In 1968, Allan Chapman an assistant from Garrison came out to the media claiming the JFK assassination had been the work of’ the Bavarian Illuminati! And although it is not certain this remark had anything to do with a chapter of "The Bavarian Illuminati" that was formed at the University of Berkeley campus as a satire sometime in 1967. This ‘Bavarian Illuminati‘ group sent out press releases on all sorts of weird subjects, the intent of which was to give people who wanted to believe in conspiracies something to point to.

What is certain however is that among those involved in this clandestine U.C. Berkeley Illuminati Bavarian project was Louise Lacey who was indeed also involved with (the forerunner of the “Church of the Subgenius”) the “Discordian Society ! During the time Jim Garrison started his investigation they already were pormomoting a spoof tract called ‘Pricipia Discordia’, a Marx Brothers version of ‘Zen’ known as “Operation Mindfuck” as the Discordians liked to call it. Reality was however (I have all evidence plus the name of the accused on file) that Jim Garrison claimed one of the members of the Illuminati/Discordian society, was in fact a double for the person that killed president Kennedy!

Robert Anton Wilson then, involved with both the formation the UCB ‘Illuminati’ and,Discordian mythos, who upon Allan Chapman’s remark brought this twisted loop of conspiratorial high weirdness into the open end 1968 when he wrote an open a letter placed in the Forum section of Playboy, which Wilson was then editing.

Here a spurious correspondence put forth the theory that the wave of political assassinations then taking place in America had been orchestrated by the Bavarian Illuminati, and Wilson thus set into motion a new mythology.

An August 1968 letter to Louise Lacey,  addressed the forthcoming "Playboy Forum" hoax, and further outlined a madcap plan of clandestine action with the creation of Hassan-i-Sabbah X, a modern-myth-in-the-making:” The name your black writer writes under is Hassan-i-Sabbah X-this name he chose as a somewhat whimsical put-on, as Hassan i Sabbah was the Moslem heretic who founded the Assassins, after which was patterned the Roshaniya (or Illuminated Ones), after which were patterned the Alumbrados of Spain and the Illuminati of Bavaria. Formerly, he was a student at Berkeley, where he joined the Berkeley psychedelic anarchist group, the Bavarian Illuminati, containing all rank-and-file brother in Black Islam. Naturally you cannot reveal the country in which Hassan-i-Sabbah languishes at present nor his real name, for to do so would be to imperil these unsung heroes who transmit his work to the world, not to mention Hassan-i-Sabbah X himself.”

Later on in the letter:

“Of course it will first be necessary to present the Bavarian Illuminati side of things-we are a much-maligned group. We are not, for example, assassins-not PEOPLE assassins, anyhow, but EGO assassins. We pick out various targets in the power structure and, by one means or another, TURN THEM ON. And, contrary to the exaggerations of our enemies, we do NOT control ALL the TV networks-better to blame us for the assassinations than THAT! Nor have we yet secured complete control of international banking (we still need your donations out there for this project to continue).

But it is plain that we definitely ARE on the offensive these days (so much so that we can begin to come out in the open at relatively liberated places like Berkeley) and one of our membership drive slogans (as we are going to start openly selling memberships in the near future in order to raise money for various worthy causes, such as Kerry Thornley's Defense Fund "Don't let Garrison wreck the Illuminati!") can be: GET ON THE WINNING SIDE-JOIN THE BAVARIAN ILLUMINATI!

For only five bucks, folks-or a larger donation if you can afford it-you get a Bavarian Illuminati Membership Card, which is to Illuminate the Opposition. You also get other junk and especially some ILLUMINATION STICKERS, which you paste up in heads and phone booths & which are triangular, feature the Illuminati Pyramid, and say on them either CONSPIRE or (depending on the sticker in question) ILLUMINATE. You also get an "in Gold we trust" button and a psychedelic recruiting poster-THE ILLUMINATI BUILD CONSPIRATORS! (THE ILLUMINATI BUILD GODS?) (BUDDHAS?)

Naturally, all illuminated people are Illuminati, and nearly all the young people are illuminated these days-but to be a Conscious Agent of the Conspiracy, you have to be a card-carrying Illuminati.”

After this letter, the shadowy world of American conspiracy theories would never be the same again. Not only was it follwed by R.A.Wilson’s ‘factual’  novel, no  not, “ The Da Vinci Code” trilogy’, but the The Illuminatus trilogy”-in addition to using several quotations lifted directly from the Principia Discordia-has been described by the (very small) Wilson-gang, as “a science fiction / occult / conspiracy novel constructed in a Discordian mindfuck framework.”

However just like the Da Vinci Code (part 2 and 3 upcoming) trilogy, seem to have pressed a magick button. New exposes of the Illuminati began to appear everywhere, in journals ranging from the extreme Right to the ultra-Left. Some of this was definitely not coming from us Discordians. In fact, one article in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1969 consisted of a taped interview with a black phone-caller who claimed to represent the "Black Mass," an Afro-Discordian conspiracy we had never heard of. He took credit, on behalf of the Black Mass and the Discordians, for all the bombings elsewhere attributed to the Weather Underground.Other articles claimed the Illuminati definitely were a Jesuit conspiracy, a Zionist conspiracy, a banker's conspiracy, etc., and accused such worthies as FDR, J. Edgar Hoover, Lenin, Aleister Crowley, Jefferson and even Charlemagne famous through Pierre Plantard’s Priory of Sion scam of the same period) of being members of it.

In fact later in an interview, R.A.Wilson remembered: "I appointed myself the head of the Illuminati, which led to a lot of interesting correspondences with other heads of the Illuminati in various parts of the world. One of them threatened to sue me. I told him to resubmit his letter in FORTRAN, because my computer wouldn't accept it in English and I never heard from him again. I think that confused him."

 

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