from Time Magazine Online:

In commercials for Domino’s Pizza, the chain’s employees wage a never ending battle against the Noid, a gremlin who delays deliveries and carries a gun that can turn a pizza ice cold. Many viewers are amused by the Noid, Domino’s says, but one of them took the advertising campaign personally. Last week Kenneth Noid, 22, walked into a Domino’s Pizza shop in Chamblee, Ga., with a .357 Magnum revolver and took two employees hostage. When police arrived, he demanded $100,000 in cash, a getaway car and a copy of The Widow’s Son, a 1985 novel about secret societies in an 18th century Parisian prison.

All Noid got was the pizza he ordered. After a five-hour siege, the two employees slipped away and Noid gave himself up. According to police, Noid has “psychological problems” and believes that he has an “ongoing dispute with Tom Monaghan,” the head of the Detroit-based Domino’s chain.

As most of you know, Dr Robert Jastrow of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies is a sober, sensible scientist; he is not a science fiction writer or a wild-eyed Futurist (like me.) Nonetheless, Dr Jastrow’s new book, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe (Simon and Schuster, 1981) concludes that it is our destiny to achieve immortality by becoming computers.

Jastrow points out that some computers have already learned to decipher a few of the brain’s signals, and can tell if a human is excited or elated, or even distinguish if he / she is looking at a circle or a square. Eventually, Jastrow says, computers will be able to contain a human mind: “…a bold scientist will be able to tap the contents of his mind and transfer them into the metallic lattices of a computer. Because mind is the essence of being, it can be said that this scientist has entered the computer, and that he now dwells in it.”

Jastrow summarizes: “The union of mind and machine has created a new form of existence, as well designed for life in the future as man is designed for life on the African savanna. It seems to me this must be the mature form of intelligent life in the Universe. Housed in indestructible lattices of silicon, and no longer constrained by the life and death cycle of a biological organism, such a kind of life could live forever.”

from Robert Anton Wilson’s Trajectories Newsletter, March 1982.

Kurt Saxon is the author of The Poor Man’s James Bond, a manual that tells you everything you could ever want to know about practical techniques of murder and mayhem, The Survivor, a four-volume extension of the same libretto, telling where to acquire any possible type of weapon, Root Rot, a diatribe against Alex Haley for implying that slavery was unfair to Black people, and several similar books. Mr. Saxon does not get reviewed in the Liberal magazines that decide which authors are important, but he has a wide readership among the Apocalyptical sects of the right-wing end of the political spectrum.

Mr. Saxon wrote in the 1970s that the United States would be destroyed almost totally by 1982. This is because the government has driven the “competents” out of business by excessive taxation and has subsidized 30 million “incompetents” on Welfare and another 30 million “incompetents” on Social Security. This country has thus become, Saxon says, “a Disneyland for
dummies.”

By 1982, Saxon said, the whole economy would collapse. “Millions of taxpayers will be unemployed… Millions who are now on Valium or other tranquilizers will go insane when they cannot get more. Drug addicts (will) swarm over pharmacies looking for dope, ruining everything they don’t steal…” We will be helpless against Russian attack because “our politicians have so devoted themselves to nurturing…incompetent dependents that further industrialization to put our nation on a war footing will be unaffordable. Even if it were not, our present unionspoiled and demanding work force cannot be expected to perform the way our parents did in the war plants of the late 1930s and early 1940s.” The only solution, Saxon informs us, is to buy farms, order his books on how to kill people efficiently, and stockpile every type of weaponry, to fight off the “drooling imbeciles and parasites” who will flee the doomed cities and try to steal your crops.

Mr. Saxon believed that these are objective predictions based on hard “laws” of sociology and economics which he learned from the writings of Ms. Ayn Rand. He did not believe that this apocalyptical reality tunnel in which he lives is in any way an artistic creation expressing his own emotional anxieties and hostilities.

– Wilson, Prometheus Rising.

I’ve had feelings of insecurity about food for as long as I can remember. It was my jerky dad’s fault. He left our valley and our wonderful peasant heritage to join the wretched ranks of the proletariat. — Kurt Saxon’s Bio on

KurtSaxon.com

excerpts from: Cleveland Okie’s Interview with Mike Shea, son of Robert Shea, science fiction author and co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy.

The appendix to “Illuminatus” says that eight appendices were “censored.” Are they still around, and are there any plans to publish them?

I’ve never heard of them. The whole thing was written long before computers so it’s not likely they’re still around. If I could get ahold of them, I’d publish them in a second.

The appendix refers to a sequel, “The Homing Pigeons.” Was there any work actually done on an ILLUMINATUS sequel?

There was a joint work on a book called “Bride of Illuminatus” that was due to be released. Unfortunately the publishers didn’t think it would do very well since Wilson had already written a bunch of post-Illuminatus books that didn’t do very well (Gods bless the publishing industry…). I don’t know if there’s an outline or a copy of the work anywhere. My father died before they could get started. I remember the first scene started with a sex scene between two gods.

Your web site says that Shea and his friend and collaborator, Robert Anton Wilson, had “philosophical and political disagreements” and that these disagreements enriched ILLUMINATUS! Can you give me a couple of examples of their disagreements?

A lot of the words on my site came from other sources on the net. I’ve never written much myself about my dad. That’s one of the reasons I’m so happy for this opportunity. Honestly I don’t know much about the philosophical differences and neither does my mom. I’d say the only differences I knew about came after I was born and my dad moved to more mainstream fiction.

As I mentioned in my blog posting, the synopses in the second and third ILLUMINATUS! books are not reprinted in the omnibus edition. Are there any plans to reprint them, perhaps on the Internet?

I just put down a bid for the three original Illuminatus covers. I’ll get them and, assuming they aren’t too long and I can find the time, I’ll retype them and publish them on my website. I might get in a little trouble for it, but I tend to doubt it. I’ll just do it and see what happens. I currently own the rights to all of my father’s original work but that doesn’t include ILLUMINATUS. That one still belongs to myself and Wilson’s heirs, so we’d have to get together todecide if publishing the whole work is ok or not. For synposes written in 1980, though, I can’t imagine I’ll get any heat for that.

I’ll make it happen.

Supposedly the idea for ILLUMINATUS! came from when your father and Robert Anton Wilson were sitting in a bar after work in Chicago, and your father suggested that it would be funny to write a novel that took seriously all the various crackpot conspiracy theories that were sent in to the Playboy Forum, which your father edited. Did your father ever give you his version of this story?

Yep, a lot of the themes in ILLUMINATUS came from when RAW and he worked at Playboy on the adviser. All of the crazy conspiracy theories gave them the idea to write a book that tied them all together. He never gave me his side of the story, really, but he didn’t believe in all the conspiracy theories. He was pretty practical. He never trusted the government, however (who can blame him?), so he wouldn’t put something past them like the Kennedy assassination, but he never really got too bent about it all. He was very scientific in his thought and believed in Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is likely the right one.

Kaddish and Other Poems
Allen Ginsberg
City Light Books, 1961 (100 pages)

from Coincidance : A Head Test by Robert Anton Wilson.

Forty years ago, Ezra Pound made his celebrated boast of the social function of art: “The artist is the antenna of the race, the barometer and voltmeter.” Allen Ginsberg is nothing if not contemporary. He brings the boast up to date with a stunning effectiveness:

I am the Defense Early Warning Radar System
I see nothing but bombs

These lines are typical of Ginsberg’s unpolished-looking verse. He seems to work in poetry the way Rouault worked in paint: hacking his way savagely, with crude and sweeping strokes, toward an image of maximum ferocity. Look at Rouault’s “Three Judges,” those faces of moronic evil plastered on the canvas as if in rage and colored with the darkest, smeariest blacks and browns this side of downtown Passaic; this is the typical “feel” of a Ginsberg poem. Actually, of course, neither Rouault nor Ginsberg work in a frothing frenzy. Ginsberg in particular probably spends as much effort sounding “uncivilized” as Henry James ever spent in sounding “civilized.”

There has been little technical analysis of Ginsberg’s verse thus far; the job requires an ear delicate as Pound’s and the patience of an elephant. It generally takes me three or four readings aloud to feel my way toward Ginsberg’s music; his great bass, as Pound would call it, is strong as a Watusi drum, but, like a Watusi drum, full of surprising polyrhythms and unexpected variations. I have heard that the poetry reviews in the Saturday Review, New York Times, etc. are actually written by machines; and, from the reviews Ginsberg has gotten in those and similar publications, I would gather that the machines in question, like most university poetry teachers, are not yet capable of following a meter more challenging than the traditional umpty-umpty-umpty (followed occasionally by umpty-umpty-UMty.)

Let’s take a closer look at one of Ginsberg’s oral constructions. A poem is a statue in sound, or “frozen architecture,” or anyway you slice it it’s basically a structure, a form manufactured by a man. The chief thing about Allen Ginsberg as a poet is that he always shows you his form emerging, the way it builds up, a thing created out of ordinary speech but suddenly, by the height of its emotion, transcending ordinary speech. Kaddish begins with words you or I might speak:

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village

Like most modern poetry, this cannot be broken down into a traditional meter, but has to be considered in terms of Pound’s Second Law of Imagism: “to write in the sequence of the musical phrase.” There are three phrases above, the second syncopating slightly with the first, and the third a prolonged complication on both of the first two. It’s rather like Charlie Parker taking off and searching for his theme. In a few lines Ginsberg finds his basic beat:

… and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking,
reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to
Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm

We are still in the area of normal American speech, but Ginsberg is beginning to pick out of it his own building blocks. “And I’ve been up all night, talking, talking” … “Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph, the rhythm the rhythm:” these lines syncopate beautifully, and the internal phrase, “reading the Kaddish aloud” picks up on the initial “Strange now to think of you.” Allen Ginsberg sifts through the resources of American English like a placer miner going through his dust, carefully lifting out a nugget at a time.

Once he has found what he’s looking for, he hammers it out with the remorseless monotony of Beethoven, or perhaps I should say Bizet in the Arlessienne Suite. Kaddish moves towards its close through a hymn to the God who allowed the poet’s mother to go mad:

In the house in Newark Blessed is He! In the
madhouse Blessed is He! In the house of
Death blessed is He!

Even the tragedy of the poor old woman is blessed:

Blessed be you Naomi in Hospitals! Blessed be you
Naomi in solitude! Blest be your triumph! Blest
be your bars! Blest be your last years’ loneliness!

But an even stronger rhythm breaks in to mourn the all-too-true truth that there is nothing blessed, only pain, in the story of Naomi Ginsberg:

only to have seen her weeping on gray tables in long wards of her universe
only to have known the wierd ideas of Hitler at the door …
only to have seen the time-jumps, memory lapse, the crash of wars, the
roar and silence of a vast electric shock

and the reality, the lack of blessing and triumph, is therupon hammered like Pound’s rock-drill till it almost bursts the reader’s brain:

with your eyes running naked out of the apartment screaming into the hall
with your eyes being led away by policemen to an ambulance
with your eyes strapped down on the operating table
with your eyes of the pancreas removed
with your eyes of appendix operation
with your eyes eyes of abortion
with your eyes of shock
with your eyes of lobotomy

The theme beats into the soul like a drum:

with your eyes
with your eyes

– and then suddenly turns around on itself and bursts forth into a line of sheer genius:

with your Death full of flowers

From “Strange now to think” through “the rhythm the rhythm” the poem has gradually created, just through the integrity of its own emotion, the justification from the drum-beat and thunder of “only to have, only to have” and “with her eyes, with her eyes.” If anybody else repeated the “formula,” it would only be a trick, because the emotion is in the words and the discovery of the words is the discovery of the emotions. It is Ginsberg’s personal Golgotha that we meet here, and if you or I were to tell our own stories we would have to find our own words and emotions. That is why a great work of poetry is always so original as to seem “formless” at first glance. It appears to have no form because it is a new form, manufactured in heart’s agony, a shape cut in the air as a sculptor cuts.

The last movement opens with a bird call:

Caw caw caw crows shriek in the white sun over grave stones in
Long Island

The crows seem to burst onto the page with the vividness of real life; we actually hear them before we see them. But Ginsberg, with the audacity of genius, has another trick for us in the next line:

Lord Lord Lord Naomi underneath this grass my halflife and my own
as hers

The tom-tom is back again, this time in a half-rhymed fugue with “Caw caw caw” chasing “Lord Lord Lord” down the page. It is “only to have” and “with your eyes” picked up into greater urgency than before:

Lord Lord great Eye that stares on ALLand moves in a black cloud
caw caw strange cry of Beings sung up into sky over waving trees

The ending is pure fugue, pure as Bach:

Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw Lord

The harsh monosyllables of American speech have dominated the poem from “Strange now to think” right through to “caw caw caw Lord.” Pound showed us how to do this forty years ago, with his “Blue jade cups well set” etc., but he has had no student to apply him half so well as Allen Ginsberg. And the economy and magnificence of using “Lord Lord Lord” against “caw caw caw”-an implied identification picked up in the montage-like shift from Godas “black cloud” to the black cloud of crows-this is balancing a poem as skillfully as Roebling balanced the Brooklyn Bridge.

Among the shorter poems in this volume, particularly good are “Poem Rocket,” “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear,”"The Lion for Real,” and “Ignu.” “Poem Rocket” contains a line that evokes extra-terrestrial beauty better than the best of the science-fiction writers: “Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?” And “The Lion for Real” brings the Spirits of Terror to the page in a way that makes one think of Dante: You can’t laugh off Ginsberg’s Lion anymore than you can smile at Dante’s hell, or Blake’s Tyger, or Melville’s Whale. Ginsberg has seen the Lion, and by God, he makes you see it, too. Naturally, Life magazine describes his vision as “sick” and “warped”; the System which is willing to create twenty thousand abnormal babies everytime it sets off a nuclear bomb cannot afford to listen to the reports of this extremely delicate instrument, the “Defense Early Warning Radar System” that is the soul of the poet today.

from Neuropolitique.
by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.

The fight for Patty Hearst’s mind is symptomatic of the world-wide battle for
the control of consciousness.

“Mom, Dad. — I’m OK. I had a few scrapes and stuff, but they washed them up, and they’re getting OK…I heard that Mom is really upset and that everybody was at home, and I hope this puts you a little bit at ease… I want to get out of here, but the only way I’m going to do it is if we do it their way… I just want to get out of here and see everyone again and be back with Steve.” February 12,1974.

The speaker is Patty Hearst. Although she has been held prisoner by the Symbionese Liberation Army guerrillas for eight days, she sounds relatively normal, and the tape is reassuring to her parents. A second tape is released by the S.LA. 49 days later, and everything changes. A new voice, that of a stranger named Tania, is speaking and the words are hostile…

“I know for sure yours and Mom’s interests are never the interests of the people. You, a corporate liar, of course, will say that you don’t know what I’m talking about, but I ask you then to prove it. Tell the poor and oppressed people of this nation what the corporate state is about to do. Warn black and poor people that they are about to be murdered down to the last man, woman and child.”

This tape is accompanied by the famous photo of Tania holding a tommy gun, standing before the Symbionese seven-headed cobra.

There is no escape from our robothood unless and until we first recognize the fact. Only then can we learn to take control of our nervous systems and to reprogram our individual realities.
Randolph Hearst, Father of the Year and top manager of a mass-media propaganda machine that has helped domesticate millions of minds during the past century, comes before the TV cameras and says, unconvincingly, “We had her 20 years; they’ve only had her 60 days. I don’t believe she’s going to change her philosophy that quickly and that permanently.” Two weeks later, Tania is photographed robbing a bank with her new comrades, and the third tape, even more vehement, describes the parents she had wanted to see again as “pigs” and Steve Weed, the lover she had wanted to return to, as “a clown” and a “sexist pig.” Tania would live to change her mind again, but obviously she would never again be the original Patty Hearst.

During the trial of Lieutenant William Calley, it was obvious to millions all over the world that the U.S. Army was seeking to disguise its own guilt by making a scapegoat out of a singularly naive young man. It was not obvious to Calley, however. “I’m for the Army all the way,” he told reporters. “I’m behind it, a member of it. The Army comes first. No matter how much I could help my own defense, I won’t make any derogatory statement about the Army.”

Rusty Calley was, before induction, an unattached, marginally employed drifter — a bellhop, a dishwasher, a pieceworker until he underwent the brain-changing ordeal of infantry basic training. Today he dutifully defends his brainwashers as robotically as Tania once defended hers, and he justifies mass murder in the jargon of the true believer.

Between the time of her arrest for pointing a gun at Gerald Ford last summer and her conviction last November, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme did nothing to aid her own defense and everything to broadcast the philosophy of Charlie Manson, in whose commune she had been brainwashed. Nothing said by the judge or by her own lawyer could make Fromme’s legal situation real or
important to her. All that she cared about was having the attention of the media in order to broadcast Manson’s message.

There is nothing to indicate any special weakness in Patty or Rusty or Squeaky. They were quite normal young Americans until they came into the ambience of, respectively, the S.L.A., the U.S. Army and the Manson family.

This is the first lesson we must UNDERSTAND. The four survival brains are progressively bleached out and reimprinted in the relatively simple mechanical process called brainwashing. Brainwashing, like malaria, is a disease of exposure. Put people in a malarial environment and most of them will get malaria. Put them in a brainwashing institution and most of them will get brainwashed. The concept of “washing” is, of course, unscientific and crude. The brain is not a dirty garment but a bio-electric computer — a living network of over 110 billion nerve cells capable of 10^2783000 interconnections, a number higher than the total of all the atoms in the universe. In this elegant, microminiaturized computer, more than 100,000,000 processes are programmed every minute.

The brain and the nervous system, like the rest of the body, are designed and programmed by the genetic code. The human being, like all other life forms, is primarily “a giant robot created by DNA to make more DNA,” as Nobel geneticist Herman J. Muller has observed. We are all neurogenetic robots. And, however unpleasant it may be for Christian theologians or sentimental humanists to acknowledge this, there is no escape from our robothood unless and until we first recognize the fact. Only then can we learn to take control of our nervous systems and to reprogram our individual programs.

A basic example of brain programming, which helps us to understand Rusty, Squeaky, Patty and ourselves, concerns the newborn giraffe whose mother was shot by hunters. The baby giraffe — in accordance with its genetic program — imprinted the first large moving object it saw, which happened to be the hunters’ jeep. It followed, vocalized to, tried to suckle and eventually to mate with the unresponsive vehicle. The giraffe’s survival instincts were hooked to that jeep. The human being also imprints — or hooks its neural equipment to — external objects.

Among humans, these imprints come in four stages:

1. The infant biosurvival circuit, concerned with safety-danger signals here and now.
2. The older-infant (toddler) circuit, or ego; concerned with motion and emotion;
3. The student, verbal-symbolic circuit, or mind; concerned with language and knowledge; 4. The adult sociosexual circuit, or personality; concerned with domestic behavior.

These four circuits are the four brains that are progressively bleached out and reimprinted in the relatively simple mechanical process called brainwashing. The process is simple, because the original imprinting of these circuits was also relatively simple.

Throughout human life, when the biosurvival brain flashes clanger, all other mental activities cease. To create a new imprint, first reduce the subject to the state of infancy, i.e., firstbrain vulnerability.

The first circuit, or biosurvival brain, is activated at birth. Its function is to seek food, air, warmth, comfort and to retreat from what is toxic, harsh, or dangerous. The biosurvival circuit of the animal nervous system is DNAprogrammed to seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism. If a mother is not present, the closest substitute in the environment will be chosen. For the newborn giraffe, a four-wheel jeep was fixated. In one of Konrad Lorenz’s ethological studies, a gosling that could not find the rounded white body of a goose to fixate imprinted a round, white ping-pong ball. Throughout human life, when the biosurvival brain flashes danger, all other mental activities cease. This is of key importance in brain programming: to create a new imprint, first reduce the subject to the state of infancy, i.e., first-brain vulnerability.

The initial step in this process is isolation of the victim. A small, dark room is ideal, since the social, emotional and mental techniques that formerly ensured survival will not work there. The longer the person is isolated in such a state, the more vulnerable to new imprint he or she becomes. As Dr. John C. Lilly has pointed out, it takes only a few minutes of true isolation before anxiety appears and only a few hours before hallucinations begin, and the victim is ready to be imprinted with a new protective, maternal object. It is no paradox that even the captor who is imposing this brainwashing on the unwilling subject can be the one imprinted. The victim is forced by instincts — biochemical programs — many millions of years old to seek this imprint and to hook it to whatever external entity comes closest to the mother archetype. For a human prisoner, any two-legged being who brings food will serve.

The second circuit, the emotional brain, or ego, is initially imprinted when the child begins to use muscle power to crawl, walk, master gravity, overcome physical obstacles and manipulate others politically. The muscles that perform these functions are very quickly imprinted with what become chronic, lifelong reflexes. Depending on the accidents of environment, this imprint will make for either a strong, dominating ego or a weak, fearful ego. Status in the pack or the tribe is assigned on the basis of an unconscious signaling system in which these muscle reflexes are crucial. All of the emotional games or cons, listed in the popular game-manuals of Dr. Eric Berne and the transactional analysts, are second-brain imprints, or standard mammalian politics.

To re-create second-brain imprint vulnerability in an adult, the subject must be made to feel like a clumsy infant. The subject’s neurological Scoreboard must clearly register the message, “I am one foot tall, ignorant, inept, frightened and wrong. They are six feet tall, wise, clever, powerful and right.”

Helplessness can be escalated to panic by means of terror tactics. In Costa-Gavras’ film The Confession, the Communist brainwashers take the subject from his cell, put a noose around his neck and lead him to a place where he expects to be hanged; some African tribes take candidates for “initiation” and bury them alive for hours. Basic imprint vulnerability occurs when the subject comes to believe, “I have no choice; they can do anything they want with me.” At this point, the emotional brain hooks into the victim internalizes a rank in the pecking order under the protection of the most powerful figure available.

The third brain, or rational mind, is imprinted when the child begins to use artifacts and to ask questions. The imprint sites are the nine laryngeal muscles that are used in speech and a neural feed-back loop between the right hand and the left cortex, which is used in examining, classifying and rearranging the objects of the environment. The entire edifice of science, art and knowledge is built on this foundation.

The quickest way to reimprint the third brain is to detach the victim from those who share the same language, symbols and doctrines by placing the victim in a situation where his usual verbal skills and physical dexterity won’t work, where he has to imprint new signals and skills in order to survive. For example, it is well known that the best way to learn a foreign language is by living with those who speak that language only: Hook the first-circuit survival needs (food, shelter) and the second-circuit status needs (security, recognition) to the third-circuit necessity of mastering the new tongue.

Conversely, the proverbial Englishman who dressed for dinner every night in his lonely tropical hut was no fool. He was keeping an English bubble around him by constantly reaffirming an English reality, and so avoiding being engulfed in the reality of the natives. It is not unusual for a man to become a Communist when he lives with Communists, or a convict when he lives with convicts. In fact, it requires delicate neurological engineering to remain oneself under such conditions.

The fourth brain, or personality, is activated and imprinted at adolescence, when the DNA signal awakens the sexual apparatus. The teenager becomes the bewildered possessor of a new body and a new neural circuit hooked to orgasm and sperm-egg fusion. The pubescent human, like any other mammal, lurches about in a state of mating frenzy, every neuron gasping for the sex object. Imprint vulnerability is acute, and the first sexual cues to turn on the adolescent nervous system remain fixed for life and forever define the individual’s sexual reality. We should not be surprised, therefore, at the various fetishes that are so easily acquired at these sensitive moments. In fact, we can tell precisely at what period in time a person was imprinted by noting which fetishes continue to turn him on: black garters, booze, cool jazz and crewcuts define one whole generational imprint group, just as sleeping bags, Mick Jagger, grass and tight jeans define another. When Sinatra sings at Las Vegas, the menopausal fan ignores his wrinkles and double chin and the neurons kick over in reflex rapture. The younger generation is amused and bored: “What’s that balding old man got to do with sex?” No group ever understands the fetishes of another sexual-imprint group.

It is important for the brainwasher to understand that sexual behavior is intensely influenced by social-domestic morals. The tribe always surrounds sperm-egg exchange with fierce threats and violent taboos — to the degree that most people don’t even know that the word morals refers to anything other than sexual no-nos. Everywhere, in every society, the sexual brain is ruthlessly domesticated, channeled into tribal productivity. Socially approved orgasm is directed toward monogamous procreation; pleasure directed orgasm is denounced and the practitioners are often persecuted. Rewiring the sexual circuits, then, breaks the domestic bond, fissions the domesticated personality and allows for the creation of a new bond to a different subculture and to its heretical sexual value system. Such reimprinting of the erotic brain can be a most effective mind-washing technique but only as an adjunct to the basic bleaching out of the first-and second-brain circuits of security and ego status. For example, if Cinque had raped Patty Hearst the first night of her captivity, a strong revulsion on her part would probably have occurred. However, after the subject has come to look to the brainwasher for biosecurity, physical support, emotional reality definition, then a sexual seduction can imprint a new erotic field.

In order to maintain one’s reality bubble, it is necessary to surround oneself with tribal reassurance. Most human communication is embarrassingly primitive, consisting of endless variations on “I’m still here. Are you still there?” (hive solidarity) and “Nothing has really changed” (hive business as usual).

Isolation, the first step in brainwashing, removes this protective bubble. When the subject no longer receives feedback — “We’re all still here; nothing has changed” — the imprints begin to fade. Explorers and shipwrecked sailors who have survived prolonged isolation, Dr. Lilly has
noted, are quite shy after being rescued. They are literally afraid of human conversation — sometimes for weeks — because they know that what they will say might sound insane to the domesticated ordinary adult; their imprints have faded and they are in the unconditioned free-floating world of the yogi or the mystic. It takes many days, at least, to reimprint their social bubble.

Similar imprint vulnerability and return to infancy occurs in many cases of prolonged hospitalization, an ominous fact that many medical technicians do not understand. Some patients are literally brainwashed into becoming lifelong invalids — a classic case of second-brain helplessness — and are accused by the staff of being malingerers, a label that shifts the blame from the incompetent technicians to the helpless victim.

It is the function of the nervous system to focus, to select, to narrow down, to choose, from an infinity of possibilities, the biochemical imprints which determine the tactics and strategies that ensure survival in one place, status in one tribe. The infant is genetically prepared to learn any language, master any skill, play any sex role; in a very short time, however, he becomes rigidly fixated to accept, follow and mimic the limited offerings of his social and cultural environment. In this process, each of us pays a heavy price. Survival and status mean forfeiting the infinite possibilities of unconditioned consciousness. The domesticated personality inside the social bubble is a trivial fragment of the potentials for experience and intelligence innate in the 110-billion-cell human biocomputer. We have literally been robbed blind; we have literally taken leave of our senses; we are literally only slightly more conscious than any other herd animal.

The brainwasher’s job is simple, then, because it consists only of substituting one set of robotic circuits for another set. Once the subject looks to the reprogrammer for biosecurity and ego support, just as the infant looks to its parents, any third-brain ideology can be impressed on the vulnerable neurons. Because we are all imprinted by our own social bubbles, it isn’t generally recognized that each reality map held by humans — however eccentric and paranoid — makes nearly as much sense as any other. People are vegetarians or nudists or Communists or snake worshipers for the same reasons that other people are Catholics or Republicans or liberals or Nazis. During imprint vulnerability, anybody can be switched from one system to another. We can easily be induced to go from intoning “Hare Krishna” to “Jesus died for our sins” to “Kill the pigs,” and to find meaning in each of the implied ideologies. The next step is for the brainwashers to persuade us that anybody who doesn’t see the world according to a particular reality map is wicked, or stupid, or insane. After programming a third-brain bubble around the subject, a complete brain-washing procedure must then reimprint sexual drives and taboo systems. It is here that governmental brainwashers are amusingly inept, as compared with outlaw bands.

Governments are prudish, uptight and sexually cold, because domestication depends on directing genital passions away from individual gratification and into the nuclear family — or, in modern insectoid socialisms, away from the individual and the family, and into collective hive productivity.

Sexual reprogramming can imprint either a new sex role (as when the Mau Mau insisted that would-be members perform an act of homosexuality, in order to sever themselves from family-oriented sex) or a sex-avoidance role (as with nuns, who become brides of Christ and convert sexual charges into religious tingles). The military and the prison systems, after isolating people from ordinary social reality, allow and tacitly approve asocial sexual imprints, whether heterosexual or homosexual; a year’s worth of sperm on cell or barracks sheets is a year’s programming in anti-domesticity.

Similarly, everybody knows that the classic attraction of military life has been the opportunity for socially approved sexual license, including whorehouse adventures and the rape of enemy women — an enticing program to a young male primate. (The great mystery that puzzled and irritated the menopausal males who ruled America in the Sixties — why weren’t young males eager for the adventure of Vietnam? — is easily answered in a neurological context: The new sexual imprints of the marijuana revolution made it unnecessary and unaesthetic to go to Saigon to get righteously laid.)

Continual follow-up is necessary to reinforce any new reality imprint. The ironic truth is that our concept of reality is so fragile that it collapses in a matter of days if we do not have continual spot announcements reminding us of who we are and that our reality is still there.

The military accordingly constructs a military-reality island for its personnel. Every successful brainwasher, whether Synanon, a Jesus cult, a Hindu swami movement, a Manson-type family, or a militant terrorist group, creates a similar reality island; once a person joins, he is in all the way, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Similarly, revolutionary governments dare not relax censorship or permit free communications in their drive to wash out the old imprints and reinforce new ones. Foreign or dissenting signals cannot, therefore, be tolerated. This reality-island context helps us to appreciate the ease with which the Army brainwashed Calley.

A confused, ineffective youth joins the Army; during basic training, he is isolated from civilian society and all reinforcers of domesticated-herd imprints; his food, clothing and shelter are provided by the Army; and new authority figures make him feel helpless and inferior. Once Rusty has been reduced to an infant state and made totally dependent on the new father figures, he is allowed to work his way up in the new pecking order and to become one of the elect. After a few weeks of being made to feel one foot tall, helpless and clumsy, he is given weekend leave to explore the new soldier morality of easy camaraderie and socially approved casual sex. (And where else in straight America is casual sex so enthusiastically approved?)

Day after day, Rusty’s third brain is being programmed with military jargon, military concepts, military reality. When he encounters civilians on the street during weekend leaves, they seem alien. Rusty has now been fully incorporated into the Army reality bubble. When his superior officer, Medina, shouts “Kill!,” Calley will not ask about the Articles of War, the Nuremberg precedents, the ethics of Sunday school — they belong to other reality islands. He kills. The whole function of the reimprinting in basic training has been to ensure that Calley will obey in such situations.

The robotization of Squeaky Fromme by Charles Manson was just as simple, although the source of Manson’s powers has been misunderstood. It is insufficient, first of all, to say that Manson — and his powers over the family members — was a product of the drug culture. The hippie movement, with its estimated 35,000,000 pot smokers, can, in fact, be viewed as an enormous, mostly amateurish experiment in self-induced brain change. Neurotransmitter drugs perform the same function as isolation, as they weaken or suspend the users’ old imprints.

This is exactly why conservatives dread dope: They do not want the younger half of the population experimenting with consciousness alteration, ego change, mind metamorphoses and sex-role roulette. If the military had pioneered the use of grass as an adjunct to imprinting military obedience, social attitudes would probably have been reversed. Conservatives would have defended Cannabis with the same pragmatism that they brought to the dropping of napalm bombs, and radical dissidents would have dreaded Cannabis as much as they fear wire tapping.

Manson used drugs as but one brainwashing tool, and he did so for ends
alien to the drug culture. While other gurus of the sixties used drugs to
rewire their followers for the peace-love-ecology trip, Manson used the same
drugs to imprint his family for fascism, racism, sexism. Manson could have
become a platoon sergeant in the Green Berets.

In Helter Skelter, prosecutor Bugliosi lists the programs Sergeant Manson
employed with his drugs: first-brain fear and isolation from straight society;
second-brain communal status and rote-repetition of emotional phrases from
the ever-convenient Bible; third-brain occult teachings; fourth-brain guiltfree
sex. In The Family, Ed Sanders adds that female members were usually
initiated with an LSD trip, during which Charlie performed oral sex on them
several times. Of course, Manson’s hypnotic power also derived from the
pathetic fact that he was the most brainwashed robot of them all; Manson
not only followed but believed in the blood-drenched script of the book of
Revelations — the great beast, the war between good and evil, the last
judgment. Instant apocalypse defined Manson’s third-brain reality bubble;
prison taught him how to enforce it.

Manson spent 17 of his first 32 years in prison; isolation behind walls and
bars reinfantized his survival brain; competing gangs of cons and guards
impressed the most violent mammalian politics on his emotional brain; a
weird variety of fundamentalist and racist ideologies was fed to his symbolic
brain; and anything except domesticated reproductive sex programmed his
erotic brain. The reality bubble Manson later created at the Spahn Movie
Ranch near Los Angeles was the stereophonic 3-D dream of every pimpdoper-
convict.

The S.LA. hideout of general field marshal Cinque, another graduate of the
California archipelago, was the Marxist version of the same convict fantasy:
guns, stolen cars, girls, obedience, senseless killings. S.L.A. kidnapers
merely applied to Patty Hearst the standard brainwashing techniques learned
by Cinque in the brain-change prisons of California: first, the physical shock
of kidnap, the disorientation of the cartrunk ride and confinement in a small,
dark room. Then came Cinque’s visits to the isolation cell, and the
transformation in his role from that of captor into that of the source of Patty’s
biological survival. The motherlike Cinque brought food and drink; the
fatherlike Cinque told her sternly that her survival depended on his whims.
Patty is reduced to the status of a suckling infant, one foot tall in a six-foottall
world. Throughout life, when the first brain flashes danger, all other
mental activities cease.

Once Patty had imprinted Cinque in place of her distant parents and
unavailable lover, he introduced the new symbol system, the new reality
bubble. His powerful laryngeal muscles filled the air of the tiny room with
the sonorous, poetic rhetoric of the ghetto, the prison and the underworld,
strengthened by Marxist apocalyptical theology. The same mindwashing has
been experienced by thousands of runaways and dropouts who, during the
past decade, found themselves in the crowded, womb-warren pads of
Haight-Ashbury or the East Village, vulnerable to a new, hip version of the
ancient anarchist, outlaw symbolism. (The importance of funk cannot be
overestimated in these cases. The brain of the baby — and of the reinfantized
adult — craves warmth, texture, skin smell, sloppymoist contact. The
newborn correctly equates dirt and smell with survival, and so does the
hairy, aromatic hippie who thrives on incense, candlelight, sleeping bags,
crash pads. Domesticated moralists who denounce this rank way of life do
not realize that, to the reinfantized brain, funk means survival bliss.)

The culmination of Patty Hearst’s reprogramming was the new sexual reality
imposed on her fourth brain. In a curiously naive account of Patty’s
captivity, an anonymous S.L.A. member has unwittingly outlined the
brainwashing procedure:

“There are many people who still cannot comprehend Tania’s swift evolution
from sheltered bourgeois to freedom fighter. We wish to end all
metaphysical speculation around brainwashing and sexual enslavement.”
With this disclaimer, the S.L.A. account found in the Harris’ San Francisco
hideout proceeds to describe classic brainwashing techniques.
“In the beginning, we provided for Tania’s basic needs: shelter, food,
clothing, medical attention and news from the outside. Although we
considered sex a basic human need, our commitment to not exploit her
sexually, coupled with her over-all status as a P.O.W., denied Tania the
freedom to have sex with another person. But later on…as she became more
integrated into the day-to-day aspects of cell life, we tried to treat Tania as
an equal. It was only natural that with increased personal interaction…these
relations would develop sexually.”

Tania’s S.LA. imprints, reinforced by 24-hours-a-day immersion in the new
tribe’s reality, seem to have remained durable until the Los Angeles shootout.
Jack Scott’s description of Tania in the subsequent months of crosscountry
flight, however, reveals a restless, irritable, unsettled person. The
chief programmer, Cinque, was gone and Patty/Tania eventually returned,
with the instincts of a migratory bird, to San Francisco, the locale of her two
birthplaces.

After arrest, a campaign to reprogram Patty yet again was initiated by her
captors. Again her biosurvival needs were satisfied by her
captors; her ego status depended on pleasing them, and ceaseless effort was
made to induce her to verbalize anew the symbol system of her parents. The
only deficiency in the new program was its lack of attention to Tania’s
liberated sexual imprints.

The hope for Patty Hearst — as for the rest of us brainwash victims — is to
realize how robot-imprinting works, to exult in joyous insight and to start
choosing our own imprints.

Was Rusty Calley, the Florida drifter, guilty of murder? No. The crimes
were committed by Lieutenant Calley, a brainwashed robot programmed by
the Army to kill on command. Was Lynette Alice Fromme guilty of
attempted assassination? No. The Sacramento gun was carried by Squeaky
Fromme, a brainwashed robot from Charles Manson’s zombie platoon. Was
Patty Hearst guilty of any crime? No. Tania is a brain-changed product of
the neurotechnology of Drill Instructor Cinque.

But let us pursue the neurology of guilt a few steps farther. Who taught
Charles Manson and Cinque the techniques of brain change, as well as their
philosophies of violence? The prison system did. And who supports the
prisons that robotized Manson and Cinque, along with the Army that
mechanized Calley? Taxpaying citizens.

Our purpose here is not to provoke another round of liberal we’re-all-guilty
handwringing. Guilt, innocence, morality and will power
have nothing to do with the neurological situation, which, in brief, is that we
are all automatons responding automatically to imprinted realities of an
embarrassingly arbitrary nature. The motivations of criminality and lawabiding
virtue, of violence and love, of domestication and deviance, of
laziness and industry, promiscuity and prudery, stupidity and cleverness, are
always random neurological imprints. What impresses the neurons during
imprint vulnerability is what gets imprinted. Guilt, innocence, punishment,
forgiveness, law and order, rehabilitation — all constitute the mythology that
masks the simple reality of badly wired robots bumping into one another.
Most agonizing and supposedly intractable social problems are caused solely
by our ignorance of the brain’s capacity for rote repetition and abrupt
change.

Brainwashing is happening to all of us all of the time. Knowledge of brain
function is our only protection against it. The solutions to our predicament
are neurological. We must assume responsibility for our nervous systems.
Our robothood can remain static if we endlessly repeat the imprints of
infancy to adolescence, or it can be drastically altered by brainwashers
without our consent, or we can take control of our nervous systems. If we
don’t assume this personal responsibility, somebody else will; if we do take
over the control board, we can each be any person we want to be.

………. December 1975
………. San Diego Federal Prison

If you do decide to move to San Francisco I know a few people there and in Berkeley. Bob Wilson is there an old friend and fan who used to work for Playboy now involved in Leary’s spaceship.
………. William S. Burroughs in a letter to his son. From the book Cursed from Birth by William S. Burroughs Jr.

The Robert Anton Wilson Preface Spectacular continues with another all-time favorite…

from Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide To Reality Selection by Antero Alli:

Herein are all the great neurological scripts of the past synthesized and modernized for our day: the Tarot. Cabala. The Hindu Chakra System. Alchemy. And here, too - praise be to the Sun Absolute! — is a refreshing absence of the cant, the pomposity and the deliberate mystification that makes most books on those subjects virtually unreadable.

Some, who like to talk of things “mystical” but have no first-hand knowledge, may find Antero’s realism a bit disconcerting. A look at my Prometheus Rising and Cosmic Trigger (Falcon Press) might help lead the reader into that set of no bovine excreta. It might do these folks some good to remember that Sufism begins with ritual dances (to gain control over the involuntary nervous system) and yoga with body-relaxation techniques. They might even ponder a bit on the traditional Christian teaching that the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit. They might further ponder Gopi Krishna’s assertion that rebirth is a matter of moving energies properly through the spinal cord, or Da Free John’s correlation of various levels of consciousness with the sympathetic, autonomic and central nervous systems. (But remember these are all models and like models they age.)

Antero Alli has chosen to organize his system around the 8 circuits of the brain, as described by Dr. Timothy Leary in ExoPsychology and other books. Many will object to this because they do not like what they have read about Dr. Leary in the newspapers. This mechanical reaction, or conditioned reflex, is no longer necessary. (See The New Inquisition Falcon Press). Dr. Leary is in the process of having his name legally changed to Irving Blum. Thus the ideas of the 8 brain circuits can now be considered on their own merits without the distraction of having an unpopular name attached to them. Considered thus, without political prejudice, it seems to me that judicious readers will agree with the 8-circuit model as an admirable creation. It combines all the latest discoveries in psychology, neurology, brain chemistry, sociobiology, etc. and also incorporates and updates the maps of altered states of consciousness to be found in astrology, alchemy, yoga, and similar prescientific disciplines for Brain Change.

All in all, this is a book that Lao-Tse could understand and enjoy — after a few scientific terms were explained to him. And 3,000 years from now, somewhere in the Sirius system, seekers of higher knowledge and wider consciousness will still find it useful, after a few of our archaic metaphors are clarified. Meanwhile, everybody can enjoy it and use it right now.

Robert Anton Wilson, Ph. D.
Institute For The Study of the Human Future

Precision cuts through the nonsense to extract the essence. The magical act of extracting essences by thinking, writing and speaking perhaps came from an Olde English word for “magic”, grammarye. Magic, on the other sleight of hand, might simply be the illusion cast by a technology more advanced than we are presently accustomed. The technique behind thinking precisely can be demonstrated with the words WHY and HOW. WHY explains and HOW evokes. WHY gives us the reason and HOW provides the method and action. In our own “grammarye”, where can we discriminate between explanation and evocation? To explain is to answer the WHY question. To evoke is to think, write or speak in such a manner as to trigger the experience of the energy or process in question. Where explaining might kill the spirit involved in an attempt to comprehend, evocation conjures the very spirit forth to be moved by it. The Art of Thinking Precisely is learning to select those words which honor THE EXPERIENCE OF THE ENERGY ITSELF. In the end, it doesn’t matter what we “know” as much as how we can proffer THE EXPERIENCE OF THE ENERGY.

………. Antero Alli, Angel Tech.

(Yes, our Robert Anton Wilson Introduction Extravaganza continues with the Introduction to Sex and Rockets:
The Occult World of Jack Parsons by John Carter.)

A Marvel Walked Among Us

I seem to be living in a nation that simply does not know what freedom is.
……….. John Whiteside Parsons(1)

This book tells the life story of a very strange, very brilliant, very funny, very tormented man who had at least three major occupations (or vocations); he also had no less than four names. He acted as scientist, as occultist, as political dissident and often as a simple damned eejit (just like you and me).

Scientists, aware of his tremendous contributions to space science, generally call him John Parsons, and they’ve even named a crater on the moon after him. Those occultists who know of his work in their very specialized arts call him Jack Parsons, the name he himself preferred; in
some magick lodges they consider him second only to Aleister Crowley as a progenitor of the New Aeon. His best-known book, Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword, which increasingly influences the libertarian and anarchist movements, gives his name as John Whiteside Parsons on the cover and title page. And, as the present biography documents, this odd bird actually had the legal name Marvel Whiteside Parsons imposed on him at birth.

Oh, well, if my parents had named me “Marvel,” I would have changed my name, too, perhaps as often as Parsons did.

For utmost scientific clarity about matters usually left in mystic murk or psychobabble, I shall use all four of Our Hero’s names: John Parsons for the scientist, John Whiteside Parsons for the libertarian philosopher, Jack Parsons for the occultist, and Marvel Parsons for the original template: an alienated and sometimes naive boy, a child of divorce, who tried to find and liberate what occultists call his True Self by creating the other three Parsonspersons and permitting them to fight brutal wars in the loneliness of his passionate brain until all three became One. When endured helplessly by a truly fractured personality, we generally call this civil war in the psyche Multiple Personality Disorder: when deliberately pursued as a path of Illumination leading through Hell and Purgatory toward a vision (at least) of Paradise, we have no name for it in our current culture but those few who, like Parsons, have taken the hermetic oath to Will and Dare and Know and Keep Silence simply call it magick (pronounced mage-ick, as in the Three Magi).

Marvel Parsons, born in 1914 in Los Angeles but raised mostly in the nearby town of Pasadena, began life like all of us in what Tibetans call the Void and the Chinese call wu-hsin (no mind). Gradually, out of the Void, form emerged. He made the distinction between Marvel and Everything Else; a glass wall then separated Marvel from Everything Else. He gradually identified various parts of Everything Else, as soon as he learned their names.

Fatherless, Marvel had a conservative middle class mother who loved him a bit too ardently (she committed suicide within a few hours after his death, 17 June 1952). She also taught him to hate his absent father, a proven “adulterer.” (Horrors!) Developing an early interest in psychology, Marvel diagnosed himself as having a classic Oedipus complex, a compulsive antipathy to “Patriarchy” (he used the word before the Feminists made it trendy) and an equally intense loathing for any and all Authority symbols, especially “God the Father.”

But let us look at 1914, the year of Parsons’ birth, more closely. Whatever you think of astrology, with its extraterrestrial bias, a “secular horoscope” limited to Earthly portents always provides amusing insights. The terrestrial world that shaped Marvel Parsons looked like this:

The First World War had started on July 28 that year; before 1914 ended the first aerial bombing of civilian populations occurred (Germany did it to France), and the bloody battles of the Marne, Tannerberg, Ghent and especially Ypres demonstrated that “civilized” modern humans could act even more inhumanely and insanely than any barbarians of the past.

Police arrested the legendary labor hero Joe Hill in Utah on January 13 for a murder he almost certainly did not commit, and the State executed him the following year. His last words, “Don’t weep for me, boys—organize!” became a mantra to union members for decades after.

In Colorado, John D. Rockefeller’s hired goons killed 21 people (including 11 children) in a clash with other labor “radicals.” Leftists protested outside Rockefeller’s New York office and got arrested for it: a court order banned any other people with signs or banners from parading in front of that sacrosanct shrine of the Almighty Dollar. Novelist Upton Sinclair appeared the next day with a blank sign, telling reporters that free speech had died. Suffragettes marched on Washington June 28, demanding equal rights for women.

In England, Dubliners, the first book by an Irish author named James Joyce, appeared; and in America Edgar Rice Burroughs brought forth Tarzan of The Apes. Musically, we all acquired three major treasures, “The Colonel Bogey March,” “Saint Louis Blues” and “12th Street Rag.” In film, D.W. Griffith’s The Mother and the Law rawly showed the abuse of women by “the Patriarchy.”

Margaret Sanger introduced the term “birth control” in The Woman Rebel and then fled to England to avoid imprisonment for the “crime” of publishing explicit details on contraception.

Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, announced that the apocalypse would begin on October 2—coincidentally or synchronistically, the very day Marvel Whiteside Parsons [who would later, as Jack Parsons, call himself the AntiChrist] emerged from his mother’s womb, or from even darker places, and began to investigate and meddle with this planet.

Going back to England again: also in 1914, Aleister Crowley (rhymes with “holy”) and his current mistress, violinist Leila Waddell, staged something called “The Rites of Eleusis” in London—several nights of quasi-masonic ritual, music, poetry, ballet and drama. On the first night, the actors informed the audience, Nietzsche-fashion, that “God is dead” and mourned and grieved
over the departed deity: things became even stranger after that, like the bardos in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and on the last night the audience received “The Elixir of the Gods,” a wine containing a high dosage of the psychedelic drug mescaline. While they willynilly entered Chaos and the Void a chorus announced the dawning of a New Aeon based on Rabelais’ Law of Thelema—“Do What Thou Wilt” . . .

And Doublemint chewing gum appeared on the market, produced by William Wrigley . . .

All of this undeniably influenced Marvel as much as, or more than, any distant stars or planets. The horrors of World War imprinted him with a wounded perception of the dark side of “human nature”: some parts of Freedom Is A Two-Edged Sword sound as bitter as Swift or Twain at their most misanthropic. Marvel also acquired a genuine sympathy for working people, and an awareness of the brute force behind Capitalism and Capitalist Governments never left him: although an ultra-individualist himself. he had more than one Marxist friend (which got him virtually tarred and feathered during the McCarthy era).

Standing there as big as life
And smiling with those eyes:
“What they forgot to kill,” said Joe
“Went on to organize.”

Margaret Sanger and the suffragettes also left a mark: no male writer since John Stuart Mill in the 19th Century has shown more empathy for Feminism than John Whiteside Parsons.

“Saint Louis Blues” helped create the Jazz Age in which Marvel began to evolve from boy to man. And, like Russell and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, he grew up convinced that the world had entered a life-and-death battle between Cosmic (or at least Archetypal) Forces—but he enlisted on the side of the rebels, since he hated what we now call the logophallocentrism of “God the Father” even more than our current crop of Feminist theologians do. Although (as noted) he could see the Oedipal roots of this bias, he also perceived/conceived it as a decision for Light and Liberty against Tyranny and Superstition.

Aleister Crowley and his New Aeon would later transform Marvel into Jack Parsons.

I don’t know how Wrigley’s Doublemint gum fits into this list of terrestrial Signs and Omens surrounding the genesis of Marvel Parsons. But I feel sure some student of Crowleyana will write to me and explain it after this book appears.

Then another major influence mutated Marvel Parsons into John Parsons and John Whiteside Parsons and Jack Parsons: in his teens he discovered a despised and disreputable genre of pulp literature confusingly known (at the time) as either science-fiction or sciencefantasy. Seen from the present, the sci-fi crowd of that age look like closet surrealists who had re-invented the Novel Of Ideas and tailored it for magazines with names like Thrilling Wonder Tales. The uncertainty about what to call their product typified the age of accelerated change in which Parsons and this literature both matured: after Jules Verne’s “fantasy” submarine appeared in the world’s real seas, nobody with more brain cells than a chimpanzee or a Fundamentalist felt totally secure about the differences between the probable, the improbable and the totally impossible. If Verne’s submarine could become materialized, why not his rocket to the moon? The question excited a lot of other boys besides Marvel Parsons: but, unlike most of them, he did something about it. He became John Parsons, almost certainly (as this book documents) the one single individual who contributed the most to rocket science. Two of the institutions he helped organize, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena and the Aerojet Corporation, still play large roles in space exploration.

You will learn more about John Parsons’ acknowledged scientific achievements in the text to follow: I will concentrate on his other, still controversial labors. Just remember that when he started building rockets they seemed as “wacko” to most people as anything else he did. Yet his careful scientific experiments and theories liberated humanity from Terracentrism and showed us the path to a starry destiny. Rocket engineer John Parsons also became friendly with the leading “fantasy” and “sci-fi” writers in the Los Angeles/Pasadena area and entered a subculture in which no idea seemed too crazy to discuss: a world where established science, fringe science, pseudo-science, philosophic speculation and visionary imagination all ran wild—in short, a world which anticipated and helped generate most of the “weird and kooky” ideas which have now infiltrated every aspect of our culture, except for the most reactionary Stone Age enclaves of Mississippi and the U.S. Congress.

It did not require much of a jump, then or now, to move from the Futurist-Fantasist world into Sex, Drugs and Magick. If you really enjoyed the Star Trek and Star Wars movies; or if you ever, even in fun, told a friend “Live long and prosper” or “May the Force be with you”; or played Dungeons and Dragons, smoked a joint now and again, participated to any degree in the New Age and/or the Neo-Pagan revival—two popularized (diluted) aspects of Crowley’s New Aeon—or even if you ever wanted to get the government off our fronts (sexual freedom) as well as off our backs (market freedom)—you have received part of the huge legacy of Jack Parsons and his merry crew of science buffs, sorcerers and subversives.

Look at it this way: in John Parsons’ 1930s–1940s sci-fantasy world, everybody he knew had already started discussing the possible “humanity” and “human rights” of extraterrestrials and robots; they created alternate societies much more rational and adventurous than most “normal” people of that time could possibly imagine; they assumed (partly due to the influence of Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics) that information and technology would further accelerate their synergetic accelerations even faster than they had in the previous century (Parsons’ friend, sci-fi-psi author A.E. van Vogt had studied with Korzybski personally); they created Alternative Worlds where anything currently considered goofy—from new economic systems to long-suppressed Gnostic doctrines—might function as efficiently as the pencil sharpener.

Robert Anson Heinlein, another friend of Parsons, wrote a novel, Waldo, in which all the arts of magick have not only won scientific acceptance but have become technologies used daily by everybody. Heinlein also wrote, a bit later, Stranger In A Strange Land, the first sci-fi novel to reach the New York Times bestseller list, and some still say Jack Parsons’ magick/libertarian ideas permeate every page of it—pax, Mr. Carter!

To leave the heady and trippy environment of chaps like van Vogt and Heinlein, and to encounter and endure the Official Reality of the U.S. of those days probably seemed to Parsons like time travel back to the Dark Ages.

In that Official Reality, Christian piety and Capitalist predation coexisted as equally sacred Idols, even though they totally contradict each other. Stupidity, superstition and intolerance imprisoned most Americans in medieval squalor, both mental and economic: many humans did not have the “humanity” or “human rights” that Parsons’ friends would grant to technically sophisticated robots (e.g. all those humans who had darker complexions than Snow White ranked as non or-sub-human in popular opinion and in law. We actually fought a war against fascism with a racially segregated army.) Almost all rational or adventurous ideas encountered blind bigotry and often violent persecution; contraception, divorce and abortion still remained illegal either locally or federally; homosexuality and bisexuality did not exist, or at least nobody in the major media could admit that they did exist; sex in general seemed so “dirty” that in the films of that time even married couples slept in separate beds, lest anyone suspect that they might occasionally fuck each other; all of the other delights of love enjoyed by most spouses remained illegal with penalties ranging as high as 20 years imprisonment; religious nutcases similar to Falwell and Robertson not only peddled hatred and intolerance to a gullible public, but nobody dared to fight back or even make cynical jokes about them; when the first scientific report on human sexuality appeared, its author, Dr. Alfred Kinsey, got hit with everything but flying monkey-shit—according to his research associate, Dr. Pomeroy, Kinsey literally died prematurely from the abuse he suffered.

Of course, irrational fear and superstition still stalk this nation; but in those days, they totally dominated it.

Parsons could only conclude that Americans, who claimed to love freedom, actually feared it, hated it and wanted to smother it with more and more tyrannical laws. They had willingly surrendered their liberty to “lying priests, conniving judges, blackmailing police” and other servitors of tyranny, as he wrote in 1946. But John Parsons, jet propulsion pioneer, had by then become Jack Parsons, sex-magician—after he discovered and joined the Ordo Templi Orientis.

The Ordo Templi Orientis alleges that it descends directly from the 18th Century Illuminati of Bavaria. Let us look into that for a moment.

WHO PUT THE LIGHT IN EN-LIGHT-ENMENT?

I need not add that freedom is a dangerous thing. But it is hardly possible
that we are all cowards.
………. John Whiteside Parsons(2)

Amid endless controversy about them, all agree that the Bavarian Illuminati began on May 1, 1776, in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, created by a Freemason (and former Jesuit) named Adam Weishaupt. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Illuminati managed to influence many masonic lodges and gained “a commanding position” in the movement of anti-royalist, anti-Papist and pro-democratic “secular humanism.” They attracted such literary men as Goethe and Herder but the whole movement came to an end when the Bavarian government banned the Illuminati in 1785. So says the standard reference.

Many conspiracy hunters have more faith in the decidedly paranoid Memoirs Of Jacobinism of Abbe Augustin Barruel, who believed that the Illuminati merely regrouped under other front names after 1785, masterminded the French Revolution and still continued until the time he wrote (1806). Modern anti-Illuminists think it still continues today, although they often disagree as to whether the Illuminati really promotes secular humanism. Most Fundamtalists think they do, but others with livelier fantasies suspect them of unleashing Jazz, Rock ‘n’ Roll, communism, fascism, anarchism, Satanism, international banking, ritual child abuse, or some combination thereof.

According to masonic historian Albert G. Mackey, the Illuminati at its peak had only 2000 members in masonic lodges in France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, and Italy. Mackey emphasizes that Baron Knigge, one of the most powerful and active members of the Illuminati, remained a devout Christian all his life and would not have worked so hard for the order if it really intended, as Abbe Barruel and others claim, the abolition of Christianity.

A new Order of the Illuminati appeared in 1880, founded by Freemasonic druggist Theodor Reuss in Munich. In 1896 Reuss, and fellow occultists Leopold Engel and Franz Hartmann co-founded the Theosophical Society of Germany, and in 1901 Engel and Reuss produced or forged a charter giving them authority over the re-established Illuminati of Weishaupt. In 1901, Reuss, Hartmann and metallurgist Karl Kellner founded the Ordo Templi Orientis and about 1912 Reuss conferred the 9th degree of the Ordo Templi Orientis upon Aleister Crowley, claiming that Crowley already knew the occult secret of that degree. (Crowley—rhymes with holy, remember?—already possessed the 33rd degree of the Scottish Rite and the 97th degree of the Order of Memphis and Mizraim.) Reuss later appointed Crowley his successor as Outer Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis. The Inner Head presumably remains invisible and unavailable to the un-
Illuminated. (Hint: meditate on the Zen koan, “What wonderful magician makes the grass green?”)

Crowley includes Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the 18th Century Illuminati, among the Holy Saints in his Gnostic Catholic Mass, performed regularly in all Ordo Templi Orientis lodges. But that list of Holy Saints also includes also such odd blokes as King Arthur, Mohammed, Parsifal, Buddha, Rabelais, Pope Alexander Borgia, Swinburne, Paracelsus, Sir Francis Bacon, John Dee, Goethe, Wagner, Nietzche, Simon Magus, King Ludwig II (“the mad king of Bavaria”) and painter Paul Gauguin . . .

Before dying, Crowley appointed one Karl Germer (a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp) his successor as Outer Head, but Germer himself neglected to attend to that little detail, and when he died suddenly several claimants arose. I counted 1005 competing Outer Heads at one time in the mid-1980s, myself among them. (I had received that honor from a group of rebels against Kenneth Grant, an embattled Outer Head in London, who still calls himself the only real Outer Head. I always carry the card Grant’s disloyal opposition sent me; it says “The Bearer of This Card is a Genuine and Authorized Outer Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, so PLEASE treat him right” and magically/anachronistically has the signature of Aleister Crowley—or of a skillful forger.)

Over on this side of the pond, the federal courts have ruled that the title of Ordo Templi Orientis belongs only and always to the guys and gals represented on the World Wide Web and have further granted it tax-exempt status as a charitable corporation and religious entity. This group descends directly from the 1930s–1940s Agape Lodge of the OTO, the one that Jack Parsons once led.

As we mentioned, Aleister Crowley became an initiate of the OTO in 1912. This happened because he had published a mystic treatise and/or book of dirty jokes perversely or paradoxically entitled The Book Of Lies (Falsely So Called). The Outer Head at that time, Theodore Reuss came to Crowley and said that, since he, Crowley, knew the secret of the 9th degree, he had to accept that rank in the OTO and its attendant obligations. Crowley protested that he knew no such secret but Reuss showed him a copy of The Book Of Lies and pointed to a chapter which revealed the great secret quite openly. Crowley looked at his own words and “It instantly flashed upon me. The entire symbolism not only of Free Masonry but of many other traditions blazed upon my spiritual vision . . . I understood that I held in my hands the key to the future progress of humanity.” (3) Crowley, of course, does not tell us which chapter contains the secret. You can spend many happy hours, days, maybe even months or years, pouring over that cryptic volume seeking the right chapter and the final secret.

We should remember at this point that even before his involvement with the OTO Aleister Crowley also received training, sometimes briefly and sometimes lasting much longer, in such traditions as Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism; and we should note that he majored in organic chemistry at Cambridge University. He often reiterated his commitment to “the method of science, the aim of religion.” His work as Outer Head turned the OTO in radical new directions, both scientific and sexual.

Now it gets really scary for the Fundamentalists.

SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL

In these experiences the ego will be totally altered or completely
destroyed in the death that must precede a rebirth into life. The terror,
agony and despair that accompany this process cannot be minimized.
………. John Whiteside Parsons(4)

Two recent books that shed some light on all these murky matters deserve some attention at this point—The Hiram Key and The Second Messiah.(5) The authors of both books, Knight and Lomas, both Freemasons themselves, claim that they have received “support and congratulations” from “hundreds” of other masons—athough they admit that their research has been greeted with hostile silence by the United Grand Lodge of England, one of the more conservative masonic bodies.

Basically, Knight and Lomas try to prove that masonry not only dates back to ancient Egypt—as only the most Romantic masons have hitherto claimed—but that it also served as a major influence on “Jerusalem Christianity,” the earliest form of the Christian faith, which St. Paul and other sex-maniacs persecuted and drove underground. When the official Romish Christianity became dominant, primordial or “Jerusalem” Christianity survived by hiding within various Gnostic “heresies,” Knight and Lomas say, and became a major force again only when rediscovered and accepted as their own secret inner doctrine by the Knights Templar. When the Templars were condemned by the Inquisition (1308) the surivivors used various other names until emerging again as “Freemasons” in the 17th or 18th Centuries.

Parts of this thesis have appeared in other books—the underground survival of primordial Christianity, for instance, underlies the entire argument of the famous Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh—but Knight and Lomas have put the puzzle together in a more convincing way an any of their precursors. But what about the original Egyptian “mystery” out of which this underground tradition emerged? Do Knight and Lomas attempt to delve that far back and claim to find a convincing answer?

Indeed they do.

The central masonic “myth” of the widow’s son, Hiram—the builder of Solomon’s temple, murdered for refusing to reveal “the mason word” to three ruffians—derives from actual events in Egypt, they aver. The “mason word” does not mean a “word” in the usual sense but acts as coded euphemism indicating a secret. (“Another damned secret?” I can hear you howl. Patience!)

Every new pharaoh, before ascending the throne, had to visit heaven and become accepted among the gods. Only after this otherworldly journey could the pharoah be accepted by the priests, and by himself, as one fit to fulfill the divine, as well as political, functions of kingship, as conceived in those days. This voyage to the highest stars, where the gods live, involved a magick ritual employing what Knight and Lomas call a “narcotic.” When the last pharaoh of the native dynasty refused to reveal the secrets of this ritual to the new Hyskos dynasty, they killed him in the manner of the widow’s son. The lost “word” = the details of the Ritual of Illumination and the name of the “narcotic” used.

It seems to me that Knight and Lomas have this last detail wrong, due to their ignorance of psycho-pharmacology. Narcotics do not allow you to walk among the stars and communicate with superhuman intelligences. They kill pain, they numb anxiety, they knock you unconscious; and they usually get you addicted: that’s all they do. Almost certainly, the magick potion used in the ritual did not belong to the narcotic family but to the entheogens—the type of drugs also called psychedelics. Entheogens produce “mystic” and godly experiences, and at least one of them, and perhaps two, had widespread religious usage among the Indo-European peoples from ancient times, Amanita muscaria definitely and psilocybin possibly, both of them members of the “magic mushroom” group. You can easily find learned works supporting this nterpretation of how humanity first became aware of Higher Intelligences. See especially Pujarich’s The Sacred Mushroom, Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, Wasson’s Soma: Divine Mushroom of
Immortality, Wasson et al., Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the
Origins of Religion, LeBarre’s Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish Soma, my own Sex, Drugs and Magick—and especially see Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods, which argues that all existing religions evolved from paleolithic rituals using entheogens and group sex to achieve ego-transcendence and cosmic consciousness. You can still see the ancient sexual symbolism even in such romish ikons as the Sacred Heart and the Cross: the former does not look like a heart at all but like a tumescent vagina and the latter has the shape of a penis and testicles.

Jack Parsons’ magick and John Parsons’ science have a closer unity than most people can imagine. They both aimed at the stars.

By the way, all over northern Europe traditional art shows the fairy-people and sorcerers surrounded by mushrooms, usually the “liberty cap” mushroom, now identified as psilocybin, the same used by Native American shamans for around 4000 years. The Irish Gaelic name for this fabulous fungus, Pokeen, means little god. (“Little fairy” in modern Gaelic, but pook derives ultimately from bog, the Indo-European root for “god.”)

Crowley spoke for this tradition when he said true religion always invokes Dionysus, Aphrodite and the Muses, which he also called “wine, women and song.”

Nowadays we call this magick trinity Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, and celebrate them at Raves that hauntingly resemble the earliest stirrings of cosmic questing by ancestors who dressed in animal skins and looked even more like gorillas than we do.

I have saved the worst shock to “good, decent Americans” for the end of this section. In 1986, researchers found another (approximately) 2000-year-old manuscript near the same Nag Hammadi caves where the “Dead Sea Scrolls” had come to light. Translated into English by Mohammed al-Murtada and Francis Bendik under the title The Secret Book Of Judas Of Kerioth, this text depicts Jesus as the bisexual lover of both Mary Magdelene and St. John, and also describes the Last Supper as an entheogenic sacrament involving magic mushrooms. It has an introduction and running commentary by Dr. Maxwell Selander of Briggs-Melton Theological Seminary and you can get a copy from Abrasax Books in Corpus Christi, Texas. It will blow the circuits of any Fundamentalists you know . . .

Sort of sounds like the historical Jesus (as distinguished from the mythical Christ) had a lot in common with Jack Parsons, doesn’t it?

THE ANTICHRIST

The time to fight for freedom is the time when freedom is threatened, not the time when freedom is destroyed, for that later time is too late. Freedom is threatened now, the destruction of freedom is not far off. Now is the time to fight.
………. John Whiteside Parsons (6)

In every state of the Union, Fundamentalists still fight to ban all the science they dislike and prosecute all who teach it. To them, “traditional family values” denotes their right to keep their children as ignorant as their grandparents (and to hate the same folks grand-dad hated.)

Our government’s war against “sin,” i.e. against all forms of individual taste and whimsy, currently costs the taxpayers (federal and local) 450 billion dollars ($450,000,000,000) every year, according to Peter McWilliams.(7) This makes up the bill for all forms of government interference in people’s private lives—i.e. the footless and hopeless attempt to stomp out “consensual” or “victimless” crimes—porno, prostitution, gambling, recreational or religious use of entheogens, etc. Who decides what consensual or victimless acts should become “crimes”? The so-called Christians who drove original “Jerusalem Christianity” underground, established the Holy Inquistion and still seem to suffer from what H.L. Mencken called “the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time”: the “lying priests, conniving judges, blackmailing police” denounced by John Whiteside Parsons in 1946. (Crowley, with his usual flair for humorous melodrama, called them the Black Brotherhood in his books, and it took me years to figure out whom he meant . . .)

In Newark, California, recently, police broke into the home of a Korean family, beat them all up and smashed all their furniture and dishes while allegedly looking for verboten drugs. They found no drugs, but the narcs explained to the press, “This is war.”(8) In Minneapolis, more tragically, the police also broke into the home of an elderly black couple, using flash-bang grenades which set the building on fire and killed both husband and wife. They offered the same “explanation” as in Newark: “This is war.”(9)

As Oliver Steinberg wrote, “It is inaccurate to speak of a War on Drugs . . . You don’t lock drugs up in jail, you lock up people . . . You can’t kill drugs—you kill people. Our government is not waging a war on drugs—it is waging a war on the people.” (10)

Due to a strange and nefarious union of the Fundamentalists and the fanatic wing of Feminism, we have had more than 60 witch-hunts or Satanic Panics since 1980. Thousands of lives ruined, mass hysterias, millions of dollars wasted on prosecutions that usually collapsed in court for lack of real evidence: a large price to pay for the destruction of the Bill of Rights. After digging in countless “mass graves” of alleged victims of human sacrifice, the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, which deals with serial killers, found no victims at all, at all, and concluded that the whole mania had no basis in fact—which led, of course, to charges that the FBI itself functioned as part of the Satanic conspiracy.(11)

And none of this has anything to do with the original Jerusalem Christianity. It emerged only from the Papist pretenders in Rome and their Protestant imitators, who make up the whole of what most people think of as “Christianity.”

Nietzsche, who lived too soon to learn of that original Christianity, regarded what passes under that label as the worst disaster to ever befall humanity. As he wrote in The Antichrist:

The hatred of intellect, of pride, courage, freedom of intellect, is Christian; the hatred of the senses, of the delights of the senses, of all delight, is Christian . . . the concepts of “the other world,” “the last judgement,” “the immortality of the soul,” “soul” itself: they are torture instruments, they are systems of cruelty by which the priests became masters. (12)

Against this system of cruelty Nietzsche rebelled; and Crowley rebelled; and Jack Parsons rebelled: and because of them we now stand on the brink of an explosion of consciousness that literally can extend our minds and carry our bodies to the farthest stars.

THE BABALON WORKING: ROCKET TO HEAVEN

No God. No Master.
………. Margaret Sanger (13)

As you have gathered by now, I do not regard Parsons and Crowley as Black Magicians or Satanists or anything of that sort. Magick has many aspects, but primarily it acts as a dramatized system of “psychology” (or neuro-linguistic meta-programming) to train us to break out of the cage of the socially conditioned ego and, by plunging directly into the Chaos and Void from which we emerged, experience a rebirth into a new sense of self, of world, and of chaos and void, knowing directly, by experience, that all these names hide the same hidden unity—the wonderful magician who makes the grass green, makes the sad man sad, makes the angry woman angry, and makes the loving heart overflow with further love endlessly.

Dr. John Lilly called this process “metaprogramming the human bio-computer”; Dr. Timothy Leary, conscious of his debts to both Crowley and Parsons, called it “serial re-imprinting” of our “realitytunnel.”

As Terence McKenna often says in his lectures, you can do all this by yoga—but only if you can spare seven years of your life, or longer, sitting around an ashram meditating. Magick works faster, especially when united with the ancient shamanic ecstasies of full sexual release and the proper en-theo-gens.

Crowley said, and Parsons liked to quote him on this, “THERE IS NO GOD BUT MAN.” (That sounds “sexist” these days, but you all know what he meant. He also said “EVERY MAN AND EVERY WOMAN IS A STAR.”) To confuse this with atheism seems to me as wildly off the mark as confusing it with “Satanism.” It quite simply means that all ideas/perceptions/experiences of the divine or the immortal refer directly back to the latent powers of the mind that contains them. (In this context, see John 10:34.)

As Jack Parsons knew, and as Freudians will readily see for themselves, the whole magickal struggle in Parsons’ Babalon Working recounted in Chapters Seven and Eight unleashed, on one level, a violent confrontation with Marvel’s Oedipus Complex. Babalon represents the Mother and the Whore, the opposite archetypes of the male mind. To say it aloud, when making love to Babalon as Cameron, Jack Parsons did consciously what all men do unconsciously: he fucked his mother. After 2000 years of Christian sex-hate and sex-guilt, only in that total life-and-death battle with all inner inhibitions could he achieve that liberation which all of us seek, all of us ear, and all of us onfront eventually, in the hour of our death, when we finally don’t give a damn anymore about what other people think.

Only in the irrational
and unknown direction
can we come to
wisdom again.

—John Parsons, letter to Cameron, 1946