The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Very few readers of the Golden Bough have pierced Sir Prof. Dr. Frazer's veil of euphemism and surmised the exact method used by Isis in restoring life to Osiris, although this is shown quite clearly in extant Egyptian frescoes. Those who are acquainted with this simple technique of resurrecting the dead (which is at least partially successful in all cases and totally successful in most) will have no trouble in skrying the esoteric connotations of the Sacred Chao- or of the Taoist yin-yang or the astrological sign of cancer. The method almost completely reverses that of the pentagrams, right or left, and it can even be said that in a certain sense it was not Osiris himself but his brother, Set, symbolically understood, who was the object of Isis's magical workings. In every case, without exception, a magical or mystical symbol always refers to one of the very few* variations of the same, very special variety of human sacrifice: the "one eye opening" or the "one hand clapping"; and this sacrifice cannot be partial- it must culminate in death if it is to be efficacious. The literal-mindedness of the Saures, in the novel, caused them to become a menace to life on earth; the reader should bear this in mind. The sacrifice is not simple. It is a species of cowardice, epidemic in Anglo-Saxon nations for more than three centuries, which causes most who seek success in this field to stop short before the death of the victim.

Anything less than death-that is, complete oblivion-simply will not work.** (One will find more clarity on this crucial point in the poetry of John Donne than in most treatises alleging to explain the secrets of magick.)

* Fewer than seventy, according to a classical enumeration.

** The magician must always identify fully with the victim, and share every agonized contortion to the utmost. Any attitude of standing aside and watching, as in a theatrical performance, or any intellectualization during the moments when the sword is doing its brutal but necessary work, or any squeamishness or guilt or revulsion, creates the two-mindedness against which Hagbard so vehemently warns in Never Whistle While You're Pissing. In a sense, only the mind dies.

A. YIN-YANG; B. SACRED CHAD; c. OUROBOROS, THE SERPENT EATING ITS OWN TAIL;

D. ASTROLOGICAL SIGN OF CANCER; E. SWASTIKA;

F. ROMAN CATHOLIC SACRED HEART; G. HEXAGRAM.

The symbolism of the swastika is quite adequately explained in Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, is chiefly emblematic of the Mass of the Holy Ghost.*

* See Israel Regardie, The Tree of Life.

The Roman Catholic symbolism of the Sacred Heart is strikingly overt, especially to readers of Frazer and Payne-Knight. In essence, it is the same notion conveyed by the cartoonist's conventional rendering of Cupid shooting his arrow into a red pulsating heart. This is the basic meaning of the Dying God and the Resurrection. The identification of Christ with the pelican who stabs its own heart with its beak (to feed its young) is an analogous rendering of the same motif. We repeat that it was only because the Saure family so misread these simple symbols that they became cruel and sadistic.

In essence, then, the basic symbols, of magic, mythology, and religion-whether Eastern or Western, ancient or modern, "right-hand" or "left-hand"-are so simple that only the pernicious habit of looking for alleged "profundities" and "mysteries" prevents people from automatically understanding them almost without thinking. The meaning of the hexagram- the female equivalent of the male pentagram- was explicated by Freud himself, but most students, convinced that the answer could not be so elementary and down-to-earth, continue to look into the clouds.

The same principles apply to written symbols. The all-important name YOD HE VAU HE, for instance, has traditionally been scanned in various ways, of which the most significant correlations are given in the following table:

The traditional lion-man-eagle-bull symbolism also fits this table,* as do Joyce's Four Old Men in Finnegans Wake;** it can also be found in the Aztec codices and Buddhist mandalas.

* YOD, the fiery father, is the lion (fire-sign); HE, the watery mother, is man as humanity; VAU, the air spirit, is eagle; final HE, earth, is bull.