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Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences

 

Occult Fiction

Secrets of the Illuminati Confabulated

COSMIC TRIGGER I: Final Secrets of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson ($14.95, paper, New Falcon Press ISBN 1561840033)

COSMIC TRIGGER II: Down to Earth by Robert Anton Wilson ($14.95, paper, New Falcon Press ISBN 1561840114)

COSMIC TRIGGER III My Life After Death by Robert Anton Wilson ($14.95, paper, New Falcon Press ISBN 1561841129)

The COSMIC TRIGGER trilogy deals with a process of deliberately induced brain change that is called ‘initiation’ or ‘vision quest’ in many traditional societies and is hazardous variety of self-psychotherapy offered as psychedelic satire. It is in many ways the best sort of occult self-parody that take large doses of the forbidden and mixes liberally with popular science and history, adding just a dash of paranoia to produce a fantasy that many may feel offers a close look at the underpinnings of the reality we pretend is different. The main thing we learn is that ‘reality’ is always plural and mutable.

In these works Wilson manages to reverse most of what we take as normal and dishes it up afresh as something delightfully novel. In many ways this trilogy is a vision of cyberpunk and a meditation upon the human condition remarkably refreshing and mutative as well as drug crazed and frenetic.

A moral work that misdirects through amorality and of course classic SF.

Any reader with an open mind and a sense of humor cannot help but be entertained and enlightened while following Wilson’s explorations into such subjects as the future of cyberspace; the peculiarities of Irish jurisprudence; links among the Mafia, the CIA and the Catholic Church; anal eroticism in The White House; the Dog Castrator of Palm Springs; and many more observations from his eminently fertile brain.

In the long-awaited third volume of the COSMIC TRIGGER trilogy includes Wilson’s witty and humorous observations about the widely spread (and, happily, premature) announcement of his demise. And, of course, what Wilson masterpiece would be complete without synchronicities, religious fanatics, UFOs, crop circles, paranoia, pompous scientists, secret societies, high tech, black magic, quantum physics, hoaxes (real and fake), Orson Welles, James Joyce, Carl Sagan, Madonna and The Vagina of Nuit. In many ways the third volume offers some of the most delightful outlandish analogies of the series.

Cult novelist, teacher and former Playboy editor Robert Anton Wilson is the author of The Walls Came Tumbling Down; The New Inquisition; Reality Is What You Can Get Away With; the Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy; Prometheus Rising; Wilhelm Reich in Hell; Sex & Drugs; Right Where You Are Sitting Now and other works.

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