Adam Weishaupt in a newspaper blog

At the Wilmington Star News (in North Carolina), Ben Steelman writes about The Wizard's Handbook: An Essential Guide to Wizards, Sorcerers, Magicians and Their Magic, by Robert Curran. The book is aimed at "young readers," Mr. Steelman says.

"Articles cover the ancient shamans, the Celtic Druids (who used the Wicker Man as a means of sacrifice) and medieval alchemists. Short biographies introduce young readers to such well-known characters as Nostradamus and lesser known souls such as John Dee (astrologer to, and sometime secret agent for, Queen Elizabeth I of England) and Adam Weishaupt, the founder of that oldtime favorite, the Bavarian Illuminati," he writes.

"(If you don’t know who the Illuminati are, see “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown, or even better, the Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. But that’s for grownups)," he adds.

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Timothy Leary's 'Mind Mirror'

Take a trip back in time to the world of DOS and try Timothy Leary's "Mind Mirror," now ported to Java so that you can try it on most any modern browser. I have not had time to do much with it myself (it looks pretty), but Skooter the Clown, who posted about this at alt.fan.wilson, wrote, "As it says on the back of my original box: TUNE IN, TURN ON, BOOT UP

"After trying out the first two exercises in Self Reflection, the analysis proved to be spot on and time well spent. I look forward to working through the other simulations."

'Prometheus Rising' makes top 50 for 'Weirdos'

Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising, a favorite of many RAW fans, has popped up in the "Top 50 Essential Non-Fiction Books for Weirdoes" a blog posting by Cheryl Botchick that has drawn considerable interest at other Internet sites.

About Prometheus Rising, she writes, "If that book cover isn’t enough to convince you to check this out, what is? Robert Anton Wilson (RAW to his fans and followers) was an icon of brain-altering philosophies, and his writing has lost zero of its power over time. The headline here is that Prometheus Rising is about meta-programming your own mind. The subheads are many. You’ll feel altered."

Her entire list is worth reading. One might wish she were a little less interested in rock music and lefty politics, and a little more interested in everything else, but her list reminded me about several books I want to get around to reading.

'Lost' Orson Welles movie may become available

Here's an item that RAW would have been interested in, so I will pass it along: The Other Side of the Wind, allegedly an "unseen masterpiece," is finally supposed to become available, the Guardian reports.

Interview with Kevin MacArdry

As I've noted a few posts ago, Kevin MacArdry's new novel, The Last Trumpet Project, is a new novel that explores many themes Robert Anton Wilson was interested in, such as immortality, libertarianism and rapid advances in technology.

I enjoyed the novel, and as I mention in the interview below, there is a chapter in the book which could be read as a reference to the ILLUMINATUS! trilogy. I thought it might be interesting to ask about that and to find out a bit more about MacArdry himself, an interesting person who resembles some of the oddball anarchist characters who populate ILLUMINATUS!

My interview with MacArdry was concluded on Feb. 3, when he returned his answers to my e-mailed questions. For more on his book (including how to obtain a copy), please go here.

Mr. MacArdry's book has been nominated for the Prometheus Award. A panel of judges will decide which five novels will go on a final ballot to be voted upon by members of the Libertarian Futurist Society. (Disclosure: I'm one of the judges.) One of the other books being considered is Ceres, by MacArdry's mentor and friend, L. Neil Smith.

When I wrote to Kevin and asked for the interview, he wrote back, "Glad to know that some RAW fans enjoy my book. I remember playing Steve Jackson's Illuminati card game that was based on his ILLUMINATUS! trilogy; it was a real hoot to play."

RAWIllumination.net: Could you tell me a little bit about yourself, i.e, where do you live and what is your "day job"?

I've been a software guy for more than 25 years now. I put in some 15 years working for corporate America, after which I "saw the farm," as Stefan Molyneux would put it. For the past decade I've been a professional agorist, still doing software but working on projects calculated to assist other livestock in getting off the farm as well.

What kinds of projects? Well, in the early 2000s I did a secure webmail service which was hosted on Sealand. I've always considered that the control of money and payment systems was the linchpin of farm control mechanisms, so following that I became involved in the digital gold
currency (DGC) industry. For the past several years I've been involved with a project related to the virtualization of stored value using cryptographically signed digital bearer certificates, aka vouchers.
This project (see http://www.voucher-safe.org) is now in beta test and will be deployed later this year.

Since you've read my book, you know that Aurumnet and DR.OS are what I see as the destination which we must reach if sustainable human freedom is to be achieved. The projects on which I work professionally are baby steps toward those goals. While we're pretty limited in what we can do today, as squishy moshes with only the current internet available, we
can at least move the ball a few inches in the right direction.

Due to the agorist (1) nature of my work I'm not terribly interested in discussing in detail where I live, though I will admit that I'm presently somewhere on the North American continent. I don't consider national boundaries or identities particularly important. Fences and ear tags.

RAWIllumination.net: Chapter 39 of The Last Trumpet Project takes place in the virtual world of Erisia, which has a capital city of Kalliste. Was that a reference to the ILLUMINATUS! trilogy?

Not directly, though quite possibly indirectly. To elaborate, the references to Eris and Kalliste were intended as a sort of homage to Doug Casey's Eris Society, whose annual meetings I used to attend in the '90s. As you can see here:

http://www.erissociety.org/about.html

no mention is made of RAW or his books. However the Eris Society was started circa 1980, so it is quite possible that Casey was influenced by the ILLUMINATUS! trilogy, which appeared some five years earlier. I suppose I could email him and ask, if you are curious.

In using Kalliste I was also thinking of the website formerly run by the late Orlin Grabbe.

RAWIllumination.net: Do you hope that a commercial publisher will become interested in your book and reprint it, or are you satisfied with the self-published approach?

I haven't regularly kept up my author's blog, but the first post from 8 July '08 should explain my thinking on this. I did revise the book and add a trade paperback option two years later, based on reader feedback that physical books were still preferred by many. The approach
I've chosen is probably the only one that makes sense for an agorist.

RAWIllumination.net: Have you read any of Robert Anton Wilson's books?

Robert Anton Wilson is one of those writers whose ideas came to me through third parties. There's a kind of circulatory osmosis which obtains in the freedom movement generally, as I'm sure you're aware. I knew about the Church of the Subgenius, Pope Bob, and understood what
friends meant by "Hail Eris!" even without reading his stuff directly. I do seem to remember reading Natural Law, or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy. If memory serves, there was a reprint in Loompanics magazine, and at the time I was buying a lot of books from their
catalog, as well as Laissez Faire Books'.

It may interest you to know that Ayn Rand was another such author for me. Although familiar with the tenets of Objectivism, and having read some of her non-fiction essays and numerous quotes and excerpts, I never actually read Atlas Shrugged cover-to-cover until the 50th anniversary edition appeared, in what, 2007? Anyway there are some things you don't really feel compelled to read, because you've already gotten the gist as it were. Or at least I find it so. I'm more likely to pick up something I know nothing about, than something I've already heard about in detail. Which doesn't mean it's not still good once you actually
break down and read it, though. ;-) Maybe one of these days I'll do
that with von Mises' Human Action.

RAWIllumination.net: Which libertarian thinkers have most influenced your own thinking? Who are your favorite SF authors (or for that matter, favorite authors?)

As far as The Last Trumpet Project goes, unquestionably the greatest influence at work was The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil, which I read in 2005. Kurzweil is a non-fiction writer, a futurist and philosopher who speaks and writes about technology, as well as a noted
inventor. He's recently done a documentary film called "Transcendent Man," but I haven't seen it yet. The idea of the Singularity is of course central to my own book.

An actual SF author whose work I respect a great deal is L. Neil Smith. (2) I've met El Neil a few times, even went shooting with him once -- must have been 20 years ago. Neil is a master of incorporating radical libertarian ideas into the plot of a novel, in such a way that those ideas appear to be the natural outgrowth of the characters and situations in the story. No 70-page radio monologues for him, just a compelling story with believable characters and a clear message. This is a methodology I've consciously attempted to adopt.

What I was trying to do in LTP is show that the only way that a philosophy of individualism, peaceful anarchy, and voluntary exchange can take hold and replace statism is if human beings become smarter; and that as soon as humans *do* become significantly smarter, the emergence
of such a dominant philosophy is inevitable. Kurzweil says: "Humans are going to merge with their technology and augment their intelligence." I agree, and add: "And in that case, church and state are both doomed."

Other authors I would list as favorites or who have been influences to some extent would include, in no certain order:

J.R.R. Tolkien
Henry David Thoreau
Frederic Bastiat
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Glen Cook
Ursula LeGuin
Murray Rothbard
Fred Saberhagen
Lysander Spooner
Roger Zelazny

Hmm, looks like the clear majority of my favorite writers are dead, how sad!

Footnotes:

(1) According to the Wikipedia article I link to here (at MacArdry's recommendation), Agorism was developed by Samuel Edward Konkin III. Konkin is one of the targets of RAW's Natural Law Or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy , which criticizes the "Natural Law cult."

(2) Apparent references to ILLUMINATUS! recur in Smith's work. For example, the email list that he uses to send out articles is called "Group 523."

The footnotes in 'The Widow's Son'

A considerable amount of the text in The Widow's Son consists of the footnotes, which often cite existing books but which also cite a number of nonexistent ones, such as Golden Hours by de Selby, the time traveling sage, and his intellectual colleagues and rivals. (See this post.)

The story in the footnotes about de Selby and his controversies mostly exists outside of the universe of the main novel — except in Chapter 22 of Part Three, where Sigismundo has an encounter with a man who appears to be de Selby.

It's not the only moment of apparent time travel in the Historical Illuminatus novels. At the very beginning of the first book, Sigismundo is "lost in the forest with a Red Indian, seeking the supreme Wakan," something that apparently cannot actually happen until the third book.

'The Widow's Son' — a missed opportunity?

It doesn't seem to be generally recognized, but The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is in fact the second novel to be largely inspired by Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. The first, as RAW fans will know, is The Widow's Son.

Without giving too much of the plot away for people who have not read the book yet, the Merovingian bloodline and the mythology of the Holy Grail play a large part in The Widow's Son. I looked through The Widow's Son after I finished reading it Sunday, and there are references to Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 11 different footnotes. In some of those footnotes, Holy Blood is cited more than one time.

Considering the amount of attention that The Da Vinci Code attracted, it seems odd that so few people have noticed that it is actually the second work of fiction to draw inspiration from Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The Wikipedia article does not even mention The Widow's Son. Perhaps this was a missed opportunity for Wilson?

News about Wilson's and Shea's former boss

The New York Times has a long story about Hugh Hefner, boss for Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea when the two writers were working as Playboy editors and working on ILLUMINATUS! At age 84, Hefner still has the same sort of blonde girlfriends in their 20s, although, the piece says, Hef acknowledges that "most of his girls have never listened to his kind of music — jazz and the big bands of the ’30s and ’40s."

I've asked for an interview with Hefner, hoping for memories about the two editors who wrote a popular cult novel that remains in print today. Both of my requests were ignored, but I'll try again. Sometimes patience and persistence works.

So, when does this guy perform at the Super Bowl?

From the Montreal Mirror comes a review of musician Genesis P-Orridge's book, Thee Psychick Bible.

The piece by Johnson Cummins explains, "This massive tome is indeed biblical in proportion and covers a lot of ground, with P-Orridge tipping sacred cows and refuting traditional Christian orthodoxy, gender roles and sexual taboos along the way. The author mounts his pulpit and helps spread the gospel according to Robert Anton Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare and other modern cultural engineers and contemporary seers."

The piece also refers to "hocus-pocus on how to correctly perform sex magick—which resulted in over 1,000 members of the T.O.P.Y. collectively masturbating on the 23rd hour of the 23rd day and sending their sperm to P-Orridge for safe keeping." (T.O.P.Y. is the "Temple ov Psychic Youth," which the article explains was a "think-tank/commune to coincide with his newest musical project, Psychic TV.")

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Was RAW interested in modern classical music?

Yesterday, I posted a video of John Cage, the famous experimental composer, and today I pose a question. Is there any evidence that Robert Anton Wilson was interested in modern classical music? It would seem odd if he were not. He was interested in classical music and he always was interested in new ideas and cutting-edge art. He lived for many years in the Bay Area, home to many modern composers. (Terry Riley's "In C," which launched a revolution in modern classical music, was first performed on Nov. 4, 1964, at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.)

And yet, when I read Wilson's work, I see no references to Terry Riley, or "In C," or Steve Reich, or Philip Glass, or John Cage, or John Adams, or any number of people who I would expect Wilson to be interested in. Have I missed something?

On a related note, I have a blog devoted to modern classical music.

John Cage on "I've Got a Secret"

Here is a wonderful video of experimental composer John Cage from the old TV show, "I've Got a Secret." Unfortunately, I have found no evidence that Robert Anton Wilson was interested in John Cage. Nonetheless, I believe RAW would have enjoyed this if he happened to see it, and showing it sets up the question that I want to pose tomorrow. (Hat tip: Jesse Walker, a Robert Anton Wilson fan who called this video to my attention by posting it at Reason Magazine's "Hit and Run" blog).

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Via Wired magazine's rather brief article on "Secret Societies," I found a Web site for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The site seems worth mentioning, particularly because it has a rather large list of links to further resources.

'My kind of stuff'

I think that the missing link between the apes and civilized humanity is Us (definitely including me.)

OK, I admit it: I'm a religious fanatic of the Post-Humanist faith. I think that humanity should become as gods or die trying, because the alternative is to die without trying. I don't think that being or being trapped in (I am also ontologically incorrect, drawing the mind/body distinction) doomed, raging, demanding Meat is enough. And while I am nowhere near silly enough to confuse acceptance of this view with literary excellence, I want to define science fiction as my kind of stuff...

— Arthur Hlavaty

This rather Wilsonian statement is excerpted from Hlavaty's Nice Distinctions 19 zine.

A couple of examples of the kind of SF which Arthur may be talking about: The Iain Banks Culture novels, and The Last Trumpet Project by Kevin MacArdry, the book I mentioned in my Jan. 30 posting.