I have read this book three times, separated by decades, and every time I have read a different book, and the three books were not always on the same shelf in the universe.
The first time I was seventeen, in a public library in Bellingham, from a mass-market paperback that was missing its front cover and whose pages had gone the color of strong tea. I had been told by older punks that the trilogy was essential — the single sentence they repeated as the whole recommendation — and I took the volume home and read nine hundred pages in a kind of fever, most of which I did not understand, and I came out of it convinced that I had been lied to by every authority in my life up to that point, which was true, and also that all the lies were connected by a single organized conspiracy, which was not. I was seventeen. Illuminatus! at seventeen is a kind of initiatory ordeal. You survive it or you don’t. The ones who don’t spend the rest of their lives on a message board in 1999. The ones who do learn, later, what the book was actually doing.
The second time I was twenty-nine, fresh back from a long stretch overseas, living in a rental in Bellingham again, reading a different paperback edition that a friend had forced on me. I had by then read a lot of other things that Illuminatus! was in conversation with — Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the Discordian materials of Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill, Timothy Leary’s post-drug writings, Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, the particular strain of late-sixties anti-authoritarianism that produced The Principia Discordia and the Church of the SubGenius and eventually Robert Anton Wilson’s whole solo career. I could read the novel the second time as what it actually was — a massive, deliberate, semi-ironic conspiracy-fiction parody of American late-sixties paranoia, written by two Playboy editors on their lunch breaks between 1969 and 1971, aiming to satirize the conspiracy theories that were eating the American left from the inside by constructing the most ridiculous possible version of such a theory and presenting it straight-faced. The book is not about the Illuminati. The book is about what belief in the Illuminati does to a person’s capacity to think. The satire is the point. The satire is also, now, the problem, because the satire has been absorbed sincerely by readers who do not know it is satire.
The third time was last year, at the kitchen table in Otaru, from a three-in-one Dell paperback that had been in my possession for fifteen years and that I had been avoiding. I read it slowly. Two hundred pages a week. I did not push through the difficult sections. I let the sex scenes be tedious. I let the Discordian digressions slow me down. I let the time-shifts and perspective-shifts do their work at whatever pace they were going to do it at. And what I saw on the third reading was neither the initiatory ordeal of seventeen nor the knowing satire of twenty-nine, but something stranger.
I saw a book that was predicting — with a specificity that is embarrassing to describe — the exact shape of twenty-first-century internet culture. Not the content. The shape. The nested hoaxes. The fake documents circulated as real. The real documents circulated as fake. The deliberate confusion of levels — sincere belief presented ironically, ironic belief presented sincerely, and the reader left to sort the nesting. The whole later 4chan-to-QAnon-to-TikTok pipeline of layered irony-as-sincerity-as-irony is a mechanism Shea and Wilson had already worked out in 1971, for a 1971 print audience, and were having fun with. They did not know the mechanism would escape the book and become the native medium of the open internet thirty years later. The book is the manual for the medium that the medium used to eat the readers who did not understand the manual.
Wilson lived to 2007 and watched the first phase of the internet’s absorption of his joke. Shea had died in 1994 and was spared. Wilson, by the 2000s, was cautious about how Illuminatus! was being read. He kept saying, in interviews, that the whole project had been meant as a satire and as an inoculation — you read Illuminatus! and you become unable to take any subsequent conspiracy theory seriously, because you have already encountered the ultimate form and it has been funny. This was the design. He was right about the design. He was wrong about what the design would do in the hands of readers who skipped the inoculating sections.
What works, all three readings: the prose. Wilson is a funny writer in a tradition — Vonnegut, early Pynchon, the Firesign Theatre — that is hard to keep alive because a misjudged sentence lands with the full weight of a comedy writer who is not funny. Wilson judges the sentences correctly nine times out of ten. Shea contributes the noir bones. Together they produce a prose that moves.
What does not work, all three readings: the women. The novel’s women are, with one or two exceptions, variations on the 1971 Playboy editorial office’s idea of what a radical libertine woman should be, and the idea has not aged well, and there are long sex passages that read, now, as the kind of thing a reader politely skims. Wilson revised his gender politics substantially over the following thirty years, in his solo nonfiction work, but the novel is a 1971 novel and it stays 1971 on this point.
Read Illuminatus! once if you have not. Read it again if you can stand it. Read it a third time if you are really committed to the project. It is not for everyone. It was not meant to be. The people for whom it is something, though — the people it catches at the right age — get something from it they cannot easily get elsewhere. An inoculation. A toolkit. A joke that has been working, on schedule, for fifty-five years, and is still working, and will still work, for as long as conspiracy thinking remains a load-bearing feature of American political life, which is to say, indefinitely.
A related vagobond.com piece: A Question of Authority: Can There Be Authority in an Anarchist Society.
Readers and fans of The Illuminatus! Trilogy will really enjoy The Sly Doubt of Uranus — my own experiment in layered-irony fiction, fifty years after Shea and Wilson cut the pattern. Different planet, different cosmology, same joke. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
