Categories
book discordianism greg hill illuminati illuminatus! kerry thornley letters robert anton wilson robert shea william helmer writings

Week 10 of the Illuminatus! Group Reading

A John Dillinger Died For You Society Membership Card.
Click image for 300dpi printable JPG (1.4MB).
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
In the Discordian Society’s early days, not only was it SOP to adopt your own unique Discordian Pope handle—such as Mordecai The Foul or Fang The Unwashed—but it was also assumed that you’d start your own Discordian cabal, which included such notables as Greg Hill’s Joshua Norton Cabal or Rev. Dr. Makuska’s Society for Moral Understanding & Training (SMUT) Cabal.

Another of the more infamous Discordian cabals was The John Dillinger Died For You Society (JDDFYS), which appears to have been primarily the brain-child of RAW—when he was working as an editor at Playboy—along with another editor there named William Helmer, who himself adopted the Discordian non de plume of Horace Naismith when engaged in JDDFYS operations. For all I know, Bob Shea (aka Josh The Dill) might have also played a part in this conspiratorial caper promoting the Dillinger legend, which further manifested itself in Illuminatus! along with more Discordian in-jokes than you could shake a magick stick at.

Letter sent to Dr. Ignotum Ignotius (aka Greg Hill) from Dr. Horace Naismith (aka William Helmer) of the John Dillinger Died For You Society, October 26th, 1970, Page 00001. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Letter sent to Dr. Ignotum
Ignotius (aka Greg Hill) from Dr.
Horace Naismith (aka William
Helmer) of the John Dillinger Died
For You Society, October 26th,
1970, Page 00002. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.



Your humble author, in full Masonic regalia, delivering the signal of distress!
One such in-joke appears on page 93 in a passage that recounts Dillinger’s first bank robbery and how the victim of the heist, a grocer named B. F. Morgan—when confronted during the robbery—summoned help by giving the Masonic signal of distress. The implication suggested in this scene is that Dillinger—from the very start of his so-called “criminal career”—was in reality a Discordian Robin Hood of sorts engaged in a covert war against the Freemasonic-Illuminati Conspiracy. The punch-line for this in-joke is that the Masonic signal of distress is given by holding both hands up in the air—although Wilson and Shea never informs the readers of this.

The Sacred Chao from Illuminatus!, page 00095.
Page 95 features an illustration of that most significant of Discordian symbols, The Sacred Chao, a sort of twist on Taoism’s Yin and Yang, depicting the opposing forces of The Pentagon and The Golden Apple, also known in Discordianism as the Hodge and Podge. The Pentagon—according to the Discordian mythos—represents the Aneristic Principle (Apparent Disorder) in counterbalance to The Golden Apple, which represents The Eristic Principle (Apparent Order.) To find out more about this you will have to consult your pineal gland.

On page 96, the mystery of the Golden Apple is further revealed, which is at the center (core) of the whole Discordian mythos that runs through Illuminatus!

Elsewhere on page 96, ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #9 refers to a chart that the missing Joseph Malik identified as first appearing in an issue of The East Village Other, June 11, 1969 with the label “Current Structure of the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy and the Law of Fives.”

'Current Structure of the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy and the Law of Fives'
chart shown on page 00097 of Illuminatus!

The chart in question was indeed published in a real underground newspaper, although once again Shea and Wilson were mixing fact with fiction into the Illuminatus! narrative, as the chart was an obvious put-on that—when it originally appeared in The East Village Other—did so without any type of editorial explanation, although in retrospect it was no doubt the handiwork of RAW and/or the usual Operation Mindfuck suspects.

The chart includes (in its diabolical Bavarian Illuminati organization) the likes of such Discordian illuminaries as Lord Omar (Kerry Thornley), Malaclypse the Younger (Greg Hill) and Mordecai the Foul (RAW)—not to mention a Discordian Society spin-off organization Greg Hill concocted called the Paratheo-Anametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric (POEE, pronounced “pooey”).

Curiously enough, Bank of America is also listed on the chart, a company where—as fickle fate would have it—Greg Hill was later employed from the late-70s until his death in July of 2000, having worked for BofA a total of 23 (synchronistic) years.

On page 100, the Legion of Dynamic Discord (LDD) is introduced and identified as a group aligned with Hagbard Celine. In reality, the LDD was the creation of Lord Omar during a period when he and Malaclypse the Younger had some sort of theological falling out and decided to form opposing (tongue-in-cheek) Discordian factions. Malaclypse named his faction the Erisian Liberation Front, more commonly known as ELF.

Get more info on Week Ten of the Illuminatus! group reading at RAWIllumination.net.

5 replies on “Week 10 of the Illuminatus! Group Reading”

Many years ago at SUNY Binghamton (prior to their foolhardy, expensive pursuit of the Division I college athletics money pit and the consequent inevitable athletics crime scandals) I’d tried finding a number of the texts cited in Illuminatus! and other things relating to the Illuminati. Often the latter were checked out – as it happened, someone there was writing a dissertation about the Illuminaten.

In the Underground Newspaper Collection the university library had on microfilm, I copied the chart from The East Village Other 4(27). June 4, 1969: 7. Somewhat miraculously, that I still have that copy (a bit worse for wear) today and scanned it today. I had luckily written down the full citation on the back.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7Mt-S77wZKfOUVoVWZfX0lGNjA/edit?usp=sharing

I was pretty jazzed that they had an underground press collection on microfilm. SUNY Albany lacks one, preferring to spend more of its money on college athletics, monetary bonuses to professors who agree to adopt an expensive and questionable proprietary group learning system, and similar cockeyed schemes. Anyhow…. apart from some spelling differences, the chart seems to be about the same as the one in Illuminatus!

There’s some other things I’d copied back then that I can scan which might be of interest.

There’s something mildly amusing to note about the library and university where I was able to copy the facetious chart:
“Binghamton University’s book collection has grown from zero in the early 1950s to 2,476,672 in 2014, Meador said. The greatest growth took place during the Gov. Nelson Rockefeller era of the 1960s and early 1970s. In 2007 and 2008, it was determined that 65 percent of the Libraries’ collection was unique.
“‘This speaks to the high quality of the collection built by the early Harpur College faculty, using Rockefeller money and working with the librarians,’ Meador said. ‘(This collection) is going to draw people here.'”
Coker, Eric. “Dean stresses local importance of University Libraries.” Inside Binghamton University. January 21, 2014. http://www.binghamton.edu/inside/index.php/inside/story/7194/dean-stresses-local-importance-of-university-libraries/

Thus the chart from the East Village Other comes to you courtesy of “Primus Illuminatus” Nelson Rockefeller. 😉

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *