What to recommend to the RAW newbie?

On Twitter, RAW Semantics: "Although relatively few, I see a steady flow of people *new* to #RobertAntonWilson, curiously inquiring. Can I gently suggest you read his BOOKS first? Here's a catalog of them (from @TheRAWTrust). I predict you'll be very glad you took this suggestion! https://hilaritaspress.com/catalog/."

I asked, "Do they ask you what to try first? If so, what do you tell them?"

Brian replied, "Generally Prometheus Rising, as that was the first RAW non-fiction book I read (and it made a big impression)."

My own tentative suggestion is Masks of the Illuminati, although I wonder if The Widow's Son might be better for someone who prefers fiction. (I'm pretty sure Apuleius Charlton told me he reads it again every year, and Mike Gathers described it in a podcast as the first RAW book he finished, if I understood him correctly. The Widow's Son is a favorite of Bobby Campbell).  I also think Cosmic Trigger 2 might be a good introduction, and I think it's an underrated RAW book. 

UPDATE: Brian loves Cosmic Trigger 2, too!

Oz Fritz on the 'Widow's Son' reading group

Oz Fritz was one of the mainstay commentators in the recently-finished reading group on The Widow's Son. Apparently he still had points he wanted to make, because on his blog, he has a new posting up, "The Widow's Son Discussion Group," where he talks about how important the book is in RAW's canon and how the discussion "opened my eyes to a great deal of magic and to mysteries of life in general."

I don't want to try to summarize Oz' post, which is pretty substantial, but although I've already posted a comment (paying him back a little, as it were), I did want to offer a couple of footnotes.

Oz finds a possible reference to the number 23 at the end of The Widow's Son, and writes:  

I interpret 23 as a number indicating the Bardo.  The correspondences suggest both death and life, or perhaps, death and rebirth.  A primary instruction in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol, = “maintain the thread of consciousness.  If you look at the transmission of the 23 Enigma from William Burroughs to Robert Anton Wilson as described in Cosmic Trigger I, this number, 23, most frequently came up in relation to death.  Outside of physical death, the Bardo represents a space in between where change occurs between one thing and another.  It makes sense to end the book with this correspondence, we enter the Bardo in between the second and third books of the Historical Illuminatus series.

Of course, another change between one thing and another is that Sigismundo heads west to America, along with some of the other characters who are crossing the waters. Could this be analogous to RAW growing up on the East Coast, migrating west, and spending the last few decades of his life on the West Coast?

But getting back to death, earlier in his post, Oz writes,

Many confrontations with death in the first two books of the Historical Illuminatus series have been noted.  Death appears to become as much of a behind-the-scenes-character in The Widow’s Son as it does in Gravity’s Rainbow.  I pointed out several associations or simultaneous occurrences of Tiphareth with Death.  This resonates with the instruction given many times in The Egyptian Book of the Dead for the voyaging soul to unite with Osiris upon departing the physical sheath at death.

A quote from Scott Apel's Beyond Chaos and Beyond:  In the autobiographical essay at the end of the book, Apel describes how his girlfriend Catherine kept RAW company during RAW's final days, and adds, "And at night, she read to him -- as she had done to Arlen -- from The Egyptian Book of the Dead, in the hopes of easing his transition." (This is an example of how the book has a lot of interesting material, including previously uncollected RAW writings, not found anywhere else.)

Also in Oz' post, Oz quotes the famous Calvin Coolidge quote on persistence, rendered into a poem: "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent." Etc. I can't resist pointing out that RAW's observation on the power of persistence is an important episode of Cosmic Trigger II (to avoid a "spoiler" for those who haven't read the book, I want to avoid being more specific.) 

BTW, speaking of the reading group, I've gotten all of the links caught up for it on the right side of the page, if any of you want to finish participating the group (you can still post comments -- I moderate and approve comments every day) or even want to start, with all of the free time everybody supposedly has these days. 

The reading group for Nature's God, the third Historical Illuminatus! book, starts April 30. I had an old paper copy, but I just got the ebook from Hilaritas so I can read the extra material and run searches. 

The Widow's Son reading group -- Finale

 James Gillray’s political cartoon which rather gleefully anticipates the trial of Thomas Paine

Week Twenty Nine (pg. 489-517 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 5,6,&7 Part IV all editions)

By Gregory Arnott

Special guest blogger

It was and is widely believed that Clement XIV was poisoned, although Wilson seems to think that the poisoning was not quite as literal as other historians. The doctors who performed his autopsy ascribed his death to scurvy and hemorrhoidal disorders and pointed out he was over 70 years old. Policy failures and the climate around the Holy See as recounted by RAW exacerbated the situation. While searching around I found a wonderfully insane conspiracy book titled AntiChrist that directly links the graffiti and (assumed) poisoning of Ganganelli to the later (re)founding of the Illuminati by (ex?)-Jesuit Weishaupt. The author goes on to state that the Illuminati founded by Weishaupt was merely the refounding of the Alahambros (which should be familiar) which were at one time led by St. Ignatius of Loyola.

An amusing tale about the nature of the papacy comes from a slim volume of stories titled The Twilight of the Gods by Richard Garnett; it concerns the reign of Pope Sylvester II, who was historically accused of being a sorcerer, and his relationship to Lucifer. It is titled “The Demon Pope.”

As we reach the crescendo of the final complete part of the Historical Illuminatus! sequence, (Nature’s God always seemed curtailed by the lack of the implied fourth novel), familiar roles carry us further along the chain of history. De Sade comments in his wry-insane manner about Rome, Wilkes and Burke try to avert war and Empire’s dissolution, Beaumarchais and Diderot don’t need a weatherman, stately plump Benjamin Franklin returns over the Atlantic towards a Continental Congress, while a less familiar character in this Romance, John Adams, proposes that we are in a state of nature.

Hobbes’ state of nature is also summed up in the Latin phrase Bellum omnium contra omnes- the war of all against all where every man has as much right to any other thing as any other. Hobbes predicted much of what would happen during the Enlightenment. The text makes sure to note that the battles at Concord and Lexington were the first time since the religion wars of the 1600s that “peasants” had defeated a sovereign power. Hobbes had learned from the atrocities that drove Grimmelshausen mad and led to Charles I losing his head and Cromwell’s dictatorship; his works accurately describe the breakdowns of society that Duccio recounts in his private history where the will to battle becomes War. John Adams seems to be maneuvering towards the direction of creating another Leviathan that will match the English Crown. The architects and prophets of America are drawing together.

In France the Leviathans of commerce and royalty have grown fat and ready for beheading- in Ireland the situation still hasn’t been resolved over two hundred years later. The world waits with bated breath, especially because of  COVID-19, to see how these motions set in place centuries ago will develop.

And Hanfkopf is woven into his final narrative and goes out like Joseph of Arimathea, another keeper of secrets. 

Sigismundo’s perspective is a little insufferable but understandable considering all that he has been exposed to- instead of becoming an unwilling pawn he decides to embrace the spirit of Rousseau’s noble savage and Crowley’s counter-dedication to Konx Om Pax:

St. Paul spoke up on the Hill of Mars
To the empty-headed Athenians;
But I would rather talk to the stars   
Than to empty-headed Athenians;

It’s only too easy to form a cult,
To cry a crusade with “Deus Vult”—
But you won’t get much of a good result 
From empty-headed Athenians.

The people of London much resemble   
Those empty-headed Athenians.
I could very easily make them tremble,   
Those empty-headed Athenians.

A pinch of Bible, a gallon of gas,
And I, or any other guess ass,
Could bring to our mystical moonlight mass   
Those empty-headed Athenians.

In fine, I have precious little use   
For empty-headed Athenians.
The birds I have snared shall all go loose;   
They are empty-headed Athenians.

I thought perhaps I might do some good;
But it’s ten to one if I ever should—
And I doubt if I would save, if I could,   
Such empty-headed Athenians.

So (with any luck) I shall bid farewell   
To the empty-headed Athenians.
For me, they may all of them go to hell, 
For empty-headed Athenians.
I hate your idiot jolts and jars,
You monkeys grinning behind your bars—
I’m more at home with the winds and stars 
Than with empty-headed Athenians.

It seems to me that Sigismundo is correct that the fourth soul or satori or enlightenment is virtually worthless if not successfully integrated into the whole personality. One of my instructors insisted, like Regardie, that any success in magic is predicated upon rigorous therapy and self-examination. I was frustrated at the time because I wanted hot chicks and to blow old men’s hats off with sylphs but I’m grateful now.

Sigismundo’s hypothesis about the origins of gods is fascinating. I have contended for years that The Fool is none other than the first chimp who took just the right amount of hallucinogenic substance to not poison itself or go beyond comprehension. Or am I just inventing my own grand opera?

Reread Chapter 24 of Part III.

Finally were brought together with the only main character I’d feel comfortable buying a drink for and a figure whose belated appearance buries the dog of his implicit involvement with almost every larger historical theme in the novel. The Narrator neglects to mention that Thomas Paine’s trip across the Atlantic was sponsored by none other than the enterprising Dr. Franklin and its peril. The ship that Moon and Paine are aboard has a case of typhoid being passed around and some will die, Paine himself will have to stay in the care of Franklin’s physician on his arrival in the colonies. Paine will immediately become a citizen of Pennsylvania and take over editing duties of a paper for Franklin where he will write an anonymous missive against slavery in the Colonies. Paine will of course incite the colonists’ ire against the British Crown further along the path towards battle. No less than the radical/conservative John Adams would state that “without Paine’s pen, Washington’s sword would have been raised in vain.”

After his first American sojourn Paine would come back to England and then Paris where he would defend and praise the Revolution, be sued in absentia for libel against none other than radical/conservative Edmund Burke, and fall prisoner thanks to Robespeirre’s paranoia. Paine would be released to travel back to America thanks to the machinations of James Monroe and died a hugely controversial figure who advocated for deism, universal rights, and the overthrow of all the old Kings and Popes. While there is no real evidence for Paine ever becoming a Mason, his philosophy could be said to have further Masonic goals more so than any other contemporary.

Moon has tried to redeem his blackmail and heads, along with Sigismundo and the world’s attention, towards the New World.

Thus we close The Widow’s Son, Robert Anton Wilson’s personal favorite of his novels, and will open again under the auspices of Nature and Nature’s God. Nature’s God begins with a foreword by none other than our own Eric Wagner, “Bewitching Rhetoric,” and was penned on Walpurgis Night 2010. I propose that we come together for the first reading group to discuss Eric’s forward on on Walpurgisnacht 2020 and continue with the first Chapter “Murder in Clontarf” on Monday May 3rd.

As a note: I should have included the factoid in my post for Week Nineteen that Mary d’Este makes a cameo in RAW’s Masks of the Illuminati as a co-conspirator of Crowley’s who helps pull the wool over Sir John Babcock’s (the descendent) eyes during the final London chase scene as Miss Sturgis, Isadora Duncan’s secretary.

Thank you to Tom. Thank you to Alias and Oz and Eric and everyone else who contributed, and to Rasa and Christina for their support. I’ve loved reading your thoughts. Thanks to anyone who read!

From Eric: ““To two scoundrels in an unpredictable universe”, and to all the other scoundrels out there, a concerto by Vivaldi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKthRw4KjEg .” 

RAW would have liked the reading groups

Robert Anton Wilson

What would RAW have thought of our online reading group for The Widow's Son, and all of our other online reading groups? It seems reasonable to think he would have liked them.

If you've read the comments for the Feb. 24 episode of the reading group,  Eric Wagner asked, "I wonder what Bob Wilson would think of our comments in this discussion group?'

Oz Fritz replied, "To answer Eric's question: I think RAW would be pleased and grateful for these discussion groups about his books. I suspect he would have liked sombunall of my comments and all of Gregory's introductory write-ups. This question sparked reflection on his reactions to the comments in the online courses of his that I took. He usually responded to people's comments always making it quite clear what he thought either way. I realized that I missed his voice in these proceedings, but then thought that his voice is always there as the subject matter and is getting expanded and explicated through our various interpretations."

I brought up Bob Dylan enjoying the fact that people talk about his lyrics and wrote, "Speaking of Dylan, he apparently is pleased by the people who study his lyrics, and I would have to think RAW would be pleased by the reading groups, although on that point I guess I have to defer to the people who actually knew RAW."

Alias Bogus then wrote, "In reference to Tom’s comment about hoping Bob would have enjoyed the reading groups, I can only quote an exchange from the Maybe Logic Academy, when we did a 12 week course on the Illuminatus! Trilogy, and in the forum I made a comment to which Bob replied:

"Bogus Magus: Little did I know, however, that I would end up treating it the way we are now – poring over the text like a Joycean scholar!

"RAW:

"10 Nov 2004

"Dear Bogmag,
Of course, I wanted at least some readers to
pore over the text like Joyce scholars….that’s
why I made it so Joycean
It has taken 29 years [plus the 5 years
lost in getting it published] but that
dream seems real at last,
and I thank everybody"

The Widow's Son reading group, Week Twenty Eight

Pope Clement XIV, noted for his suppression of the Jesuits (after heavy political pressure) and his humane treatment of the Jews.

Week Twenty Eight (pg. 471-477 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 3&4 Part IV all editions) 

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger

De Sade remains indomitable; or rather, as written about previously in this series of posts, the Divine Marquis will evade capture (until he doesn’t). Then he’ll be free again, and then captured again — but they never quite get the best of De Sade. We could expect such a harsh philosophy from so singular a man, who mustn’t have worried what could be done to him as opposed to what he could do to those around him.

Everyone hates the Jesuits. They’re feared outside and within the Catholic Church, they are depicted as learned scholars, shadowy spies (see Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon), and tormentors of the imagination (Portrait of the Artist). The Jesuit secrecy, or supposed secrecy, has won them few friends over the years. Although I don’t think anti-Jesuit sentiment is that popular or thought of today, we could relate the fear of the Jesuits to the whispers about the Knights of Malta during the P2 conspiracies heyday, or Opus Dei when Dan Brown released his magnum opus The Da Vinci Code.

It looks like old Ganganelli is being targeted by meme magic. I guess Pope Francis, another liberal Franciscan, should make sure not to piss off any gamers. Imagine the outskirts of the Vatican, covered in graffiti of a frog in a blond wig standing over Francis’s corpse flashing a white power sign. Like everything related about Pope Clement XIV, the information about the Pugachev Uprising is related accurately if occasionally with the flavor of contemporary perspective. The Pugachev rebellion is yet another example of how Russians are entirely incapable of self governance. It would be nice for someone in Russia to lead an uprising now instead of being as utterly feckless as the rest of the world in combating the menace that is Vladimir Putin.

We move on from Weishaupt’s nuptial bliss to a tumultuous chapter in Sir John and Maria Babcock’s marriage. Like the scenes with Sigismundo’s drinking in the first novel, RAW depicts the inner turmoil of a character flirting with alcoholism. Maria and John’s conversation sees some of the truth come to the surface, but not enough to make this reader comfortable. But considering the attitude that is still prevalent about homosexuality, it is eminently understandable that Sir John does not want to add that to Maria’s knowledge of his infidelity. Moon has acted the blackguard, and now has his shop in Liverpool: just as Sir John unknowingly played a part in Moon’s terrible experiences, does his blackmail count as some sort of revenge?

From Eric: “I have selected Mozart’s Symphony 29 this week. President Trump tweeted suggesting Symphony 23. I appreciate the suggestion, but I chose 29 instead.”

The Widow's Son reading group, Week Twenty Seven

Family Portrait of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette 

Week Twenty Seven (pg. 457-470 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 1&2 Part IV all editions) 

By Gregory Arnott

Special guest blogger

Part IV begins with another scene in the mode of realism. The dregs of society gather to talk about the machinations of great men and debate their merits. Pierre, still riding on an upward tangent, has become a shopkeeper but is still troubled by dog shit. A fitting allegory for life. 

Louis XVI was regarded much as the text and characters indicate.The poor guy had the lowest charisma score of perhaps any monarch in history. 

I discussed Madame du Barry and Beaumarchais all the way back in my post for Week 8. I think, I hope, that what I wrote down still stands as a decent enough commentary on these figures. The Chevalier d’Eon was discussed a little more fully in the post for Week 4. 

Finally Duccio recalls the very true story about Robespierre the student addressing the newly crowned King Louis and Marie Antoinette. He kneeled and recited an address composed in Latin verse and neither monarch seemed to care. It’s one of those funny moments that makes one wonder. As they say on Last Podcast on the Left: be sure to hug your aggressive, strange acquaintances- you never know when it might save your life. 

From Eric: “With this week’s discussion of Beaumarchais, this seemed appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKkJAu16yJ0 .”

Widow's Son reading group, Week Twenty six

The Promethean 

Week Twenty Six (pg. 433-454 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 23&24 Part III all editions) 

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger

I am yesterday, today and the brother of tomorrow: these words are from Crowley’s Liber Israfel. Israfel was supposedly based on a manuscript by the sainted Allen Bennett named Liber Anubis which was itself supposedly a translation of a hymn from that disparate corpus of writings known as The Egyptian Book of the Dead, more properly called The Book of Coming Forth By Day. And now, it seems, Sigismundo is allowed back into the light of liberty.

Sigismundo naturally doesn’t trust that his rescuers are who they claim to be at first. He begins to cotton to the situation as-it-appears-to-be after being given the grip of the fourth degree. Earlier in the novel Sir John is lectured after his fourth degree initiation that help may always come from an unexpected quarter. Sigismundo/Joseph has become despondent and had almost given up hope of salvation.

Johann Conrad Dippel was born in 1673 at Castle Frankenstein; he was a man of learning, a theologian, hermetic scholar and an alchemist. The great visionary Emmanuel Swendenborg was once a student of Dippel’s but later rejected him and viciously attacked him as a megalomaniacal opportunist. Dippel believed that hermetic scholarship and alchemy was a truer key to understanding Nature than the then emerging natural sciences and espoused millenarian beliefs about the Second Coming. However, one friend claims that as an adult he despaired of Christ, describing him as “an indifferent being”, and put all of his faith into his alchemical experiments. At one point he tried to buy his birthplace with a vial of something he claimed was the elixir of life. A contemporary myth about Dippel that is pertinent to the incarnation in the novel is that he conducted experiments to transfer souls into cadavers. Nearly a decade before The Widow’s Son was published a popular and controversial idea was proposed to Academia that Shelley had been inspired to write Frankenstein after visiting Castle Frankenstein and hearing the tale of Johann Dippel. Regardless, Dippel - who indeed was said to have died in 1734 - strikes an interesting and undeniably Faustian figure. Dippel claimed a year before his death at age 61 that he had developed a tonic that would allow him to live to 135 - so in the manner of most of the people I admire, he was a dumbass and a goddamn liar but I’m sure RAW would appreciate the life-extension optimism.

Frankenstein, or Actually, It’s Frankenstein’s Monster, is one of those novels that some people are forced to read in school or believe that they know through cultural osmosis but is definitely worth revisiting often. The novel is a mess of ideas and contradictions that not only exemplifies Romantic literature and philosophy but the eternal crises of “progressing” humanity. Shelley, not her husband, was the superior wit. (Not to mention that she single-handedly created the genre of science fiction.) Ingolstadt figures strongly with Frankenstein as the location of Victor Frankenstein’s studies and his monster’s birthplace: Shelley almost certainly chose Ingolstadt because of its connection to Herr Weishaupt and His Merry Men.

Dippel von Frankenstein and Sigismundo is a satisfying conclusion to the mind-bending action of the third Part that can only be followed up with something like Chapter 24. A few observations:

When Sigismundo begins to think that the key is to Stay Drunk All The Time I was reminded of Baudelaire’s advice which I have tried to follow and also that after seeing how his relationship with alcohol played out in the previous novel, I’m hoping he doesn’t pursue that train of thought.

This sequence, I believe is meant to be funny:

“What do you feel when you look at the stars at night?” Frankenstein asked.
“The same as anybody else. Feelings that I cannot put into words.”
“Not the same as anybody else. Try putting it into words….” and so forth.

I'm pretty sure RAW/Frankenstein is playing a trick on the reader who is almost invariably going to identify with Sigismundo as Frankenstein lists all the ways that he is special. I would especially imagine the type of person who would be reading this novel in the first place would love to relate. We’re all the Fairest.

The idea of the Enlightened Despot is an old one though I do think it is interesting that two of my favorite series, this one and Terra Ignota, both play with this idea. If you enjoy The Historical Illuminatus! Chronicles I heartily recommend checking out Ms. Palmer’s novels as they are the closest material I can think of.

The following chapter is a hodge-podge of Gnostic fragments, Biblical verse, and the Author’s ingenium. I have tried to think of something to add and I cannot summon up anything worthy. This is the Gospel According to St. Wilson the Evangelist and it is a perfect encapsulation of Chesterton’s absurd good news or Pascal’s Night of Fire. Read and Read and Read it.

“The foxes have their holes and the birds have their nests, but the Living One does not stop and rest.”

The ankh is actually a representation of a sandal strap and the Egyptian form of “god” was conjugated as a verb.

“That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” Genesis Chapter 6

Maybe Dippel was onto something.

“Believe in the Stars.”- Kenneth Parcell, another Immortal

From Eric: “For the soundtrack I have chosen Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis conducted by Jascha Horenstein. This piece seems to fit the mystic Christianity of this section. Man, this section of the novel blew me away when I first read it during the carefree Reagan years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmjSzSc2bxk”

Widow's Son reading group, Week Twenty Five

Anna Liffey in her new location

Week Twenty Five (pg. 415-432 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 21&22 Part III all editions) 

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger

Our protagonists are drawn closer together psychically, in the case of Moon emotionally. Moon’s discombobulated thoughts give way to two long soliloquies on hate and idealism as he wanders around in the pre-dawn gloam. (Moon’s short remarks about living somewhere where the sun doesn’t come up at three in the morning and missing half the day is an example of how RAW can deftly point out basic perceptual differences between populations. Coming from a mid-Atlantic latitude, while I am duly grateful as the days become longer, the rash of daylight that takes place at the antipodes of the world has always seemed slightly horrifying. Last year’s Midsommar uses the lengthened day to great disconcerting effect.)

Moon’s greater understanding of Ireland’s situation makes it harder to blindly hate the agents of his misfortune as he apprehends them as cogs in a miserable machine. I can relate to this as I am currently disgusted with some policies I have been dealing with- but the more I have looked for a person to despise and blame the more I have found people with their hands tied and just as frustrated as I am.

While Moon reflected on Ireland I found myself thinking of my Home and wishing more of her sons and daughters felt the loyalty I did to Her.  I am often confused that my neighbors don’t realize that we are an occupied people, mere proles meant to scrape by in a glorified industrial colony. I wish we would someday rise against our ineffectual, bought and sold government and elect someone other than corporate shills and religio-maniacs but I doubt that day will come soon. Instead we suffer a brain-drain as those who can leave and those who remain behind do a great job imitating the undignified poverty and breeding habits of the 18th-Century Irish. Alas, I doubt that most of my “countrymen” appreciate the beauty of our home as much as an Irishperson enjoys Green Eire. Does anyone revere the Ohio like the Anna Liffey? Where is our dancing spirit?

A perhaps-interesting synchronicity is that I have read three books this week that took the time to relish Homer’s address to Rhododaktylos eos.

De Selby seemingly makes a leap from the footnotes into Sigismundo’s cell as he wrestles with and hammers at his recalcitrant machine. (The footnotes are keeping up their bizarreness quotient as we are reminded randomly of Bill Patterson’s ears and the fact that a whale is not a fish.)

Despite Moon’s inner conflicts, at the end of our reading he seems set on a path to make himself into a villain.

From Eric: “With all the hammering in this week’s reading, I chose the Hammerklavier Sonata by Beethoven - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKlLPe86Flk .”

I personally like this selection as it brings together our novel with Schrodinger’s Cat. 

The Widow's Son reading group, Week 24

Week Twenty Four (pg. 403-414 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 19&20 Part III all editions) 

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger

Once learned men knew that things fell because it was in their nature to fall, according to the Peripatetic. Once a man was burned at the stake for saying that there might be other Earths that were perhaps themselves inhabited. Once a man knew that the world had begun precisely on an October day in 4004 BCE based on his study of a bastardized translation of a bastardized translation of a bastardized translation. Once a poor engraver’s poetry was said, in the only review of his lifetime, to be “the ravings of an unfortunate lunatic.” Once man said he could split the atom, knowing full well that this was a lie because the idea of an atom was smaller, much smaller, than our primitive tools could ever discern. Once a man thought that he’d explained away consciousness as the meat sweats of glands and pulse. (I do not mention Woman because She was never given enough of a platform to be as Wrong as He.)

Mankind’s wrongness is a blessing in disguise. Because the world that mankind builds always seeks to be correct and being such a flawed Being mankind’s idea of what “correct” might be is almost always so heinously incorrect. Humanity never really shook the stupid so its a good thing our “best and brightest” are usually proven to have a bit of egg on their face. It makes way for the Future, which is where our hopes lie. And someday, perhaps, the last shall be first and this whole barrel of babbling apes will burst into something better.

A smart guy, by my estimation, wrote a few years ago that everyone else was writing history so he better get in on the game. He titled his work True History and it was entirely composed of lies. Partially because of a trip to the moon atop a waterspout, it makes a better case for one of the first works of science fiction than anything by Margaret Cavendish or Voltaire. Our lies often turn out to be better than our truths. We did go to the Moon- we did that against all odds. Once another dude, who I think was pretty smart, wrote that “all art is quite useless,” but another guy, considerably weirder but perhaps as smart, crossed that out and pointed out that “nothing that is useless can continue to grow and thrive.”

Both of our protagonists are at a loss. Sir John is arguing with human arrogance and God/Author even knows what is happening to Sigismundo at this point. But at least he gets a pleasant show in the best of RAW fashions: the set dressing should be familiar. The light-skinned blond and the darker brunette- his affection for coitus reservatus, the hanged man and ejaculate. Lovely, old-fashioned stuff just like Grandpa’s stories.

We all live in different worlds. De Selby was right.

I don’t have much else to add this week. You all have been doing an excellent job in the comments picking up the piece I’ve still dropped.

From Eric: “This week’s soundtrack, a version of the EU theme song, comes courtesy of Toby Philpott with the caption, “BREXIT, Stage Left”. I think it fits in with the absurd nature of some of the footnotes in the novel.”

The Widow's Son reading group, Week Twenty Three

Hogarth’s illustration of a scene from Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera”

Week Twenty Three (pg 383-402 Hilaritas Press edition, Chapter 17 & 18, Part III all editions)

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger 

Chapter Seventeen asks the very important question- did de Selby fuck enough to understand the alchemical process?

I have little to add to the excerpts from Benoit’s memoirs or our-faux Robison’s, still attacking himself, satanic accusations save for: “[t]he need for this fourth ‘soul’ or higher facility is that mankind is not a finished creature but a being in process of transcending its own past” seems to recall “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” When asked about his short story “Funes the Memorious,” Borges explained that it was a parable about being awake. He explained the category of wakefulness: “Once a student asked the Buddha if he was a god. ‘No.’ The Buddha replied. ‘Are you the Enlightened One?’ Again the Buddha declined. The student then inquired as to what he may be then, The Buddha replied ‘I am awake.’”

While the names are very reminiscent of the players in Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, to my memory, none of these characters show up in the original text. Considering that Gay’s poem was written fortysome years before the events of our narrative, it is doubtful that the footnote on pg. 386 is being totally honest. In our timeline at least the play was inspired by a letter from Jonathan Swift to Alexander Pope suggesting a pastoral opera about whores, informers, and thieves. Their enterprising friend John Gay turned it into The Beggar’s Opera which would itself be retold nearly two hundred years later into Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Wiell’s The Threepenny Opera which is still one of the most potent eviscerations of society dreamt up by frustrated artists in extant.

Sir John is dealing with a different frustration this chapter as he drinks and morbidly contemplates his bisexuality. RAW does a great job in displaying his inner torment and by the time he calls himself “the bifurcated man” I felt a pang of empathy for the poor Parliamentarian. It is interesting that Sir John notes that he met many willing male sexual partners in Baghdad. I remember the oddest part of Regardie’s The Eye In the Triangle is his obsessive detailing of Crowley’s homosexual activities. Regardie seems both sickeningly fascinated by this part of Crowley’s life and it is a bit off putting. I remember at one part of his interpretation he goes out of his way to make sure to note that the Near East offered a plethora of opportunities for Crowley to explore homosexual relationships. I forget if he mentions that much of Crowley’s homosexual-orientalism was merely an adoption of Sir Richard Burton’s. As this has stuck with me throughout the years I wonder if that is where RAW picked up that detail as well.

Just as Gay’s play intersperses vulgarity amongst its character’s lamentable states of being, John’s drunken inner monologue is periodically interrupted by happening in the main barroom as the dregs of society gather to celebrate their lowly station in the world. Here John finds himself in Castaneda’s wilderness or the Buddhist’s carrion-ground as he drinks himself deeper into the world of regret and confusion. Let us hope his Author’s scroll allows him to stagger home without meeting Macheath.

And now our other hero’s cracks are showing as well. In some ways Sigismundo seems to be coming closer to liberation as he contemplates selfhood, language, history, and memory: “Uncle Pietro had encouraged “Sigismundo” -- that is, the invisible being manifesting on this plane under the name “Sigismundo”-- to read Vico, when he was only fourteen, before he did any travelling. That was wise, Vico made clear that every group of men and women is a separate reality-neighborhood...All reality grids were created by people talking to each other. They make their history out of forgotten poems…”

The process continues and it seems as if his jailers are putting him in some sort of psychic centrifuge, separating the robot and the higher facilities. That stinks of danger. The footnotes begin interrupting the narrative incessantly as the reader begins to find themselves drawn deeper into these mad circumstances. “De Selby defined ‘existence’ (he did not believe in ‘the universe’ as an object) as ‘the sum total of such states as encountered and endured, before magnification or exaggeration by the instinct to gossip’” Magic is a disease of language.

no wife, no horse, no moustache

From Eric: “Monday, 1/27, marks Mozart’s birthday, so I thought we would use his Masonic Funeral Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okFlNAl7HQQ”

The Widow's Son reading group, Week 22

Illustration from “Right Where You Are Sitting Now” for “The Persecution and Assassination of the Parapsychologists as Performed by the Inmates of the American Association for the Advancement of Science under the Direction of the Amazing Randi.”

Week Twenty Two (pg. 361-382 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 15&16, Part III all editions)

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger

Chapter 15 should be considered in light of an earlier article by RAW that was seemingly written during the time of the composition of either The Earth Will Shake or The Widow’s Son: “The Persecution and Assassination of the Parapsychologists as Performed by the Inmates of the American Association for the Advancement of Science under the Direction of the Amazing Randi.” (The name of the article is not-coincidentally named after a play that has already been briefly mentioned in our posts The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade better known as Marat/Sade.)

In the beginning of the essay RAW mentions “This interest was particularly concrete at this time because there was one part of the historical Novel that was giving him trouble. His hero, Sigismundo Celine, had seen a meteorite fall. Celine had dragged the Damned Things, which couldn’t exist according to 18th-century science, to the Academy of Sciences in Paris. Naturally, he was roundly denounced and mocked for his troubles. This was accurate: anyone who reported a meteorite to 18th-century scientists was treated like a Close Encounter of the Third Kind today.” Obviously, there were some changes made during the time in between the original High Times article and the final draft of The Widow’s Son. Instead we see our secondary protagonist Sir John dragging his stone and sanity before the uncompromising panel of scientists from The Royal Scientific Society.

Sir Charles Nagas is obviously a stand in for Carl Sagan. Sagan wasn’t present during the panel on “Science and Pseudoscience” that inspired RAW’s essay but his debate with Emmanuel Velikovsky is mentioned and our Author seems to think Sagan wasn’t fair to the iconoclast author of Worlds in Collision. As in the novel the Author takes time to point out that Nagas had discovered nothing himself but rather was merely well known as he wrote often for the papers and journals, RAW refers to Sagan simply as a “television scientist” in his earlier essay. I can understand RAW’s disdain for scientists who seem to think that proficiency in one of the multitudinous branches of science such as evolutionary biology (Dawkins), astrophysics (Tyson), mechanical engineering (Nye) makes them an (or the) authority on every facet of reality. These science communicators who follow in Sagan’s mold do as much to repel the public away from science as they do to popularize it. I don’t really need some creep who doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up online or a former kids television host telling me whether God exists or not but they sure seem to think I do. These science popularizers’ extraordinarily high regard for themselves led to the markedly evangelical efforts of atheists in the early 21st century by scientists such as Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris, the aforementioned Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Like the unruly “Herbert Sharper” in the narrative, whose bigotry against “Papists” and “Moslems” is on full display during Sir John’s tribunal, these atheist-evangelists have at times shown that they are no scientists but rather run-of-the-mill bigots (see Harris and his hellish alliance with right wing thinkers to promote an anti-Muslim philosophy).

Gardner Marvins is obviously a stand-in for Martin Gardner who was known for his love of Lewis Carrol and GK Chesterton, his mathematical puzzles, and his founding role of CSICOP (now CSI). (RAW mentions a novel with a scientist named Bertha Van Ation that is in the works- he must have been talking about the novels in the Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy which also include a cocaine-addicted writer names Marvin Gardens.) Gardner, like his counterpart, had a lighter touch than other self-appointed skeptic inquisitions, but his works, such as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, drip with paternalistic condescension for those who aren’t in lockstep with his understanding of current scientific consensus. (See also Sagan’s Demon Haunted World.)

The most belligerent member of the panel, Herbert Sharper, remains something of a mystery to me; his name is not a simple transposition of a famous scientist. After reading RAW’s article I can only deduce that Sharper is based on The Amazing Randi himself. Years ago I wrote about the so-called skeptic movement in the paranormal community and contended that it was nothing more than a movement of evangelical atheists who believe that current human knowledge is nigh-infallible. Nothing happens that cannot be explained by our human understanding of the universe. In that essay I quoted RAW’s article and can think of no better commentary on Randi and his character: “Finally, the high point of the morning arrived, in the form of The Amazing Randi, as he styles himself. Randi looks like Santa Claus and talks like the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (Rep.-Wis.) Randi is not a Liberal by any definition but a real, old-fashioned, honest-to-Cthulhu Conservative, fire-breathing variety. He wants to hit the heretics on the head with a blunt instrument.

You see, The Amazing Randi is of the school of thought which holds that he and his friends have the only ‘real’ reality-labyrinth on the planet. All proponents of alternative reality-labyrinths are therefore, by definition, a bunch of sneaks, cheats, and liars. This is the best rhetorical stance for a heresy-hunter, since it is rooted deeply in the primate psychology… Hitler pointed this out in Mein Kampf, every demagogue knows it, and Randi, an old showman, plays it to the hilt.

Randi’s presentation consisted of saying five different ways that the heretics are a bunch of dishonest bastards who lie morning, noon and night, and lie in their sleep just to keep in practice.  Then, in case there were any dullards in the audience who hadn’t gotten his message, Randi said it again, five more ways. The Journalist [Wilson refers to himself in different ways throughout the piece to show where his mindset was at] hadn’t heard such oratory since Jim Garrison way in his heyday, finding new Kennedy assassins every second newsbreak. It was a smashing performance, and the Sociobiologist was convinced that most of the audience were breathing harder and starting to tense their muscles before it was half over. Primate mode psychology at its most primitive.”

A footnote mentions how Hanfkopf disregards Barney and Betty Hill’s experience in New England as merely being caused by the stress of being an interracial couple in mid-century America. For anyone who has studied ufology this is a common explanation to write off the couple’s odd sojourn. In RAW’s essay a young physicist by the name of Stanton Friedman stands up to argue that some objects in the sky are unidentified and is roundly castigated. Friedman would become one of the leading authorities on the Barney and Betty Hill case on the side of those who aren’t sure what happened to the couple all those decades ago.

This chapter serves the same purpose of the essay: to show how certain humans are of their mastery of time and space despite the fact that we may presume, if there is a future, that our knowledge will grow and past convictions will become droll mistakes. Like the Royal Scientific Society, who are only aware of seventeen elements, it seems those who crusade on behalf of Science put the cart of certainty ahead of the horse of doubt which is, after all, the true driver of inquiry. (It is also humorous that the narrator mentions the full 92 elements that compose the universe as we are currently up to 118.) Given a choice between Randi and his ilk, I’d much rather hang out with the Divine Marquis.

Across the channel Sigismundo is still being bombarded by false circumstances that take place all over the continent and during different times. As he is being held in an English asylum in the nineteenth century Sigismundo again turns the tables on his interrogators before their conversation turns away from a concerned doctor and patient to initiate and interrogator. The symbolism of Masonry and mysticism swirls around as the drugged Sigismundo grapples through these staged circumstances: as he is led away by the Three Ruffians Sigismundo believes he is going to be thrown back in the well but is instead simply put back in his cell. The well refers to one of the initiatory rites of the O.T.O..

From Eric Wagner: “Well, with the Masonic talk in this week’s reading, I figured we might use the whole of Bergman’s Magic Flute. I considered “She Blinded Me with Science”, but I opted for Mozart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l17SQeytHN8”

(Eric sent this as a follow up to Tom and I and I asked his permission to share it here. My thanks to you.) “I hope all goes well. In 1985 after I graduated from college I went to Europe. I arranged my trip to arrive in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, on July 23. The next day I visited the concentration camp at Dachau which horrified me so much I just wanted to get out of Germany. I had a train ticket to leave for Vienna that night. I wandered the streets of Munich feeling despair about the human condition. I noticed a theater playing Bergman’s Magic Flute which I had heard about but never seen. I figured I had just enough time to see the movie and run to the train station to catch my train. I know some German, so I could barely follow the movie in Swedish with German subtitles, but the film restored my faith in humanity. Bergman’s realization of Mozart’s vision of a masonic society looking out for us seemed just what I needed. Peace.”

The Widow's Son reading group, Week 21

Week Twenty One (pg. 339-359 Hilaritas edition, Part III Chapter 13&14 all editions)

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger

Howdy everyone, I can only beg your forgiveness for my tardiness; life and work have consumed the past few days.

Sigismundo’s ordeal takes such a bizarre and menacing turn that we are almost able to forget how kind our Author is towards their protagonist; Sigimundo has been led into the heart of some conspiratorial scheme that is able to warp gravity, time, and space but our intrepid hero is well-versed in the theory of conspiracy and is able to strike a claim in this new murky mental territory. Is this Chapel Perilous where Sigismundo may either grow insane or canny? Perhaps -- but much like a True Initiation, Chapel Perilous never really seems to end. Sigismundo has been thrust into so many mind-boggling, unpleasant situations and has learned so much contradictory information that it is hard to point to this sequence as the apogee with any certainty. But these experiences have taught Sigismundo the value of practical agnosticism and understand the nature of perspective.

One could expect a young man who has seen multiple people killed in front of him, been drugged by his own rapist/murderer father, killed himself, learned of the different infamies of life in such demonstrative ways to have been broken at this point; consigned to an ugly world or driven mad by its brutality. But Sigismundo is keeping his head above water, able to deal with his new circumstances in the Bastille, or wherever the chamber had been prepared, with enough calmness and rationality to see the nails keeping the furniture on the ceiling/floor. He is able to not dispassionately examine the pantomime behind his surroundings and even reacts with sincere good humor when dragged before what appears to be an Inquisitorial board. Many of us have the 23rd Psalm read after our deaths but how many have the conviction to recite that as we are led away to have the demons whipped out of us?

The hidden variable to Sigismundo’s supple mind isn’t that he has read widely but that he has an education that allows himself to examine ideas from many different angles. I would name the hidden variable as magic, the rituals and lessons in between have already brought him into the metamorphic world of occultism whose foundation seems to be composed of Fata Morgana, shadow-boxing, and a mountain that disappears and reappears with the blink of an eye. Magic is stronger medicine than most philosophy is one takes enough and is able to keep it down: what differentiated Wilson from others who lost themselves in Chapel Perilous? What techniques did he use to cope with his season in hell?

Like Cosmic Trigger, these chapters stand as a clear-enough enunciation of RAW’s theory of conspiracy. It does not do to give into first impressions, nor does the slitting one’s throat with Occam’s razor and subsequently giving into the next best choice of the “simplest” explanation. (As a fideist, I’ve always wondered exactly how anyone was certain that they knew what the simplest explanation would be.) Of course, like a flu shot, one must take some of the virus inside one’s body to prevent a greater sickness, and like most occultists who I give credence to Sigismundo’s mind is filled with gods and wild happenstance. But this adds flavor to paranoia and makes it considerably more edifying. Right now, when we see Sigismundo in such desperate circumstances, I see our protagonist stronger than ever, excelling in the light of misfortunate circumstance and such concerted conspiracy.

Notes: Don’t occultists always do a much better job of interpreting the profundity of Hume and Berkeley than run-of-the-mill academic philosophers? How anyone who truly buys into the religious nonsense of Academe thinks they grasp the arch-Skeptic is beyond me.

Another Freemasonic interpretation of the Ripper murders is covered in Alan Moore’s From Hell where Dr. William Withey Gull is fingered as the agent of destruction. Of course, Moore’s Gull’s crime exceed his mandate and he is eventually drug before a tribunal of high-ranking Masons, including founders of the Golden Dawn, before being sequestered in an asylum. Moore also adds his own take on conspiracy theory and muddy history in his epilogue, “Dance of the Gull-catchers.”

De Selby appropriately gets the last word on this part of the narrative as he splits reality into a trinity of interpretations.

Enjoy the Days Between.

The perfect pick from Eric Wagner: The upside down room suggested this Fred Astaire number: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsoYyDlYU8M

The Widow's Son reading group, Week Twenty

 Joseph Warren rethinking his refusal of a General’s commission 

Week Twenty (pg. 325-337 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 11&12 all editions) 

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger 

Chapter 11 serves as another zoom out shot of what is happening in Sigismundo’s world while he is imprisoned, while Chapter 12 is a zoom into Sigismundo’s mind as he languishes in the Bastille.

The Committee of Correspondence is precisely what RAW describes it as, though there is plenty more interesting historical information about the Committees here. These Committees served as the first Continental network of Revolutionary sentiment in the years building up to the spring of ‘75. Given that the purpose of the first Committee was explicitly spelled out as to “state the rights of the colonists,” I don’t think the “radicals” Samuel Adams and Dr. Warren were trying hard to fool anybody.

Dr. Joseph Warren was a physician who served along with Revere on his Midnight Ride to warn the countryside, fought at Lexington and Concord, and denied his General’s commission to fight at Bunker Hill as a private which proved to be a noble decision, if not entirely the best one. Dr. Warren’s martyrdom was preserved by John Trumbull’s painting that served as powerful propaganda for the American Experiment. Samuel Adams was, of course, a famous brewer who pioneered overcharging customers for mass-produced mediocre beer by claiming it was “craft beer.”

Weishaupt was, by many accounts, outwardly a pretty mellow guy. He was a deep one.

As someone who sat through enough Music Appreciation classes in grade school to have seen Amadeus at least three times, I can attest based on the most solid of historical information that Mozart’s relationship with his dad was, indeed, quite fraught.

This is an accurate description of one of the many scandals in the life of de Sade. The four prostitutes that he procured that afternoon would perhaps serve as an inspiration for the four prostitutes who inspired the sexual depravities in the beginning of 120 Days of Sodom. (The prostitutes were considerably more jaded and enthusiastic about sexual excess in de Sade’s fucked up masterpiece- go figure.) Cantharides, also known as Spanish Fly, is a classic aphrodisiac which is derived from beetle excretions and inflamed the urethra which I guess is what some people felt they needed to perform. Today it ranks up there with famously mysterious accoutrements such as Horny Goat Weed and those tablets behind the counter at gas stations as an essential part of any witches’ apothecary.

What RAW leaves out of the account of de Sade’s debauchery in the south of France is that he was sentenced to death for sodomy with his manservant during the same orgy he had with the four prostitutes. He, the manservant, and the seduced sister of his wife were the ones who made the initial escape. They would be captured shortly after this only to escape again and be rejoined by his wife at a later date. I guess Renee de Sade would adopt an attitude of “if you can’t beat ‘em” for a few years before finally divorcing the Divine Marquis.

Jean Jacques Jeder reminds us again of the quotidian facts of existence in the 18th century as he experiences meager prosperity. Sartines, who evidently trusts the free market as much as the infallibility of the Roman See and the benevolence of governments, has taken control of some parts of the Parisian economy, freezing inflation.

And finally we come to Sigismundo, slowly succumbing to despair and fearing that he is succumbing to madness.

Richard St. Victor was a Scottish theologian and one of the Mystics of the Catholic Church. The other philosophers that Sigismundo quotes in his journal are all pretty well known. Sigismundo is dithering, understandably so as it seems his luck has run out for the time being and all that he has ahead of him is confined within the walls of the Bastille. Between Sigismundo’s entries RAW’s footnotes provide a scaffolding of conspiracies so that the reader shares in Sigismundo’s inability to take much comfort from the philosophical fragments that he records. The anxiety of Oglesby’s War and the sinister machinations of Hanfkopf and the Vatican seep through time to infect the already tenuous situation in 1772.

Like Sir John Babcock (Crowley’s student not Maria’s husband), as Sigismundo is spinning out he uses formulas and equations to calm his mind. This reminds both men of the non-subjective “facts” of reality and that there is something very solid outside their own, relatively uncomfortable, existences.

Finally something happens to free Sigismundo from his depressing musings. He finds himself stuck on the roof of his cell.

From Eric Wagner: “This section of the novel enters 1772 and mentions Mozart’s Symphony 21, so that seemed an obvious choice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3md8zc7Ernc .”

The Widow's Son reading group, Week Nineteen

Mary d’Este Desti Dempsey Sturges aka Soror Virakam aka Soror Iliel aka Lisa la Giuffria 

Week Nineteen (p.315-323 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 9&10 Part III all editions)

By Gregory Arnott

Special guest blogger

Chapter nine reminds me of nothing more than a scene from an Armando Iannuci comedy. The scene has that sublime mix of ineptitude, competence and order thwarted at every turn, chaos, and ever-present frustration transformed into howling rage as Lieutenant Sartines is faced with the unyielding chaos of the universe that is reminiscent of similar shitstorms faced by Iannuci’s protagonists. Like Malcolm Tucker or Selina Meyer, Sartines is a character beset by nothing less than their own inability to control everything around them despite their razor sharp wit and uncompromising realism. An arch-cynic such as Sartines can of course realize that they could reject all of the trappings of their “duty” to live a more honest life in pursuit of the truth but won’t because they love legitimacy and order more than their own sanity/integrity. The fatal flaw of civil servitude is beginning to believe in the necessity of your position to stave off some Hobbesian hellscape.

Unsurprisingly, Sartines’ honest viewpoint is almost identical to Signor Duccio’s or whomever might be the true “Spartacus.” Naturally, de Selby is somehow able to pick up on Sartines’ moment of hesitation hundreds of years in the future and record a laterally accurate hazard to who the original author might have been.

Behind all the insurmountable chaos and extrajudicial jailings there is an invisible hand as Cagliostro begins the transition.

Maria’s Daybook immediately lets us know that Lady Babcock’s psychic connection to Sigismundo is still intact; her prayer might do more for Sigismundo than any other effect within the pages of the narrative. Maria is perhaps able to think more kindly of Sigismundo, though she does try to bury the idea of him as quickly as she may, because of the news about Carlo’s virility and marriage. The d’Este family was/is a noble family of northern Italian descent that had/has ties to the house of Hapsburg.

A more interesting d’Este is a d’Este that never was: Mary d’Este, born Mary Dempsey. Dempsey was born in the American Midwest around the turn of the century and gave birth to Preston Sturges, a Hollywood polymath during the 30s and 40s (also producer of one of my all time favorite films, I Married a Witch). Dempsey, perhaps inspired by that New Thought ethos that meshed so well with the American frontier can-do attitude that enabled people to claim things that weren’t actually theirs, decided that her name was actually a mispronunciation of d’Este- she was actually royalty.

Presumably Mary d’Este is the name that she was going by when she met and befriended Isadora Duncan and later became her secretary.She had travelled to Europe and met Duncan in Paris while she was presumably studying theater. It was during this time that she also met Aleister Crowley. She became Crowley’s Scarlet Woman for a time around 1911 and they travelled to a place “beyond Rome” where he began to compose Book IV under the guidance of the disembodied spirit Ab-ul-Diz. Crowley details how d’Este, or Soror Virakam, began to channel Ab-ul-Diz and the precautions he took to make sure that the spirit was an objective being, similar to the measures he took to make sure Rose wasn’t just having a lark back in 1904. He also details how she claimed to know where they would write Book IV as she had seen their villa in a dream.

Crowley and Virakam travelled to Posillipo, near Naples to pick up “Vikaram’s [sic.] brat- a most godforsaken lout” (as Crowley refers to the young Preston Sturges) for Christmas. While travelling about the countryside Virakam/d’Este/Dempsey shouted that before them was the exact villa she had seen. The villa also fulfilled some requirements that Crowley had come up with using his own methods of magical deduction having to do with “Persian nuts.” (I can’t believe how much of my life I have based on what this guy says.) They rented the villa and began the book.

Soror Virakam is given author’s credit, along with Leia Waddell and Mary Butts, for Book IV which many consider to be Crowley’s master publishing achievement. Predictably, d’Este and Crowley had a falling out. He would paint a rather unflattering portrait of her in his novel Moonchild where she went by the name of Lisa la Giuffria. La Giuffria is portrayed as an indolent faddist who betrays Crowley (Cyril Grey) to the Black Lodge (led by characters based on Samuel Mathers, Arthur Waite, William Westcott, Yeats, and Annie Besant) causing the failure of the Butterfly Net Operation. Of course this is all part of the White Lodge’s, led by Simon Iff (also Crowley), plan.

Around this time d’Este was running a cosmetic company under her regal name which attracted the attention of the actual d’Este family who basically sent her a cease and desist. She did and changed her name to Desti. Desti/d’Este/Virakam/Dempsey/la Giuffria never really got the hang of traditional motherhood. In one incident in 1915 she left Preston on the docks after running after Duncan to join her on a voyage to France. Despite her unconventional lifestyle she seemed to have been remembered fondly by Sturges and the article where I found out much about her non-Crowley related life details how she was obviously an influence for many of his female leads. She certainly lived quite a life.

Mistress Kyte reads the cards for James and reveals the Hanged Man- while she is apologetic in the best theatrical card reader manner, he is comfortable with the shuffle. It is the card of every Irishman. The Hanged Man is probably one of the most romanticized of any of the Trumps, appearing in famous works such as Eliot’s The Wasteland with the familiar phrase “death by water.” The Hanged Man in the Thoth tarot represents the Hebrew mother letter Mem and the element of water- Crowley writes that it represents “the supreme adeptship” of the new Aeon but also warns that water is the element of illusion and in this capacity the card may allow leaks of Old Aeon sacrifice-fetishization through into the New. Crowley roundly castigates this idea and proclaims that the ethos of sacrifice must be done away with as well as the notion of redemption. Redemption implies debt, says Crowley, as stars owe nothing. Alas, in the eighteenth century, James Moon has a while before the Hanged Man means little else aside from drowning and sacrifice.

Maria gets The Star which is chock full of feminine, mystical, and Thelemic imagery which I believe Oz will do a much better job of explaining. Finally Sir John receives the Prince of Wands, Air of Fire, which is notably the card that Crowley identified with the most and of which he writes very poetically in The Book of Thoth.

The discourse on the bear god should be familiar to RAW readers as it is something he dwells on elsewhere. We end with Franklin grappling a maid and marvelling at the revelations brought back from Cook’s journey.

Happy New Year everyone. As John Higgs said in his last newsletter, we’re moving from an ill-defined decade into one that will be much different. A time where time-travellers will want to visit. Good luck to everyone.

From Eric: “In honor of Maria Babcock, I have chosen more Handel this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qUhY2Tcwg4 .

Peace and welcome to the Twenties!”

The Widow's Son reading group, Week Eighteen

John Robison, electricity enthusiast and a bit off his rocker

Week Eighteen (pg. 301-313 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 7&8 Part III all editions)

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger

My elementary investigations point towards the fact that Spawn of the Serpent only exists in our feverish narrative and that MacKenzie is a MacGuffin.

Although they are accounted as rivals in the footnote that begins chapter seven, MacKenzie (1735-1826) seems to be a fictional reflection of John Robison (1739-1805) that is slightly distorted, as in a funhouse mirror. While I could find no connection between Robison and Banks’ Floralegium nor any account of Robison’s musical aptitude, he was a many of many accomplishments.

Robison spent fourteen years serving as a surveyor, navigator, and tutor to the son of Admiral Charles Knowles- during this time he served in Quebec and sailed around the Atlantic. During a period of time ashore in Scotland Robison became the professor of chemistry at the University of Glasgow and helped the aforementioned James Watts with the construction of a steam car. He left Scotland to accompany Admiral Knowles to St. Petersburg. During this sojourn he was initiated into Continental Masonry.

We are told that John MacKenzie involved himself in the disputes concerning the authenticity of James Macpherson’s The Poem of Ossian. The Ossian debate concerned some translations that were purported to have been translated from ancient Scotch Gaelic, Ossian himself was purportedly the son of the legendary Finn McCool; the works were heralded by members of the Scottish intelligentsia and the burgeoning Romantic movement but cracks soon appeared in Macpherson’s story. Historians pointed out incongruities with names and words used in the text with its supposed date of origin: Samuel Johnson, never one to let an opportunity to shit on the Scottish go wasted, also became involved and generously maintained that Macpherson had found snippets of an authentic text and incorporated them into his embellished narrative.

Despite their dubious origins the Poems of Ossian were still valued by poets such as William Blake and the later Romantics for their beauty and imagination- Goethe included fragments of his own translation into his bildungsroman The Sorrows of Young Werter. (Interestingly, Werter would become the focal point of another hoax or faux-hysteria when the book was blamed for a rash of suicides modelled on the end of the titular protagonist. There are no reliable accounts of any such suicide. Thomas Love Peacock, in his hilarious Nightmare Abbey, parodies the concerns by having his fictional stand-in for Percy Byshe Shelley attempt suicide saying “I will make my exit like young Werter.” ) Literary historians today consider Ossian to have been one of the greatest forgeries of all time.

This is all to say that I could find no connection between John Robison and Ossian aside from a couple publication schedules that had the poems being printed at the same time as some works on natural philosophy by Robison. Henry MacKenzie was the name of an investigator who, on behalf of the Highland Society, investigated the provenance of The Poems of Ossian and found it to be less-than-authentic.

Robison would indeed author Proofs of a Conspiracy later in his career after he had settled in Edinburgh and had served as the professor of natural philosophy at its famed University. He also invented the siren somewhere during this time and tried a bunch of shit with electricity. Robison had grown disillusioned with the Enlightenment after the events in France and was perhaps still concerned over discoveries made in his travels with Admiral Knowles. His book was famous enough to cause concern among the ranks of political power during the late 18th century- a copy was sent to George Washington by a minister. In his response to the minister Washington wrote:

“It was not my intention to doubt that, the Doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am. The idea that I meant to convey, was, that I did not believe that the Lodges of Free Masons in this Country had, as Societies, endeavoured to propagate the diabolical tenets of the first, or pernicious principles of the latter (if they are susceptible of separation). That Individuals of them may have done it, or that the founder, or instrument employed to found, the Democratic Societies in the United States, may have had these objects; and actually had a separation of the People from their Government in view, is too evident to be questioned.”

Like MacKenzie in our narrative, Robison drew heavily upon the work of Jesuit priest Abbe Augustin Barruel whose writings on the history of the clergy in France, seemingly first, drew a connection between Enlightenment values, the Revolution, Illuminati conspiracies, paganism, and a plotted overthrow of Christianity and European power centers. It is part of the fun that Robison’s fictional analogue accuses him of being a member of the conspiracy he spent so much energy trying to expose.

The actual excerpt from MacKenzie’s Spawn of the Serpent doesn’t offer the reader much new information but instead serves as an atmospheric touch to heighten the sense of continent-spanning paranoia. After a time of great upheavals the people of Europe are at a loss to explain what has happened; not everyone has as shrewd a mind as Signor Duccio or the agnostic vantage point of Henri Benoit and we are left with the raving reconnaissance of someone on the other side of the veil.

Professor Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millenium served as an inspiration for much of the shadow history contained in The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

Chapter eight consists mostly of an interrogation between Sartines and Sigismundo. I believe that through Sartines characterization as professional, competent, and imminently practical, RAW betrays some affection for the character. Sartines certainly doesn’t share the sinister, odd, or wretched characteristics that make other characters uncomfortable to the reader but instead seems to serve as a reminder that there is someone with a decent amount of composure, even humility, in the narrative. Their conversation, not to mention the footnotes, is concerned with genealogical matters having to do with Holy Blood, Holy Grail which Alias or Oz will do a much better job elucidating upon in the comments than I could do here. I will say that in Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire, what the Templars found is implied to be the physical remains of Jesus Christ- this is a theory I have heard elsewhere and seems to be the most chilling for the faithful.

For a moment the reader seems to be led into having a faint hope that Sigismundo has found an ally who can help him escape his interminable and confusing fate before it is taken away by an interruption. Sartines is no hero and the dread and resignation that Sigismundo must feel as the police inspector gives his men orders to transport him back to the Bastille and refuses to meet his eyes seeps slightly off the page.

And the tension is broken with the crack of a gunshot.

A very Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Solstice, Yule or whatever makes you happy during the darkest days of the year! I’m glad to have this forum and time with all of you and look forward to one more post before the new decade. While I’m not always as active as I’d like to be with my responses, I hope you all know that reading what you have to say has been one of the great joys of life for the past few months.

From Eric Wagner: “With Sigismundo’s love of Bach and Bob Wilson’s love of the Modern Jazz Quartet, I thought this might work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADHny8ZDmbI .”

The Widow's Son online reading group, Week 17

The statue of the Archangel Michael atop the Northampton Guildhall. His views on time expressed in “Clouds Unfold” of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem have much in common with de Selby’s apprehension of plenumary time. 

Week Seventeen (pg 275-299 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 5&6 Part III all editions) 

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger

Before we begin, I must admit that I was wrong last week when I assumed that the stonecutter that met Sigismundo was Signor Duccio. Thankfully, other readers picked up on what RAW actually intended in the scene.

The narrative of chapter five takes place in the fevered mind of Sigismundo as he fights off two assailants in what is revealed to be Signor Duccio’s backyard. The pitch of battle is humorously broken up by the footnotes detailing controversies surrounding de Selby; for example the footnote extending from 278-280 begins right after the intimate glance between Sigismundo and the second assassin in the yard of angels. It thoroughly takes us away from the main narrative as we are informed about more schemes perpetuated by the shadowy Professor Hanfkopf, the assertions of another nefarious German- Hamburger, Bell’s Theorem and how it relates to de Selby’s concept of plenumary time, and a hilarious attempt at discrediting Ferguson by crudely pasting his face over a picture of Harry Reems and Georgina Spelvin going at it (presumably from the classic porn film The Devil in Miss Walker), the Professor’s subsequent breakdown over the scandal and his conversion to Shinran Buddhism. We are then dropped immediately back into Sigismundo’s plight with the jarring line “[t]hen the assassin fell.” We are travelling at different speeds through time and space. (RAW writes often about Shinran Buddhism and was married in a Shinran Buddhist temple.)

RAW does an excellent job of making violence as ugly and gross as it must be in real life. His use of descriptors like “bloody pulp” and the sensory details such as Sigismundo hearing his own blood squish in his boots take away any possibility of celebrating the fighting as courageous or romantic. It is a nasty, brutish, and short affair.

Perhaps because of his heightened sense(s) of focus Sigismundo is able to cue into the conversation of a trio of dogs that are nearby. Most likely what is happening is that Sigismundo has stumbled into a clear connection with the second circuit, the anal-territorial circuit, through his martial exertions and is able to understand the territorial squabbles and first-circuit complaints (hunger) of animals who are in a similar headspace.

Also on pg 280, I just want to point out the brilliant simile that Sigismundo was “wary as a hunted otter.” I do know that otters can be as vicious as any other mammal (wasn’t there a study about some otters raping baby dolphins that found its way out of the journals and into the internet?) but haven’t had the experience necessary to make the comparison anything more than humorous. I have been angrily chattered at by a beaver who didn’t like how close my kayak was to  her/him.  Luckily I escaped without further conflict- unlike President Carter who was attacked by a swimming rabbit. (Personally I’m convinced the rabbit is still after him and is responsible for the President’s recent falls.)

Another footnote discusses de Selby’s proposed conversations with dogs and goats and some guesses towards discerning his “real” identity. Perhaps the most disappointing possibility is that de Selby is a pen name for Prince Charles- I guess in between trying to get the British to eat mutton again and waiting for mother to abdicate or die he would have some free time. It is also proposed that de Selby is another pen name for the group of mathematicians behind Nicolas Bourbaki or the result of another cabal consisting of the unlikely alliance of Schrodinger, Borges, Velikovsky, Churchill, and Groucho Marx. It would be very much in the mold of Borges to create a precocious, reality-threatening philosopher as he subverts the line between fiction and nonfiction in works such as Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, The Man Who Wrote Don Quixote, and The Zohar/The Aleph. Borges also admired the Irish imagination and his few comments on Joyce have shaped my own perceptions of that master. Recently a collaboration between the Marx Brothers and Salvador Dali has been published- Giraffes on Horseback Salad which was edited by the comedian Tim Heidecker. Jacoby, the scholar who proposed the unlikely collaboration, evidently proposed a solution to the loud hammering involved in de Selby’s experiments that was fit for a surrealist manifesto.

Sigismundo stumbles into the house of Signor Duccio, who has not arrived home yet, and helps himself to bread and beer. I guess he didn’t know that alcohol thins the blood and isn’t what one should be drinking while hoping a wound will stop bleeding. I was unable to find the original person who said “necessity knows no law” and instead most places seemed to consider it an English proverb. We end with Sigismundo failing to menace the homeowner and fainting with the familiar closing line “back to the Bastille.”

And yet, that isn’t the case, at least not until the end of the chapter. Duccio has of course been searching for Sigismundo and he and his compatriot have a plan to smuggle him out of Paris. While Sigismundo recovers he learns about the political theories of his would-be saviors, debates theology with the atheistic Duccio who is working on an 8AM buzz, and undergoes the culture shock of meeting a representative of the Third Estate. (I guess his experiences with servants and non-noble members of the craft doesn’t count.)

I am curious as to the identity of the P communicating with Chartres- it doesn’t seem to be Pierre at this point but perhaps Sigismundo’s location under his feet in the carriage was the author being coy. Pierre is still hung up on dogs(hit). Sigismundo and the reader are further educated on the hearts of ruffians as he listens to two of them argue in favor of letting their children have pets and hears about the kindness of the late Jules.

And Sigismundo is caught. Back to the Bastille.

From Eric: ”In this week’s reading Sigismundo remembers how he wanted to become a greater composer than Scarlatti, so I chose some more Scarlatti played by Horowitz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-5yWDliZZw 

The Widow's Son reading group, Week Fifteen

“The worst that had ever been said about Old Kyte was that, many years ago, she had led peasant dances in the woods on May Eve, which some of the Methodists and Ranters had called licentious.”

Week Fifteen (pg. 237-260 Hilaritas edition, Chapter 1&2 Part III all editions) 

By Gregory Arnott
Special guest blogger 

While staying in my home town over the Thanksgiving holiday, I picked up my relatively old New Falcon edition of The Widow’s Son  to read over this week’s material. When I came home and picked up my Hilaritas edition I was struck by how much Bobby Campbell improved his already excellent illustrations. I’m particularly referencing the illustration that kicks off Part III and incorporates Poussin.

This Part of the novel begins with a quotation from Pound’s Cantos, one of RAW’s favorite works, specifically the section written while Pound was imprisoned for his radio broadcasts against the Allies in Italy. During this part of the poem Pound identifies with Odysseus as Oytis or “no man” (You can also spell it Outis and translate it as “no one” which is one of our cats’ names.) but by this point is beginning to feel after a state of permanence. The next line continues “fire must destroy himself ere others destroy him,” which certainly fits in with the themes of transformation that we’ve been reading about in the narrative. The Canto continues and speaks of a city, Hooo Fassa, destroyed and rebuilt four times before being built in the “mind indestructible” guarded with “the four giants at the four corners” and “a terrace the colour of stars.” From the commentaries I looked at Hooo Fassa seems to be a mixture of Mencius’ philosophy that the mind responsible for its own destruction can be responsible for its rebirth and the Ghanan myth of Wagadu, a divine spirit that inhabited the city of the same same that was destroyed four times; since Wagadu existed in the minds of the people she was able to rebuild her city a fifth time under the name Fasa. (Wagadou was the proper name of the old Ghanan Empire as well.) So self-transformation and life-death-rebirth served all around. We’ll encounter a set of the four giants soon enough.

Old Kyte is a walking caricature of the shaky beliefs in a contiguous pagan tradition continuing throughout the Christian era in Europe and late twentieth century women’s mysteries- a term Maria uses to describe what Kyte has been teaching her during the initial process of her labour. She also serves as an example of the difference between the Matrist/Patrist mindsets that RAW likes to ruminate upon. She is drawn up in Sir John’s mind as the opposite of Dr. Coali who represents rationality, science, and the “man’s way” of handling childbirth. Because RAW is obviously sympathetic for the “woman’s way” of childbirth this is an inversion of the Masonic themes found in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” where the noble, masculine Sarastro triumphs over the dark, feminine Queen of Night. These ideas are especially interesting during a time in our U.S. society where midwives and doulas seem to be making a comeback and women’s bodies are seemingly heading towards the Supreme Court in the near future.

As a reminder that none of the Christian sects are innocent, RAW introduces a dissenter priest who tried, and failed, to run Old Kyte out of Lousewartshire.

The Matrist, earthy, “primitive” sides of Mistress Kyte are further illustrated as John ruminates on how she looks medieval compared to the setting of a “modern” bedroom, and by her Shakespearean use of piss and shit instead of the Norman/higher class terms for excretion. Of course she works with herbs and a dispenses an herbal drug- what else could one expect? This fascination with the use of dangerous herbs and wise women comes up repeatedly in RAW’s work- in Sex, Drugs, and Magick he recommends that the reader check out John Dickson Carr’s The Crooked Hinge for the inclusion of old witchery as part of the plot. (I read it years ago and really enjoyed it. It’s also a perfectly bizarre story in and of itself.) She also has Maria panting before contractions which is reminiscent of the tantric practice of “the breathe of fire” which RAW’s gives instructions for in Sex, Drugs, and Magick.

Kyte also calls upon four cardinal spirits to guard the room and the childbirth. These are further variations on the four archangels like the ones used by the Carbonari in The Earth Will Shake. Unlike the spirits called upon by Sigismundo’s father, which can be traced to the factitious Aradia: or, The Witch’s Gospel, the spirits called upon by Kyte seem to have been RAW’s invention. Sir John identifies Bride as Brigit in his own thoughts after Maria asks where she gets the names from. Robin is probably Robin Goodfellow, another name for Puck, but paired with Marian immediately brings Robin Hood and Maid Marian to mind as well. Marian could also be a form of the Virgin and Orfee is most likely a representation of Orpheus who has somehow ended up being part of an ancient Celtic tradition here. Side and Sidhe are the same and both are described as different places, different times, or different dimensions. Sidhe here has a lot in common with the notion of Magonia. John’s inner commentary illustrates the further themes of syncretization as he notices similarities between Kyte’s philosophy and Platonism as well as the dual use of the term “the Craft.” We can assume that Charles Putney Drake, the Worshipful Master of John’s Lodge who believed all that could access the baraka were once in one Lodge, is an ancestor of that Nietzschean ne’er-do-well Robert Putney Drake of Illuminatus! fame.

Maria, seen through the male gaze of Sir John and the narrator, is a picture perfect representation of femininity in this chapter. She accepts and even relishes the pain of childbirth and later reminisces on how the post-birth glow is better than the other times she has had transcendent experiences. Everything about the process of birth is received by her with grace and good humor. This portrait is heightened as Sir John reflects that no man deserves a woman’s love. I admit that I like this portrait of femininity but am curious how female readers would react to such a male fantasy of what femininity “should” be.

As Sir John wanders around in his own state of bliss he meets James Moon again who has brought his “fookin rock” and blesses him in the name of God, Mary, Patrick, and Brigit, a perfectly Irish formulation of the cardinal spirits.

Kyte gets the last word, promising the child that both her parents, by virtue of their involvement with “the Craft,” will come to know Side.

The next chapter requires little commentary: Signor Duccio is as concise as possible and reiterates his Malthusian belief that population growth is the main driver of societal upheaval. This serves as a fatalistic reminder that all the events we, the readers, know are coming in the narrative’s future are unavoidable even if our characters’ efforts were to play out. Change is inevitable and the future is coming at us like a bullet train. No time to dodge, not even for one who can do miraculous feats using the baraka.

The A.’.A.’. reflects on the mysteries of the vagina before imploring the reader to burn this page.

From Eric Wagner: More Handel in honor of Maria’s baby for this week. Happy Thanksgiving.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g-_Zm_-WM5Y