Editor's note: John Merritt is on Twitter as @17beowulf. I noticed him when he got into a dialogue with Ted Hand about RAW (reproduced here in the Sept. 21 posting.) We began following each other. On Sept. 24, he Tweeted, "Working on a precis for a annotations volume for "lluminatus!" Mater deoruum, would it be a lot of work!" Naturally, I was interested and I asked for more information, and he kindly shared the following article with me. Mr. Merritt is not nominating himself as the editor of the proposed volume but wants to get a discussion going. -- Tom.
Notes concerning a Concordance and Commentary for Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus!.
By John Merritt
(Divina Mater deorum, would this be a lot of work!)
The following represents some thoughts about a concordance and commentary on the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. This work was originally published in three volumes by Dell in 1975 and is now available in a one-volume edition first published in 1984. The basis of Illuminatus! is a general lampoon of various conspiracy theories and the mentality that goes along with them. This is a free-wheeling, drug-fueled free-for all, the Dionysian counterpart to Umberto Eco’s more Apollonian Foucault’s Pendulum.
Illuminatus contains numerous references to events in American history, especially between 1968 and 1972. Other historical subjects touched on are the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and the many conspiracy theories deriving from that event, the history of American gangsters in the 1930s, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the 1968 Democrat Convention in Chicago, the drug scene of the period, UFOs, alternative religions, and various occult currents. The work is also full of a Gawd-awful number of puns, many of which are tied to cultural and/or literary references which may not be apparent to the casual reader.
The physical structure of the work is based on the Tree of Life in Kabbalah in its normal form. The overall work is divided into four parts, corresponding to the Four Worlds of Kabbalah, the three parts of the narrative and the appendices at the end. The story parts are divided into ten chapters, named by the ten Sephrioth, and thirteen appendices named for the first thirteen letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The continuity of each of the three parts of the narrative is further broken into smaller parts by sudden changes in plot and/or location. There is a further division of the narrative into five parts, corresponding to the “Illuminati’s Theory of History”, which is explained in Appendix Gimel.
This compilation would consist mainly of a series of short articles explaining the historical and fictional persons and places mentioned, historical events, and geographical places real and imagined, and the explication of puns. The order of the articles should be that of the subjects’ occurrence in the work, an approach taken in similar commentaries for Joyce’s Ulysses, Pound’s Cantos, and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
An example of a pun: "Purple Sage": sage = wise man, also a plant used as a seasoning. _Riders of the Purple Sage_: a novel by Western writer Zane Gray. Possible reference: "Riders of the Purple Wage", a short story by Philip Jose Farmer first published in _Dangerous Visions_, edited by Harlan Ellison, first published in 1967. Wikipedia also lists several bands with the name.
Since the work was published in two different formats, the page references should be given for both.
While it perhaps would be possible for one person to do this, it would be better if there was a general editor and several sub-editors for major topics:
• One for the Kennedy assassination and related conspiracies.
• One for American politics and the Viet Nam War (one for each?).
• One for the literary references and allusions.
(An example: General Tequila y Mota uses Edward Luttwak's; _Coup D'Etat: a Practical Handbook_ as his guide for taking power in Fernando Poo. Here's some links on Luttwak. A tough bastard.)
• One for music allusions (?).
• One for occult references.
• One for libertarian politics and non-standard (i.e., not Keynesian, monetarist or Austrian “free market”) economics.
The following are some further thoughts:
• The three biggest sections would probably be those on the Illuminati—with or without the “regular” masonic groups—, the JFK hit and the fallout therefrom, and Atlantis.
• At the beginning of “Leviathan” is a long list of rock bands going to the big festival at Ingolstadt. How many are/were real and how many fictitious at the time that Illuminatus! was written?
• Sort biographies and bibliographies of the various libertarian and alternate economics authors and works mentioned, which are mostly in Appendix Zayn.
• Possible real-life basis for characters, e.g., how much of Joe Malik is based on Hugh M. Hefner, publisher of Playboy magazine. Both Wilson and Shea were assistant editors at Playboy when they started work on Illuminatus!
• Occult references: Aleister Crowley, Tarot, Kabbalah, the Black Mass.
• Chicago politics and the Daley Machine.
• Religions: Catholicism, Fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, Zen Buddhism, Discordianism. Discordianism as a spoof of revealed religions.
• In the bibliography of works mentioned in Illuminatus!: full bibliographic information for the first edition and any current printings should be given, as well as whether older books are available online.
• Writers mentioned or referred to: Joyce, Pound, Lovecraft, R. W. Chambers, William S. Burroughs, Edgar Rice Burroughs (?), Raymond Chandler, J-K Huysmans, Hart Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Zane Gray (in pun), Ayn Rand, Allan Ginsberg, J. G. Ballard, Dante, and Arthur Machen. This is a partial and incomplete list.
• The various Atlantis stories, starting with Plato’s Timaeus and including Mu and Lemuria as Pacific Ocean variants. How much of the film that Joe Malik sees is from previous post-Plato Atlantis yarns and how much is Shea and Wilson’s invention?
• A big part of the second and third volumes is taken up by a spoof of Ian Fleming’s MI6 hitman, James Bond—particularly, the last three books Fleming completed: Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. These are the books concerning SPECTRE and its chief, Ernst Starvo Blofeld. This is intertwined with a variation on the Cthulhu Mythos during the part of Illuminatus! that takes place on Fernando Poo.
• One big help would be Shea and Wilson’s Nachlass; where are they and are they available for study?
In Cosmic Trigger I Wilson mentions that, at one time, he had a fair sized collection of conspiracy books. What happened to them? If the collection didn’t survive, is there a surviving list of titles?
• A list of translations should be given, with notes on completeness, illustrations, and any other interesting points. Here is an example for the German translation.
Illuminatus! Die Trilogie. Aus dem Englischen von Udo Breger. Reinbek: Rowalt, 2011. Copyright © 1977, 1978, 1978 der ersten deutschesprachigen Ausgabe by (sic!) Sphinx Verlag, Basel. Copyright © 2002 der deutschsprachigen Ausgabe by Heinrich Hugendubel Verlag, Kreuzlingen/München.
I have no idea what is going on here with the copyright notices, unless Breger’s version is the second German translation. I also don’t know if Hugendubel the publisher is related to Hugendubel the bookstore chain. (I did buy my copy at a Hugendubel. Synchronicity strikes again.) The German Wikipedia article on Illuminatus! says that Breger’s is the only translation, and lists the different editions.
(The German Wiki article looks to be a lot better than the English one.)
The individual volumes are also available. The one-volume edition is not paged continuously, but keeps the pagination of the individual parts. It also keeps the introductory sections of the 2nd and 3rd volumes, which are omitted in the Dell one-volume edition.
Breger leaves some American slang untranslated, but otherwise this seems to be a complete, unexpurgated version. There are some interesting inconsistencies, though. On III, 276-7 he leaves the quotation of Chapter 23 of Crowley’s The Book of Lies untranslated, but the nearly complete quotation of Liber Oz at the beginning of volume 2 (p. 7) is translated entire. And in the other quote from The Book of Lies (on I, 183) he opts for the in German nonsensical half of Crowley’s pun on ass, translating it as Ärsche (‘arses’) and ignoring the equine reference (German Esel), though admittedly there is no way to get the pun to work in German—or in British English.
The chart of conspiracies from The East Village Other is reproduced untranslated on p. I,128. The other illustrations in the original are also present.
There is also a German translation of Masks of the Illuminati.
On the Internet
There is an Illuminatus! wiki at http://illuminatus.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page, but it seems to just be an outline for now.
There is a character index to Illuminatus! at http://www.rawilsonfans.com/articles/characterguide.htm. ¶
Friday, September 30, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
RAW on Philip K. Dick
Cosmic Trigger Vol. 3: My Life After Death has a chapter on Philip K. Dick, "The Black Iron Prison."
I thought it was pretty good, but although I've read PKD for years (I read him when he was a paperback SF writer not not a prominent member of the modern canon) I wondered what someone with a really serious in Dick would think of it.
So I asked Ted Hand via Twitter. He replied, " I like it. But along with his mentions of PKD in CT1+Selected Letters of PKD introduction too tantalizing! I wish he'd said more."
I thought it was pretty good, but although I've read PKD for years (I read him when he was a paperback SF writer not not a prominent member of the modern canon) I wondered what someone with a really serious in Dick would think of it.
So I asked Ted Hand via Twitter. He replied, " I like it. But along with his mentions of PKD in CT1+Selected Letters of PKD introduction too tantalizing! I wish he'd said more."
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
My three books
Yesterday, I posted Supergee's three books that changed his life, and Oz Fritz (in the comments) listed his three. After thinking about it for a day or so, here are mine:
1. ILLUMINATUS! Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. There's obviously a lot that can be said about this book, but just one of the things I like about it is the philosophical agnosticism — none of the characters can ever be sure they are getting a real idea of what's going on. That's true even of the protagonists narrowly focused on solving a problem in their area of expertise, i.e., the New York City police detective trying to investigate a crime, a missing persons case that might be murder. Wilson remarked many years later (in Cosmic Trigger 3, Chapter 31) that "I see the universe as Puzzle to Work On, Joyce-Welles fashion, and not as Puzzle Solved," and that's one of the major themes of the trilogy.
Notice also that the "puzzle" of what kind of novel ILLUMINATUS! is can't really be solved. Is it a literary novel, or a pop culture novel? (How many readers notice right away that Hagbard Celine is sailing around on a yellow submarine, just like the Beatles song?) Is is a literary novel, a mystery, an occult-horror novel, a science fiction novel, a political novel a la Ayn Rand or a Cthulus Mythos novel? (H.P. Lovecraft even appears as a character in the book.) It would seem to be all of those things.
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. I've always liked fiction that is "out there" — science fiction, ambitious literary fiction (I've liked Vladimir Nabokov since high school), complex books like ILLUMINATUS!
More than any other book, Pride and Prejudice taught me about the power of fiction that is straightforward, written in clear prose, about everyday people in the present doing ordinary things. I went on to read all of Austen's works, and I still read many "Austenite" comic novels about everyday people in the present (I've read everything by Tom Perrotta, for example, including his new one, and most of Elinor Lipman's books.)
3. The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown. This book, and Hugh Elton's Warfare in Roman Europe AD 350-425 helped focus my interest in late antiquity, a wonderfully interesting period in history which is neither classical history not medieval history, but something in between. At the same time that the Angles and Saxons were invading Britain and creating "England" — the putative time of King Arthur, in other words — the inhabitants of Constantinople, the new Rome, were still going to public baths and watching "Ben Hur" style chariot races.
1. ILLUMINATUS! Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. There's obviously a lot that can be said about this book, but just one of the things I like about it is the philosophical agnosticism — none of the characters can ever be sure they are getting a real idea of what's going on. That's true even of the protagonists narrowly focused on solving a problem in their area of expertise, i.e., the New York City police detective trying to investigate a crime, a missing persons case that might be murder. Wilson remarked many years later (in Cosmic Trigger 3, Chapter 31) that "I see the universe as Puzzle to Work On, Joyce-Welles fashion, and not as Puzzle Solved," and that's one of the major themes of the trilogy.
Notice also that the "puzzle" of what kind of novel ILLUMINATUS! is can't really be solved. Is it a literary novel, or a pop culture novel? (How many readers notice right away that Hagbard Celine is sailing around on a yellow submarine, just like the Beatles song?) Is is a literary novel, a mystery, an occult-horror novel, a science fiction novel, a political novel a la Ayn Rand or a Cthulus Mythos novel? (H.P. Lovecraft even appears as a character in the book.) It would seem to be all of those things.
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. I've always liked fiction that is "out there" — science fiction, ambitious literary fiction (I've liked Vladimir Nabokov since high school), complex books like ILLUMINATUS!
More than any other book, Pride and Prejudice taught me about the power of fiction that is straightforward, written in clear prose, about everyday people in the present doing ordinary things. I went on to read all of Austen's works, and I still read many "Austenite" comic novels about everyday people in the present (I've read everything by Tom Perrotta, for example, including his new one, and most of Elinor Lipman's books.)
3. The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown. This book, and Hugh Elton's Warfare in Roman Europe AD 350-425 helped focus my interest in late antiquity, a wonderfully interesting period in history which is neither classical history not medieval history, but something in between. At the same time that the Angles and Saxons were invading Britain and creating "England" — the putative time of King Arthur, in other words — the inhabitants of Constantinople, the new Rome, were still going to public baths and watching "Ben Hur" style chariot races.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
List three books
Supergee, asked to list three books that changed his life, picks Catch 22, Stranger in a Strange Land and ILLUMINATUS!
I would pick ILLUMINATUS! too, but I don't know what my other two are yet.
I would pick ILLUMINATUS! too, but I don't know what my other two are yet.
Monday, September 26, 2011
RAW and Madonna
I've been re-reading Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death and I just finished the chapter on Orson Welles F Is for Fake and Madonna's movie, Truth or Dare. The Welles part is not a surprise, as RAW's interest in Welles is well known, but the Madonna part surprised me a bit. It's clear from the essay that RAW made an effort to find as many reviews of Truth or Dare as possible and that he made a point of watching her music videos (it's interesting to picture RAW, normally not known for his interest in pop music, earnestly squinting at MTV to spot moments of postmodern ambiguity in "Like a Virgin." Does anyone know how RAW got interested in Madonna?
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Audiobook of Finnegans Wake
Here is something for the James Joyce fns: Ubuweb has posted an audiobook of Finnegans Wake, in MP3s, read by Patrick Healy.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Sarah Hoyt accepting her Prometheus Award
Apart from any intrinsic interest, Sarah Hoyt is an interesting person. English is her third language, after Portuguese and French. She read Robert Heinlein in translation. Apparently Heinlein made a lasting impression on her; the book she won the award for, Darkship Thieves, is dedicated to Heinlein, and she named one of her sons "Robert Anson."
Robert Shea's Prometheus acceptance speech is here.
Robert Shea's Prometheus acceptance speech is here.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Optimist and Pessimism
I often read, and sometimes understand, Tyler Cowen's and Alex Tabarrok's blog, Marginal Revolution. (It's kind of like Overweening Generalist, with more economics.)
Tyler recently published a list of "About what I am optimistic and pessimistic," and it inspired a similar list from libertarian economist Bryan Caplan, which I thought was interesting and might interest RAW fans. Some of them relate pretty directly to RAW's ideas.
Caplan's No. 4: "4. I am a pessimist about life extension. The only path to centuries of healthy life (as opposed to mere simulation) is probably genetically engineering embryos - and it's too late for me and everyone I care about."
On the other hand, he thinks that in 100 years poverty will be gone and a major war will be unthinkable.
Tyler recently published a list of "About what I am optimistic and pessimistic," and it inspired a similar list from libertarian economist Bryan Caplan, which I thought was interesting and might interest RAW fans. Some of them relate pretty directly to RAW's ideas.
Caplan's No. 4: "4. I am a pessimist about life extension. The only path to centuries of healthy life (as opposed to mere simulation) is probably genetically engineering embryos - and it's too late for me and everyone I care about."
On the other hand, he thinks that in 100 years poverty will be gone and a major war will be unthinkable.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
More from Ted Hand on RAW
Some recent Tweets from Ted Hand (@t3dy). Hand's Twitter profile says he is "ex-Nova Cop digs Renaissance Magic Alchemy Gnosis+Angels, Discordia/Psychedelia/Pataphysica, SF Fantasy BodyHorror+VGame Theory, Music,Cats,Comedy,Detectives."
R.A.W.'s allegorical use of flames, ambulances, protest tactics as weird models of consciousness change in illuminatus! deserves more study.
R.A.W.'s "The Widow's Son" is one of his most successful experiment. Hilarious+highly readable, original use of "fake" footnotes, thrills...
I'm surprised I haven't seen more studies of R.A.W.'s The Earth Will Shake in the light of Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."
R.A.W.'s "Masks of the illuminati" has some weird joycean elements but they don't interfere with it being a ripping good suspense novel/trip
The R.A.Wilson nonfiction book I'm most interested in is Coincidance. Long fascinated with the hints/wonder if anybody's decoded his cabala.
R.A.W.'s allegorical use of flames, ambulances, protest tactics as weird models of consciousness change in illuminatus! deserves more study.
R.A.W.'s "The Widow's Son" is one of his most successful experiment. Hilarious+highly readable, original use of "fake" footnotes, thrills...
I'm surprised I haven't seen more studies of R.A.W.'s The Earth Will Shake in the light of Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."
R.A.W.'s "Masks of the illuminati" has some weird joycean elements but they don't interfere with it being a ripping good suspense novel/trip
The R.A.Wilson nonfiction book I'm most interested in is Coincidance. Long fascinated with the hints/wonder if anybody's decoded his cabala.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
An exchange on Twitter
Ted Hand: @17beowulf I'm sure there are a ton of closet RAW fans in English departments by now. We need more graduate students interested+brave enough
Ted Hand: @17beowulf It should simply be obvious that RAW was doing something really interesting when he applied Cabala and Semantics to Joycean prose
John Merritt: @t3dy Joyce & Pound's influence on RAW: two dissertations looking for authors. But RAW's too plebeian for snooty English departments.
John Merritt: @t3dy To you and I, yes. To theory addicted English professors, maybe not.
John Merritt: @t3dy The problem is waiting for the oldsters to retire, like the Yeats "expert" I know who won't touch "A Vision" or the G. D. stuff.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf Burroughs and Dick have prepared the way, I suspect. But I understand the pessimism. Might be quitting academic for good myself.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf I guess we need to encourage more students to publish papers addressing theory addict concerns with RAW, easy to do I'm sure
Ted Hand @17beowulf That's ridiculous. To refuse to study something your guy wrote? Golden Dawn is getting plenty of scholarly attention in rel.stud.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf illuminatus! would be perfect for an American Studies course on the 60's, but I like reading it as a critique of Hobbes+Ayn Rand.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf really we need to do linguistics to understand what he's doing when he plays around with post-joycean prose. interdisc. RAWstudy!
John Merritt: @t3d, Perhaps I'm too pessimistic. Detectives and SF were once off limits also. RAW uses tropes from both.
John Merritt: @t3dy Hammett's Continental Op is in Schroedinger's Cat.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf yeah I would love to see a study of Detective story in illuminatus! I like to compare it to Firesign Theatre Giant Rat of Sumatra
Ted Hand: @17beowulf since RAW was in some ways a card-carrying postmodernist, but especially since he misunderstood so much, he should be theory gold
Lots of other RAW observations recently from Ted Hand. I'll reprint some tomorrow.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf It should simply be obvious that RAW was doing something really interesting when he applied Cabala and Semantics to Joycean prose
John Merritt: @t3dy Joyce & Pound's influence on RAW: two dissertations looking for authors. But RAW's too plebeian for snooty English departments.
John Merritt: @t3dy To you and I, yes. To theory addicted English professors, maybe not.
John Merritt: @t3dy The problem is waiting for the oldsters to retire, like the Yeats "expert" I know who won't touch "A Vision" or the G. D. stuff.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf Burroughs and Dick have prepared the way, I suspect. But I understand the pessimism. Might be quitting academic for good myself.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf I guess we need to encourage more students to publish papers addressing theory addict concerns with RAW, easy to do I'm sure
Ted Hand @17beowulf That's ridiculous. To refuse to study something your guy wrote? Golden Dawn is getting plenty of scholarly attention in rel.stud.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf illuminatus! would be perfect for an American Studies course on the 60's, but I like reading it as a critique of Hobbes+Ayn Rand.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf really we need to do linguistics to understand what he's doing when he plays around with post-joycean prose. interdisc. RAWstudy!
John Merritt: @t3d, Perhaps I'm too pessimistic. Detectives and SF were once off limits also. RAW uses tropes from both.
John Merritt: @t3dy Hammett's Continental Op is in Schroedinger's Cat.
Ted Hand: @17beowulf yeah I would love to see a study of Detective story in illuminatus! I like to compare it to Firesign Theatre Giant Rat of Sumatra
Ted Hand: @17beowulf since RAW was in some ways a card-carrying postmodernist, but especially since he misunderstood so much, he should be theory gold
Lots of other RAW observations recently from Ted Hand. I'll reprint some tomorrow.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Michael Johnson on free love and related topics
Michael Johnson, apparently partially inspired by the RAW essay reprinted here earlier this week, riffs on "Free Sex, Free Love, Sex-Politics and Neat Stuff Like That."
Inspirational sentence: "Feel free to use these lines from me and Woody Allen if you're trying to hookup with someone at the airport." You have to read the post to get the context.
Inspirational sentence: "Feel free to use these lines from me and Woody Allen if you're trying to hookup with someone at the airport." You have to read the post to get the context.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Death of Charles Percy
U.S. Sen. Charles Percy has died. NY Times obit is here.
Percy is mentioned in The Universe Next Door, the first book of the Schroedinger's Cat trilogy, in the Boston Cream Pie chapter, describing Benny "Eggs" Benedict's attempt to cope with the grief from the murder of his mother:
Then, one day looking through the old files in the newspaper morgue, Benny found an interview with Senator Charles Percy given in 1970, two years after the murder of his daughter. "For the first year after the murder," Senator Percy said, "my whole family lived in terror."
(Page 20 of the omnibus volume; page 32 of the 1979 Pocket Books first printing.)
Percy was a U.S. senator from Illinois when Wilson lived there as an editor for Playboy magazine. Grief over the murder of his own daughter is one of the major themes of Wilson's trilogy. (Hat tip: Michael Johnson in altfanrawilson.com).
Percy is mentioned in The Universe Next Door, the first book of the Schroedinger's Cat trilogy, in the Boston Cream Pie chapter, describing Benny "Eggs" Benedict's attempt to cope with the grief from the murder of his mother:
Then, one day looking through the old files in the newspaper morgue, Benny found an interview with Senator Charles Percy given in 1970, two years after the murder of his daughter. "For the first year after the murder," Senator Percy said, "my whole family lived in terror."
(Page 20 of the omnibus volume; page 32 of the 1979 Pocket Books first printing.)
Percy was a U.S. senator from Illinois when Wilson lived there as an editor for Playboy magazine. Grief over the murder of his own daughter is one of the major themes of Wilson's trilogy. (Hat tip: Michael Johnson in altfanrawilson.com).
Sunday, September 18, 2011
No Governor posted
I have posted a copy of the first issue of Robert Shea's fanzine, No Governor, here. I'll also post a link under "Feature Articles and Interviews." As I mentioned yesterday, it includes a Robert Anton Wilson article.
My thanks to the University of Michigan library, and to Mike Shea, who gave me permission to post it.
My thanks to the University of Michigan library, and to Mike Shea, who gave me permission to post it.
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