RAWIllumination.net

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Saturday, April 5, 2025

What I read last month


I was concentrating last month on novels nominated for the Prometheus Award, as I am one of the judges on the nominating committee. 

Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky. A science fiction novel about a prison colony on a mysterious alien planet. Every creature in the planet exists in a state of symbiosis with another creature, and they are constantly combining and recombining. A fascinating premise.

Beggar's Sky, Wil McCarthy. An unusual first contact novel, quite well done. I had not read Wil McCarthy until a couple of years ago, but it appears I missed a good writer. 

The Glass Box, J. Michael Straczynski. Political prisoners kept inside a mental hospital. Kind of reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Epicurus and His Influence on History, Ben Gazur. I believe I've mentioned my interest in Epicureanism. This one focuses on the reception of the philosophy across centuries. Not the best introduction to the philosophy itself, but it covers the history of it nicely. 

Moby Dick, Herman Melville. I was glad to re-read it, and I appreciated everyone's comments in the reading group. 


Friday, April 4, 2025

The Wobblies in Illuminatus


Chicago poet and anarchist Franklin Rosemont, one of the inspirations for the character Simon Moon in Illuminatus!

Jesse Walker sends me this quote from the book Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture by Chicago writer Franklin Rosemont


See also my 2014 interview with Neil Rest, the "real Simon Moon," which has this bit:

Did you know "Wobbly Surrealist" Franklin Rosemont very well? Can you talk about how he provided some of the inspiration for the "Simon Moon" character in Illuminatus! ?

Nope.  Didn't know him.  When I saw Bob Wilson, probably later in the summer of '76, I diffidently stoked my ego by saying that I recognized a lot of people in Illuminatus! but not myself.  He  replied, "Simon Moon is a composite."  I'm not sure when, but I eventually found out it was himself, Franklin Rosemont, and me.

Thursday, April 3, 2025

New 'Tales' Kickstarter meets goal


From Bobby's Substack.

Last year's Kickstarter campaign for the first Tales of Illuminatus comic book was an exciting affair featuring a struggle to meet the goal. (Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing fundraising site, if you don't meet the goal, the campaign fails.)

This year Bobby Campbell set a more modest goal for this year's planned second issue, $777, and it has already been met! As I write, late Thursday morning, $871 has been pledged. (I turned in my pledge Tuesday, shortly after spotting Bobby's campaign announcement on Substack and social media).

Of course, as many orders are possible are still desirable. Let's support the project! But congratulations to Bobby for meeting the goal so quickly. Much of that has to be people who bought the first comic book and were happy with what they got for their money.


Wednesday, April 2, 2025

'Tales of Illuminatus #2' Kickstarter launches

 


The Kickstarter has begun for Tales of Illuminatus #2, the new comic book adaptation for Illuminatus! Here is the announcement from Bobby Campbell.  And also here is the Kickstarter page for the project.

"A CAVALCADE OF NEW CHARACTERS JOIN THE CAST! Simon Moon, Mary Lou Servix, Hagbard Celine, F.U.C.K.U.P., Harry Coin, John Dillinger, Dutch Schulz, Dr. Charles Mocenigo, Robert Pearson, Fission Chips, and so many more!" Bobby writes.

"We are running an extended Kickstarter campaign this time around, running from April 1st through May 31st, and will take late orders up until we go to press...

"TOI #2 will go to press in Summer 2025, and begin shipping world wide immediately thereafter, with digital editions sent out that same day :)))

"Our goal is to ship in Early Summer, Mid Summer is probably more likely, and Late Summer is the worst case scenario."

Please visit the links for more information. 



Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Recommendation for edition of 'Ulysses'

 


Aaron Gwyn on X: "The Gabler ULYSSES was the first edition I read. It’s not my favorite, though. When I taught an undergraduate ULYSSES seminar a few years back, I used the 1934/1961 Corrected Text that Modern Library puts out. This is the edition I recommend."

Many of the people who read this blog are big Joyce fans; is there a consensus on this? 


Monday, March 31, 2025

Moby Dick online reading group, conclusion of the novel



I particularly liked this image from the Jan. 27 blog post, so I'm going to post it again. 

Chapter 135, "The Chase -- Third Day" and "The Epilogue."

So we conclude the reading group that began on Nov. 4. Of course, if my fellow bloggers, Oz and Eric, want to add something and do another post, I would be happy to run it.

I would suppose that some of the people who might be reading along with us are reading the novel for  the first time, and don't know what happens at the end. So I would prefer to avoid spoilers!

Still, I feel comfortable noting one more time that Melville does well when action is taking place.  

"What a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world." A lovely passage about a day that will be filled with horrors.

"Time itself held long breaths with keen suspense." A moment of calm before the action.

And the ending has a couple of nice ironies to it, but I can't explain that without giving away the ending!

The last sentence of the novel is referenced in the title of "Another Orphan," a 1982 novella by John Kessel, a story about a contemporary man who goes to sleep and wakes up to find himself aboard an old-fashioned sailing ship with a diverse crew: "The crew was an odd mixture of types and races: there were white and  black, a group of six Orientals who sat  apart on the rear deck and took no part  in the work, men with British and German accents, and an eclectic collection of others — Polynesians, an Indian, a huge, shaven-headed black African, and a mostly naked man covered from head to toe with purple tattoos, whorls and swirls and vortexes, images and symbols, none of them quite decipherable as a familiar object or person." 

Plus, the ship's captain offers a pretty good clue about the situation: "Fallon looked back with him and saw the black figure there, heavily bearded, tall, in a long coat, steadying himself by a hand in the rigging. The oil lamp above the compass slightly illuminated the dark face — and gleamed deathly white along with the ivory leg that projected from beneath his black coat. Fixed, immovable, the man leaned heavily on it. 'Ahab,' the sailor said."

Kessels story won a Nebula Award, so some of the science fiction fans reading this blog entry may well remember it. Discussion here, the particular issue of F&SF is available on the Internet archive. 

Thank you to Oz and Eric, and to everyone who has followed along with us for weeks!


 

Saturday, March 29, 2025

New interview with Steve "Fly" Pratt


Steve's album for the Tales of Illuminatus project, available on Bandcamp. Also, see my interview. 

R.U. Sirius interviews Steve "Fly" Pratt about his use of AI in making music. Here's the first question and answer of the Mindplex magazine interview:

RU Sirius: How do you view your creative project (in the broadest lifelong sense) as a process that benefits from integrating current AI systems?

Steve Fly: The latest iteration of my quarter-century (and counting) of research into Robert Anton Wilson’s Tale of the Tribe is a collaboration using some AI tools. Tale of The Tribe is a mountain range whose size and scope requires training to traverse, hill-climbing toward coherence. So far I’ve produced over 65 stanzas with corresponding audio. The first iteration is structured on 60 stanzas to represent the 60 vertices of the Buckminsterfullerene. This is prompted from a line in Ezra Pound’s Cantos “buckie has gone in for structure.” The structure of the poem/album is a tribute to Buckminster Fuller, whom RAW admired and studied with, and it snugly sits as one of the 13 primary inspirations in the way RAW conceived/perceived the universe.

These first 60 stanzas are a proof of concept, to be built on in the next iteration. The goal is for each stanza to also function as a concept for a new core ontology, the totality of the 60 stanzas. As Ben put it: “an overlapping yet somewhat diverse set of perspectives on the core ontological concept”.

More here. 

Friday, March 28, 2025

Timothy Leary's space migration plan


A space colony from Gerard O'Neill's book,The High Frontier. (Public domain image, via Wikipedia). 

In "Mine the Moon, Seed the Stars," the space migration part of Timothy Leary's SMI2LE proposal gets a nice writeup in the November 1976 issue of Mother Jones magazine. The writeup by  Don Goldsmith does a good job of covering the details of Gerard O'Neill's proposal for colonies in space. 

Goldsmith's article opens with a description of Leary talking to several dozen listeners in a house in Berkeley. "The man's name is Timothy Leary. Berkeley made him a PhD, Harvard a professor, LSD an ex-professor, the media a devil, the government a convict, prison a space-oriented philosopher. He is, perhaps, sane. But what is this elixir he is pushing? Space travel to other star systems? The aging process slowed by a factor of ten, halted entirely before long? Can you get behind it?" I thought the article would tell us more about Leary, but it shifts quickly to O'Neill and the pros and cons of his proposal. 

Goldsmith, 82, has written many space-related books and also is an astronomer.

Hat tip, Jesse Walker. 

Thursday, March 27, 2025

The number 23 from RAW Semantics

 


From RAW Semantics on Bluesky: "Oh crap - after all the time I spent trying to get this "Escher" 23 blueprint image right, I forgot to add it to my goddamn blog post! Now inserted, near the end. (And it's a good, long blog post - check it out!)"

I really liked the artwork, so I am sharing if you missed it in the earlier version of the post. 

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Jesse Walker reviews the RAW biography


 Jesse Walker in Reason magazine: The time an "acquaintance informed me that he had met a member of the Illuminati at a Grateful Dead show ... Every now and then, one of them would approach him at a Dead show just to check in on how he was doing and how well he was working toward his innate potential. Then another Deadhead piped up to say that he'd had the same experience."

This is part of a roundup reviewing two books: Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today, by Phil Tinline and Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, by Gabriel Kennedy.

About Chapel Perilous, Jesse writes, "Gabriel Kennedy has drawn on everything from Wilson's early journalism to his cameos in the Chicago Red Squad's surveillance files. Not just an in-depth look at Wilson's life and career, Chapel Perilous is an ably conducted tour through the many milieus that Wilson passed through—worlds of mystics and atheists, scientists and Playboy staffers, the antiwar and civil rights and libertarian movements. Not to mention pranksters and conspiracy theorists."

Read the whole thing.



Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Tuesday links

From Bobby Campbell on Bluesky, quoting Israel Regardie's intro to Prometheus Rising. 

Many of these probably deserve a blog posting all to themselves, but there's been a lot of news lately, so I am getting caught up.

New blog posting from RAW Semantics: "Cosmic Trigger 4 'is' you." As usual, the art is good, too. Spookah and I have weighed in, come  join us. 

Vayse podcasting interviewing Sequoyah Kennedy, co-author of Ong's Hat: COMPLEAT. In his newsletter, Joseph Matheny strongly recommends it, writing, "I’d go so far as to say this episode can be considered a COMPLEAT companion piece while retaining its strength as a stand-alone."

New John Higgs newsletter. New London dates have been added to the book tour. 

The Mycellium newsletter from Michelle Olley: Three new Discordian events at The Cockpit in London. 

Michael Grossberg on Lionel Shriver's novel, Mania. 



Monday, March 24, 2025

Moby Dick online reading group, chapters 131-134

 


This Week: Chapter 131, "The Pequod Meets the Delight," to Chapter 134, "The Chase -- Second Day."

By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger

Around about the early 1850s Herman Melville predicted that America would be the most powerful country in the world by the turn of the 20th Century and it most definitely required a robust national literature equal to its stature. This goes a long way toward explaining why he put so much into Moby Dick – all the Biblical and Shakespearean references and allusions and a plethora of other academic indicators afforded by a broad, rich and interested education in the arts combined with well-traveled life experiences; his philosophical questions and realizations; the vast panoramic scenes used as a canvas to create his masterpiece. Moby Dick became a cornerstone of the new, American Literature. 

 D.H. Lawrence helped codify this nascent body of writing with the publication in the early 1920s of Studies in Classic American Literature featuring two chapters on Melville, one of them on Moby Dick. According to Deleuze, Lawrence described “the new messianism, or the democratic contribution of American literature” … as a “morality of life in which the soul is fulfilled only by taking to the road, with no other aim, open to all contacts, never trying to save other souls, turning away from those that produce an overly authoritarian or groaning sound, forming even fleeting and unresolved chords and accords with its equals, with freedom as its sole accomplishment, always ready to free itself so as to complete itself.” 

Perhaps we now see this from the other side – having been a Great Power since the end of WW II, America seems to be exiting stage left (as Snagglepuss* might say) from the world stage with its new protectionist policies, trade wars, and threatened abandonment of allies. Not to mention the brutal, scorched earth policy of dismantling government.  American ideals may yet survive in its literature having outlived their existence in the morality of the power possessors who steer the ship of state (currently like drunken sailors).

*Snagglepuss, a pink, anthropomorphic mountain lion with a black tie and upturned collar, was a character in Hanna-Barbera cartoons, known for his catchphrases like "Heavens to Murgatroyd!" and "Exit, stage left!" After reading or watching the news these days I often catch myself exclaiming “Heavens to Murgatroyd!”

Great American literature with its joyful and tragic expressions of freedom from oppression will live on; there appears much to discover.  A case in point, partly built on the template of Moby Dick, is Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. In the first week of this reading group Jesse Bob commented:

“Lately, I've had my nose in another American novel that explores America's history, and many mysteries of metaphysical, existential and Fortean nature: Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, who influenced Robert Anton Wilson, but perhaps not as much as Moby Dick influenced both of them. Mason & Dixon presents itself in the style of an 18th century novel -- more Gulliver's Travels than Moby Dick -- but one can nonetheless detect the influence of Melville in its pages. Mason & Dixon places our heroes in Sumatra to chart the transit of Venus in its second episode. Moby Dick has Lazurus reaching for the Northern Lights before placing him in Sumatra in its second chapter.”

Sumatra mentioned in chapter 2 in both novels shows a direct resonance, the same opening note. I will point out more. Pynchon turns the Northern Lights into a communications medium for Jesuits at their headquarters in Quebec to send signals over the North Pole to conspirators. I’m also of the opinion that RAW influenced Pynchon – evident in Mason & Dixon (M&D). 

I find M&D an excellent read after Moby Dick (MD). In one sense, it could be its 20th Century sequel, taken several levels beyond. Like MD, M&D doesn’t concern itself with lot of plot or action. It’s framed around the work and partnership of an astronomer and surveyor. What the former does for whaling and the sea, the latter does for the land, the earth, and drawing precise lines on it. Both novels use the stars to navigate, one on land, the other in the sea; a little more so in Mason & Dixon. The detailing of every aspect connected with drawing the famous Mason & Dixon line including the context that led up to it, from complicated engineering details to a wide variety of human interactions with the locals and their crew and the politics of everything going on in America in the mid 1760s reminds one of the scale of Melville’s comprehensively covered ocean world.

Mason and Dixon has its own Ishmael, the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke who ostensibly narrates the entire book in the form of bedtime stories to his nephews and nieces and surrounding relatives. He was the  Chaplain on the expedition and, earlier, also happened to accompany Mason and Dixon on their mission to observe the transit of Venus around the southern tip of Africa. Like Ishmael, Cherrycoke sometimes becomes an omniscient narrator, relating things it seems the character couldn’t possibly know or have seen.   

By chapter 4 Pynchon has the two, newly met, on a long ocean voyage aboard the Seahorse (a name combining the sea with a land animal; also horse = Horus) recalling the nautical mood of Moby Dick. The back story of Dixon is that he had a teacher, Emerson, – a sort of incognito magician/wizard and early electromagnetic technician who gives a nod to Moby Dick: “– a Ship to him is the Paradigm of the Universe. ‘All the possible forces in play are represented each by its representative sheets, stays, braces, and shrouds and such, – a set of lines in space, each at its particular angle. Easy to see why sea-captains go crazy, – god-like power over realities so simplified ….”

Earlier I presented Deleuze’s view that great writers create a foreign language within the language they write in. For Moby Dick that foreign language consists of the ocean and whales. Spookah pointed out that the foreign language of Finnegans Wake often appears more prevalent than the English language it’s written in. Mason & Dixon has the foreign language of 18th Century literature that takes a little getting used to; written as if done circa 1786. So, we find a lot of Capitalization, mostly, but not always nouns; also not all nouns get capitalized – Pynchon has fun with this Style. Often, usually at the end of a word, the letter “e” gets replac’d by an apostrophe. Some words are too strong for the religious sensitivity at the time to spell out completely like the D___l, or d___‘ d.  Famous historical figures turn up like Ben Franklin and George Washington. The details around the drawing of the Mason and Dixon line seem obsessively accurate. He also throws in anachronisms from the future without warning such as having Mason take the Staten Island Ferry which didn’t come into existence until 1817. This recalls the kind of guerilla ontology Robert Anton Wilson puts into his novels. We find overlaps, folds and atmospheric resonance between Wilson’s final Historical Chronicles novel, Nature’s God and Mason & Dixon. The former novel came out in 1991, the latter 6 years later in 1997.  

Learning to comprehend and assimilate the foreign language of great writers like Melville, Joyce, Pound, Wilson, Pynchon, (who, btw, all use Cabala) and others (Burroughs, Kerouac, P.K. Dick, Heinlein, Bester, etc. etc. etc.) seems an entertaining and effective method of Intelligence Increase. Learning this language  comes from frequent reading and re-reading. Often I’ll reread a paragraph or section of Mason & Dixon  right away, sometimes a few times until a flicker of understanding begins to kindle.  Occasionally the brain just kicks in, going inside the language to easily to follow the text. At that point you’ve earned another notch on your neural wings, so to speak. It appears a tautology that solving one maze or puzzle makes it easier to solve others even more difficult. Cracking Joyce might help you to understand Pynchon or vice versa. Reading Moby Dick has made you smarter, possibly helping to open the door upon Joyce or Pynchon or the deeper strata found in Wilson, or now for something completely different. 

Similar to Moby Dick, what I especially love about Mason & Dixon is the frequent Bardo Exploration the reader traverses through. On one level it has all the earmarks of a Book of the Dead. Entry to the Bardo comes through a variety of surrealistic ways like paradoxes of time or dreams or encounters with non-human Intelligence of one stripe or another. The story begins with Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke coming to Philadelphia to attend Charles Mason’s funeral in 1786. He’s late getting there, misses the funeral, but visits Mason’s grave every day for his months long visit. Cherrycoke is able to stay with his sister and brother-in-law, the LeSparks, on the condition that he entertain his young twin nephews and older niece with stories, which of course, turn out to be all about Mason & Dixon. The book ends shortly before Mason’s death.

This form of a postmortem looking back on a main character’s life up to their death bears a strong similarity to another classic of 20th Century American literature, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, another Bardo classic with a strong presence of Magick. Lowry’s novel begins on the Mexican Day of the Dead one year after the demise of the main character, Geoffrey Firmin aka the Consul. The rest of the novel looks back on the Consul’s life leading up to his death on the very last page. Pynchon possibly pays homage to Lowry by naming a minor character in M&D, a revolutionary, Captain Volcanoe. Another parallel: Under the Volcano starts with a look at the lay of the land: “Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus.” The lay of the land, how it’s affected by drawing lines upon it and various other telluric effects (ley lines, Fung shui, Geomancy, etc.) appears a major theme of M&D. We see the word “traverse” in Lowrey’s first sentence, a word that Pynchon utilizes in M&D, but rises to great prominence in his next novel, Against the Day, where he makes Traverse, the surname of his primary protagonists. Traverse has bardo implications; one always traverses the Bardo, going from a “death” to a “rebirth,” never remaining in a static or steady-state in that territory; the only constant is change.  Both novels show a strong influence from Moby Dick. According to the AI Overlords, “Lowry's text contains multiple allusions to Moby-Dick," including references to the final words of Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick: ‘one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.’” Lowry would explicitly acknowledge the influence of Melville.

The emphasis on Death and the Bardo begins immediately in Mason & Dixon. After establishing the presence of Cherrycoke in his sister’s household and mentioning the purpose of his daily visit to Mason’s grave: “– “that like a shade with a grievance, he expected Mason, but newly arrived at Death, to help him with something”, the Revd begins his story of Mason and Dixon:

“’It begins with a hanging.’

‘Excellent!’ cry the Twins.

The Revd, producing a scarr’d old Note-book, cover’d in cheap Leather , begins to read. ‘had I been the first churchman of modern times to be swung from Tyburn Tree, – had I been then taken for dead, while in fact but spending an Intermission among the eventless corridors of Syncope,. . .’”

Corridors appear often in the Bardo domain. Tyburn Tree marks the spot in London of the principal location of public executions for over 650 years. 

For the majority of the novel, Mason is haunted by the death of his wife Rebekah: he experiences multiple Bardo encounters with her, in dreams and alternate realities. In one of the final chapters after completion of the Line, Mason reflects back on his life and her death: 

“That other Tract, across the Border, – perhaps nearly ev’rything, perhaps nearly nothing, – is denied him. “Is that why I sought so obsessedly Death’s Insignia, it’s gestures and forumlæ, its quotidian gossip, – all those awful days out at Tyburn, – hours spent nearly immobile, watching stone-carvers labor upon tomb embellishments, Chip by Chip, – was it all but some way to show my worthiness to obtain a permit to visit her, to cross that grimly patroll’d line, that very essence of Division?” He has another encounter with Rebekah in the next paragraph. She seems to be advising him what to do now that the Line is finished.

It's no secret that Pynchon loves puzzles, codes, cabala, cryptography, conspiracies, secret societies and mysteries of all sorts. The “sc” letter code seems on steroids in M&D particularly in the first half to two thirds of the book. It feels like Pynchon hits you over the head with it, so blatantly obvious does it appear. I don’t fully understand why (I have my guesses as you know) and tend to regard this “sc” ubiquity along the lines of a Zen koan. The code even turns up in the name of our faithful narrator, Revd Wicks Cherrycoke with the last letter of his first name followed by the first letter of his last name.

I’ll leave it here, for now, with one last quote that strongly suggests the influence of RAW:

“The Ascent to Christ is a struggle thro’ one heresy after another. River-wise up-country into a proliferation of Sects and Sects branching from Sects, unto Deism, faithless pretending to be holy, and beyond, – ever away from the Sea, from the Harbor, from all that was serene and certain, into an Interior unmapp’d, a Realm of Doubt. The Nights. The Storms and Beasts. The Falls, the Rapids, . . . the America of the Soul.

"Doubt is of the essence of Christ. . . . The final pure Christ is pure uncertainty.”

This comes from Undeliver’d Sermons by Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke. It can also easily read as the same “Christ” Crowley writes about being able to produce in “Postcards to Probationers” Equinox I Vol. II. Two allusions to Crowley: his initials, AC, at the top of the quote, and “Beasts” later on. Crowley’s oft mentioned and taught by RAW early piece on Skepticism, “The Soldier and the Hunchback: ! and ?” appeared in Equinox I Vol. I.

You may not want to read another difficult and dense novel immediately following Moby Dick, but I highly recommend giving Mason & Dixon a try at some point especially if one likes historical novels. In my opinion, it’s one of the greatest books ever written. Meanwhile, back on the Pequod the pace picks up.

Chapter 131 “The Pequod meets the Delight” foreshadows their final fate. There seems a reason Melville called the other ship the Delight, a paradoxical moniker given the circumstance, he calls it “most miserably misnamed.” 

Chapter 132 “The Symphony” does indeed have a very lyrical prose style reminiscent of Tolkien for its excellent descriptions. Starbuck starts to play the counter-melody of trying to get Ahab to change course.

Chapter 133 “The Chase–First Day”. Ahab smells Moby Dick before she’s spotted. These are some of the more epic chapters in the book . . . the Symphony starts to build to its climatic crescendo. 

Chapter 134 “The Chase–Second Day.” I found this bit very interesting for its synch with Thelema: 

“for of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port.

"Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales.”

For the last note of this Symphony I’ll quote different famous literary cetaceans: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

Next week: Almost done! Please read  Chapter 135, "The Chase -- Third Day" and "The Epilogue."