The Illuminatus! Trilogy

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Eldritch Abomination: In addition to the Lloigor, there's also the Leviathan, a mountain-sized single-celled life form that's lived in the oceans since the Precambrian Era. This is Bureaucracy,” said Dionysius, and he smashed his wine jug in anger; beside him, his lynx glared balefully. Harry Truman, a servant of Realpolitik, wearing the face of Oliver Hardy, looked upon his work and saw that it was good. But beside him, Albert Einstein, a servant of that most elusive and gnomic of gods, Truth, burst into tears, the familiar tears of Stanley Laurel facing the consequences of his own karma. For a brief instant, Truman was troubled, but then he remembered the eternal words: “Now look what you made me do,” he said. Creepy Uncle: the man who made Atlanta Hope the woman she became and who indirectly inspired Telemachus Sneezed.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden

The themes in these book - Lovecraftian, erotic, science fiction, conspiracy, new age - have, for better or worse, embedded themselves in the minds of those who will not accept that state authority is anything other than oppressive. Depraved Bisexual: Harry Coin claims to be willing to have sex with anything that moves and a few things that don't. His first appearance in the story involves him trying to Prison Rape George Dorn, and threatening to rape his corpse if he didn't submit willingly. Later on he does a Heel–Face Turn and joins the good guys, and explains that the weird sex acts cause him to see pure white light, implying that he achieved a partial illumination through them! Mega-Microbes: Leviathan, the "other half of creation" that sustains itself by having grown, whilst remining a single-celled organism: he is the brother of Mother Nature, who grows by having divided into all the millions of discrete species on Earth. After millenia and aeons, Leviathan is large. World of Mysteries: The main storyline does get resolved, but there are lots of side plotlines which are either completely unresolved or provide contradictory answers regarding "who's behind what" and "who works for whom" (such as Mama Sutra's story about the Cult of the Yellow Sign). You look blank, Joe," said Malaclypse. "Has no one explained to you that the human race is divided into two distinct genotypes - neophobes, who reject new ideas and accept only what they have known all their lives, and neophiles, who love new things, change, invention, innovation? For the first four million years of man's history, all humans were neophobes, which is why civilization did not develop. Animals are all neophobes. Only mutation can change them. Instinct is simply the natural behavior of a neophobe. The neophile mutation appeared about a hundred thousand years ago, and speeded up thirty thousand years ago. However, there has never been more than a handful of neophiles anywhere on the planet. The Illuminati themselves sprang from one of the oldest neophile-neophobe conflicts on record."Historical Domain Character: William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg appear in a scene set at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party convention.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy - Wikipedia

Rather like the remarkable Sixties BBC series 'The Prisoner', the final message is that you must decide for yourself what is important, what is real, and what is misdirection. Also like 'The Prisoner', Illuminatus owes much to the spy genre of the sixties, from freewheeling sex to ultra-modern undersea bases and high-stakes secret missions. There is even an overt parody of the Bond franchise running through the books. On re-reading it today, I perceive that I came upon it at a propitious moment in my life. It has also become clear to me that it works less well for others than it did for me - in the book club I was in, none of the women were able to finish even the first book, which seems to result from the rather adolescent attitudes toward sex expressed by the authors. It was healthy enough for me as a 16-year-old male, but it does occasionally make me wince as an adult. A more minor concern is that there is so much bad German (since the "Illuminati" were Bavarian, of course). It's pretty clear that neither author spoke German, yet they tried to insert it in various places to spice things up. When I read the German translation of the book, this led to some amusing moments as the translator often just left their nonsensical German phrases in the midst of the prose. The many English puns often went right over his head as well, so I guess it was even. Unfortunately, it also seems to fall into the Boys' Club atmosphere of spy stories. Though it switches between narrators, all of them are men, and the focused sexuality of the book is usually aimed at women. There are moments where bisexuality, homosexuality, and feminist sexual power dynamics are explored, but these tend to be mere intellectual exercises while the hot, sweaty moments are by and large men taking their pleasure from women. I can enjoy porn, but I wish it were as balanced as the rhetoric to which the authors pay lip service.The All-Concealing "I": Much of the first-person narration is revealed at the end to be from the perspective of a third-person omniscient narrator in a fiction novel. However, there is a strong argument to be made for the existence of multiple first-person narrators; including, at one point, a squirrel.