CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ROBERT ANTON WILSON
Erik Davis
R
obert Anton Wilson (1932–2007), born Robert Edward Wilson, was an American
novelist, essayist, editor, playwright, and lecturer whose playful and proliic
writings helped make him one of the most stimulating and inluential popular thinkers
in the ‘head’ or ‘freak’ currents of the American counterculture in the 1970s, 1980s,
and 1990s. Wilson’s large, often digressive novels, including the seminal 1975
Illuminatus! trilogy written with Robert Shea, exploited the lore of conspiracy
theories and occult secret societies to explore philosophical, political, and mystical
themes with a satiric and willfully ‘pulp’ sensibility inluenced by drug culture,
American vernacular humor, modernist iction, and the bawdy slapstick of
underground comics. Wilson was also an original thinker whose witty, accessible,
and highly discursive noniction texts drew from a wide range of discourses, including
existentialism, phenomenology, general semantics, occultism, mysticism, sociology,
anarchism, and quantum physics, not to mention his own experiments in ‘hedonic
engineering.’ Developing an expansive skepticism rooted in the phenomenology of
the nervous system, Wilson argued that that ‘the only “realities” (plural) that we
actually experience and can talk meaningfully about are perceived realities – realities
involving ourselves as editors – and they are all relative to the observer’ (Wilson,
1977: iv). For Wilson, this neurological relativism demanded a ‘guerilla ontology’
that critiqued, rejected, and culture-jammed the ‘reality tunnels’ that dominate
modern society and individual behavior. Beyond this critique, Wilson also trumpeted
and embraced the creative, hedonistic, and libertarian ‘meta-programming’
possibilities of self-relexive reality-creation. Though his writings have not received
the academic or mainstream recognition they warrant, their infectious ethos strongly
inluenced a number of cultural discourses that emerged from or passed through the
counterculture, including occultism, libertarianism, transhumanism, psychedelia,
and ‘New Edge’ cyberculture.
Born to a working-class Brooklyn family, Wilson contracted polio as a child, and
suffered the effects of post-polio syndrome off and on throughout his life. Though
raised a Roman Catholic, Wilson became a committed philosophical materialist as a
teenager, dabbling in Marxism and studying engineering and mathematics at New
York University. In his 20s, he underwent various courses of psychotherapy, studied
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existentialism, phenomenology and anarchism, and developed the ‘model agnosticism’
he would reine throughout his life and work. In 1958, Wilson married Arlen Riley,
with whom he had four children; despite Wilson’s celebration of the ‘Tantric’ and
hedonistic currents of the counterculture, they remained a devoted pair until Arlen’s
death in 1999. In 1962, after reading a positive article about psychedelics in the
conservative National Review, Wilson embarked on an extensive exploration of
peyote and eventually LSD. In 1964 he traveled as a journalist to Millbrook to meet
Timothy Leary, who would become a life-long friend; Wilson’s debt to both
psychedelics and Leary’s ideas was profound, and he remained until the end of his
days a tireless evangelist for Leary’s SMI2LE program (Space Migration, Intelligence
Increase, Life Extension). In 1965, Wilson became an editor at Playboy, a job he kept
until 1971. Though he later earned a degree in psychology from Hawthorne College,
Wilson remained an independent author and freelance writer for the rest of his life.
His blue-collar beginnings, his journalist’s commitment to entertaining (and
sometimes chatty) writing, and the wayward bouts of poverty he experienced raising
a family as an underground intellectual helped inform the down-to-earth character of
both his writing and his libertarian politics.
Wilson’s work can be conveniently divided into iction and noniction, though the
division is perhaps ultimately an artiicial one. Wilson larded his stories with historical
data and philosophical argument, and laced his essays with synchronicities and
unsystematic evocations of concepts and possibilities. His quantum physics trilogy,
Schrödinger’s Cat, represents an innovative and well-informed narrative exploration
of quantum weirdness, but his most important iction remains the Illuminatus!
trilogy, co-written with Robert Shea (another Playboy editor) in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, but not published until 1975. Inspired by the wilder conspiracy theories
mailed in by readers of the ‘Playboy Forum,’ the two authors wove together a restless,
baggy, satirical science iction famously described by Greil Marcus as ‘the longest
shaggy dog joke in literary history.’ An exemplary postmodern text, though without
literary pretension, Illumninatus! anticipates the conspiracy ictions later penned by
Umberto Eco and Dan Brown, as well as the ongoing Masonic conspiracies associated
in the 2000s with some hip-hop stars.
The novel follows various characters as they discover, combat, and propagate the
feverish plots of the Illuminati, a conspiratorial global organization secretly run by a
German rock band called the American Medical Association. The Illuminati lie
behind the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and other 1960s igures, and may or
may not be responsible for a myriad other plots and possibilities the novel teasingly
and only partly unpacks. The ultimate aim of the organization is to ‘immanentize the
eschaton,’ a phrase popularized by William F. Buckley and drawn from the
conservative historian Eric Voegelin, who warned against a modern utopian drive to
forcibly realize the millennial kingdom on earth. Arrayed against the Illuminati are
the Discordians, an underground cabal who worship and foment chaos and are
headed by the submarine captain Hagbard Celine (who may or may not be the
Illuminatus Primus, or supreme potentate, in disguise). Wilson and Shea based the
group on an actual Discordian Society, then one of the counterculture’s more obscure,
satirical, and innovative engagements with religious mysticism, and an important
inluence on Wilson. Largely the invention of two Americans, Gregory Hill and Kerry
Thornley (aka Malaclypse the Younger and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, who both
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appear in Illuminatus!), Discordianism holds that chaos is as least as fundamental to
reality as order, and that it should be honored with paradox, contradiction, principled
anarchism, and an irony so profane (or so silly) that it suggests the sacred. The
principal Discordian text, originally published in 1965 in ive copies and revised a
number of times and by numerous hands, is the Principia Discordia, a parodic (and
possibly sincere) collage of cartoons, bad puns, Beatnik Zen, tongue-in-cheek
religious language, and a deeply irreverent strain of American vernacular humor.
Wilson became both an Episkopos and Pope of the Discordian Society, and was later
considered ‘Pope Bob’ by the Church of the Subgenius, which appropriated a good
deal of Discordian DNA.
Placing the Discordian current within modern magical history, Margot Adler
credits Kerry Thornley with irst using the word ‘Pagan’ to refer to emerging nature
religions like Wicca. However, the Discordian materials themselves are not deeply
marked by occult currents. In Illuminatus!, however, Wilson and Shea weave in
dense historical threads about Freemasonry and ceremonial magic, make copious
references to H.P. Lovecraft and other occult iction writers, and stage scenes tinged
with pop Satanism, like the obscene black mass led by Padre Pederastia in the third
of the trilogy’s ten chapters, which correspond to the ten sephirot of the Tree of Life.
But it was the mysterious events (or perceptions) that occurred to Wilson following
the completion of the bulk of Illuminatus! in 1971 that turned him into a philosopher
of the modern occult. Wilson relates these experiences in his 1977 book Cosmic
Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, the irst volume in what would eventually
become Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger trilogy of autobiographical essays. Inspired by his
continuing Illuminatus! research into esoteric conspiracies and revisionist histories,
Wilson embarked on a course of ceremonial magic and other psycho-spiritual
practices that catalyzed a series of synchronicities, conceptual insights, and robust
altered states of consciousness. The conspiratorial ictions he had co-written began to
bleed into his personal reality, and from July 1973 until roughly October 1974,
Wilson came to inhabit a ‘reality tunnel’ in which he was receiving telepathic messages
from an extraterrestrial intelligence linked to the double star system Sirius.
One of the more important catalysts for this explosion of high weirdness was
Wilson’s close reading of Aleister Crowley, whose writings Wilson had begun to
explore in 1970 at the recommendation of Alan Watts (Crowley also appears as a
character in Wilson’s 1981 novel Masks of the Illuminati). Drawn to the encryption
and pun-illed misdirection of Crowley texts like The Book of Lies, Wilson began to
decode and then experiment with ritual regimens involving drugs and sexual magic.
Over time, these and other practices seemed to catalyze what Wilson called – using
the language of Timothy Leary’s psycho-cybernetic model of consciousness – a new
evolutionary ‘circuit’ lying in potentia in his nervous system and DNA. Wilson came
to suspect that the techniques of hedonically engineering this state was the secret that
lay at the core of Illuminism and other esoteric traditions. With apotropaic doses of
irony, Wilson narrates a widening paranoid web of signiicance that involves
telepathic agents from the Dog Star, the number 23, Leary’s 1973 ‘Star Seed’
communications, Suism, Horus, and other lorid arcana.
Cosmic Trigger can be read as an extended engagement with the uncanny
conceptual and psychological powers of synchronicity, as well as an insightful spore
print of California’s occult and psychedelic demimonde. But the occultist signiicance
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of this book and many of the noniction books that followed lies precisely in Wilson’s
ability to largely come through the other side of the disturbing synchronistic web he
called ‘Chapel Perilous.’ He did so with his deployment of what Wilson calls
‘neurological model agnosticism.’ One important inspiration for this method was
Wilson’s take on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, which asserts,
roughly speaking, that the manifest character of quantum objects is dependent on the
instruments used to measure them. Applying this model to consciousness, Wilson
held that the synchronistic or apparently supernatural effects associated with
ceremonial magic do not reveal truths about reality but rather evidence for the
autopoetic capacities of the human nervous system. At the same time, Wilson was not
claiming simply that it is all ‘just in the brain.’ Inspired by parapsychology, Leary’s
8-circuit model, and the possible entanglement of consciousness with quantum
effects, Wilson hewed to an optimistic vision of the transformative potential of the
brain that signiicantly exceeded the boundaries of conventional naturalism. In this,
Wilson can be seen as an outlier of the New Age, whose platitudes he often mocked
but whose concerns—quantum physics, directed evolution, the Aquarian conspiracy—
he overlapped. Indeed, Wilson’s philosophical effort may be understood as a neurosociological and skeptical corrective to the essential New Age gambit that we ‘create
our own reality.’
As an occultist thinker, Wilson needs to be seen in light of his reading of Crowley,
and speciically of the pragmatist and even reductionist thread that runs, inconsistently,
throughout Crowley’s work. In the introduction to his 1903 edition of the Goetia,
for example, the young Crowley argues that ‘the spirits of the Goetia are portions of
the human brain.’ Crowley later voiced something closer to Wilson’s own model
agnosticism in ‘Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae,’ an instruction manual for the A.:A.:
that Wilson often quoted. Alerting students that they will encounter the discussion of
things – like gods and spirits – which may or may not exist, Crowley asserts that ‘it
is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things, certain results follow;
students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or
philosophical validity to any of them.’ Though offering a simplistic portrayal of the
contradictory Crowley, Wilson helped propagate an inluential ‘countercultural’
vision of Crowley.
With his allergy to gurus and grand narratives, Wilson helped articulate and deine
a distinctly ‘postmodern’ theory and method of occultism. Conceptually, Wilson
afirms the rich phenomenology of occult and mystical experiences while emptying
them of ontological, idealist, or supernatural claims. The negative or critical character
of such doubt is balanced with the exuberant ‘meta-programming’ possibilities rooted
in the hedonic body, in experimental practice, in human intelligence, and in the
virtual possibilities of the imagination and the transformative ictions it breeds. In
this sense, Wilson may be productively placed in the context of a self-relexive
American reformulation of Paganism. Fellow travelers here include Discordianism,
the science-ictional and originally libertarian Church of All Worlds, and the New
Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (with whom Wilson practiced
ritual); all of these groups acknowledged and celebrated their own contingent
religious invention.
Wilson should also be considered an important progenitor of chaos magic. Like
Wilson, many chaos magicians adopt a skeptical instrumentalism or ‘guerilla
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ontology,’ a methodology that is sometimes coupled with a taste for social critique,
absurdist humor, and the meta-ictional use of science-iction and fantasy materials.
Especially important here is the work of H.P. Lovecraft, whose Yog-Sothery saturates
Illuminatus! Wilson also placed magical and mystical concerns into dialogue with a
heterogenous and productive set of discourses whose inluence on various counterand subcultural ields of production remains under-appreciated. These include
transhumanism, libertarianism, psychedelia, science iction, rave culture, and the
‘New Edge’ of early cyberculture. Wilson’s continued online inluence, as well as the
fellow feeling inspired by his generous disposition, was demonstrated in the months
before his death in early 2007, when an Internet campaign started by Douglas
Rushkoff and publicized through Slashdot and Boing Boing raised over sixty thousand
dollars for Wilson’s care in three days.
REFERENCES AND F U RTHE R RE AD ING
Adler, M. (1986) Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and
Other Pagans in America Today, Boston: Beacon.
Cusack, C. (2010) Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction, and Faith, London: Ashgate.
Gorightly, A. (2003) The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and
How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture, New York: Paraview.
Malaclypse the Younger and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (1980) Principia Discordia: or, How
I Found Goddess And What I Did to Her When I Found Her, Port Townsend, WA:
Loompanics.
Robertson, D. (2012) ‘Making the Donkey Visible: Discordianism in the Works of Robert
Anton Wilson,’ in C.M. Cusack and A. Norman, eds, Handbook of New Religions and
Cultural Movements, Leiden: Brill.
Wilson, R.A. (1977), Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati, Phoenix, AZ: New
Falcon.
——(1983) Prometheus Rising, Phoenix, AZ: New Falcon.
——(1991) Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth, Phoenix, AZ: New Falcon.
Wilson, R.A. and R. Shea (1975) Illuminatus!, New York: Dell.
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