Tales Of Illuminatus! At Substack

 DON'T PANIC. DO NOT.....ADJUST....YOUR BRAIN!

REALITY IS MALFUNKTION-NING....NING.....

ALL WILL BE REVEALED ON JULY 23RD

                                    ALL WILL BE REVEALED JULY 23RD

                                                                        ALL WILL BE REVEALED JULY 23RD

 

https://talesofilluminatus.substack.com/

New tv series based on Illuminatus! trilogy

A most astonishing announcement, a well-kept secret for some years, a tv version of Illuminatus!

You can find ongoing details about this plan, over on RAWIllumination.net, and this post contains the complete press release, with details of the production company, etc.

Borders

"Borders are a basic mammalian territorial imperative. All mammals want a territory, and they claim it by making excretions that make a topological outline, that’s the territory they claim. That’s why your dog pees on every tree when you take him for a walk. That’s the way the dog is marking his territory. Chimpanzees mark their territories with excretions too. The difference between human beings (or domesticated primates) and the other mammals is we mark our territories with ink excretions on paper—land titles, peace treaties, and so on. Every national border in the world marks a place where two gangs of domesticated primates fought until they were exhausted, and then made a territorial mark. That’s how national borders are created. We don’t throw excretions at each other like the chimpanzees, we throw chemicals and bombs and so on, but it’s basically the same mammalian process. The only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours." RAW

With thanks to an Article in Dangerous Minds.

In 1989 an hour-long movie called Borders about Robert Anton Wilson, author of The Illumnatus! Trilogy and the Cosmic Trigger series, was produced for public TV (WGBH Boston was one of the production companies behind it). The movie, directed by Merrill Aldighieri and Joe Tripician, is a blend of dramatic and documentary elements that also occasionally includes charmingly rudimentary computer graphics.

May Our Minds Be Blown Just Right by Daisy Eris Campbell

May Our Minds Be Blown – Just Right — Daisy Eris Campbell
(MinorLits 02/05/2017 Essays & features)

I want to take you back to a moment I experienced about eight years ago. It’s a few weeks after my father, Ken Campbell’s, sudden and untimely death. I’m standing on the corner of two cobbled streets in Liverpool in the rain. And I’m looking at a bust of CG Jung. And that’s kind of weird because right at that moment I’m halfway through an essay about Carl Jung for a Master’s degree I’m doing. But that’s not why I’m there.

Stood next to me is Prunella Gee, Chris Langham and a guy called Peter O’Halligan. We’re all looking up at this bust of Carl Jung.

It’s there because Carl Jung had a dream about Liverpool and he wrote about it in his book, Memories, Dreams and Reflections. He said he thought it may be the most important dream he’d ever had. And he realised that in his dream, Liverpool was the Pool of Life.

I’m writing this essay about Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious and synchronicity, a phrase he coined, and now I find myself looking at this bust of his head. And that bust has only been erected because of the tireless campaigning of Peter O’Halligan, who’s standing next to me. Because Peter O’Halligan is sure that this very spot is the exact spot that Jung dreamt about.

But just to the side of this bust is another unusual thing – it’s a plaque, set into the wall, which commemorates The Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun.

This has also only been erected due to the tireless campaigning of Peter O’Halligan.

Because just over 30 years previously, which is when O’Halligan first found this illustrious Jung-Dream site, he also noticed that the building on the corner of these two streets – just along from where the Beatles first performed – was derelict. And so he adopted it, set up a caff, and called it The Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun.

And the first production to be staged in a room above the caff, was an eighteen hour epic called Illuminatus!, directed by my father, Ken Campbell, starring (amongst many many others) my mother, Prunella Gee as Eris, Goddess of Chaos and Confusion, and co-adapted with Chris Langham from a novel by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

And there we all are now, and I say “It’s weird because right now I’m in the middle of an essay about Jung“, then I realise that, although I’m doing a distance-learning Master’s degree, I am actually studying at John Moores University, based in Liverpool.

And Peter O’ Halligan tells me that John Moores knew my dad’s dad, my grandfather, who I never met, they were both from just outside Liverpool, and John Moores offered my grandfather the opportunity to get involved with his new business venture, but my grandfather declined. It was the football pools! Which made John Moores a multi-millionaire, which was how come he’d had enough money to build a whole university, where I was right now studying Carl Gustav Jung.

2023 - The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (sic)

Well we're back again,

They never kicked us out,

twenty thousand years of 

SHOUT SHOUT SHOUT

Down through the epochs and out across the continents, generation upon generation of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu have told variants of the same story - an end of days story, a final chapter story. But with one hope, even if the hope at times seems forlorn.

The story contained in this trilogy is the latest telling. Here it is presented as a utopian costume drama, set in the near future, written in the recent past.
Read with care.
REMEMBERED - TOLD - TRANSCRIBED for K 2 Plant Hire Ltd.

Set for publication on 23 August 2017 - through Faber & Faber

The Illuminati rise again...

"Forged in the same crucible as every modern political ideology from conservatism to nihilism, anarchy to military dictatorship, the Illuminati conspiracy has become a modern myth: not merely in the dismissive sense that its factual basis evaporates under scrutiny, but as a shapeshifting narrative capable of adapting its meaning to accommodate new and unforeseen scenarios. Since the 1970s, it has been gleefully satirised as a baroque folly of conservative thought by counterculture figures from Robert Anton Wilson onwards, yet this has only increased its fame and mystique: Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons demonstrates that today’s readers will still lap up Robison’s unreconstructed version of the story in their millions. In popular culture and old-time religion, satire and nationalist politics, the Illuminati conspiracy still resonates with its warning that the light of reason has its shadows, and even the most enlightened democracy can be manipulated by hidden hands."

From:     "Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy"
at the Public Domain Review




In just a minute Bob tells you the 'truth' that he considers them a short-lived organisation from the past, but ends up wishing them well in their future endeavours.    You figure it out.  OM.

For those of you who have not read Bob's range of Guerrilla Ontology books, particularly with reference to The Illuminati, we can still recommend the original trilogy - ILLUMINATUS!.
You can find a selection of notes about it (which arose from Bob's online study group, etc) here.

For people who like original source material, you can find Robison's book as a PDF at the Conspiracy Archive, here.

ILLUMINATUS! READING GROUP STARTING ON MONDAY FEB. 24

Press release from RAWIllumination.net

Website RAWIllumination.net to sponsor online group reading of 1970s cult literary work “Illuminatus!” starting on Feb. 24.

An online reading group plans to spend more than a year doing a page-by-page analysis of an unusual 1970s cult novel that has never gone out of print.

Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, originally published as a series of three science fiction paperback originals, was  influenced by writers as diverse as James Joyce, William Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft. The book reads at first like a thriller about a vast conspiracy, albeit one that uses an obscure theological term, “immanentize the Eschaton,” in the first sentence. But it also has elements of fantasy and the occult and spends many pages discussing political theory.

The ostensible subject of the book is the Illuminati, an alleged secret society that seeks to control the world and is still the subject of many conspiracy theories. Many of the book’s protagonists are either battling the Illuminati or struggling to figure out what is really going on.

The work makes liberal use of Discordianism, a tongue-in-cheek religion devoted to worship of the Greek goddess Eris, who was blamed for starting the Trojan War, and of the Kabbalah, an esoteric mystical system that began as part of Judaism. The text also reflects the authors’ strong interesting anarchism and libertarianism.

Readers of the RAWIllumination.net website will participate in an online discussion of the book beginning on Feb. 24. The discussion will proceed at a pace of 10 pages a week, to give readers time to untangle many of the esoteric references and meanings in the text. The slow pace also will allow time for readers who missed the initial announcement to get caught up and participate. The standard paperback edition has 805 pages, so the discussion is expected to take well over a year. 

Each week, an entry on a 10-page section of the book will be posted on the website’s blog, and readers will be invited to weigh in using the comments.

The book began as a joke in a Chicago bar. The two authors, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, were editors at Playboy magazine in 1960s, responsible for the Playboy Forum, a section of letters from readers. Many of the letters dealt with speculation on who had killed the Kennedys and other conspiracy theories. 

   

The two editors, who were friends, had a habit of going to a bar every payday. One day, Shea jokingly suggested that the two collaborate on a novel that would take seriously every crazy conspiracy theory that had been sent in by a reader. The idea caught the pair’s imagination, and they began work on the book that became Iluminatus!

Issued beginning in late 1975 as three mass market paperbacks, The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan, Illuminatus!  was reissued beginning in 1984 as a one-volume trade paperback and has remained in print ever since. It also is available as an ebook and an audiobook. 

Illuminatus! received good reviews from publications such as the Village Voice but was generally ignored by major literary magazines, newspapers and book reviewers. It won only one literary award, the relatively obscure Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, in 1986. It has received less attention from major literary critics than two broadly similar works written at about the same time, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed. It has nonetheless enjoyed a strong cult following from its initial publication and there are many websites on the Internet devoted to it or to one of its two authors. 

The two authors never collaborated on another book, although they remained close friends, but Illuminatus! helped them launch their literary careers. Wilson quit his job at Playboy and became a freelance writer. He eventually published more than 30 books, including novels and essay collections. He died in 2007. Shea continued to work for Playboy, but after he lost his job at the magazine, he began sending out proposals for novels and began a successful second career as a historical novelist. He died in 1994.

Cosmic Trigger - The Play

Here is the brilliant video of Daisy Eris Campbell from the recent Horse Hospital gig:



The plan is for the play to start in the UK and then head to America.
In the meantime anyone who donates £23 or $23 (or multiples thereof) in this pre-launch phase will be on the guest list for
The Grand Discordian opening night. (One in the UK and one in The States).
Much of the money raised will contribute directly to The RAW Estate by securing the rights.

So write an e-mail now to get on the mailing list.
The E-mail address is: cosmictriggerplay at gmail dot com
You can use paypal, or if you would rather use online banking, E-mail Daisy and she'll send you the details.

Another Cosmic Trigger event along the lines of this one, looks likely for Liverpool on *UPDATE* February 23rd, 2014.
A Kickstarter with lots of fun incentives will launch, hopefully on April 23rd, 2014.

Illuminatus! vs Atlas Shrugged

John Higgs, who wrote the better Timothy Leary biography, I Have America Surrounded, has made a comparison chart on his blog between The Illuminatus! Trilogy and Atlas Shrugged, which might amuse sombunall of you.  It has also led to some enlightening discussion in the Comments.

Find it on his blog, here.

Seven Years On

I find it hard to believe that seven years have passed since I signed up to study the Illuminatus! trilogy directly with one of its authors - Robert Anton Wilson - through the Maybe Logic Academy.

Online study, remote learning, a forum - all new experiences to me, at the time.

It turned out to lead to many more study groups, and subjects, but that going deeply into one text felt like one of the most satisfying and focused of processes.

Very few books seem to warrant re-reading, but this trilogy belongs in that category, for me - like Catch-22 or Joyce's Ulysses.   I doubt I re-read them more than once a decade, as the world seems full of great new stuff - but they beckon me back at times, just as favourite movies can.

We did put up a wiki for the book (after seeing wikis for - say - Gravity's Rainbow) but it didn't really reach critical mass, and attracted a lot of spam, so turned into a high maintenance site with relatively little new input.   We also came across another and 'official' wiki for the trilogy (on Wikia), but that also seemed fairly slow moving.

With a re-read approaching, and Fuzzbuddy working on film scripts of the book(s) it seemed like a good time to review the online material, update the links, etc - so the wiki stuff has got imported into an Illuminatus! trilogy website linked to this blog for review.

It remains a work-in-progress, of course....

looking back over the forum posts, I found this exchange towards the end of the course:

9 Nov 2004    Bogus Magus:  

Little did I know, however, that I would end up treating it the way we are now - poring over the text like a Joycean scholar!

10 Nov 2004   RAW:  

 Dear Bogmag, 

Of course, I wanted at least some readers to 

pore over the text like Joyce scholars....that's
why I made it so Joycean

It has taken 29 years [plus the 5 years
lost in getting it published] but that
dream seems real at last, 

and I thank everybody

Good Talking

The Major Spoilers website has this great podcast...with very interesting discussion on Illuminatus! (the Trilogy), and other RAW books, between Stephen Schleicher and Bruce Otter. If you gotta spare hour...

If you need some frameworks (plot, a draft timeline, character lists, etc) then you can find some of our accumulations on the Wiki we set up to compile our material.

Sadly, the Home Page keeps getting spammed, and we revert it when we can...fortunately you can find the other pages, as most spamming seems to hit that home page. So it goes.

New Edition of "NATURE'S GOD" by Robert Anton Wilson

"THESE ARE THE EVENTS WHICH WILL SOON RESHAPE THE WORLD..."

Available from New Falcon Publications and Amazon.com

I was actually reading this for my own enjoyment when I got the call to work on the new edition. It was awesome to work on this book as I was reading it. The game got real in Philadelphia!

This was the last book of fiction that RAW wrote, and it totally rules, I hope I did it justice.

"oh, bejesus, Seamus thought, General Washington has been knock-knock-knocking again."

I'm finishing up artwork for "The Earth Will Shake" & "The Widow's Son" this weekend.(Volumes 1 & 2 of the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles) The lasagna remains airborne, Go Phils!

Freeman Hagbard Celine

Freeman Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H. (Holy Man, Shit Head) is a central protagonist in the Illuminatus trilogy of books by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

SON OF ILLUMINATUS!

Pang yourself to the infinitude of absolute mind

OK, here’s my current list:
Writing
Scripts (clues at least, to finding some)
Looking on AbeBooks I could see Skungpoomery, School for Clowns, Old King Cole, the Bald Trilogy (Recollections of a Furtive Nudist, Pigspurt and Jamais Vu) – those sometimes sold separately - Violin Time or The Lady From Montsegur.
Visual recordings

DVDs of performance from Merifela
YouTube clips of Ken at the RAW Memorial Event




Audio recordings

Official site Audio CDs available

DeepLeaf’s Illuminatus!
(Listening to Ken reading the Appendices as I type)

A radio clip talking about Beadle’s library

An excerpt from Jeff Merrifield's thesis (mentioned in the Beadle clip)
Illuminatus! Amazing adventures in putting Science Fiction on the stage


History of Comedy - Part One: Ventriloquism article in The Guardian

And finally, a quote from an interview with Ken three years ago, which you can find in the Guardian archive:

Not content with itemising his autobiography on stage, Campbell is currently engaged in teaching Doris the parrot her own. So far, he says, she can say, "'I used to be an egg and then I hatched out, didn't I? All fluffy at first, then the feathers' ... she's working on the next bit now." Sometimes, though, Doris comes out with unexpected bits of her own, such as "I'm up 'ere, you're down there ... shall I do my silly noises? I think I will ... whoops!" And as her limited repertoire also includes a formidable impression of the telephone, Campbell can't answer it for a while whenever it rings "because it's probably only her. She does three rings, then says "Ello!' like me. Parrots live for ever and she's nowhere near 10 yet, so she'll live way after me. At least I know my voice will carry on for a bit after I'm gone: 'I'm up 'ere, you're down there!' "


'I'm up 'ere, you're down there!'

As if it matters...

I always imagine our visitors as passing through - so rarely bother to explain the goings-on around here.

For 3 years we ran this blog as a semi-official students' site, linked to the Maybe Logic Academy, and supplementing the quarterly magazine output.

In the recent rebuild of the campus we got invited to move inside. So now we have a blog incorporated into the campus with (confusingly to some) the same name. It doesn't yet have a lot of bells and whistles, whereas this one seems like a coral-reef encrusted with useful or interesting links so I tend to drop back here, and can't quite abandon ship just yet.

Do I explain, or leave you to explore?

Markoff Chaney (for instance) remains a very subversive character in RAWilson's books (most notably Illuminatus!) who puts up vaguely insulting or threatening notices in public places and private offices, apparently signed by the Management (The Mgt) but really from MC himself (the midget).

Does that spoil or illuminate the joke?

Hey, these Blogger Labels work real nice!

I just tried The Mgt, and got a blog cut including RAW, PKD, Bob Dobbs, Bob Dylan and Ken Campbell, and all sorts. "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be", to quote Peter de Vries (who may never have even heard of E-Prime)...

(Note: you'll need your red-green 3-D glasses for October 14th)

Maybe this blog will just float now, become self-rererential and more complex...

Markoff Chaney

Hopalong Horus Rides Again!

We made a start on the Illuminatus! Wiki, and I guess visitors here might find it interesting, even in the bare bones state.

Feel free to contribute either by adding comments, suggestions, questions, advice, etc on the Discussion pages, or creating/editing Article pages to expand on some detail of the book(s).

On Friday 11th Jan we will have completed a year without Bob on the planet, and may hopefully get to celebrate Albert Hofmann's 102nd birthday (!)

Wiki for The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Carrying on with an interactive and collaborative experiment seems the best memorial we can offer to MLA founder, Robert Anton Wilson.

Do the exercises!

Amor et Hilaritas!

Things To Come

A Fairy Tale for Paranoids

The decision to start a Wiki for discussion of Illuminatus! seems popular with the gang, so we will probably start on that in the new year (Christian Calendar).

I have various bits and pieces that I found useful when doing the Illuminatus! course with RAW that I would simply like to put in one easily accessible place.

First of all, a list of characters, which had been compiled by Toff Philippo and shows just how many people swirl around in the books – and helps piece together who they all are (like a Russian novel, it seems easy to lose track). I tidied up the formatting, and Quackenbush posted it on the excellent RAWilsonFans website.


I hope we can supplement this list a bit with things like the origins of character’s names (someone called Mocenigo, for instance, betrayed Giordano Bruno to the Inquisition).

I also had a secret weapon during the course (for quick research of non-linear time plots) in that I found a (probably illegal) PDF download on a Russian site, in praise of the KLF. I actually found a couple of other places you could download or read online copies, but kept quite quiet about it for a while (not feeling secure about how an author might feel about PDF versions of a book).

Anyway – they exist, and you can find them if you have any skill at Googling at all…and who reads whole books on screen? Not many people, yet. As a research tool to supplement reading the paperback, it seems essential, however. Rather than point to my various secret sites, perhaps I should direct you to RAWilson Fans, again, as it would seem best if we all refer to the same copy (consistency of page numbering, etc). Here’s the ebooks page…whatever you do, don’t go to the html copy on that Buddhist hustler page… (heh)

NB: I do wish they would publish the thing in 3 volumes again, like my original set which I gave away. So much easier to carry around than the fat Omnibus edition. I’d also like to see the plot summaries (story so far) that appeared at the beginning of volumes two and three.

Somewhere in my boxes I have the programme for the stage show, which I should dig out…sadly, a few of the actors have left the planetary stage…and at least one is in jail (George Dorn).

While considering this project, I discovered that 3 issues of a comicbook version had come out. I have traced copies of the first two, but not the third (as yet).

Still, the artist, Mark P.Steele (ICARUS!) has a MySpace place where you can look at some of the art work.

Hot News

I just heard that the full version of the London Tribute to Robert Anton Wilson has gone online.

You can find it here.

Lots of stuff to enjoy. You may have watched excerpts here (Alan Moore, his exceptional second set), and elsewhere...but it's worth putting up with the sound quality (or is that just my PC?) [later: OK, it sounded fine on a Mac] to hear the astonishing Ken Campbell, hilarious Bill Drummond and two sets from Alan Moore, quite aside from the music and visuals, and Bob's wonderful words. Much hilaritas!

I only have one anecdote provoked by watching the whole thing (I missed the live moment). I saw the first show at the National, and I decided to take a friend to the shorter version they did in The Roundhouse. On the night I took my girl-friend of the time (who wasn't especially a fan of the material) an announcement was made that Prunella Gee was ill, and, at short notice, her part was going to be taken by Ken Campbell (!) I guess he remembers that night. She played (for instance) Mavis, so his opening routine was breaking George out of jail and giving him a blow-job (hidden only by a discretely placed prop plant...) It got even funnier, later.