Chapter 7:

The Invisible War

This chapter discusses various books that treat the manipulation of human society by unseen agencies as a complex "invisible war" between opposing forces, starting with the works of Robert Anton Wilson.

In my opinion, his most useful ideas are in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, written in collaboration with Robert Shea and published in 1975.

On the surface, the three books are an avant-garde political allegory that uses the concept of the "Illuminati" and conspiracy theories in general as a medium for communicating the author's ideas about freedom and totalitarianism. The trilogy's political content has made it a classic of the modern Libertarian movement, but the material on conspiracies also deserves to be taken seriously.

Wilson was originally trained as a historian, and did years of serious but sporadic research on the Illuminati and related topics just to satisfy his own curiosity, so the trilogy contains enough solid conspiracy information to fill several nonfiction books of average size.

However, since the conspiracy speculations are embedded in a work of fiction that depends on heavy-handed irony and morbid humor for much of its appeal, it's impossible for the reader to tell when Wilson is being serious and when he's writing for empty shock value.

In Cosmic Triger (1977), Wilson explains how and why the Illuminatus! trilogy was written, and states that he wasn't completely aware himself when he was speculating seriously, and when he was just recording "wild ideas." The book also explains that he was experimenting with psychedelic drugs and a variety of serious occult practices - sex magic, various forms of meditation and ritual, etc. - while he was writing Illuminatus!

Since these practices develop the psychic powers, he may have received more of his ideas and conclusions by telepathy than he has ever admitted or consciously realized.

Wilson's basic speculations about the agencies responsible for the manipulation of human history down through the ages are similar to those advanced by Shaver, Keel, and Vallee; but since he's writing fiction, he isn't forced to keep them internally consistent. Many different characters in the three books "discover the truth about the Illuminati," and each person's version of it totally contradicts that of all the others.

Some of these explanations of the nature of the Illuminati are familiar to readers of other conspiracy and unexplained-phenomena books; others are wilder than anything ever presented as fact or serious speculation.

Wilson postulates that the "Lliogor" (the name is from Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos) are the ultimate source of the knowledge and power used to manipulate human society and reprogram individual minds throughout history. As in Lovecraft, they are shadowy beings that usually remain in the background in "another dimension," and most of the earthly conspiracies are the work of humans who have learned some of their knowledge second-hand.

One of Wilson's characters describes the process that transforms a person into an "Illuminatus":

"It's possible for humans, given the right methods, to translate themselves into sentient lattice works of pure energy that will be more or less permanent. The process is called transcendental illumination. Mass human sacrifice is the most reliable method of achieving transcendental illumination."

Wilson was referring to this passage when he said in Cosmic Trigger,

"I had already incorporated into IIlluminatus a variation on the Lovecraft mythos... in which the "Cthulhu Cult' or some other secret society was aiding the schemes of hostile Aliens.

 

I had attached this theme to the Illuminati as a kind of dead-pan put-on and laughed like hell at the thought that some naive readers would be dumb enough to believe it."

However, he then goes on to explain that working with Jacques Vallee, other unexplained-phenomena researchers, and various occultists had started him to thinking that maybe the whole idea wasn't so ridiculous after all.

Cosmic Trigger also contains a quotation from a conversation Wilson had in 1974 with Grady McMurty, an occultist whom Aleister Crowley had designated as one of his chosen successors.

McMurty, who had read much of the secret knowledge of the OTO and the Order of the Golden Dawn, had said:

"I'll tell you what I think. There's WAR IN HEAVEN. The Higher Intelligences, whoever they are, aren't all playing on the same team. Some of them are trying to encourage our evolution to higher levels, and some of them want to keep us stuck just where we are."

One of the characters in Illuminatus also describes a connection between conspiracies and organized religion:

"I must tell you now that your God is a manifestation of some Lliogor.

 

That is how religion began, and how their servants in the Cult of the Yellow Sign continue it. All such experiences come from the Lliogor to enslave us. Revelations, visions, trances, and miracles, all of it is a trap....

 

Every religious leader in human history has been a member of the Cult of the Yellow Sign and all of their efforts are devoted to hoaxing, deluding, and enslaving the rest of us."

Another major theme in Cosmic Trigger is Wilson's involvement with the "Sirius Mystery," which many people now believe represents impressive evidence that space travelers from that star visited Earth in the time of the Pharaohs.

Since I will present an alternative explanation for this evidence in Part Two, I won't go into the details presented in Robert K. G. Temple's The Sirius Mystery (1979). What's important for my purposes here is that Robert Anton Wilson and a number of other people started consciously receiving telepathic messages concerning Sirius years before Temple's book was written.

In 1973, Wilson received a short but extremely vivid telepathic message that said simply, "Sirius is very important." Almost simultaneously, Timothy Leary, who was in prison at the time, received a long series of telepathic communications that also purported to be from extraterrestrials.

Leary called these the "Starseed Transmissions," and had them published almost immediately in Terra II (1973).

Terra II seemed to contain a serious attempt by some unknown agency to communicate extremely advanced spiritual and scientific knowledge, but I completely failed to understand most of it. I concluded that the book may very well have contained messages from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization; but if so, they were not clear enough for me, or for most Earth people, to comprehend.

I now know that the same general group of extraterrestrial spirits who dictated the material for WiH (War In Heaven) to me ten years later had previously sent the "Starseed Transmissions" to Leary. And Wilson's message about Sirius had the same origin.

And some of John C. Lilly's books also contain material channeled from the sane source:

• Center of the Cyclone (1972)

• The Programming and Metaprogramming of the Human Biocomputer, and The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography (1978)

The spirits themselves will explain more about this in Part Two.

Another conspiracy theory that helped me make the breakthrough is described in Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.

The basic premise of the book is that the medieval Knights Templar possessed knowledge that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene; that he left descendants who married into various European royal families; and that this "holy bloodline" can be traced down to the present day.

I was already familiar with this legend because it has been part of the secret doctrine of the Gnostics and other Christian splinter groups for many centuries, and there are numerous references to it in occult literature; but the subject had never interested me until the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail analyzed it seriously as a conspiracy theory.

They made me realize that there's more to the story than just another religious myth. The legend itself may or may not be based in fact, but the conspiracies it has generated seem to be real and important.

The book traces the history of a secret society called the "Priory of Zion" from medieval times to the present, noting its influence on the Templars, on the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges of the seventeenth century, and on the evolution of Western society in general.

The book documents the existence of the Priory fairly well, but it doesn't even try to present evidence to prove the validity of the basic premise that Jesus left descendants. The authors are more concerned with the nature of the Priory and its influence over historical events.

And this is why the book was important in helping prepare me for the breakthrough: it helped me gain some deep insight into how the Invisible College has worked to manipulate the course of Western history.

The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail were mostly concerned with the members of the Priory of Zion as what William Burroughs would call "conscious agents." They may or may not have believed that their secret knowledge about the descendants of Jesus was true, but they were fully conscious of the political power it gave them over a civilization that accepted the "divine right of kings."

However, my own reaction to the story was to analyze it on deeper levels, trying to find a conspiracy behind the Priory that its members weren't consciously aware of.

Here are some of my speculations. What if the story about the descendants of Jesus was simply a cover story to keep people from seriously looking for an even more important secret? Maybe the Priory possessed some of the "Q Documents" (the lost texts that many Biblical scholars think several books of the New Testament were copied from).

Perhaps these had been kept hidden by a secret society because their account of the origins of Christianity was very different from that now accepted by Christians.

For example, what would be the impact on modern Christianity if it were learned that they state explicitly that Jesus never claimed to be the "Only Begotten Son of God," but merely a human prophet?

Even if the Templars didn't unearth actual copies of the Q documents in Jerusalem, it's likely they talked to Jewish and Islamic scholars and found out that certain Talmudic texts written in the first centuries of the Christian era deny the divinity of Jesus. This might have given them the idea of forging ancient documents proving the Gnostic claim that Jesus left descendants and denying fundamental tenets of Christianity.

Such documents, real or faked, would have given the Priory of Zion a potent weapon for political manipulation.

They could have set themselves up as king-makers by claiming to have proof that certain rulers were of divine descent, but they'd also have a more potent weapon than that to use against kings and the Church alike: the potential to debunk Christianity and plunge all of Western society into chaos.

Thinking about this reminded me that in the fifteen years before Holy Blood, Holy Grail was published, dozens of novels were written on the general theme of the discovery of the Q documents and their political use by conspiracies.

 Irving Wallace's The Word is the best known of these.

Had the Invisible College motivated all these books by sending out telepathic messages on this subject? If they had, I didn't receive them, which is understandable because I had little interest in the subject until I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

I found out when I made the breakthrough that this line of conjecture was on the right track, but it didn't go far enough.

The "Great Secret" of the medieval Priory of Zion, which was passed on through the Templars to the eighteenth-century Masons and Rosicrucians, was a cosmological theory similar to the one presented in Part Two. I describe this information in terms drawn from modern physics, psychology, etc., which didn't exist back then.

The Priory's version was undoubtedly phrased in very different words and analogies drawn from religious and occult mysticism, but many of the essential facts were probably the same.

This is why a number of occult books assert,

"The Great Secret reveals the true nature of gods and men and the relationship between the two."

Holy Blood, Holy Grail was only one of many books that helped to raise my consciousness to the point where I could make a breakthrough.

A number of recent works of speculative fiction were also useful. Among the best are Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos: Archives series (starting with Shikasta, 1979), which treats the general subject of extraterrestrial intervention in earthly affairs as thoroughly as it's ever been covered in either fiction or non-fiction.

One of the best things about her theories is that she doesn't even try to keep them self-consistent, but dramatizes many different alternatives that can be deduced from the available factual information on the subject.

Here is a quotation from another of her novels, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (1971):

"At the risk of boring you, I must repeat, I am afraid, repeat, reiterate, reemphasize, it is not a question of your arriving on Planet Earth as you leave here.

 

You will lose nearly all memory of your past existence. You will each of you come to yourselves, perhaps alone, perhaps in the company of each other, but with only a vague feeling of recognition, and probably disassociated, disorientated, ill, discouraged, and unable to believe, when you are told what your task really is.

 

You will wake up, as it were, but there will be a period while you are waking which will be like the recovery from an illness, or like the emergence into good air from a poisoned one.

 

Some of you may choose not to wake, for the waking will be so painful, and the knowledge of your condition and Earth's condition so agonizing, you will be like drug addicts: you may prefer to continue to breathe in oblivion. And when you have understood that you are in the process of awakening, that you have something to get done, you will have absorbed enough of the characteristics of Earthmen to be distrustful, surly, grudging, suspicious.

 

You will be like a drowning person who drowns his rescuer, so violently will you struggle in your panic terror.

"And, when you have become aroused to your real condition, and have recovered from the shame or embarrassment of seeing to what depths you have sunk, you will then begin the task of arousing others, and you will find that you are in the position of rescuer of a drowning person, or a doctor in a city that has an epidemic of madness.

 

The drowning person wants to be rescued, but can't prevent himself struggling. The mad person has intermittent fits of sanity, but in between behaves as if his doctor were his enemy.

"And so, my friends: that's it. That's my message to you. It's going to be tough. Every bit as tough as you expect."

During the period immediately before my breakthrough, I re-read several older works of speculative fiction.

Here's a quotation from Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites (1967):

"We now had an important clue about the origin of the parasites...

 

They couldn't exist apart from mankind because they were mankind. And it was this that brought a new level of knowledge. When I had said to them. ‘Man is not alone,' I had understood what I meant, but all its implications were not clear to me; I was speaking about the source of power, meaning and purpose.

 

Now I realized that, in a far more obvious and simple sense, we were not alone. We had joined the police of the universe, and there were others. Our minds now made instant contact with these others. It was as if we had sent out a signal, which had instantly been picked up by a hundred receivers, who immediately signaled their presence back to us.

 

The nearest of these receivers was situated only about four thousand million miles away, a cruising ship from a planet in the Proxima Centauri system."

And it's not just speculative fiction by mainstream avant-garde writers that helped prepare me for the breakthrough. Literally hundreds of books written during the last ten years in the science fiction and fantasy fields contain a few paragraphs or a few lines of useful material.

Here's an illustration from a realistic modern fantasy: Mystery Walk (1983), by Robert R. McCaramon:

"Why does it hate us?"

"Because it's a greedy beast that uses fear to make itself stronger. It feeds like a hog at a trough on the human emotions of despair, torment, and confusion; sometimes it traps revenants, and won't let them break away from this world. It feeds on their souls, and if there's a Hell, I suppose that must be it.

 

But when we work to free those revenants, to take their suffering into ourselves and do something constructive with it, we steal from the shape changer's dinner table. We sent those poor souls onward to where the shape changer can't get at them anymore."

Many occult books written for the general reader during the last fifteen years contain similar material.

The dozen or so Oversoul Seven and Seth books produced by Jane Roberts during this whole period are an example, as are the recent works of Ruth Montgomery and Brad Steiger.

I'll finish this series of quotations with a couple from works that were published after I started making my personal breakthrough in 1983. The ideas they communicate were published earlier in less explicit form, so I was already vaguely familiar with them in 1983, but I feel this chapter will be more effective if I quote the best version of the material now available.

First, from Carlos Castañeda's The Fire From Within (1985):

"...They SAW that it is the Eagle who bestows awareness. The Eagle creates sentient beings so that they will live and enrich the awareness it gives them with life.

 

They also SAW that it is the Eagle who devours that same enriched awareness after making sentient beings relinquish it at the moment of their death.... Sentient beings live only to enrich the awareness that is the Eagle's food."

And I'll end with a paragraph from Extra-Terrestrials Among Us by George C. Andrews:

"Human psychic energy may be the equivalent of rocket fuel or cocaine to inhabitants of other dimensions. Seen from this angle, the otherwise senseless wars between the devotees of different jealous gods which have recurred constantly throughout human history take on a rational motivation.

 

It would explain why such extraordinary importance has been accorded to the individual's choice of which deity to worship. By worshipping a specific deity, one channels psychic energy in a specific direction..."

I acknowledge that all the people mentioned in this chapter so far, and many others as well, contributed to the background knowledge that helped me to understand the spirit communications quoted in Part Two.

I found useful ideas in literally hundreds of different books and articles; the works mentioned here are just a sample to show the wide variety of sources where such information can be found. I can't single out one or a few as being more important to this process than the others.

The significant items of information and theory in the works of all these authors are present only as isolated passages embedded in material of much less value.

I had constant psychic guidance from my spirit guides while I researched this material, and this helped me to recognize what was valid and relevant from what wasn't. My selection of the material for this chapter is intended to help the reader to extract approximately the same information from this literature as I did.

I'll continue this process further in the next chapter.

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