The illuminatus! trilogy (106 page)

Volume 34, page 72, undated letter of Spring 1796,
shows that the years did not decrease this passion; he again writes to the gardener: “What was done with the seed saved from the India Hemp last summer? It ought,
all of it
, to have been sewn [sic] again; that not only a stock of seed sufficient for my own purposes might have been raised, but to have disseminated the seed to others; as
it is more valuable than the common Hemp.”
(Italics added)

Volume 35, page 265, shows him still nagging the gardener; page 323 contains the letter to Sir John Sinclair mentioned in the First Trip.

The Weishaupt impersonation theory, congenial as it may be to certain admirers of the General, cannot account for all of this. A diary entry of August 7, 1765 (
The Diaries of George Washington
, Houghton-Mifflin, 1925), reads: “Began to seperate [sic] the Male from the Female hemp at Do—rather too late.” This is the passage quoted by Congressman Koch, and remembered by Saul Goodman in the novel; the separation of male from female hemp plants is not required for the production of hemp rope but is absolutely necessary if one wants to use the flowering tips of the female for marijuana. And at that time Adam Weishaupt was very definitely still in Bavaria, teaching canon law at the University of Ingolstadt.

All of this data about General Washington’s hobby, originally researched by Michael Aldrich, Ph.D., of Mill Valley, California, was rediscovered by Saul Goodman while he and Barney Muldoon were employed as investigators by the American Civil Liberties Union on test cases seeking to have all remaining anti-marijuana laws repealed as unconstitutional. The Goodman-Muldoon Private Investigations Agency (which had been formed right after those two worthy gentlemen had resigned from the New York Police Department amid the international acclaim connected with their solving the Carmel disappearance) was offered a lion’s share of the best-paying business accounts possible. Saul and Barney chose, however, to take only the cases that really interested them; their most notable work was performed as investigators for lawyers defending unpopular political figures. Goodman and Muldoon, it was agreed everywhere, had an uncanny knack for finding the elusive evidence that would demonstrate a frame-up to even the most hostile and skeptical jury. Many political historians say that it was in large part their work which kept the most
eccentric and colorful figures of the extreme right and extreme left out of the prison-hospitals during the great Mental Health/Social Psychiatry craze of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In fact, Rebecca Goodman’s memoir of her husband,
He Opened the Cages
, written during her grief after his heart attack in 1983, is almost as popular in political-science classes as is her study of comparative mythology,
The Golden Apples of the Sun, the Silver Apples of the Moon
, in anthropology classes.

These following ciphers were found in the home of the lawyer Hans Zwack during a raid by the Bavarian government in 1785. Letters from Weishaupt (signed “Spartacus”), written in the code and outlining most of the plans of the Illuminati, were also found, and led to the suppression of the Order, after which it went underground and regrouped.

These cyphers are given (curiously, without their code names) in Daraul’s
History of Secret Societies
, page 227. The purpose of the code names was to make breaking the cypher more difficult. All messages begin in the Zwack cypher, but the fifth word is always “Weishaupt” or “De-Molay,” and the message then switches to whichever of these cyphers is thus indicated; whenever either of these words (or “Zwack”) appears again, the system again switches. Breaking the cypher by the usual statistical methods is, therefore, virtually impossible, at least before the invention of the computer—for the uninitiated cypher-breaker is confronted with, not 26, but 3 × 26, or 78, separate symbols, whose regularity has little to do with the celebrated formula (EATOINSHRDLU…etc.) for the regularity of the 26 letters.
*

In addition, any of the 78 symbols can be replaced by the abbreviation for the corresponding Tarot card, thus further befuddling the uninitiated. The Tarots are arranged in the sequence: Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles, Trumps. Thus, the first symbol can be replaced by AcW (Ace of Wands), the second by 2W (two of Wands), and so on, through Cups, Swords, and Pentacles. The last 22 symbols are represented by the 22 trumps: TF (The Fool), TM (The Magus), THP (The High Priestess), and so forth. Since there are five groups in the Tarot (the four suits and the trumps), and the alphabet is repeated only three times, this leaves two null sets for transmission of Zen telegrams. “Once you’ve seen the Great Vision,” Hagbard once said, “you look at everything else in life
twice.”

The Illuminati calendars, finally, are all based on five seasons (due to the Law of Fives.) The names of the seasons, their meanings, and the Christian equivalents are as follows:

Everything is dated from year 1 A.M. (Anno Mung), which is 4000 B.C. in the Christian calendar—the year Hung Mung first perceived the Sacred Chao and achieved illumination. Thus, Hassan i Sabbah founded the Hashishim in 5090 A.M., Weishaupt reformed the Illuminati in 5776 A.M., and—to take a year in the middle of our novel— 1970 in the Christian calendar is, to the Illuminati, 5970 A.M., just as it is in the calendar used by Royal Arch masons.
(The reader can decide for himself whether this fact represents coincidence, complicity, or synchronicity.)

The Illuminati date for anything is always a higher number than that in any other calendar, since the Jews (and, oddly, the Scotch Rite masons) date everything from 240 A.M., Confucians from 312 A.M., Christians from 4000 A.M., Moslems from 4580 etc. Only Bishop Usher, who dated everything from 4004 B.C. (or -4 A.M.), produced an older starting point than the Illuminati.

For instance, here are some random dates as they appear on the Illuminati system of reckoning:

Returning to the yearly round, each of the five seasons is divided, of course, into five months, thus producing a year of 5 × 5 or 25 months. The first three months of every season (known as the tricycle) each have 15 days, which fits the law of five because 1 × 5 = 5. The last two months of each season each have 14 days, which also fits the law of fives because 1 + 4 = 5. Each season has 73 days, because (a) you
have to
get 73 when you divide 365 by 5; (b) 7 + 3 = 10, the first multiple of 5 after 5 itself; and (c) this corresponds, as Dr. Ignotius pointed out in the novel, to the 73 parts of the Illuminati pyramid (counting the Eye as a part). The last day of each season is known as Eye Day and is celebrated in ways too foul to be mentioned in a book such as this, intended for family entertainment.

The mystic 23 appears in the calendar in the following ways:

(1) The bicycle has 2 months and the tricycle has 3.

(2) The bicycle has 28 days (two months of 14 days each), and when you subtract the all-important 5 this leaves, again, the mystic 23.

(3) When 5 is multiplied by its own first product, 10, the
result is 50; and when this, in turn, is subtracted from the days in a season, 73, the significant 23 once again appears.

(4) The tricycle has 45 days; add one for Leap Year’s Day and you get 46—exactly 2 × 23.

(5) 2 + 3 of course equals the all-important 5, the number on which the calendar is based and, even more significant, the number of this proof.

As Weishaupt said to Knigge after explaining all this, “Could Aquinas do better?” (Actually, the mystic meaning of these numbers is sexual. The male sex cycle is, as Tantrists know, 23 days; add the mystic five and you get 28 days, the female cycle. It’s that simple. Or is it?)

The sanctification of the number 5 antedates Atlantis itself and goes back to the intelligent cephalopods who infested Antarctica about 150,000,000 years before humankind appeared on earth; see H.P. Lovecraft’s work of “fiction,”
At the Mountains of Madness
(Arkham House, 1968), in which it is suggested that 5 was sacred to these creatures because they had five tentacles or pseudopods. In this connection, the reader might find some food for thought in a conversation which took place between Hag-bard Celine and Joe Malik in the late autumn of 1980. Joe, at the time, had just received the Pulitzer Prize. (He was also under investigation by a Congressional Committee, in connection with the same achievement: publication of certain governmental secrets.)

“Five
of the Senators voted to cite me for contempt, for not revealing my source,” Joe said. “Three voted against it. So I’ll be cited, and the Grand Jury will draw up an indictment. There’s that Law of Fives again.”

“Are you worried?” Hagbard asked, relaxing in one of the heavy leather chairs that were part of
Confrontation’s
new, more ornate offices.

“Hell, no. I can always seek sanctuary in Panama, or someplace, if they convict me. And Peter can keep this operation going.”

“You’re not afraid to start a new life as an exile?”

Joe grinned. “At my age, any new experience is an adventure.”

“You’re doing fine,” Hagbard said. “Here’s your latest revelation from the
.” He reached into his pocket and took out a photo of a female infant with six fingers
on each hand. “Got this from a doctor friend at Johns Hopkins.”

Joe looked at it and said, “So?”

“If we all looked like her, there’d be a Law of Sixes.”

Joe stared at him. “You mean, after all the evidence I collected, the Law of Fives is an Illuminati put-on? You’ve been letting me delude myself?”

“Not at all.” Hagbard was most earnest. “The Law of Fives is perfectly true. Everybody from the JAMs to the Dealy Lama agrees on that. But you have to understand it more deeply now, Joe. Correctly formulated, the Law is: All phenomena are directly or indirectly related to the number five, and this relationship can always be demonstrated,
given enough ingenuity on the part of the demonstrator.”
The evil grin flashed. “That’s the very model of what a true scientific law must always be: a statement about how the human mind relates to the cosmos. We can never make a statement about the cosmos itself—
but only about how our senses (or our instruments) detect it, and about how our codes and languages symbolize it
. That’s the key to the Einstein-Heisenberg revolution in physics, and to the Buddha’s revolution in psychology much earlier.”

“But,” Joe protested, “everything fits the Law. The harder I looked, the more things there were that fit.”

“Exactly,” said Hagbard. “Think about that. If you need quick transportation to Panama,” he added, heading for the door, “call Gold and Appel Transfers and leave a message.”