Robert Anton Wilson, 1932-2007

Robert Anton Wilson, my favorite wacky hippie writer, died last week. Wilson's best known work was the Illuminatus! trilogy, co-written with Robert Shea. I first read this book during my last year of college, and by the time I was two thirds through it, it had become my favorite book of all time (knocking Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues out of the number one spot). Illuminatus! is like Foucalt's Pendulum written by acid heads. Every page is alive with ideas, philosophical discourses, puns, jokes and conspiracy theories. That's what the book is mostly concerned with--the question of whether there is a masonic secret society that controls every aspect of the world's governments from behind the scenes, worshipping ancient gods out of H.P. Lovecraft, and being thwarted by equally secret societies of goddess-worshipping followers of chaos who communicate with dolphins from their secret submarines. It also proposes that John Dillinger lived long enough to witness the Kennedy assasination, and explains the secret meaning of "Kick Out the Jams." Furthermore, the book is a clear source of inspiration for The Church of the Subgenius, Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, a bizzarre card game, and probably the upcoming Jim Carrey film The Number 23.

I should probably note that at the time, I was in a mental state that was perhaps overly susceptible to Wilson's writings. Coasting through college, I was basically stoned all the time and taking frequent trips on mushrooms and acid, while living in a small town where the police had little to do but bust college kids for drugs. Indeed, the neighbors I shared a duplex with got busted in the middle of the night one night, and we were very sure that we were next. Some more friends got busted shortly after I left. So I had a weakness for the type of paranoia that Illuminatus! was playing with.


Most of Wilson's ideas seem to have come second-hand from William S. Burroughs, James Joyce, Carl Jung, Buckminster Fuller, Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Carlos Castaneda, Phillip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, Terrence McKenna and others, but he mashed them together and added his own twisted sense of humor, creating a Paul's Boutique of ideas with a never-ending capacity to entertain (at least to entertain me). Randomly opening one of his books, one will inevitably find an interesting sentence.

"..government is a hallucination in the minds of governors."

"The error of most alleged Libertarians--especially the followers(!) of the egregious Ayn Rand--is to assume that all property is property."

"'The moon has a fat jaw tonight,' he said in Italian. 'Looks like someone punched her in the mouth.'"

I was considering going back and rereading the book last summer to see if it held up. After all, it's been 15 years since I last read it, and my ideas about literature have become somewhat more sophisticated. I suppose I'll probably read it this summer for sure. In the years since, I have read a few of his other books.

The Shroedinger's Cat trilogy is the fictional follow-up to Illuminatus! A lot of it is based on ideas from quantum physics, especially the idea of infinite parallel universes. The story constantly slips from one universe to another, where details are slightly different. This makes it pretty irritating to read, and it's not as funny as Illuminatus!, but has enough great ideas buried in its pages to make a dozen interesting scifi novels.

Masks of the Illuminati is more to my liking, a very funny piece of historical fiction with James Joyce, Albert Einstein and Aleister Crowley as characters (and a few other historical figures passing through).

I spent years looking for his popular non-fiction book The Cosmic Trigger. At one point, a roommate of my neighbor in Athens had a copy, and refused to loan it to me. I finally found it at Books on Wilshire around '98. It's a strange combination of autobiography, philosophy and phenomenology. It explains many of the ideas behind Illuminatus!, discusses Wilson's experiences with drugs, examines UFO contact, psychedelic experimentation (including those experiments conducted by Timothy Leary, John Lilly and Carlos Castaneda as well as the author), and psychic projection, and lays out a map of brain circuits for our continued mental evolution. The best idea I got from this book is Wilson's definition of "agnosticism"--which, to Wilson, doesn't mean not believing in God, but not believing in anything. It's more difficult than it sounds, to always keep the idea that you could be wrong in your head on every single issue, but all we have to do is look around to see the results of the failure to do so.

Most recently, I read Prometheus Rising, which takes ideas from Cosmic Trigger and develops them further, providing practical intructions for rewiring your brain. Each chapter ends with a series of excercises, none of which I've actually done.

At one point, I bought a book called The Widow's Son, the first volume of The Historical Illuminati Chronicles. I got about 5 pages into that before deciding it was not to my taste. The one other piece of his writing I've come across is The Horror on Howth Hill, a story in the anthology Three-Fisted Tales of Bob, put out by the Church of the Subgenius, a Lovecraft parody that poses the question "how big was King Kong's dick?" Hey, you can read that one for free!