Michael Johnson on Illuminatus!

I'm psyched beyond belief to have leading RAW exegete Michael Johnson, the Overweening Generalist himself, join us for a rollicking tour of the Illuminatus! idea space!

Go get yourself a cup of coffee, find a nice place to sit, and prepare to stretch your mind into a Bavarian pretzel :)))

 bc: How did Illuminatus! find you and what impact did it have on your life?

MJ: It was around 1992.  I have it all in journals somewhere, as I had become a compulsive chronicler of my quotidian doings starting 9/8/89, but there are now sooo many spiral-bound notebooks crammed with minutiae on dusty shelves in a closet that it would take half a day to find the exact date. Anyway, here’s how I remember discovering RAW: My wife and I had gone out to our favorite diner (in Torrance, CA) and afterward, as we often did, browsed a bookstore across the street from the diner. At that time, my biggest influence was Aldous Huxley, a novelist/essayist whose wide range of topics made me swoon. I read everything by him, sometimes thrice. I still have a long couple of shelves of his stuff. But I was interested in...if not "everything" then certainly too many areas of knowledge. It's a weird problem to have, I think. I know some people find they really love one or two areas and they go all-in for decades. Civil War buffs, medieval European history, Carl Jung, city planning and infrastructure and building codes, Elizabethan poets and Shakespeare, French cooking, etc. Bless these folk but I cannot do it. I've tried, like the cigarette addict who "quits" 2,300 times. 

Anyway, I'm browsing and found a couple things I'd been wanting to read. Then I saw this spine of a thin book titled Right Where You Are Sitting Now. Interesting title. Robert Anton Wilson. Nevah hoidda dis dude. No familiarity at alI. Colin, Edward O, Edmund, even August: I knew these Wilsons and had enjoyed them all, especially Edward O.  I did what I call an "x-ray" of the book: you open at random for a hit of the thing. You flip around inside and get the general lay of the land. Is there an index? No, but: a quiz next to an essay on politics (and his seemed a lot like mine, or close enough), odd and trippy artwork and illustrations, a glossary? Cool! And I didn't know some of the terms. The structure of the thing looked wild. Sorta like some Modernist magazine format. Okay, I'll get it. 

I went home and started reading it and read it all into around 4AM, couldn't put it down, was instantly enchanted, went to work bleary-eyed with this Wilson guy's ideas/tone/outlooks/provocations rattling around in my cortices. Came home tired, took a nap, then started reading it again. It's still one of my favorite books.

Now: I've been a bookish person for as long as I can remember. My mom said she read to me every day as an infant, and around age 2 or 3 (the story varied), I astonished her when I just started reading by myself one day. I remember her teaching me phonics. When you're this sort of person you develop a reading style with certain habits. Reading "fingerprints", for lack of a better term. This first reading of RAW was not normal for me. I think the cut-ups - which I'd been somewhat familiar with because a colleague at work - a gay poet - loved Burroughs…were particularly provocative. And so I'd seen some of WSB's cut-up stuff and knew a bit about the theory of it. I liked RAW's cut-ups. Or rather: he used them in a slightly different way than WSB did: he seemed to still have an agenda for his audience's reading brain. There were messages he wanted to get across, so there were breaks in the cut-ups, which then resumed. It all seemed to be linked to the equation from Claude Shannon, of which: this, too, was totally new for me. This was overwhelmingly interesting to me, as it seemed to be writing about how reading occurs. This was one of a few things I found completely fascinating and still do. I've since read a bunch of books on the phenomenology and neurobiology of reading, and RAW was the main impetus.

His hermetic morphing into different types of writers, which he usually pointed out to us - the Investigative Journalist, the Skeptic, the goofy comic writer who filled one page with two "zen telegrams", the piece on Bucky Fuller, etc. - I loved this ironic mercurial "role- playing” by him. 

Also: there seemed to be some codes I couldn't crack, like in-group jokes. I took this as a challenge. Maybe other RAW books would give hints?

After I woke up I read the entire book again. I can't say I understood it, especially the gnomic cut-ups. The essay on Pop Ecology was fascinating, but I tended to disagree with him, though I wasn't exactly sure why. He made me think, which made me brim-over with gratitude. I have never lost that feeling with him. 

Sorry this answer was so long, so I'll wrap it up here: I did what I'd always done: does the library - where I worked at the time - have any other of his books? They didn't. (They had Playboy’s Book of Forbidden Words in the reference section at another branch. Nothing to check out.) None. I could get a few via Interlibrary Loan, but at that time I had a job with a regular paycheck and what better things to buy than books? So I hunted down and concocted a bibliography, with notes on which books seemed to be a big deal from him. I put in special orders for four or five of his books. I recall there was something like a "temporarily out of print" deal about his Illuminatus! book, so I had to wait. I'm not kidding: within 3-4 months I'd bought and read the first two Cosmic Triggers, Prometheus Rising, Ishtar Rising, and I forget what others before one day I walked into another bookstore and not far from the front door there was a huge stack - literally on the floor - of the hardback single-volume of Illuminatus!, put out by MJF Books of NY, NY, for like $6.99. You ever see a book and one second later POUNCE on it?

This is what a geek I was and still am: for some reason - hey younger readers? This was WAY before Amazon - the woman who worked in the bookstore who took my special orders for Wilson books had a pronounced lisp over the phone when she called to inform me that "Prometheuth...Ritheeng?" - she said it like a question - had come in for me and was ready to be picked up. Some neurobiologists who study memory call this "flashbulb" memory: a heightened physical state in which you remember everything, like 9/11, or the JFK assassination, or the day they announced New Coke. I had that for Prometheus Rising coming in for me to read. My gawd, it's almost embarrassing to say that!

When I started in on Illuminatus!, it was on some other level of reading. I hadn't read Ulysses yet, though I'd been "meaning" to. My numerous readings in Illuminatus! definitely prepared me for Joyce. And it became obvious - as I hunted for fugitive interviews with him pre-Internet, via databases librarians worked with at that time, that not only was he heavily influenced by Joyce, but consciously used his techniques. Learning how to read the Modern Novel was a step-up for me, and RAW was my best teacher. Aldous Huxley's novels were in the tradition of 19th century novelist George Meredith and the "Novel Of Ideas." I remember Aldous saying somewhere that he thought Joyce's experiments were not a good idea. This made me realize what a departure I'd made since Huxley was my main squeeze. Both Huxley and Wilson were generalist intellectuals, from very different socioeconomic classes, but they are both didactic, which I love. 

Just developing strategies for grappling with and enjoying what I still think of as "experimental" prose techniques was an education in itself. Not long after this, I also developed a serious Pynchon addiction that has never abated. All this was another dimension of reading, and I got a huge buzz from it, which is addicting as all get-out, lemme confess.

bc: I asked Grant Morrison's advice about adapting a classic novel to a new medium and he advised care in maintaining the "original energy" of the book. Illuminatus! seems to be made of pretty stern stuff, in that it survived & thrived after having 500 pages cut at random pre-original publication, and even an adaptation into a 12 hour anarchistic stage play. How would you describe the "original energy" of Illuminatus!? What is it doing literarily that makes it unique?

MJ: Wow. Great question, Bob. Where to start? Okay: all of us at one time or another just sat back dazzled and a tad dizzy with our recent foray into RAW and Shea's book and wondered: how would those extra 500 pages have affected my experience? I've grown into the heresy that it's a goddessend that a lot got cut, because no doubt it added to the "modernistic" structure. 

RAW at times invoked DW Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard and a few others when talking about the structure of these novels and other works of literary modernism: the new and radical (and still "radical", judging by the best-seller lists) thing was collage in Art, montage in film, the ideogrammic method used by Pound in making his revolution in poetry, and stochastic operations originally popularized by surrealists and Dadaists like Tristan Tzara and Max Ernst. RAW had talked about how, for some reason - he has opinions as to why - literature took a long time to catch up to film and painting. A lot of it was due to monied conservatism of publishers, although I think it has more to do with our methods of reading, the neurobiological phenomena of reading, the way we're taught - in certain ways teachers who mean well tend to give the impression that difficulty is to be avoided, probably because their mandate is to produce workers who can communicate lucidly? - and what we assume writing and reading is "for." 

Nota bene RAW's naming of three filmmakers when discussing modernistic structure in literature. Why can a lot of us watch Intolerance, Battleship Potemkin and Breathless and "get it" while our eyes glaze over when we try to sample Ulysses? It's too much for me to get into now, so I'll try to get back to answering your question: RAW (and I don't know how much Shea had to do with this; perhaps more than I thought?) was thoroughly steeped in Pound/Joyce/ Burroughs and other modernist experiments and and structure, and he had linked this to Shannon's literally world-changing equation for Information Theory: the more we can't guess what's going to come next, the more information in a text, and when there's a very high level of information, the reader's consciousness is likely to be altered in ways they haven't experienced with...let's say: best-sellers. In this, the editing of Illuminatus! "is" style, which "is" content. Which “is” energy.

From the beginning, a technique linked to the earliest modernist experiments - Free Indirect Discourse - occurs. Who or what is talking here in the first paragraph of the novel: "For instance, I am not even sure who I am, and my embarrassment on that matter makes me wonder if you will believe anything I reveal." This voice allows the writers to tell us stuff while making us unsure about the veracity or status of the speaker. It's now commonplace in certain writers and styles; it all depends what you do with it. Then the narration shifts, shifts again, and there are, very soon in the novel, jump-cuts, and even a few of what we'd think of now as "hip-hop editing": very quick, seemingly too fast cuts from one character or scene to the next. 

The avalanche of information, its density, the play with genres: RAW told Briggs and Apel in an interview that the novel was trying to "be all things at once: detective story, allegory, science fiction, satire, porno, fairy tale, novel of ideas, adventure story, and the literary equivalent of pop art in a sense." This all obviously adds to the destabilization of reading strategies and fosters altered states in the game reader. The space/time shifts, the arcane information delivered by members of one secret society battling with others and you don't know who's pulling another character’s - or your own - leg in order to gain an advantage: all this probably seems a bit much for the ordinary reader. Those who love this are, to paraphrase Pynchon slightly out of context, weirdos on my wavelength. The ones who dismiss it after reading 50 pages are the ones I want to stay away from: nothing good can come from such a person. 

Lastly, you asked what makes it unique. Beside what I say above, I think it's the inclusion of very outré references: to Discordianism (how many had read the Principia beforehand?), scenarios around "Western" tantra, ideas about this character Hassan i Sabbah, allusions to Crowley and 20th century magick, dense allusions to genres and texts that have been largely marginalized in US education, of course “conspiracy theory” was déclassé if not taboo in “serious” education, too. And then there were just lots of things that were sorta "current" around university "hippie" milieux in the roiling late 1960s. The entire book is a bright, blinking hint that the reader might want to take time out and read marginalized discourses, pulp writers, organized crime, anarchist theories, the hermetic tradition, kabbalah, etc. The encyclopedic aspects of this were (and are) a thrill for me. RAW was influenced by the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, who called books like Illuminatus! an “Anatomy.” 

Recently another academic, David Letzler, wrote about “cruft” in fat encyclopedic novels like those of Joyce, Pynchon and Gaddis: cruft is a computer scientist’s term for code that accomplishes what it needed to do, but there was a lot of not-totally-necessary stuff added to the code: “cruft”. And his thesis (in The Cruft of Fiction) is that spotting cruft within the narrative of 700 page novels helps us to more efficiently read our information environments in what I so laffingly think of as “real-life.” It’s an interesting idea. The next time we read Illuminatus!, try to spot the cruft. In a certain sense, cruft is part of the author’s style, so it’s not “trash.” It seems to be the stuff that encourages a lot of readers to quit by page 50, though. 

Also: there still seems a dearth of literature on the Bavarian Illuminati translated into English. 

Now, any time one of us might make an assertion about what is "unique." It's a throw-down challenge to other nerds, geeks, erudites, and other Cool Cats to cite references and say, "Naw man! That was done before by So-and-So: check out Q,X, Z, Y books." So, for example, have we all read The Butterfly Kid (1967) by Chester Anderson? What about Unicorn Girl (1969), by Mike Kurland? Or maybe: T.A. Waters's 1970 novel The Probability Pad? Oh, and talk about that zeitgeist: Brian Aldiss's 1969 novel Barefoot In The Head seems like something RAW and/or Shea might have had next to their bed during the later writing of Illuminatus! I'd say RAW's inclusion of physical science along ideas about, say, astrology or popular gangster myths sets this apart. Again, it's a matter of degrees of uniqueness, I suppose. I mean, Willard effing Gibbs shows up! Who was that for?

bc: (This is more of a conversational question that pertains to what I have on my drawing board at the moment, it's okay if there's nothing to it!)

I noticed that the Bobs seem to go out of their way to refer to "Russia" as opposed to the "Soviet Union." Is this just the genuine parlance of their day? (Like people still referring to "Twitter") Or do you think this is an intentional creative choice?

MJ: I don't know. I don't think I'd really considered this Q. My guess would be that we say "Russia" vs. "the Soviet Union" because it's less syllables. You know, we all have things to do, stuff to "get done." Why waste valuable life-seconds adding four syllables when two was just fine? If you add it all up, I might get more "accomplished" in life than you because you unwisely used six syllables while I conveyed roughly the "same" meaning using only two, and now look at me: billionaire, bon vivant, man-about-town. It's about efficiency, son! Ask any other fascist tech-bro billionaire. (Which is what now? All of 'em?)

Also, when you say "Russia" you get the unvoiced fricative, of the /sh/ sound and it's a minor thrill to push that air through your upper incisors; "Soviet Union" makes your mouth do funny contortions, and the /v/ is a voiced fricative; the /t/ a debuccalized glottalization. Fer crissakes, everyone knows that.

bc: As someone well steeped in Illuminatus! lore, and even the expanded RAW universe, (perhaps Shea's as well?) do you have any favorite hidden details or obscure storylines that might be worth signposting for fellow explorers of the luminous?

MJ: Holy crap there seems to be so very much and personally I've gotten flummoxed and nonplussed over the years with these, so it got to the point where I'm no longer sure what's hidden or obscure.  Illuminatus! is the rabbit hole nonpareil. I’d like to see it get the treatment that Gifford and Seidman gave Ulysses (I mean, who can really begin to grok the “Proteus” or “Scylla and Charybdis” sections without that?), or at least Steven Weisenburger’s delightful A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion. 

A few times I've found out that when I'd assumed something had been made-up but it turned out to be true. When I first read Illuminatus! I thought Fernando Poo was a crude joke, like a lot of the other ones. But it's an actual place (now called Bioko) with very rich and real history, and Sir Richard Burton the explorer, writer, translator of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, and influence on Crowley had worked for the British government there? Whoa! Now that's an educational avenue I never would've driven down in high school!  And furthermore, the spy and spy-novelist and bestseller Frederick Forsyth (who RAW has name-checked a few times)  had actually been involved somehow in a coup d'etat there? Equatorial Guinea. Something like that. I forget. If I recall, Forsyth had written novels The Day of the Jackal about the attempted assassination of de Gaulle and The Odessa File, about Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. So you're telling me he wrote Dogs Of War about a coup in Equatorial Guinea that he had a hand in actually trying to pull off in real life? Or did I dream that? That's what a novel like Illuminatus!, with so much info, deception, and layers does to you: I can't remember what's "true" anymore. Sometimes. You follow the information and you end up down in some town you've never visited and you don't know the language, or how you got there. But here's the thing: some of us like that feeling. I assume this all somehow works via Pauli and Jung's synchronicity: RAW pulls "Beethoven was a member of the Illuminati" out of his ass, for a satire on right wingers who feared the Beatles being subversive political figures...and the Beethoven bit turns out to be true? The “Cosmic Giggle Factor.”

Dell paperbacks sat on Illuminatus! for at least three years. That building's at 666 5th Avenue in NY. It was bought by Jared Kushner and then he needed money so he sold it to...the Carlyle Group. Am I making that up?

Genius TV writer Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul) came up with a character who got his fake name, not from Illuminatus!, but from how people slurring say "It's all good, man." - Saul Goodman. A mere coincidence. We can relax. Typical Jewish name. Take a deep breath.

I assume a lot of our readers know full well what I'm talking about. To be parsimonious, it could be that when you jam in so many arcane facts and fictional stuff over 800 pages you reach some sort of critical mass in which the info takes on a different life. Fiddle with energy levels and steam congeals into water, water into ice, and pretty soon you’ve got ice cubes poured into your underwear. Something you never bargained for.

Lately I've been marveling at how much "hidden" James Joyce there is in RAW's books. For those who've read some of Joyce, you've seen it, but I suspect most people have no idea how much Joyce is hidden in RAW's work. Sure, a lot of it is explicit. But quite a bit of it would only be seen by a serious Joyce scholar. Maybe not "hidden" at all to a large percentage of RAW fans though? I really admire that rhizome, that tendril, between Simon Moon and his hash-and-tantric-fucking black girlfriend Mary Lou Servix. On p.537,  just before Simon heads off from O’Hare with her in a plane with a copy of Telemachus Sneezed. Especially  starting around p.635, where Simon meets his father Tim and Simon asks him, with joy, "Tell me the Word." Tim tells him "Kether, right here in the middle of Malkuth." Mary Lou then asks Simon who that man was and Simon says it was his father and he might never see him again. We then get a Mary Lou inner monologue, followed by another a few pages later, culminating with a Molly Bloom-like page-long soliloquy that uses "No" where Molly uses "Yes" and illustrates the consciousness of an intelligent African-American woman who has lived a life in racist America. That soliloquy is on p.674. I personally find it very powerful...and odd because there are so many storylines and cuts where you're not sure who's talking; even the best readers shouldn't be ashamed to admit they can't quite keep all the threads together; I noted how often I forgot there were these tones in the book. There's a gaping chasm between capsule paragraph-or-two-long descriptions of the Trilogy out there - "counterculture" "the Lord of the Rings for dope smokers" "every conspiracy theory might be true" "Dillinger, the Dealy Lama, and Hagbard Celine and their philosophies" "1970s countercultural cannabis and late-night dorm-room bull session novel", etc - and those of us who are attempting to become exegetes of the Damned Thing. My gawd Shea and RAW were hot, 1968-71, when the bulk of it was written. Zeitgeist? Aye!

Throughout RAW's fiction the character "Simon Moon" appears in various universes, with little variation, but some. He's largely based on a labor-left-anarchist named Neal Rest, who Shea and RAW knew in Chicago in 1968. Tom Jackson interviewed Neal Rest, who said that Simon Moon was part himself and part Chicago-based surrealist scholar Franklin Rosemont. I remembered reading Rosemont on the surrealist qualities in Bugs Bunny, and that shows up in one or two of Wilson’s books. But Simon's also a lot like Stephen Dedalus, I think. They’re roughly the same age, both Irish. Simon's a working-class intellectual cannabis fiend and even writes FW-like prose in Schrodinger's Cat. So, I’m thinking I don't have to be like Stephen, who Buck Mulligan says "has proved by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father" to assert that Simon Moon contains some shards of Joyce too. In his earliest (?) incarnation, in The Sex Magicians, he's "Simeon Luna." 

Let us ponder that for a second, knowing what happened to RAW's family three years after The Sex Magicians... A side Q that will go on forever until you're sick of it: why all the Moons in RAW's work? I'm just goofin' here, but "Celine" is very similar to selanna, from the Greek "moon" and Selanna appears as the Moon Goddess in Pound's Canto #106. In RAW Explains Everything he drops that when he had polio his mother (who battered him) said a novena to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Nova=nine, the number for the moon. Bucky Fuller published Nine Chains to the Moon. 

I look at what's written of the relationship between Simon and his dad Tim: working class intellectual Irishman, and see a tenderness that I can't help think was similar to RAW's memories of his own father. Lest we suspect we're leaving out Shea's contribution to Simon Moon, RAW told Neal Wilgus in a (1977?) interview that Simon was "99%" his writing. In Lion of Light the moon is identified with the Age of Isis and oral/matrist Partnership values (which RAW thought were shared by Leopold, Molly and Stephen, by the by...). In The Walls Came Tumbling Down, the protagonist Michael Ellis has a Harvard Psychology Professor friend named Simon Selena, who aside from the obvious parse of Leary, seems a lot like Marcello Truzzi to me. Does this have anything to do with a character from the late 18th/early 19th century, Seamus Muadhen (AKA "James Moon") seeing a meteorite and not being believed by the CSICOPpers of his day? Certainly RAW wanted to thread the Moon family from the 18th century into the 21st, if only things had worked out. I think we got a lot of it...

Simon and Tim: Tim was a Wobbly. (RAW’s father was in the Longshoreman’s Union.) This reminds me of the family and familial descent of Frenesi Gates in Pynchon's Vineland, a novel I've long been obsessed with. Frenesi's parents were Leftists and worked in Hollywood and lived through the Blacklist, and grandpa was a Wobbly, too. Pynchon scholars (and I, too) see a historical through-line in Frenesi's family background to the kinship system that linked the IWW to the blacklist to the 1960s hippies and radicals...which dies in the 1980s by Frenesi's choices and the election of Reagan and Bush. What killed the idealism of the 1960s? Vineland seems to be about that, at least in part. Industrial Left-wing terrorist "Webb Traverse" in Pynchon's Against The Day is Frenesi's mother Sasha's grandfather in Vineland. Why don't we know more about the Industrial Workers of the World? Just a Q...

Frenesi's mistakes in Vineland haunt me, and it has a lot to do with a corrupt SCOTUS that basically said Fuck You to the Founding Fathers on 7/1/2024. Your mileage may vary.

William Cookes pioneered work on element #34: Selenium, then turned to "spiritualism", much to the consternation of the London Royal Society. NB: locoweed is like meth for cows: it leeches selenium from the soil and gets cows all weirded-out. Think of that the next time you see a cow.

Stanford psychologist and sufi and Idries Shah friend Robert Ornstein cites G. William Domhoff (who also studied the richest families in the US and how they intermarry, etc) on his conclusions from a survey on the myth and symbolism of "left" and "right" by noting that “the left is often the area of taboo, the sacred, the unconscious, the feminine, the intuition, and the dreamer. And we do find that the symbolism of the two sides of the body is quite often in agreement with these ideas. In myth, the feminine side is most often on the left, the masculine on the right." (Psychology of Consciousness, p.64) q.v. John Higgs, who sees the moon's effects on consciousness in history: Stranger Than We Can Imagine, pp.165-166.

Maybe it's all a coincidance and I'm a just-a-readin' into it. But does this idea in any way favor Objective Reality a tad too much and does it put Poetic Imagination out on the street? This I refuse to allow. I'll give Poetic Imagination a bed and a shower and two scrambled eggs any day. Least I could do.

I really could - you damned well know I could - go on and on with this, but I can see I'm boring y'all. Does it have something to do with Nietzsche and sun-Apollonian vs. moon-Dionysian thought? Is the moon the right hemisphere, metaphorically? Are metaphors generated in the right hemisphere? Is the linear computer-coded "reason" the reason we're in a shit-ton of trouble now, nationally and globally? Do we need more "moon": poetic thought and "female" wisdom? I haven't seen any literary critics wax on about this. Why? (No doubt I've missed out somewhere...) What do I seem to be arguing for here?

Do we get much more “moon” from reading books rather than on our digital gadgets?

I can't go on...I will go on: Is RAW only a recent writer in a long long looooong line of writers coding for "moon"? Is there some sort of Poetic Conspiracy going on? Tom Robbins has a hilarious shaggy dog bit about moon rocks and cheese, moon power and females in Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, pp.59-60. In Robbins's Still Life With Woodpecker the Unabomber-like Woodpecker, an outlaw, has a very strong affinity for the moon. Robbins was interviewed by the FBI when they were trying to track down Kaczynski, or is that common knowledge? On p.77 of Still Life, the "essential insanities" are linked to the moon; the inessential ones are linked to herd-mentality values, and are "solar."

I'm not sure if I answered?...where was I? Oh. 

I'd say pick a section and then go off and break it down. Have you taken the conning spiel Mama Sutra gives Danny Pricefixer (pp.519-537) out for a spinning chase-down-the-references whirl? You could get lost there. It's so much easier to look up "Carcosa" nowadays; when I was first reading Illuminatus! I wasn't yet on Internet.  I guess I use Internet for a lot of fact-checking, but then get lost tracing down some other weird tidbit. My physical books beckon. 

Aside from my essential inanities around "Moon" here (hey! I'm just typing!, I didn't do it!), a good example of what anyone could get lost in is what Erik Davis did with that memo from Pat, in which the source was Teenset magazine. Simon Moon wrote that?... Wha? Ohhh yea! (???): Adam Weishaupt's motto was Ewige Blumenkraft! : "eternal flower power." Simon clearly is fucking with someone, as is his wont. But Erik Davis found that Internet websites were repeating this "fact" about the Illuminati. What's weirder is Simon's origin story for the Justified Ancients of Mumu (Kick out the JAMS, brothers 'n sistuhs!). Simon tells us it originates with the Babylonians, but Davis traces this back to Von Juntz's Unaussprechlichen Kulten ("unspeakable cults"), which was a part of Weird Tales and a sampler of the Cthulhu Mythos gathered and assembled by Conan-creator Robert E. Howard. 

There are "puzzles to be solved" and then there are "puzzles without end" which are "inexhaustible", a term RAW used for his favorite books.

I recall a few years ago I accidentally happened upon why "Robert Pearson" in Illuminatus! is there. It was an accident on my part. An agent provocateur who worked for...Jerry Rubin? Really? 

Who really originated the All-Seeing Eye? And what was this guy all about? How does he relate to RAW?

Note to any readers left: RAW said he wanted to help us overcome paranoia. I think he was serious. 

bc: During his eulogy for RAW, Alan Moore remarked that Illuminatus! changed paranoia from an illness into an illuminating game, and that certain contemporary conspiracy theorists had switched it back again. How is it that Illuminatus! was able to deal with such toxic subject matter, but alchemically transform it into a clarion call for hope and optimism?

MJ: Well, on a certain level, it was one long Shaggy Dog story, eh? I mean it's a comic novel. We’re supposed to go from paranoia into metanoia, glee, and a delightful pixelation. The first time I read it I thought: what a cool device to see the characters suddenly realize they were in a book (one of RAW's favorite tropes), only to then wonder what kind of a book! This seems to be the answer: what kind of book are you in these days, reader? I ain't talkin’ about book-books but your own world as a metaphor for a book. 

I found out that Tristram Shandy knew he was in a book, but then, even earlier than that, in Don Quixote, some guys came to Quixote's house and saw some Cervantes on the shelf and made untoward remarks, if I recall correctly. It's an olde fiction device, but it still works for me, being something of a simpleton. Gimme a broken fourth (or fifth?) wall any day and I'm in!

It's this hilaritas in Illuminatus! that allows us to be engaged with the text as if it's a "serious world" (or set of worlds); meanwhile, in another circuit of our brain, we also know the thing is a huge put-on. Are there secret societies duking it out? Yea, but RAW says it's "normal mammalian behavior." The ugly disaster we see going on now is, I think, basically, due to an illiterate society that thinks it's literate. To me, that's a fucking nightmare. When I read the Washington Post, I'm quickly in a horror novel, gotta say. I really never bargained for men and women buying that - not Donald Trump and his dead pal Epstein, but "the dumbocrats" - are child molesters. Hey, they do it mostly for fun because they're bad people! And that's what bad, evil people do. It's like 25% of the 30 year olds out there have the mentality of a four-year old preschool bully. Has "modern life" got ya down, friend? Lash out! And furthermore these big-money neoliberals are after the chilluns' adrenochrome in order to live longer. 

I just...never saw that coming. Any one of us might go on from there, but please don't...

Jeeez. A lot of us have spent the last eight years (at least) pondering this Q you pose to me here. I siriusly doubt I have a better answer than anyone else reading this. But I will say this, and Eric Wagner also states this in his forthcoming Straight Outta Dublin: I prefer actual books to reading on the Internet. And I agree with him on this. Why?

There's a lot that we need to consider in the way we are primates who are really good at seeing patterns "out there." If we don't see them, we'll make ourselves recognize patterns pretty soon. It was a fantastic survival mechanism for 99% of the time we walked upright as primates, but now? Not so much. We are suffused with “information” and material wealth, safety, and we apparently don’t know how to manage this very well. It’s quite unlikely a large animal will eat you, but our brains evolved to avoid that situation. Now, it’s a traffic jam, boredom, how other people are ruining your lives with the way they think. (There seems to be something to this, but it seems few can figure out who’s causing actual harm or why.) And these patterns: they...can lead us astray and hypnotize us into thinking we know WTF is going on when we (ahem!) really might not. Not even close. I often think of pareidolia: we see faces in the grill of a car, that kind of thing. And I think it's neurologically linked to our wired-in pattern recognition. Someone once said "What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves." Another weirdo once said something like, "Only the madman is absolutely certain." Something like that...

Although there's quite a bit of research on how comprehension is freakishly higher in studies when children read the same text in a book vs. online, I've been trying to figure this out. At this point I can coldly cite a bunch of studies and passages in books about the neurobiology of reading, but the "physical thing" of a book seems to attenuate the shit-for-brains dealio that people get when they read online, all the live-long day. The quality of potential distractions - reading books vs. being online - seems a different kettle of fish, for one. RAW often talked about Zen being mostly “attention.” And obviously, the online worlds have not fostered this sort of attention. Quite the contrary.

I recently watched a marvelous and sumptuous, 5th-circuity documentary, The Book Makers (2020 James Kennard). The portability of books, the thingification of information packaged that way - the codex book and tactility of paper, the way books smell - seems to go back to a very ancient past in which we manipulated things with our hands. We do not manipulate all that info that's on our screens. It's a different embodied, physical process. I think this has something to do with it, though I'm not sure how much. Certainly, if you're unhappy right now, one hint of advice I could give you is: have as little to do with your smartphone or computer as possible; the data backs me up here. Read books instead. Read old books. If they have a coating of dust on them, they might be lookin' for you. I don't know. 

The neurobiologist Maryanne Wolf - in her Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain In A Digital World - has a lot to say about laying down circuits for reading and comprehension, thinking and creativity from an early age. If you don't get your kids to read BOOKS early on...you get Trump elected, I guess. No, but seriously: I think she's got a great point and there's a long passage near the beginning of the book that gets pretty wonky with neural circuitry and certain lobes and our perceptual apparatuses and... I read it stoned and got a major buzz off it. Reading stoned: we all know of a certain author who was the Greatest of All-Time at this. (But he laid the circuitry down WAY before other media, although there is that anecdote about being terrified at SURRENDER DOROTHY being written in the sky. Do I digress? Maybe it's all the weed.)

Books could snap us out of our misery, though clearly it's somewhat unclear how and yet very ultra-clearly some people - especially men - in history have read some book and it helped make them go insane and commit violent acts. Look at the Bible, Q'uran, The Turner Diaries, Catcher In The Rye, etc. If McLuhan is right: Gutenberg's press fostered nationalism (reading, alone, in your language, not some filthy French-person's or some creepy weirdo Italian's - who can read that?), which might be the worst religion invented yet. 

Of thine own online being: stay away, friends...unless you're typing out answers to Qs from a bruthuh from anuthuh muthuh living in...Pennsylvania, is it? [Just over the bridge in NJ, actually! - bc] (I must add: They have no idea how to handle the Internet and social media; You need to cut way back on your online consumption; I am just fine and have learned how to be Iron Man when it comes to all the toxic hoo-ha. Which is a joke...) Chomsky once said in an interview, and I think he's right: the highly educated class consume huge amounts of Kwality Info; they think they can suss out the BS, but they're wrong: they fall for idiotic ideas all the time. And then are positive they're "right" about them. It's not an easy Q you've posed here. Not easy por moi, at all, at all.

No but seriously: how addicted are we to all this? Only we can answer that for our own selves, but I will say that, on the days when I only check email and look up some fact/factoid/factoidish thing on Wikipedia, I'm happier. 

Another entree into this murk: I remember when I was getting ready to graduate from HS. I was hanging out with some older guys a lot, and my aunt, who wasn't that much older than me, like 10 years older. And I kept getting the feeling that they had gotten much better educations in HS (and I went to a school in a rich area) than my cohort did. They graduated in the 1960s or early 1970s. Me? 1979 (cue:Smashing Pumpkins). And RAW had a conspiracy theory about education being dumbed down, and I don't think he was drilling in a dry hole. I'm not sure about the mechanics of this plot, though. But what do I mean about "education"? Well, I mean mostly: critical thinking and seeing how much BULLSHIT there is out there and not only calling it out, but analyzing why it's there. Look, I'm sure there are 16 year olds right now who are way smarter than I was at 18 and getting ready to graduate, but I tend to think that, all-in-all, education has failed us. And teachers should get paid more, but also: the Socrates Problem (corrupting the youth of Athens by making 'em smart and willing to doubt authority by asking Qs) today seems to have a lot to do with the digitally-addled parents, who want to storm the School Board Meetings and STOP ALL LEARNING THAT DOESN'T FIT MY WORLD VIEW (Which was formed by AM talk radio, Fox News, CNN, Breitbart, Steve Bannon, and the deluge of "leftist" New Age claptrap so endemic now.) 

A Drag Queen reading a storybook to kids in a school will turn 'em GAY! Gender nonconformity wasn't a thing until...certain school books? And these people marched down the row to "Pomp and Circumstance," all proud they made it through. (Myself? I dropped out. Tired of the never-ending Lord of the Flies scene. I couldn’t wait to go to the local community college.)

To go further - and I'm sorry, I realize this answer seems beastly dull, but I'm trying! - I recently got around to Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, and in there she made one of those points that, in some level, in the back of my mind, I "knew" and was operating with, but I don't think I ever made a big-time-forefront-of-consciousness connexion: you will learn a LOT about conspiracy theories if you have a grasp of capitalism on some substantial level. Just get well-acquainted with how it really works. If it changes you, okay. But no matter your politics, get to the point where you could teach a relatively unbiased version of how Capitalism works to a group of bright high schoolers, warts 'n all. And I don't think it's easy to get this: you pretty much have to have a library card, although inside the dizzyingly overwhelming welter of films out there, there are some that can help. Think The Corporation (2003 Jennifer Abbot and Mark Achbar). But mostly: just delve into this for yourself. I'm not saying "become a Leftist if you weren't one before" or "Be like me!": if you develop a well-rounded theory of how capitalism works and still "believe" in it, you'll see a lot of conspiracy theories will go away and you'll think: "Well, that's the way markets are working right now. It's no conspiracy!" “Look at how Google outplayed Apple on that bit.” “Well, the Supremes did fuck us with the ‘money is speech’ thing.” Klein's right, I think when she cites Abram Leon, who researched how antisemitism had been used by capitalists to divert attention from their crimes for hundreds of years. Leon did his research underground, but the Nazis got him at Auschwitz. Now that is a horrifying "novel" that happens to be true.

By the way: the "economically" based conspiracy theories were the ones RAW took seriously. Naomi Klein - who I confess to being in love with - pointed out the "true" conspiracy around Covid vaccinations: that we, the rich people of the Global North got boosters, while the markets weren't never quite right for the Poor of the world. Jeez. She's so much tougher than I am! It was so easy for us to laff at the hideous horrified who talked about 5G and "tracking devices" and say, knowingly, "Wait till they find out about their phones." She actually followed Steve Bannon's “War Room” show, and not only because of Naomi Wolf, her doppleganger, who, I learned, subscribed to the idea that people who were vaccinated were "shedding" all kinds of stuff that makes your mind and affect go blank. Ya gotta wonder. I should pay more attention to...the Q-Anon ideas but Naomi Klein and many of you readers are made of much sterner stuff than I. All that really does give me the willies. I remember when the right wing-fusion with "wellness gurus" New Age stuff really got going, and it was a lot like the last time I visited Las Vegas: Wow! This is both amusing and garish as all get-out! Look at all the lights and beautiful sexy people and there's so much food and entertainment and isn't this all amazing...then…suddenly: get me the fuck outta here! I never want to see Vegas again! This is insane! 

No but seriously: try the veal at Circus Circus.

I use the term "capitalism" but there is no such thing: there are only people acting with intent, within a system. And obviously, there are "socialistic" aspects always going on: look at the Pentagon's budget. Look at Medicare. I personally have major problems with the first and think the second is a beacon of decency in our country. (So the billionaires will have to wreck it somehow?) Whether "capitalism" or "socialism": the details are all that matter. Is it a shareholder's world right now? I think it is, and that's not good, but aún aprendo, as Aldous Huxley used to write. "Still learning."

bc: Given RAW’s penchant for emphasizing the multiplicity of reality, when Illuminatus! gives us conflicting reports about events in the book, from different characters’ perspectives, ala Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, do you think the novel has a true deep reality, where questions like “what really happened in Fernando Poo?” or “Did F.U.C.K.U.P. generate the entire story?” are answerable? Or is it designed to remain forever in the maybe state?

MJ: When I first saw this Q I thought of RAW's friend from the Berkeley Physics-Consciousness Research Group, Nick Herbert, who said, "There is no 'deep reality.'" 

Illuminatus!, that Damned Thing, seems to scream "Maybe" to me, over and over and over. Did RAW and Shea have certain political leanings they hoped might infect some readers? No doubt. They both flew the Black Flag of one shade or another. When I discovered them for myself, I was already learning that way anyway. My anarchism was closer to Simon Moon's than Hagbard's, but I started to see the merits in Hagbard's ideas. Those pirate-smugglers who went around the State and provided, say, that rather large forest of weed I smoked over the decades before it magically became legal medicine? Bless those libertarian-anarchists. Or I'll call 'em whatever they prefer to be called…but stop stealing my lighters. 

Subscribing to one and one only fairly hardcore program for politics seems insane to me. I forget which philosopher said this, but if you're going to travel to a foreign land for personal interest or "vacation" or to just be a tourist, be a good one, but why in the fuck would you buy the Package Tour, where someone already decides ahead of time where you'll go, where and when to eat, when you get back on the boat or bus, etc. That's not a responsible "adult" decision! Be creative, investigate the weird areas, get lost, leave some stuff to chance. I think we need some of that spirit in our political ideas about How We Want Things To Go. Inject some "Maybe" into your tourism. And your tours among political ideas. Yes, you have deeply felt values. Still, there's probably more wiggle-room than you thought.

I knew an American-born guy and his partner. They both graduated from UCLA with degrees in Anthropology and lived and worked in Tokyo, spoke fluent Japanese, and they were proud to call themselves "tourists." I stayed with them in Tokyo and then we all flew to Kathmandu for a couple weeks. They saw it as a fine skill, tourism. That's stayed with me, although these days, approaching my dotage, I just want to stay home and laze around all day and scratch where it itches, watch baseball and 1940s films, and read Ulysses yet again. My tourism days are over. See how long it took me to digress? No wonder I loved Tristram Shandy when I first read it! My version was around 600 pages and it wasn't until page 200 or so that the main character was born. Why not just...take your damned time as you please, if you can? (Uncle Toby!)

One of the things this Illuminatus! novel and RAW's work in general helped me with was in jettisoning the need to have final answers or even final vocabularies. Just before I found RAW I had been trying to crack all the "French theory" that was raging in academia. One of the terms that came up a lot was aporia:  a fundamental undecidability between forces within a text. All those paradoxes that blew our minds when we first encountered them! There are so many. I remember taking a Logic class in college and Zeno's Paradox came up. The idea that Achilles gives the Tortoise a head start in a race, but can't catch the Tortoise, ever, because he must first cover X amount of ground, but then he first must cover half that distance, but first must cover half of that, ad infinitum, poor Achilles probably wanted to go back and sulk in his tent because he couldn't even move!: I soon figured out the catch, but I see all these things - the barber who only shaves those who don't shave themselves, so does he shave himself? - and so many others, as certain kinds of delightful tricks of language and mind. But eventually I began to appreciate all these classic paradoxes along aesthetic lines, as little works of "thought-art." Very close to Poetry. Wilson covered a lot of this stuff when he wrote about the Metaprogramming Circuit, which I long ago decided should be the 6th Circuit in Leary's 8 Circuit Brain Model, but I don't want to fight about it. I tend to think of ideas about the structure of the nervous system and its operations along these terms.

An idea that wasn't prominent in RAW, but one I think is along Metaprogramming Circuit lines: Mysterianism. This philosophical take on phenomena (EX: "consciousness") says that maybe we're wired in such a way that it turns out we can figure out how quantum mechanics works: it works just fine; it's the most successful physical theory ever, you wouldn't be reading this without it because it's a fundamental part of computers/Internet, etc...but it's been 98 years now since 1926, when Heisenberg and Schrodinger basically completed the quantum theory and we can't agree on what it means about the nature of "reality", much less Einstein's greatest scientific desideratum: a Grand Unified Theory of quantum mechanics and Relativity. A little equation that humbly described a Theory of Everything that could be written on a piece of paper you could carry around in your wallet, and whip out and admire every now and then: 

"Isn't it just the most purty thing ya ever done seen, Clem?" 

"Yep. I reckon you're right, Chet! We did it. We human beans. Sets one to feelin' mighty proud, don't it? Pass that Everclear, will ya, son?"

 A million super-brilliant minds working long overtime hours for 98 years and...not only bupkis, but things just seemed to get Weirder! Maybe - just maybe -  we are wired in such a way that we can't figure it out? Certainly, those readers who've wanted "consciousness" nailed down once and for all either have way more Faith than I do, or they are just really really RILLY patient. I, for one, have read the ideas about qualia and they make total sense to me. Other thinkers who seem smarter than me deny qualia is a thing. But a lot of the "consciousness" problem for me hinges on qualia. Again, one's emotional response to these ideas are really interesting to me. I want people to not only be clear on the facts and ideas, but be willing to entertain all the Maybes, babies. Just an opinion of mine, but you should be able to not only give an unbiased account of a stance you disagree with, but be willing to have a decent laff about your own stance. Or - my intuition says - you don't "get it." (Maybe?) 

(Oh yea: those of you who have read Philip Goff and see links between the new Panpsychism and RAW's ideas there - and there is quite a lot in RAW: I'm with you. This assumption about what consciousness "is" seems on a whole Other Level. Qualia seems to pale in this argument, and I'm cool with it. Let us have qualia AND panpsychism! But just get us home in time for those thick, juicy steaks, okay? Back to the scheduled program...)

The paradoxes have no good "solution" until you haul in certain thinkers, who help you take apart the thing. I liked Korzybski's "levels" of abstraction. Running a race is one thing; the number system and "infinity" is quite another, but if you don't know any of this stuff and are at an aporia? Well, then, for me, it's a test of someone's mettle. Those who, in general, get angry, or dismiss these paradoxes as a buncha college-kid bullshit, and so "grow the fuck up and get a real job, college-boy!"? They tend to lack something I call "fun." I prefer the ones who are amused, or even laff at this stuff. Did you ever look at Cantor's Proof for some Infinite Sets being larger than other Infinite Sets? It's absurd, but gorgeous. A real work of thought-art. Poetic.

I tend to see most of Illuminatus! as leaving us in an aporia, or, less academically, a “maybe” state. Maybe states seem to cover a lot more ground, including a function in Four-Value Logic: True/False/Indeterminate (AKA “Maybe”)/Meaningless. RAW often used examples like "Sophia Loren is more beautiful than Marilyn Monroe." It's meaningless, because there is no way to measure Beauty. The only way to make this statement non-meaningless is to tweak it into something operational like "Sophia seems even more beautiful than Marilyn to me." Now it's an opinion, so it makes sense. However, scientists have been working on something like a Pulchritude-ometer, which works on measuring symmetry in the features of the face, and the body. These are fine ratios that roughly correlate with mass opinions about beauty. Google Dr. Kendra Schmid for more about this. It will all shake out into some sort of Pulchritude-ometer, but for me: academic. Because personally, I like some asymmetry. I have been really attracted to women with big honking noses. In a dated joke that I still steal, Woody Allen said he was attracted to "a nice vaccination scar." I get it. 

Also: take a gorgeous person, man or woman. But either one is kinda shallow and boring to talk to. And neither are particularly kind or considerate. Gimme the uglier person who's read poetry or mathematics, and who makes me laugh and is nice to strangers, 'cuz they're much more "attractive" to me than the physical knock-out. I remember my wife was walking through a scene where a fence was being replaced, and as she walked through a hole in the fence, she didn't see a nail sticking out near eye level and cut herself really badly. My gawd: I had to rush her to one of those Urgent Care places while towels and rags hastily assembled got blood-soaked as I drove way over the speed limit. If I didn't have something to do, urgently - get her to a doc, stat! - I might've passed out, it was so gross and I'm hemophobic. If I get a paper cut I get woozy, my ears start to ring, I begin sweating, and I will ask, "Can I lie down over there in the corner and cry?"  Anyway, I got her to Urgent Care and there was a Chinese female doctor there to stitch my wife up. This woman was stunning, just drop-dead gorgeous. She was ridiculously pretty. Tall, everything. If I saw her on the street and someone said "she's a model" I would believe it. And I talked to her afterward - shakily - and she was really pleasant and had a sense of humor. As we drove home I said to my wife, “That…doctor that stitched you up?...” And looked at me, knowingly: Yea: stunning. Crazy pretty. It was awesome. My gawd, people like that actually exist! (See: Clooney, George)

But I was supposed to address aporia or “maybe” or indeterminate situations. So now, in July 2024, theoretically, there is a Planet 9 or "Planet X" in our solar system. It's far beyond Pluto, has the mass of Neptune, and its orbit is so elongated it takes something like 20,000 Earth years to orbit the sun once, which, if you lived there, would keep ya young: no birthdays! But we haven't found it. Using all the complex math it should be there. But we haven't found it. Yet. The existence of Planet X is in a Maybe state, just like the coin you just flipped - still in the air - to see who has to clean grandma's bedpan before lights out. That coin landed heads, has ceased to be in a Maybe state and make sure you rinse it out before putting it back, okay? Better luck next time, suckuh! I'm off to smoke a bowl.

Did the computer FUCKUP write the novel? I like to play with that idea. But I can't prove anything, within the game-rules of fiction. Likewise with the Fernando Poo storyline, if I recall. Was there a second Oswald? Yea: Kerry Thornley. (Certainly: Dillinger did not die, and there are at least five Dillinger look-alikes. I will not brook any dissension on this one.) But was Kerry Wendell Thornley being used by some intelligence operatives to muck up the JFK hit? I don't know. I tend to doubt it, but...Maybe. Indeterminate. How exceedingly weird that a book was written about Oswald before Nov. 22nd, 1963! I remember hearing about that and thinking it was a put-on. Another Discordian put-on. 

I've gradually come to realize that most things are in a Maybe state. What ultimately causes the state vector to collapse into Yes/No, Live/Dead, Exists/Doesn't Exist, etc? Here's where I start to feel a little bit high, even if I hadn't been smoking a joint AKA "burnin' a bugle": When things do collapse into some "stable" state, what caused the cause? And what caused that? Everything seems to have caused everything else, and now I sound like a maniac. But really: think about it. 

Of course, look at all the interpretations of what the Schrodinger's Wave Equation implies about the "nature" of '"reality": when Hugh C. Everett came up with what's now called the "Many Worlds" interpretation in 1957, it was seen as too influenced by science fiction, or "ridiculous." Every time a particle decays, a new universe is born? Now, it's simply assumed to be the most parsimonious interpretation of the Wave Equation, so PhDs in Physics find it the best model. Sean M. Carroll of CalTech/Santa Fe Institute is an adherent and defends Many-Worlds with aplomb. According to one survey, more than half of living physicists who are engaged with quantum theory thought Many-Worlds was the best interpretation, and that was around 2015 or so when I read that. However many think this, it's liberating for someone like me - some inveterate book-reader - to realize this. 

If entanglement is correct, and it seems to be, then all the particles in our universe were cooked up during the Big Bang. They were all entangled, and we're made of that same stuff, so we're not only entangled with everything and everyone, but this seems to imply another interpretation of quantum mechanics: Superdeterminism. Which...can't be right, can it? There never was any Free Will, ever. Everything was already determined, even Hitler, Hiroshima, Trump, and the popularity of The Bachelor? C'mon! Weisman and Cavalcanti thought Super-D was about as appealing as the paranoid’s alien mind control ideas. Still: it’s taken seriously. 

Have you ever read about sexual reproduction in humans? At some point - and it's almost as complex as quantum mechanics to me - every embryo is female. Then, certain things occur that make some embryos turn out male. Getting down to the microscopically fine points here - around seven weeks after fertilization - the SRY gene's presence and the presence or absence of the Y chromosome - this is vastly oversimplifying it, but anyway - you turn out to “be” "male" or "female." I like to put quotes around those terms out of respect for all the non-binary folks out there. Hey, it "seems" a lot of us think we're "normal" (that term imported from the Chilly Realms of statistics) and that we're "totally" "straight" (from the slightly warmer realms of Euclidean geometry) women or men. But that's the common picture. And at this point, I will just say I think it shouldn't be common, much less accurate, because Nature is WAY too creative and playful to be hardcore Binary when it comes to the total field of all this stuff. 

The point is: what the hell happened during certain moments - seconds, parts of an hour? - during our seventh week that made us "dudes"? Seems kinda like a crapshoot to me. You're knocked up? Cool! Do you know if it's a boy or girl yet? No. Why? We can't tell until around 10 weeks. You wanted, what? A girl? And there's not much we can do about it now. Or is there? 

There is: we have preimplantation genetic selection, where we use IVF to create a batch or embryos (although I doubt the fine technicians use the term "batch" as if they’re toll house cookies), and then genetically test each one until we see the desired sex. Is that playing "god"? Yea, but we all play "god" every day. Tell a five year old to not play jump-rope on the expressway. Anytime we use our intellects to do something to correct Nature - think of soy, cotton, sugar, milk, and corn: most of it is genetically modified these days. People with Type 1 diabetes need insulin, and genetically modified bacteria tweaked with the human gene for insulin keeps all these folks having a fairly normal life. The prices should be LOWERED for them, though…

People with Type 1 diabetes were destined for a tightrope-walking life of measuring blood sugar levels, but when things go wrong, your blood turns into acid without insulin. We figured it out. We played "god." And good thing...There was a point where the hypothesis of using bacteria cultures infused with the gene for human's insulin was "Maybe" that would work. A lot of science and technology is like that. Some stuff just looks on the drawing board like it will work (Yes!), but then we found it was more complicated (No), but if we save this and this and tweak that and that, then Maybe...

Will we die this week? Maybe. Statistically: probably not. But it's not a 100% No on death this week for any of us. Shit happens. So go out there and - to coin a phrase - "Have a good one."

I hope this all cleared up the one true meaning of Illuminatus! once and for damned all.