The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan by Robert Shea

Aug 26, 2007 Seth rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Teenagers, fuddy-duddy geeks, SF fans

Shelves: modernfantasy, books-that-built-me, masterpieces, humor, spirituality-and-woo-woo, sf-f-h

I gave this book 5 stars.
- As science fiction it would get 2
- As philosophy it would get 1 (the world-view it argues for is much better discussed in other books--some of them even by RAW)
- As humor it would get 3. Maybe 4 on a good day
- As conspiracy theory it would get 4
- As research it doesn't even rate 1
- As a good guide to things to research for yourself, it's a solid 4 (great game: open to a random page and pick 5 things to look up in a library)

But it crosses the line on two things:
*...more I gave this book 5 stars.
- As science fiction it would get 2
- As philosophy it would get 1 (the world-view it argues for is much better discussed in other books--some of them even by RAW)
- As humor it would get 3. Maybe 4 on a good day
- As conspiracy theory it would get 4
- As research it doesn't even rate 1
- As a good guide to things to research for yourself, it's a solid 4 (great game: open to a random page and pick 5 things to look up in a library)

But it crosses the line on two things:
* Cultural references that make points and explain things in the SF/geek/outcase/introvert subcultures. The Roberts nailed the experience of believing you're different and believing that what you want or experience is different and wanting to share it with the world. The terms and phrases that come out of this (fnord, illuminati, AUM, "You'll like it inside the apple," All Hail Discordia, Law of Fives, Aneristic Illusion, Paratheoanametamystichood, etc.) may not all be original, but they have built a part of a culture. Much like it's worth seeing Monty Python even if you don't "get" the humor to understand the "code."

It inspired two (excellent) card games and a wide variety of "bits" of other games, books, comics, and so forth.

* This book is one of the best tools for an adolescent or young adult (not YA--young adult) colonostickectomy. A young person hiding their creativity and trying to be "serious" so they can make it through life will get a huge amount of value from this book. You have to forgive them for believing the viewpoint for a few years and then you have to forgive them for rejecting it for a few. In the end, they'll probably come to a happy medium, but they'll always be gratefull for getting that damned uncomfortable thing out of their butt.

Oh yeah... the first 100 pages suck. Really. They're bad. But they're never referenced again (well, until the last 100 pages, which you really just skim looking for jokes), so skim them or skip them. You really don't need to start reading until the words "Egyptian Mouth-Breeder" appear on the page.

Actually, that might be the simplest and best review of all:
You really don't need to start reading until the words "Egyptian Mouth-Breeder" appear on the page.
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Dec 16, 2010 Keely rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: humor, science-fiction, spy, american, reviewed, novel, philosophy, supernatural-horror

A sprawling, many-faceted, satirical series, Illuminatus! is difficult to rate and more difficult to review. There are so many aspects which one could address, so many points of divergence, ideas, philosophies, and influences, but at it's heart, it's a rollicking adventure story that, despite it's many political and social themes, rarely takes itself too seriously.

I can certainly say I liked it, but it's hard to say how much. Some parts were better than others, but there are many parts to be con...more

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Sep 30, 2009 Ryan rated it 5 of 5 stars

I'm re-reading this now, and felt I should clarify my position on this book, as I often list it as one of my favorites.
High Literature this is not. It is campy sci-fi, saturated with gratuitous sex scenes, psychedelia, conspiracy theories, counterculture etc. When I recommend this book, it's usually with the caveat that the authors are sort of bumbling about and finding their feet for the first 80 or so pages.

When it finally does start moving along, the reader finds his- or her-self bombarded wi...more

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Mar 29, 2008 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

I like this book because it takes every conspiracy theory that existed prior to 1975 and weaves them into a grand narrative of the 'haves' pulling a fast one on the 'have nots' since before the beginning of recorded human history. Also, similar to William S. Burroughs, I think you have to examine RAW's work in the context of him being such a defining force in the American underground culture. Having said this, I do have one major complaint about this work. This is one of those books that has too...more

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Jul 16, 2007 Gar rated it 5 of 5 stars

Honestly, the bury-the-needle rating on this is primarly from nostalgia and gratitude. The thing is, the book saved my soul. I say this because I read the Illuminatus! trilogy the very first thing after stumbling into reading Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in high school, as a fairly bright and moderately-creative geek, which qualities looked even more exaggerated by relative comparison to a very small class size. That's like getting injected with concentrated live-culture viruses af...more

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Jul 24, 2007 Geoff Gerrietts rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: all my friends

I have given this book away so many times now. It's the only way I can repay the favor Jayson did me when he initially loaned it to me. This book literally changed my life, and I can only believe for the better.

Countless bizarre ideas and ideologies are brought together in a raucous, chaotic storyline spun through three volumes. Discordianism, Kabbalah, the Church of the Sub-Genius, elaborate retellings of conspiracy theory and countless other bizarre and interesting ideological landscapes get m...more

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Jun 12, 2012 Myke rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi, american-literature

I came across this book in my local libraries science fiction section and aware of its reputation i decided to check it out. In hindsight that was not a wise idea, while the first book "The Eye In The Pyramid" was fairly interesting with nods to cultural figures such as William Burroughs and Alesiter Crowley by the time i got half way through "The Golden Apple" i was tired with the lack of direction and character development which in the end resulted in it giving up on this book.

The Trilogy also...more

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Oct 02, 2010 Noble rated it 4 of 5 stars

In a nutshell: sex, drugs, and conspiracies.

Ridiculously surreal, jumping from one POV to another often and without warning (and sometimes mid-sentence, I think - it's been a while), as well as bouncing between pre-history and the near future and various points in between. Not even the characters really know who/where/when they are, half the time. Most of it seems like abject silliness, until you come across something, such as a prediction or comment about government and/or society, that makes j...more

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Aug 14, 2007 Michael rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: collection-anthology

On one hand, I really dug this series the first time I read it. I've always been a fan of occult conspiracy, and lots of crazy stuff happens, and it IS pretty mind-bending.

On the other hand, when I tried re-reading the series about ten years later, I realised that it's pretty puerile. I probably don't do enough drugs to truly appreciate it.

fnord.

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Apr 04, 2013 Sandy Bookwitch rated it 4 of 5 stars

Stream of consciousness style from hell! More decipherable than Finnegan's Wake, but how much does that really say?? Keeps switching tense, point-of-view, moves between first person perspective of multiple and conflicting characters over space and time. A real mind fuck and I'm only about 100 pages in... Still trying though. Fascinating actual historical stuff and actual conspiracy theory quoted documentation dating back centuries. The first fictional work, of which I'm aware any way, to tackle...more Stream of consciousness style from hell! More decipherable than Finnegan's Wake, but how much does that really say?? Keeps switching tense, point-of-view, moves between first person perspective of multiple and conflicting characters over space and time. A real mind fuck and I'm only about 100 pages in... Still trying though. Fascinating actual historical stuff and actual conspiracy theory quoted documentation dating back centuries. The first fictional work, of which I'm aware any way, to tackle the Illuminati theories etc. The authors do so *mostly* tongue-in-cheek.

02/22/2013 Still slogging through it, at about page 220 now. Some amazing research of conspiracy theories but the jumping back and forth between characters and points of view is still dizzying and confusing but so far worthwhile, if slow-going. I see that some of the research done for these books eventually also went into Shea's "All Things are Lights" about the Inquisition's destruction of the Cathars in Languedoc and Templars in the Crusades.

03/05/2013 Now up to page 350-ish and into the 2nd book. Found they had written their own mostly accurate but hilarious review of this triple volume within the first book as something for which the magazine that begins the whole tale is awaiting the submission by the reviewer.

"'It's a dreadfully long monster of a book,' Wildeblood says pettishly, 'and I certainly won't have time to read it but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent--no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the times sequence is all out of order in the very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors--whom I've never heard of--have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be sure I won't waste time reading such rubbish, but I'll have a perfectly devastating review ready for you by tomorrow noon.'" At least somewhat accurate...

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May 25, 2013 Rob rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-misc, sf, hippies, fantasy, pomo-fiction

On p. 650 of 800 but the last 70 are just appendices and I feel like writing a review now, so . . .

I've been reading this very slowly over the course of many months, which I guess is a reflection of how little it has really engaged me. On the other hand, I feel no animosity towards it, and fully intend to finish it eventually. To my taste it is neither especially good nor especially bad; it is just a odd, underwhelming if inoffensive sort of book that seems to have been intended for an audience...more On p. 650 of 800 but the last 70 are just appendices and I feel like writing a review now, so . . .

I've been reading this very slowly over the course of many months, which I guess is a reflection of how little it has really engaged me. On the other hand, I feel no animosity towards it, and fully intend to finish it eventually. To my taste it is neither especially good nor especially bad; it is just a odd, underwhelming if inoffensive sort of book that seems to have been intended for an audience I do not belong to.

According to Wikipedia, this is how the authors came up with their premise:

The trilogy was originally written between 1969 and 1971 while Wilson and Shea were both associate editors for Playboy magazine. As part of the role, they dealt with correspondence from the general public on the subject of civil liberties, much of which involved paranoid rants about imagined conspiracies. The pair began to write a novel with the premise that "all these nuts are right, and every single conspiracy they complain about really exists".

The trilogy is pretty much what you'd expect to yield from such an idea, or specifically what you'd expect from a work that set out to thoroughly explore that idea at the expense of plot and characters as traditionally conceived. The narrative is a phantasmagoria of crackpot ideas, rarely sticking with one character or idea for more than a few pages. To say that the plot is full of twists would be misleading -- in fact there is not so much a "plot" as an extended, rather monotonous sequence of shifts from one weird worldview to the next. The reader quickly learns not to be surprised when any given perspective on the story begins to break down, so there is little room for these shifts to have anything like the impact of ordinary "plot twists."

Reading the trilogy ultimately feels a lot like surfing the internet in search of information about conspiracy theories. If you've ever done that for fun (and I have), you may find it entertaining. But 800 pages worth of conspiracy surfing is quite a lot. There is a set of recurring characters but none of them are especially well developed -- different segments of the book are told from different characters' perspectives, but often these are barely distinguishable -- and, outside of a few fairly effective scenes of frightening peril, there is very little "human interest" material to sustain one's interest. The prose is mostly flat, unadorned description, with occasional not-very-impressive stream of consciousness episodes. There is plenty of violence, unusual sex, drug use, and far-out ideological talk, but the people who engage in this behavior feel to the 21st century reader like a set of 60s/70s cliches, and the trilogy's attempts to be weird and shocking feel like quaint artifacts of their time, much less truly mind-bending than, say, Joyce (whom Shea and Wilson clearly idolize -- in fact they mock themselves for this in the text).

I get the feeling that Shea and Wilson would agree with me that their characters are cliches. Much of the trilogy is written with a deliberate sense of artifice, as if the authors want their characters to feel like they are outgrowths of ideas -- cliches, conspiracy theories, ideologies -- rather than organic, independent beings. The goal is, I guess, to instill a universal skeptical wariness in the reader, to encourage them to reflexively doubt every element of the story, whether it emerges from conventional wisdom or from the furthest-out fringe. Again, though, 800 pages of this is a lot, especially for readers for whom universal, reflexive wariness is not a new idea. The parts of the trilogy I have most enjoyed are the parts that come closest to ordinary extended fictional narrative -- such as a segment about the history of Atlantis -- and these segments make me wish Shea and Wilson had written something closer to a straight science fiction novel about an elaborate mega-conspiracy, rather than this campy, self-parodic, under-characterized not-quite-a-story, which stretches its gimmick out at great length in the name of some fairly obvious principles of critical thinking. It's not that I have a problem with experimental writing, or with novels that don't have conventional plots, or with works that joke about and undermine each discourse they invoke -- it's just that there are plenty of books that do those things much, much better. When Shea and Wilson bring up their love for Joyce it's hard not to wonder what they think they have to offer that he doesn't.

Nonetheless, this is a pleasant, readable, likable work that occasionally achieves the kind of transcendence-through-zany-bricolage that its authors are striving for. It apparently has a lot of extremely devoted fans, which I don't entirely understand, but I'm not going to question the validity of their enthusiasm. Maybe if I had read it ten years ago -- or had been born thirty years earlier -- Illuminatus! would have blown my mind. As it is, my opinion of it is almost entirely neutral, as if it and I have passed through each other in ghostly fashion without touching or leaving any marks.(less)

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May 16, 2013 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Hippies, Discordians, Young Men

Recommended to Michael by: Steve Jackson

Shelves: science-fiction, anarchism, conspiracy-theory, satire

For me, this book was a moment of Awakening, and the changes I wrought in myself after first reading continue to reverberate today. I had been brought to it through playing the card game it inspired. A desire to Seek the Mysteries caused me to follow up on the "Bibliography" included with that game, and I picked up this book expecting a sort of "In Like Flint"-style spy thriller/parody that exploited theories of vast conspiratorial networks. What I found was an exploration of reality on various...more For me, this book was a moment of Awakening, and the changes I wrought in myself after first reading continue to reverberate today. I had been brought to it through playing the card game it inspired. A desire to Seek the Mysteries caused me to follow up on the "Bibliography" included with that game, and I picked up this book expecting a sort of "In Like Flint"-style spy thriller/parody that exploited theories of vast conspiratorial networks. What I found was an exploration of reality on various levels that deconstructed my assumptions about the nature of politics and existence. It won't work this way for everyone; all Awakenings are personal. It remains, however, a very funny book with a surprising amount of metaphysical insight - a pretty rare combination (although I daresay that the truly Enlightened laugh while reading the Bible or the Tao Teh Ching).
On re-reading it today, I perceive that I came upon it at a propitious moment in my life. It has also become clear to me that it works less well for others than it did for me - in the book club I was in, none of the women were able to finish even the first book, which seems to result from the rather adolescent attitudes toward sex expressed by the authors. It was healthy enough for me as a 16-year-old male, but it does occasionally make me wince as an adult. A more minor concern is that there is so much bad German (since the "Illuminati" were Bavarian, of course). It's pretty clear that neither author spoke German, yet they tried to insert it in various places to spice things up. When I read the German translation of the book, this led to some amusing moments as the translator often just left their nonsensical German phrases in the midst of the prose. The many English puns often went right over his head as well, so I guess it was even.
A lot of the book hinges on then-current political events, which makes it a kind of funky-hippy lesson in American history: Watergate, Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination(s), the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Woodstock, the Weather Underground and the Civil Rights movement all play their parts. Discerning between the parody and the reality may require some knowledge of the period, or perhaps one could create annotations to the text through frequent reference to Wikipedia. Part of the awakening aspect I spoke about for me was figuring out what it was everyone was so worked up about when I was a kid, and seeing the political world through the eyes of concerned and disillusioned adults.
I suspect one of the reason people have difficulty reading it is that it is written in an experimental and seemingly random third-person omniscient perspective, which floats into the first person and occasionally changes from past tot present tense. The sort of thing that was common enough at the time, but today gives editors (and many readers) fits. This may help to explain why I have such a hard time reading contemporary fiction - if the point of view hasn't changed after three chapters, I'm bored. I do think however that Wilson & Shea handle their transitions and pacing well, it just takes some getting used to if you're new to it.
I still enjoy the book greatly, and it belongs in the pantheon of "important" books of my life. It is not without flaw, but I owe it a great deal nonetheless.(less)

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Nov 21, 2008 Danny rated it 5 of 5 stars

If James Joyce was a one-man literary IRA, then Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea are the literary Al Qaeda. As these groups can be viewed as either terrorists or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view, so it is with this book.

As is probably not ironic for a book considered to be the holy grail of conspiracy theory, it's definitely not difficult to perceive the Illuminatus Trilogy as an act of intellectual terrorism. This is not an easy book to read. Time, location, perspective, an...more

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Oct 23, 2007 Donald rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Free Thinkers Everywhere

The "Illuminatus" trilogy is marvelous, compelling and often hilarious. Authors Shea and Wilson weave a complex, meandering tale around the Illuminati, a group that even establishment historians acknowledge existed. The difference here is that, like many conspiracy theorists, the authors propose that the Illuminati never disbanded and continue to run the world behind the scenes.

Reading author Robert Anton Wilson's susequent works, some inspired by his friendship with LSD guru and rumored CIA ope...more

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Oct 08, 2007 rachelm rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

As I'm having trouble summarizing this book myself, I've decided to quote the meta-review of their book which the authors wrote into the novel:

"'It's a dreadfully long monster of a book,' Wildeblood says pettishly, 'and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent--no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most...more

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Aug 06, 2011 Tom rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book was more confusing than my Neurobiology and Organic Chemistry textbooks put together. While many of the parts were entertaining reading, the book really reads like the authors were taking every single recreational drug possible as they were writing it, with its stream of consicousness, time-traveling, too-long paragraphs/monologues/acid trips/conversations only a pothead could pretend to follow with any comprehension. The conspiracy plots in the book might have more significance for so...more

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Jul 18, 2007 Aaron rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: someone who relishes in confusion

Couldn't finish it. Didn't even finish the first book in the trilogy. Interesting. Ever-shifting in perspective like Ulysses , but Ulysses unlocalized. Instead of focusing on one person on one day in a very distinct place, it looks at a number of disparate people all over the world in places both real and imaginary, with no regard for chronology. Some fine writing in there, but the hyper-leaps from the JFK assassination to underwater battles over Atlantis to graphically-described sex rituals (s...more

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Mar 30, 2007 Naomi rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: scifi-fantasy

The authors thought they were WAY more clever and intellectual than they really were. Mostly these books were pretentious and boring and a regurgitation of themes that had been explored numerous times in numerous other places. Not to mention the fact that the whole trilogy pretends to be building up to some huge world-altering event that never actually happens. It's like the authors finally realized after 3 books that they didn't really know what they were trying to say or where they wanted the...more

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Mar 11, 2009 Bruno-Ken rated it 4 of 5 stars

Finally finished off this Leviathan.

Was much more impressive when I first started reading it some time around 2000 or so. Perhaps my memory of its excellence had inflated in the intervening years. Or perhaps I have gotten much more fluent in conspiracy literature since then, making the originally mind-blowing "revelations" (fictive or not) less so now. And even back then I found the writing pretty bad.

Still, it remains impressive, first, because it manages to keep all its crazy threads going unt...more Finally finished off this Leviathan.

Was much more impressive when I first started reading it some time around 2000 or so. Perhaps my memory of its excellence had inflated in the intervening years. Or perhaps I have gotten much more fluent in conspiracy literature since then, making the originally mind-blowing "revelations" (fictive or not) less so now. And even back then I found the writing pretty bad.

Still, it remains impressive, first, because it manages to keep all its crazy threads going until the end, if they disappear for long stretches, and even manages to more or less resolve all of them (even if in one of the appendices); related to this, the book stays true to its pseudo-Joycean form (which they freely admit to emulating, in their cheeky way), and anticipate Gravity's Rainbow by a few years (though I have not read Pynchon's earlier works, and if those are similar they quite possibly may have had some influence on Wilson and Shea.) Second, the scholarship and research behind the book is undeniable. Also, while playing with and even mocking a lot of ideas that no doubt had become clichés to the authors' generation by the time they wrote the book, they are able to come up with some creative and unexpected twists to them, even if you can sense them pushing and pulling and working at it. I never did LSD, and pot never worked for me, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of their better ideas came to them while they were stoned on those and/or something else.

One serious problem with the book is that it is misognystic. All the female characters are around twenty years old with the bodies and sex appeal of Sports Illustrated swimsuit models, the brains of PhDs, and the hearts of your sweet sister or devoted wife. The exceptions are a 15-year old Sicilian girl, two Las Vegas prostitutes, a 30-year old tarot card reader who makes herself to look middle-aged, a matronly conservative activist who prostitutes herself to obtain a donation for her organization, an aging secretary who appears in only one throw-away scene, and a ambitious, manipulative sex pot charlatan. There is one woman who undergoes some level of character development, a sort of rebellion, in fact, which is quite sharp and striking, and stands out from the rest of the book. Perhaps the sexual caricaturization -- and consequent demeaning -- of all the women who count in the book was intentional on the part of the authors, and that one rebellious woman's rejection was meant to put this into relief. I am not sure. But even if true, it would not redeem this book from its narrow and superficial treatment of women, whom the authors clearly -- and sincerely, I believe -- want to elevate, in fact, to put it mildly.

But this gripe aside, the authors' philosophical project is well taken and appreciated for its optimistic and even philanthropic message.

Last minor note: The appendix is actually a lot funnier and feels much more spontaneous and successful in its humor than the book itself. Maybe Shea and Wilson thought of the book as a labor they had to "get right", but the appendix was a "freebie" that had far less import, so they could relax and have more fun with it, with the result that in some ways its superior to the book.(less)

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Jan 05, 2009 JT rated it 2 of 5 stars

I WANT TO BELIEVE--more importantly, I just wish I could understand.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a brilliant work--it really is. The writing, references, connections, intentionally loose treatment of history, stream of conscious craziness is genius. But I think I'm just too stupid.

I am familiar with all the conspiracy theories within, and I found the author's humorous treatment of obscure, famous, and plain goofy (c'mon The Discordians riding around in a golden submarine trying to plunder Atlanti...more

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Feb 16, 2013 Daniel Schalit rated it 5 of 5 stars

When I first got to college, a mere 16 year old pup, my first girlfriend there was 21... and heavily into Objectivism. Angsty teen that I was, and eager to please as always, I poured through Atlas Shrugged (and then everything else Rand had ever written, I tend to devour an author's works whenever I discover them). For a year or so I was a very, very annoying Randroid.

Then I stumbled across Illuminatus! when I was aimlessly browsing in a book store. "Why the fuck not?" thought I, and picked it...more

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Feb 04, 2013 Diana Trimble rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is one of the most profoundly influential books I've ever read, personally, and likewise its impact on post-modern pop culture cannot be overstated. I actually think this book should be required reading in high school, except then of course that would take all the subversive fun out of it. But at least it would help prevent people from jumping on bandwagons like David Icke's shape-shifting lizards and they would hopefully stop posting comments on Youtube about how everything from the stupid...more This is one of the most profoundly influential books I've ever read, personally, and likewise its impact on post-modern pop culture cannot be overstated. I actually think this book should be required reading in high school, except then of course that would take all the subversive fun out of it. But at least it would help prevent people from jumping on bandwagons like David Icke's shape-shifting lizards and they would hopefully stop posting comments on Youtube about how everything from the stupid UK royal wedding to Spears videos are really bloodletting rituals for the Illuminati. The vast majority of people out there have no idea that the only reason they have ever even heard of "the Illuminati" is because of this book!

I happened to have had an early start with it as my super-hip parents took me to see the live, 9 hour, stage production (featuring full frontal nudity) at the Roundhouse in London when I was about ten years old. Finding the paperbacks on the shelves 3 years later, I immediately decided to read the books which I found completely addictive and fascinating. Within a year I'd taken acid for the first time, featuring a Warhol-esque picture of Timothy Leary's lips, and it wasn't long after that I met Leary himself! I ended up knowing him right up to his death and even sang at his memorial service in SF. It was very apt to me that at Leary's LA memorial (he couldn't have just one) I ultimately met and shook the hand of Robert Anton Wilson, who was then quite ill himself. I wish I'd had a chance to tell him this:

My interest in psychedelia and research, which have led me into some of the most fascinating friendships, situations and discoveries, were both triggered by the Illuminatus trilogy as was my extremely robust suspicion of absolutely anybody who claims to think they REALLY know what's going on! This is a very healthy perspective to have by the way.

So as someone who has for over 35 years been in on the joke regarding seemingly odd appearances of the number 23, is long familiar with using the word "fnord" in conversation, has gleefully posted anonymous signs in public spaces signed "the mgt", fantasized about living on a yellow submarine with the Discordians, and even prayed to Eris; who fully understands where the entertainment world's seemingly random obsession with 6 foot tall humanoid rabbits comes from (now seen in everything from the film Donny Darko to UK TV shows Misfits and Utopia), and further understands the intrinsic connection of this book to the psychedelic visionaries of the 60s and 70s, I find it sad that so many people have a) not read this book and thus are unaware of the lineage of a phenomenal number of cultural signposts and reference points; and b) have not taken acid either.

Wilson continued his trend for bringing things out of his own subconscious and into popular awareness with his next masterpiece, Schrodinger's Cat, which I can guarantee is the number one reason anybody outside of theoretical physics knows what Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is.

Ignore any reviews written by people who admit they didn't finish the book. (less)

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Nov 08, 2012 Ed rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: to-reread

I think calling this my favourite book might be a bit of a step too far, it's not critically acclaimed or even particularly well written, at least apparently. It's not really a book it just wears that to fool you.

I was struggling as what to put in the review space and i see that other people have had trouble too. It's not necessarily that the narrative is difficult to follow, or that there are too many characters or organisations, though a pen and paper may come in handy. It's more that each cha...more

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Jun 04, 2012 Elf M. rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Illuminatus! Trilogy saved my life.

It won't save yours.

Since first reading it at age 13 (the year it saved my life), I have dutifully re-read the entire trilogy (really, it's not that long) every five years since. But when I was 13, that was 1979: the jokes about Nixon, late 60s and early 70s rock bands, the coming of disco, the obscure neopagan nonsense that washed through every college campus in the late 1980s, bizarre alternative histories and conspiracies theories, were hilarious and fas...more The Illuminatus! Trilogy saved my life.

It won't save yours.

Since first reading it at age 13 (the year it saved my life), I have dutifully re-read the entire trilogy (really, it's not that long) every five years since. But when I was 13, that was 1979: the jokes about Nixon, late 60s and early 70s rock bands, the coming of disco, the obscure neopagan nonsense that washed through every college campus in the late 1980s, bizarre alternative histories and conspiracies theories, were hilarious and fascinating.

There's even a page from the Principia Discordia mentioned, and that too was life changing, because in tiny print in one corner it contained this quote: "When I was 8 or 9 years old I acquired my first split beaver magazine. You can imagine my disappointment when, upon examination with a microscope, I discovered all I could see was dots." And I realized that, hey, I'm not the only one who's tried that. Being 13 and finding someone like Robert Anton Wilson, who wrote so irreverantly about sex, morality, religion, politics-- all the things that do not make up polite dinner conversation-- does change a life, especially when that life had been constrained by a middle class conventionality wherein parents seethed with their own furtive excesses and failed to understand their SF-reading child.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy really is a beast of its own time, and that time has passed. It is a historical oddity. The wacky conspiracy theories of Illuminatus! have become either the grist of Dan Brown's mill or the weirdly pessimistic thought experiments of Scott Adam's Dilbert. Our culture now has its own bugaboos-- we are a highly pornographic culture, with nearly-naked underage nymphs selling underwear on billboards and Disney promoting boy bands with lyrics about irresponsible lust and desire, yet at the same time we consider red-lettering for life any and every man who had sex in a public park at midnight or chatted up just the wrong person at the wrong moment. The Internet tightly wires our entire informational existence together which has had the effect of telling us what other people really think and feel-- and paradoxically led to the even stronger vehemence against those opposing worldviews because now we perceive just how many people hold to them. These habits of thought, these expectations, just do not live in Illuminatus! and we miss them. Illuminatus! is a historical oddity and a good one, but unless you have a grasp of that history, Illuminatus! will be a hollow and unmemorable pleasure.
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Apr 05, 2012 Harry is currently reading it

"It's a dreadfully long monster of a book," Wildeblood says pettishly, "and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent--no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkne...more "It's a dreadfully long monster of a book," Wildeblood says pettishly, "and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent--no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors--whom I've never heard of--have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be sure I won't waste time reading such rubbish, but I'll have a perfectly devastating review ready for you by tomorrow noon."
"Well, we don't expect you to read every book you can review," Peter says mollifyingly, "just so long as you can be entertaining about them."

Isn't that cheeky! I'm not sure how okay I am with that bit--it's awfully cute and more than a little defensive on the part of the authors--but it did make me laugh and it's a better summary than I could manage so I'll stick with it for now. This is a tricky little book and while I liked it quite a lot I don't want it getting cocky. There's still two books of it left to go and I have this strange feeling of guilt for liking it as much as I do so far, which isn't a feeling I get often with something I think that I like.

(In the interest of full disclosure: I bought all-in-one binding of The Illuminatus! Trilogy when I was sixteen and never finished it. I vaguely remember taking two months to read The Eye In The Pyramid, the first book, but I didn't understand any of it and the experience left me frustrated more than anything else. I've just finished (re?)reading the The Eye (again?) and while I remember parts of it I'm remembering them through a seven year haze, so while this isn't a totally fresh read, I would say this is the first time I've "read" the book, if that makes any sense. Certainly the first time I've enjoyed it.)

The appeal of The Illuminatus! Trilogyis its promise to explain away every conspiracy theory as part of an even greater conspiracy that no one person can comprehend on their own. I've had a playful interest in conspiracy theories since way back when I heard my first ghost story--it's all tied up in the same muck--so this was like catnip to me. It's a difficult read at times, but only in the self-important way that all "big books" try to be. The links to Pynchon are obvious, but where Pynchon's noodling sentences hint at an unending bigger picture that we can't understand (and shouldn't try to, anyway), Shea and Wilson are playing in a closed system. You get answers, and big crazy ones at that, but that gets the book lumped in with the likes of Dan Brown in the scifi/fantasy/thriller racket, which I don't think is a label it totally deserves. At the risk of sounding genre-ist, all of the Dan Brown books I've read (which are hilarious and great) treat the conspiracy as an obstacle course the rugged historian has to hop through before he can punch the Klansman Bishop in the hood, or whatever. Illuminatus, on the other hand, is a definite product of its time--the late 60s and early 70s--when things felt so terrible that there just had to be a reason behind all of it. The Kennedy assassinations, MLK, Watergate, Cold War escalation, so many scenes of this book are of hippies being graphically beaten to death by merciless cops. It's an atmosphere so oppressive the only way out of it is to try and push a needle through the earth and sew the whole world back together so it starts to make sense. Paranoia and conspiracy theory are tools we use to explain away fear, and there's a weird comfort in knowing there's an unstoppable superstructure that rules every facet of our lives. It gives us something to fight against.

A word to the plot. Detectives Saul Goodman and Barney Muldoon are pulled away from their wives early in the morning to investigate the bombing of the offices of a countercultural magazine in New York City. The editor Joe Malik is missing, presumed dead, and he's left a stack of "Illuminati Memos" tucked away in his office, which the detectives spend the first third of the novel reading before being kidnapped, drugged, and brainwashed by forces unknown. The action jumps back and forth without warning between the detectives and the story of George Dorn, a reporter for the magazine who meets Hagbard Celine, a libertarian anarchist with a golden submarine that takes them on a quest to save Atlantis. On the fringes are several other smaller stories, like what really happened to Joe Malik and the crisis in Fernando Poo, and these stories weave in and out of each other so well that sometimes it took me a moment to notice that the book had switched tracks. The feeling of paranoia is palpable--by the time I finished The Eye In The Pyramid I felt that someone was creeping up on me, getting closer and closer, just like in the movies.

There's a lot more to take apart in here--I was struck by how intentionally underwhelming most of the fantastic elements of the novel are, Atlantis and the spider robots are purposefully under-hyped, with most of the characters wondering if they're just high--but I'm going to hold any formal analysis until I'm done with this mess. I will say that I'm hoping to meet some actual female characters soon. Every woman who shows up here is more or less a vagina on legs, and I'm hoping they do something subversive with that soon, because right now it's just coming off as massively sexist. There might be something to the scene where George Dorn has sex with a golden apple. There his sex becomes anonymous, and with the addition of the golden apple it becomes self-consciously symbolic, but I never know if the authors here are writing for a laugh or a profound sigh. I'm holding my verdict until I reach the end, but I don't think I'll be able to shake the feeling that I should be reading this thing high. (less)

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Jan 27, 2012 Alexandra rated it 5 of 5 stars

Possibly the wittiest book i have had the pleasure to read, from start to finish. It makes you lol, not an internet lol but a real lol, vocal chords and and lots of "hehehehe Hagbard you bugger, your funny" kinda laugh.

I have read it twice now so am very familiar with the book, which really helped upon the second reading. It is a very long book, and if your taking your time reading it then you may forget a few things, like why Saul ended up in that weird hospital, the first time i read it i comp...more

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Dec 08, 2011 Normacarpenter rated it 4 of 5 stars

There are many plotlines and characters, and the narrative constantly skips from one thing to another. I think every reader will find at least some plots/characters to like.
I agree with some of the points in this novel, such as the idea that humans are constantly and unnaturally forced into pigeon holes and labels. I like the way one of the main characters, Hagbard Celine, defines himself as neither conservative nor liberal but simply a human being. There is also a cool dolphin and a pint-sized...more

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Jul 30, 2011 Garrett Zecker rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book takes you into the paranoid world of a large cast of characters bent on rising up against the forces of the Illuminati conspiracy that surrounds us all. As a humming underground sect, fueled by endless money and drugs, the underground champions fight against them for the freedom of thought and action of every world citizen.

I read this heavy volume several times in my life, and every time I do, I realize something else about my world that is disturbing and troubling, and with good reas...more This book takes you into the paranoid world of a large cast of characters bent on rising up against the forces of the Illuminati conspiracy that surrounds us all. As a humming underground sect, fueled by endless money and drugs, the underground champions fight against them for the freedom of thought and action of every world citizen.

I read this heavy volume several times in my life, and every time I do, I realize something else about my world that is disturbing and troubling, and with good reason. The two authors of this text approached writing it while they were editors of Playboy. Uncertain of the implications of many of the letters asking about the truth behind conspiracies of the world, legend says one of the authors mentioned to the other that it would be really interesting if they wrote a book about one of them being true. The other, apparently with a stroke of genius, responded it would be really cool if they wrote a book with the stance that they all were true.

This book is an awakening experience that shakes the very foundations of our modern society (whether you believe any of it or not), calling into question religion, consumerism, public safety, government, and above all, freedom. The text accuses so many of so many things that, by the end, you are believing it yourself and wanting to engage in the resistance's acts of sex, drugs, and violence to finally set your mind free.

I suggest anyone read this book a few times in their life They may find it an entertainment once (as I did in Junior High School), an awakening another time, and a sarcastic rant of the absolute ridiculousness of society and its structure as a whole. Predating these questions far before the Matrix philosophy, this book is an intricate realistic view that so many writers have tried to tackle, from the greats that discuss it in books like The Chalice and the Blade (which is a testament to the book's well researched aspects), to the poor such as the DaVinci Code.

A great read, I recommend this highly, but give yourself a good month to digest it, and take your time. One reading is not nearly enough.

By the time you are done, you will see fnords everywhere, and grok them quite proficiently.(less)

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Apr 29, 2011 Norman LaFave rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was the strangest book I have ever read. I almost gave up a couple of times but I am glad I didn't.

The book presents every conspiracy theory known to man in a fashion that seems to defy coherent timeline and consistency. It is as if each chapter was written independently, with only the faintest of connecting threads. I often thought that I was reading someone's acid induced musings.
It wasn't until I had read well into the book that I realized there actually was a pattern to the story. It wa...more

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Mar 26, 2011 Robyn rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed, religion-and-spirituality

Be careful if you're going to pick up this book. This is not the kind of story that hands everything to you, or wraps up every element of the plot in a neat little bow. This book demands a lot of you, it moves fast, and not always in the way you expect, and you just have to keep up. Yes, there are plenty of places where you are going to have NO IDEA just what is going on, you are going to have to go back and re read passages to understand them, and you do need to read all of the appendices if yo...more

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title link	preview: The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan
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The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan (Illuminatus! #1-3)

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