Deconstructive Parody: Of conspiracy theories, 1960s hippie culture, and even the book itself. See Self-Deprecation. After having smoked marijuana for nearly a decade, Wilson first experimented with mescaline in Yellow Springs, Ohio, on December 28, 1961. [8] Wilson began to work as a freelance journalist and advertising copywriter in the late 1950s. He adopted his maternal grandfather's name, Anton, for his writings and told himself that he would save the "Edward" for when he wrote the Great American Novel. He later found that "Robert Anton Wilson" had become an established identity. Author H. P. Lovecraft is alluded to often, with many mentions of characters (e.g., Robert Harrison Blake, Henry Armitage, Klarkash-Ton), monsters (e.g., Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu), books ( Necronomicon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten) and places ( Miskatonic University) from his Cthulhu Mythos. He even appears himself as a character, as does his aunt Annie Gamwell and one of his acquaintances, Hart Crane. Interest in Lovecraft reached new heights in 1975, with two full-length biographies published in the same year as The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Among Wilson's 35 books, [20] and many other works, perhaps his best-known volumes remain the cult classic series [21] The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), co-authored with Shea. Advertised as "a fairy tale for paranoids", the three books— The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan, soon offered as a single volume—philosophically and humorously examined, among many other themes, occult and magical symbolism and history, the counterculture of the 1960s, secret societies, data concerning author H. P. Lovecraft and author and occultist Aleister Crowley, and American paranoia about conspiracies and conspiracy theories. The book was intended to poke fun at the conspiratorial frame of mind. [22] Wilson advocated Timothy Leary's 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic engineering, which he wrote about in many books including Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and Quantum Psychology (1990), which contain practical techniques intended to help the reader break free of one's reality tunnels. With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension, which they combined to form the word symbol SMI²LE.

Betty and Veronica: Arguably Stella and Mavis, for George. Subverted in that they turn out to be the same person (or rather, Goddess). Illuminatus stumbles". April 3, 2013. Archived from the original on April 3, 2013 . Retrieved June 15, 2017. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown ( link)The author of 35 books on subjects like extrasensory perception, mental telepathy, metaphysics, paranormal experiences, conspiracy theory, sex, drugs and what he called quantum psychology ..." The New York Times obituary. In conversation, you realised how liberating his brand of agnosticism is. By not believing in anything he was free to examine everything. To Bob, everything was interesting. This openness was life-affirming because he did not shut himself off from the good and the humour in things. His pleasure in wild ideas may have sidelined him as a contemporary thinker, but his approach was an antidote to fundamentalism. For Bob, fixed belief was intellectual suicide, and the framing of an argument into only two competing sides was absurd. He is gone but, I think, there is still much we will learn from him.

Stella giggled and kissed his mouth briefly. 'It takes a lot to get those words out of you, doesn't it?' she said bemusedly. Coldcut, Mixmaster Morris, Ken Campbell, Bill Drummond and Alan Moore (March 18, 2007). Robert Anton Wilson tribute show. Queen Elizabeth Hall, London: Mixmaster Morris . Retrieved August 28, 2009.

The word makes its first appearance in The Illuminatus! Trilogy without any explanation during an acid trip by Dr. Ignotum Per Ignotius and Joe Malik: "The only good fnord is a dead fnord". [12] Several other unexplained appearances follow. Only much later in the story is the secret revealed, when Malik is hypnotized by Hagbard Celine to recall suppressed memories of his first-grade teacher conditioning his class to ignore the fnords: "If you don't see the fnord it can't eat you, don't see the fnord, don't see the fnord..." [13] Numerology [ edit ] There's also Timothy Leary, Adam Weishaupt, John Dillinger, Adolf Hitler, George Washington, Dutch Schultz...

According to Ken Campbell, who created a stage adaptation of Illuminatus! with Chris Langham, the writing process was treated as a game of one-upmanship between the two co-authors, and was an enjoyable experience for both: No film or video exists of the performances at The National Theatre. However a full audio recording does exist and is available as a limited edition perk [43] in the crowdfunding [44] for the 2014 stage play of Wilson's book Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, adapted by Daisy Eris Campbell (Ken Campbell's daughter). [45] a b c Carlson, Michael (January 17, 2007). "Robert Anton Wilson". The Guardian . Retrieved June 15, 2017.Fun with Acronyms: Two examples are an ultra-right-wing group called the Knights of Christianity United in Faith, and a computer named the First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic Ultramicro-Programmer. There's also two right-wing organizations whose acronyms are WHORE and TWAT. One of the many groups holds its meetings on Lake Shore Drive "because of the acrostic significance". The 23-strong cast featured several actors, such as Jim Broadbent, David Rappaport and Chris Langham, who went on to successful film, stage and television careers. Broadbent alone played more than a dozen characters in the play. [37] Bill Drummond designed sets for the show, [38] and it was eventually seen (when it moved to London, with Bill Nighy then joining the cast) by the young Jimmy Cauty. Drummond and Cauty later went on to form the Illuminatus!-inspired [39] electronica band The KLF. [40] Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson; January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was an American author, futurist, psychologist, [1] [2] and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews. [3] In 1999 he described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". [4] Wilson's goal was "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything." [5] Wilson followed up with the autobiographical Cosmic Trigger: Final Secrets of the Illuminati, which included encounters with extraterrestrials while under the influence of peyote and mescaline. He would produce two more volumes of the Cosmic Trigger, in 1991 and 1995. Where he had fun with the conspiracies of Illuminatus, in his non-fiction he pursued the revelation of a parallel kind of secret control, the way society acts to restrain individual consciousness, and the search for freedom through expanding that consciousness. Drugs played an important role. He collaborated with Leary on two books, Neuropolitics (1978) and The Game of Life (1979) reflecting those concerns, but he also practised what he preached.