Robert Anton Wilson RIP - Wrote Conspiracy Literature

[William Kelly]

R. A. Wilson, 74 coauthor of sci-fi classic

By Dennis Heavesi New York Times News Service

Robert Anton Wilson, 74, a coauthor of The Illuminatus! Trilogy - a mind-twisting science-fiction series about a secret global society that has been a clut classic for more than 30 years - died Thursday at his home in Capitola, California. The cause of death was not announced.

The author of 35 books on such subjects as extrasensory percetpion, mental telepathy, metaphysics, paranormal experiences, conspiracy theory, sex, drugs and what he called quantum psychology, Mr. Wilson wrote the trilogy with his friend Robart J. Shea in the late 1960s, when both were editors at Playboy. The books - Eye in the Pyramid, the Golden Apple and Leviathan - were all published in 1975 by Dell Science Fiction. They never hit the best seller lists, but have never gone out of print. Shea died in 1994.

Inspired by a thick file of letters that the authors received from conspiracy buffs, the trilogy traces the conflict between the Illuminati and the Discordians. The Illuminati are elite authoritarians who pull the puppet strings of the world's political establishment while seeking to become super-beings by sucking the souls from the masses. The Discordians resist through convoluted tactics that include a network of double agents....

Mr. Wilson was bor in Brooklyn, N.Y., and attended Brooklyn Polytechnical College and New York University. He worked as an engineering aide, a salesman and a copywriter, and was an associate editor at Playboy from 1965 to 1971.

DISCORDIANS UNITE!

[Sid Walker]

My favourite Robert Anton Wilson quotation is apparently a story he was fond of telling, that also surfaced as Position Paper #23 of the Guns & Dope Party

It may not be appropriate for an Educational Forum, so I'll just provide the link.

Pure American libertarianism.

R.I.P.

[Cliff Varnell]

In the afterlife may all RAW's women have green eyes and red hair.

23.

R.I.P.

[Shanet Clark]

Playboy editor and author.

Fantastic writer and investigative journalist.

Robert Anton Wilson should be remembered as a fantastic

talent and cultural icon, one of my favorites ..............

[William Kelly]

Playboy editor and author.

Fantastic writer and investigative journalist.

Robert Anton Wilson should be remembered as a fantastic

talent and cultural icon, one of my favorites ..............

"...But this international conspiracy existing in secret for eight hundred years, it's like opening a door in our own house and finding James Bond and the President of the United States personally shooting it out with Fu anchu and the five original Marx Brothers...."

ILLUMINATI PROJECT : MEMOR #4

Here's a letter that appeared in Playboy a few years ago (The Playboy Advisor, Playboy, April, 1969, pages 62-62):

I recently heard an onld man of right-wing views - a friend of my grandparents - assert the current wave of assassinations in America is the work of a secret soceity called the Illuminati. He said theat the Illuminati have existed throughout history, own the international banking cartels, have all ben 32nd degree Masons and were known to Ian Fleming, who portrayed them as SPECTRE in his James Bond books - for which the Illuminati did away with Mr. Fleming. At first all this semed like a paranoid delusion to me. Then I read in the New Yorker that Allan Chapman, one of Jim Garrison's investigators in the New Orleans probe of the John Kennedy assassination, believes the Illuminati really exist...."

"The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies" - Ishmael Reed, Mumbo-Jumbo.