Eric Wagner on Michael Johnson's 'Skeleton Key'

 “Illuminatus! Skeleton Key #1: Extra Kether

    

By Eric Wagner

Special guest blogger

R. Michael Johnson has written a brilliant explication of Bob Campbell’s Tales of Illuminatus! based on Shea and Wilson’s Illuminatus! Bob Campbell has presented the text beautifully in scholarly comic book fashion with appropriate illustrations. The “Skeleton Key” suggests Campbell and Robinson’s Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, and “Extra Kether” suggests George Harrison’s Extra Texture, although I don’t know if they intended the latter allusion. They may have merely wanted to suggest a Madison Avenue advertising sense of “Now with extra Kether!” knowing Johnson’s deep reading of McLuhan.

One can tell that Johnson has spent decades reading Robert Anton Wilson’s works, as well as works that inspired Wilson. In addition, Johnson has read a lot material about the time period in question (the sixties and beyond) and the wide world of sex and drugs and conspiracy theories.

Aside: I first read The Lord of the Rings in 1978. Visiting bookstores and comic book stores over the next twenty-three years I saw lots of art inspired by Tolkien, presenting Gandalf and Middle Earth in a wide variety of ways. When the film The Fellowship of the Ring came out in 2001, it (and Jackson’s subsequent films) did a good enough job of recreating Tolkien’s world that I now think of Gandalf as looking like Sir Ian McKellen. Bob Campbell has done a terrific job of creating a visual universe parallel to Bob Wilson’s universe, in his comics as well as in Bob’s other Wilsonian artworks such as his terrific book Raw Art: The Illustrated Worlds and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson.

Dr. Johnson has outdone himself in the text. He has written about Bob Wilson’s work for over thirty years, and I always find Johnson’s writing brilliant and thought provoking. Johnson approaches Wilson’s work both with deep seriousness and with a profound sense of play. I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking of my ideas about Wilson’s work as the only correct ones, but Johnson shows me again and again that one can approach Wilson’s work in a multitudinous variety of ways. In Masks of the Illuminati Bob quotes the Upanishads: Remove infinity from it and infinity remains. That seems true of works of literature. Umberto Eco defined a novel as a machine for generating interpretations.

One could spend fruitful years following up all the leads Johnson provides in this work. I found myself thinking about young people encountering Campbell’s comic books. I think Johnson’s work will give them the tools for a richer understanding of the world of Illuminatus! as well as a guide-map for future studies. In 1970 before my family ever went to Disneyland, I had a large map of Disneyland on my wall. Interestingly, the map included Space Mountain even though the ride wouldn’t open until 1977. Johnson and Campbell have provided an information rich map to Illuminatus! and Tales of Illuminatus!, one of use to first time visitors as well as to those of us who have lived there for years.

[See this earlier post for information on the Skeleton Key -- the Mgt.]

Tuesday links

Photo by Dave Adamson on Unsplash

 "Robert Anton Wilson: Useful Idiot?" New Substack by Michael Johnson.

 New Joseph Matheny Substack. Includes archive of his old blog.  

The latest bad news about pro football. 

Anecdote about Patrick Stewart and Sting (bottom of the newsletter). 

Recommendations from John Higgs. 

Bobby Campbell recommends "You Can See Everything." 

Update from Prop Anon

 

[I'm going to post the main news from his latest Substack newsletter -- The Mgt.]

Hi Everyone,

Just wanted to drop a few updates your way about my work. I’ve recently wrapped the successful Kickstarter campaign for the Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson audiobook. I’m also currently working on another book, or pamphlet, that deals with an aspect of Robert Anton Wilson’s thought and work. My hope is to have a class that will coincide with the book’s release.

I’m also dealing with some intense life situations at the moment. My landlord never renewed my lease, and I’ve been doing the car life thing for the past month. Overall, it’s not so bad, however, it would be better to have some sort of home base rental secured to keep the wheels on this Chapel Perilous bus moving.

The triple whammy at the moment is that I have a pretty bad physical injury. I’ve had it since April of this year and I haven’t really said anything about it since now, because why would I? But I saw a doctor recently and they said I need surgery to fix what’s going on, and so I have a surgery date set for January. After the surgery I should be able to get back to being able to work physical labor jobs and gigs again, but there is a two-month recovery time I need to abide by after the surgery.

So, I find myself in a bit of a bind at the mo. As such, I created a GoFundMe to help spread the word and to humbly accept whatever support any of you could muster. For those of you who know me, I don’t really like asking for things like this, but I would not be asking if it was not existentially necessary.

Alternatively, if you would prefer to support my work long-term, upgrading to a paid Substack subscription today will directly fund this transition. As a tangible thank-you, anyone who transitions to a paid subscriber tier this week will receive a free digital copy of my book emailed straight to their inbox.

More on 'Maybe Magick'

 

I am a big book buyer -- despite the fact that Ohio has excellent libraries, much of what I read are my own books -- and I have noticed that carefully reading the endorsements for a book can give me an idea of whether it is worth buying. If I am thinking of buying a book about Roman history, it matters to me whether I know the names of the historians blurbing the book; if I am looking at a science fiction author, the names of the writers endorsing it will give me an idea if the book is worth my time.

The Hilaritas Press page for Maybe Magick has endorsements by Lon Milo DuQuette, Joseph L. Flatley, Oberon Zell and Cat Vincent. 

I bought the book as a preorder, obtaining it as soon as October 31 arrived, but if you are on the fence and haven't bought it  yet, I might be worth reading what the four had to say.

Lon Milo DuQuette wrote, "Maybe Magick: Notes from an Evolving Nervous System is maybe master Bob’s single most secret-busting, awe-inspiring exposition of the esoteric arts and sciences of Magick. Every page is a thunderous reminder why I fell in love (and continue to love) this man’s scintillating wit and wisdom. (or maybe not)."

The other three statements at at the link. 

Hilaritas releases 'Maybe Magick'

 

Hilaritas Press has released Maybe Magick, the new anthology of Robert Anton Wilson's writings on Magick. 

Here is the official blurb:

What if magick is neither supernatural nonsense nor solemn occult theater, but a practical way of tinkering with the machinery of perception? Robert Anton Wilson spent a lifetime investigating the confounding territories where magick, science, psychology, language, and belief overlap. Maybe Magick gathers essays, introductions and interviews charting three decades of exploration, tracing the evolution of a mind learning not to mistake certainty for evidence. The result is funny, provocative, skeptical, and occasionally liable to upend your favorite assumptions. Wilson does not ask you to believe in magick. He asks a more interesting question: what happens when you try it? 

The editors for the book were Mike Gathers, Oz Fritz, Dave Skelton and  Tom Clisson. Oz, Dave and Alan Chapman all wrote pieces for the book. Cover and design by Rasa. (I corrected an earlier version of the blog post in response to a comment.)

Having worked with Hilaritas for my Robert Shea book, I know how much work and care goes into producing a Hilaritas Press title, and I have heard enough from the editors to know a great deal of labor went into this new book. 

More information here, includlng endorsements and links to purchase the book. 

UPDATE: One more quick book note: All ebooks at OR Books are on sale for $2 until midnight today, including Operation Mindfuck by Robert Guffey and American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda by Ru Marshall.  You can read the Ru Marshall interview published here. 

Steve 'Fly' Pratt music links

Steve "Fly" Pratt has released two music recordings that tie in to the ongoing Tales of Illuminatus comic book adaptation by Bobby Campbell: The First Trip and, this year, K9 Rapture by DJ Flai, which was made available as part of the Tales of Illuminatus 3 packages. So if you supported Bobby's project, you may have heard the music. I bought K9 Rapture as part of my package. I'm going to listen to it today as I run my errands. 

Steve made lots of music available at other places. Much of it can be streamed at SoundCloud.  See also his Deep Scratch website and his music at Bandcamp. He also has a Patreon site. 

I also  own the Robert Anton Wilson Meets Steve Agaric Pratt album, here are the track notes for the album. 

New book with World War II revisionism

 

The historian and writer Thaddeus Russell has a new book out, Savior and Seducer: A Renegade History of the United States in the World, and as Robert Anton Wilson was interested in World War II revisionism, I thought the book might be of interest to sombunall of you. 

"The Case Against the 'Good War' Still Stands," the latest issue of Russell's Substack newsletter, written as a rebuttal to a bad review, outlines Russell's arguments about World War II.

"In the book’s World War II chapters ... I argue that American policy under Franklin Roosevelt transformed two regional wars, one in eastern Europe and the other in eastern Asia, into a global conflict that killed more than sixty-five million people. I also argue that American intervention ensured the fulfillment of the Holocaust," Russell writes.

"...much of the book’s discussion of World War II is devoted to Hitler’s ideology, which always included commitment to conquering all of Poland and western Russia for Lebensraum ('living space'). He claimed these territories as part of a 'Greater Germany' once inhabited by Teutonic peoples whom he regarded as ancestors of modern Germans. This was racial imperialism, to be sure. But as I also show, it was an imperialism that ended in eastern Europe.

"Hitler had for decades written and spoken extensively about his lack of interest in colonies outside Greater Germany, hoped for an alliance with Britain and the United States, and, according to virtually every historian of the Third Reich, invaded the West in the spring of 1940 only as a defensive measure to secure Germany’s western flank before advancing eastward."

Russell also contends, "American moves toward war through 1941 eliminated the Jews’ usefulness to Hitler as hostages against intervention while immigration restrictions blocked their escape. Whether the extermination decision came in the spring or fall of that year, I interpret this reversal of the emigration policy as a response to America’s de facto entry into the war. This is the basis for my argument that the six million would have lived had the United States stayed out of the war."

I don't know what to make of all this. I've put the book on hold at my local library. 

Hilaritas looking at publishing 50th anniversary hardcover edition of 'Cosmic Trigger'

 

The Hilaritas Press edition of the first book of the Cosmic Trigger trilogy. 

Cosmic Trigger; The Final Secret of the Illuminati, first published in 1977 and published in a new edition by Hilaritas Press in 2016, is one of Robert Anton Wilson's most popular and influential books. It's the first in three Cosmic Trigger books that RAW published. (The second one, Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth, also available as a Hilaritas edition, is a personal favorite of mine.) 

With the 50-year anniversary of the publication of Cosmic Trigger I looming, Mike Gathers has  suggested that something should be done to mark that anniversary. Rasa was pleased by the suggestion and has decided that a new hardback edition, with some sort of extra features, would be a good idea. Ideas for what to have in the new edition are now being discussed. 

Halloween reading update

I've finished the two books I planned to read for Halloween. A few comments:

Twice As Dead by Harry Turtledove is an urban fantasy, set in Los Angeles in the years following World War II. The protagonist is a mixed-race detective. There are vampires, ghosts and other supernatural beings. The detective has a talking cat who periodically kills rats that are sent by the detective's enemies to snoop on him. I thought it was one of Turtledove's better books.

The Return by Walter de la Mare has a protagonist who falls asleep at a graveyard. When he wakes up and returns home, he and others discover his face has changed to resemble the person who was buried where the hero took his nap. There is not much else that actually happens in the book and the reader is left wondering if the protagonist is experiencing everything he describes or suffers from mental illness. At first I was a little disappointed by the book, but then I started noticing how atmospheric and poetic many passages were.  I started marking them. 

"After all, what is every man?" he talked on; "a horde of ghosts -- like a Chinese nest of boxes -- oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front -- in our ancestors, back and back, until -- "

Another passage:

The still grave face beneath the shadow of its veil had never turned, though the moon poured all her flood of brilliance upon the dark profile. And once when as if in sudden alarm he had lifted his head and looked at her, a sudden doubt had assailed him so instantly that he had half put out his hand to touch her, and had as quickly withdrawn it, lest her beauty and stillness should be, even as the moment’s fancy had suggested, only a far-gone memory returned in dream.

One of the characters is named Herbert Herbert, so I wondered if Vladimir Nabokov referenced the novel when he named the main character in Lolita Humbert Humbert. But whereas Humbert Humbert liked very young girls, Herbert Herbert surrounds himself with very old books. 

De la Mare also wrote ghost stories and I plan to hunt them up. 

Christina Pearson update

 

RAW daughter Christina Pearson, who runs the RAW Trust,  is still facing open heart surgery, now scheduled for Oct. 27 at last report. I wanted to note that the Gofundme to help her has exceeded its goal, as people have rallied around her, but the site is still taking donations, if you can afford to help. 

Preorder the new RAW book

Over the last few years, I have bought many books from Hilaritas Press, the publishing imprint for  the Robert Anton Wilson Trust. Many of these books have been editions of RAW's works, but many also have been works by other writers. What I've almost always done is buy the book as soon as it was released.

This time, I am doing something different. I have preordered Maybe Magick, the latest compilation of RAW's writings, due for release Oct. 31.

I don't suppose that my one order will make much difference, and several preorders by other fans likely won't make much difference, ether, but preordering books  helps  them become a success. As ChatGPT explains, "the biggest reason is that preorders can influence how publishers, bookstores, and the media judge a book's prospects for success. A preorder is more than a promise to buy a book: it can help build momentum before the book even reaches store shelves." Follow the link for a longer explanation.

Here is the Amazon page to preorder. Here is the Bookshop page.  You can also preorder from Barnes and Noble. 

Of course, I will still cover the full announcement when the book is released. 

'What the world needs most is a little more tenderness'

 

The above is probably from Rasa. Posted on Bluesky by Klaster Chaosmos, who posts a lot of Discordian/RAW-related material. 

Hilaritas podcast: Prop Anon on 'Quantum Psychology'

 

"Guest host Zach West chats with Gabriel “PropAnon” Kennedy, author of Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson which he’s now recording as an audiobook. Zach and Gabriel spend most of the episode unpacking Quantum Psychology as Wilson’s attempt to change how we talk, perceive, and argue."

Related links here.