The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Snapped last week while trying to locate the movie theater showing Donnie Darko, just down the road from Pepsi and Wolverine.

It really makes me wish we’d had the better camera with us, though. We got a cheap one we could leave it in the car and have it for unexpected finds like this, but the image quality really is pathetic.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

The most insidious part of the book(s) is the frequent use of historical or other authors’ fictional sources. “Oh, there’s Emperor Norton.” “OK, we’re back to Buckminster Fuller again.” “Hey, that’s right, ‘Tekeli-li!’ does show up in both Lovecraft and Poe.” And this constant mixing of fact with fiction, familiar with strange, and things known to be true with things which seem implausible does make you wonder: how much of this did they make up on their own, and how much did they stitch together out of real events, prior works, and creative synthesis?

After all, if you had never heard of Joshua Norton, and one day heard the story of a man who declared himself Emperor of the United States, and was allowed to continue to make the claim, issue his own currency and get local merchants to accept it, and even settle disputes from time to time… would you believe it? You’d have to check the history books first, wouldn’t you? (Side note: I was actually at the 1993 WorldCon in San Francisco that featured fans dressed as “time travelling guests of honor,” including Mark Twain, Emperor Norton, and others, which is mentioned in the article linked above.)

So of course I’m starting to notice all the eye-in-pyramid symbols — it’s a common motif, after all, like the cross or the ankh, or like using an eagle as a symbol of power — in places like the site icon for catb.org, home of Eric S. Raymond and The Jargon File (in which I looked up a phrase this afternoon), or the logo for Icon Comics (I picked up the new Powers collection today). Everyone’s looked at the back of the dollar bill (the only bill in common circulation that hasn’t been redesigned in the last decade).

But what really confused me was a mention of the Erisians as an actual cult on Kuro5hin, and a subsequent Wikipedia search that actually found the “philosophy” of Discordianism, complete with a diagram of the Sacred Chao (chao being the singular of chaos). And it was clear that, assuming the article is accurate, the subculture and its founding document predate the Wilson/Shea trilogy by several decades.

And that brings me back to the original question: how much is creative invention, and how much is creative connection? What other little-known but real people, organizations, or events are hidden away in these books?

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

The only problem is I can’t find the quote. I don’t remember the exact phrasing, I don’t remember for certain who said it — I think it was either Neil Gaiman or Warren Ellis, but it could have been one of them quoting someone else — and I can’t even nail down enough words to get a decent search going.

Anyway, it finished up with something like “If you believe there is a vast alien conspiracy to take over the world through teddy bears, you’ll start seeing evidence of it.”

In my efforts to find the quote, though, I came across some interesting information. It turns out I’ve been misusing the word all along. I generally use it as a synonym for coincidence, or possibly to mean interesting coincidence. But synchronicity actually refers to a theory by Carl Jung that such coincidences actually have meaningful connections.

People do have a tendency to perceive order in chaos. It’s what makes us see horses in clouds, or people in mountainsides, or faces on Mars. It’s why faces on cartoon cars make more sense than faces on walls, and it’s almost certainly a factor in the popularity of numerology. I found the technical terms for this. Apophenia, or Type I error refers to seeing connections where there are none. Pareidolia refers to seeing something vague, but perceiving it as if it were something clear. I also found a very nice collection of pareidolic illusions.

Today I read a whole sequence in Illuminatus where one character is describing the significance of the numbers 2, 3, 5, 8, 17, 23 and 40. And of course you can relate numbers to each other in all kinds of ways, given the number of mathematical operations available. It’s finding meaning in those connections that strays into apophenia. There was an email floating around two years ago about the number of elevens you could find in the 9/11 attacks. Snopes did a good job of dismantling this example by picking another number to look for, and quoted an excellent parody.

So if you convince yourself that the number 235 has some sort of significance, you’ll be looking for it. And you won’t pay as much attention to all the other numbers that pop up, but every time you see 235, it’ll register. When a movie starts at 2:35, when someone has an apartment number 235, you’ll notice it, and the fact that you do start seeing it will confirm in your mind that it’s significant.

Combine confirmation bias with apophenia and pareidolia, and you know what? You will start seeing things that fit in with whatever the theory is. Maybe it’ll be as harmless as an opinion of BMW drivers and turn signals. Maybe you’ll start seeing Elvis. Or maybe you will see evidence of the interplanetary teddy bear conspiracy!