The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Weishaupt assumed that Kolmer meant the passage would become clear if he read it while under the influence of ergot. He promptly went down to his laboratory and tossed off a jigger; then, for good measure, he chewed a few peyote buttons. (He was under the misapprehension that the Don Juan referred to was the same Yaqui Indian magician of the twentieth century whose mind he had been tapping through the Morgenheutegesternwelt. Peyote was that Don Juan's great "teacher," and Weishaupt had imported some from Mexico at great trouble and expense.) It should be explained at this point that the question which Kolmer was answering happened to be not philosophical but personal. Weishaupt had sought his advice on a problem much perplexing him that month: the fact that his sister-in-law was somewhat pregnant and circumstantial evidence seemed to mark him as the father. He wasn't at all sure how to explain this to Eve. Kolmer had intended to convey that Adam should give his paramour the ergot, since it often functions as an abortifacient; the alternative referred to the path of an earlier Don Juan and meant splitting the scene entirely. However, the stoned Ingolstadt sage misunderstood totally, and so came to the Necronomicon full of hashish, peyote, and a substantial quality of ergot, which had, under the influence of the other drugs and his own intestinal juices, mutated into ergotine, a close chemical cousin of LSD. The result was that the words seemed to leap out of the page at him, shouting with intense meaning:

THEY RULED ONCE WHERE MAN RULES NOW SUMMER WHERE MAN RULES NOW AFTER SUMMER IS WINTER THEY SHALL RULE AGAIN AND AFTER WINTER

Abdul Alhazred's concept of the Great Cycle, which derived actually from the Upanishads, took on kinky edges in Weishaupt's flipped-out cortex. Five kinky edges, to be exact, since he was still obsessed with the profound new understanding of the Law of Fives he had achieved the night he saw the shoggoth turn into a rabbit. He quickly fetched Giambattista Vico's Scienze nuovo from his shelf and began reading: He saw that he was right. Vico's theory of history, in which all societies pass through the same four stages, was an oversimplification-there were, when you looked closely at the actual evidence behind Vico's rhetoric, five distinct stages each time the Italian listed only four. Weishaupt looked very closely, and, like Joe Malik, the harder be looked the more fives he found.

It was then that the man's truly unique mind made its great leap: He remembered that Joachim of Floris, a proto-primus Illuminatus of the eleventh century, had divided history into three stages: the Age of the Father, dominated by Law; the Age of the Son, dominated by Love; and the Age of the Holy Spirit, dominated by Joy. Where most philosophers rush to publish their insights, Weishaupt saw the advantage of an alternative path. The Law of Fives would be kept secret, so that only Illuminati Primi would know about it and could predict events correctly, but the Joachimite theory would be revived and publicized to mislead others. (He, Kolmer, Meyer Amschel Rothschild, DeSade, and Sir Frances Dashwood-the original Five-had some discussions about possibly pushing Vico instead of Joachim, but, as Weishaupt argued, "Four is a little bit too close to five…" Even so, it was quite a spell of years before they found the ideal front man to push the three-step theory, G. W. F. Hegel. "He's perfect," Weishaupt wrote in the De Molay cipher from Mount Vernon. "Unlike Kant, who makes sense only in German, this man doesn't make sense in any language.") The rest of the story-the exoteric story, at least -is history. After Hegel was Marx; and after Marx, the Joachimite three-step was permanently grafted onto revolutionary tactics.