The Illuminatus! Trilogy

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Just like Enclosure Acts," I said hollowly. "One day the land belongs to the people. The next day it belongs to the landlords." Many observers have not noted that, as a book of constant paradox, the Trilogy, with its twists and turns has inherent fascistic aspects too - the elite eroticism, the leadership principle underpinning Hagbard, the cyclical views of history, the appropriation of traditionalism. Bill, don’t bother doing anything unless it is heroic.” This was the first lesson I learned from Ken. Today, 38 years later, I still don’t know if he meant that it’s not worth doing anything in life unless it’s heroic, or just when it comes to stage sets. It is definitely a product of it's generation. The copious drug use, and underlying philosophies are very typical of most of the underground cult classics of the '70s that I've read, but for the most part it's brilliantly insightful, and has many fantastic aphorisms that you'll probably want to repeat later. It's also beautifully self-satirical, which is probably a good thing because if this book took itself seriously it really might have been an act of intellectual terrorism.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson

If authority implies submission, liberation implies equality. Authority exists when one man obeys another, and liberty exists when one man do not obey other men. We invite you to join us in our mission to preserve, archive, expand, and enjoy the great works of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Also known for inspiring early-90s electronic dance musicians, The KLF, AKA The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. Both names are references to the books. Thus, in pre-literate societies taboos on the spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organization. With the invention of written speech — hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical — the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what they write.As philosophy it would get 1 (the world-view it argues for is much better discussed in other books--some of them even by RAW) Unless you're a teenager looking for a counterculture to believe in, the conspiracy mish-mash probably won't be a life-changing revelation, but it might be food for thought. Conspiracy fiction is big business these days with 'The Name of The Rose', 'Foucault's Pendulum' and 'The Da Vinci Code', yet the originator of the genre gets insufficient credit. What a strange, strange trilogy that I *unfortunately* was not able to finish. I was 1/4 way through "Leviathan" (the third and final book in the trilogy) before calling it quits. It got so repetitive to read and the stuff they daresay call "humor" was well, kinda boring and not original at all. 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." Bill Drummond, right, and KLF bandmate Jimmy Cauty in 1990. Photograph: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images Cosmic postscript

Illuminatus - Wikipedia Illuminatus - Wikipedia

Brown Note: fnord. It is hinted that the actual fnord word is not fnord, but some word people actually fnording use, with the same effect. Look hard and there is a paragraph in the Appendices where an argument for human sacrifice of a most primitive type is made too plausible to be ironical, a nod perhaps to Evola, yet contrasted with horror at the mass immolations of war and that 1970s preoccupation, the Holocaust. He scripted 'Alien' without gender markers, all characters being referred to by last name, and Sigourney Weaver's portrayal of Ellen Ripley has proven one of the most realistic and unaffected of any woman in film. It was a disappointment to see Shea and Wilson so fettered by gender while simultaneously spouting the latest feminist sound bites. Public Secret Message: A secret society places personal ads reading "In thanks to St. Jude for favors answered - A.W." as a code to their other members.Apocalypse Cult: The Illuminati Prime (the five most powerful people in the world) are actively seeking to Immanetize the Eschaton — ie, bring about the apocalypse — to make themselves immortal and provide a massive blood sacrifice to their Elder Brothers and Sisters, the Lloigr of Cthulu.

Illuminatus! (Literature) - TV Tropes Illuminatus! (Literature) - TV Tropes

This is where the 1960s Generation can be seen to be bifurcating into an authoritarian and ideological optimism on the one side and a tendency to inverted rage and pessimism. The slave now adopts guerrilla tactics to undermine what cannot be destroyed frontally. O’Halligan said I could use the basement of the cellar as my workshop. He then gave me Ken’s phone number. I went and found a phone box and called the number. It was in London, thus long-distance, thus cost me all the money I had on me, almost all the dole money I had for the week. The phone was answered by a strange, strangulated voice. “Ken Campbell here. What do you want?” In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom—in anarchy—such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you, professor—raise your nose from your great books and survey the actual world as it is—and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this, professor? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables? You have named it yourself, or Mr. Adler has: the Great Tradition. Privilege, I prefer to call it. When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The privileges, or Private Laws—the rules of the game, as promulgated by the Politburo and the General Congress of the Communist Party on that side and by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve Board on this side—are slightly different; that’s all. And it is this that is threatened by anarchists, and by the repressed anarchist in each of us,” This series is expansive in scope. As we grow, we will focus on extracting and explaining the contents of the novels, cataloging the characters and places, to help both new and old readers.Submission is identified not with cowardliness, but with virtue, rebellion not with heroism, but with evil. Fun with Acronyms: Two examples are an ultra-right-wing group called the Knights of Christianity United in Faith, and a computer named the First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic Ultramicro-Programmer. There's also two right-wing organizations whose acronyms are WHORE and TWAT. One of the many groups holds its meetings on Lake Shore Drive "because of the acrostic significance".

The Illuminatus! Trilogy - Wikipedia

The trilogy comprises the books The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple and Leviathan. They were first published starting in September 1975, as three separate volumes, and in 1984 as an omnibus; they are now more commonly reprinted in the latter form. The trilogy won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, designed to honor classic libertarian fiction, in 1986. The authors went on to create several works, both fiction and nonfiction, that further discussed the themes of the trilogy, but no direct sequels were produced. Illuminatus! has been adapted for the stage, and has influenced several modern writers, musicians and games-makers. The popularity of the word "fnord" and the 23 enigma can both be attributed to the trilogy. It remains a seminal work of conspiracy fiction, predating Foucault's Pendulum and The Da Vinci Code by decades. I had come prepared, with models of the sets. These I had spent all of the previous night building and they looked exactly how I wanted the real thing to be. I thought they looked brilliant. I still have them. Many male authors have shied away from writing female characters from the inside, despite having no compunction about getting inside them in other ways. I cannot reiterate enough the late Dan O'Bannon's insistence that the secret to writing women was writing men and then leaving out the penis. To the Roman slave owners, Spartacus was not the hero and obedient slaves were not cowards. Spartacus was not a hero, and obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient slaves believed this also. The obedient always think about themselves as virtuous, rather than cowardly. Harry Truman, a servant of Realpolitik, wearing the face of Oliver Hardy, looked upon his work and saw that it was good. But beside him, Albert Einstein, a servant of that most elusive and gnomic of gods, Truth, burst into tears, the familiar tears of Stanley Laurel facing the consequences of his own karma. For a brief instant, Truman was troubled, but then he remembered the eternal words: “Now look what you made me do,” he said.

In this world view, there is still a hierarchical view of humanity. The masses could have their eyes open, and the Discordians devoutly wish that this would happen, yet a deep conservative pessimism in the game players leads them to accept that it will not.