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

by Robert Shea

He died that year, and I found out that there was more to the Imagination than I had known, for he didn’t die at all. He’s still around, in the back of my skull somewhere, arguing with me, and that’s the truth. It’s also the truth that he’s dead, really dead, and part of me was buried with him.

I have to pay a debt to Lenin for he gave me the words to express how I felt when Dad was gone. “Revolutionaries,” he said, “are dead men on furlough.”

Cowboying, in the language of the profession, leaves no room for personal taste or delicacy: the important thing is that there should be a lot of lead in the air and the victim should leave a spectacularly gory corpse for the tabloids, as notification that the Brotherhood is both edgy and short-tempered and everybody better watch his ass. Although it wasn’t obligatory, it was considered a sign of true enthusiasm on a cowboy job if the guest of honor took along a few innocent bystanders, so everybody would understand exactly how edgy the Brotherhood was feeling.

They had a good argument. ‘Look around/ they’d say, ‘what do you see most of? Chaos, right? Therefore, the god of Chaos is the strongest god,

“An Irish Illuminatus of the ninth century, Scotus Ergina, put it very simply—in five words, of course—when he said Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt: ‘All things that are, are lights.’

If there were no death, there would be no sex. If there were no sex, there would be no death. And without sex, there would be no evolution toward intelligence, no human race. Therefore death is necessary. Death is the price of orgasm.