The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"How many contradictions did you spot in these memos? I counted thirteen. This researcher, Pat, saw it, too: the evidence is deliberately warped and twisted. All of it- not just that East Village Other

chart- is a mixture of fact and fiction." Saul lit his pipe and settled back in his chair (in 1921, reading Arthur Conan Doyle, he first began playing these scenes, in imagination).

"In the first place, either the Illuminati want publicity or they don't. If they control everything, and want publicity, they'd be on billboards more often than Coca-Cola and on TV more often than Lucille Ball. On the other hand, if they control everything, and don't

want publicity, none of these magazines and books would have survived- they would have disappeared from libraries, book stores and publisher's warehouses. This researcher, Pat, never would have found them.

"In the second place, if you want to recruit people into a conspiracy, besides idealism and whatever other noble motives you might exploit in them, you would always exploit hope. You would exaggerate the size and power of the conspiracy, because most people want to join the winning side. Therefore, all assertions about the actual strength of the Illuminati should be regarded, a fortiori,

as suspect, like the voters' polls released by candidates before elections.

"Finally, it always pays to frighten the opposition. Therefore a conspiracy will exhibit the same behavior that ethnologists have observed in animals under attack: it will puff itself up and try to look bigger. In short, potential or actual recruits and potential and actual enemies will both be given the same false impression: that the Illuminati is twice, or ten times, or a hundred times, its actual size. This is logical, but my first point was empirical- the memos do exist- and therefore logic and empiricism confirm each other: the Illuminati are not able to control everything. What then? They've been around a long time and they are as tireless as the Russian mathematician who worked out pi

to the one-thousandth place. The probability, then, is that they control some things and influence a hell of a lot more. This probability increases as you think back over the memos. The two chief Arabic branches- the Hashishim and the Roshinaya- were both wiped out; the Italian Illuminati were 'crushed' in 1507; Weishaupt's order was suppressed by the Bavarian government in 1785; and so forth. If they were behind the French Revolution, they influenced rather than controlled, because Napoleon undid everything the Jacobins started. That they had a hand in both Soviet Communism and German Fascism is plausible, considering the many similarities between the two; but if they controlled both, why did the two take opposite sides in the Second World War? And, if they ran both the Federalist party, through Washington, and the Democratic Republicans, through Jefferson, what was the purpose of the Aaron Burr counterrevolution, which they are also supposed to be behind? The picture I get is not a grand Puppet Master moving everybody on invisible strings, but some sort of million-armed octopus -a millepus, let's call it- constantly reaching out tentacles, and often drawing back nothing but a bloody stump, crying, 'Foiled again!'

"But the millepus is very busy and quite resourceful. If it controlled the planet, it could choose either operating in the open or retaining secrecy, but since it doesn't have that omnipotence yet, it must choose to be as anonymous as possible. Therefore, many of its tentacles will be probing around in the areas of publication and communications. It wants to know when somebody is investigating it or getting ready to publicize an investigation he has already completed. Finding such a person, it then has two choices: kill him or neutralize him. Killing may be resorted to in certain emergencies, but will be avoided when possible: you never know when a person of that sort has stashed extra copies of his documents in various unexpected places to be released in the event of his death. Neutralization is best, almost always."

Saul paused to relight his pipe, and Muldoon thought, The most unrealistic aspect of Doyle's stories is Watson's admiration at these moments. I'm just irritated, because he makes me feel like a chump for not seeing it myself. "Go ahead," he said gruffly, saving his own deductions until Saul was finished.