's best-known
financier-philanthropist," Robert Putney Drake. (Louis marched toward the Red Widow,
maintaining his dignity. An old man in a strange robe pushed to the front of the crowd, trembling
with exaltation. The blade rose: the mob sucked in its breath. The old man tried to look into Louis's
eyes, but the king could not focus them. The blade fell: the crowd exhaled. As the head rolled into
the basket, the old man raised his eyes in ecstasy and cried out, "Jacques De Molay, thou art
avenged!") Professor Glynn lectured his class on medieval history (Dean Deane was issuing the
Strawberry Statement on the same campus at the same time) and said, "The real crime of the
Templars, however, was probably their association. with the Hashishim." George Dorn, hardly
listening, wondered if he should join Mark Rudd and the others who wanted to close down Columbia
entirely.
"And modern novels are the same," Smiling Jim went on. "Sex, sex, sex— and not normal sex even.
Every type of perverted, degenerate, unnatural, filthy, deviated, and sick kind of sex. This is how
they're gonna bury us, as Mr. Khruschchev said, without even firing a shot."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 114 von 470
Sunlight awakened Saul Goodman.
Sunlight and a headache. A hangover from the combination of drugs.
He was in a bed and his clothes were gone. There was no mistaking the garment he wore: a hospital
gown. And the room— as he squinted against the sun— had the dull modern-penitentiary look of a
typical American hospital.
He hadn't heard the door open, but a weathered-looking middle-aged man in a doctor's smock drifted
into the room. He was carrying a clipboard; pens stuck their necks out of his smock pocket; he
smiled benignly. His horn rimmed heavily black glasses and crewcut marked him as the optimistic,
upward-mobile man of his generation, without either the depression/World War II memories that
gave anxiety to Saul's contemporaries or nuclear nightmares that gave rage and alienation to youth.
He would obviously think of himself as a liberal and vote conservatively at least half the time.
A hopeless schmuck.
Except that he was probably none of those things, but another of their agents, doing a very
convincing performance.
"Well?" he said brightly. "Feeling better, Mr. Muldoon?"
Muldoon, Saul thought. Here we go— another ride into their kitsch idea of the Heart of Darkness.
"My name is Goodman," he said thinly. "I'm about as Irish as Moishe Dayan."
"Oh, still playing that little game, are we?" the man spoke kindly. "And are you still a detective?"
"Go to hell," Saul said, no longer in mood to fight back with wit and irony. He would dig into his
hostility and make his last stand from a foxhole of bitterness and sullen brevity.
The man pulled up a chair and sat down. "Actually," he said, "these remaining symptoms don't
bother us much. You were in a much worse state when you were first brought here six months ago. I
doubt that you remember that. Electroshock mercifully removes a great deal of the near past, which
is helpful in cases like yours. Do you know that you were physically assaulting people on the street,
and tried to attack the nurses and orderlies your first month here? Your paranoia was very acute at
that point, Mr. Muldoon."
"Up yours, bubi," Saul said. He closed his eyes and turned the other way.
"Such moderate hostility these days," the man went on, bright as a bird in the morning grass. "A few
months ago you would have tried to strangle me. Let me show you something." There was a sound of
paper.
Curiosity defeated resistance: Saul turned and looked. The man held out a driver's license, from the
State of New Jersey, for "Barney Muldoon." the picture was Saul's. Saul grinned maliciously,
showing his disbelief.
"You refuse to recognize yourself?" the man asked quietly.
"Where is Barney Muldoon?" Saul shot back. "Do you have him in another room, trying to convince
him he's Saul Goodman?"
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 115 von 470
"Where is . . . ?" the "doctor" repeated, seeming genuinely baffled. "Oh, yes, you admit you know the
name but claim he was only a friend. Just like a rapist we had in here a while ago. He said all the
rapes were committed by his roommate, Charlie. Well, let's try another tack. All those people you
beat up on the street— and that Playboy Club bunny you tried to strangle— do you still believe they
were agents of this, um, Prussian Illuminati?"
"This is an improvement," Saul said. "A very intriguing combination of reality and fantasy, much
better than your group's previous efforts. Let me hear the rest of it."
"You think that's sarcasm," the man said calmly. "Actually, behind it, your recovery is proceeding
nicely. You really want to remember, even as you struggle to keep up this Goodman myth. Very
well: you are a sixty-year-old police officer from Trenton, New Jersey. You never were promoted to
detective and that is the great grievance of your life. You have a wife named Molly, and three sons—
Roger, Kerry, and Gregory. Their ages are twenty-eight, twenty-five, and twenty-three. A few years
ago, you started a game with your wife; she thought it was harmless at first and learned to her sorrow
that it wasn't. The game was, that you pretended to be a detective and, late at night, you would tell
her about the important cases you were working on. Gradually, you built up to the most important
case of all— the solution to all the assassinations in America during the past decade. They were all
the work of a group called the Illuminati, who were surviving top-level Nazis that had never been
captured. More and more, you talked about their leader—Martin Borman, of course— and insisted
you were getting a line on his whereabouts. By the time your wife realized that the game had become
reality to you, it was too late. You already suspected your neighbors of being Illuminati agents, and
your hatred for Nazism led you to believe you were Jewish and had taken an Irish name to avoid
American anti-Semitism. This particular delusion, I must say, caused you acute guilt, which it took
us a long time to understand. It was, we finally realized, a projection of a guilt you have long felt for
being a policeman at all. But perhaps at this point, I might aid your struggle for self-recognition (and
abort your equal and opposite struggle for self-escape) by reading you part of a report on your case
by one of our younger psychiatrists. Are you game to hear it?"
"Go ahead," Saul said. "I still find this entertaining." The man looked through the papers in his
clipboard and smiled disarmingly. "Oh, I see here that it's the Bavarian Illuminati, not the Prussian
Illuminati, pardon my mistake." He flipped a few more pages. "Here we are," he said.
"The root of the subject's problems," he began to read, "can be found in the trauma of the primal
scene, which was reconstructed under narco-analysis. At the age of three, he came upon his parents
in the act of fellatio, which resulted in his being locked in his room for 'spying.' This left him with a
permanent horror of being locked up and a pity for prisoners everywhere. Unfortunately, this factor
in his personality, which he might have sublimated harmlessly by becoming a social worker, was
complicated by unresolved Oedipal hostilities and a reaction formation in favor of 'spying,' which led
him to become a policeman. The criminal became for him the father-symbol, who was locked up in
revenge for locking him up; at the same time, the criminal was an ego-projection and he received
masochistic gratification by identifying with the prisoner. The deep-buried homosexual desire for the
father's penis (present in all policemen) was next cathected by denial of the father, via denial of
paternal ancestry, and he began to abolish all Irish Catholic traces from ego-memory, substituting
those of Jewish culture, since the Jew, as persecuted minority, reinforced his basic masochism.
Finally, like all paranoids, the subject fancies himself to be of superior intelligence (actually, on his
test for the Trenton Police Force, he rated only one hundred ten on the Stan-ford-Binet IQ index) and
his resistance to therapy will take the form of 'outwitting' his doctors by finding the 'clues' which
reveal that they, too, are agents of the Illuminati and that his assumed identity as 'Saul Goodman' is,
in fact, his actual identity. For therapeutic purposes, I would recommend . . ." The "doctor" broke off.
"After that," he said briefly, "it is of no interest to you. Well," he added tolerantly, "do you want to
'detect' the errors in this?"
"I've never been in Trenton in my life," Saul said wearily. "I don't know what anything in Trenton
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 116 von 470
looks like. But you'll just tell me that I've erased those memories. Let's move to a deeper level of
combat, Herr Doktor. I am quite convinced that my mother and father never performed fellatio in
their lives. They were too old-fashioned." This was the heart of the labyrinth, and their real threat:
while he was sure that they could not break down his belief in his own identity, they were also
insidiously undermining that identity by suggesting it was pathological. Many of the lines in the
Muldoon case history could refer to any policeman and might, conceivably, refer to him; as usual,
behind a weak open attack they were mounting a more deadly covert attack.
"Do you recognize these?" the doctor asked, producing a sketchbook open to a page with some
drawings of unicorn.
"It's my sketchbook," Saul said. "I don't know how you got it but it doesn't prove a damned thing,
except that I sketch in my spare time."
"No?" The doctor turned the book around; a bookplate on the cover identified the owner as Barney
Muldoon, 1472 Pleasant Avenue, Trenton, NJ.
"Amateur work," Saul said. "Anybody can paste a bookplate onto a book."
"And the unicorn means nothing to you?" Saul sensed the trap and said nothing, waiting. "You are
not aware of the long psychoanalytical literature on the unicorn as symbol of the father's penis? Tell
me, then, why did you decide to sketch unicorns?"
"More amateurism," Saul said. "If I sketched mountains, they would be symbols of the father's penis,
too."
"Very well. You might have made a good detective if your— illness— hadn't prevented your
promotion. You do have a quick, skeptical mind. Let me try another approach— and I wouldn't be
using such tactics if I weren't convinced you were on the road to recovery; a true psychotic would be
driven into catatonia by such a blunt assault on his delusions. But, tell me, your wife mentioned that
just before the acute stage of your— problem— you spent a lot of money, more than you could
afford on a patrolman's salary, on a reproduction of the mermaid of Copenhagen. Why was that?"
"Damn it," Saul exclaimed, "it wasn't a lot of money." But he recognized the displaced anger and
saw that the other man recognized it too. He was avoiding the question of the mermaid . . . and her
relation to the unicorn. There must be a relationship between fact number one and fact number two. .
. . "The mermaid," he said, getting there before the enemy could, "is a mother symbol, right? She has
no human bottom, because the male child dare not think about that area of the mother. Is that correct
jargon?"
"More or less. You avoid, of course, the peculiar relevance in your own case: that the sex act in
which you caught your mother was not a normal one but a very perverted and infantile act, which, of
course, is the only sex act a mermaid can perform— as all collectors of mermaid statues or mermaid
paintings unconsciously know."
"It's not perverted and infantile," Saul protested. "Most people do it...." Then he saw the trap.
"But not your mother and father? They were different from most people?"
And then it clicked: the spell was broken. Every detail from Saul's notebook, every physical
characteristic Peter Jackson had described, was there. "You're not a doctor," he shouted. "I don't
know what your game is but I sure as hell know who you are. You're Joseph Malik!"
George's stateroom was paneled in teak, the walls hung with small but exquisite paintings by Rivers,
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 117 von 470
Shahn, De Kooning, and Tanguy. A glass cabinet built into one wall held several rows of books. The
floor was carpeted in wine red with a blue stylized octopus in the center, its waving tentacles
radiating out like a sunburst. The light fixture hanging from the ceiling was a lucite model of that
formidable jellyfish, the Portuguese man-of-war.
The bed was full size, with a rosewood headboard carved with Venetian seashell motifs. Its legs
didn't touch the floor; the whole thing was supported on a huge, rounded beam that allowed the bed
to seesaw when the ship rolled, the sleeper remaining level. Beside the bed was a small desk. Going
to it, George opened a drawer and found several different sizes of writing paper and half a dozen felttipped
pens in various colors. He took out a legal-size pad and a green pen, climbed on the bed,
curled up at the head and began writing.
April 24
Objectivity is presumably the opposite of schizophrenia. Which means that it is nothing
but acceptance of everybody else's notion of reality. But nobody's perception of reality is
the same as everybody's notion of it, which means that the most objective person is the
real schizophrenic.
It is hard to get beyond the accepted beliefs of one's own age. The first man to think a
new thought advances it very tentatively. New ideas have to be around a while before
anyone will promote them hard. In their first form, they are like tiny, imperceptible
mutations that may eventually lead to new species. That's why cultural cross-fertilization
is so important. It increases the gene-pool of the imagination. The Arabs, say, have one
part of the puzzle. The Franks another. So, when the Knights Templar meet the
Hashishim, something new is born.
The human race has always lived more or less happily in the kingdom of the blind. But
there is an elephant among us. A one-eyed elephant.
George put the pen down and read the green words with a frown. His thoughts still seemed to be
coming from outside his own mind. What was that business about the Knights Templar? He had
never felt the slightest interest in that, period since his freshman year in college, when old Morrison
Glynn had given him a D for that paper on the Crusades. It was supposed to be a simple research
paper displaying one's grasp of proper footnote style, but George had chosen to denounce the
Crusades as an early outbreak of Western racist imperialism. He'd even gone to the trouble of finding
the text of a letter from Sinan, third leader of the Hashishim, in which he exonerates Richard Coeur
de Lion of any complicity in the murder of Conrad of Montferret, King of Jerusalem. George felt the
episode demonstrated the essential goodwill of the Arabs. How was he to know that Morrison Glynn
was a staunch conservative Catholic? Glynn claimed, among other dyspeptic criticisms, that the
letter from the castle called Messiac was well known as a forgery. Why were the Hashishim coming
back to mind again? Did it have to do with the weird dream he'd had of the temple in the Mad Dog
jail?
The sub's engine was vibrating pleasantly through the floor, the beam, the bed. The trip so far had
reminded George of his first flight in a 747—a surge of power, followed by motion so smooth it was
impossible to tell how fast or how far they were going.
There was a knock at the stateroom door, and at George's invitation Hagbard's receptionist came in.
She was wearing a tight-fitting golden-yellow slack ensemble. She stared compellingly at George,
her pupils huge obsidian pools, and smiled faintly.
"Will you eat me if I can't guess the riddle?" George said. "You remind me of a sphinx."
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 118 von 470
Her lips, the color of ripe grapes, parted in a grin. "I modeled for it. But no riddle, just an ordinary
question. Hagbard wants to know if you need anything. Anything but me. I've got work to do now."
George shrugged. "You beat me to the question. I'd like to get together with Hagbard and find out
more about him and the submarine and where we're going."
"We are going to Atlantis. He must have told you that." She shifted her weight from one foot to the
other, rolling her hips. She had marvelously long legs. "Atlantis is, roughly speaking, about half way
between Cuba and the west coast of Africa, at the bottom of the ocean."
"Yeah, well— That's where it's supposed to be, right?"
"Right. Hagbard's going to want you in the captain's control room later. Meanwhile, smoke some of
this, if you want. Helps to pass the time." She held out a gold cigarette case. George took it from her,
his fingers brushing the velvety black skin of her hand. A pang of desire for her swept through him.
He fumbled with the catch of the case and opened it. There were slender white tubes inside, each one
stamped with a gold K. He took one out and held it to his nose. A pleasant, earthy smell.
"We've got a plantation and a factory in Brazil," she said.
"Hagbard must be a wealthy man."
"Oh, yeah. He's worth billions and billions of tons of flax. Well, look, George, if you need anything,
just press the ivory button on your desk. Someone will come along. We'll be calling you later." She
turned with a languid wave and walked down the fluorescent-lit corridor. George's gaze clung to her
unbelievable ass till she climbed a narrow flight of carpeted stairs and was out of sight
What was that woman's name? He lay down on the bed, took out a joint, and lit it. It was marvelous.
He was up in seconds, not the usual gradual balloon ascent, but a rocket trip, not unlike the effect of
amyl nitrate. He might have known this Hagbard Celine would have something special in the way of
grass. He studied the sparkles glinting through the Portuguese man-of-war and wiggled his eyeballs
rapidly to make the lights dance. All things that are, are lights. The thought came that Hagbard might
be evil. Hagbard was like some robber baron out of the nineteenth century. Also like some robber
baron out of the eleventh century. The Normans took Sicily in the ninth century. Which gave you
mixtures of Viking and Sicilian, but did they ever look like Anthony Quinn? Or his son Greg La
Strade? What son? What the sun done cannot be undone but is well dun. The quintessence of evil.
Nemesis of all evil. God bless us, every one. Even One. Odd, the big red one. Eye think it was his I.
The eye of Apollo. His luminous I. Aum Shiva.
— Aye, trust me not. Trust not a man who's rich in flax— his morals may be sadly lax. Her name is
Stella. Stella Maris. Black star of the sea.
The joint was down to the last half inch. He put it down and crushed it out. With grass flowing like
tobacco around here, it was a luxury he could afford. He wasn't going to light another one. That
wasn't a high, that was a trip! A Saturn rocket, right out of the world. And back, just as fast.
— George, I want you in the captain's control room.
Clearly, this hallucinating of voices and images meant he wasn't all the way back. Reentry was not
completed. He now saw a vision of the layout of that part of the submarine between his stateroom
and the captain's control room. He stood up, stretched, shook his head, his hair swirling around his
shoulders. He walked to the door, slid it back, and walked on down the hall.
A little later, he stepped through a door onto a balcony which was a reproduction of the prow of a
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 119 von 470
Viking ship. Above, below, in front, to the sides, was green-blue ocean. They seemed to be in a glass
globe projecting into the ocean. A long-necked red-and-green dragon with golden eyes and a spiky
crest reared above George and Hagbard.
"My approach is fanciful, rather than functional," Hagbard said. "If I weren't so intelligent, it would
get me into a lot of trouble." He patted the dragon figurehead with a black-furred hand. Some
George thought. A Neanderthal Viking, perhaps.
"That was a good trick," George said, feeling shrewd but still high. "How you got me up on the
bridge with that telepathy thing."
"I called you on the intercom," Hagbard said, with a look of absurd innocence.
"You think I can't tell a voice in my head from a voice in my ears?"
Hagbard roared with laughter, so loud that it made George feel a little uncertain. "Not when you've
had your first taste of Kallisti Gold, man."
"Who am I to call a man a liar when he's just turned me on with the best shit I ever had?" said
George with a shrug. "I suspect you of making use of telepathy. Most people who have that power
would not only not try to hide it, they'd go on television."
"Instead, I put the ocean on television." said Hagbard. He gestured at the globe surrounding their
Viking prow. "What you see is simply color television with a few adaptations and modifications. We
are inside the screen. The cameras are all over the surface of the sub. The cameras don't use ordinary
light, of course. If they did, you wouldn't be able to see anything. The submarine illuminates the sea
around us with an infrared laser-radar to which our TV cameras are sensitive. The radiations are of a
type that is more readily conducted by the hydrogen in water than by any other element. The result is
that we can see the ocean bottom almost as clearly as if it were dry land and we were in a plane
flying above it."
"That'll make it easy to see Atlantis when we get to it," George said. "By the way, why did you say
we're going-to Atlantis, again? I didn't believe it when you told me, and now I'm too stoned to
remember."
"The Illuminati are planning to loot one of the greatest works of art in the history of man— the
Temple of Tethys. It happens to be a solid-gold temple, and their intention is to melt it down and sell
the gold to finance a series of assassinations in the U.S. I intend to get there before them."
The reference to assassinations reminded George that he'd gone down to Mad Dog, Texas, on Joe
Malik's hunch that he'd find a clue there to an assassination conspiracy. If Joe knew that the clue was
leading 20,000 leagues under the sea and eons back through time, would he believe it? George
doubted it. Malik was one of those hard-nosed "scientific" leftists. Though he had been acting and
talking a little strangely lately.
"Who did you say was looting this temple?" he asked Hagbard.
"The Illuminati. The real force behind all communist and fascist movements. Whether you're aware
of it or not, they're also already in control of the United States government."
"I thought everybody in your crowd was a right-winger—"
"And I told you spacial metaphors are inadequate in discussing politics today," Hagbard interrupted.
Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 120 von 470
"Well, you sound like a gang of right-wingers. Up until the last minute, all I've heard from you and
your people was that the Illuminati were commies, or were behind the commies. Now you say they're
behind fascism and behind the current government in Washington, too."
Hagbard laughed. "We came on like right-wing paranoids, at first, to see how you'd react. It was a
test."