Gabriel Kennedy leads us into the Chapel Perilous

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

LP: I'm so excited to meet you and speak with you for a variety of reasons. I guess as a way of jumping in, it's always exciting to meet a Bob Wilson — not only enthusiast, but now with you, someone who has immersed themselves in his work and in his life and times. There's so much I want to talk about in that regard. But first, as a service to me and our listeners, let's start with a little about who you are, where you're from, and how and why you.

Gabriel Kennedy: Sure. Yeah, no problem. No problem. And I get it, too, man. Over the years, it was always a nice discovery to find other Bob-heads. For so long, Robert Anton Wilson was relegated to the underground forever.

Gabriel Kennedy: I get it. It's nice, man. Salute.

LP: Tell me about you. Where are you from? What's your origin story? And what brought you into the world of music, art, and what I would call freak philosophy?

Gabriel Kennedy: Sure thing. I was born in Long Island, New York, and was raised by two Irish immigrants who came to New York and opened bars. So, I was raised in a bar family. I have many memories of sitting at the end of the bar while my parents were working and observing people in that setting. I was always around stories in a way; listening to people speak at the bar as a young kid was educational. Then, I went through a fairly good high school education. In my senior year, I discovered Robert Anton Wilson through a friend of mine in math class. He handed me a copy of Illuminatus! Trilogy. I was completely intrigued by the book. I read it that summer. It was a formational sort of intellectual book for me because I was just hopping into college, and now everything that was said in Illuminatus Trilogy was like my job to fact-check it. I just gave myself that job, but Robert Anton Wilson encourages people to fact-check his stuff. And that's part of the fun journey of reading his work is that his writing is very exploratory, inviting, and inclusive. It's inspirational to motivate you to put yourself on track for an education Wilson tapped into. Again, the autodidactic, do-it-yourself, heavy scholastic sort of education that he encourages in his work. I was like a Bob-head from a fairly young age then.

We're all into many different things, so that was just one guy I loved reading, right? I would read Henry Miller as well. I got super into his work, and it was very inspiring. And it was Henry Miller who showed me how exciting writing could be because I was raised on TV. I didn't read a lot of books at a younger age. MTV was amazing, right? Music videos are so cool. It seems like something that we take for granted in a way that music is such an everyday part of our lives, but there was a time when humans couldn't tap in and listen to music so easily and so easily. But yeah, so I loved music. Being at the bar, we had a jukebox, right? Like every bar, I would hear so many songs on that jukebox. And then I started getting into my interests and stuff, like hip hop, heavy metal, punk rock, etc. I just became like so many people, just like a fan of The counterculture of the American counterculture rooted in the 1960s ideals, if you will, and just followed that arc through the stages from the sixties through punk rock, new wave, post-punk, hip hop, metal, techno, went to a ton of raves as a kid. All these things coalesced around 2000 in a way that seemed like there was a moment when all the doors and windows were open, and anything was possible. And then, sadly, something crazy happened in 2001, which shut so many doors and windows and seemed to change everything completely. And we're still living through that 9/11 effect if you will. Yeah, that's a brief rundown with some thoughts.

But yeah, I was a huge Wilson fan since I was About 18 and just kept at it, kept reading his stuff. He became the guy that I would bounce everything off. People have their favorite sort of thinkers that they're always having a conversation within their minds or perhaps, and it's like, Oh yeah, I just came across this interesting factoid. What did Robert Anton Wilson write about this or think about this? And I used him as an intellectual mentor and teacher.

I read all his books repeatedly, was a super fan and whatnot, and then wanted to write a book about him. And the book became a biography because, at first, I was seeking to write about his ideas. But when I was doing that, it dawned on me, "Oh, wow, I need to really contextualize what he was writing." The things he was writing about in Cosmic Trigger are different than what he's writing about in The Thing That Ate The Constitution many years later, so I need to contextualize where he was in space and time. I should draw up a quick biography, which became the book. And it was like my final lesson with a teacher of sorts.

When someone is into one's ideas, the people who are saying the ideas can seem larger than life, obviously. And so it was like just grounding the man and his ideas into a simple, humble life that he lived. But within all that, there were a lot of exciting and interesting things that he was engaged in and that were happening around him. And so that really makes the book pop, if you will, because the book is called Chapel Perilous, the Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. So it's an approach of like a micro history, writing about Bob, his ideas, but spending a little bit of time contextualizing what was going on in America and the world and at the time that he was doing all this stuff. So it was the final test or the final lesson. It really grounded Wilson for me, and it educated me. Writing the book, when you're writing about a person's whole life and then up to someone's death, forced me to contemplate the whole lifespan that we have, and that was super interesting and a very humbling experience. But it was also eye-opening, and I applied a critical eye to Wilson, too. I presented warts and all. It's not a hagiography. It's not a fan praise of, "This guy's so great." I don't think Wilson would deserve more. You have to put him through the wringer. And I think I did, but I toasted him more than I roasted him.

LP: It's really difficult, and this can be said of most figures, but it stands out for me with Wilson that it's impossible to separate him from his time, right? He's such a post-World War II American figure. You almost could not create one in fiction better. He's not only a reflection but a summation and an arbiter.

I don't know, he's just, he's such a, he's such a late 20th-century figure in my mind. Something that's always struck me about him since I first learned about him, so I came to Wilson in the early 90s when so much of this stuff got in the air, that sort of the late zine, pre-internet era, digital communities were first emerging, the small presses were all really strong and vibrant.

As a very young man, I owned a bookstore. I carried all the New Falcon stuff. A lot of Crowley, just the whole universe, all those things that came together, technology, freak culture, philosophy, the cyberculture, and Wilson is smack dab in the middle of all that, conspiracy theories, all those things.

It's so strange to have that figure rattling around in your brain for 30-odd years and still have to understand how most people don't really know about him, and he's such a pivotal figure. So it's something that makes your book very exciting. The warts-and-all approach is something that is merited because it would be very easy to put him on a pedestal and idealize him. Still, it doesn't detract from him to place him in his time when, whether that's some of the attitudes or beliefs or whatever, it doesn't diminish him. And I certainly wouldn't expect that there's like a 'Me Too' moment or something awful that would knock him down too many pegs. If anything, it humanizes him a little.

Gabriel Kennedy: No, I didn't find many of those. He wasn't that guy.

LP: He wasn't problematic?

Gabriel Kennedy: There's a couple of things. I should leave it for the book for people to read and then digest and whatnot.

But the most critical take one could have on Wilson would be that he was living the life that he lived and also with his wife, Arlen. They were both extremely artistic and intellectual. They had four kids together. Arlen had two from a previous marriage, and then Bob and Arlen had two of their own.

Like you said, this was during the '70s, when the kids were around the house the most, and as a product of the time, they were the anti-helicopter parents. They moved around a lot when the kids were very young, and so this affected their children with a destabilizing effect. Moving is one of the more stressful things that people experience: loss of a job, being another one, or death of a loved one, but it's a common one that we don't normally realize that it is actually fairly stressful on the body and the mind.

And so Wilson quit his job at Playboy in 1971. He got the job in 1966. But he left the job in 1971 at Playboy a few years before he was eligible to eventually start collecting extra payments or something from Playboy to further provide for his family, right? His kids were young. When he did work at Playboy, the family, and the kids had dental care and healthcare.

And when he left, obviously, they lost all that stuff. That's one area where one could look at Bob and Arlen with a critical eye and be like, "Oh, maybe you weren't the best of parents. Perhaps you were somewhat neglectful. You were so wrapped up in your own thing that you really couldn't be there for your kids." Now, at the same time, that's a harsh judgment. And again, I'm not psychoanalyzing Bob in the book. I did not make that. I made it a conscious choice not to psychoanalyze Wilson, but these were things that crossed my mind as I was doing the research, right? But one has to temper that with how can you judge another person's life with their family.

It's very difficult to do that as an outsider, and I was being very careful not to do that. But what I observed was Bob and Arlen being a reflection of those times when they were extremely hands-off with their kids. And speaking with their kids, they could see that still stays with them, right? But at the same time, the times that Bob was around his kids are reflected in his book Cosmic Trigger, Volume 1. He was far from a jerk. He was like such a nice, doting, loving father who did take great care to provide certain things for his kids. It's just that he was also a full-time writer who needed to spend a lot of time at his desk, cloistered from the world, and digging into his mind to present these jewels to the rest of the world. And it shows, like, how the path of an artist is not an easy one, especially if you have a family and you're trying to balance those two things. It's educational, though. It's good for people to read because our generation, this new generation, is parents who want to be there for their kids. We're almost going into heavy helicopter parent areas, and I don't have any kids, so I don't know what it's like exactly. Still, it was educational in terms of a human education to get this close. It's like I was like a shadow for Wilson. I felt like I was time traveling going through his whole life, and just like The Great Gazoo from The Flintstones, I was able to appear and watch all this stuff as if I was one of those intelligences from the Cosmic Trigger years that he thought was zoning in on him. I did that through writing this biography, which again made it so much fun. And it was just super educational, Lawrence. There were so many things, like so many jewels, in doing this research into Wilson.

LP: Is it true that there's no sort of one central place to go? I've always understood that he didn't necessarily have the luxury of having an archivist, so it's different than visiting one place and accessing everything. Like what is it what did that mean for your role as a writer and researcher?

Gabriel Kennedy: That's true. That is very true. The closest he had to a central archivist was Michael Horowitz, who was Timothy Leary's main archivist. And Michael Horowitz maintained amazing archives of Leary, which he eventually gave or sold to the New York Public Library. So, those Timothy Leary papers are all at the New York Public Library.

Wilson and Leary enthusiasts and scholars like Christian Greer have accessed them. He really did a lot of work with the Tim Leary papers. I say all that because I got a chance to go to the New York Public Library. to look at the Wilson files that were grouped with the Leary archives because Horowitz, for some time, was sort of Bob's archivist as well. But no, not to say that, and also, he didn't have an archivist. I did have to pursue and search out all these different avenues of research and access all these special collections across America to find letters that Bob wrote to other people that they kept in their own archives.

So I was able to do this with people like Ed Sanders, one of the co-founders of The Fugs. And also the beat poet and writer who Bob was friendly with from like 1962, like just as The Fugs or before The Fugs were formed, which was pretty cool. I was able to do the same with Tuli Kupferberg, who is the other co-founder of The Fugs. Ed Sanders's archives are in the UConn Library Special Collections, and then Tuli Kupferberg's in NYU Special Collections. That was a lot of fun. That was an aspect of this book that kept me going, that kept the engine turning and staying totally motivated. To keep writing this book at full speed. And it took many years to get this book together because his archives are decentralized, you could say. There is not one collected Robert Anton Wilson archives in any library, any special collections library in America or the world, right now.

LP: Is there a day when that happens? Does the family sit on unpublished manuscripts and letters? What is the hope for there to be a Robert Anton Wilson collection somewhere? Is it possible?

Gabriel Kennedy: This is me educated guessing here, but it's possible. It's like what you said; it would involve the family and the RAW Trust, which is headed up by one of Wilson and Arlen's daughters.

What I've noticed is when they receive a manuscript because, within the course of my writing this book, there have been two Wilson manuscripts, quote-unquote, long lost manuscripts that have been discovered in the different special collection libraries. The first one is this book called The Starseed Transmissions. I think that's the name of it. That was found by Christian Greer and given to Adam Gorightly, another writer of very interesting and fun topics. Then it made its way to the Raw Trust, and they eventually put that book out on their publishing house. And then this just happened with another one, a book they're calling The Lion of Light. I actually accessed this book. It was at Harvard Special Collections Library, called the Houghton Library. I paid per page for the photocopy, and I read it on my YouTube page if anyone wants to check it out. Because it's a really awesome book about Crowley, it's Wilson's most compact explanation of Crowley's life, but more importantly, what he calls Crowley's curriculum, which is, if you're interested in Thelemic Magic, that's the step-by-step right there. Bob has given it to you in a more clear way than Crowley will present it. I want to answer your question in terms of when and if a physical Wilson archive will manifest in a college somewhere.

I'm going out on a limb and saying I have the most letter correspondence, in terms of different people that he wrote to from my going out and research than anyone right now. And I'm holding onto it until the book is out, and then there was the other archive, if you will, that was kept on Wilson and Arlen, which was the Chicago Red Squad files.

That's like a type of FBI file. And that was like the Chicago Police Department starting their commie squad. It was basically their anti-radical task force. And they surveilled thousands of people in Chicago during the '60s into the '70s until a lawsuit shut them down if you will. And it was that lawsuit that forced the Chicago Police Department to present these files and put them in the Chicago History Museum, which one can access. And I was able to access those files, and it took a lot of work to access those files. Hopefully, at one point in the near future, some centralized Wilson archive will manifest because there's a lot there.

LP: I want to dig into some specific topics of interest of his and get some of your thoughts on it. But to wrap up on this point, if you had to make an educated guess. Are there still unpublished manuscripts that will see the light of day?

Gabriel Kennedy: There may still be two more unpublished manuscripts that Wilson wrote about, possibly three. One was something he was calling Death Shall Have No Dominion, and he wrote about that a little bit in Cosmic Trigger Volume One. It was his book that was about the anti-aging space migration part of the Tim Leary smile equation. That was huge in the seventies, space migration, intelligence, increase in life extension. And as you know, and many Bob people know, Wilson was very much into the science of delayed aging or anti-aging and stuff like that. He might've had a book in that. He wrote in letters to his friends that he was sending out all these different manuscripts. And that was one of them.

Another one was actually a book that he was calling Lion of Light. As I said, there's a book out right now called Lion of Light. That book has that title. That book was actually in this essay that Bob wrote, which is now a book called Lion of Light. But the essay is actually called Do What That Wilt. What I'm getting at is that Wilson wrote a number of letters to friends And also letters to the magazine called Green Egg, which was a pagan magazine in the 70s. So he wrote in those letters column that he was working on a full-length book called Lion of Light. So that's not the book that's out right now. This is another book that was also about Crowley. Still, it was like a deeper exploration of Crowley intersecting with the notion of paganism and this idea called the Witch Cult Hypothesis, which was a notion that the witch trials in Europe hundreds of years ago, as we now tend to believe, because this is what the scholars are saying, is this was a manifestation of mass hysteria where people called these other people witches, and they burned them at the stake. Because they were crazy, and they projected their paranoid delusions onto women who were practicing folk medicine. The witch-cult hypothesis is a notion that this is actually a witch cult predating Christianity that has existed throughout Europe going back thousands of years. Bob was exploring that notion in the '70s.

It was also a part of that pagan worldview at the time, I suppose, right? But I guess it went out of favor, right? In academic circles, I'm not sure what happened. Bob never really writes about that again. But at that time, in 1974, he was super into this idea that he could trace Crowley to paganism, to this witch cult, Dianus. This is the notion that the way that they celebrate — I think it would just be women, mostly women at the time — they would sit around in a circle, and then a guy would come in wearing horns. They would all copulate in the name of the religion, and this is what made everyone's …

LP: Christians weren't down with that?

Gabriel Kennedy: (laughing) They weren't down with that! This is like early rock and roll!

And long story short, that book, The Lion of Light, has not manifested yet. That may be still there. And I want to make sure listeners understand because, as I said, there's a book out right now called Lion of Light, and it's great, but that's not The Lion of Light that Bob was talking about in the mid-70s. And I talk about all this in my book to give it more context and stuff.

LP: That is a fascinating line of inquiry, though. There's a strand there, and it seems exactly like the kind of thing he would play with.

Gabriel Kennedy: And in such a fun way!

LP: I'm not sure how to frame this question, so forgive me in advance for being inarticulate. There's this idea that for a lot of the 20th-century sort of philosophers and writers like Bob, it's interesting to ponder how much in their speculative writing they've actually infected the historical record and corrupted the historical record. Things like The Priory of Sion becoming quasi-fact. And as time goes on, those things become codified in official history or even, to stay with that one in particular, the whole notion of the bloodline of Christ and these stories that start to try to become rooted in antiquity and with good storytellers rooting them in antiquity. They become facts. It's an interesting notion that there's this strand of hucksterism on one extreme, pranksterism on the other, and somewhere in between, an attempt at scholarship and research. Some of this stuff may actually be true. That's like the milieu that Bob is in for me. He's of that genre, and how that notion lands for you and what you think of that.

Gabriel Kennedy: Yeah, that's a great point. In terms of analyzing Wilson with a skeptical eye critical tone, in the appropriate way. Because if anyone's attempting to say anything worthy to be carried on through the ages, it has to be confronted with a scrupulous eye, right? But it is funny because Wilson promoted this notion of himself. This RAW scholar named Michael Johnson said that Wilson was for stoned-out intellectuals. That's one of his main markets if you will. He is obviously one, having a lot of fun making himself laugh a lot. I think that he, for instance, with the Discordians, where maybe it all started with Bob, like going super satirical. And it was also part of a wave of the '60s, too, this sort of pranksterism Bob was friends with and wrote for Paul Krassner. The kind of countercultural comedy legend Bob wrote for The Realist, which Krassner started in the late '50s. And Krassner, of course, one of his more memorable articles or whatever is about how Lyndon Baines Johnson fucked the skull of JFK after JFK was assassinated, which is, that imagery is gruesome.

But as you said earlier, this notion of like things. One cannot decontextualize Wilson, and this is the seduction of today with the communication technologies that we have. Everything promotes a historical decontextualization, and so many things, when they're presented in an isolated way, can appear very bad or dangerous, or what have you, right? But this is life, man. This is what I learned through reading Wilson, educating myself, and going out into the world: you cannot judge a book by its cover. You can't judge a person based on one statement or tweet that they've made. If you really want to know somebody, you have to come in contact with them and communicate with them, etc. We're in a time of such knee-jerk reactionism and reactionaries. We all do that, like this initial reaction, right? We're in an interesting moment of that, shall we say. Wilson and the Discordians, it was very mischievous, right? What they specifically did with this thing called Operation Mindfuck, that the specific notion of it was Bob's friend and Discordian co-founder, Kerry Thornley, was called in as a witness to Jim Garrison's investigation of the assassination of JFK.

At first, Thornley was a friendly witness. But then, one of Garrison's, so the story goes, research aides or investigative aides was following this idea of the Illuminati and then found the Discordians and somehow was thinking that the Discordians could be on some shit, let's say. And so Thornley was hurt by that, and he was like, "Yo, let's go get them.

We're gonna start Operation Mindfuck." And Bob was all with it. The main thing with that was they sent letters under pseudonyms, different titles of people saying they were representing different groups or whatnot to this person named Harold Chapman, who was one of Garrison's investigative aides. They're saying to him, "You're right, the Illuminati's real, and the Discordians are the Illuminati, and they're down with everything horrible," just as a way to mess with this guy. And they got a kick out of it. It's a very hippie-yippie sort of thing. They got a kick out of this other guy, becoming increasingly paranoid. And they laughed at him for that, right? They were all young; that's like what younger minds can do, right? At times just fuck you. You know what I mean? Like, I'm gonna mess with you, right? I don't know if Wilson, in later years, would have thought that that wasn't the best approach. It just seemed like he walked away from that saying, if you don't know that I'm kidding, well, then you deserve to get fucked with. He's really staunchly rooted in a satirical approach to his whole life and philosophy.

And we're in an interesting age again right now. 2016 was an interesting moment of all these people claiming that they were satirists when they were really just racists and just saying all these sorts of things, and it's like, that's not funny. What do you know about Jonathan Swift? Well, Wilson knew satire. He knew that Burroughs was a satirist.

He studied Jonathan Swift through and through. When it came to the Priory of Scion, there's a really good talk that he gave called The Eye in the Triangle, and you can watch it on YouTube. And you see what Wilson was doing with the Priory of Scion, and he's constantly saying I'm not drawing any conclusions here.

And, of course, it's a line that people later have said. What he does is he presents these different arguments from these different books that are talking about the Priory of Scion, and then he stresses the fact that you have to utilize your critical thinking skills here to make sense of this yourself. But in the meantime, I'm going to take the Priory of Scion story, Mythos, which he got initially from the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which came out in 1982. Bob ate it up because it was about a secret society, right? At the same time, 82, 84, he also got into this whole actual thing that happened called the Propaganda Due conspiracy, which was an actual conspiracy of actual fascists and Nazis who were seeking to take over the government of Italy and then other South American countries. They were high-level Freemasons who were clandestinely picked to enter the Propaganda Due group. Bob really went into that as well. And he took these two things, the Propaganda Due and Priory of Scion. And he smashed them together into a historical timeline, and he put it in one of the best books that he's ever written, The Widow's Son. And he basically created two dual plot lines in that one book through the use of footnotes. The regular narrative was about the continuing story of the protagonist Sigismundo Celine and his adventures and coming-of-age story in the late 1700s in a time of great revolution. What a great story that is.

But then, at the same time, through footnotes, Bob is telling a whole other tale utilizing the themes found within the Priory of Scion and then the facts found within the Propaganda Due conspiracy. And that was pretty much Wilson. But that was a fiction, and he was clear. Wilson was never out there trying to support the idea of the Priory of Scion as absolutely true. He used it mostly for plotline, and I would direct people, if they want to know about Bob's use of the Priory of Scion, just to read The Widow's Son. He even confused his editors at Bluejay Press at the time, who were constantly checking his stuff in the book, and they were like, is this true? But again, that was one of Wilson's main points. Illuminatus was that as well. He was there to spark an interest in history, to begin with, to get you interested, to read more about the late 1700s in France and America, and to check out all these different sources, and do your own research … but not in the QAnon sense! (laughs)

LP: Yeah, we live with the ramifications of that in a big way, and it's something I wrestle with in my admiration for him, which is, One of the byproducts is, and I think he knew this as well, that there's a lot of stupidity out there. I think about the Frank Zappa quote that hydrogen is not the most common element in the universe; stupidity is. And the repercussion of that, though, is everybody's their own scholar. Everybody can say, well, maybe, and it gives credence to way too much bullshit. I appreciate the side of Bob that says we are a collection of individuals, and the individual has the ultimate responsibility. But it's not playing out very well for us.

But you mentioned Kerry Thornley and one of the things I wanted to ask you about, so I wanted to come back and ask you about a couple of the areas of interest that Bob's had over the years. And you can't talk about it without talking about JFK. It's interesting to watch, I'll put in air quotes, Bob and his contemporaries, I would include people like Ivan Stang, and I guess Bob Shea, maybe Leary, certainly lots of other people who thought about JFK and the assassination, to look at how their kind of thinking and comments have changed over the years. It seems there's a general sense of, "Yeah, it's a lot of fun, it's very interesting, but you kind of want to stay away from it because it's a quick path to lunacy."

It's so strange. It has such an Ouroboros quality. It's the ultimate, "Yeah, maybe?" It's such a bizarre tale, and obviously, you and I could spend hours talking about the layers there. Still, the highest level way I would articulate it is that there's the story of what happened. Then there's every person involved in that story. If you scratch the surface of them and their story and their involvement in the story, it quickly unravels into something almost scary. The most benign thing to say is that it's bizarre, but if you really dig into it, it stops making sense very quickly, like how these things could be unrelated. There was this culture jamming aspect to it through the late '60s into the '70s, maybe the early '80s. And then, when we got to the late '80s and the '90s, when the media and the world magnified the conspiratorial worldview, I came up in of the independent presses. The right wing started to adopt a lot of this stuff, JFK as a topic, the assassination as a topic; how does it fit into your take on Bob's story?

Gabriel Kennedy: That's a really great topic to get into in relation to Wilson because you're right, that is one association. With Wilson's work, probably mostly because of Illuminatus! Trilogy, because in that novel, he and Shea present the JFK assassination in five episodes throughout the 800 pages. And anyone unfamiliar with the book skips around like someone flipping through a TV channel, which is interesting and disorienting.

This touches on your previous question and observation about Wilson's antics influencing the way people think about how history went, right? He and Shea presented a theory within Illuminatus about what really happened. to JFK who was behind the assassination. In the first episode, it's just Lee Harvey Oswald up there at the Texas Book Depository, sixth floor, ready to bust shots. But then a shot comes from the grassy knoll, right? Three shots or whatever come from the grassy knoll. And before Oswald could get a shot off, he's like, "What's that?" And then the story progresses. And in the next episode that comes up, John Dillinger, the famous American bank robber, actually was not killed in Chicago's Biograph Theater. He's still alive, and he was ready to assassinate whoever. And I could be maybe mashing up some of these things because they keep going with the absurdity. Because then, in the next episode, there's another assassin there who was not a historical figure. He's just the character in the book. And then he notices some other stuff, and then eventually it gets to the fifth episode where none of those people, it wasn't the CIA, it wasn't Cuban rebels, it wasn't the mafia, it wasn't Soviets, it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald, it was this guy who felt jilted that JFK started investing in space age technologies because he had taken his money out just years before from investing in space-age technologies. He went broke, and his whole life fell apart. He really is a lone gunman who killed the president. Illuminataus! The trilogy is placed in science fiction. It's a fiction. It's a book. It's a joke. Wilson's whole approach, I think, is that within this joking, there might be some truth.

It's also contextualized within his time and place. As you said, things started shifting when the conspiracy theories hit the media. Things seem to take on a different flavor that, that wasn't quite as maybe done in good fun as like a fun game, paranoid game that you play when you're smoking weed with your friends of what if Robin Ramsay, the British investigative journalist, wrote a great book about conspiracy theories. He observed, as do many other scholars, that for a long time, the Kennedy assassination and any theories about The bad actions of the CIA were mostly relegated to the left in the political spectrum. The left is mostly reflected in countercultural stuff and growing up like Bowie and Zappa.

And you're not really going to read William F. Buckley after you listen to a Bowie album. You might read whatever; you know what I'm getting at, right? There has been an evolution, and it coincides with our communication technologies. Wilson was mostly writing these things, and now it's going to be 50 years ago, 40 to 50 years ago, when he really got into writing about conspiracy stuff. He also anticipated the change. He said that as society continues to change and morph with the increase in communication technologies, people are going to find more recondite conspiracy theories to attach themselves to, meaning they're going to find weirder, more obscure things to get all crazy about.

For people who wonder if what Wilson was saying was ultimately productive or destructive, and does it help people think more or lead them to more stupid shit? This was a major part of his work to steer people away from being stupid. That's what Intelligence Increase was about, right? Did he accomplish that? I'm not sure, but personally, from reading and studying his stuff, more people know about Illuminatus! Trilogy, but maybe they haven't read Everything is Under Control, which he published in 1998, where he pretty clearly breaks down and states how conspiracy theories tend to take over people's minds like viruses, if you will. And what's one reason why they do that? Because they're stuck looking for a soul or a group of core essential bad guys. When you look at things from a Wilson perspective, where he's seeking to encourage people to boost their critical thinking skills, we see how complex it really is, but he's playing with people's paranoia in his fiction as a plot device.

Just like Philip K. Dick used alien invasion as a plot device, he wants people to start thinking like this. Now, 50 years later, say post QAnon, even like QAnon was the ultimate explosion of conspiranoid madness. I still think reading Robert Anton Wilson is an antidote to that and not a gateway drug to that.

But one really has to read, say, well, one could read the Illuminatus! Trilogy and pick that up. But it's funny because some people believe either they believed everything in Illuminatius! Trilogy, which is pretty wild to me. I wonder how you could do that, or they think that Wilson and Shea actually took Sincere Seekers to find out the truth about the JFK assassination. They were actually misinformation agents taking people away from caring to even look at who really was behind the JFK assassination. I think what Wilson provides really is a sort of context when you dive into all this weird, crazy stuff like looking at the JFK assassination.

As you said, when you scratch someone's name, you see all those weird labyrinthian connections, which he calls The Spaghetti Theory. That's the way the world is, though, right? The further you go up the chain, the less people there are. Flannery O'Connor wrote a short story, Everything that rises must converge. There are Bilderberg meetings. Like where the press is not allowed to go. Why? And these people are not janitors at your local YMCA who are taking over these hotels and discussing whatever they're discussing. They're not talking about their golf game. They are discussing policies. The average everyday janitor is not allowed inside unless they're working. Wilson was looked at as a philosopher then, and people who read him a lot tend to think of him as that, even though he was not generally considered a philosopher by many people. But he is seeking to take this wide view of the idea of the open exchange of information and communication signals. That's one of his main points, that communication can only exist between equals. So, if we flip that, equality can only exist if there's truly free communication. We live in a world of different hierarchies of communication. Who's allowed to know what, and who's allowed to say what? I mean that within structures where secrecy exists because, there are many structures where one must be holding secrets. Bob is looking at that. No one has come up with an answer for that yet, really. This is something we're all trying to figure out all the time, but he's cognizant of that McLuhan idea that the medium is the message, right? So, as you mentioned, like the early 90s was this awesome consilience of the zine culture, of the beginning enthusiasm for this thing called the internet, the World Wide Web that's coming that will one day make everything better. Bob definitely got into the techno-utopianism of that.

But I don't think, with all of his work, that you can find his rigorous sort of dedication to being as scrupulous and skeptical as possible, while at the same time, there's plenty to find to lead you to the madhouse if you will, within his stuff. So, ultimately, I hope my book helps contextualize some of that. And many people might really just know Bob through the Illuminatus! Trilogy. And that's it, or they've read Cosmic Trigger or whatnot. I hope to provide a very wide discussion of all of his work and what that means through the context of presenting his life. I'm saying all this, but I also agree with you, and I disagree at the same time.

LP: In true Bob fashion! One of the other things that are interesting to me, and this has to do mainly with my on-ramp to Bob, but it's, again, it's stuck with me for the better part of 30-some-odd years. Cosmic Trigger was the first book I read of his. I read it every couple of years. Like a lot of people, I give it to anybody who would be open to its vibe. By and large, nobody reads it and shrugs. Everybody who reads it is on a spectrum of being moved or intrigued. Nobody says, "Oh, I don't know. Interesting book, I guess."

Again, at the time, I was in my early twenties, a seeker, not having a massive intellectual underpinning to the things I was exploring, and incredibly open. I was very interested in the UFO topic, specifically the extraterrestrial hypothesis. I was getting really deeply into the work of Jacques Vallée, who completely changed my understanding of the phenomenon, how to think about it, and the questions to ask. As I was reading Vallée's books, I read Cosmic Trigger, and the two strands that came together for me are like the folkloric aspect of the UFO phenomenon and Bob talking about what is a little green man, right?

He's a leprechaun, he's Mr. Spock, he's an icon that's been with us forever throughout history and across cultures. And Vallée is saying the same thing from his scientific research point of view. But something that really blew my mind in Cosmic Trigger, and I forgot about it until a few years ago rereading it, was that their paths crossed.

Bob tells a specific story, I think it's of a dinner party or something like that, and a conversation he's involved with Vallée. That's all a long way of me getting to the, to this point, which is That era of, let's call it the late 60s or early 70s, till maybe the early 80s, in California in particular, where so much of what we think of as our modern, really our modern world has come from. Not just the technology revolution, the way psychedelic culture, new age culture, freak culture, technology culture, the infusion of government research money into all the universities, like, all these things came together where All kinds of thinkers were out there at the same time doing work that's impacted our current world, but a lot of them knew each other.

And we're approaching the same problems from different disciplines. I think about Jacques Vallée working on remote viewing. What is, he's a computer scientist being hired by the government to do a remote viewing study. Also, what we think of is very California. I would love to hear any thoughts you have in conducting your research and writing about Bob about that particular era and that stew, but also, did that era come up in your book at all?

Gabriel Kennedy: It does. Yes, Lawrence, it definitely does. And I did a lot of research around that topic, and some of it I had to cut because there's so much there.

LP: It's like a whole other social history.

Gabriel Kennedy: Definitely. Of which I was seeking to decipher how much of a part Wilson played in that. You mentioned Vallée and the research into remote viewing, but you also mentioned just before how Bob and Jacques Vallée met at a Crowleymas party. Off the top of my head, it might have been 1974, it could have been, and Crowleymas is a celebration of, I think it's Alistair Crowley's birthday.

And so it was October 12th, which is also Columbus Day, right? But I know it's Crowleymas, right? Bob was living in Berkeley, and he was in an apartment house. It was just a few people, like a few apartments, and they were all into the paganistic sort of movement at the time, which was huge out there in 1974. And so they're like, hey, let's throw a Crowleymas party. Someone knew Jacques Vallée, and it could have been Jeffrey Mishlove, the broadcaster. I would call him the interviewer and writer, the only person to graduate, I think, from UC Berkeley with a degree in parapsychology: just a great interviewer, Jeffrey Mishlove, and a great resource for this book for this period.

Wilson and Vallée met at Wilson's party. Wilson writes in Cosmic Trigger how he hurried Vallée to another room so he could pick his brain. Wilson's friends, Grady McMurtry and his wife, Phyllis McMurtry, and then later Phyllis Seckler, were both pivotal individuals in the revitalization of the Ordo Templi Orientis, which wasn't Crowley's invention. Still, Crowley was the head of it for a while. The OTO owes McMurtry and Seckler a huge debt of gratitude for the work that they did in resurrecting getting the OTO really together again in America. Bob hung out with some heavyweights, right? When he wanted to find out about a subject, he went right to the source.

When he wanted to find out about Crowley, he went right to Grady McMurtry, right to Israel Regardie. And Israel Regardie was the British occultist, chiropractor, psychotherapist who wrote a book about Crowley called The Eye in the Triangle. It was a biography of Crowley that Alan Watts recommended Wilson to read. How was Bob friends with fricking Alan Watts? He probably read a book of Alan Watts's and hit him up directly. So, a great takeaway from this book is if you want to know about something, go right to the source. Find out who the source is and go right to the source, right? He and McMurtry and Seckler and a couple of other people were in a back room talking with Vallée about what was going on with Bob's life at the time.

He thinks he's tuning into, as you call it, the extraterrestrial hypothesis, where there are maybe physical beings in the Sirius galaxy telepathically giving him messages. And he has a great conversation about all this there. And Vallée actually has such an impact on his thinking that he starts reconsidering his initial interpretation of what's going on.

And Vallée's, what I wanted to take was like what you said, right? It's uncertain exactly what it is, but we know that it could have been here much longer than the 1948 flap of UFOs. These presences have manifested in these different forms. Maybe the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Little Green Man, or Angels, for now, they could have been with us.

The whole time there, there have been people seeing these weird things. If you look at it through this Vallée lens for an awfully long time, Bob took to that. I think because that way of thinking goes non-dual, it escapes the notion that it's either this or that. Wilson was like an ardent believer in Aristotelian logic, which he picked up from the writer Alfred Korzybski, who started this whole thing called General Semantics. It was linguistic relativity, basically. The anthropological approach is the way the language we use really influences the way we think about the world, right? And the way we even see the world. Wilson was really heavy into not locking things down to an either-or categorization because when you analyze nature, it doesn't work like that. Nature doesn't work in complete binaries. There are so many things that, when you really look at it, are on the spectrum of flux. So Wilson is a process philosopher in that regard, or at least he's presenting this process philosophy.

Today's world is much more open to this notion of flux and process, and we're all just moving on this flow through existence. But one thing that Wilson brings to the table is seeking to apply a rigorous eye to this flux because it's very easy for people, lazy thinkers, To be like, hey man, it's all flux, don't worry about it, don't even think about it, and it's usually the people who have you sleeping on the floor that are telling you not to worry about it. Still, they're sleeping in a bed. Wilson spent enough time sleeping on the floor to understand that we need to keep applying as much intellectual rigor as we can to this flux that we truly exist in because when you can't rely on an either-or category, what exists, and what exists is a multivalued logic that takes a lot more work to look at the world through that lens. I think this is what he thought Vallée was presenting in his interesting take on these appearances of UFOs or whatnot.

LP: I'm curious. Did you find any evidence or indication that he and Vallée maintained communication or correspondence over the years?

Gabriel Kennedy: I was unable to find any letters. But Vallée's still alive. Sadly, I tried a few different avenues to contact Vallée about Wilson, but I was unable to hear back from him. I don't know, and I've never really found anything either about Vallée speaking about Bob Wilson. I don't know if Vallée ever read any of Wilson's stuff. Jeffrey Mishlove was friends with a lot of scientists in Berkeley at the time, and he said that even though, retrospectively, Wilson is writing a lot of amazing stuff. But at the time, scientists weren't really reading Bob because he wasn't seen as a scientist in that regard. He was more just like a satirical novelist. That's something for the next Wilson researcher to find, and that's one thing that's great about this is that my book is the first. There's going to be more. I hope my book is heavy enough to keep people chewing for a while.

LP: To close off the Vallée conversation, I think a biographical treatment of him would be fascinating. He's such an interesting character. And he vacillates between being incredibly explicit with the things he's willing to say and incredibly cagey with the things he won't say about what he either knows or believes. He's clearly non-dualistic in his thinking. His impact is going to take a while, probably till after he passes and allows the release of certain things. Still, he's a fascinating under-read and under-appreciated character.

Unfortunately, because most of his work has been in the UFO field, he's not been able to re-couch it as a consciousness or a phenomenology. It's stuck as a UFO line of inquiry, but he's a fascinating character.

Gabriel Kennedy: To add on to what you were asking about within that scene, how these people rubbed shoulders and Vallée was doing work at SRI, Stanford Research Institute, and know, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff were sponsored by the CIA to do research into ESP and remote viewing. There's some really good literature out there that does link that whole circle. And it revolves around Arthur C. Young, right? Arthur C. Young finds himself at the intersection of all these kinds of crazy sort of conspiracy theories, if you will, that couldn't really fit in the book. But Arthur C. Young He created the Bell Helicopter for the military. It was used, maybe the most used helicopter in Vietnam, right? He made all this money, and then he married this woman, and they started a consciousness research institute in Philadelphia. This woman was the mother of a man who was married to a woman named Ruth Paine.

LP: I could do an hour on Ruth Paine! (laughs)

Gabriel Kennedy: So when Wilson is writing Cosmic Trigger Volume 1, he first meets Kerry Thornley, and he learns of Kerry Thornley's intersection with the JFK assassination investigation. Wilson notes, "Wow, that's really weird and interesting because our family doctor is the brother of this woman named Ruth Paine." The guy's name was Carl Hyde Jr., And this was in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1962. Carl Hyde Jr. was the family doctor for the Wilsons. That's Ruth Hyde, who becomes Michael Paine's wife. Michael Paine is the son of the woman who marries Arthur C. Young. Together, they started this consciousness research institute in Philadelphia. So Ruth Paine was the last person to see Lee Harvey Oswald before he assassinated JFK.

LP: She got him the job!

Gabriel Kennedy: She got him the job, exactly! (laughter) And the famous picture of Lee Harvey Oswald holding the rifle that he supposedly killed JFK with was taken outside of Ruth and Michael Paine's Garage, as you know. And she's an interesting individual. Her husband's stepdad is Arthur C. Young, who later moved to Berkeley and was actually four blocks away from where Robert Anton Wilson was living. And Arthur C. Young, it becomes a huge epicenter. His house is open to all these amazing quantum physicists, speakers, and lecturers. Bob becomes friends with this particle physicist named Saul-Paul Sirag, who is like such a genius. Sarag was actually Arthur C. Young's assistant at the time at the Institute for Consciousness Research or something like that in Berkeley.

Sarag becomes friends with Wilson; they mail letters to each other, but they're only four blocks away from each other. Porpicuity is the term where people are within proximity of each other, and these weird and interesting relations come up. Wilson was not part of that crew, the Arthur C. Young clique, but a man named Robert Temple was. Robert Temple was also later Arthur C. Young's assistant. Robert Temple wrote the book The Sirius Mysteries, which Wilson, of course, read and got somewhat into and wrote about in Cosmic Trigger Volume One. It was Arthur C. Young who told Robert Temple about the original anthropological study of the Dogon tribe in Mali about Sirius. So here you have Arthur C. Young, man. He's a promoter of this notion of the idea of Sirius, right? The story goes that he even heard about it from an artist and archivist named Harry Smith. The Smithsonian bought his records.

According to Saul-Paul Sirag, the Sirius mystery starts with Harry Smith. And Harry Smith told Arthur Young, but it's also the study from these French and Belgian anthropologists of the Dogon tribe in Mali. The point is, Sirius was a meme, was a Sirius meme in the early 70s. There's actually a conspiracy book called The Stargate Conspiracy. I hope that's what it's called. They present this sort of theory in the book basically, and it leans towards conspiracy theory because, for the writers, this was all a big movement, and all these writers and thinkers got taken in by this idea of Sirius. The point is to get people to believe in a UFO religion as a form of control — to control the way people think, even about UFOs. And that was a wide, broad swath. Robert Anton Wilson didn't say that. That was in the book The Stargate Conspiracy. But they relate all these people together.

LP: Vallée flirts with that. That's a big part of his thinking over the years is that it appears to his observation to be part of some control mechanism. He doesn't speculate too openly about the purpose of it, but how he views the UFO phenomenon is that it behaves in ways that are meant to spark belief, in air quotes, and that belief is manipulatable.

Gabriel Kennedy: Yeah, that's a very interesting line of thought, it really is, and it's a good approach to have towards, especially today, all this talk of UFOs and stuff like that.

LP: Rather than ask you to go down that rabbit hole with me, tell me a little bit about when we will be holding copies of the book that we can order online. And who's putting it out?

Gabriel Kennedy: It's being published by Stranger Attractor Press, based in London. They are a great publisher of really fun and interesting occult titles and books on music and stuff like that.

They also published Erik Davis's book a few years ago. It was called High Weirdness.

LP: Oh, it's a great book. It's a lot of this stuff about the California sort of culture.

Gabriel Kennedy: For sure. Yeah, he presents it very well. So they published that book. The Wilson biography fits in very well. I like their whole approach. They have a cool vibe to them.

LP: And they clearly know how to get the books covered, which is exciting. That book got a lot of press when it came out.

Gabriel Kennedy: Oh, that's nice. They have a deal with MIT Press, too, so it's technically on Strange Attractor/MIT Press. It's nice to have that. And over the last few years, there has been more discussion of Wilson's work within an academic context. It's only increased. Erik Davis is a good example. And I hope the book adds to that. It's going to be published in February next year, 2024, but pre-orders are available.

LP: Excellent. I'm so looking forward to reading it. I wasn't sure I should even hope that someone would attempt to tackle this subject, so thank you for doing so.

Gabriel Kennedy: My pleasure, man. It was a trip.

LP: I bet. Thank you for making time. This whole thing could be the topic of its own podcast. Bob's the gift that keeps giving.

Gabriel Kennedy: For sure, man.