We are in the dog days of summer, and that means that the star Sirius is about to "rise," becoming visible over the horizon before sunrise.
A new piece, "A Real Scorcher! — Sirius At Heliacal Rising" by Bob King at Sky and Telescope offers a primer on the subject. Check the supplied link to see when it starts in your area. It looks like in Cleveland I may have just missed it.
Hat tip, Charles Faris, who has become a serious ally for this blog (or a Sirius ally?)
1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.
1950. A lone Surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts—and by the forces of Hell. To escape the city, he must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse.
I haven't kept up with China Miéville — keeping up with every good writer is hard — but I loved Perdido Street Station. Another of his, The City & the City, also is reputedly particularly good, but I haven't gotten to it yet.
Parons also is a character in the novel The House of Rumour by Jake Arnott.
John Merritt sent me the above flyer for a 1998 "Conspiracy Tour of Texas" featuring Robert Anton Wilson and Ivan Stang. Fringeware was an unusual Austin shop that had all kind of weird items; I used to love getting the shop's catalog.
Jesse Walker, meanwhile, has Tweeted out evidence that the Illuminati are in Reading, Pennsylvania. Or at least they were. The ad ran in the early 2000s, but the place is out of business.
If you are interested in the concept of space migration, as popularized by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson (among many others, of course), you could do worse than to read Arkwright, the latest novel by science fiction writer Allen Steele.
Steele's novel contains descriptions of real people and real events, such as the 1939 and 1989 worldcons, but his title character is fictional, as are the other main characters. Nathan Arkwright is one of the "Big Four" science fiction writers (in "real life," the big three were Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, all mentioned in the book, which is reminiscent of Clarke), and he leaves his estate to a foundation charged with building and launching an interstellar spaceship. I've read other Steele but I like this one better than anything else I've come across by him. Inspirational and carefully plotted, with memorable characters. The title character's name may be a reference to Richard Arkwright, the "father of the Industrial Revolution."
Synchronicity watch: In the acknowledgements, Steele mentions the assistance of Geoffrey Landis, a science fiction writer and NASA scientist who lives in Berea, Ohio, where I live, and also thanks his editor, the late David Hartwell, who also was one of Robert Anton Wilson's editors (see my interview with Hartwell, and then Part Two.) So in effect, the book serves not just as a memorial to the great science fiction writers who helped inspire interest in SF, such as the Big Three, but also to Hartwell, too, although Steele could not have predicted this when he wrote the book. The 1989 Worldcon is the one where I met Robert Shea, although unfortunately Steele does not mention the Golden APA room party.
By Charles Faris, Cosmic Trigger online reading group guest blogger
Welcome to week 18 of the RAWIllumination Cosmic Trigger Reading Group. This week we cover 3 chapters ostensibly about signals from Sirius, beginning with Other starry signals (141 Hilaritas) and finishing with Dope and divinity. I say ostensibly because Wilson is always building maps, connecting people, places, and ideas, and at the same time…well, we’ll get to Mr. Wilson’s Doggie Funeral business…eventually…eventually.
Other Starry signals begins as a straight exposition of a variety of “reputable” scientists who have received “signals” from interstellar space (or expended considerable energy trying). Jorge Hals, Norwegian radio engineer. L. George Lawrence, American radio engineer. Carl Sagan, American face of science.
Jack Sarfatti
Wilson then brings in Dr. Jack Sarfatti’s notion of “electromagnetic chauvinism” as an argument against the radio signal efforts of Sagan and crew. When I asked Dr. Sarfatti about this phrase, he said “That’s what post quantum retro-causal signaling is all about” — I’ll let you investigate that nugget on your own.
This leads to a quick view of the life-work of Jack Parsons, rocket engineer, co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA, thelemite, receiver of messages from Higher Intelligence, buddy of L. Ron Hubbard, prophet of libertarianism, sex-magick, and rockets into space, etc. Wilson notes that “For his countless contributions to aerospace science, Parsons is honored by having a crater on the moon named after him.” He is also honored by being virtually expunged from NASA history.
Wilson relates Parsons to Sirius, as well as the push to “get off this planet.”
Jack Parsons
Quick cut to The footsteps of the Illuminati, which finds out intrepid Author browsing in a bookstore! (See! He’s just like us!) Via some writings of J. G. Bennett our Hero comes across the Gurdjieffian directive to “bury the dog deeper,” i.e. hide important esoteric information from easy discovery by superficial minds.
Of course, on this level “the dog is Sirius, the dog star,” which is what drew Bob’s attention to the passage in the first place, and as the years went by I would argue that the Sirius connection paled in comparison to the notion of hiding various harder to digest notions “in plain sight.” I would argue that great treasures can potentially be discovered whenever we come across any of the many “mysteries of Bob”—the areas where he seemingly just ‘got it wrong’ if we just dig a bit into that doggie graveyard. In my experience the times that Bob seems most “off” usually involve a certain level of naivety, and while Bob plays the naive waif quite a bit in Cosmic Trigger (and various other writings), in “real life” I’m not so sure. In my case certainly Bob did not suffer fools gladly!
This chapter is also notable for bringing up Bob’s notion of “the indispensable Big 3 of 20th century occultism.” That would be Blavatsky, Crowley, and Gurdjieff, all of whom Bob can tie to Sirius of course, of course.
We also get a bit of a clue regarding Bob’s reading of Joyce’s Ulysses, as Bob claims that in 1973 he did not yet know why Joyce had set the novel in the spring of 1904.
Bob also brings back the “angelic language” argument, which strikes me as one of the weakest that the Author uses, and it would bother me not one iota if both of those were struck from the book—and yet i wonder, what might be buried underneath them? For which reason I reveal my first law for reading RAW: whenever you come upon something that seems just plain wrong, bordering on crankiness, or …, ask yourself why lies beneath it? What dog is buried there?
Dope and divinity bring us back to Gurdjieff, and the question of whether the interstellar Higher Intelligences of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson are allegory or a case of hiding the “real secret out in front where nobody would think to look for it.” I was intrigued by the section on angels and archangels, which some in Mr. Gurdjieff’s St. Petersburg group equated with planets and suns, and which Bob suggests perhaps equating with “intelligent, more evolved entities in other solar systems” in order to bring Gurdjieff in line with Leary.
All of this brings to mind an earlier chapter, Sirius Rising, where, on page 85 (Hilaritas), the Investigator thinks that whatever he had tuned into during his June 6th trip was “a kind of planetary consciousness.” An angel perhaps? And then following a drug-free sex-magick trip on July 22, the Shaman scribbles in his magical diary “Sirius is very important.” Archangels anyone?
At a certain point, of course, it is hard to tell what is being concealed and what is being revealed, and this seems as good a time as any to remember that the map is not the territory!
Diving a bit further into the worldview of Mr. G, we are presented with a vision of an unconscious mankind — “asleep, hypnotized, sleepwalking” — and the occasional interstellar intervention to accelerate our evolution.
At this point the Author takes another rough cut to make a case for the development of language, civilization, and religion (i.e. communication with Higher Intelligences) via the shamanic use of metaprogramming substances (peyote/amanita mascara). Bob ties these intelligences directly to other planets through the use of a Don Juan/Carlos Castaneda quote, and then finishes with a question from Captain James T. Kirk — “Can all this just be an accident? Or could there be some alien intelligence behind it?”
On the one hand, it is easy enough at this point to frame this as the Author posing a rhetorical question, as he seems quite clearly to favor the alien intelligence theory, and to locate the aliens in question somewhere in the vicinity of Sirius. And on the other hand, perhaps all this Sirius business is just another deeply buried shaggy dog story.
What do you think? So much here to chew on, dig into, serve up in a nice fresh comment. So take it away—until next week when Adam Golightly, Discordian expert and author of Historia Discordia offers us his own unique slant on The horrors begin (150) and Ishtar’s Walk: a guided tour of Hell (154).
Brian Eno in 2008 (Creative Commons photo by cosciansky)
A footnote to Friday's blog post about the Thad McCracken piece published at Disinfo: One of the Twitter messages publicizing the article came from the account of Brian Eno.
I don't actually know if Brian Eno Tweets himself, or if he delegates the job, or if in fact the account is a fan's operation. Does anyone know?
But I'm intrigued that Eno might be a Robert Anton Wilson fan. Eno has long been one of my musical heroes.
Listing all the ways that Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno has intersected with my record collection and music listening habits over the years would require an impossibly long blog post, but here are examples: He played on the first two Roxy Music albums, he produced albums by the Talking Heads, he put out solo albums (many of which I purchased), he did a really good album in collaboration with David Byrne, he collaborated with David Bowie on the Berlin albums, he co-produced several U-2 albums ... and so on.
I would like to think that this blog offers a better guide to RAW's work than McCracken's piece. Hey, Brian! Over here!
I've been reading debate on Twitter about whether Gary Johnson is libertarian enough to be the Libertarian Party candidate. He and his running mate, William Weld, appeared on CNN's Town Hall for an hour, so I sat down and listened.
I was interested in Johnson's positions on the issues, so I took some notes with my phone. Here were some of them:
• The U.S. should get out of Afghanistan, and should have gotten out shortly after overthrowing the Taliban about 15 years ago.
• He defended the ownership of semi-automatic rifles and said outlawing them would turn millions of Americans into criminals.
• He said he opposes the "imperial presidency."
• He said Utah's current law strikes a good balance between gay rights and religious freedom. (I'm not familiar with that law.) On bakeries serving gays, he said businesses should sell wedding cakes to anyone who walks in the door but have not obligation to decorate any cake a certain way.
• He defended immigration and free trade.
• He favors legalization of marijuana and believes the federal government should deschedule pot as a class one narcotic. (He wouldn't legalize heroin.)
• He would eliminate the Department of Education. More generally, on the size of the federal government, he would cut spending 20 percent to deal with the deficit.
• When asked about terrorism, he said government isn't omnipotent and can't stop every attack. "These things are going to happen."
• He favors a "noninterventionist" foreign policy and opposes regime change as a policy.
• He defended legalizing prostitution.
My conclusion is that by any reasonable real world standard, Johnson is a libertarian, although he doesn't go as far as some libertarians would on some issues. Jack Hunter says that "Johnson is a serious 2016 presidential candidate who is also generally and significantly libertarian," and that seems about right to me. Scott Sumner also weighed in recently, pointing to a long interview Johnson gave to the Los Angeles Times
It was interesting to hear from Johnson himself, as opposed to reading about him. (The Green Party's Jill Stein will appear on the show with her running mate on August 17, 9 p.m. Eastern time).
I'm not telling anyone how to vote; that's not what this blog is about. Think for yourself, as Timothy Leary says.
Thad explains that he began re-reading Robert Anton Wilson after an "alien contact" in 2010 which carried the message, “We are the beings from the Sirius Star System who were communicating with Robert Anton Wilson." It's not wise to ignore such messages, so Thad has been reading RAW and trying to decide which of his concepts make sense to him.
Thad has no shortage of controversial and interesting opinions. Here he is on the state of magick in 2016: "Maybe the Occult vibe was different back in the late 60’s/early 70’s. I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that most of what passes for magick these days is some dark uber douche goth crap that I want exactly nothing to do with. Lord, if I unintentionally lead anyone to believe that the Occult is somehow cool with my writing, I want to formally apologize. Holy crap is it lame. Cool in theory, painfully embarrassing in execution. Religion’s slander campaign won and it really ends up being a bunch of cosplay 'I want to be in a horror movie' creepiness more than anything else. "
And he says Aleister Crowley is a "total fraud." There's a link that goes into detail about his opinion on that.
Thad writes that "Wilson’s work is almost like a Rorschach test in a way. There’s so much intel there that people pick up on vastly different aspects of it. " That seems correct to me.
Headline: "Peter Thiel wants to inject himself with young people's blood."
An article from Vanity Fair about Thiel's life extension efforts. The article ends with these sentences, which sound a lot like what RAW used to write: "He’s also signed up with cryogenics company Alcor to be deep-frozen when (or if, a more optimistic death-cheating evangelist would say) he dies. There are three ways you can approach death, Thiel has said. 'You can accept it, you can deny it, or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it'."
Oh, and he says he hasn't started spending $120,000 a year to be infused with the blood of an 18-year-old, he's just thinking about it.
Via Charles Faris, who's probably going to make a big deal about Thiel bragging he'll never die unless someone drives a pointed wooden stake through his heart. I'm just kidding. I think ...
Wow, an entire blog post that doesn't mention Godwin's Law!
I've recently finished a book about World War II by Andrew Roberts, called The Storm of War. There's a lot I could say about the book — that its military judgments seem generally sound, that Roberts obviously put a lot of work into it, that he's a little too hard on Irish neutrality and a little too easy on Winston Churchill — but I've been spending the last few days letting my mind be boggled by the closing salutation in a letter from Adolf Hitler that Roberts quotes, "Kind regards, Adolf Hitler."
"Kind regards, Adolf." "Kind regards, Pol Pot." "Kind regards, Attila the Hun."
Michael Johnson has been thinking about cruelty lately. He has a blog post up that got me thinking about this.
Here's a related quote from Robert Anton Wilson:
"People who like to write witty, nasty things about other people are not generous or charitable, to put it mildly. We should all try to give out as much good energy to other human beings as we possibly can. I honestly believe that every bit of bad energy we put out has adverse effects that go on forever. This is the Buddhist doctrine of karma. The Buddhists believe that every bit of anger, resentment, hate, and so on that goes out passes from one person to another, without stopping. The same is true of good energy: every bit of good energy one puts out makes someone else feel a little bit better. I think if people were really conscious of this psychological fact, they would try very, very hard to put out nothing but good energy, no matter what happened to them. They would certainly not be so casual about passing on bad energy. All the bad energy in the world builds up like a giant snowfall, until we have a huge war. Nowadays, it can mean a total nuclear Armageddon. This is traditional Buddhism, as I say, but I think it’s materialistic common sense, too. One only needs to study human behavior to realize it. I regard those people who make a career out of being nasty as emotional plague carriers."
By Charles Faris, Cosmic Trigger online reading group guest blogger
Welcome to week 17 of the RAWIllumination Cosmic Trigger Reading Group. This week, we cover 4 short chapters, beginning with Appearances and Disappearances (131 Hilaritas, And/Or 130) and finishing with Nikola Tesla, secular shaman. Wilson covers a lot of territory here, from the continuing travails of Timothy Leary to the lessons we can learn from our children, from the shamanic technique of near-death/rebirth to the question, once again, of extra-terrestrial communication. And so without further ado…
“It gets even spookier now.” And so begins Appearances and Disappearances, which begins with the appearance of a variety of messengers from God, the extraterrestrials etc., most of whom were nuts, in Bob’s estimation, and one of whom spent $380 (in 2016 dollars) taking Bob and Arlen out to dinner and then slipped him a grand (again, 2016 dollars) before leaving, never to be heard from again.
Quick cut back to Vacaville, where Bob and Tim discuss Giordano Bruno’s practice of Tantric Yoga. Bob assumes that Tim learned of this by reading Francis Yates—Tim counters that it was obvious from Bruno’s own writings—“Sex magic is always the first of the Secrets.” Tim tells Bob that he will be getting out of Prison soon, and then he disappears into the void of Terminal Island.
The Great Silence begins and great paranoia ensues as the rumor spreads that Leary is turning states evidence. Lot’s of wild rumors and speculations follow, and with Watergate thrown into the mix and soon pretty much everyone is beginning to believe that sombunall people in “the Government [are] Capable of Anything.”
A lesson in Karma introduces us once again to the special relationship between Bob and his children, in particular his youngest daughter Luna. Bob opens by noting that “Lao-Tse says (at least in Leary’s translation) that the Great Tao is most often found with parents who are willing to learn from their children.” I have always loved this chapter, and here are a few of my favorite bits from it.
After detailing how he finally learned to actually hear his children and learn “a great deal from them,” Bob notes that his children went on to listen to him, and that their “mutual respect for each other grew by leaps and bounds.” Wilson goes on to claim that this is “the greatest result I have obtained from all of my occult explorations.”
He then goes on to recount how Luna taught him “the hardest lesson of all,” by refusing to take on any of the bad energy from a gang of black kids who had beaten and robbed her on her way home from school. “I stopped the wheel of Karma,” she tells him.
The only way to “stop the wheel,” Bob notes, “is to stop it inside yourself, by giving up bad energy and concentrating on the positive.” He references Gurdjieff and “the horror of the situation,” and notes that 13 year old Luna understood this better than he did, at 43, “with all my erudition and philosophy.”
Witchcraft recounts another parent/child story, this time involving Bob’s son Graham, roaming the wilds of Arizona with friends in April of 1974. While I have to wonder what RAW would think of the current generation of Helicopter Parents, the Author wisely uses this story of interstate “astral travel” as a stepping stone for a discussion of his “concerted effort to gain admission into as many shamanic schools as possible” which grew out of his effort to follow the edict of Aleister Crowley to engage with multiple gods and goddesses “so as not to fall into the error of monotheism.”
He notes that Uncle Aleister had love affairs with “Allah, Nuit, Pan, Kali, the Virgin Mary, and quite a few others,” and then drops that other lovely AC nugget — “Thank God I’m an atheist.”
All the while, the Skeptic continues to work with the notion that any experience with a “luminous being is probably subjective, barring any objective evidence, and possibly extraterrestrial when he finds himself seeing things that are happening hundred of miles away at the same time.
Nikola Tesla
In Nikola Tesla, secular shaman, Bob recounts the parallels between the “wild talents” (and their acquisition) of Nikola Tesla, Gopi Krishna, and certain tribal shamans. None of this sounds particularly fun, and here we are reading the account of someone who is undertaking this sort of thing on purpose!
Gopi Krishna
The Author also distills for us a formula — “near death plus ‘rebirth’ on a higher level” — which he finds in occult initiations of all types. He also notes the use of bringing the initiate into a “state of terror.”
Curiously, in a chapter ostensibly about Contact and Contactees, the Author then states that “Obviously, the first shamans had no teachers; they simply went through the illness-rebirth transition accidentally, as it were.” Whatever happened to extra-terrestrials? — Aha! One sentence later…”entities of superhuman nature,” assisting an initiation that may never end!
The Prognosticator then finishes the chapter with this nugget—“Obviously, the whole show shamanic process of near-death and rebirth on a higher level will become commonplace by the 1990s, if Leary is right and we have then both a Simulated Death pill and an Immortality pill.” I love his use of the word “obviously.” And the focus on a pill makes sense if we consider that statement from Cosmic Trigger 2 that Bob was taking a lot more acid in 1973 than he let on in Cosmic Trigger. Although I’m not so sure the average human would choose to go down that road regardless of the ease provided by a pill.
Okay — that’s it from me. Hopefully you can find a bit of controversy in these chapters and my commentary thereupon. And regardless — please comment, that what brings this old text to life!
Next week we begin on page 141 (Hilaritas!) with Other starry signals and finish with Dope and divinity. Until then, remember the Dog Star, rising and setting with our Sun.
Neal Stephenson. (Creative Commons photo by Bob Lee.)
There's been a lot of discussion in this week's Cosmic Trigger online discussion about Robert Anton Wilson's predictions for technology breakthroughs in the near future, including life extension and space colonization.
I wrote in the comments that "RAW's predictions on longevity have turned out badly so far, and his predictions on space travel/space colonization haven't worked out, either, but a lot of people have been wrong about the pace of space travel, including Arthur C. Clarke, who has generally done well with predictions. I've seen discussion about the unexpectedly slow pace of space travel and technology in general from Neal Stephenson, Tyler Cowen and Peter Thiel, among others." Allow me to clarify and expand on that.
Eric Wagner wrote in reply, "I don't think Bob's prediction on longevity and space migration have turned out badly. I think the changes have happened more slowly than he anticipated, but the he correctly saw the trends."
About whether life extension is likely to happen anytime soon, I am agnostic; I have not studied it the way that Charles Faris or Rasa have, so I don't feel qualified to offer an opinion. As for space migration, I tend to agree with Eric that it seems likely.
The establishment of space colonies in orbit and on the Moon hasn't happened as quickly as RAW thought it would, but a lot of other people were wrong about that, too. In fact, many people have written in the past few years about how space travel and technology in general have not advanced as quickly as expected.
Tyler Cowen wrote an entire book, The Great Stagnation, to argue that with the exception of information technology, there have been few advances in technology in the last few decades and that for the most part the way we live is very similar to how our grandparents lived.
Peter Thiel has been thinking along much the same lines, and in fact referenced stagnation in his speech about a week ago at the Republican convention, saying that during the time of the Apollo space program, "The future felt limitless."
"But today our government is broken. Our nuclear bases still use floppy disks. Our newest fighter jets can’t even fly in the rain. And it would be kind to say the government’s software works poorly, because much of the time it doesn’t even work at all.
"That is a staggering decline for the country that completed the Manhattan Project. We don’t accept such incompetence in Silicon Valley, and we must not accept it from our government.
"Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East."
Neal Stephenson, in his 2011 essay "Innovation Starvation" (reprinted in the book Some Remarks) wrote, "I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where's my donut-shaped space station? Where's my ticket to Mars? ... I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program may be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer, to name only a few."
What steps should be taken to revive a sense of optimism about technology and "get things done"?
