Tristan Eldritch — no doubt his real name — blogs at a few years in the Absolute Elsewhere. His latest blog entry, Cosmic Trigger: Le Soleils de l'ile de Paques (The Suns of Easter Island) 1972. offers this observation:
The early to mid-70s is a period I'm particularly fascinated by; it was a watershed era for Fortean/occult shenanigans. The idea of mental contact with extraterrestrial higher intelligence was very much in the ether during this strange time. On July 23, 1973, the great Robert Anton Wilson experienced the first of what he then suspected to be transmissions from an extraterrestrial intelligence located somewhere in the vicinity of the dog star Sirius. Timothy Leary, then doing the persecuted philosopher routine in Folsom prison, was also receiving downloads from a cosmic intelligence - a cosmic intelligence, it should be conceded, whose oracular pronouncements sounded more than a little like Leary himself. Philip K. Dick was writing the best fiction of his career, and was of course zapped by the motherlode of all cosmic transmissions in the legendary VALIS incident of '2-3-74'.
The post is actually part of a review of an old movie.
Unrelated question: I seem to recall a passage in Illuminatus! about organized crime making a campaign contribution to try to keep marijuana illegal, but I couldn't find it when I went looking. Can anyone help?
2 comments:
I couldn't find quite what you are looking for in Illuminatus!
However, these two bits sounded similar:
"You're in the dope business, too?"
"I'm in every illegal business. Every time a government declares something verboten, two groups!
move in to service the black market created: the Mafia and the LDD. That stands for Lawless
Delicacy Dealers."
And from APPENDIX YOD: OPERATION MINDFUCK
"Citizens Against Drug Abuse. This organization possesses elegant letterheads and is engaged in a
campaign of encouraging Congressmen to outlaw catnip, a drug which some young people are
smoking whenever marijuana is in short supply. The thought behind this project is that, the
government having lost so much credibility due to its war against pot (a recent ELF survey showed
that in some big cities a large portion of the under-25 population did not believe in any of the moon
shots and assumed they were all faked somewhere in the American Desert), a campaign against this
similar but more comical herb will destroy the last tattered shreds of faith in the men in Washington."
Those are close, but not quite what I was looking for. Very frustrating as I'm pretty sure I didn't hallucinate the passage.
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