Comments on: RAW Week: Mindfucking Since 1976, by Gareth Branwyn

By: Joel Westerberg

Joel Westerberg — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 23:36:00 +0000

It’s all right! Nice to see you doing the MAKE stuff. Love this RAW week here on BB.

By: stygyan

stygyan — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:02:00 +0000

I wish they were available as ebooks.

By: Gareth Branwyn

Gareth Branwyn — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:30:00 +0000

Joel, my gawd, what a blast from the past. How the heck are you? Long time no e.

By: georgedorn

georgedorn — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:19:00 +0000

hi mwiik,there’s an Illuminatus! wiki here:
https://sites.google.com/site/onlymaybe/illuminatus-trilogy/books-chapters-and-trips/golden-apple-prologue
Prologues from THE GOLDEN APPLE and LEVIATHAN single editions are under (5a) and (8a) of Volumes, Books and Trips.
Be great to have any of y’all contribute!

By: Tod Booth

Tod Booth — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:37:00 +0000

I came across RAW around 1976. I had just spent most of the previous year as a Moonie, but had “escaped” and was one lost and confused soul. I spent quite a bit of time in a little bookstore in Novato where I lived. The owner seemed to take an interest in me (he knew my Moonie story, and we talked Buddhism sometimes) and recommended books occasionally. One day he saw me eyeing the Illuminatus Trilogy and, in no uncertain terms, advised me to NOT read it under any circumstances. Of course I gobbled it up immediately (I bought it elsewhere so he wouldn’t see me) and it grounded me back to the earth like nothing else possibly could have.

By: acoastwalker

acoastwalker — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:14:00 +0000

“open to anything, skeptical of everything” The perfect recipe to survive working with a team (e.g. your workplace) Remember, you may be just as mad as they all are. RAW is just as much a genius as Stephen Hawking at translating post Einsteinian reality in some ways.

By: Michael M. Hughes

Michael M. Hughes — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000

I met Bob once, at the 2000 Disinfo conference in NYC. I was flustered and a bit tongue-tied, thanking him and telling him how influential he was to me blah blah blah, but as I stammered he noticed my girlfriend and all of his attention shifted to her.

“Where you in Playboy?” he asked, smiling devilishly.

Loved that guy.

By: teknohed

teknohed — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:48:00 +0000

Did no one else discover these books because they were fans of the KLF?

By: princeminski

princeminski — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:18:00 +0000

When the trilogy came out I had read a little Fort and a few issues of stuff like FATE and HIDDEN WORLDS as an addendum to FADS AND FALLACIES IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE (which I don’t imagine RAW liked very much). I had never heard of most of these conspiracy theories and was stunned to find that Wilson and Shea hadn’t just made most of them up. The books were a much bigger gateway drug than marijuana had been years before. When I got to the Dallas Museum of Art in 1980 I was *ripe* for the Church of the SubGenius. Thanks, Bobs and “Bob” (and Joyce and John Hagen-Brenner).

By: wakingsleep

wakingsleep — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:14:00 +0000

Thanks for the info. Illuminatus! is one of those trilogies I’ve been meaning to read for years, and just haven’t gotten around to it. I was just wondering if I should try to track down copies of the original paperbacks, or if the in-print single-volume was sufficient.

Schroedinger’s Cat is a different story…. doesn’t even seem worth reading if it’s missing that much material, and it seems likely that the original books are much harder to track down.

By: R. Psmith

R. Psmith — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:12:00 +0000

Thanks for the great pieces. I do miss Bob’s intelligence and sense of humor, etc. I wonder what he would have made of the politico-econimic adventures of the past five years.

Eric Wagner

By: mwiik

mwiik — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:05:00 +0000

There’s 3 answers:

1) RAW’s original manuscript for Illuminatus! had to be cut by about 500 pages. These pages never existed in a published work and are lost to history forevermore.

2) Volumes 2 and 3 of Illuminatus! began with short recaps of what occurred in the preceding volumes. This is where the story about Hagbard teaching mynah birds to be suicidal comes in. These were cut from the single-volume edition. These are just a few pages, no great loss.

3) The currently in-print, single-volume version of the Schroedinger’s Cat trilogy, is missing somewhere around half the content. The book should be almost as thick as the single-volume Illuminatus!. Entire chapters are missing. It’s an abortion.

By: Bruce Otter

Bruce Otter — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:55:00 +0000

I read Illuminatus! in the early 90s. I was a Rush Limbaugh quoting Dittohead, no lie. Fortunately I had an interest in sci-fi and conspiracy theories, and saw something that described Illuminatus! in those terms, so I picked it up and read it.

Kaboom! The book truly changed my life, altering my worldview in truly profound ways. I’ve read anything and everything by RAW that I’ve been able to get my hands on. I consider myself a model-agnostic libertarian these days, always (and often failing) to look at the world and maintain Wilson’s infectious optimism. Thanks RAW!

By: wakingsleep

wakingsleep — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:03:00 +0000

Just for clarification… which series is missing so much material: Illuminatus!, or Schrodinger’s Cat? Thanks!

By: neilinchicago

neilinchicago — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:19:00 +0000

Naw, that's The Sex magicians. Schroedinger's Cat is just especially self-indulgent. I really appreciated the shout-outs, though.

By: Joel Westerberg

Joel Westerberg — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:00:00 +0000

What a fantastic story Gareth! Really liked it.

By: OgilvyTheAstronomer

OgilvyTheAstronomer — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:41:00 +0000

“Be open to anything; be skeptical of everything” are words to live by. I was fortunate to find RAW’s books in my teens, along with Forteanism, and while I can be terribly opinionated, I hope some of that attitude has stuck with me.

By: Jay Kinney

Jay Kinney — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:10:00 +0000

My theory was that those 500 lost pages were resurrected as the Schrodinger’s Cat trilogy. Sure read like it.

By: Gareth Branwyn

Gareth Branwyn — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 03:19:00 +0000

Close. I was a Wiccan (er… at the time), living in a commune, in former tobacco country. We had these amazing old tobacco barns on our property next to the fields.

By: pjcamp

pjcamp — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 02:13:00 +0000

Seriously? You lived in a Wiccan tobacco commune?

By: Genre Slur

Genre Slur — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:57:00 +0000

Begin by lending out Cosmic Trigger I-III. Then Prometheus Rising. Then lend out Illuminatus! Usually a good sequence, I find.

By: Genre Slur

Genre Slur — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:56:00 +0000

Excellent!

By: neilinchicago

neilinchicago — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:24:00 +0000

p.s.
The two crises that threaten to destroy the world but don’t are anthrax leprosy pi and Fernando Poo (usually spelled Fernando Po).
In the consensus reality 1976, the two horrible crises which didn’t turn out to threaten the world after all were swine flu and Angola. Another one of them coincidences.

By: neilinchicago

neilinchicago — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:22:00 +0000

It’s worse than that . . .
Illuminatus! was written mostly between 1969 and 1971. It was set in 1976 to give it a slightly futuristic flavor.
Unfortunately, it severely confused publishers. A junior editor would rave that they had to have this, be shrugged off, burn out, get replaced, and the new junior editor would start raving about this manuscript, rinse, repeat.
So eventually, it got bought. But it was way too ginourmous, so the publisher insisted they cut the manuscript by 500 pages (the appendices originally ran all the way through the alphabet, for instance) — and then cut the remaining stuff into thirds.
Those 500 pages were lost a long time ago.

By: Egypt Urnash

Egypt Urnash — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:12:00 +0000

“In 1976, I was this awkward, alienated Wiccan teen, a restless seeker. But I was also a science and space nerd. I could never reconcile these two and constantly switched between them, rejecting one for the other, at least for a time.”

been there done that. And it is thanks to RAW that I figured out how to put the two together. The Skeptic rolls her eyes at some of the stuff the Mystic does and says, but she’s not entirely sure that some of what the Mystic does works.

I found the collected volume in the university bookstore when I was in college. Inhaled it in like one or two days, which to be honest is not that unusual for me – I read fast! And it turned things inside out for me.

…in fact, hmm. I’m going on a plane trip tomorrow and I’ve been wondering what to read. Now I know. *hits up Amazon for a Kindle copy of the Illuminatus! Trilogy*

By: neilinchicago

neilinchicago — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:10:00 +0000

Historic Illuminatus was jinxed. After the first volume came out, the publisher went bankrupt. Eventually the second volume came out . . . and its publisher then went bankrupt. Eventually, I asked bob about vol. 3, and he said, “When someone pays me to write it.”

By: Egypt Urnash

Egypt Urnash — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:09:00 +0000

It was about Donald Duck IIRC.

By: Michael Roberts

Michael Roberts — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:49:00 +0000

I think the time-delay joke names may have blown my mind more than anything else. I caught a ride home from the college class I was taking as a senior the year I read Illuminati and one of the traffic signs had the name of one of the characters in the book! I will never, ever forget the feeling that gave me, of a profound mixing of two strictly separated realms.

Later, I was telling my mother about the book and pronouncing the name of another character got me such an odd look that I had to rewind what I’d just said – and realized RAW had got me again. Fantastic stuff!

(I’m being deliberately obscure just in case there’s somebody who hasn’t read them and might like the same experience – and if you have read them, you can giggle about this very sentence with me…)

By: ciacontra

ciacontra — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:32:00 +0000

I love that so many other people experienced this as some kind of mentally-readjusting, paradigm-shifting acid trip.

I tried to read it twice when I was about 15, and just couldn’t get past 100 pages or so. Then that summer we went on vacation and I sat down and read the whole darn thing, swaying in a hammock in the mountains, over the course of three days. I felt shellshocked afterwards… Completely changed my politics and aspirations.

By: David Faler

David Faler — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:17:00 +0000

I remember a debate over Mickey Mouse being a communist, but I just moved and can’t get to my books right now (and I only have two of the three), so I can’t confirm that the scene exists outside our memory