The Illuminatus! Trilogy Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
Raven trd pbk, 805 pgs, £9.99
Review by Mike Don (1998)
The definitive cult classic, but difficult to describe to the (as it were) un-illuminated. It can be any or all of the following:
- A subversive yippie-surrealist-anarchist mockery of the American Empire and its po-faced capitalism.
- A subversive, wickedly-pointed satire against the loonier conspiracists, rolling up every conspiracy theory ever thought of and pushing the idea to its absurd limit.
- A subversive, subtle introduction to RW’s own brand Discordian occult practice, full of hints about the True Significance of dollar bills and the number 23 (equally, a parody of those same ideas; that’s the beauty of Discordianism).
Re-reading this after 20 years, though, left me feeling that it hasn’t aged well. Two decades of triumphalist bloody-raw capitalism has crushed the spirit, doused the hopes that were still - just about - alive in ’76. Oklahoma City and the rise of Nazoid militias has destroyed the innocence of conspiracy believers. It’s a murkier business now. (Ironically, post-Oklahoma, tales circulated that Illuminations was a holy text to these nutters). Almost incidentally, it’s also a story, or rather a clutch of interleaved stories; great fun, but mindblowing in complexity unless the reader is fortified with exotic pharmaceuticals, as many of us were when we read it first time round.