The Illuminatus! Trilogy

And then without warning it was there: a dark shape against the sun moving on silent wings, not flying but gliding: embodiment of some arrogance or innocence that surpassed fear and surpassed even the suggestion of any pride in its own fearlessness. "Oh my God," Smiling Jim whispered, raising the Remington and starting to sight, and then it banked, flapped its wings wildly, and uttered one shriek that seemed like the very sound of life itself. "Oh my God," he repeated: that sound seemed to outlast its own echo, it had entered into his brain and couldn't be dislodged, it was the sound of his own blood pumping in his veins: the primary, the only, the single sound that was the bass and treble of every organic pulsation and spasm, "Oh my God," he had it in the sight, the head was in profile, only one diamond-hard eye staring back and recognizing him and his weapon, but that sound still moved in his blood, moved the seminal vesicles, moved the secretion of every gland. It was the sound of eternal and unending clash between I and AM and their unity in I AM, he even thought for a flash of the critics of hunting and how little they understood of this secret, this mystic identity between the killer and the killed, then it uttered that Sound again and started to rise, but he had it, it was in the sight, he breathed, he aimed, he slacked, he squeezed, and for the third time the Sound came to him, death in life and life in death, it was falling, he thought he felt the earth stir below him and the word "earthquake" almost formed, but the Sound went on and on to the roots of him, it was the sound of the killer and he had killed the killer, he was the greater killer, and still it fell, faster and faster, dead now and subject only to the law of gravity not to the law of its own will, 32 feet per second per second (he remembered the formula of the fall), plunging downward, the most heartbreaking beautiful sight he had ever seen, every hunting club in the world would be talking about it, it would last as long as human speech survived, and he had done it, he had achieved immortality, he had taken its life and now it was part of him. His nose was running and his eyes were watering. "I did it," he screamed to the mountains, "I did it! I killed the last American eagle!" The earth below him cracked.

THE APPENDICES

(which are most instructive)

GREATER POOP: Is Eris true?

MALACLYPSE THE YOUNGER: Everything is true.

GP: Even false things?

MAL-2: Even false things are true.

GP: How can that be?

MAL-2: I don't know, man, I didn't do it.

–Interview with Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., Greater Metropolitan Yorba Linda Herald-News-Sun-Tribune-Journal-Dispatch-Post and San Francisco Discordian Society Cabal Bulletin and Intergalactic Report and Poop

Note: There were originally 22 appendices explaining all the secrets of the Illuminati. Eight of the appendices were removed due to the paper shortage. They will be printed in Heaven.

APPENDIX ALEPH: GEORGE WASHINGTON'S HEMP CROP

Many readers will assume that this book consists of nothing but fiction and fantasy; actually, like most historical tomes, it includes those elements (as do the works of Gibbon, Toynbee, Wells, Beard, Spengler, Marx, Yerby, Kathleen Windsor, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Moses, et. al.); but it also contains as many documented facts as do not seriously conflict with the authors' prejudices. Washington's hemp crop, for instance, is mentioned repeatedly in Writings of Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931. Here are some of the citations:

Volume 31, page 389: October 1791, letter from Mount Vernon to Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of Treasury: "How far… would there be propriety, do you conceive, in suggesting the policy of encouraging the growth of cotton and hemp in such parts of the United States as are adapted to the culture of these articles?"

In the next three years, Washington evidently settled the matter in his own mind, whatever Hamilton thought of the "proprieties." Volume 33, page-279, finds him writing from Philadelphia to his gardener at Mount Vernon to "make the most you can of the India Hemp seed" and "plant it everywhere." Waxing more enthusiastic, on page 384 he writes to an unidentified "my dear doctor," telling him, "I thank you as well for the seeds as for the Pamphlets which you had the goodness to send me. The artificial preparation of the Hemp from Silesia is really a curiosity…" And on page 469 he again reminds the gardener about the seed of the India Hemp: "[I] desire that the Seed may be saved in due season and with as little loss as possible."