Certain Damnations are socially and intellectually necessary, of course. A custard pie thrown in a comedian’s face is Damned by the physicist who analyzes it according to the Newtonian laws of motion. These equations tell us all we want to know about the impact of the pie on the face, but nothing about the human meaning of pie-throwing. A cultural anthropologist, analyzing the social function of the comedian as shaman, court jester, and king’s surrogate, explains the pie-throwing as a survival of the Feast of Fools and the killing of the king’s double. This Damns the subject in another way. A psychoanalyst, finding an Oedipal castration ritual here, has performed a third Damnation, and the Marxist, seeing an outlet for the worker’s repressed rage against the bosses, performs a fourth. Each Damnation has its values and uses, but is nonetheless a Damnation unless its partial and arbitrary nature is recognized. The poet, who compares the pie in the comedian’s face with Decline of the West or his own lost love, commits a fifth Damnation, but in this case the game element and the whimsicality of the symbolism are safely obvious. At least, one would hope so; reading the New Critics occasionally raises doubts on this point. Bill, don’t bother doing anything unless it is heroic.” This was the first lesson I learned from Ken. Today, 38 years later, I still don’t know if he meant that it’s not worth doing anything in life unless it’s heroic, or just when it comes to stage sets. The book is justified by its bringing these thoughts about social reality subliminally to thousands of young people in every generation although, sadly, for every one who gets it, ten or a hundred will not and cease to be as functional in their own interest as they might. Next, they saw a city of 550,000 men, women and children, and in an instant the city vanished; shadows remained where the men were gone, a firestorm raged, burning pimps and infants and an old statue of a happy Buddha and mice and dogs and old men and lovers; and a mushroom cloud arose above it all. This was a world created by the cruelest of all gods, Realpolitik. The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned to it. The theologians call it a sinner and tries to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychotherapist calls it neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy Quotes by Robert Shea - Goodreads The Illuminatus! Trilogy Quotes by Robert Shea - Goodreads

As is probably not ironic for a book considered to be the holy grail of conspiracy theory, it's definitely not difficult to perceive the Illuminatus Trilogy as an act of intellectual terrorism. This is not an easy book to read. Time, location, perspective, and identity can and do shift without warning in mid-paragraph, sometimes mid-sentence (making an interesting model for the idea of the 'collective unconscious'). The best analogy I can think of for this book is that it's like reading someone else's acid trip, and that someone else is criminally schizophrenic and watching 15 televisions at the same time. When it finally does start moving along, the reader finds his- or her-self bombarded with multiple, conflicting realities and extremist, revolutionary politics from all points of the spectrum. The intended result is mind-expansion. This book invites the reader to become more skeptical, but also to start thinking about what he or she thinks about the world and why. Stella giggled and kissed his mouth briefly. 'It takes a lot to get those words out of you, doesn't it?' she said bemusedly. Multilayer Façade: Every ancient secret is actually a cover-up for some other ancient secret. And yes, that same principle applies to pretty much every level, thus creating an infinite loop of The Reveal.Overall, the series is interesting, unique, informative, humorous, and entertaining. There are moments where it bogs down, but overall, it is well-structured and well written. There aren't many books where you get a fun spy story, a harrowing Cthulhu tale, and a rundown of the zeitgeist of an American era all in one, but there is at least one. Counter-Earth: The leaders of the Illuminati may have originated on a counter-Earth named Vulcan and come to Earth on flying saucers from Mars via Saturn. The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson purportedly between 1969 and 1971, and first published in 1975. The trilogy is a satirical, apparently postmodern, science fiction-influenced adventure story; a drug-, sex- and magic-laden trek through a number of conspiracy theories, both historical and imaginary, which hinge around the authors' version of The Illuminati. The narrative often switches between third and first person perspectives. The third-person omniscient narrator finds these switches, as well as its original non-identity as a disembodied narrator, very troubling and disconcerting at first. It also jumps around in time, as do the minds of some of the characters, but by then it has settled down to a point where it is somewhat less evidently self-aware. It is thematically dense, covering topics like counterculture, numerology, anarchism, and Discordianism.

Illuminatus! Trilogy - Archive.org Illuminatus! Trilogy - Archive.org

Bill Drummond, right, and KLF bandmate Jimmy Cauty in 1990. Photograph: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images Cosmic postscriptDeconstructive Parody: Of conspiracy theories, 1960s hippie culture, and even the book itself. See Self-Deprecation.

Illuminatus Trilogy : Free Download Robert Anton Wilson Illuminatus Trilogy : Free Download

Punny Name: too many to count, including Fission Chips, Markov Chaney, Saul Goodman and the Saure siblings (named after the German word for "Acid", which is also the S in LSD) Maybe I'm destroying the integrity of my reading list and goals for the year by rating this along with the three individual novels. I have thus only read either three books instead of four, or one instead of four if I want to think of the books I've read as something closer to the books I've bought, since I don't own old mass market copies of the three books, and thus only 'read' from one book. I think in the spirit of this book it's most appropriate to add four books to my reading list... since I think it was Pythagoras who called four (or a tetrad) the perfect number, because contained in it is the number 10 (1+2+3+4), and ten is 5 two times (I'm trying my hardest to come up with some rationalization for all this that ends in the number 23 but I'm failing, I'm sure it's there somewhere though..... oh oh oh, I've got it, by rating four books the tetrad becomes 5 and 23, 1+4 = 5 and 2 and 3 in the middle are obviously 23, thus this trilogy needs to be read/rated in this manner, or at least now I can feel comfortable having done so and not feel like I'm throwing off the whole 'how many books did I actually read' number or feel like a total fake when December 31, 2017 comes around and I'm reading some comic book just to get one last book to on to my 'read' list for the year so I can earn yet another 'reading goal' little image on my profile...). Also, to a certain degree, Hagbard Celine. Somewhat justified in that Hagbard seems at least to a certain degree to be a parody of Ayn Rand's character Ragnar Danneskjold.Let us consider humanity a biogram (the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of "conditioned verbal habits"). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society.” This is Bureaucracy,” said Dionysius, and he smashed his wine jug in anger; beside him, his lynx glared balefully. Captain Nemo Copy: Hagbard Celine, the genius anarchist who opposes The Illuminati with his golden submarine, the Leif Ericson. Wrongly sold as science fiction, this is an anarcho-libertarian bit of mischief mashing up some serious indirect philosophy and psychology with popular cultural memes, conspiracy theory, erotica, the occult and a lot of dated political satire.