Robert Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Pat

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 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."

"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 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.