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The Illuminatus! Trilogy

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The Illuminatus! trilogy of novels were written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

The books are unashamed hippie paranoia, or perhaps a satire of such paranoia, including many references to Discordianism, the Illuminati and various world domination plans, conspiracy theories and pieces of gnostic knowledge. Many of the odder conspiracies in the book are taken from unpublished letters to Playboy magazine, where the authors were working as editors while they wrote the novels. fnord

One of the most interesting conceits was the fnord, a word that the majority of the population had been trained since early childhood to ignore (and of course trained to forget the training, and the fact that that they are ignoring it) but also to associate with a vague sense of unease. The interesting thing about this conceit is that it is not falsifiable. fnord

The three books that make up the trilogy are

  • The Eye in the Pyramid
  • The Golden Apple
  • Leviathan

The trilogy was later published in a single volume, minus the "what has gone before" introduction to The Golden Apple; some of the material in that foreword--such as the self-destruct mynah birds--occurs nowhere else in the trilogy and is irrelevant to the plot.


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