The Illuminatus! Trilogy

There is nothing here with which a modern physicist could quarrel; and this is the magical theory of the universe. The magician assumes that sensed reality- the panorama of impressions monitored by the senses and collated by the brain- is radically different from so-called objective reality.* About the latter "reality" we can only form speculations or theories which, if we are very careful and subtle, will not contradict either logic or the reports of the senses. This lack of contradiction is rare; some conflicts between theory and logic, or between theory and sense-data, are not discovered for centuries (for example, the wandering of Mercury away from the Newtonian calculation of its orbit). And even when achieved, lack of contradiction is proof only that the theory is not totally false. It is never, in any ease, proof that the theory is totally true-for an indefinite number of such theories can be constructed from the known data at any time. For instance, the geometries of Euclid, of Gauss and Reimann, of Lobachevski, and of Fuller all work well enough on the surface of the earth, and it not yet clear whether the Gauss-Reimann or the Fuller system works better in interstellar space.

*See the anthology Perception, edited by Robert Blake, Ph.D., and especially the chapter by psychologist Carl Rogers, which demonstrates that people's perceptions change while they are in psychotherapy. As William Blake noted, "The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees."

If we have this much freedom in choosing our theories about "objective reality," we have even more liberty in deciphering the "given" or transactional sensed reality. The ordinary person senses as he or she has been taught to sense -that is, as they have been programmed by their society. The magician is a self-programmer. Using invocation and evocation- which are functionally identical with self-conditioning, auto-suggestion, and hypnosis, as shown above- he or she edits or orchestrates sensed reality like an artist.*

* Everybody, of course, does this unconsciously; see the paragraph about the cheese. The magician, doing it consciously, controls it.

This book, being part of the only serious conspiracy it describes- that is, part of Operation Mindfuck- has programmed the reader in ways that he or she will not understand for a period of months (or perhaps years). When that understanding is achieved, the real import of this appendix (and of the equation 5 = 6) will be clearer. Officials at Harvard thought Dr. Timothy Leary was joking when he warned that students should not be allowed to indiscriminately remove dangerous, habit-forming books from the library unless each student proves a definite need for each volume. (For instance, you have lost track of Joe Malik's mysterious dogs by now.) It is strange that one can make the clearest possible statements and yet be understood by many to have said the opposite.

The Rite of Shiva, as performed by Joe Malik during the SSS Black Mass, contains the central secret of all magick, very explicitly, yet most people can reread that section a dozen, or a hundred times, and never understand what the secret is. For instance, Miss Portinari was a typical Catholic girl in every way- except for an unusual tendency to take Catholicism seriously- until she began menstruating and performing spiritual meditations every day.* One morning, during her meditation period, she visualized the Sacred Heart of Jesus with unusual clarity; immediately another image, distinctly shocking to her, came to mind with equal vividness. She recounted this experience to her confessor the next Saturday, and he warned her, gravely, that meditation was not healthy for a young girl, unless she intended to take the oath of seclusion and enter a convent. She had no intention of doing that, but rebelliously (and guiltily) continued her meditations anyway. The disturbing second image persisted whenever she thought of the Sacred Heart; she began to suspect that this was sent by the Devil to distract her from meditation.

* These two signs of growth often appear at the same time, being DNA-triggered openings of the fourth neural circuit.

One weekend, when she was home from convent school on vacation, her parents decided she was the right age to be introduced to Roman society. (Actually, they, like most well-off Italian families, had already chosen which daughter would be given to the church- and it wasn't her. Hence, this early introduction to la dolce vita.) One of the outstanding ornaments of Rome at that time was the "eccentric international businessman" Mr. Hagbard Celine, and he was at the party to which Miss Portinari was taken that evening.