EW: I first read Illuminatus! in the summer of 1982 after having read and loved the Schroedinger's Cat trilogy. I bought the three Illuminatus! paperbacks at the Book Mark in Tucson in the science fiction section. I took one volume with me on a trip to New York in August. I remember reading a comment about Washington Square Park around the time I walked through the park. I had just begun paying attention to coincidences.
Reading Schroedinger's Cat and Illuminatus! I began to become obsessed by Wilson. I next started Masks of the Illuminati in the beginning of September, and stopped after a few pages. I had a sense that if I continued reading it, my life would change radically. I decided to continue, and my life took a left turn. At that point I considered Robert Heinlein my favorite author. I majored in math in college and I had worked three summers at IBM, planning to work for them after I graduated. I ended up changing my major to English and have spent much of my life teaching English.
Could you maybe give us an overview of what it means to travel through the Tree of Life in this manner? What did the Bobs intend the reader to experience on this journey?
EW: Robert Anton Wilson's approach to the Kabbalah derives greatly from Aleister Crowley. Israel Regardie's books helped Bob to delve into the Kabbalah and Crowley's worldview. 777 proved a very useful book for understanding Wilson, Crowley, and Regardie. In 1990 I began a procedure I called Nanokabballah where I would spend a week on each Hebrew letter/tarot trump. Each day I would go through the correspondences in 777 for that letter/trump, sometimes reading supporting passages from Magick in Theory and Practice and The Book of Thoth. I found that practice so rewarding that I did it again, this time spending 23 days on each letter/trump.
When I wrote Insider's Guide, I did something similar. I went through all the correspondences for Kether each day while working on the Kether section of Illuminatus!, all the Chokmah correspondences each day while working on the Chokmah section, etc. When I reached the appendices of Illuminatus!, I used my Nanokabbalah procedures for the appropriate letter/trump. I gave the appendices in my book the letters for the missing appendices from Illuminatus!
I suspect the Bobs wanted the reader to reimprint their third circuit reality tunnels through reading the book. Crowley insisted that memorizing the basic Kabbalistic correspondences seemed foundational for understanding the tarot. On the other hand, I now find myself trying to unlearn some of this material. I think I did reimprint my third circuit, but now I would like to reimprint it again with a non-Crowley worldview. This has proved difficult for me.
bc: As someone who enjoyed a decades-long personal correspondence with Bob Wilson, do you have any favorite apocryphal details about Illuminatus! and/or its sequels and prequels, both realized and unrealized, that never made their way to the printed page, but that might help broaden and enliven that fantastic fictional world?
EW: In 1989 I asked Bob Wilson if Illuminatus! takes place in 1976. He said no. When I began working on Insider's Guide in the late 90's, I asked him what year Illuminatus! takes place. He said 1976.
bc: Similarly, as someone who has exhaustively chronicled the timeline of Illuminatus!, and elucidated so many of the nooks and crannies of character and plot details, do you have any favorite unanswered questions or mysteries that still persist even after over 40 years of study?
EW: I find Bob Wilson's interest in the Decembrists at the end of his life fascinating. He repeatedly encouraged people to google "Decembrists + Illuminati". He took to signing his emails "The Last Decembrist". Next December marks the 200th anniversary of the Decembrist uprising. Tolstoy said he began writing War and Peace to explore the origins of the Decembrists. War and Peace brings to life Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. 1812 marks the birth of Alexander Herzen. The Decembrists inspired Herzen as a young man, and Herzen later inspired Tolstoy. War and Peace has some intriguing Masonic scenes. Neither of the War and Peace films I've seen include any of the Masonic or Decembrist material, not even the seven hour Russian version.
bc: Also, just as an aside, I have a weird question that is probably a dead end, but I've asked two people so far and got somewhat conflicting responses:
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?
EW: Many people referred to the USSR as Russia in the US in the seventies. I did it myself.
EW: Alan Moore seems to have focused on doing things in comics one cannot do in other media. This seems part of the reason he seems so little interested in film adaptations of his works. Comics do allow an extension of the ideogrammatic method, although I don't know how much this has actually happened. I loved your piece on Moore and Grant Morrison. They have both done interesting work on suggesting a secret London in From Hell and The Invisibles. I like how comics can provide maps and diagrams to help people inhabit imaginary worlds, from Marvel's diagrams of the Baxter Building to the maps of Paris in the Proust comics.
6 comments:
Thank you, Bob.
I loved this! The bit about beginning Masks of the Illuminati and then pulling up short, realizing if (Eric Wagner) went on, his life would change: my Epiphany of the Month.
Also: I continue to be amazed by Wagner's study of cabala and the way he approached that MASS of knowledge, and the idea of trying to over-ride that learning now seems fascinating. I'm not sure the nervous system works like that; the hidden metaphor seems to be like how computers work, but we don't work like that. Eric knew/knows tons of Crowley 777-based correspondence stuff. We need not wipe the hard drive here and start over (not sure if that's really what's implied); we have storage space for prior learning and - given a healthy brain - a functionally infinite amount of more to learn "on top of" prior learning. And here I'm using computer metaphors myself...Oy!
Re: Bobby Campbell's sequential art: this seems a very rich mine of media-McLuhan-sensory ratio stuff to me. I see what he does as closer to Pound's ideogrammic method than, say, montage in film. Because it's "static" images that we make move. The images are already composed for the Reader to make them "animate" which seems very close to the core of ideogram-process psychology. Has anyone here read Scott McLeod's _Understanding Comics_? Pretty cool. Also, even more philosophically, check out _Unflattening_ by Nick Sousanis, all you RAW fiends who also like Campbell and Pound.
Great interview! Nice and concise. According to one of the authors, Illuminatus! does and does not take place in 1976. Sounds about right. One of the books I'm currently reading and recommend for hermetic Pound nuts: '76 and The Cantos of Ezra Pound by Forrest Read
Thank you, Michael and Oz. Crowley uses Kabbalah as a filing system and as information processing system. Moving away from his world-views has proved difficult for me. My horns won't fit through the....
Thank you both for this interview, Bobby and Eric.
About the parallels between ideogrammatic prose and the comic books medium, i think it makes a lot of sense. If you take something like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, it definitely looks like an ancestor of comics.
Now, some people considers hieroglyphs to be a sort of proto alphabet, with a specific sign referring both to a given word but also a sound, perhaps in that way similar to the hebrew alphabet. But other folks think hieroglyphs might have been closer to sigils, with deeper meanings embedded, for those who knew how to read them.
The bit about the "secret London" reminded me of the Jacques Rivette film Le Pont du Nord, where a snakes and ladders type of board game is drawn over a map of Paris, and two women go around the city playing the game in real life. When the map and the territory becomes one...
Michael, I loved “Understanding Comics”. Spookah, I love Rivette, but I have located that film.
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