Filled with sex and violence--in and out of time and space--the three books of The Illuminatus are only partly works of the imagination. They tackle all the coverups of our time--from who really shot the Kennedys to why there's a pyramid on a one-dollar bill.
Ia all of history a vast conspiracy? Cosmic joke? Robert Anton Wilson developed the story of the Illuminati, a conspiracy as old as time itself, as a vehicle to amuse and enlighten. His best-selling books, The Illuminati Trilogy and Cosmic Trigger, have delighted readers the world over and made the Illuminati conspiracy the perfect metaphor for our time. In the ILLUMINATI PAPERS, Robert Anton Wilson speaks through characters from his novels and other realities and presents his views on our future way of life. Includes The HEAD Revolution Secrets of Evolution How to Eliminate Stupidity Illuminati Interoffice Memos The Position Papers of Hagbard Celine Economic Liberation The Usual Gang of Lunatics, Mystics, and Characters Clamoring for a New Social Order
This American underground classic is a rollicking cosmic mystery featuring Albert Einstein and James Joyce as the ultimate space/time detectives. One fateful evening in a suitably dark, beer-soaked Swiss rathskeller, a wild and obscure Irishman named James Joyce would become the drinking partner of an unknown physics professor called Albert Einstein. And on that same momentous night, Sir John Babcock, a terror-stricken young Englishman, would rush through the tavern door bringing a mystery that only the two most brilliant minds of the century could solve . . . or perhaps bringing only a figment of his imagination born of the paranoia of our times. An outrageous, raunchy ride through the twists and turns of mind and space, Masks of the Illuminati runs amok with all our fondest conspiracy theories to show us the truth behind the laughter . . . and the laughter in the truth. Praise for Masks of the Illuminati “I was astonished and delighted . . . Robert Anton Wilson managed to reverse every mental polarity in me, as if I had been pulled through infinity.”—Philip K. Dick “[Wilson is] erudite, witty, and genuinely scary.”—Publishers Weekly “A dazzling barker hawking tickets to the most thrilling tilt-a-whirls and daring loop-o-planes on the midway to a higher consciousness.”—Tom Robbins “Wilson is one of the most profound, important, scientific philosophers of this century—scholarly, witty, hip, and hopeful.”—Timothy Leary
"A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." - John Leonard, The Nation Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason & Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost. Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.
Throughout history, secret societies have played a crucial role in shaping events that have created our world. Only an inner circle of power elite know the full extent of the influence of the conspiracy. It is Paris, 1772, and Sigismundo Celine knows he is destined to play an important part in this history-behind-history. The masons, the English nobil ity, the Jabobites, the Rosicrucians, the ruling clique of pre-Revolution France: these are but a few of the factions involved in the machinations and intrigue in which Sigismundo has become enmeshed. Thrown into the Bastille, shot at, assaulted by assassins, tortured, and brutally interrogated, he knows only what he is and what he must do to become the one spoken of in the old texts. But what he doesn't know could kill him: the secret powers of Maria, the Italian beauty who has become an English Lady; the Irish fisherman, Moon, who stumbles across the inner workings of an unsuspected cult; and the question they keep asking: the identity of The Widow's Son.
The great modern classic of a brilliant rebel's personal exploration into the nature of consciousness Featuring a New Introduction by John Higgs "Cosmic Trigger deals with a process of deliberately induced brain change. This process is called "initiation" or "vision quest" in many traditional societies and can loosely be considered some dangerous variety of self-psychotherapy in modern terminology. I do not recommend it for everybody . . . briefly, the main thing I learned in my experiments is that "reality" is always plural and mutable." - Robert Anton Wilson from the Preface The Robert Anton Wilson Trust Authorized Hilaritas Press Edition
A story that entwines the fate of Cathars of southern France with the occult traditions of Courtly Love and the troubadours.Robert Joseph Shea (14 February 1933 - 10 March 1994) was the co-author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy with Robert Anton Wilson and the author of six other novels including Shike, All Things Are Lights, The Saracen, and Shaman. Robert Shea met Robert Anton Wilson in the late 1960s, when both were working in the editorial department of Playboy. Before long, they decided to collaborate on a novel that would combine sex, drugs, alternative religions, anarchism, and conspiracy theory, which became Illuminatus!. While they remained close friends for life, they had philosophical and political disagreements, and these enriched the book, helping to make it a dialogic novel in which no single point of view is privileged. On his own, Shea went on to write historical novels, including Shike (1981), All Things Are Lights (1986), and what probably is his most underrated work--The Saracen, a book published in two parts in 1989 depicting the struggle between a blond Muslim warrior called Daoud Ibn Abdullah and his French crusader adversary Simon De Gobignon. It's a book of love, intrigue, and suspense during the time of the Crusades. It is a book that avoids racial and religious stereotyping and is at times very sensual. His last book was the Native American tale Shaman (1991). Robert Joseph Shea attended Manhattan Prep, Manhattan College and Rutgers University and worked as a magazine editor in New York and Los Angeles. In the 60's he edited the Playboy Forum where he met Robert Anton Wilson, with whom he collaborated on Illuminatus! After publishing Illuminatus!, Bob left Playboy to become a full time novelist. His novels include: Shike, set in medieval Japan. All Things Are Lights, a story that entwines the fate of Cathars of southern France with the occult traditions of Courtly Love and the troubadours. The Saracen, describing the intricate politics of medieval Italy through the eyes of an Islamic warrior. Shaman, tracing the fate of the survivors of the Black Hawk War in 19th century Illinois. Lady Yang, a tragic story of an idealistic empress of medieval China.