Sephiroth
The references to Cabala, Kabbalah, Q'abala (whatever) as chapter headings seem fairly important. Here's RAW in an interview:
" I don’t think the reader needs to be particularly erudite to appreciate most of the humor in Illuminatus! I’ve received lots of fan letters from teen-agers, and nobody is particularly erudite at that age (although I thought I was). There are lots of “in” jokes that will only be appreciated by mathematicians, or physicists, or Joyce scholars, or acid-heads, or Cabalists or other special interest groups, but that’s just the icing on the cake. Some traps are deliberate, of course; as Josiah Warren said, “It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly.” I have tried to shield my readers from that danger. Besides, a book should last and not get worn-out. I’ve been reading Finnegans Wake for 27 years now and I still find loads of new jokes and subtleties every time I get into it. I hope Illuminatus! might last that way for its real aficionados. There’s lots of fun, for instance, in store for anybody who starts relating the contents of the ten chapters to the Sephiroth on the Cabalistic Tree of life after which the chapters are named."
For an excellent starting point in reading Illuminatus! through this particular grid, we can recommend
Insiders Guide to Robert Anton Wilson by Eric Wagner (link to New Falcon Publications but also available on Amazon) Appendix Samekh: Illuminatus!
Thanks, also, to Ananta Baraka for drawing my attention to RAW's excellent essay, available on Dedroidify here. A brief but clear introduction to the subject, and enough to lead to a new re-reading of the trilogy, through this different lens or filter.
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The Bogus Magus does not claim any skill or knowledge with the Kabbala, but it certainly features as a crucial element of the text (particularly in the Trip titles) so he thought he would compile a couple of resources here which may at least prove suggestive. His lack of knowledge means he cannot assess these random samplings from the Web, for accuracy. He will assume that the Two Bobs were drawing on the Hermetic Qabalah tradition of the Golden Dawn, rather than the traditional Jewish Kabbalah. Even that remains an assumption.
To clarify that distinction we can recommend Colin Low's excellent site, which you can find here.
The Trips follow the Lightning Flash descent into matter:
The Lightning Flash describes the creative process,
beginning with the unknown, unmanifest hidden God, and follows it
through ten distinct stages to a change in the material world. It
can be used to describe *any* change - lighting a match, picking
your nose, walking the dog - and novices are usually set the
exercise of analysing any arbitrarily chosen event in terms of
the Lightning Flash. Because the Lightning Flash can be used to
understand the inner process whereby the material world of the
senses changes and evolves, it is a key to practical magical
work, and because it is intended to account for *all* change it
follows that all change is equally magical, and the word "magic"
is essentially meaningless (but nevertheless useful for
distinguishing between "normal" and "abnormal" states of
consciousness, and the modes of causality which pertain to each).
It also follows that the key to understanding our "spiritual
nature" does not belong in the spiritual empyrean, where it
remains inaccessible, but in *all* the routine and unexciting
little things in life. Everything is is equally "spiritual",
equally "divine", and there is more to be learned from picking
one's nose than there is in a spiritual discipline which puts you
"here" and God "over there". The Lightning Flash ends in Malkuth,
and it can be followed like a thread through the hidden pathways
of creation until one arrives back at the source. The next
chapter will retrace the Lightning Flash by examining the
qualities of each sephira in more detail.
Below:
Bobby Campbell's version, designed for An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson by Eric Wagner
Some call The Septhiroth the Ten Holy Apples (according to Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi)