The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Hagbard took another belt of the brandy and repeated: "The Saures were not Illuminati. Neither were Weishaupt or Hitler. They were frauds, pure and simple. First they deluded themselves, then they deluded others. The real Illuminati, the A:.A:., have never been involved in politics or in any form of manipulating or coercing people. Our interests are entirely elsewhere. Do what thou wilt is our law. Only in the last few decades, as the fate of the earth seemed to be hanging in the balance, have we taken any direct action. Even so, we have been cautious. We know that power corrupts. We have acted chiefly by not-acting, by what the Taoists call wu-wei. But then things got out of hand. They moved too fast… We fucked up somewhat. But only because total inaction seemed to mean total disaster."

"You mean you, as an official of some sort in the A:.A:., infiltrated the fake Illuminati and became one of their top Five, intending to undo them nonviolently? And it didn't work?"

"It worked about as well as any activity on that level ever works," Hagbard said somberly. "Most of humanity has been spared, for a while. And the wild free animals have been spared. For a while." He sighed. "I guess I'll have to begin from the A-B-Cs. We have never sought power. We have sought to disperse power, to set men and women free. That really means: to help them to discover that they are free. Everybody's free. The slave is free. The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences. 'Fear is failure.' 'The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.' "Thou hast no right but to do thy will.' The goose can break the bottle at any second. Socrates took the hemlock to prove it. Jesus went to the cross to prove it. It's in all history, all myth, all poetry. It's right out in the open all the time."

Hagbard sighed again. "Our founder and leader, the man known in myth as Prometheus or the snake in the garden of Eden-"

"Oh, Christ," Joe said, slumping forward in his seat. "I have the feeling that you're starting to put me on again. You're about to tell me that the Prometheus and Genesis stories are really based on fact."

"Our leader, known as Lucifer or Satan," Hagbard went on, "Lucifer being the bringer of light-"

"You know," Joe said, "I'm not going to believe a word of this."

"Our leader, known as Prometheus the fire-bringer or Lucifer the light-bringer or Quetzalcoatl the morning star or the snake in the garden of Osiris's bad brother, Set, or Shaitan the tempter- well, to be brief, he repented." Hagbard raised an eyebrow. "Does that intrigue you sufficiently to silence your skepticism long enough for me to finish a sentence?"

"He repented?" Joe sat upright again.

"Sure. Why not?" Hagbard's old malicious grin, so rare in the last week, returned. "If Atlas can Shrug and Telemachus can Sneeze, why can't Satan Repent?"

"Go ahead," Joe said. "This is just another one of your put-ons, but I'm hooked. I'll listen. But I have my own answer, which is that there is no answer. You're just an allegory on the universe itself, and every explanation of you and your actions is incomplete. They'll always be a new, more up-to-date explanation coming along a while later. That's my answer."

Hagbard laughed easily. "Charming," he said. "I must remember that the next time I'm trying to understand myself. Of course, it's true of any human being. We're all allegories on the universe, different faces it wears in trying to decide what it really is… But our founder and leader, as I was saying, repented. That's the secret that has never been revealed. There is no stasis anywhere in the cosmos, least of all in the minds of entities that possess minds. The basic fallacy of all bad writers-and theologians are notoriously bad writers-is to create cardboard characters who never change. He gave us the light of reason and, seeing how we misused it, he repented. The story is more complicated, but that's the basic outline. At least, it's as much as I understood until a week ago. The important thing to get clear is that he never aimed at power or destruction. That's a myth-"

"Created by the opposition," Joe said. "Right? I read that in Mark Twain's defense of Satan."

"Twain was subtle," Hagbard said, taking a little more brandy, "but not subtle enough. No, the myth was not created by the opposition. It was created by our founder himself."

"Wilde should be alive," Joe said admiringly. "He was so proud of himself, setting paradox on top of paradox until he had a nice three- or four- or five-story house of contradictions built up. He should see the skyscrapers you create."