Think for yourself Schmuck

Humanichs in the world

The following is an interview given by the late Robert Anton Wilson. Please read if you hold half-baked crock of warmed up nonsense about global conspiracies

I Didn't Go Looking for the Illuminati They Came Looking for Me.

What spurred your initial interest in the Illuminati?

RAW - In a sense, I didn’t go looking for the Illuminati; they came looking for me. Back in the 1960s I had a friend named Kerry Thornley. He was accused of complicity in the JFK assassination by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. The case was built around the fact that Kerry and Oswald served in the same Marine platoon in Japan and later lived within a few blocks of each other in New Orleans. Garrison called that propinquity but Kerry, before he had a particularly bummer trip on LSD, called it coincidence. Considering what it led to, I call it synchronicity.
Thornley had some very slight brushes with a group at UC Berkeley who called themselves the Bavarian Illuminati and had officers with titles like International Jew, International Banker, High Priest of Satan, etcetera—an obvious joke at the expense of right-wing paranoids. A lot of Kerry’s friends, including me, decided to make the Bavarian Illuminati a lot more famous and send Garrison on a snark hunt. We all had lots of outlets in publishing. A group called the Black Mass infiltrated the L.A. Free Press, claiming to be the Afro-Illuminati. Claims that Chicago mayor Richard Daley was an Illuminati got into Teenset magazine, and also the Spark, a left-wing Chicago paper. Dozens of similar weird tales appeared hither and yon. Playboy mentioned that one of Garrison’s investigators named Chapman was seriously investigating the Illuminati. And then Bob Shea and I wrote the Illuminatus! Trilogy and nothing and nobody could disentangle reality from satire after that.
Unfortunately, somewhere between 1970 and 1972, Kerry had the bum “cosmic conspiracy trip” which mutated him. He became convinced that he was in fact part of the JFK hit squad—but unknowingly, as a kind of Manchurian candidate. At first, he only believed that both he and Oswald had been brainwashed while in the Marines. Later, it got more elaborate—a lot more elaborate—and involved Nazi flying saucers and all sorts of occult nastiness, including CIA brainwashing and “voices” implanted in Kerry’s tooth fillings. Next he decided that all his friends, including me, were either brainwashed robots like himself or CIA “managers,” and it became increasingly hard to communicate with him. As Nietzsche said, “When you gaze into the abyss, beware: the abyss will also gaze into you.”
I think Garrison eventually agreed with everybody else that Kerry had wigged out. Garrison dropped all charges. Kerry told him to go to hell at their last meeting. If you want more details, see The Prankster and The Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture by Adam Gorightly.

How did you go about researching the Illuminati? What led you to begin your initial research?

RAW - I had an utterly unscrupulous—or at least undogmatic—attitude. I did not aim to prove a case but to blast open the readers’ minds. Every source I found had to pass just one test—did it challenge consensus reality? If so, it got into the novel, whether it seemed plausible or totally nuts to me. In the thirty-nine different theories about the Illuminati in the Illuminatus! Trilogy, one may be closer to the truth than the other thirty-eight, but my opinion about that seems no more valid to me than anybody else’s. I don’t want readers regurgitating my guesses; I want them thinking for themselves.

If your aim was to undermine consensus reality, does that imply that your suggestions are meant to be taken as historical claims, albeit newer or more radical ones? Or does fiction itself, as an alternative myth or epic, undermine consensus reality?

RAW - I regard all maps and models as fiction; Darwin, Genesis, Einstein, Joyce all seem good fiction. Of course, some models seem more useful for a time than others. But I don’t think anybody, not even me, is clever enough to have created a model that will prove useful at all times and in all circumstances, never needing revision. I call people who think they have such a model modeltheists, and regard them as custard-heads. Consensus reality—or conventional wisdom—especially needs this kind of scepticism because nobody usually even thinks of challenging it.

Where did this research lead you? What deeper sources did you explore—the sort of books that Dan Brown might also have consulted before writing Angels & Demons?

RAW - Francis Yates’s books, especially Giodano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, The World Stage and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment; Aleister Crowley, especially The Book of Lies; Baigent, Lincoln & Leigh, Holy Blood, Holy Grail; Gérard de Séde, La Race Fabuleuse; Michel Lamy, Jules Verne, Initiate et Initiateur; Robert Temple, The Sirius Mystery.

You make much of esoteric and occult connections to the Illuminati. Do these groups claim them as some sort of pedigree?

RAW - Aleister Crowley, prominent occultist and leader of the Ordo Templis Orientalis [the Templar Order of the East, an esoteric organization that combines Masonic initiation with magical and occult ritual], includes the historical Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt in the 114 saints of Gnosticism in his Gnostic Catholic Mass. That’s a direct link. A few others allegedly involved in the Illuminati pop up in that list of saints, too—Jacques de Molay, Richard Wagner, Ludwig II of Bavaria. Those are indirect links, since allegation does not equal proof. Crowley’s magazine, the Equinox, had the subtitle Journal of Scientific Illuminism. That means whatever you think it means.
The occultist is attracted to organizations like the Illuminati because occult initiation uses experience where churches use dogma. An initiatory order ideally changes your mind at least as often as a sane person changes his underwear.

What do you think about Dan Brown’s suggestion that the Illuminati originally made up of scientists, rationalists and freethinkers, some of whom adopted violence and terrorism?

RAW - It seems plausible, but unproven. Variations of it appear in my historical novels, especially The Widow’s Son. I would place Giordano Bruno [the Italian Philosopher, scientist, and heretic who was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600] as the ringleader rather than Galileo, though, because the Inquisition charged him with forming secret societies (note the plural) to oppose the Vatican. You can read more about it in Francis Yates’s book on Bruno. Bruno, with one foot in Cabala and the other in science, seems a likely suspect as ringleader of a scientific-occult underworld, much like the drug culture of today.
Additionally, I think Bruno has special interest, because the two most controversial scientists of my lifetime—Dr. Wilhelm Reich and Dr. Timothy Leary, both imprisoned for their books—felt Bruno anticipated their ideas. I strongly suspect Bruno of practicing the same sexual Cabala as Aleister Crowley.

Were members of the Illuminati actually arrested, tortured, and murdered by the church as Dan Brown asserts in Angels & Demons?

RAW - Witches, alleged witches, scientists, gays, Jews, and anybody with an opinion suffered at the hands of the Inquisition. I imagine they snagged a few of the Illuminati, too.

Do you think the Illuminati persisted from the eighteenth century into modern times?

RAW - Maybe. Some people think I’m one of their leaders. Mae Brussel [a mid-twentieth-century conspiracy theorist and radio personality] accused me of being an Illuminatus in a magazine called Conspiracy Digest. I confessed in the next issue and added that David Rockefeller personally pays me in bars of gold. I thought that would improve my credit rating but apparently nobody believed it but Mae. Lyndon Larouche has also called me an Illuminatus, and so does a Christian radio station that I pick up on now and then. I’ve also heard reports of other Christian stations that rant and rave against me regularly.

You trace the existence of the Illuminati in and through virtually every secret society known to conspiracy thinkers, both before and after the historical Illuminati of the late eighteenth century. Are there any historical events that have their stamp on it? What are the Illuminati actually responsible for?

RAW - The high price of gas and the fact that you can’t get a plumber on weekends anymore.

Angels & Demons suggests the Illuminati hid themselves inside the Freemasons as a secret society inside a secret society. Is this an accurate view?

RAW – It certainly seems so, in Europe in the eighteenth century. After that, I’m more dubious. John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy [the book that began the anti-Illuminati hysteria in Europe in 1798] lacks what I recognize as a paranoid style of thinking. He makes sense, even to me, and I don’t even sympathize with his Christian-Royalist outlook. Besides, his claim that the Illuminati had taken over a large part of continental Masonry circa 1776 to 1800 seems well accepted by “respectable” sources like Durant’s Rousseau and Revolution, Solomon’s Beethoven, and even the Encyclopedia Britannica. I doubt later expansions of Illuminism into Masonry worldwide because all such claims come from weird books with very paranoid odors and lacking even remotely respectable support.

Do you believe the Illuminati were active more than a hundred years before Weishaupt in Bavaria? Were they ever associated with Galileo?

RAW – More with Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler, and John Dee, I think.

What can you tell us about the breadth and depth of the involvement of Freemasons in United States history, political culture, and official symbolism? What leaps out at you as particularly interesting or remarkable about their presumed or factual involvement?

RAW – The Whigs in England, the Jeffersonian Democrats in America, and the Freemasons have all had some influence on one another, but it would take five hundred pages to clarify “who did what and with which and to whom”. But I do think the First Amendment almost certainly represents the clearest Masonic influence on US history. Freemasonry in all orders and lodges is committed to opposing superstition and tyranny and promoting religious tolerance. The main intent of the First Amendment is to prevent any religion from stomping on all the others—not a theoretical danger in those days, but one that kept Europe at war in the three hundred years in which Freemasonry and free thought and free markets evolved as parts of the new aeon [a term usually employed to signify a turning point of immense significance in human history, in this case the change from Medieval to Renaissance and Enlightenment culture] which destroyed feudalism and perpetrated that damn constitution.

Dan Brown alludes to but doesn’t go very far in explaining the relationship of Hassassin murderer, his supposed ancestors, and the Illuminati. What do you know about the Hassassin and their origins and fate?

RAW – The Hassassin is an Occidental name for what is more properly called the Ismaelian sect of Islam, of which the current head is the Aga Khan. In AD 1092 Hassan i Sabbah was their leader. He invented the sleeper agent, a man who would pass as a member of the opposition and really work for Hassan. He made modern men out of his contemporaries, and they didn’t like it. Nobody could trust anybody. Usually, they assassinated leaders of groups opposed to the Ismaelians. According to legend, they only struck when the target was about to invade Ismaelian territory. I’d like to believe that; it’s both romantic and spooky.

Is there a presumed relationship with the Illuminati?

RAW – Both the Illuminati and the Ismaelians, just like Freemasonry, use an initiatory system of orders. The final secret of the top rank of the Ismaelians is said to be “Nothing is true; all is permitted.” Hassan’s contemporaries didn’t like that either. Some say the final secret of the Illuminati of Weishaupt was similar. Crowley stated the same idea as “Do what though wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” The fools stay at their own level;the sceptics rise higher. You can lead a horse’s ass to order but you can’t make him think.

Is this relationship a historical fact? A common link drawn by conspiracy theorists?

RAW – I found it in Drual’s History of Secret Societies, not a conspiracy book at all. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it sounds plausible. The hashish link between Sabbah and Weishaupt is a joke I invented myself. I claimed Weishaupt studied Sabbah and grew his own pot. Later, a guy named Don Jodd made a living on the fundamentalist revival circuit peddling that, and some of my other jokes, as solemn facts. I’m delighted that some people believe it at all, which confirms my low opinion of the intelligence of the American people. The highest orders of mysticism and the highest types of rationalism do not disagree at all. The lower ranks of the Hashishim were probably as superstitious and ignorant as any other gang of Muslims or Christians. But the upper ranks would agree with Buddha and Bertrand Russell: anything capable of being believed is an oversimplification and therefore nonsense.

You’re familiar with the plot of Angels & Demons. What sort of fictional or conspirational sources do you detect in it?

RAW – Immodestly, I see a lot of my own influence. And a lot of the books (allegedly nonfiction) about the Priory of Sion.

Dan Brown identifies his Illuminati with the desire for scientific enlightenment. Yet their reputation becomes conflated with Satanism and other forms of occultism because of the church’s closed-mindedness. What other themes have the Illuminati been identified with, both factually and fictionally?

RAW – When you get into the literature of the Illuminati you find them blamed for anarchism, fascism, Sufism, extraterrestrial manipulations, sea serpents, and even crop circles. The Illuminati conspiracy is the happy hunting grounds of all minds who have lost their balance.

What is it about conspiracy theories that makes them so eminently adaptable for the fictional form?

RAW – We live in an age of increasing uncertainty. The greatest writers, like Joyce, use this uncertainty in philosophical ways, and popular authors of spy thrillers use it also. Nobody knows whom they can trust anymore. If you saw the new version of The Manchurian Candidate, haven’t you wondered yet how many implanted robots exist in your office or your political party, or—gulp!—among your religious leaders?

In your own work, as in much recent conspiracy theory, conspiracies are stackable, like Chinese boxes. Each seems to implicate the other or lead back to each other like a snake eating its tail. What is it about the conspiratorial psychology that makes conspiracies so endlessly daisy-chained?

RAW – Suspicion, like trust, grows with experience. The more you suspect, the more you find that should be suspected. Kerry Thornley originally suspected only two of his friends as being robots, but eventually he suspected all of them. Abbé Barruel—who was the fountainhead of Anti-Illuminism paranoia—originally suspected only Illuminati, but then suspected the Jews, the English, the bankers, the Arabs, and everybody who wasn’t a French Jesuit like himself. He probably suspected some Jesuits, too, by the end of his life.

One of your characters from the Illuminatus! Trilogy begins to see conspirational connections everywhere—in numerology (the law of fives), in history, in literature both high and low, in politics, in folklore, etc. Once you begin to accept the plausibility of a conspiracy, is this sort of free fall inevitable? What can conspiracies tell us about different modes of knowing?

RAW – I suspect a great deal, but believe nothing. After finding the law of fives everywhere, I no longer claim to know anything for certain. This has led me to formulate what I call maybe logic, in which I consider ideas not simply true or false, but in degrees of probabilities. If other conspiracy theorists learned this much, they would sound less like paranoids and people would take them more seriously.
Maybe logic is a combination of general semantics, neurolinguistic programming, and Buddhism—all three as methods of bullshit control, not as dogmas. I joined the Flat Earth Society for a year once, just to challenge myself. I didn’t learn much from that experiment but it was fun. I just preach that we’d all think and act more sanely if we had to use “maybe” a lot more often. Can you imagine a world in which Jerry Falwell hollers “Maybe Jesus was the son of God and maybe he hates gay people as violently as I do.” Or every tower in Islam resounds with “There is no God except maybe Allah and maybe Muhammad is his prophet”?

What do you think of the overall story line that Dan Brown seems to buy into, connecting seven thousand years of secret knowledge handed down through a succession of secret societies?

RAW – The happy live in a happy universe, the sad live in a sad one. Materialists in a material one, spiritualists in a spiritual one. “facts” adjust to the filing and filtering system of the observer’s brain. At seventy-two, I assure you there’s a hell of a lot more of what I don’t know than there is of what I still think I do know. I suspect Dan Brown has as much sense of humor as me, but chooses to hide the fact. I’d like his books better if the professor came from Miskatonic instead of Harvard.