![]() ![]() ![]() The true identities of the Illuminati are wrapped in a series of guises specific enough to evoke plausibility: the Freemasons, the Founding Fathers, the Nazis, the mafia, the CIA. To Shea and Wilson’s credit, both factions draw as much on historical reference as they do on surrealist fantasy. The resultant saga has been described by Wilson as an exercise in “guerilla ontology.” It is nominally about a millennia-old conflict between the global Illuminati that secretly controls world governments, and the Discordian Society, an Eris-worshiping chaos religion. Shea and Wilson received a near-steady stream of “paranoid rantings from people imagining totally baroque conspiracies.” At some point, the duo decided to write a novel that would consider what might happen if every possible conspiracy theory was not only real but also interconnected. It was, according to authors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, conceived in the late 1960s during their tenure as associate editors of Playboy magazine’s Forum, a section devoted to reader correspondence on the subject of civil liberties. ![]() The book-which is actually three smaller volumes mashed together into a single text-defies description. Reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy as an adult, as I did late last year, was a kind of revelation. ![]()
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