The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Answer: It had nothing to do with the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Confrontation bombing, the Illuminati, or any of the subjects it seemed to suggest, except indirectly. She had aimed in the dark, and picked up bits and pieces of the old 'movie Manhattan Melodrama, thusly:

District Attorney Wade does not refer to the Dallas official who first proclaimed Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt over TV; it refers to the character played by William Powell in the movie.

Clark does not refer to any of the Captain Clarks we have encountered; it refers to Clark Gable, Mr. Powell's co-star. The Ship is sinking does not refer to the Illuminati spider-ships, or the ship piloted by Captain Clark; it refers to the General Slocum, as Mama guessed- the sinking of this ship on June 15, 1904, is the first scene in the movie. 2422 does not refer to the dates of Oswald's and Kennedy's assassinations, or to the old Wobbly address; it refers to a scene in the film where Gable, at a racetrack, walks from box 24 to box 22 (box 23 is never shown, his body being between it and the camera).

If I can't live as I please, let me die when I choose is the last line spoken by Clark Gable in the screenplay.

The fact that these phrases overlap certain themes in this novel (and in Joyce's Ulysses) is either coincidence or synchronicity- take your choice. Manhattan Melodrama, you might be interested to know, was playing at the Biograph Theatre on the night of July 22, 1934, and was the last film seen by the man who was shot outside and identified as John Herbert Dillinger.

2. What was the Masonic signal of distress used by the grocer B. F. Morgan when Dillinger tried to rob him in 1924?

Answer: It consists in holding your arms outward, bent upward 90 degrees at the elbow, and shouting, "Will nobody help the widow's son?"

3. Is there really a secret passage beneath the Meditation Room in the UN building?

Answer: If so, we haven't been able to find it. Other spooky secrets about that room, however, are revealed in The Cult of the All-Seeing Eye, by Robert Keith Spencer (Christian Book Club of America, 1964).

4. What was the Erotion of Adam Weishaupt mentioned by Hagbard in the First Trip?

Answer: The word translates, loosely, as "love-in," and the idea is basically the same. (See the books of Nesta Webster and John Robison cited in the text.) Now do you believe in a conspiracy?

5. Did Al Capone really help the FBI set up the man who was shot at the Biograph Theatre on July 22, 1934?

Answer: That's one of the more plausible arguments in Dillinger: Dead or Alive, by Jay Nash and Ron Offen.

6. If no animals were reported missing from local zoos, how is that Robert Simpson of Kansas City was found dead with his throat torn as if by "the talons of some enormous beast?"

Answer: See the sequel, The Homing Pigeons.

7. If Simon Moon majored in mathematics and was so obsessed with numerology, why didn't he ever notice the most significant 23 in mathematical history-the 23 definitions that open Euclid 's Geometry?

Answer: Perhaps for the same reason that the road from Dayton, Ohio, to New Lebanon, Ohio, was due east when Joe Malik drove it on June 25, 1969, but has always been due west on every day before and since then. Or maybe by the same processes that allowed Joe to see a Salem commercial on his TV set in the mid-1970s, although cigarette advertising was banned from television in 1971.

8. Did Smiling Jim Trepomena achieve the fame he had sought?

Answer: No. Dr. Vulcan Troll's definitive history of the Great Quake, When a State Dies, mentions on page 123 that "no American Eagle has since been reported, and we can only assume that this species was another victim of nature's mindless rampage on that tragic May 1." On page 369, Dr. Troll mentions, among prominent casualties, "The famous Cincinnati lawyer and proponent of censorship James J. Trepomena." Neither he nor anyone else ever connected the two occurrences.

9. Where are the missing eight appendices?

Answer: Censored.

APPENDIX NUN: ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT SOME OF THE CHARACTERS

THE PURPLE SAGE. An imaginary Chaoist philospher invented by Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (another imaginary Chaoist philosopher).

LORD OMAR KHAYAM RAVENHURST. An imaginary Chaoist philosopher invented by Mr. Kerry Thornley of Atlanta, Georgia. Mr. Thornley was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald's, was accused of complicity in the John Kennedy assassination by District Attorney Jim Garrison, and is the author of llluminati Lady, an endless epic poem which you really ought to read.