The Illuminatus! Trilogy

* Fission Chips, like our other characters, was given a chance to peruse this manuscript before publication and correct any factual errors that may have crept in. Of this appendix, he said, "I think my leg is being pulled again, chaps. I suspect that Crowley wrote that in 1915 as a joke on his readers, and you blokes found it and inserted a reference to a magic formula used by Dillinger in your story just so you could then compose this appendix and 'explain' it." Such skepticism, straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, may be compared to the stance of the Bible Fundamentalist who avers that JHVH made the universe in six days in 4004 B.C. but included fossils and other false leads to make it appear much older. One could equally assert that the cosmos appeared out of Void one second ago, including us and our false memories of a longer duration here.

APPENDIX VAU: FLAXSCRIP AND HEMPSCRIP

Flaxscrip was first introduced into Discordian groups by the mysterious Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., in 1968. Hempscrip followed the year after, issued by Dr. Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S. (In the novel, taking one of our few liberties with historical truth, we move these coinages backward in time and attribute hempscrip to the Justified Ancients of Mummu.)

The idea behind flaxscrip, of course, is as old as history; there was private money long before there was government money. The first revolutionary (or reformist) use of this idea, as a check against galloping usury and high interest rates, was the foundation of "Banks of Piety" by the Dominican order of the Catholic Church in the late middle ages. (See Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.) The Dominicans, having discovered that preaching against usury did not deter the usurer, founded their own banks and provided loans without interest; this "ethical competition" (as Josiah Warren later called it) drove the commercial banks out of the areas where the Dominicans practiced it. Similar private currency, loaned at a low rate of interest (but not at no interest), was provided by Scots banks until the British government, acting on behalf of the monopoly of the Bank of England, stopped this exercise of free enterprise. (See Muellen, Free Banking.) The same idea was tried successfully in the American colonies before the Revolution, and again was suppressed by the British government, which some heretical historians regard as a more direct cause of the American Revolution than the taxes mentioned in most schdolbooks. (See Ezra Pound, Impact, and additional sources cited therein.)

During the nineteenth century many anarchists and individualists attempted to issue low-interest or no-interest private currencies. Mutual Banking, by Colonel William Greene, and True Civilization, by Josiah Warren, are records of two such attempts, by their instigators. Lysander Spooner, an anarchist who was also a constitutional lawyer, argued at length that Congress had no authority to suppress such private currencies (see his Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations and Frauds). A general overview of such efforts at free enterprise, soon crushed by the Capitalist State, is given by James M. Martin in his Men Against the State, and by Rudolph Rocker in Pioneers of American Freedom (an ironic title, since his pioneers all lost their major battles). Lawrence Labadie, of Suffern, N.Y., has collected (but not yet published) records of 1,000 such experiments; one of the present authors, Robert Anton Wilson, unearthed in 1962 the tale of a no-interest currency, privately issued, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the 1930s depression. (This was an emergency measure by certain local businessmen, who did not fully appreciate the principle involved, and was abandoned as soon as the "tight-money" squeeze ended and Roosevelt began flooding us all with Federal Reserve notes.)