The illuminatus! trilogy (112 page)

“Property* is impossible” means that property
₃
(= property
₁
creates so much conflict of interest that society is in perpetual undeclared civil war and must eventually devour itself (and properties
₁
and
₃
as well). In short, Proudhon, in his own way, foresaw the Snafu Principle. He
also foresaw that communism would only perpetuate and aggravate the conflicts, and that
anarchy is the only viable alternative to this chaos
.

It is not averred, of course, that property
₂
will come into existence only in a totally voluntary society; many forms of it already exist. The error of most alleged libertarians—especially the followers (!) of the egregious Ayn Rand—is to assume that all property
₁
is property
₂
. The distinction can be made by any IQ above 70 and is absurdly simple. The test is to ask, of any title of ownership you are asked to accept or which you ask others to accept, “Would this be honored in a free society of rationalists, or does it require the armed might of a State to force people to honor it?” If it be the former, it is property
₂
and represents liberty; if it be the latter, it is property
₁
and represents theft.

Readers who do not understand the scene in which Hag-bard abdicates in favor of Miss Portinari should take heart.

Once they do understand it, they will understand most of the mysteries of all schools of mysticism.

The most important idea in the
Book of Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage
is the simple-looking formula “Invoke often.”

The most successful form of treatment for so-called mental disorders, the Behavior Therapy of Pavlov, Skinner, Wolpe, et al., could well be summarized in two similar words: “Reinforce often.” (“Reinforcement,” for all practical
purposes, means the same as the layman’s term “reward.” The essence of Behavior Therapy is rewarding desired behavior; the behavior “as if by magic” begins to occur more and more often as the rewards continue.)

Advertising, as everybody knows, is based on the axiom “Repeat often.”

Those who think they are “materialists” and think that “materialism” requires them to deny all facts which do not square with their definition of “matter” are loath to admit the well-documented and extensive list of individuals who have been cured of serious maladies by that very vulgar and absurd form of magick known as Christian Science. Nonetheless, the reader who wants to understand this classic work of immortal literature will have to analyze its deepest meanings, guided by an awareness that there is no essential difference between magick, Behavior Therapy, advertising, and Christian Science. All of them can be condensed into Abra-Melin’s simple “Invoke often.”

Reality, as Simon Moon says, is thermoplastic, not thermosetting. It is not quite Silly-Putty, as Mr. Paul Krassner once claimed, but is much closer to Silly-Putty than we generally realize. If you are told often enough that “Budweiser is the king of beers,” Budweiser will eventually taste somewhat better—perhaps a great deal better—than it tasted before this magick spell was cast. If a behavior therapist in the pay of the communists rewards you every time you repeat a communist slogan, you will repeat it more often, and begin to slide imperceptibly toward the same kind of belief that Christian Scientists have for their mantras. And if a Christian Scientist tells himself every day that his ulcer is going away, the ulcer will disappear more rapidly than it would have had he not subjected himself to this homemade advertising campaign. Finally, if a magician invokes the Great God Pan often enough, the Great God Pan will appear just as certainly as heterosexual behavior appears in homosexuals who are being handled (or manhandled) by Behavior Therapy.

The opposite and reciprocal of “Invoke often” is “Banish often.”

The magician wishing for a manifestation of Pan will not only invoke Pan directly and verbally, create Panlike conditions in his temple, reinforce Pan associations in every gesture and every article of furniture, use the colors and perfumes
associated with Pan, etc.; he will also banish other gods verbally, banish them by removing their associated furnitures and colors and perfumes, and banish them in every other way. The Behavior Therapist calls this “negative reinforcement,” and in treating a patient who is afraid of elevators he will not only reinforce (reward) every instance in which the patient rides an elevator without terror, but will also negatively reinforce (punish) each indication of terror shown by the patient. The Christian Scientist, of course, uses a mantra or spell which both reinforces health and negatively reinforces (banishes) illness.
*
Similarly, a commercial not only motivates the listener toward the sponsor’s product but discourages interest in all “false gods” by subsuming them under the rubric of the despised and contemptible Brand X.

Hypnotism, debate, and countless other games have the same mechanism:
Invoke often
and
Banish often
.

The reader who seeks a deeper understanding of this argument can obtain it by putting these principles to the test. If you are afraid that you might, in this Christian environment, fall into taking the Christian Science mantra too seriously, try instead the following simple experiment. For forty days and forty nights, begin each day by invoking and praising the world in itself as an expression of the Egyptian deities. Recite at dawn:

Repeat at moonrise. Continue for the full forty days and forty nights. We say without any reservations that, at a
minimum, you will feel happier and more at home in this part of the galaxy (and will also understand better Uncle John Feather’s attitude toward our planet); at maximum, you may find rewards beyond your expectations, and will be converted to using this mantra for the rest of your life. (If the results are exceptionally good, you just might start believing in ancient Egyptian gods.)

A selection of magick techniques which will offend the reason of no materialist can be found in Laura Archera Huxley’s
You Are Not the Target
(a powerful mantra, the title!), in
Gestalt Therapy
, by Perls, Heferline, and Goodman, and in
Mind Games
, by Masters and Houston.

All this, of course, is programming your own trip by manipulating appropriate clusters of word, sound, image, and emotional
(prajna)
energy. The aspect of magick which puzzles, perplexes, and provokes the modern mentality is that in which the operator programs somebody else’s trip,
acting at a distance
. It is incredible and insulting, to this type of person, if one asserts that our Mr. Nkrumah Fubar could program a headache for the President of the United States. He might grant that such manipulating of energy is possible if the President was told about Mr. Fubar’s spells, but he will not accept that it works just as well when the subject has no conscious knowledge of the curse.

The magical theory that 5 = 6 has no conviction for such a skeptic, and magicians have not yet proposed a better theory. The materialist then asserts that all cases where magic did appear to work under this handicap are illusions, delusions, hallucinations, “coincidences,”
*
misapprehensions, “luck,” accident, or downright hoax.

He does not seem to realize that asserting this is equivalent to asserting that reality is, after all, thermoplastic—for he is admitting that many people live in a different reality than his own. Rather than leave him to grapple as best he can with this self-contradiction, we suggest that he consult
Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain
, by Ostrander and Schroder—especially Chapter 11, “From Animals to Cybernetics: The Search for a Theory of Psi.” He might realize that when “matter” is fully understood, there is nothing a materialist need reject in magick
action at a distance
,
which has been well explored by scientists committed to the rigid Marxist form of dialectical materialism.

Those who have kept alive the ancient traditions of magick, such as the Ordo Templi Orientalis, will realize that the essential secret is sexual (as Saul tries to explain in the Sixth Trip) and that more light can be found in the writings of Wilhelm Reich, M. D., than in the current Soviet research. But Dr. Reich was jailed as a quack by the U.S. Government, and we would not ask our readers to consider the possibility that the U.S. Government could ever be Wrong about anything.

Any psychoanalyst will guess at once the most probable symbolic meanings of the Rose and the Cross; but no psychologist engaged in psi research has applied this key to the deciphering of traditional magic texts. The earliest reference to freemasonry in English occurs in Anderson’s “Muses Threnody,” 1638:

but no parapsychologist has followed up the obvious clue contained in this conjunction of the vaginal rose, the phallic cross, the word of invocation, and the phenomenon of thought projection. That the taboos against sexuality are still latent in our culture explains part of this blindness; fear of opening the door to the most insidious and subtle forms of paranoia is another part. (
If the magick can work at a distance
, the repressed thought goes,
which of us is safe?)
A close and objective study of the anti-LSD hysteria in America will shed further light on the mechanisms of avoidance here discussed.

Of course, there are further offenses and affronts to the rationalist in the deeper study of magick. We all know, for instance, that words are only arbitrary conventions with no intrinsic connection to the things they symbolize, yet magick involves the use of words in a manner that seems to imply that some such connection, or even identity, actually exists. The reader might analyze some powerful bits of language not generally considered magical, and he will find something of the key. For instance, the 2 + 3 pattern in “Hail Eris”/“All hail Discordia” is not unlike the 2 + 3 in “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” or that in the “L.S./M.F.T.”
which once sold many cartons of cigarettes to our parents; and the 2 + 3 in Crowley’s “Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!” is a relative of these. Thus, when a magician says that you
must
shout “Abrahadabra,” and no other word, at the most intensely emotional moment in an invocation, he exaggerates; you may substitute other words; but you will abort the result if you depart too far from the five-beat patttern of “Abrahadabra.”
*

But this brings us to the magical theory of reality.

Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji
*
writes in
Yoga for Yahoos:

Let us consider a piece of cheese. We say that this has certain qualities, shape, structure, color, solidity, weight, taste, smell, consistency and the rest; but investigation has shown that this is all illusory. Where are these qualities? Not in the cheese, for different observers give quite different accounts of it. Not in ourselves, for we do not perceive them in the absence of the cheese …

What then are these qualities of which we are so sure? They would not exist without our brains; they would not exist without the cheese. They are the results of the union, that is of the Yoga, of the seer and seen, of subject and object …

There is nothing here with which a modern physicist could quarrel; and this is the magical theory of the universe. The magician assumes that
sensed reality
—the panorama of impressions monitored by the senses and collated by the brain—is radically different from so-called objective reality.
^†
About the latter “reality” we can only form speculations or theories which, if we are very careful and subtle, will not contradict either logic or the reports of the senses. This lack of contradiction is rare; some conflicts between
theory and logic, or between theory and sense-data, are not discovered for centuries (for example, the wandering of Mercury away from the Newtonian calculation of its orbit). And even when achieved, lack of contradiction is proof only that the theory
is not totally false
. It is never, in any case, proof that the theory
is totally true
—for an indefinite number of such theories can be constructed from the known data at any time. For instance, the geometries of Euclid, of Gauss and Reimann, of Lobachevski, and of Fuller
all
work well enough on the surface of the earth, and it not yet clear whether the Gauss-Reimann or the Fuller system works better in interstellar space.

If we have this much freedom in choosing our theories about “objective reality,” we have even more liberty in deciphering the “given” or transactional
sensed reality
. The ordinary person senses as he or she has been taught to sense —that is, as they have been programmed by their society. The magician is a self-programmer. Using invocation and evocation—which are functionally identical with self-conditioning, auto-suggestion, and hypnosis, as shown above—he or she edits or orchestrates sensed reality like an artist.
*
Everybody, of course, does this unconsciously; see the paragraph about the cheese. The magician, doing it consciously, controls it.

This book, being part of the only serious conspiracy it describes—that is, part of Operation Mindfuck—has programmed the reader in ways that he or she will not understand for a period of months (or perhaps years). When that understanding is achieved, the real import of this appendix (and of the equation 5 = 6) will be clearer. Officials at Harvard thought Dr. Timothy Leary was joking when he warned that students should not be allowed to indiscriminately remove dangerous, habit-forming books from the library unless each student proves a definite need for each volume. (For instance, you have lost track of Joe Malik’s mysterious dogs by now.) It is strange that one can make the clearest possible statements and yet be understood by many to have said the opposite.