Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"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 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 free-thinking 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:

"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:

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":

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."