(Who was Emperor Norton? Joe asks, wondering if the drug is beginning to work already or Dr. Ignotius just has a tendency to speak more slowly than most people.)
Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. San Francisco is proud of him. He lived in the last century and got to be emperor by proclaiming himself as such. For some mysterious reason, the newspapers decided to humor him and printed his proclamations. When he started issuing his own money, the local banks went along with the joke and accepted it on par with U.S. currency. When the Vigilantes got into a lynching mood one night and decided to go down to Chinatown and kill some Chinese, Emperor Norton stopped them just by standing in the street with his eyes closed reciting the Lord's Prayer. Are you beginning to understand Emperor Norton a little, Mr. Wabbit?
(A little, Joe said, a little…)
Well, chew on this for a while, friend: there were two very sane and rational anarchists who lived about the same time as Emperor Norton across the country in Massachusetts: William Green and Lysander Spooner. They also realized the value of having competing currencies instead of one uniform State currency, and they tried logical arguments, empirical demonstrations and legal suits 'to get this idea accepted. They accomplished nothing. The government broke its own laws to find ways to suppress Green's Mutual Bank and Spooner's People's Bank. That's because they were obviously sane, and their currency did pose a real threat to the monopoly of the Illuminati. But Emperor Norton was so crazy that people humored him and his currency was allowed to circulate. Think about it. You might begin to understand why Bugs Bunny is our symbol and why our currency has the ridiculous name hempscript. Hagbard Celine and his Discordians, even more absurdly, call their money flaxscript. That commemorates the Zen Master who was asked, "What is the Buddha?" and replied, "Five pounds of flax." Do you begin to see the full dimensions of our struggle with the Illuminati?
At least, for now, you can probably grasp this much: their fundamental fallacy is the Aneristic Delusion. They really believe in law n' order. As a matter of fact, since everybody in this crazy, millennia-old battle has his own theory about what the Illuminati are really aiming at, I might as well tell you mine. I think they're all scientists and they want to set up a scientific world government. The Jacobins were probably following precise Illuminati instructions when they sacked the churches in Paris and proclaimed the dawn of the Age of Reason. You know the story about the old man who was in the crowd when Louis XVI went to the guillotine and who shouted as the king's head fell, "Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged"? All the symbols that De Molay introduced into Masonry are scientific implements- the T-square, the architect's triangle, even that pyramid that has caused so much bizarre speculation. If you count the eye as part of the design, the pyramid has 73 divisions, you know, not 72. What's 73 mean? Simple: multiply it by five, in accordance with Weishaupt's funfwissenschaft, the science of fives, and you get 365, the days of the year. The damn thing is some kind of astronomical computer, like Stonehenge. The Egyptian pyramids are facing to the East, where the sun rises. The great pyramid of the Mayans has exactly 365 divisions, and is also facing to the East. What they're doing is worshipping the "order" they have found in Nature, never realizing that they projected the order there with their own instruments.
That's why they hate ordinary mankind- because we're so disorderly. They've been trying for six or seven thousand years to reestablish Atlantis-style high civilization- law 'n' order- the Body Politic, as they like to call it. A giant robot is what their Body Politic really amounts to, you know. A place for everything and everything in its place. A place for everybody and everybody in his place. Look at the Pentagon- look at the whole army, for Goddess's sake! That's what they want the planet to be like Efficient, mechanical, orderly- very orderly- and inhuman. That's the essence of the Aneristic Delusion: to imagine you have found Order and then to start manipulating the quirky, eccentric chaotic things that really exist into some kind of platoons or phalanxes that correspond to your concept of the Order they're supposed to manifest. Of course, the quirkiest, most chaotic things that exist are other people- and that's why they're so obsessed with trying to control us.
Why are you staring like that? Am I changing colors or growing bigger or something? Good: the acid is starting to work. Now we can really get to the nitty-gritty. First of all, most of what I've been telling you is bullshit. The IIluminati have no millennia-old history; neither do the JAMs. They invented their great heritage and tradition- Jacques De Molay and Charlemagne and all of it- out of whole cloth in 1776, picking up all sorts of out-of-context history to make it seem plausible. We've done the same. You might wonder why we copy them, and even deceive our own recruits about this. Well, part of illumination- and we've got to be illuminized ourselves to fight them- is in learning to doubt everything. That's why Hagbard has that painting in his stateroom saying "Think for yourself, schmuck," and why Hassan i Sabbah said "Nothing is true." You've got to learn to doubt us, too, and everything we tell you. There are no honest men on this voyage. In fact, maybe this part is the only lie I've told you all evening, and the Illuminati history before 1776 really is true and not an invention. Or maybe we're just a front for the Illuminati… to recruit you indirectly…
Feeling paranoid? Good: illumination is on the other side of absolute terror. And the only terror that is truly absolute is the horror of realizing that you can't believe anything you've ever been told. You have to realize fully that you are "a stranger and afraid in a world you never made," like Houseman says.
Twenty-two big rhinoceroses, twenty-three big. rhinoceroses…
The Illuminati basically were structure-freaks. Hence, their hangup on symbols of geometric law and architectural permanence, especially the pyramid and the pentagon. (God's Lightning, like all authoritarian Judeo-Christian heresies, had its own share of this typically Occidental straight-line mystique, which was why even the Jews among them, like Zev Hirsch, accepted the symbol first suggested by Atlanta Hope: that most Euclidean of all religious emblems: the Cross.) The Discordians made their own sardonic commentary on the legal and scientific basis of law V order by using a 17-step pyramid-17 being a number with virtually no interesting geometric, arithmetic or mystic properties, outside of Java, where it was the basis of a particularly weird musical scale- and topping it with the Apple of Discord, symbol of the un-rational, un-geometrical, and thoroughly disorderly spontaneity of the vegetable world of creative evolution. The Erisian Liberation Front (ELF) had no symbol, and when asked for one by new recruits, replied loftily that their symbol could not be pictured, since it was a circle whose circumference was everywhere and its center nowhere. They were the most far-out group of all, and only the most advanced Discordians could begin to understand their gibberish.
The JAMs, however, had a symbol that anyone could understand, and, just as Harry Pierpont showed it to John Dillinger midway through a nutmeg high in Michigan City prison, Dr. Ignotius showed it to Joe midway through his first acid trip.
"This," he said dramatically, "is the Sacred Chao."
"That's a symbol of technocracy," Joe said, giggling.
"Well," Dr. Ignotius smiled, "at least you're original. Nine out of ten new members mistake it for the Chinese yin-yang or the astrological symbol of Cancer. It's similar to both of them- and also to the symbols of the Northern Pacific Railroad and the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, all of which is eventually going to lead to some interesting documents being produced at John Birch headquarters, I'm sure, proving that sex educators run the railroads or that astrologers control the sex educators or something of that sort. No, this is different. It is the Sacred Chao, symbol of Mummu, God of Chaos.