Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"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:

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…

"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

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

J.M.:

This is from a small left-wing newspaper in Chicago (The Roger SPARK 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

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 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.