Bobby Campell's illustration for the Illuminatus! online reading group.
[I am working on an anthology of Robert Shea's nonfiction pieces and of interviews with Shea, similar in format to many of the Robert Anton Wilson anthologies. In light of the focus on Illuminatus! for this year's Maybe Day celebration, I thought I would share an excerpt from the work-in-progress: Shea's thoughts about Illuminatus!, culled from his zines. Many of these thoughts are mailing comments, made to other members of The Golden Apa. The Management.]
[In a mailing comment to Robert Anton Wilson] I was stunned by your comment [to] Kevin, wherein you say you brooded over why you couldn’t finish a long book and then, collaborating with me, finished one. You see, I’ve been going around telling people that I never completed a book project before writing Illuminatus! and it was my collaboration with you, and your example of joyful productivity that taught me how to write and finish novels. I never realized that Illuminatus! was a breakthrough book for both of us. I guess I sort of assumed that you had never before written a book simply because you hadn’t gotten around to it, whereas I, who had started a number of novels and never finished any, had a “problem.”
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TODAY IS JUNE 22, 1988, FEAST OF THE MARTYRDOM OF ST. JOHN DILLINGER. HAIL ERIS. ALL HAIL DISCORDIA. 23 SKIDOO.
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Bob Wilson on the myth of John Dillinger’s penis – Wilson may answer this, too, but I can’t resist – ah – inserting my own recollections. We first heard the myth about the Smithsonian keeping Dillinger’s penis stashed away when a Playboy reader queried the “Advisor” about it. One of our researchers called the Smithsonian and said, “What I’m about to ask you may sound ridiculous, but we’ve received a serious question from a reader about it.” Before she could continue, the man on the other end said, “No, we do not have John Dillinger’s penis here.” He went on to say that people called to ask about it several times a year.
As for it being 23 inches long – when Dlllinger was cruelly assassinated and murdered a photograph of him lying on a tilted morgue table was published in the Chicago Daily News. He was covered with a sheet and seemed to have an enormous erection. Actually, the sheet was thrown over him and a lever that controlled the tilting of the table, but in the photograph the lever looked like part of Dillinger. Some Chicago papers published the photo retouched, with the sheet flattened out.
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There is and always has been an awful lot of hokum around everything to do with the uncanny, esoteric, the occult, the paranormal, the supernatural, the mystical. Throughout this century and in past centuries as well. That is why I appreciate, as a needed corrective, even the knee-jerk skepticism of such groups as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
But it also happens to be true that people can get useful philosophical and moral ideas from dubious sources. I’ve quoted Robert Anton Wilson’s observation that Buddhism would still be valuable even if the Buddhist texts turned out to be forgeries. A lot of people have the same feeling about Castaneda; it doesn’t matter whether Don Juan ever really existed.
I hope it won’t seem too immodest to say that there are people who claim to have gotten a lot, philosophically, out of Illuminatus! and Shike, even though both novels are clearly labeled fiction. It seems to me that ideas have a life of their own, and that it may be important, in evaluating an idea, not to consider the source, but rather to consider its possible usefulness to one’s own belief system.
But ideas are ideas and facts are facts (yes, I know this is a terribly stodgy Aristotelian/Newtonian/Cartesian way of looking at things, but there it is: I seem to be struck with it).
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Do you still read/like Korzybski? Wilson says Korzybski’s ideas, though absorbed by him many years ago, are still influential in his thinking. Mine, too.
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Indeed Jim Frenkel does have good taste; he was one of the five editors at Dell who worked on Illuminatus! He’s the one who described it as, “The anarchist acid-rock answer to Lord of the Rings.”
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I’ve run into a fair number of people who believe world events are manipulated by the Illuminati or some similar conspiracy. This always poses a moral dilemma for me, because I want to be honest and tell them novel was intended to spoof such notions, but I don’t want to take away their reason for buying the book and recommending it to their friends.
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The Masons have always been pretty open about being behind the U.S. government. Look at the eye and the pyramid on the dollar bill. They’re so brazen they even put their headquarters on 23rd Street.
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Re: Fans wanting to be disembodied intelligences: It strikes me as interesting in this connection that there are a number of sf stories on the theme of brains in boxes or brains removed from people and installed in machines, or minds or brains transplanted from one body to another, sometimes to an alien body. And higher intelligences are sometimes portrayed as beings of pure energy. We used this idea in Illuminatus! – but note that it was the Illuminati who wanted to get rid of their bodies, not our heroes and heroines.
I’m a student of Zen, and Zen teaches that mind and body are one.
I don’t feel knowledgeable enough to comment on Judaism’s attitude towards the body, but Catholics are taught that the body is “the temple of the Holy Spirit,” and that they are obligated to take good care of it. The obligation to maintain good health comes under the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” This is interpreted to mean that it is forbidden to injure oneself. My sense is that many Catholics don’t give much thought to this obligation, or to the rest of the Fifth Commandment.
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Another thing I want to make perfectly clear, to quote a famous Illuminatus, that, as I have said again and again and again, to quote another one, that I am not only not an expert on conspiracy theory, I don’t even believe in the damned things. I cannot speak for Bob Wilson on this point, but I know one of my intentions in writing Illuminatus! was to poke fun at the conspiracy paranoia besotting both Right and Left in the U.S. in the late 60s and early 70s.
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Bob Wilson and I once had a bit of a run-in with Roger Ebert at a press party at the Biograph Theater promoting a book called Dillinger, Dead or Alive, which asserted that Dillinger had not been killed at the Biograph in 1934 but is, in fact, still living. Since this idea had also occurred to the authors of a Certain Trilogy, we showed up to express our support of the proposition that Dillinger lives. Ebert got the notion that we were making fun of his friend’s book. A contretemps ensued. Hail Eris! [Dillinger: Dead or Alive? by Jay Robert Nash and Ron Offen was published in 1970].
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Your essay caused me to think some more about how I feel about people masturbating to sex scenes I have written, and I’ve decided my attitude is more complicated than just being flattered that I had written something sexy enough to turn somebody on. I definitely would not be embarrassed and would be rather pleased, but it’s occurred to me that I did have different intentions in writing the two scenes you refer to. In writing Illuminatus! Bob Wilson and I agreed that we would incorporate some out-and-out pornographic writing into the novel, and pornography is meant to turn people on sexually. So that was what I was trying to do when I wrote the cocksucking scene between George and Mavis on the beach, which is what drove my actor friend to bring himself off.
When I was writing Shike I was trying to bring to life on paper an imaginary world and its people. I was thinking more about clearly expressing what was in my imagination than about how it might affect the reader. Jebu and Taniko’s first erotic encounter was something happening between them, and it was my job to describe it as well as I could and not to manipulate the reader’s sexual feelings. The George-Mavis scene was written somewhat in the crude style I recall from the typewritten pornographic stories that were passed around in my high school classes. Even after passing through Bob Wilson’s typewriter, it retains that flavor. The Jebu-Taniko scene was written in what I hoped was a subtle, delicate style that seemed appropriate for the Japanese characters. Which is to say that while I wouldn’t mind somebody being moved to masturbate – or to look for some nice person to have sex with – after reading the Jebu-Taniko scene, it would seem to me that the reaction wasn’t all that relevant to my intention. After all, I wouldn’t want to write anything that would make people want to stop reading.
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Last September, Yvonne and I saw the Lyric Opera’s production of The Magic Flute. I’m becoming more and more of a lover of Mozart’s music, and this has certainly done much to hasten the process. Of the libretto of Die Zauberfloete, no less an illuminated being than Goethe declared its “high meaning will not elude the initiated.” Besides the music, I was entertained by the sets, which were, of course, full of pyramids. One pyramid had the word “WEISHEIT” over its entrance, which I at first misread as “WEISHAUPT.” At the end, an orange sun arose and appeared centered in a gigantic triangle. The evening would have been complete if the sun had opened a bright red eye and winked at me. Highly recommended, in whatever form you might have access to it. Die Zauberfloete was first presented in Vienna on Friday, Sept. 30, 1791, fifteen years after the founding of the Bavarian Illuminati and six years after its suppression by edict of the King of Bavaria.
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It is relatively easy when you are writing a wild book like Illuminatus! to come up with funny stuff. But most historical novels tend not to lend themselves to a lot of humor although there are exceptions, and when my head is in the historical novel mode it does not produce much humor – except in minor ways, like a couple of Perrin’s songs in All Things.
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Yes, there really is a Fernando Poo. It is named after the explorer Fernando Poo, who landed there in 1492. Whence comes the well-known rhyme, “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Fernando Poo discovered Fernando Poo.” Some people spell his name Po, but they are just spoilsports.
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