5a Golden Apple Prologue

Hagbard Celine, a mad genius fully qualified to practise several varieties of engineering and law, chooses instead to be a pirate and attempts to design the world’s first Self-Destruct Mynah Bird.

“Here, kitty-kitty-kitty! Here, kitty-kitty-kitty!” Hagbard can be heard saying as we dolly in for a close-up on his swarthy Sicilian face. (Actually, he’s half Norwegian and has a raft of Irish relatives named McGee and Marlowe in Ohio somewhere.) As the camera pulls back, we see Hagbard standing between two rows of Mynah Birds, each perched on a separate miniature lemon tree. “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty! Here, kitty-kitty-kitty!” the birds robotically repeat, thereby being programmed for self-destruct when he unleashes them in New York City.

“Honest to God,” Epicene Wildeblood (New York’s bitchiest literary critic) is later heard telling a crowd of sceptics in the office of Confrontation magazine. “The damned bird committed suicide. I was sitting in Washington Square and I heard him cackling, “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty!” Just like that. “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty!” It was a big Siamese that got him, but every cat in the neighborhood was on the prowl by then. I tell you, this city has reached the end of its rope if even the birds are turning depressive-psychotic.”

“Tell that to the Occult Digest,” Joe Malik said sceptically. Actually, Joe—who had edited Confrontation all through the eras of Joe McCarthy and Jim Garrison and flying saucers and Watergate and Linda Lovelace—was almost a transcendental agnostic by now, ready to embrace any insane rumor as possibly true. “If the real is so often bizarre, then the bizarre may often be real” had become his motto; “but,” he always added, “you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. As Mason said to Dixon.” Drawing the line had admittedly become increasingly difficult for him, especially since the Democratic Convention in Chicago, 1968, when he met Simon Moon of the Nameless Anarchist Horde and learned of the mysterious and diabolical Bavarian Illuminati.

Cut. Tight close-up on Simon Moon as he tells us about himself. “Well uh Dad and Mom were both anarchists, dig? He was the Bakuninist, I.W.W., One Big Union and keep steel helmet handy, boys, the Revolution is coming any day now. She was the Tolstoyan, nonviolence, the Jesus Trip, the next step in evolution is Universal Love. So naturally I rebelled against both of them and became a disciple of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade. For a while. But then Padre Pederastia introduced me to the JAMs.”

The JAMs—Justified Ancients of Mummu—are an ancient Babylonian secret society, worshippers of Mummu, god of chaos. (“The Chinese Taoist laughs at civilization and goes elsewhere,” Simon explains helpfully, “but the Babylonian Chaoist sets termites at the Foundations.”) When Simon and Padre Pederastia recruited Joe Malik—a process begun at the last-ever SDS convention, 1969, and continued into the 1970s, Joe being then still a confirmed skeptic—the JAMs were engaged in the 59th century of their war against the Illuminati, not counting a few centuries of alliance.

Joe Malik, whose narrow, intelligent face contained all the ambiguities of an Arabian-American intellectual who was raised Roman Catholic, joined the Trotskyists during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and edits a magazine radical enough to attract tons of crackpot mail every week, smiles tiredly. “Before meeting Simon and the Padre, the only people I ever heard talk about the Illuminati Conspiracy were right-wing cranks. I was sure Simon was putting me on at first. But then I met the leader of the JAMs...” (Thunder on the soundtrack; eerie shadows cross Joe’s face.)

We are standing outside a bungalow in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Simon knocks, Joe looks nervous. The door opens and a feisty little man says, “So you’re the new recruit. Come in and tell me how a goddam intellectual can help us beat the shit out of the cocksucking Illuminati motherfuckers.” This little old fellow has a peculiarly mocking and stony glitter in his eyes. He is John Dillinger, now living under the name Frank Sullivan, the president of Laughing Phallus Productions, king of the rock music industry. Dillinger’s first robbery, in 1923, was a travesty. The victim, a grocer named B. F. Morgan, gave the Masonic Signal of Distress and John was quickly apprehended. He made a deal with the D.A. but landed in prison anyway. Sure that the Masons were behind this betrayel, John joined the JAMs and subsequently used their motto—“Lie down on the floor and keep calm”—during each of his bank heists. This was his way of taunting J. Edgar Hoover, a thirty-third degree Mason and high Illuminatus Primus. Hoover, in turn, recognizing the “leaping bandit” (the tabloids’ gaudy title for John) as a JAM agent, gave orders which resulted in the shooting of the three innocent businessmen at Little Bohemia Lodge, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, when they were mistaken for the Dillinger gang. Smarting from criticism after this blunder, the FBI subsequently kept quiet when the man they shot at the Biograph Theatre, July 22, 1934, also turned out to be an innocent bystander. Dillinger meanwhile was promoted to a higher rank in the JAMs and gave up such crude tactics as knocking over banks.

Now an old man in the mid-1970s, Dillinger has decided to amalgamate the JAMs with a new anti-Illuminati group, the Legion of Dynamic Discord, headed by the madcap Hagbard Celine, pirate extraordinary and breeder of Self-Destruct Mynah Birds. Simon Moon: “Hagbard’s a right-wing crank!”

Joe Malik: “I dunno. Hagbard’s a genius, that’s for sure. Unfortunately, his IQ is devoted mostly to keeping the world confused about what his real motives and aims are. I just don’t know...”

Hagbard, in fact, is the discoverer of the Snafu Principle, which holds that communication is possible only between equals. Every hierarchy, therefore, in order to repress equality, must also repress communication. This, he claims, is the Achilles’ heel of armies, corporations, governments and other front groups used by the Illuminati in their conspiracy to govern mankind.

Where the JAMs worship the Babylonian god of chaos, Mummu, Hagbard’s Legion of Dynamic Discord worships Eris, Greek goddess of confusion, who is also known in Latin as Discordia. (Conversations among the Discordians usually begin: “Hail Eris!” “All hail Discordia!” “Kallisti!”) Unknown to the JAMs, Hagbard also has an alliance with the Erisian Liberation Front (ELF), a super-Zen supersecret insurrection following a program known as Operation Mindfuck (OM) and directed by the Dealy Lama, who lives in the sewers below Dealy Plaza, Dallas, Texas.

Close-up of a computer face almost as bland as HAL-9000. This is FUCKUP (First Universal Cybernetic Kinetic Uni-Programmer), Hagbard’s greatest invention. FUCKUP “throws” I Ching hexagrams internally, reading random open circuits as yin lines and closed circuits as yang; these are then correlated with three thousand years of I Ching scholarship, current astronomical and astrological data, CBS news, and reports from Hagbard’s agents in world capitals, thereby combining FUCKUP’s memory-integration circuits a Worldgame Report unique in its comprehensive objectivity. “World War III is imminent,” FUCKUP reports blandly, “Prognosis: many megadeaths. No blame.”

“My ass, no blame!” Hagbard rages; he now realizes the true importance of the Fernando Poo incident. Fernando Poo is a tiny island in the bay of Biafra, off the coast of Africa, where Captain Ernesta Tequila y Mota has arranged his own promotion to generalissimo by staging a blitz coup d’etat. Crack CIA agents quickly report to Washington that the new regime is under the control of Russia and China; but Russian agents report to Moscow that it is under the control of China; and Chinese agents report to Peking that it is under the control of Moscow. Hagbard, recognizing the fine hand of the Illuminati, reprograms FUCKUP to locate the source of major danger and is told that Las Vegas needs watching. Sherri Brandi (née Sharon O’Farrell) gives us her version: “The only way to make some scratch is to sell your snatch. At least, that’s the story in this hard-ass town. So I work for Carmel, who isn’t bad as pimps go, if you don’t mind getting beat all black and blue every so often. But now Carmel thinks we can get rich...”

Carmel, indeed, is convinced that Sherri’s latest john, Charlie Mocenigo, has discovered the ultimate secret weapon. Obviously, if he and Sherri can steal it and sell it to the Goddam Commies, they’ll both be millionaires. Alas, the secret weapon is Anthrax Leprosy Pi (ALP), a virus with certain unpredictable properties. Mocenigo and Sherri are both killed by an accidental infection, and Carmel unknowingly becomes a kind of Typhoid Mary. Since nobody else is aware of this significant fact either, the world is dancing on the edge of an abyss, watching Fernado Poo with trepidation, while only FUCKUP and Hagbard Celine know the real threat is coming from Las Vegas.

(Fission Chips, English Secret Agent 00005, has already discovered that all the American, Russian and Chinese reports from Fernando Poo are inaccurate. He, alas, has jumped to his own Wrong Conclusion and believes that BUGGER—Bad Unreformed Goons, Gangsters and Espionage Renegades, headed by Eric “the Red” Blowhard—is behind the coup there. Chips has never heard of the Illuminati...)

Acting on orders from Hagbard, Joe Malik sends Confrontation’s star reporter, George Dorn, to Mad Dog, Texas, to investigate the right-wing groups there, one of which is widely rumoured to be behind the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, George Lincoln Rockwell and Spiro Agnew. (Joe smiles knowingly. “That’s what I told George,” he winks.)

In Mad Dog, George is busted for possession of marijuana and hustled off to jail by Sheriff Jim Cartwright. George’s cell-mate, a snaky-looking individual named Harry Coin, first brags about killing various famous people, then attempts to rape George. The jail is then invaded by a mysterious group led by Mavis, a young lady in a trench coat carrying a Tommy gun, and they remove George after blowing holes in the walls. On the way out, George sees a hidden chapel with a pyramid-shaped altar and an open eye on top, with the slogan “Ewige Blumenkraft!” Mavis tells him that Mad Dog Jail is a secret headquarters of the Bavarian Illuminati.

George is driven to the Gulf of Mexico, where he and Mavis just have time to argue politics and engage in a little friendly oral sex before the Leif Erikson appears. This is a gigantic golden-yellow submarine owned by Hagbard Celine, who explains to George that he is neither left-wing nor right-wing but a political non-Euclidean. The Illuminati, Hagbard goes on, is the cause of all unhappiness in the world: a vast secret society founded by the Mason and former Jesuit Adam Weishaupt in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, May 1, 1776.

Back in New York, however, Saul Goodman, Inspector of the Homicide Squad, is investigating the bombing of Confrontation and the mysterious disappearance of editor Joe Malik. The strange aspect of the case is that Malik’s dogs---he had an apartment full of them, according to neighbours—also disappeared. Stranger yet is the fact that magazine staffers insist Joe was allergic to dogs. Strangest of all is a series of memos found in Joe’s apartment. Quoting various authorities, academic and otherwise, these memos give a strange variety of theories about the Illuminati, to wit:

1. According to French sociologist Jacques Ellul, the Illuminati was founded in the 11th century by disciples of Joachim of Floris and tried to redistribute wealth by robbing the rich; they were vanquished by Law and Order in 1507 and ceased to exist. But the National Review claims Joachim’s followers still survive and are seeking to imminentize the Eschaton.

2. According to Daraul’s History of Secret Societies, the Illuminati was begun by Hassan i Sabbah in 1092, entered Spain in 1623, spread throughout Europe and infiltrated Masonry via Adam Weishaupt in 1776.

3. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Illuminati was founded by Weishaupt in 1776 and suppressed by the Bavarian government in 1785.

4. According to a letter in Playboy, the Illuminati is still in existence and masterminded the assassinations of recent years.

5. According to Teenset magazine, the Illuminati controls the rock music business.

6. According to American Opinion magazine, the Council on Foreign Relations is the latest manifestation of the One World conspiracy originally founded by Weishaupt’s Illuminati.

7. According to The Spark, a Chicago newspaper, Mayor Richard Daley used the Illuminati slogan “Ewige Blumenkraft” during his diatribe against Abe Ribicoff at the 1968 Convention. Furthermore, Weishaupt and George Washington were the same man.

8. According to CBS radio, paintings of Washington are so different that they look like more than one man.

9. According to East Village Other, New York, the current leaders of the Illuminati (1969) are Malaclypse the Younger, Mao Tse-tung, Mordecai the Foul, Richard Nixon, Aga Khan, Saint Yossarian, Nelson Rockefeller, Saint McMurphy, Lord Omar and Mark Lane. (“This one must be a hoax,” Saul Goodman concludes thoughtfully...)

10. According to Virginia Brasington’s Flying Saucers in the Bible, the eye-in-pyramid, Illuminati symbol was given to Jefferson by a mysterious man in a black cloak. Neither Jefferson nor any of the other Founding Fathers knew what it meant, but they put it on the Great Seal anyway.

11. According to Planet, San Francisco, the eye-in-pyramid design is the symbol of Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

12. According to Proofs of a Conspiracy by 18th-century Mason John Robison, the Illuminati was not destroyed by the 1785 crackdown by the Bavarian government and was still trying to infiltrate Masonic groups everywhere. They supervised the French Revolution, Robison says, and are plotting more revolutions.

13. According to World Revolution by Nesta Webster, the Illuminati controls all socialist, communist and anarchist groups; the celebration of May 1 as International Labor Day by these groups actually honors the founding of the Illuminati on May 1, 1776.

14. According to History of Magic by French cabalist Eliphas Levi, the Illuminati was founded by Zoroaster and introduced to Europe by the Knights Templar in the 12th century.

15. According to High IQ Bulletin, the Illuminati are invaders from the planet Venus.

16. According to Libertarian American, the Illuminati is the political front of the Vril Society, where Adolf Hitler received his occult education; their aim is Christian Socialism, as distinguished from “godless Russian socialism.”

17. According to Los Angeles Free Press, the Theosophical Society has been accused by John Birch Society members of being the chief front for Illuminati activities; and the founder of the Illuminati, they say, was Cain, son of Eve and the Serpent.

18. According to Levi’s History of Magic again, the Holy Vehm (a kind of medieval Catholic version of the Ku Klux Klan) was the morals-enforcement wing of the Illuminati in the Middle Ages.

19. According to Daraul’s History of Secret Societies, the Nazis revived the Holy Vehm and it may still be active today.

After comparing and reviewing these memos, Saul Goodman deduces by rigorous logic that the Illuminati have inspired much of this literature to conceal their real identity and actual motives. Meanwhile, Barney Muldoon of the Bomb Squad finds evidence, annoying to himself, that the Illuminati are controlled by the Jesuits. Comparing notes, Saul and Barney conclude that the Illuminati are actually Satanists who have infiltrated every organization from Catholicism to Masonry to sow conflict and achieve their own ends. Unfortunately, soon after arriving at this deduction, Saul is kidnapped, held prisoner in a fake mental hospital and put through a psychedelic brainwashing process intended to convince him he is Barney Muldoon, a patrolman on the Newark Police Force, suffering from the hallucination that he is Saul Goodman, an Inspector on the New York Police Force.

Hagbard Celine, meanwhile, races toward sunken Atlantis in the Leif Erikson, hoping to seize some golden statues which the Illuminati are planning to melt down to finance their current projects. George Dorn is hurriedly initiated into the Legion of Dynamic Discord (with the lusty assistance of a lovely black lady named Stella Maris)—but let George tell it himself:

“Well, wow, like, man, uh I’m no hero, you know. I’d rather be initiated again—especially by Stella—or maybe Mavis—I mean a Discordian initiation is something special—(“I’ll say,” Stella interjects lewdly)—but the next thing I know Hagbard has me up on the bridge and we’re talking to a dolphin named Howard and about to be attacked by five Illuminati spider ships. Maybe I’d been smoking too much of that great Kallisti Gold grass that Hagbard grows, but it was all a big freakout. What’s it like to drown at the bottom of the Atlantic? The water pressure must crush you atom by atom, I imagine. And the Illuminati are ready to blast us with everything they have. I just go away from there in my head, you know, and I’m back in the Morituri Underground, in my younger days, when Carlo wanted me to kill a pig to show my dedication to the revolution. So there I am trailing this cop down Broadway in the ‘70s, trying to get the courage to pull the gun out of my pocket, and Howard the dolphin is yelling through the intercom “Here come the spider ships!” and I’m still remembering Stella’s luscious-lovely-yummy pussy, and I don’t know if I’m in a porny novel, a science-fiction movie, or the real world, and I got this ESP flash that this cop had a retarded four-year-old child and suddenly that made him human so I knew I couldn’t kill him. Wow, man, you see? It was heavy.” George later—or earlier: it depends on which of his time tracks we’re in—tried to shoot himself in the head, despising his cowardice, but the gun provided by Morituri Underground didn’t fire. “Well, yeah, sure”—Simon Moon is horning in on the narrative again—“Morituri is no kindergarten, we all know that. But every time I hear “Joe Hill” I think of my father:

The copper bosses killed you, Joe. “I never died,” says he.

And both lines are true, and mourning never ends, and the revolution never ends, whatever way you’re fighting it. Read De Sade. Or ask John Dillinger. You don’t come alive, as a Person, until you break the laws. Inside the legal cage, you’re nothing but a robot.” He bursts into song: “Tho’ cowards cringe and traitors sneer/ We’ll keep the Red Flag flying here...” (Down, boy. Go on, George.)

“Well, yeah, Hagbard finally blasted all five of those Illuminati spider ships and we salvaged the golden Atlantean statues. They were gorgeous, if you like antediluvian porno, I mean, but then Hagbard told me my first mission as a Discordian was to take them to the headquarters of the leader of the Mafia. I shit.”

Actually, George did fairly well on his visit to the Blue Point, Long Island, home of Robert Putney Drake, famous banker and philanthropist, unacknowledged governor of the Mafia, and Illuminatus Primus. It was arranged that, in return for the statues, Drake would break with the Illuminati, sign a treaty with the Discordians and arrange the assassinations of twenty-three top Illuminati officials in the United States as a gesture of good faith. Afterwards, George was entertained in his bedroom by Tarantella Serpentine, the lady who taught Linda Lovelace everything. George was very entertained indeed.

(But the Fernando Poo incident was escalating: the President of the United States gave Russia and China twenty-four hours to get their troops out of Fernando Poo or else was taken by terrorized earth-people everywhere to mean all-out thermonuclear war, the Kremlin and Peking were leaked the information that it also meant Anthrax Leprosy Pi—which, in fact, was already loose on the person of the little Las Vegas pimp Carmel, unknown to anyone...And, in Fernando Poo, the brave but dumb English agent Fission Chips, after a glorious fuck with a lady named Concepcion Galore, learned about a mysterious Church of Saint Toad and decided to investigate it...Whilst the rulers of Russia and China, having no troops in Fernando Poo, politely informed the world that the President of the U.S. was a mental case. The Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party thereupon, finding Marx no source of inspiration in such parlous times, threw the I Ching sticks and puzzled over Hexagram 23: “Breaking Apart”...)

And (things are moving faster now) Saul Goodman discovers that the phony psychiatrist “treating” him in the fake mental hospital is actually the missing editor Joe Malik. They are both aboard Hagbard’s submarine, Leif Erikson, bound for Ingolstadt, Bavaria, where the Illuminati hope to use the energies of Woodstock Europa—a gigantic rock festival—to imminentize the Eschaton. “What does imminentize the Eschaton mean?” Saul demands; but just then the submarine is attacked by the Illuminati spider ships and we are back in Simon Moon’s interminable monologue again:

“A glorious fuck? What the hell does a government agent like Fission Chips know about glorious fucking? Let me call a witness for the antigovernment forces. She’ll tell you about glorious fucking. Mary Lou?”

Documentary-style close-up on Mary Lou Servix, a black cop sent to infiltrate the Nameless Anarchist Horde, who ended up learning Tantra from Simon Moon also.

“At first I thought Mr. Simon Motherfucking Moon was a stone kink, an Ignatz, you know? I mean, trying to ball sitting up—it’s from Bizarresville. And I got a backache the first half-hour. But he kept telling me, “Just hang in there, just hold on, baby.” And then it started to happen—that kundalini he calls it. Earthquake City! Wilder than the time I hadda take acid with the Weather people, trying to infiltrate them. The Ancient Babylonian Secret of Serpent Power he calls it...”

Simon coughs modestly. “Our secret weapon against the Illuminati. Neuroprogramming the sixth circuit. See Dr. Leary for details.”

“To reveal everything is an ineptness,” Hagbard Celine remonstrates. “Truth must come to bloom slowly, like a secret flower in the heart. We don’t communicate much better than the dogs most of the time—as per my famous Snafu Principle. True communication, in the egalitarianism of neurology, is more complex than galactic law.” He stares into the distance, remembering Uncle John Feather...

Uncle John, a Mohawk Indian, gives us the Moral of This Fable, fairly straightforwardly for once: “You are a good lawyer, Hagbard; I know that. But can you tell the truth in a government court? I doubt it. They make their own rules and everything relevant is declared irrelevant...” But that was over twenty years ago, and after the Mohawk land was taken from them, Hagbard abandoned law for piracy...”Seeking a more honest way of making a living,” he says with that hawklike look in his eye.

But, back in present time again, Danny Pricefixer of Homicide Squad, New York, is investigating the disappearances of Joe Malik, Saul Goodman and Barney Muldoon. Some of the references in the Illuminati memos draw him, like most of our characters, into past time, where he was once a detective on the Arkham, Massachusetts, Police Force and investigated the disappearance of Professor Joshua Marsh of Miskatonic University. Professor Marsh had written a book on the lost continent of Atlantis, claiming that the Atlanteans worshiped gods, called the lloigor, who actually existed—extrasolar visitors to earth from higher civilizations in remote galaxies. Alas, every clue in the Marsh case led to a dead end, and Danny never did find out what happened to the eccentric professor...

“The one lead that bothered me most,” Danny tells our interviewer, “was the fnords. What in hell are fnords? But just the day before his disappearance, Professor Marsh was overheard by several witnesses talking to himself in the Miskatonic Library. “I’ve seen the fnords,” he kept saying. Now, I ask you, what can a poor cop do with a clue like that? It’s depressing.”

A visit to the New York Public Library and some browsing among occult books gives Danny the information that many traditions trace the Illuminati back to Atlantis, or to some interstellar source.

Waking in the big bed, George Dorn finds Tarantella has left him. But how did Mavis get here? Looking down at his elderly hands, he sobs, “You’ve won. I’m no longer sure who I am or which way Time runs...”

“No,” Mavis says, “you’ve won, Saul. You’re waking up at last.” “You mean I am Saul Goodman but I’m all the others, too...” “Who asks that question?” Mavis responds like a Zen Master...

But returning to his hotel suite, Fission Chips finds Concepcion Galore lying in his bed with her throat cut from ear to ear, and beside her the emblematic Flame Dagger of Hassan i Sabbah. “Damn, blast and thunder! Every time I find a good piece of ass, those fuckers from BUGGER come along and shaft her!”

And the White House order is given; the SAC bombers head toward Fernando Poo and the Third World War...

(Rising organ music.)

Can World War III be averted? Will Carmel infect the whole world with Anthrax Leprosy Pi? What is Hagbard’s real angle anyway? Who are the Illuminati and what’s their angle? Continue reading for the next psychotic episode...

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