Robert Anton Wilson’s Advice for Stopping the Illuminati from Messing with your Head

Every now and again, I go back to Robert Anton Wilson. After reading his Illuminatus! Trilogy, I went on to theorize about his Sex Magicians. I then took a look at his Irish novel before returning a few years later to his autobiography. While the effects that Wilson’s writing had on the realms of conspiracy and modern occultism are vast, not all of his books are Nocturnal Revelries material. I recently read 2 of his books, Prometheus Rising and The Illuminati Papers.

Prometheus Rising

Prometheus Rising is basically a self-help book to show people how to untangle their neuroses and understand their own thinking. It’s largely based around Timothy Leary’s 8 circuit model of consciousness. This idea comes up in the first entry of Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger series, but he goes into more detail here. I’m not a psychologist or neurologist or anything, but this concept seems like a load of hoaky bullshit to me. The first few “circuits”, the ones involving survival, emotions and semantics, make some sense. These are definitely things that affect how people think, but by the time we get to the discussions of genetic memory and quantum consciousness in the 7th and 8th circuits, we are dealing with nonsense.

While the main premise behind the book isn’t remotely convincing, Wilson’s writing was entertaining enough to get me through to the end. One of Wilson’s big ideas, and I think he talks more about this in Quantum Psychology (which is essentially a sequel to Prometheus Rising), is the idea of reality tunnels. The fact that Robert Anton Wilson’s reality tunnel incorporated Leary’s 8 circuit model of consciousness doesn’t have much of an effect on how I view his other ideas. It works for him, but I don’t think it works for me. Maybe I just don’t understand it properly.

SMI²LE, another of Leary’s ideas, is also important in this book. SMI²LE stands for Space Migration, Intelligence squared and Life Extension. As Leary and Wilson saw things, these were the goals that humanity should be striving for. I found it painful to see how optimistic Wilson was in the early 1980s. Back then, these guys thought that humanity would currently be living on different planets, educated to the point that we’d be living in a work and war free utopia and that medicine would be bringing us to the edge of immortality. What’s actually happening in the world today? Social media has taken control of our thinking, and it’s promulgating anti-scientific and anti-humanitarian disinformation to an audience that is too complacent to spit out the shit they are being fed. The quality of human life in wealthy nations is actually deteriorating. The most powerful men in the world are narcissistic scum who care only for themselves, and the majority of people are happy about this. We’re completely fucked.

The Illuminati Papers

**Ronin Publishing – 1990 (Originally published 1980)**

I also read The Illuminatus Papers. This is a collection of interviews with Wilson and essays that are written from the perspective of characters in his Illuminatus! Trilogy. It’s far less focused than Prometheus Rising, but it contains many similar ideas. The 8 Circuit Model of Consciousness and SMI²LE both come up again. There’s also essays on Stanley Kubrick, Ezra Pound, Beethoven and Raymond Chandler and lots of poems. The most interesting parts of this book are the interviews with Conspiracy Digest magazine where Wilson discusses Crowley, Satanism and various conspiracies. Of the 12 books by Robert Anton Wilson that I have read, this one is the least important. I actually enjoyed reading it more than Prometheus Rising, but it doesn’t really add anything substantive to the the author’s big ideas.

Just last night, I found an interview that Robert Anton Wilson did with Nardwuar. I knew that they had talked, but I had never heard the interview before. It’s a good listen. I find that Bob’s interviews and lectures are a more entertaining way of learning about his ideas about the real world. I think I’ll read some more of his fiction next.

Catholicism, Conspiracies and Consciousness: Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger Trilogy

Robert Anton Wilson has been a hero of mine for quite a while. His Illuminatus! Trilogy was one of the first books I read for this blog. My reviews of his The Sex Magicians and Masks of the Illuminati are probably the best pieces of writing I’ve published. I’ve read a couple more of his books since posting those, but the contents of The Book of the Breast and Quantum Psychology aren’t exactly Nocturnal Revelries material.

I’ve been reading a lot of books about conspiracies recently, and digging in this field this has led me to an absolutely bizarre individual called James Shelby Downard. There are rumours online that he’s not a real person, and that was was made up by Adam Parfrey and Michael Hoffman II for an essay published in Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture from 1987. This confused me as I had read that Robert Anton Wilson had mentioned Shelby in Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, the first part of Wilson’s “autobiography”, in 1977. There’s actually a quote on the cover of Shelby’s autobiography from Wilson that says, “the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all”. I thought it only responsible to see what Wilson had to say about Downard, so I read all three entries of the Cosmic Trigger series.

So these books aren’t really an autobiography. There’s autobiographical elements, especially in the second volume, but, as a whole, they’re more a collection of Wilson’s big ideas and how he came to adopt them.

Final Secret of the Illuminati – 1977

The first book wasn’t that great. I’ve watched enough video lectures of Wilson to know his general outlook, and none of the stuff on Timothy Leary, the Illuminati, Discordianism, Aleister Crowley, and the author’s own alien contact came as a surprise to me. One of the big things that Wilson pushes is the idea of reality tunnels and how truth, by his definition, is relative. I accept this idea, and Wilson’s linguistic philosophy is one of my favourite things about him, but the examples he provides in this book are ridiculous. One of his favourite books at the time of writing this was Robert Temple’s The Sirius Connection, one of the worst pieces of crap I’ve ever read. He also presents the psychic powers of Uri Gellar as evidence for some of his claims. I was a bit surprised that a person who I thought was intelligent had been duped by such garbage. Also, there’s a bit near the end where Wilson presents Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of consciousness in significant detail. Admittedly, I am not a cognitive neuroscientist, but this idea absolutely stank of shit to me. The book ends with Wilson’s kid dying. This was heartbreaking to read, and I wonder if it had something to do with the second half of the book being far worse than the first.

Down to Earth – 1991

Part 2 was by far the most enjoyable in the Cosmic Trigger series. Wilson tells more of his life story in this one, and he comes across as the witty, interesting guy I know he was. He had spent much of the time between writing this and the first book in Ireland, and this is apparent in his writing. Much of the book is taken up with discussions on his “Irish” upbringing, James Joyce and the modern Irish legal system. He also gets into the P2 conspiracy. Honestly, you could read and enjoy this one without picking up the other 2 entries in the series. It actually deals with the earliest parts of his life more thoroughly than the first entry in the series, so it’d be a fine starting point.

My Life after Death – 1995

I don’t know if I’d been reading too much of the one author or that this book is just worse than the others, but I didn’t hugely enjoy the last entry in the series. Wilson had already covered most of his important life experiences in the previous books, and this one came out only 4 years after the preceding entry. Does enough stuff happen between the ages of 59 and 64 to warrant a new entry in an autobiography? Apparently not. Instead of offering new, insightful ways of thinking about the world, Wilson instead fills this book with cringeworthy claims about the threat of political correctness and how society oppresses men more than women. I am quite sure that Wilson wasn’t a bad guy, but these tirades are hard to stomach in 2024. Don’t get me wrong. I accept that some of the ways that people currently expect others to use language are utterly ridiculous, but in my experience, the people who are complaining about political correctness and “wokeism” are usually assholes. Again, I’ve read enough of Wilson to know that he wasn’t anything close to a bigot, and he does make some valid points about identity politics, but the way he sets his arguments up are a little too similar to your Trump voting uncle’s facebook posts. At one point he asks why there’s no such thing as a straight pride parade. Sigh. There’s some discussion of the Priory of Sion mysteries here, and it seems that Wilson had encountered similar ideas on this topic to Tracy Twyman’s. He also discusses Orson Welles, Shakespeare and Elmyr, the art forger. This wasn’t as interesting as the other books, but it’s still worth a read.

I read these books because I’m going through a conspiracy theory phase at the moment, and Robert Anton Wilson is something of a conspiracy expert. He does discuss multiple conspiracies in these books, but he’s using conspiracies as a way to explain his worldview rather than adding a huge amount to conspiracy lore. Some of his ideas were a bit naïve and/or silly, but Wilson was always self aware enough to avoid coming across as a complete tool. He also had a lot of really good ideas, and I think his ideas on language should be more widely read. The Cosmic Trigger books were amusing overall, and they’re probably an easier starting point than the author’s fiction. I’m sure I’ll get around to more of that in the future.

Beware the Cryptocracy! Michael A. Hoffman II’s Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

When I was reading 9/11 as Mass Ritual, I noticed repeated references to a book called Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare by Michael A. Hoffman II and put it on my to-read list. Recently, I’ve been researching a particularly bizarre conspiracy-theorist named James Shelby Downard, and it turns out that his most infamous piece of writing, an essay called Kill King 33°, was co authored by Hoffman. I did a little research on this Hoffman chap, and it turned out that most of his other books are about how much he dislikes the Jews. He’s a holocaust denier and a key proponent of the Irish slavery myth. I’m not interested in reading crap like that, but this particular text is focused on more esoteric topics, and it seems pretty influential among cuckoo crazy conspiracists. Bill Cooper spent a couple of episodes of his radio show on this text. I had to read it.

**Wiswell Ruffin House – 1992 (First published 1989)**

Michael A. Hoffman II – Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare

The world is ruled by a shadow government. It’s not exactly clear who makes up this cryptocracy, but it’s almost definitely the Freemasons. This satanic cabal uses the media, shadow language and psychodrama to control the unthinking masses.

Hoffman claims that the cryptocracy produce traumatic events to scare the public and then wait a few years to leak information that basically admits their guilt. Jack the Ripper, the Son of Sam, and the Kennedy assassination were all examples of this. It’s this idea that 9/11 as Mass Ritual is based around. I covered the Son of Sam stuff before, and I’m going to be revisiting the JFK stuff with Hoffman’s pal Downard real soon. I’m also thinking of doing a deep dive into Ripperology at some point in the future. The main thing holding me back is the sheer volume of books about Saucy Jack. I don’t know where to start.

Shadow language is method by which the cryptocracy deliberately drop hints that they have done something terrible. Remember that time when an Ozzy Osbourne song contained the name of an airport where a plane landed on 9/11? You think it’s coincidence that Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was killed is on the 33rd parrallel and that there are 33 degrees in Freemasonry? I suppose crazy people forget that there is a finite number of words in and that some words will pop up in conversations about entirely different things.

Hoffman also claims that the murder of Sharon Tate was a sacrifice to the moon goddess after the first astronauts to land on the moon desecrated her by loading 50lbs of moon rocks into their shuttle back to earth. I hadn’t heard that one before.

In general, there are two big problems with Hoffman’s writing. The first is that it’s bad. I’m a big fan of clarity. My approach to argumentative writing has always been to state things as clearly and simply as possible. Don’t beat around the bush. Say what you mean and then provide examples and clarifications. Hoffman doesn’t do this. There’s no clear central thesis to this work. It reads like a frustrated rant.

The second problem is that most of what Hoffman says is glaringly obvious. In fact, many of his claims about the manipulability of the public seem understated given the events of the last 30 years. Human beings are exactly as stupid as Hoffman portrays them, but in reality, the forces that govern them are considerably more powerful (and sinister) than the freemasons. It would be pretty easy for a stupid person to read this book and see it as prophetic. In that way, it’s similar to the Unabomber’s manifesto. It came as no surprise to see that Hoffman actually contributed an essay on the Unabomber to the second volume of Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture.

People are dumb idiots, but I cannot believe that there is a well coordinated effort by a shadow government to control them. That idea gives us too much credit. Everybody is stupid, absolutely everybody. The Illuminati, if they exist, are morons too. As mentioned above, I am currently reading more of Hoffman’s work on conspiracies. It’s leading me to a lot of bizarre texts and sketchy characters. Take care. There’s a lot of freaks out there.

Ozzy did 9/11! S.K. Bain’s The Most Dangerous Book in the World

I was still in school when I saw Loose Change, one of the documentaries that popularised the 9/11 truther movement. It was a formative experience for me. I was convinced that it was real for a few days, but after reading up on it, I came to realise that it was nonsense. I accept that the American government is a deceit machine that was at least partly culpable, but if they were deliberately going to do this to their own country, they wouldn’t leave as many clues and discrepancies as conspiracy theorists would have us believe.

I ignored the topic for almost 20 years, even after taking an interest in conspiracy theories. If the 9/11 attacks were staged, it could only have been political. There were no aliens or Satanic cults involved, so I wasn’t interested.

The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 as Mass Ritual

A few years ago, I saw this book and it caught my attention. Not only is the title unutterably stupid and potentially offensive, but it also promises a scintillating layer of black magic to the 9/11 truth movement. I knew I’d have to read it, but it seemed pretty long. The introduction was also written by Peter Levenda. I’ve read a few of his books, and my least favourite was his book on conspiracies. After recently reading and enjoying the Heck out of Milton William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse, another lengthy book about insane conspiracy theories, I decided to dive into Bain’s work.

I’m really glad I did. I enjoyed this book a lot more than I was expecting, and I finished it in just a few days. Please don’t misunderstand. This is not a convincing book at all, but it’s easy to read, and its claims are so outrageous that I consumed it very quickly

The US government is run by Illuminati disciples of Aleister Crowley. These creeps organised the 9/11 attacks as a massive black magic ritual to usher in a new era of Satanic glory. The details that give this information away were not accidents. They were deliberately left there because the Satanic Elite are mocking us. I’ll just give a few examples.

George Bush found out that the planes had flown into the World Trade Center while he was visiting a school. Footage exists of him listening to the children reading a story called “The Pet Goat” as he is told that “America is under attack.” This is not a coincidence. The Pet Goat is a symbol of Lucifer. Even the text of the story depicts this particular goat as rebellious and violent. Also, the children in the classroom were mostly black. Seeing the pattern yet? (Bain’s insinuation, not mine!)

One of the many illustrations in this very important and serious book

The school that Bush was in was also close to the flight school where the terrorists had trained and a clown college with links to the Freemasons and the CIA. You think this is a coincidence? Guess again, idiot!

Flight 93, the plane in which the passengers overpowered the terrorists (who were armed with shanks), crashed down in a place called Shanksville. Bill Crowley (yes, CROWLEY!!!) was a Pittsburgh FBI guy who had jurisdiction in Shanksville. Flight 93 too! 93 was one of Aleister Crowley’s favourite numbers. You might brush this off and say that there’s loads of Crowleys out there and that the FBI guy’s name has nothing to do with anything, but Bill wasn’t the only Crowley involved.

Korean Airlines Flight 85 was supposed to land in Alaska on September the 11th, 2001, but because of some miscommunication, it was redirected to the airport in Whitehorse in the Yukon. The air traffic controller at that airport was one Tim Crowley. As if that wasn’t enough, please recall the lyrics to Mr. Crowley, one of the most famous songs about Aleister Crowley:

Mr. Crowley
Won’t you ride my white horse?
Mr. Crowley
It’s symbolic, of course
Ozzy Osbourne 1980

White horse? Whitehorse! The song was written more than 30 years before the events it describes, and the songwriter was at the peak of his legendary drug use, but to me, it seems almost impossible that Ozzy didn’t foresee the Korean pilot of flight 085 misunderstanding the message from the groundstation in Alaska. He is clearly in league with the Illuminati overlords.

Ozzy isn’t the only heavy metaller involved here. Judas Priest’s Some Heads are Gonna Roll forecasts the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Arizona in 2012. Rob Halford was in on it too.

Oh, by the way, if you’re reading that last bit and you’re wondering why you don’t remember the nuclear bomb detonating in Arizona in 2012, that’s because it never happened. Half of this book deals with the attacks of September 11th, 2001, but the other half describes what was supposed to happen in 2012, the year after the book was published. None of this stuff actually happened, but that’s probably only because Bain had predicted it, and the Illuminati backed off. It’s ironic that the subtitle of this work is “The World’s Most Dangerous Book” when it actually saved millions of lives.

There’s a lot more in here that I’m not mentioning. The Skull & Bones Society, the JFK assassination and the Insane Clown Posse all play their part. Did you know that the Statue of Liberty actually depicts Lucifer? This is ridiculous stuff, and trying to refute the claims made in this book would be entirely pointless. It was an entertaining read though.

Milton William Cooper’s Behold A Pale Horse: A Blueprint for the X-Files

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

The hole in the ozone layer was made by people to let excess heat escape into space. There are colonies on the moon and mars. JFK was killed by his driver because he was going to tell the public about aliens. Whitley Strieber is an agent of the CIA. 600 aliens live with Bo Gritz in Area 51. Tobacco is purposely grown in fields covered in uranium so that more smokers will get cancer. Timothy Leary was an MK ULTRA agent. The Pope made the gas canisters used in German concentration camps.

Oh and the Illuminati run everything, AIDs was invented to kill homosexuals and black people, and the human race is just an alien experiment, but I’m assuming you knew all of that already.

Behold A Pale Horse – Milton William Cooper

**Light Technology Publications – 1991**

Yes, I finally got around to reading Bill Cooper’s conspiracy classic, Behold A Pale Horse, the book that served as a blueprint for the X-Files. I’ve known of its existence for a long time, but it’s over 500 pages of intense paranoia, and I didn’t want to put myself through it. What I didn’t realise was that it’s not exactly a cohesive work, and you don’t actually have to read every single part of it to get the idea. Much of it is scans of letters, newspaper clippings and bizarre documents.

To try and summarise this book would be pointless. Cooper is so paranoid that he doesn’t really commit to any specific theory. At times he seems confident that there are aliens living on Earth, but then he points out that he might only think that because that’s what the Illuminati want him to think. At one point he claims that the apparition at Fatima was a warning in which aliens showed children a hologram video of the actual crucifixion of Christ. He then ruminates on whether the aliens actually travelled back in time to record the crucifixion or if they just animated it themselves. He then goes on to point out that if they have the power to do either of those things, they may have staged the entire Jesus thing for their own purposes. Trust no-one.

Ultimately, I quite enjoyed Behold A Pale Horse. I also got the names of several other books I’ll be trying to track down in the near future. I assume that those books will also be complete rubbish, and I only hope that they are as sincere as this bizarre masterpiece. I don’t know if it’s the frenzied nature of Cooper’s writing or the knowledge of what happened to him after writing this book that makes his writing captivating.

Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America – Mark Jacobson

Directly after finishing Behold A Pale Horse, I read Mark Jacobson’s Pale Horse Rider, a book that analyzes Cooper’s life and works. Much of what it covers is contained in Behold A Pale Horse, but it’s reassuring to have somebody sane confirm that Cooper did actually mean the things that you’ve just read in his book.

Pale Horse Rider also covers Cooper’s radio show, his surprisingly powerful following in the hip-hop community, his shockingly accurate prediction of 9/11, and his unfortunate end. William Cooper spent his last months living alone on a mountaintop convinced the police were going to come and kill him. The police eventually came up the mountain and shot him in the head.

One thing that this book briefly mentions about Cooper’s life that is not included in Behold A Pale Horse is the time he spent in a mental institution after returning from Vietnam. He was crazy in the literal sense. He also seems to have been an unpleasant person to be around, an angry, paranoid mad man. I’d say I wish he was still alive, but part of him still is. Alex Jones is basically a poor man’s Bill Cooper, and a lot of the right-wing militia style conspiracists seem to have admired Cooper. Timothy McVeigh came to visit him before bombing Oklahoma. Cooper did include a photocopy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Behold A Pale Horse, and he loved the 2nd amendment, but his politics weren’t as cut-and-dry as many of his ilk today. I’d like to think of him dismissing Q-Anon and Pizzagate as Bilderberg disinformation campaigns to make truth-seekers look stupid. (I mean… that’s what they are, right?)

I recommend reading both Cooper’s own book and Jacobson’s book about Cooper, but if you are a normal person, the latter will probably suffice. It’s very entertaining.

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been really into conspiracy theories since reading Programmed to Kill and JFK and UFO recently. It’s a field I’ve been avoiding for a few years, but I’m quite enjoying it at the moment. More to come soon!

Ghosts, the Illuminati and a Swastika

ghosts illuminati swastika mcivor tyndall.jpg Ghosts: A Message from the Illuminati
Dr. Alexander James McIvor-Tyndall
The Balance Publishing Co. – 1906

Hang on. A terrifying spectre, the Illuminati and a swastika on its cover? What frightful secrets must a book like this contain? Were the Nazis in contact with spirits? Did the Illuminati try to warn humanity of the coming horrors of World War II? Were the Nazis just an offshoot of the Illuminati? There’s so many questions raised by a cover like this. Fortunately for you, I have read this fairly hard to find book, and I am about to share with you its shocking revelations.

The Ghosts of the title are the rules of society. They are ghosts in the sense that the ideas behind them are as dead as the festering, rancid corpse of Michael Jackson. For instance, many people believe that life is not supposed to be full of joy. This notion is the result of the fact that human life used to be pretty shit. Back then, people told themselves that it was good to suffer in order to make themselves feel better about their shitty lives. But life isn’t that shit anymore, and the notion that it shouldn’t be filled with happiness is outdated – it is a Ghost of an idea. Fair enough, I accept the message of this book. I feel the same way about men wearing ties. Why fucking bother? To keep you warm? Fuck ties.

This book was published as part of a series of short books on mysticism, but there’s nothing particularly mystical about its message. It was published just two years after Crowley’s Book of the Law though, and there’s a very definite “Do what thou wilt…” vibe to the message here. There’s not a lot about the author, Dr. Alexander James McIvor-Tyndall (alias Ali Nomad), online, but I found a dead link that shared some interesting information on his life. He was English but moved to the States as a young man. Although trained as a doctor, he seems to have spent his life lecturing and writing about spiritualism and the likes. He had been working as a hypnotist several years prior to writing this book and had already published a book on palm-reading. Apparently he had also lectured on Theosophy as early as 1890. Only a few people would have had the chance to read Crowley’s Book of the Law when Ghosts was written, but as an English occultist writing in the early 1900s, it’s not impossible that Dr. Alexander James McIvor-Tyndall would have heard Crowley’s message (possibly through mutual friends in the Illuminati). He did go on to write a book about “the spiritual function of sex”, so if he wasn’t familiar with Crowley, the two men were at least working on similar wavelengths.

Presumably Ghost‘s message of nonconformity to the oppressive rules of society is coming directly from the Illuminati, but other than the title, the only reference to the Illuminati in this work is when the author introduces a quote from Hamlet, referring to its author as ” Shakespeare, the Illumined”. I guess the message of Ghosts falls in with the original purpose of the Illuminati, that of promoting equality and freedom.

The swastika on the cover makes the book seem rather curious indeed, but as I’ve already mentioned, Ghosts came out in 1906, so its appearance has absolutely nothing to do with the Nazis. (Unless of course the Nazis were just an offshoot of the Illuminati!) The author of this book actually went on to edit an occult magazine called The Swastika from 1907 until 1911, all issues of which are available here. (I love the internet.)

ghosts illuminati ad swastika.jpg
Advertisement taken from Swastika Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 4.

Despite having the most alluring cover of all time, Ghosts: A Message from the Illuminati isn’t hugely exciting. For those who clicked into this post hoping for a book about Nazi Occultists, stay tuned. I have a post on that topic scheduled for next week.