Illumination Day

[supergee]

42 years ago today, I finally got my hands on the last volume of the Illuminatus! trilogy and read it. Like the authors, I knew that half of it was BS, but I wasn’t sure exactly which half. One part that was true was that it programmed me in ways that weren’t obvious for months or even years, and unlike W.C. Fields and the woman who drove him to drink, I thanked the authors for it.

Comments

[arlie]

Everyone in my Wiccan social circle loved those books. I was the sole exception. I dutifully read them, but have never appreciated people who present obvious falsehoods as truth. The game of guessing which parts might be true does not appeal to me. Particularly as I tend to the unconscious belief that people who lie sometimes probably lie always - i.e. like as not none of it is true. (As you can imagine, the common modern literary usage of "truth" to refer to things which are emotionally right tends to infuriate me - and cause me to ignore the authors/speakers, unless perhaps their usage is 100% clear from context.)

Did I get reprogrammed? No idea, but if so it was most likely second hand, via the Wilson afficianados in that coven. The coven certainly tried hard to reprogram people - in reterospect, it scored rather too high on the cult scale. It also eventually threw me out as indigestible.