Mini-Review: Deck the Halls With Boughs of Hellbore!

Maria J. Pérez Cuervo’s Hellebore has previously adopted a twice-yearly publishing schedule, roughly aligned with the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes, but this year they’ve decided to do a special extra release – Yuletide Hauntings, an issue of the periodical focused on ghost stories for Christmas.

As is typically the case with Hellebore, the collection is a mixture of articles I enjoyed but tend to wish were a bit longer, and articles where I don’t entirely see the point. In the former category, Katy Soar provides an intriguing history of sightings of Roman ghosts – as well as considering why stories of such only seem to have caught on in the early 20th Century. Pérez Cuervo herself goes even earlier, offering snapshots of hauntings associated with Britain’s ancient barrows. Verity Holloway offers a quick profile of the efforts by Victorian mediums to report on the fate of the doomed HMS Erebus and Terror, lost on an expedition to seek the Northwest Passage, which perhaps allows the practitioners in question off the hook a little for their exploitation of the desperation of Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the expedition leader Sir John, to hear news of the lost men.

Perhaps the best article is Julia Round’s profile of Misty – a British horror comic from the 1970s aimed at girls, with an eponymous host giving a sort of witchy pagan allure to the whole thing. I’d vaguely heard of Misty but hadn’t read any, but it sounds wonderful – like a feminist folk horror counterpart to 2000 AD. It’s nice enough, but one could wish it included more extract from Misty stories, since I feel the piece gives a rough idea of what the comic was like whilst barely showing any of it – we get some bits of cover art and splash pages, but little idea of what the meat of its stories looked at.

On the less compelling side of the equation, Alice Vernon’s survey of the theme of disturbed sleep in ghost stories feels like it collects examples without reaching any conclusions. I was also unconvinced by John A. Riley’s essay on The Stone Tape (both the original TV drama and the 2015 radio adaptation), since his conclusions about commodity fetishism seem a little tacked on to the end and aren’t the product of an argument developed over the whole article. Edward Parnell’s article about Borley Rectory and how it inspired The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (the basis of The Haunting) which rounds out the collection is one of those rambling collections of personal musings which Hellebore tends to conclude its issues with, and which never quite land for me, tending towards solipsistic musings relevant only to the author.

Yuletide Hauntings, then, is not so much a Christmas annual as it is, well, just another issue of Hellebore. The journal tends to be just about good enough to keep me coming back for more, but I continue to wish that Pérez Cuervo would either see her way to expanding its pages to allow some of the articles to sprawl more or cut some of the more superficial articles to give extra space to those which are constrained by its limitations.

Mini-Review: Hellebore Harvest

It’s been a while since I last dipped into Hellebore, Maria J. Pérez Cuervo’s folk horror occulture periodical. Rather than exhaustively going through everything in the most recent five issues, I’m instead going to do a rapid tour and note which articles I thought were particularly worthwhile.

Each issue of Hellebore is themed, and issue 6 is the Summoning Issue, with a big emphasis on occult subjects. This included some really eye-opening material, introducing me to subjects I hadn’t heard of previously – a good sign that the magazine isn’t just steering to the fairly well-travelled routes of folk horror and high weirdness but getting deep into the weeds. Per Faxneld’s Spinster Satanism offered an absolutely fascinating look at Lolly Willowes, a novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner which mashed up Satanic themes with feminist anger; Victoria Anne Pearson examines the strand of Irish folklore which based on the idea of the deck of playing cards as being “the Devil’s prayer book”; Verity Holloway offers an interesting biography of eccentric farm labourer George Pickingill, who ended up at the centre of a storm of claims that he was the last of a long line of “cunning men” representing an ancient pagan magical tradition.

Issue 7 was the Ritual issue, and coming out around Beltane 2022 it had a big emphasis on rituals to greet the summer. Pérez Cuervo herself offered an analysis of the imagery used in the May Day parade in The Wicker Man, whilst Hannah Armstrong offers an overview of the career of Jane Ellen Harrison, a classical scholar who beat the gender barriers imposed by Victorian society between her and her intended profession and who scandalised the field by focusing on subject matter considered unfashionably grim.

Issue 8 was dedicated to Unveiling, and its best articles were probably an article by Pérez Cuervo about the Lobsang Rampa hoax and the man behind it and an extended look by James Machin at Penda’s Fen. The Old Ways-themed issue 9 includes an interesting pair of articles about the development of particular New Age theories – Katy Soar and Niall Finneran offer interesting insights into how the concept of ley lines turned from a fringe archaeological theory into the underpinnings of the sort of “Earth mysteries” stuff which underpinned the psychic questing movement, whilst Kenneth Brophy discusses the weird mid-1970s trope of stone circles having alien connections, as seen in Children of the Stones, The Stones of Blood, and the fourth Quatermass series. The Darkness issue, number 10, felt to me a little light, but I did enjoy Chris Esson’s look at the alchemical imagery in A Field In England.

Once again, there’s a few too many articles which simply take too shallow a look at their subject matter – issue 8 has a look at psychedelic folk by Rob Young which doesn’t offer much of interest at all, merely outlining an idea about how the British landscape is inherently a psychedelic place without really digging deep enough to illuminate many of its assertions. Hellebore always seems to include a bunch of articles I enjoy but which could do with more meat on their bones, and others which feel like somewhat shallow treatment of their subject matter, and I think the periodical would be a much stronger offering if the latter were trimmed out right to make room to expand the former.

Still, it is heartening to see that the Hellebore team is branching out into chunkier works: Pérez Cuervo has also recently issued The Hellebore Guide To Occult Britain, a nice pocket-sized tour guide of sites of occultural interest across the UK. Here, the somewhat terse summaries of the places in question are beneficial – they leave space for stuffing more material into the book and, in keeping with more conventional guidebooks, are to be expected to provide only a quick introduction to the site in question, not an in-depth discussion.

Pickin’ Up Truth Vibrations, Part 9: David Icke Fumbles In the Dark

Another year, another book has come out from David Icke – The Dream. As with his preceding book, The Trap, I had no intention of actually paying anyone any money to look at it, but I had an opportunity to have a skim anyway, so I may as well continue this occasional series keeping track of one of our era’s more damaging demagogues just for the sake of taking note of his latest gambits.

Once again, Icke recycles vast amounts of material here; he seems to operate on a business model these days which calls for one book per year which he dutifully churns out, regardless of whether he has much of anything to say this time. That said, his particular emphasis has been known to shift back and forth; for instance, there was a while when he went really hard after particular Jewish sects, an aspect of his work he has dialled back on recently (though in this book he believes that Jewish religion regards Leviathan as a “Holy Serpent” and that “El”, one of the names of God in Hebrew, refers to Saturn, and suggests that the Star of David is related to Saturn worship).

This time he seems to be dialling up his focus on his metaphysical outlook. That isn’t to say that the book does not also include an awful lot of conspiracy theories, bigotry, and general nastiness towards the usual targets of his ire – but these all arise as tangents coming off his long, rambling, and repetitive restatement of his modern-day update of Gnosticism. Then again, there’s a lot of these tangents, and he lashes out at a bunch of folk; he even suggests that Putin might be a bit of a tyrant, though he still doesn’t accuse Putin of being an agent of the Conspiracy, despite the fact that he’s happy to accuse more or less every other world leader, and in general Russia comes off much lighter than Ukraine in here.

Strange Attractor’s Strange Revival

Way back when I started on this wild blogging journey, when I was just starting out writing stuff for Ferretbrain, I mentioned my enjoyment of Strange Attractor, Mark Pilkington’s journal focusing on erudite articles about off-beat subjects, with the centre of gravity being equally shared between the arts and esoterica. For a good long while, the series has been dormant, with Pilkington concentrating on making a success of its publishing arm, Strange Attractor Press, which would put out books largely within the same general spheres as Strange Attractor explored – just on here I’ve covered releases like England’s Hidden Reverse, Of Kings and Things, Days of the Underground, The Moons At Your Door, There Is A Graveyard That Dwells In Man, and Gef!, and all of those have been enjoyable and enriching in their own way.

After a long absence, though, a fifth Strange Attractor Journal has emerged from the darkness. The new Strange Attractor is edited by Mark Pilkington and Jamie Sutcliffe, whereas the previous issues were edited by Pilkington solo (note that I’ve not read Journal 4, so Sutcliffe may have been involved there). Pilkington and Sutcliffe are coy about why there’s been this long gap between issues, but to be honest it’s completely understandable: Strange Attractor Press has been undertaking ambitious projects in the intervening years and after the journal put them on the map initially, it had arguably already served its purpose. Still, it’s nice to see the old project back on track, and if Sutcliffe’s assistance can get things back on track that will be all to the good.

So, what do we get in this issue? First off is William Fowler’s Fact Or Crucifixion, a look at the infamous Hampstead Heath consensual crucifixion of the late 1960s, the legal storm and brief media flutter it inspired, and the occult and performance art motivations behind it. It’s a deep dive into an otherwise forgotten pop culture incident, and sits squarely in the Strange Attractor wheelhouse as a result. Just as appropriate is E.H. Wormwood’s The Green Crucible, offering an overview of claims of psychoactive substances being derivable from toads, and speculating about the use of toads in folk magic and alchemy.

In Tree Spirits & Celestial Brothers, Phil Legard offers a glimpse of the work of “Charubel”, an obscure working-class Welsh mystic and occult author of the 19th Century whose eccentric philosophy offered a distinctly different flavour of magic and esotericism than that propagated by the middle and upper-class Masons, Theosophists, and Golden Dawn types of the era. Humans With Animal Faces finds Jeremy Harte exploring British folklore surrounding shapeshifting ghosts and spirits, particularly spirits of humans who end up in animal form after death.

A Classier Standard of Plagiarism

Inspiration, homage, and the widespread borrowing of ideas is part of how any artistic medium works, cinema included. Culture is a conversation, conversation often requires responding to something someone else said. Kurosawa made Yojimbo as a Samurai-inspired riff on Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest; Sergio Leone then made A Fistful of Dollars as a Western-flavoured riff on Yojimbo. That’s just how the game works.

That said, the Italian film industry has sometimes been, shall we say, unusually flagrant about borrowing from others. It got especially blatant in the 1980s; Bruno Mattei would release a film entitled Terminator 2 (and, even more cheekily, renamed as Aliens 2 in some markets before it eventually settled on the less ripoff-y name Shocking Dark), there’d be an Alien 2 (and Contamination, which borrowed a bunch of ideas from Alien but executed them in a sloppy way), the distributors of The Last Shark got sued because it was just a straight ripoff of Jaws, there’s the La Casa series of films passed off as Evil Dead sequels, and then there’s the absolute legion of zombie films that have been spuriously presented as being sequels to Dawn of the Dead.

However, before the 1980s the Italian film industry seems to have been in a genuinely healthier place. For this article, I’m going to take a look at a couple of Italian horror releases which take clear inspirations from other movies or movie series – but at the same time, also bring something distinctive and new to the table.

Lady Frankenstein

Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) and his research partner, Dr. Charles Marshall (Paul Muller), are on the verge of the culmination of their life’s work: restoring life to a cobbled-together corpse (Riccardo Pizzuti). How fortunate that this wonderful event should coincide with the return home of the Baron’s daughter, Tania (Rosalba Neri), after her successful qualification as a surgeon! Alas, the creature predictably runs wild and goes on a murder rampage.

Intent on conserving her father’s reputation, Tania refuses to allow Marshall to notify the police. Instead, she comes up with her own plan: make her own creature, strong enough to battle the original prototype! And it had occurred to her that her ideal man would combine the intellectual wit and obvious infatuation for her of Dr. Marshall with the youth and physicality of Thomas (Marino Masé), the castle’s manservant who has fairly significant intellectual disabilities. Alas, busybody lawman Captain Harris (Mickey Hargitay) just won’t leave well enough alone…

Lady Frankenstein, directed by Mel Welles, is a 1971 Frankenstein-themed horror movie which is part of a long tradition of riffing on Frankenstein, but seems specifically to be imitating the Hammer Studios Frankenstein series in its approach. Specifically, it mashes up the overall aesthetic of the Hammer Frankenstein series with the more explicit sensibilities of 1970s Italian B-movies. Really, this largely amounts to saying the quiet part loud; classic Hammer wasn’t afraid to be a bit titillating from time to time, but within fairly careful limits; The Horror of Frankenstein was their attempt to do a “Frankenstein, only the scientist is a hottie who fucks” movie, and it seems positively tame next to Lady Frankenstein. Not for nothing did one of the taglines read “Only the Monster She Made Could Satisfy Her Strange Desires!” – if you saw that and bought a ticket, you’d have gotten more or less what you paid for.

Bite-Sized Book Thoughts (The Fall of Númenor, Back Book 3, and Masks of the Illuminati)

Sometimes I’ll read a book and have a thing or two to say about it on here, but not enough that I think it merits a full article, so here’s the first entrance in my Bite-Sized Book Thoughts – a book-themed update of the old Ferretnibbles concept from the Ferretbrain days.

This time around, I’m going to look at three pieces which are either direct sequels to stuff or further entries in their overall settings – where, as such, I don’t have loads to say about them which wouldn’t be redundant with what I said about related works in their respective series.

The Fall of Númenor (J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Brian Sibley)

This is essentially doing for the Second Age of Middle-Earth what The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, and The Fall of Gondolin did for the major legends of the First Age – bringing together as much as possible of the material Tolkien cooked up on the subject, arranging it in a sensible order, and releasing it as a “new” Tolkien book. With Christopher Tolkien having sailed to Valinor, for this volume the editorial burden is taken up by Brian Sibley, who was responsible for the 1981 BBC Radio dramatisation of The Lord of the Rings – for my money the best adaptation of the story extant.

This is an apt choice; between his hand in the radio drama and his authoring the official making-of books for Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth movies, Sibley has a wealth of experience in the problem of adapting Tolkien, which inherently involves a certain amount of editing Tolkien, which is the task he is faced with here. He wisely decides to follow the chronology in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings; the book is essentially a massively adapted version of that, with additional information from The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-Earth, The Nature of Middle-Earth, and Tolkien’s letters and whatnot parachuted in to expand on the entries there.

Whereas I didn’t like The History of Middle-Earth and The Nature of Middle-Earth, because to an extent they’re as much a compilation of ideas that Tolkien toyed with and then rejected as it is a collection of ideas he added to his worldbuilding but never saw light of day in his published work, I did like Christopher Tolkien’s various expansions on the First Age legends, because they saw him doing the additional legwork of taking all that material and presenting it in a much more focused fashion. This does more or less the same trick, and is able to cover a much greater span of time than any of those volumes because the Second Age is the one that Tolkien developed the least.

As a consequence of Tolkien not really writing any stories set in that time (there’s one fairly developed story of the tempestuous marriage of a Númenorean prince and a woman who does not understand his urge for exploration), this is more backstory than it is a satisfying story in its own right. This will mostly be of interest for use as a worldbuilding reference, looking up Second Age-relevant information – say, if you’re writing fanfic, running a Middle-Earth-based RPG like The One Ring, or are trying to figure out where Amazon have deviated from canon in The Rings of Power. (Answer: everywhere.)

Back Book 3 (K.C. Green and Andrew Clark)

I covered the first two volumes of this graphic novel back when I wrote about the Kickstarter for Book 2. This volume is about as long as both the previous ones put together, but the plot here has become sufficiently un-episodic that it makes sense to burn through it all in one go. The most interesting thing I have to note here is that the production of the book wasn’t crowded through Kickstarter but TopatoGO! – the TopatoCo own-brand crowdfunding platform. This is an interesting development and might make sense for projects likely to use the TopatoCo umbrella for distribution and the like, and may also be a symptom of growing mistrust of Kickstarter due to stuff like their investment in blockchain technologies of dubious utility.

In terms of the action here, this rounds out the series, sees the final revelation of the nature of the strange world that Abigail the gunslinger and Daniel the druid live on, exposes the plans of the witches manipulating King Dang, and brings everything to a satisfying resolution. This whole arc dragged a little bit when I read it on release, because it suffered from the curse of webcomic pacing where you don’t really get much more than a few pages a week, and that’s if you’re very lucky and the artist can work very quickly and update very reliably; it works substantially better read all at once, so I’m glad to get the collection. (The whole sequence is online, but it’s nice to have insurance against it disappearing in the future.)

Masks of the Illuminati (Robert Anton Wilson)

In the days immediately prior to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand kicking off World War I, Sir John Babcock comes to Zürich in a state of high agitation, believing himself to be hounded across Europe by a diabolical conspiracy. Through sheer coincidence, he encounters Albert Einstein and James Joyce – two notable thinkers of their age who happen to both be in town – and regales them with his story. Is he merely highly paranoid, or could it be that he has stumbled across a vast occult conspiracy directed by none less than the wickedest man in the world, one Aleister Crowley?

Published in 1981, Robert Anton Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminati came out hot on the heels of his Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy, in which Wilson dialled the most irritating aspects of his writing up to 11 in order to make much the same points as he did in the Illuminatus! trilogy, only in a more meandering structure with more filler which has dated worse. Since the Illuminatus! trilogy has a highly meandering structure, perhaps a bit of filler, and hasn’t dated brilliantly, that’s saying a lot.

Nonetheless, I actually think Masks of the Illuminati is pretty good. Sure, Wilson’s usual writing quirks are still there, but unexpectedly, out of nowhere, he suddenly learns something resembling narrative discipline, and he ensures his use of his various recurring schticks are actually appropriate to the job at had. For instance, yet again he’s back to mimicing James Joyce at points, but this is generally pulled out for sections written from Joyce’s point of view, so the Joyce-isms are justified by the premise.

(One might argue that that’s also true in Schrödinger’s Cat, since that’s a slice-of-life book without any conventional plot which is consciously borrowing from Ulysses, famously a slice-of-life book without any conventional plot, but in that context it doesn’t stick the landing because it’s also trying to do a dozen other things in a fairly disorganised fashion.)

More broadly, the whole arc of the novel is about an initiatory experience in which Babcock’s worldview is forcibly leapfrogged from a somewhat stuffy and old-fashioned Victorian mindset into a more postmodern outlook – so Wilson’s occasional drifts into experimentalism, his comedic asides, the sections of the book written as scripts (some including cinematic-style notes on shots), the obligatory hallucinatory trip at the end (likely induced by mescaline rather than LSD, but other than that a good old-fashioned Wilson standby), and all the rest are kind of apt in that sense.

In particular, such anachronistically experimental notes end up being a neat device for nudging the reader and reminding them that, despite appearances to the contrary, this is not a straight-up horror novel in the style of Arthur Machen, Robert Chambers, or Lovecraft (not credited in the text, obviously, but an entire strand of the story is a nicely-done riff on The Whisperer In Darkness) with a plot from straight out of Dennis Wheatley; that’s merely the subjective experience of Sir John, who has a worldview which reverts to that sort of thing when under stress.

In addition, whereas Schrödinger’s Cat had Wilson attempt address a large number of subjects in a fairly disorganised way, with the result that he touches on a lot of them in a fairly oversimplified manner, Masks sees him be a bit more careful about setting the boundaries of his narrative. Sure, there’s all sorts of nods to Schrödinger’s Cat and Illuminatus! scattered through the thing, with various characters here conceivably being ancestors or alternate versions of characters from those series, and there’s implications about deeper linkages and the possibility that World War I might have been the result of Illuminati machinations, but those are sideshows, and Wilson makes sure not to get bogged down in them. His story here is the psychological liberation of Sir John Babcock, and he focuses on that.

Wilson actually focusing on something is a novelty, but in this instance it pans out surprisingly well. The entire story spins a yarn about Crowley which, though fictional in its particulars, shows a fairly deep knowledge of Crowley’s life and philosophy and a fair amount of research; Wilson’s erudition on the subject is especially impressive when you remember he was writing at a time before some of the better biographies of Crowley were extant.

Indeed, it is possible to interpret the novel in an entirely sceptical manner – regarding any claims about the Golden Dawn (and therefore Crowley’s A.’.A.’., his Golden Dawn splinter group) having a sort of apostolic succession dating back to the Knights Templar and beyond as spurious and regarding the entire thrust of the novel as psychological, and not magical, and for the book to still tell a story with a satisfying narrative arc. Equally, you can read all sorts of additional stuff into it should you wish. Squaring that particular circle is difficult, and it’s impressive how well Wilson does it. Although Illuminatus! would forever be Wilson’s major claim to fame, Masks of the Illuminati is possibly a better novel if you are after something that resembles an actual novel, rather than a bullshit session between two stoned philosophical autodidacts.

Schrödinger’s Litter

When I did my review of the Illuminatus! trilogy, I mentioned that it was the high-water mark of Shea and Wilson’s respective careers, at least in terms of critical recognition. Robert Shea was significantly less prolific as an author going forwards; Robert Anton Wilson was, but he’d always be billed as the guy who co-wrote Illuminatus! and nothing would really end up displacing that.

Not that he didn’t give it a level try. Schrödinger’s Cat is a triptych of novels which offer Wilson’s panoramic view of the late-1970s zeitgeist, much as Illuminatus! captured the spirit of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The schtick is that each book centres around a different interpretation of quantum mechanics – so the first book, The Universe Next Door, unfolds over a cluster of parallel universes, the second (The Trick Top Hat) explores the idea of non-locality and the third (The Homing Pigeons) tackles the difficult question of the role of the conscious observer in collapsing the wavefunction.

This is a clever trick, and Wilson is so impressed with how clever it is that he neglects to give the trilogy much in the way of a substantive central plot. Oh, sure, some ongoing stories do happen and develop, but they aren’t really the point – the point is more that we are following these characters around and observing their little lives and their bullshitty little conversations with each other and whatnot.

You can make an artistically compelling novel out of people doing nothing in particular beyond depicting people living their little lives in the shadow of greater events, mind. James Joyce did it with Ulysses, as Wilson will allude to. Frequently. As he alludes to all of his other pet subjects, more or less all of which he also leaned on heavily in Illuminatus! – and all too often, he doesn’t really have all that much to say about them there which he didn’t handle with a little more flair over there.

Burden of Dreams, Labour of Nightmares

Whereas Werner Herzog was extremely busy in the 1970s – putting out early, formative works, his first major artistic successes, and many of the films his reputation would rest on going forwards – cinematically speaking, he was less prolific in the 1980s. Part of this is because in this period his endeavours diversified – for instance, in 1986 he began a long-running parallel career as an opera director.

There is, however, another reason – which is that at this point his feature film concepts became so elaborate, and so difficult to execute, that this combined with his insistence on making things as authentic as possible (along with some major additional production challenges not of his own making) made executing and completing them much more difficult. In fact, he would only finish three full-length movies in this decade – but one of them would overshadow all the rest.

In all three, Herzog tries to tackle the subject of colonialism, and yet the stories of these productions suggest that the mere process of trying to make a commercially viable movie – even one aimed at the arthouse market – can itself be an act of colonialism.

But before that, a few shorts…

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

This is a short piece, directed by Les Blank, essentially shot as publicity material for Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven, a documentary about the pet cemetery industry. Herzog had encouraged Morris to complete the project by saying he’d eat his shoe if it got finished and released; this depicts him making good on that. It has some interesting insights into Herzog’s mindset about filmmaking and his consciously anti-commercial approach, but the piece is most interesting for its role in bringing Les Blank into Herzog’s orbit – which, as we’ll see, will prove crucial later on.

Ready Illuminatus One

It’s a busy April somewhere in the 1970s. Just off the coast of west Africa, a coup sees the island of Fernando Poo become the biggest Cold War flashpoint since the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Las Vegas, a biowarfare scientist’s erratic behaviour might compromise the security of the supervirus Anthrax Leprosy Pi. In Ingolstadt, a music festival that would make Woodstock look like a church picnic is set to raise the psychic energy necessary to enact a monstrous plan. In Atlantis, Howard the dolphin has spotted nefarious activities he’ll need his human allies to deal with. In the face of both the overt international crisis and the more esoteric matters bubbling under the surface, the bombing of the New York offices of Confrontation, a radical left-wing journal, and the disappearance of its editor Joe Malik would seem to be a minor matter. But hardened detectives Saul Goodman and Barney Muldoon discover in the wreckage a stash of memos on Malik’s “Illuminati project” – the product of research into the legendary global conspiracy of the same name.

It sounds too weird to be true – but Confrontation journalist George Dorn has been busted in Mad Dog, Texas by a sheriff who seems to have some decidedly Illuminated decorations in a back room at the local jailhouse, and then sprung from jail by a cadre of free market radicals. Whisked away to a golden submarine and introduced to international seafarer, ace attorney, and mystical leader Hagbard Celine, Dorn is about to discover that the Illuminati are all too real, and that their hidden hand is behind all of the above cosmological crises and more as they seek to Immanentize the Eschaton – or, to get away from the theological language, bring about the end of the world as we know it…

The Illuminatus! Trilogy was originally published in three volumes – The Eye In the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan – but was conceived by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea as a single book, and indeed is more generally available these days in omnibus editions collecting all three books than as separate volumes. Between this and the fairly extensive appendices, there’s a certain conscious riffing on the structure of The Lord of the Rings going on – along with innumerable other nods to other pop culture and counterculture touchstones. In constructing the novel Shea and Wilson touch on music, numerous strands of occultism and New Age thinking (with major doses of Crowley and Discordianism a key part of the curriculum), flavours of libertarianism ranging from Objectivism to Michael Moorcock-esque left-libertarianism, pulp sword and sorcery versions of the history of humanity, horny on main sexual fantasies, references to literary inspirations ranging from William Burroughs to James Joyce, and so on and so forth ad nauseum.

All this is to add window dressing to what is ultimately a fairly thin main plot which, without the conspiracy theorising and the mysticism and the libertarian politics, could have been happily addressed in some 300 pages or so, rather than the cumbersome 800+ pages the trilogy actually weighs in at. However, a tight conspiracy thriller this is not: it’s more of a stoned countercultural morass of parodies which are slightly too on the nose, in-jokes which are milked entirely too often to stay funny, rambling conversations which come across as little more than student common room bullshit sessions given some conspiratorial bling, and a dense thicket of references.

Phantom Recollections of a Profane Youth

Some conspiracy theorists are merely remixers and collage artists, grabbing scraps of other people’s fringe research and assembling them into their own larger pattern. Alex Jones, Bill Cooper, David Icke, and Jim Keith all fit into this category. Other works of conspiracy literature, however, are more original. In some cases, like Martin Cannon’s essay The Controllers or William Bramley’s The Gods of Eden, they look over the existing literature, do a bit of their own legwork and hypothesising, and propose a genuinely new – albeit spurious – concept. In other cases, like the original Alternative 3, the conspiracy theory is constructed out of whole cloth as a deliberate hoax. Then there are those rarer cases, where a novel conspiracy theory appears a priori – constructed not from an eccentric interpretation of existing research and evidence, and not from a deliberate joke, but as an expression of the writer’s idiosyncratic worldview.

And surely, in the modern history of the world, few worldviews have been quite as eccentric as James Shelby Downard’s.

Downard was never exactly famous in his lifetime. Born in 1913 and dying in 1998, he seems to have toiled away in obscurity for much of his mortal span. In the 1970s he appeared on Sirius Rising, an audio lecture in which he assisted Jim Brandon in laying out a theory that secret societies on Earth were trying to contact extraterrestrial intelligences from Sirius – an idea reported by Robert Anton Wilson in his Cosmic Trigger as “the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all” (and as the author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, he’d have heard a fair few of those theories).

A little later, Downard would show up in the company of Michael Hoffman, infamous Holocaust denier and antisemite (Downard, alas, would have few qualms about expressing his own racist views from time to time in his writing), who would produce an edited version of one of Downard’s essays, King-Kill/33°; Adam Parfrey, founder of Feral House, would include the essay in his first edition of Apocalypse Culture (in the revised version it’s switched out for another Downard essay, The Call to Chaos), and an unexpurgated version of it – the “pure Downard” rendition, if you will – appeared in Secret & Suppressed as Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism.

Downard’s theory, as outlined in King-Kill/33° and The Call to Chaos, was that major world events – the Trinity nuclear weapons test, the Moon landing, the Kennedy Assassination, the death of Marilyn Monroe, and so on – were all orchestrated by the Freemasons not necessarily because they valued the direct cause-and-effect results of those events, but because they played a crucial role in vast symbolic rituals intended to shape the psyche of humanity as a whole. Perhaps only Alan Moore’s dizzying (and specifically fictional) theory of the Ripper murders being committed to resonate with London’s sacred architecture, as outlined in From Hell, would ever come close to Downardian territory back in the 1990s when these essays first hit the scene.