Illuminatus online reading group, Week 14

Hassan Sabbah, leader of the Assassins. 

(This week: Page 134, "Joe stood there looking at the mocking bandit," to page 144 "to see if Danny found this 'Pat' who wrote them.")

In class at Harvard, Hagbard Celine realizes that his unpopular opinions are not welcomed by many of the other students: "As in law school, the other students were disturbed. Hagbard began to understand: they are not here to learn, they are here to acquire a piece of paper that will make them eligible for certain jobs ... "

While I agree that many people go to college and emerge with all of their previous beliefs intact, there are people who see the campus experience as a kind of voyage of discovery. I went to the University of Oklahoma (in 1974) thinking I was a liberal Democrat, and emerged  (in 1978) (acquiring my piece of paper, a journalism degree, one year later) thinking of myself as a libertarian, a person who had peculiar opinions and who sometimes read very peculiar books.

It is interesting to go to college and see RAW's observations on belief systems played out, not only in the diversity of opinion among various folks who are all convinced that they are right, but in the way people change their belief systems. I had one friend who was a various times a Marxist and a Jesus Freak. (He was always into drugs, though, and never had a libertarian phase.) The Marxist bit stuck.

Try as I might, I cannot remember how I heard about Illuminatus! or how I "found the others," the other campus libertarians. I might have heard about Illuminatus! from some of my new friends, or I might have run across it in paperback book rack (then, as now, I was a voracious reader, particularly of cheap science fiction paperbacks.) I wrote to a couple of these guys over the weekend, asking what they could remember. Steve Browne (he has a blog and still calls himself a libertarian, his views resemble the Instapundit's) wrote back: "I remember finding out about the trilogy. My late friend John Aynesworth discovered it and brought it over to my place and read the entire 'Atlas Shrugged' parody 'Telemachus Sneezed' to me and some others that were there, can't remember who." (Many years later, when I was in the 50s, I discovered that John was a fellow member of the Libertarian Futurist Society. In the libertarian movement, there are seldom very many degrees of separation.)

The bit about Ayn Rand is telling. Most libertarians in those days obtained their opinions by reading Rand tomes such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There was even a popular libertarian book by Jerome Tuccille called It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand. (Hmm, I see that there is a cheap revised Kindle edition.) 

But not me. I went to a high school on the south side of Tulsa where I was surrounded by conservative Republicans, some of them my friends. (It's the side of Tulsa that had the "Socs," if you've read S.E. Hinton). I was a liberal Democrat who opposed the war in Vietnam, although when I went to college I found I didn't have any affinity, either, with the Marxists who celebrated the fall of Saigon. Reading Illuminatus! was a critical stage in discovering that I was something called a "libertarian."

So for me it began with Illuminatus! and continued with books such as the ones mentioned above and with The Illuminati Papers. Illuminatus! resembled the world I sometimes found myself in, at least when I went to parties. And for other people, I think it began with Illuminatus! too.

If you read my 2011 Jesse Walker interview, you can see he went through a political evolution similar to mind. Here is a passage from that interview: "Illuminatus! is one of the first forthrightly libertarian books I read. I've joked that the great invisible divide in the libertarian movement is between the people who were transformed by reading Atlas Shrugged in high school and people who were transformed by reading Illuminatus! I never went through a Rand phase, so you can put me firmly in the Illuminatus! camp."

Jesse says he jokes about it, but even now, I think the Rand fans tend to be a little more "right" than the RAW fans, although many libertarians would cite both as an influence.

In the 1970s, when one became a libertarian, one usually went on to read various movement books. For me, those books included For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard, The Incredible Bread Machine and Rand's anthology, For the New Intellectual, still the only Rand book I've ever read.

It's interesting to me that Illuminatus! fans tend to fall in different camps. I don't remember that my friends and I talked about magick or Kabbalah, or even reality tunnels. I don't remember any particular interest in Timothy Leary. Libertarians in those days favored legalization of drugs, of course, but when I think about it, I realize that the libertarians I knew were not, in fact, the biggest druggies of my acquaintance. We were all involved with the nascent Libertarian Party. The biggest surprise to me in writing this blog is that not many RAW fans seem terribly interested in libertarianism. Perhaps it's a testimony to the man that he had so many different interests, and people pick up on them in so many different ways.

So, how did you discover Illuminatus!, and what effect did it have on you? 

Some notes on the text:

"it seemed to him a frieze and a freeze in time: a moment that would linger, as another stage in illumination," pages 134-135 this sounds to me like Zen, the Buddhist path to sudden insight. 

"But more years had to pass .... and  Joe had to plan the bombing of his own magazine with Tobias Knight," page 135. This is apparently in 1969-1970. According to the handy Iluminatus! timeline in Eric Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, the bombing took place on April 23, 1976.

"Tequila y Mota Street," page 136. Named after the ruling dictator, Captain Ernesto Tequila & Mota (page 18) but I did not realize until now that "mota" is slang for marijuana.

"The SAC bases," page 137, the Strategic Air Command, the bombers  in the U.S. Air Force deployed to drop nuclear bombs.

The Book of Lies, by Aleister Crowley, written under the pen name of Frater Perdurabo.

Hassan i Sabbah, leader of the Assassins. Perhaps this is a good time to mention that according to the Wikipedia article, he had an associate named Malik: "Hassan's austere and devoted commitment to the da'wa brought him in audience with the chief missionary of the region: ‘Abdu l-Malik ibn Attash."

"Jesus Christ went by on a bicycle," page 142. LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann rode home on a bicycle during the first intentional acid trip. See the reference to Jarry on page 143.

"they are here to acquire a piece of paper that would make them eligible for certain jobs," page 144. For the concept of signalling, go here. An amusing British perspective on signalling in American colleges is here.

(Next week: From page 144 "ILLUMINATI PROJECT MEMO #15" to page 154, "and you're going to tell the judge that, in exactly those words.")