Review of Carole Cusack's 'Invented Religions'

Last year, I read Carol Cusack's Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith, her history of modern religions such as Discordianism, the Church of the SubGenius and the Church of All Worlds.

J. Christian Greer, a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Amsterdam, who has taken part in the Illuminatus! discussions as JCG,  has published a review of Cusack's book for the latest issue of "Correspondences," an "online journal for the academic study of Western esotericism." All of the journal's contents are made available for everybody online — there's no firewall.

Greer's review finds Cusack's book a useful early foray into the subject of these odd religions, but he also has criticisms:

Cusack argues for the typological designation 'invented religion'  by way of illustration with chapters dedicated to Discordianism, The Church of All Worlds, the Church of the SubGenius and a final concluding chapter on Jediism, Matrixiism and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. As it is the first scholarly study devoted to these religions, the book marks a notable contribution to the study of new religious movements. Furthermore, her pioneering analysis convincingly challenges the tendency to dismiss religions that openly incorporate fictitious (and humorous) elements into their worldviews. Despite these obvious virtues though, Invented Religions suffers from two serious flaws: first, large portions of it are not sufficiently grounded in primary source research, and second, Cusack's ahistorical, top-down approach distorts the highly idiosyncratic nature of these religions to suit the 'invented religion' typology.

Greer's review was particularly interesting to me in that it attempts to explain the differing agendas of Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius. Really, read the whole thing.

Mr. Greer's biography page is here. and I intend to explore his papers and conference presentations.  While Mr. Greer is still working on his Ph.D., he already holds three other degrees, including a master's degree in "hermetic philosophy and related currents."

Iluminatus online reading, Week 12 (with special guest Oz Fritz)

Aleister Crowley in Golden Dawn clothing. 

(As much of this section of the work concerns magick, I asked Oz Fritz if he would consider doing a guest post for me, and he kindly obliged. 

Oz is a professional recording engineer who has worked with a variety of artists including The Ramones, Buckethead, Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell, The Golden Palominos, Tom Waits, Primus and Iggy Pop. Although he is based in California, his excellent blog includes recent dispatches from Mali, Australia and Israel. His album, Oz Fritz: All Around the World received a positive review from Allmusic. com.  He has studied magick for many years and once gave a copy of the American Book of the Dead to Sting. I am sure you will find his post as interesting as I did. -- The Mgt.)


(This week: Page 114 "After being lost for an hour in Hitler's old neighborhood" to Page 124 "but I've felt weird for the last week and a half.")

By Oz Fritz

This week’s reading begins on p. 114 right after the phrase “23 Skidoo…” Besides being old American patois, Skidoo recurs as the title of Chapter 23 in Crowley’s Book of Lies thus reading as 23 Skidoo.  Crowley defines this phrase as “Get out” and turns it into an initiatory practice in that chapter.  As this turned out to be one of the first things we studied in RAW’s online Crowley course, I suspect the pun intended especially since in the next sentence Clark Kent and His Supermen get out of Munich.   Their band name appears an obvious glyph for transformation with the bonus of representing an instantly recognizable image from pop culture.  That they were “lost for an hour in Hitler’s old neighborhood” mirrors the archetypal descent into the underworld or dip into the darkside that seems part of the course on the initiatory path.

Starting toward the end of p.114 we see Simon Moon inviting Joe Malik to a meeting which turns into a sex magick ritual.  The ritual seems to be the authors’ own creation based on Crowley-style magic but viewed through the lens of someone programmed in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Malik calls it a “black Mass.”  He interprets the “God is dead” chant as blasphemy.  “God is dead” could refer to the famous quote by Friedrich Nietzsche which brings us back to Clark Kent and His Supermen, and transformation.  The end of the paragraph in the book where Nietzsche first made that proclamation reads: “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
p.115: “They were in an elegant apartment…” important for the ritual because it shows what kind of space they were in – “elegant” ie high aesthetic.  Next we see some obvious allusions to other preparations for the ritual, spelled out as it were, perhaps tempered at the end of the paragraph with Joe’s suspicion that it’s for a black Mass.  “… the sounds of the automobile traffic …”  introduces a sense of flow and movement into the environment.  Also automobile = auto - mobile, ie get yourself going.

Readers can make of it what they will concerning the coincidence that these other preparations occur on p.115 which in the Gematria dictionary found in 777 = “Here am I,“  “The heat of the day,“ and  “to make strong;  vehement, eager.”

Next we see the classic Crowley greeting intended to begin all communications.  The priest then gets introduced as “Padre Pederastia.”  To me, this name sounds oddly prescient of the widespread pederasty scandals afflicting the Catholic Church in recent years.  It could also have been inspired by the conspiracy rumor that the Roman Catholic Church power elite originated in the gay cabal power elite behind  the Roman Empire.  When they could no longer control their empire militarily, they learned to control the people ideologically through the Church.

p.116: Simon and his partner draw a pentagram.  Some form of the banishing ritual of the pentagram usually begins a magick ritual as it works to focus and protect.  The method the authors have of making the pentagram here is unique to my experience.   They may have done it this way for the sentence: “A triangle was added to each side of the pentagon, forming a star – the special kind of star.” The triangle suggests Binah, the title of this chapter.  The pentagon may represent the highly combustible energy of Geburah, the Sephiroth right below Binah on the Tree of Life.  The path that connects Geburah with Binah = Cheth = The Chariot from the tarot.   Crowley called The Chariot the formula of this modern age of Horus, a formula you can read about in his Book of Thoth.  This formula also underlies this ritual up to the point where the demon Billy Graham makes an appearance.

The poem from the Wolfman movies Joe remembers on p. 116 looks quite accurate for ritual magick.   You can be as pure and pious as anything and still get overwhelmed by primal energies when launching into those kinds of spaces.   Strategies and techniques exist to not succumb, one of the most basic being the pentagram just given which effectively acts as a shield .
p.116:  “Joe felt a strange, ashy, acrid taste…”  Joe feels a space change, not uncommon symptoms.  He’s no longer in Kansas.

“Ol sonuf vaoresaji”  - the first phrase from the Enochian First Call that translates as “ I reign over  ye.”

The Guardian they have to pass might signify psychic barriers that inevitably occur with these kinds of experiments.  Notice how they get energy when stepping into the pentagram.
p.117: the woman with red hair and green eyes recalls Marjorie Cameron who had the same.  She was the woman who entered Jack Parson’s life during his Babalon working eventually becoming his wife.

Jack Parsons and his wife, Marjorie Cameron

p.118: “the Malleus malificarum” isn’t a grimoire, it’s a medieval treatise put out by the Catholic Church on the persecution of witches, what they do, and how to discover them; seems to have nothing about sex rituals in it.  I suspect Shea and Wilson included it to represent resistance to the operation because in the next sentence Joe sees the protective pentagram.  Malleus malificarum translates as “Hammer of the Witches.”  Hammer = 291; 290 (which can get read as 291) = Thine enemy.

p.119: “She was Ishtar, Aphrodite, Venus…”  - seems a common practice in tantra,  to identify with a godform , in this case those associated with Binah.  This also seems closely related to verse 61 in the first chapter of The Book of the Law.

The priest then invokes Lucifer ending with fiat lux – let there be light, also the 3rd verse from Genesis - possibly another Binah allusion?  Powerful energy enters the space then becomes contained by different formulae.  We see an allusion to the Rosy Cross, and also “by Mary’s Son” which sounds a bit odd except  that emphasizing Mary more than her son harkens back to Binah once again.

“- but the distraction of his attention had its cost.” – another key for handling situations such as these.  If you’re a football or basketball player you have to work out regularly to keep your body in shape.   Likewise, if you’re a Shaman, you keep the attention buffed up for when having to play to the max in the big leagues.

The whole Lucifer manifestation sounds a bit gothic and medieval which perhaps the writers acknowledge with the paragraph on p.120 that starts “It was just a room again…”  It’s quite funny that this implied evil turns out to be Billy Graham, the ubiquitous face of evangelical Christianity when I was growing up.  Sounds pretty right to me!

The scene changes right after Billy Graham arrives .  Later we see some interesting notes about Lucifer and lux.   The note that really grabbed me (p. 123): D.E.A.T.H. – Don’t Ever Antagonize the Horn .  Does Pynchon know?  The Horn could = the Hierophant , maybe.  In previous times Crowley or Gurdjieff.  It seems like good advice.  In my opinion, after reading Against the Day (which came out after Illuminatus!), Pynchon definitely knows.  I would even go so far as to surmise that Pynchon put one or two things in Against the Day to directly answer the question ( I suspect) RAW put to him in Illuminatus!

(Next week: Page 124 "Simon parked the car and held the door open" to Page 134 "his old impudent grin flashed wickedly.)

Sunday links

55 free literature courses online from Open Culture.

Glenn Greenwald says this is "The NSA story we did with the biggest gap between significance & attention." Justin Raimondo's related column.

A history of pranksters.  One of the chapters in the book is "Meet the Illuminati."

Bill Drummond in the news. I've been puzzled by all the references to UKIP in my Twitter stream; they seem a bit different. I'm puzzled by their self-description as "libertarian"; in the U.S., "libertarians" do not oppose immigration, favor increased defense spending or promote monarchical government. Maybe UKIP is some whacky performance art and I'm not getting the joke?

Interview with Ira Glass of This American Life (my favorite radio show/podcast). It's going to start broadcasting in the UK.

All of Bach for free.

The secret plot to feed us Muslim food!

The secret machinations of sneaky Muslims trying to trick westerners into eating Islamic food hasn't gotten much ink in the United States, but over in Great Britain, the watchdog reporters at the Daily Mail are alert to the vital issue. 

The headline in the paper (in black all capital letters)  is "Millions are eating halal food without knowing it." As Robert Anton Wilson scholar Jesse Walker points out in his excellent Reason magazine post, "Halal food is basically the Islamic counterpart to kosher food, so this is essentially equivalent to a paper breathlessly announcing that "MILLIONS ARE EATING KOSHER FOOD WITHOUT KNOWING IT." Or, if you want to make the barely concealed subtext explicit, "RABBIS ARE PUTTING SOME WEIRD JEW-SPELL ON YOUR MEALS."

Tyler Cowen, in his food book An Economist Gets Lunch, suggested that Indian food fans should seek out Pakistani restaurants, preferably those that have pictures of Mecca on the wall. Tyler's point is that such restaurants would have little appeal for most Americans and so will serve authentic food. At least, that's Tyler's purported reasoning, although I suppose we should not discount the possibility that he's part of a cabal of American college professors trying to smuggle Sharia food into our stomachs.

No food with exotic spices, please. We're British!

Is there such a thing as kosher haggis or halal haggis?

Two interesting documents available on net

Via Nick Helweg-Larsen, I've been made aware of the fact that Timothy Leary's 1966 interview by Playboy magazine is available in a variety of formats on the Internet Archive. Much of it holds up quite well, although the passages in which Leary asserts that LSD is a "cure" for homosexuality will likely raise modern eyebrows.

Meanwhile, Adam Gorightly has posted a PDF of Kerry Thornley's "Book of the Demons of the Region of Thud," illustrated by Roldo.

Thursday links

Oz Fritz on Aleister Crowley's sex magick.

PQ on the 75th anniversary of Finnegans Wake. 

New evidence the "Jesus' wife papyrus" may be a fake.

Observation from Ted Hand.

Article in Spanish about Robert Anton Wilson. Not sure the real Jean Paul Sartre posted the first comment.

Antiwar Republican Congressman survives primary challenge. It was the only election I cared about Tuesday. Jesse Walker comments. 

Final Cosmic Trigger play promotional video

5 of 5 : CTB_05// Will you pull the CosmicTrigger? from amoeba on Vimeo.

This one lasts two minutes, 27 seconds, and it's really cool. Please note that by clicking "Share" at the top right, you can obtain the code to embed this on your own blog/website, or take advantage of other ways to spread the word.

Listening to Daisy, John and Nick

Nick Margerrison (official profile photo)

I did finally get the chance to listen to Nick Margerrison's podcast interview with Daisy Eris Campbell, and the hour-long show (with Daisy taking up much of it) was very interesting. I got a better sense of Daisy's personality, and also managed to get a handle on all of those puzzling references to "rainbow colored knickers," which I couldn't make head or tail of. Nick is a British broadcaster and podcaster; currently, he produces a talk radio show for Jon Gaunt at fubarradio.com.

Nick's podcasts are available online from the website link referenced above; if you go there, you'll see a link to the iTunes list of his podcasts. This was not particularly convenient for me, as I have an Android phone, but I was also able to find his podcast episodes by searching for "thecultofnick" (one word; searching for "Nick" yielded nothing) on my podcasting app, Podkicker. Some of the episodes seem pretty out there; I haven't tried "How to call down a UFO" yet. But I did listen to episode 030, the interview with John Higgs, which has quite a bit of insightful discussion of Robert Anton Wilson; Nick refers to RAW as a kind of St. Paul of Discordianism. Nick is an avowed Discordian; the episode concludes with a discussion of magick.

Illiuminatus reading group, Week 11

(This week: Page 102 "ILLUMINATI PROJECT MEMO #12) to page 114 ("that mysterious bit of 1929 slang, '23 Skidoo ... ' ")

Who were the Illuminati?

In Illumintatus!, they are the statists, the folks who stand behind all of the most sinister elements of big government. This is the theory offered by John Robison in memo No. 12, the memo that begins the current section of the work that's under consideration, and I recently posted an item about Robison.

But the question of who the Illuminati might really be, and what their secrets were, was an issue that Robert Anton Wilson returned to in other books, particularly perhaps in Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati. (You may have heard that a play based on the book is in the works in England.)

In Cosmic Trigger, Wilson offers more than one answer to the questions the Illuminati pose, but particular emphasis is placed upon one possible answer:

It occurred to me that I finally had the secret of the Illuminati. They were not the fantasy of right-wing paranoids. "The Illuminati" was one of the names of an underground mystical movement using sexual yoga in the Western world. The veils of obscurity and mystery around such figures as Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Cagliostro, the original Rosicrucians (17th century), Crowley himself, and various other key figures in the "conspiracy," had nothing to do with politics or plots to take over the world. It was a screen to protect them from persecution from the Holy Inquisition in earlier centuries and puritanical policemen in our time. (Page 60 of the original paperback, in the chapter, "The Horrible Secrets of the Wicked Aleister Crowley).

There's more about the subject in Cosmic Trigger 1, and Wilson goes on to say that readers can learn more by consulting two of his other books. The current titles for the books, still in print, are Sex, Drugs and Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits and Ishtar Rising.  The Wikipedia entry for Sex, Drugs and Magick says, "It was Wilson’s intention to call the book Sex, Drugs and the Occult, however the 'occult' was removed at the insistence of Playboy head Hugh Hefner." The reference to Ishtar also gives me an excuse to post an image of Ishtar at the head of this blog entry, taken from the Wikipedia article about Ishtar. Notice how Ishtar's figure resembles those of the ladies photographed as centerfolds for Hugh Hefner's magazine, where Wilson worked.

In a useful synchronicity, Oz Fritz has just put up a blog post, "Aleister Crowley's Sex Magick," the references the very same Cosmic Trigger chapter that I mention in this post.

Of course, illumination is achieved in various ways; Oz says, "We all know that reading a good poem or listening to a special piece of music can suddenly open tracks into an expansive mood or set the soul on fire." No doubt others will cite Zen, or meditation, or reading Illuminatus! RAW mentions Beethoven in Cosmic Trigger 1, Illuminatus!, Schroedinger's Cat and elsewhere. Beethoven was associated with members of the original German Illuminati.

Here is a relevant quote from Robert Anton Wilson, from "Beethoven as Information" in The Illuminati Papers: 

Perhaps some mystics have achieved higher levels of consciousness than Beethoven (perhaps!), but if so, we cannot know of it. Aleister Crowley once astonished me by writing that the artist is greater than the mystic, an odd remark from a man who was only a mediocre artist himself (although a great mystic.) Listening to Ludwig, I have come to understand what Crowley meant. The mystic, unless he or he is also an artist, cannot communicate the higher states of awareness achieved by a fully turned-on brain; but a great artist can. Listening to Beethoven, one shares, somewhat, in his expanded perceptions; and the more one listens, the more one shares. Finally, one is able to believe his promise: if one listens to that music enough, one will never again be unhappy."

(For more on Beethoven and RAW, use Beethoven as the search term for the search box at the top of this blog.)

Some comments on the text:

Proofs of a Conspiracy by John Robison, page 102,  available online. And see the article referenced above.

"The Knights Templar," page 106, discussed in Robert Shea's All Things Are Lights, also available online. 

"novelist William Burroughs," page 108. Does anyone know what Burroughs thought of Illuminatus! ?

"Allen Ginsberg," page 108, RAW writes about Ginsberg in Coincidance.

"... the dissenters known then as RYM-1 and RYM-2." This Wikipedia article explains the factions. 

"23 Skidoo," page 114. There is a fairly long Wikipedia article about the expression.  There may be a connection to the Law of Fives: "Perhaps the most widely known story of the origin of the expression concerns the area around the triangular-shaped Flatiron Building at Madison Square in New York City. The building is located on 23rd Street at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, and, because of the shape of the building, winds swirl around it. During the early 1900s, groups of men would allegedly gather to watch women walking by have their skirts blown up, revealing legs, which were seldom seen publicly at that time." (The cops allegedly would order men hanging around to ogle the ladies to "23 skidoo" out of there.)

(Next week: Page 114 "After being lost for an hour in Hitler's old neighborhood" to Page 124 "but I've felt weird for the last week and a half.")

Sunday links

4 of 5 : CTB_04// Apple ov Cosminatus-7714 from amoeba on Vimeo.

The video above is the fourth of a series of videos promoting the Cosmic Trigger play. Over at Only Maybe, Bogus Magus has collected together all of the videos available so far. 

Download free art books from the Getty Museum.

John Higgs on Steve Moore.

India declares dolphins to be "non human persons." Gary Acord comments on Twitter, "Ah, what would Howard have to say?"

MAD magazine editor Al Feldstein dies.

TAILS, the Linux operating system for preserving your privacy, issues version 1.0. On Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow comments, "Effectively, this is the ParanoidLinux I fictionalized in my novel Little Brother."

British 'Wired' piece on Jack Parsons

An archival NASA photo of Jack Parsons, at a test site, with a Jet Assisted Take-Off canister, a technology he helped develop. 

A piece in the British edition of "Wired" magazine, "Occultist father of rocketry 'written out of Nasa history,' tells the story of Jack Parsons, the early rocket scientist and NASA founding father. I'm not clear why it was published in the Brit Wired and not the one in the USA.

lt's an interesting article, but it has quite a few typographical errors, and unfortunately not a few mistakes, some of which are pointed out in the 23 comments that were posted on the piece when I accessed it. For example, it is apparently not true that NASA ignores Parsons' role in its past. On one of the alleged mistakes, however, it appears that the article's author got it right: Parsons believed his magic had summoned his new girlfriend, Marjorie Cameron. (See the Wikipedia piece referenced below.) 

Here is an interesting sentence from the piece that is not disputed by any of the commenters: "Parsons came to believe in magic, a force that he felt could be explained through quantum physics, as espoused by Thelema's founder Aleister Crowley."

There are at least a couple of biographies of Parsons: The Wired piece cites biographer George Pendle. Another Parsons bio, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons by John Carter, has an introduction by Robert Anton Wilson. 

Wikipedia has a long bio of Parsons, with 190 footnotes. I was amazed to see that Parsons used music by Sergei Prokofiev to accompany one of his magic rituals; I'm a huge Prokofiev fan. 

John Robison's 'Proofs of a Conspiracy'

Mike Jay's piece says this is the original insignia of the Bavarian Illuminati: the owl of Minerva, symbolising wisdom, on top of an opened book. Minerva is Athena, one of the three goddesses competing for the golden apple in the Judgment of Paris. 

Proofs of a Conspiracy by John Robison, a seminal document in the "Illuminati paranoia" cult cited in Memo #12 of Illuminatus!, gets a writeup in an excellent article by author Mike Jay. The piece has some very good illustrations, too. Some familiar names pop up in the piece and in the citations.

The article appears in the Public Domain Review, "an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to promoting and celebrating the public domain in all its richness and variety."

 I admit I was not familiar with Mike Jay, but he seems to be an interesting writer. His official page is here.

Thursday links

Ilya Somin on the controversy over this year's Hugo Awards slate. There are endless blog posts on this stuff that you can read on the Internet, including this long one from Larry Correia, one of the folks in the middle of the controversy. Mr. Correia says he nominated Sarah Hoyt's A Few Good Men for the Hugo "because it was a really good book." I thought it was badly written (I just read it) and I can't believe anyone would nominate it for an award. Obviously, there are folks who disagree with me, as it is a finalist for the Prometheus Award.

Latest news from Daisy Eris Campbell.

Daisy is interviewed by Nick Margerrison.

Radley Balko, on a hero in the "War on Some Drugs" killed in a plane crash.

"The children are actually told NOT to hop on pop."

"From 1790-1875 the federal government placed almost no restrictions on immigration."

Bonus link: The Power of Twelve by William Gladstone is $1.99 for Kindle, today only. "Arnold is The Grand Light and Keeper of the Code of the Illuminati, which quietly and covertly control every major development on Earth. He is quite aware of the universal shift in consciousness predicted by the Mayans long ago. With this shift, humanity has the opportunity, for the first time, to reach its full potential. Except the Illuminati have other plans."