A Discordian bumper sticker promoting Illuminatus! Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
The most intriguing passage—at least for yours truly—in Week Nine of the Illuminatus! group reading (other than the introduction of The Golden Apple on page 85!) is the following quote on page 91:
The Purple Sage cursed and waxed sorely pissed and cried out in a loud voice: A pox upon the accursed Illuminati of Bavaria; may their seed take no root.
May their hands tremble, their eyes dim and their spines curl up, yea, verily, like unto the backs of snails; and may the vaginal orifices of their women be clogged with Brillo pads.
For they have sinned against God and Nature; they have made of life a prison; and they have stolen the green from the grass and the blue from the sky. And so saying, and grimacing and groaning, the Purple Sage left the world of men and women and retired to the desert in despair and heavy grumpiness.
But the High Chapperal laughed, and said to the Erisian faithful: Our brother torments himself with no cause, for even the malign Illuminati are unconscious pawns of the Divine Plane of Our Lady.
—Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S.,“The Book of Contradictions,” Liber 555
This passage seems quite similar to other excerpts in Illuminatus!—by Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (aka Kerry Thornley) and Malaclypse the Younger (aka Greg Hill)—that are taken from the Discordian Holy books, such as Lord Omar’s The Honest Book of Truth, and that were also previously quoted in the bible of Discordianism, Principia Discordia.
For years, many suspected that The Honest Book of Truth never actually existed, other than a few quotes that Kerry Thornley cooked up… but now, at last, the truth can be told! Lord Omar (Kerry) did indeed compose a work called The Honest Book of Truth, a 15 page irreligious tract that will be reproduced in its entirety in my forthcoming book, Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society.
As a sidebar, when I was talking to RAW once regarding his thoughts on Thornley as a writer, he told me that Kerry’s most significant work was The Honest Book of Truth—a comment I didn’t know what to make of at the time, because I, like most everyone else, believed that the book never actually existed.
Mordecai Malignatus, of course, was RAW’s Discordian alias, and in the above passage he speaks of The Purple Sage, a character Thornley first introduced in The Honest Book Of Truth. As for “The Book of Contradictions,” Liber 555, I’m guessing this was a made-up Discordian Holy book that RAW never actually composed, excerpt for the above passage which seems like a takeoff on The Honest Book of Truth.
It can indeed get quite confusing trying to make sense of all this, Hail Eris!
Letter from Camden Benares to Louise Lacey, September 8, 1976. Courtesy of Louise Lacey.In this 1976 letter to Louise Lacey, Camden Benares reflects on his life as a writer—of both Zen and porn—noting that Zen Without Zen Masters was scheduled for release in the spring of 1977. In addition, Camden mentions a science fiction collaboration in the works between he and his Discordian pal John F. Carr, a book that was finally published in the futuristic faraway year of 2013 and chronicled in my previous post “The Discordian Sci-Fi Series That Almost Never Was.”
Camden congratulates Louise on the recent publication of Lunaception, her landmark work on a natural method to conception, using the phases of the moon as a guide, a concept later explored by Tom Robbins in Still Life With Woodpecker.
Camden also floats the idea of putting together a list of Discordian books then in publication. With that theme in mind, here is just such a list, a snap shot in time of books in print by Discordian authors as of 1977.
By the time Illuminatus! was published in 1975, Kerry began suffering severe bouts of delusional paranoia along with his growing belief that the shadowy character he’d met in New Orleans in the early-60s (referred to as “Brother-In-Law”) was actually legendary CIA spook E. Howard Hunt, and that Hunt had manipulated Kerry to later set him up as an unwitting dupe in JFK’s assassination. During this period, Kerry began to suspect that he’d also been a victim of MK-ULTRA mind control, that Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) was involved in a plot to deprogram him, and that Illuminatus! was at the root of a lot of the high weirdness then going down in his life. As RAW told me in The Prankster and the Conspiracy:
“(Kerry) had the impression that I came to Atlanta more than once and that I had given him LSD and had removed the programming the Navy had put into him when he was in the Marines—and that I was one of his CIA handlers.”
When RAW informed Kerry that he didn’t remember any of this taking place, Kerry said that was because they had brainwashed him (RAW), too. Because of these suspicions, the two eventually ceased communication because as RAW later explained:
”It’s hard to communicate with somebody when he thinks you’re a diabolical mind-control agent and you’re convinced that he’s a little bit paranoid.”
On page 69, the character of Atlanta Hope is introduced, leader of God’s Lightning, a group who are opposed (at least on the surface) to all things fun and immoral. Atlanta Hope has always reminded me as a sort of Anita Bryant type: a seeming Miss All America goody two-shoes who, in reality, is willing to sleep her way to the top of the Illuminati pyramid while using the trappings of Christian fundamentalism to further her own duplicitous ambitions.
Kerry came to believe that the Atlanta Hope character was actually modeled after a woman he knew in Atlanta, Georgia named Mary Jo Padgett who belonged to a group of Quakers that provided ministry and group counseling sessions. At the time, Kerry sought counsel through this group and, in time, came to believe that they had been infiltrated by the intelligence community. Mary Jo Padgett, Kerry surmised, was:
“…an extremely high-level intelligence community dirty work organizer for elements of the Southern Rim (military-industrial complex) of the ruling class, including very probably the Dupont family. I believe these elements have been conducting a virtual reign of terror in this area for some years, not to mention corruption of the various levels of government, and that they must have been involved rather deeply in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr…. I’m rather strongly convinced that the Illuminatus! character, Atlanta Hope, is based substantially on Mary Jo Padgett…”
Letter: Kerry Thornley to Greg Hill, 1976. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Back in 1966, Kerry was editing the libertarian newsletter, The Innovator, which had published an article entitled “Postman Against the State” dealing with various non-governmental postal systems throughout history that had functioned more effectively than government operated systems. As the “Playboy Forum” was then receiving a slew of complaints from readers about snooping on the part of the U.S. Postal Service, Kerry persuaded The Innovator’s publisher to send a copy of the “Postman Against the State” issue to Playboy. RAW—then an associate editor at Playboy—received this issue of The Innovator and, in turn, responded to Kerry, which initiated a longstanding correspondence between the two.
Kerry and RAW discussed, among other things, the American Letter Mail Company operated in New England in the mid 1800s by the individualist anarchist, Lysander Spooner. The American Letter Mail Company, at the time, offered cheaper postage rates than the U.S. Postal Service, gave more deliveries per day, and earned a profit to boot. Spooner was finally put out of business when Congress made it illegal to deliver a first class letter for profit. Both Kerry and RAW agreed that the U.S. Postal Service was once again ripe for change, and the concept Spooner had spawned one hundred years earlier was the direction the current mail system should go.
Thornley later described his correspondence with RAW as “one of the longest, most intense, most stimulating, rewarding, enriching, enlightening—and certainly the most unusual—of my entire life.”
“We began writing long letters to each other… astonished at how totally our political philosophies agreed—we were both opposed to every form of violence or coercion against individuals, whether practiced by governments or by people who claimed to be revolutionaries. We were equally disenchanted with the organized Right and the organized Left while still remaining Utopians, without a visible Utopia to believe in.”
During this period, Kerry was promoting the idea of “floating ocean utopias” where Anarcho-Libertarians—such as he fancied himself—could live high and free on the sea. This is a concept that RAW and Shea entertain in Illuminatus! embodied by the character of Hagbard Celine and his golden submarine, the Lief Erickson, which first emerges on page 71.
Celine—like many other Illuminatus! characters—seems a composite of much of the idealism after which Kerry aspired during those heady days of the 60s: the dream of living on the high seas—like swashbuckling Captain Celine—free of governments and any limitations on the individual, devoted to pursuing true freedom and sensual pleasures while engaged in a battle to free men’s minds.
'The Gypsies of the Sulu Sea,' Kerry Thornley’s short article on 'aqua-libertarians' from Ocean Living magazine, 1968. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy, 'candy apple red' edition from Dell Trade Paperback, January 1984. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.And now yet more revelations of certain Erisian Mysteries in Week 6 of the Illuminatus! group reading…
On page 54, 00005 (Of Her Majesty’s Secret Service) is introduced, otherwise known elsewhere in Illuminatus! as the character Fission Chips.
00005 is the first reference in Illuminatus! to the Discordian Law of Fives, which states that all things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly related to five.
Page 00005 of the Sacred PUD (the original Paste-Up Discordia): A Zen Story by Camden Benares from the Principia Discordia. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.00005 is also an example of the same five digit numbering system Greg Hill devised for the Principia Discordia. Illuminatus! is permeated with such Discordian allusions, which very few people at the time of its publication in 1975 would have been able to pick up on—or had even heard of Discordianism, for that matter. During this period there were only a few hundred copies of Principia Discordia in circulation, and so these Illuminatus!-Discordian allusions (such as this obscure reference to The Law of Fives) were initially inserted into the narrative as nothing more, it would seem, than inside jokes to the few who would understand them: a small cabal of Early Discordians numbering no fewer than five and probably not more than 23. The ultimate design of including all these Discordian winks and nods in Illuminatus! was part of a well thought out (albeit semi-covert) Discordian campaign to bring the Principia Discordia and Discordianism to a larger audience. The subsequent success of Illuminatus!, as a result, led many in turn to seek out the Principia Discordia, which was no easy task to track down at the time given its limited availability.
This limited availability of the Principia Discordia—coupled with its repeated referencing in Illuminatus!—no doubt intrigued and motivated the likes of Michael Hoy at Loompanics, and later Steven Jackson Games, to come out with new editions in the years to follow, thus unleashing an insidious plague that would soon envelop the planet, and usher in modern day Discordianism as we now know it.
On page 58 is a direct quote from Malaclypse the Younger, aka Greg Hill:
Hang on for some metaphysics. The Aneristic Principle is that of ORDER, the Eristic Principle is that of DISORDER. On the surface, the Universe seems (to the ignorant) to be ordered; this is the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Actually, what order is “there” is imposed on primal chaos in the same sense that a person’s name is draped over his actual self. It is the job of the scientist, for example, to implement this principle in a practical manner and some are quite brilliant at it. But on closer examination, order dissolves into disorder, which is the ERISTIC ILLUSION. —Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., Principia Discordia
From this passage one can see the philosophical inspiration Greg Hill provided to RAW and Bob Shea, which once again attests to the overarching role that Hill, Kerry Thornley and Discordianism played in the creation The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
As for the “K.S.C.” tagged on to the end of Malaclypse the Younger, this appellation is an acronym for Keeper of the Sacred Chao, which we will of course learn more about as we progress further down the Illuminatus! rabbit hole.
A John Dillinger Died For You Society Membership Card, Courtesy of the Discordian Archives. On page 59, the legend of John Dillinger is first introduced, a mythology that’d been evolving in certain Discordian circles since at least 1970 in the form of the John Dillinger Died For You Society (JDDFYS), a legend largely inserted into the Discordian mythos by RAW.
Camden Benares sent Greg Hill this article on Mad Dog, Texas from the November 1970 Playboy, Page 00001. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives. An early mention of JDDFYS appeared in one of the more obscure articles found in Playboy magazine, no doubt penned by RAW and/or Shea or both when they were editors there. As I’ve mentioned in previous reading group posts, many of the conspiracy theories in Illuminatus! contain equal amounts of fact mixed with fiction, although it’s hard sometimes to figure out where one ends and the other begins. Included in this Playboy “After Hours” article from November 1970 is an early reference to the JDDFYS, which was a real society created in a large part by RAW and based on fanciful legends mixed with an equal measure of historical fact. So once again we have a real article in a real magazine, about a group of writers, artists and radicals launching their own “independent republic” in Mad Dog, Texas—that was probably totally made-up although the article included some elements of truth mixed with fiction, as well as real people (such as Warren Hinckle and George Plimpton) co-existing with some imaginary people mentioned in the article. Reality tunnels within reality tunnels…
Camden Benares sent Greg Hill this article on Mad Dog, Texas from the November 1970 Playboy, Page 00002. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives. Mad Dog, Texas—as the reader shall soon discover—later plays a key role in the Illuminatus! narrative, although it really seems to have next to nothing to do with the Mad Dog, Texas group discussed in the Playboy “After Hours” article.
Discordian Guerrilla Ontology advert for the release of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Several posts ago, we presented a letter from Robert Shea to Discordian co-founder Greg Hill concerning the Illuminatus! book cover art proofs that proved quite interesting with some great background insights into that effort before the release of the book.
After the release of Illuminatus!: The Eye in the Pyramid, co-author Shea and Hill continued their correspondence through the fall of 1975, attached below for your reading pleasure. Shea is referenced and signs as “Josh” in two of these letters acknowledging his Discordian nom de plume “Josh the Dill.”
From this exchange, we learn some interesting tidbits about the publication of Illuminatus!, such as the book’s publisher, Dell, initially printed only 75,000 copies of The Eye in the Pyramid. We also gain some insights into how the book was being received and what efforts were being made by Shea and his co-author Robert Anton Wilson to market the book via radio interviews.
In the November 11, 1975 letter from Hill to Shea, Hill enclosed a copy of the fake Illuminatus! review he and Wilson had been working on under the name of Mordecai Zwack and were sending out to various newspapers like The New York Times as a part of their ongoing “Operation Mindfuck.”
This exchange of letters also contains an extensive discussion and analysis of Discordian co-founder Kerry Thornley’s recent-at-the-time state of mind, his growing paranoia, and his theories regarding his involvement in the JFK Assassination, including Thornley’s experiences with the mysterious “Brother-in-Law” Gary Kirstein. Shea and Hill’s take on Thornley and what he was personally going through around this time is quite revealing in context of what this whole era of realization would eventually mean for Thornley and his life in the years to come.
Also of note is Shea’s response to various Illuminati “true believers” during his promotional radio interviews leading him to confide to Hill, “We are definitely dealing with volatile materials.”
Indeed, Hail Eris! Enjoy.
Letters: Robert Shea and Greg Hill, Fall 1975
Letter: Robert Shea to Greg Hill, October 1, 1975, Page 00001. Courtesy of bobshea.net from the Discordian Archives.Letter: Greg Hill to Robert Shea, November 11, 1975, Page 00001. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Letter: Greg Hill to Robert Shea, November 11, 1975, Page 00002. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Letter: Greg Hill to Robert Shea, November 11, 1975, Page 00003. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Letter: Robert Shea to Greg Hill, November 22, 1975, Page 00001. Courtesy of bobshea.net from the Discordian Archives.Letter: Robert Shea to Greg Hill, November 22, 1975, Page 00002. Courtesy of bobshea.net from the Discordian Archives.
On Page 45, a haunting specter from Kerry Thornley’s past is summoned in this passage:
(Back at the Grassy Knoll, Howard Hunt’s picture is being snapped and will later turn up in the files of New Orleans D.A. Jim “The Jolly Green Giant” Garrison: not that Garrison ever came within light years of the real truth…)
For those unfamiliar with Thornley’s strange journey down the JFK assassination rabbit hole, I’ll refer them to a previous Historia Discordia post:
How E. Howard Hunt fits into Thornley’s JFK assassination odyssey dates back to the period in the early-60s when he was living in New Orleans and met a shadowy character referred to as “Brother-In-Law.” Kerry later grew to suspect that “Brother-in-Law” was actually the legendary aforementioned CIA spook, E. Howard Hunt, and that Hunt had manipulated Kerry into the role of a potential JFK assassination patsy had the Lee Harvey Oswald setup gone awry.
The Dealey Plaza 'Old Man Tramp,' left, and E. Howard Hunt, right.As for photos of Hunt in Dealey Plaza that later turned up in Jim Garrison’s files, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson were no doubt referring to the photos of the infamous Three Tramps that were picked up by the Dallas Police right after the assassination and then subsequently released, one of whom was dubbed the Old Man Tramp that many suspect was actually Hunt in disguise. Garrison contended that the Three Tramps were trigger men in the assassination, and Garrison actually showed the Tramp photos for the first time to a national TV audience on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show on January 31, 1968. During this period, Kerry Thornley became one of Garrison’s suspects in the case. In this regard, Kerry found himself in a somewhat awkward position, that of being a target of the underground press, as over the years he had written for such publications as the L.A. Free Press who now embraced Garrison as a counterculture hero, and so accepted the Garrison party line that Kerry was somehow involved in a JFK assassination conspiracy. This irony did not go unnoticed by RAW, who encountered a media blackout when trying to address Kerry’s case. As RAW later explained:
Newspaper photo of Kerry Thornley, 1968.In ’67 or ’68, most of the underground press was publishing a lot of stuff pro-Jim Garrison, and this included Kerry’s role in the assassination. And I had lots of contacts in the underground press, so I started sending out articles defending Kerry, which nobody would print, because the underground press was behind Garrison and the official corporate media was totally anti-Garrison—I was trying to send the message to the wrong place.
On Page 50, Saul Goodman and Barney Muldoon examine three alternatives to explain the apparent Illuminati plot they’ve uncovered:
(1) It is all true, exactly as the memos suggest; (2) it is partly true, and partly false; (3) it is all false, and there is no secret society that has endured from 1090 A.D. to the present.
In a previous post, I commented how Illuminatus! is a mental exercise of sorts in trying to distinguish what is true and what is false in the book. In their quest to bust the Illuminati, Goodman and Muldoon arrive at the theory that the clues they’ve uncovered suggest the same thing: that the reality of the Illuminati is both true and false. And perhaps that’s the final secret of Illuminatus! (maybe): that it’s partly true and partly false and it’s ultimately up to the reader to decide for themselves which parts are true and which are false—so it becomes a different reality tunnel for each reader/experiencer.
As I previously noted, the Teenset article was a perfect example of this, a real article in a real magazine, featuring a mix of fact and fiction, credited to a certain Sandra Glass, who never really existed to begin with and was actually Bob Shea in drag (and probably to some extent, RAW) making modern myths out of conspiratorial legends and pop culture influences while smoking a fair measure of pot for inspiration, one would imagine.
In Week 4, the “Illuminati Project: Memo #7” quotes The Roger Spark article “Daley Linked With Illuminati” which was another real article in a real newsletter (originating from the Chicago neighborhood, Roger’s Park) written by an anonymous author who once again was either Shea or RAW or both. This was during the time frame both Shea and RAW worked for Playboy magazine in Chicago, so I imagine one or both lived in or near Roger’s Park.
The Roger Spark piece contained a lot of the same information as the Teenset article, repeating the spurious rumor that Mayor Daley had shouted “Ewige Blumenkraft!” at the 1968 Democratic Convention, all part of Bavarian Illuminati shenanigans.
Photocopy of The Roger Spark Vol 2, No. 2 linking Daley with the Illuminati, Page 00001. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Photocopy of The Roger Spark Vol 2, No. 9 linking Daley with the Illuminati, Page 00002. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Photocopy of The Roger Spark Vol 2, No. 9 linking Daley with the Illuminati, Page 00003. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Photocopy of The Roger Spark Vol 2, No. 9 linking Daley with the Illuminati, Page 00004. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
As RAW mentioned on numerous occasions, Illuminatus! was an exercise of mixing fact with fiction, and in particular the many conspiracy theories presented willy-nilly in the book. Years after its publication, RAW admitted that even he was unclear as to which of these theories—in the final analysis—were ultimately true or false, and that some might have been both true AND false at the same time. In this regard, the book is a mental exercise of sorts in unraveling the many mythologies swirling around the kooky conspiratorial landscape of the late-60s and 70s.
During the Week 2RAWIllumination.net group reading, I neglected to mention a reference to the Berkeley Illuminati, which was indeed a real group based out of the U.C. Berkeley campus in the mid to late-60s that ran concurrent to the Discordian Society’s Bavarian Illuminati activities. Like RAW and Kerry Thornley, the Berkeley group sent out spurious announcements about far flung conspiracies just to see how people would react and possibly even piss themselves in the process. I’ve never actually seen any of the Berkeley Illuminati materials, but Jesse Walker in The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory interviewed one of the members of the group, Sharon Presley, who stated that: “We actually had a recognized student group at Cal called the Bavarian Illuminati. The by-laws were a hoot; obviously no bureaucrat actually read them.”
So, in essence, they were a real group that put out false announcements, so they were both true and false at the same time, a prime example of Operation Mindfuck run amok.
As for the Week 4 reading, I don’t have a lot to comment on, other than to note that the Teenset article mentioned on Page 40 (“The Most Sinister, Evil, Subversive Conspiracy In The World”) was indeed a real article in a real magazine, written by someone named Sandra Glass (who was, most likely, Robert Shea), which documented an investigation into the mysterious Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria (A.I.S.B.). This article was ominously prefaced with an editor’s note: “Before her recent death, Miss Glass was an expert on subversive affairs.” The source— for many of the revelations in the article—came allegedly from an anarchist named Simon Moon, who would later turn up as a character in Illuminatus!.
Robert Shea letter to Greg Hill, discussing Illuminatus! book cover proofs, Page 00001, dated June 25, 1975. Courtesy of bobshea.net from the Discordian Archives.
One of my favorite finds in the Discordian Archives is this letter from Robert Shea to Greg Hill sent the summer before the release of Illuminatus!.
The letter includes some great Erisian Mysteries insights. Such as Shea’s back-story on how cover artist Carlos Victor (Carlos Ochagavia) learned about Illuminatus! to create the individual book covers. I find this amusing as it must have been quite an endeavor by editor Fred Feldman and the interpreter to communicate to Victor such a strange and bizarre concept, which Victor nails solidly.
Another great nugget is Shea’s admiration for the latest in 1975 photocopier tech, provided by his employer, Playboy magazine, used to photocopy the Illuminatus! book cover proofs attached to the letter.
Photocopiers as hip-tech were something Shea and the Early Discordians used-well in the production of personal zines, like Shea’s No Governor mentioned in the letter, and various Erisian tracts, including the Principia Discordia.
Robert Shea letter to Greg Hill, The Eye in the Pyramid book cover proof attachment, June 25, 1975. Courtesy of bobshea.net from the Discordian Archives.Robert Shea letter to Greg Hill, The Golden Apple book cover proof attachment, June 25, 1975. Courtesy of bobshea.net from the Discordian Archives.
Greg Hill had, by the time of this letter, long-ago hacked how photocopiers could be used with paste-ups to produce artwork that left no cut-marks or seams when reproduced and liberally employed this production technique for Third and Fourth Editions of the Principia Discordia. Eventually this approach was ubiquitous in the mid-to-late-80s zine scene explosion, no doubt also helped along by Kinkos’ great photocopier equipment and liberal policies of photocopy production (while looking the other way on copyright infringement).
One can imagine “Faster/Clearer/More Gradients!” as a mantra that Shea and Hill would have embraced in their pursuit of top-notch photocopier tech of the time.
Greg Hill’s 'Bavarian Illuminati' business card, front. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Greg Hill’s 'Bavarian Illuminati' business card, back. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives. As we embark upon Week 2 of the RAWIllumination.netIlluminatus! reading, I will continue my obsessive quest to note any Discordian references I encounter along the way. So away we go…
What immediately jumps out is the character of Joseph Malik, who is at least a hat tip to Discordian Society founder, Greg Hill, as among Hill’s various Discordian personas was Mad Malik, an apparent member of the Bavarian Illuminati, as depicted in this Illuminati business card from the late-60s/early-70s.
In Illuminatus!, Joseph Malik is an underground magazine editor who has uncovered an apparent Illuminati plot, as documented in a number of written exchanges between Malik and someone named Pat.
The evolution of much of the Illuminati mythos depicted in Illuminatus! was initially inspired by Jim Garrison’s JFK assassination investigation of all things, which makes all of this even more convoluted, so bear with me. For those unfamiliar with Big Jim, he was the New Orleans District Attorney during the 1960s and the lead character played by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone’s JFK. As fickle fate would have it, Discordian co-founder Kerry Thornley was identified by Garrison as being involved in the JFK assassination plot, which of course led to a lot of chaos in Thornley’s life (Hail Eris!) in the years to come, a topic I first broached in The Prankster and the Conspiracy and which will be the main theme in my forthcoming book Caught In The Crossfire: Kerry Thornley, Oswald and Garrison’s JFK Investigation coming soon from Feral House.
During the course of Garrison’s investigation, one of his unofficial investigators (otherwise known as the “Irregulars”) was a fellow named Allan Chapman who subscribed to the theory that JFK’s assassination had been orchestrated by (you guessed it!) the Bavarian Illuminati. After catching wind of Chapman’s Illuminati-JFK assassination theory, Thornley initiated—along with the support of some of his fellow Discordian Society pranksters—what became known as Operation Mindfuck (OM), a campaign designed to screw with Garrison’s head by sending out spurious announcements suggesting that he (Kerry) was an agent of the Illuminati. Among the culprits who helped perpetrate Operation Mindfuck was none other than RAW. As Kerry later noted:
Wilson and I founded the Anarchist Bavarian Illuminati to give Jim Garrison a hard time, one of whose supporters believed that the Illuminati owned all the major TV networks, the Conspiring Bavarian Seers (CBS), the Ancient Bavarian Conspiracy (ABC) and the Nefarious Bavarian Conspirators (NBC). —Kerry Thornley, Dreadlock Recollections
I suspect that the “Illuminati Project Memos” on pages 14, 15, 16 and 20 were actually exchanges between Wilson and Thornley during the period the two were conducting Illuminati research, and that Wilson inserted these exchanges into the Illuminatus! narrative. This research led both Thornley and Wilson to compose the infamous letter and answer that appeared in the April ’69 issue of Playboy.
On page 21, Peter Jackson tells Saul Goodman that the missing Malik—through his magazine, Confrontation—was attempting to re-open an investigation into the MLK and Kennedy brother assassinations, which is exactly what Kerry Thornley was attempting to do around the time of the publication of Illuminatus!
Thornley, as well, had been an underground magazine editor during the 1960s, so it can be further conjectured that Malik was a composite character based on Thornley and Greg Hill.
NOTE: After taking another gander at Illuminatus!, I noticed that the first “Project Illuminati Memo” was dated 7/23, the date of RAW’s otherworldly experience with certain denizens from Sirius as well as being the beginning of the Dog Days of Sirius.
