Nature's God: Historical Illuminatus Chronicles Volume 3

By Robert Anton Wilson

They are the most secret of organizations and the most powerful - the Illuminati. They continue to shift the patterns of history to fulfill plans of their own, to open pathways to power which ordinary mortals are never meant to tread.It is 1776, and Sigismundo Celine, a young Neapolitan aristocrat and musician - exiled from his homeland after an

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hilaritas Press, LLC.
• Release date: Jul 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781734473599

Book preview

Nature’s God

THE HISTORY OF THE EARLY ILLUMINATI

The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles

Volume 3

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Robert Anton Wilson

Introduction by Eric Wagner



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Copyright © 1991 Robert Anton Wilson

All rights reserved. No part of this book, in part or in whole, may be reproduced, transmitted, or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles, books and reviews.

eBook: ISBN: 978-1-7344735-9-9

ROC Penguin Edition 1991

New Falcon Edition 2004

Hilaritas Press Edition 2018

Cover Design by amoeba

Illustrations by Bobby Campbell

eBook Design by Pelorian Digital

Hilaritas Press, LLC.

P.O. Box 1153

Grand Junction, Colorado 81502

www.hilaritaspress.com

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When in the Course of human Events it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them . . .

– Thomas Jefferson

Declaration of Independence of the United States

The question before the human race is, whether the God of Nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?

– John Adams

Letter to Jefferson, 20 June 1815

I only bow to Nature’s God.

– Philip Freneau,

called the Poet of the American Revolution

CONTENTS

Bewitching Rhetoric – Introduction by Eric Wagner

BOOK ONE

1. Murder at Twilight

2. Rape Before Lunch

3. Revolution and Witty Sayings

4. A Reverser of Laws

5. The Light Sings Eternal

6. The Marquis de Sade and Other Libertines

BOOK TWO

7. The Wilderness Diary of Sigismundo Celine

8 My Lady Greensleeves

9. Cherry Valley

10. The Pursuit of Wild Pigs

11. The Grand Orient and Other Treacheries

Bewitching Rhetoric:

An Introduction to Robert Anton Wilson’s

Nature’s God

By Eric Wagner

You have the good fortune to hold in your hand Robert Anton Wilson’s final novel. I have perceived this book in a number of different ways over the years. It first came into my consciousness after reading Bob’s The Widow’s Son in 1986. I began imagining what would come next in the lives of Sigismundo Celine, Maria Babcock, Sir John Babcock and Seamus Muadhen, etc. Bob published various hints and fragments over the next few years, and in 1991 Nature’s God appeared, and I had the great good fortune to discover what did happen in the lives of those four individuals and much else of interest.

After actually reading and rereading Nature’s God during the next six years, I continued contemplating what would happen next to the wonderful characters Bob had created, hoping he would write another novel about them. In 1997 Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon appeared, a novel largely about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon’s surveying mission from 1763 to 1767 to create the Mason-Dixon line, the first (nearly) straight geographical border in the history of the world, between the then British colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia (thanks Wikipedia). Pynchon’s novel included a hemp smoking George Washington and references to the Illuminati, and reading it I got the strong impression that Mr. Pynchon had read Robert Anton Wilson’s novels, especially his Historical Illuminati novels. I discussed this with Bob Wilson, and he agreed with me.

I had now experienced Nature's God as 1) an unwritten potential novel, 2) an actual and wonderful book, 3) a novel which I imagined Mr. Pynchon reading and contemplating. Around 1999 I reread the novel yet again as I began writing A Lazy Entity’s Guide to Robert Anton Wilson (which metamorphosed in various ways over the next six years). This led me to experience the novel in a fourth way, as a book I wanted to have something worthwhile to say about.

Robert Anton Wilson passed away on 1/11/2007, and Nature’s God shifted from Bob’s last novel so far to Bob’s actual last novel (unless he wrote an unpublished novel afterwards, which seems unlikely), a fifth way of experiencing the novel.

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Sadly, the Robert Anton Wilson Trust has not found any evidence of a fourth volume of the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles. – The MGT.

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On Easter of this year (2010: The Year We Made Contact*) I started to experience Nature’s God in a sixth way as I began to contemplate writing this introduction. After our Easter meal here in Southern California, our four generational group, ranging in age from 15 to 83, went to see Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland in 3-D. Near the end of the film, the earth began to shake for about 45 seconds. Most of our group decided to head outside with my mother-in-law in her wheelchair, but a few intrepid souls decided to stay inside and see the end of the film. (I imagine I will see the end of the film one day, likely in 2-D.) It only later occurred to me that Wilson’s The Earth Will Shake also opens with a family gathering on Easter. (Fortunately, our Easter did not include an assassination like the one in the novel).

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* Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2010: Odyssey Two, which provided the basis for the film 2010: The Year We Made Contact. Carl Sagan wrote Contact, and Sagan provided the basis for Bob’s character Sir Charles Nagas in his novel The Widow’s Son. I read Contact in 1991, and I seem to remember a Zen Buddhist monk in the novel who reminded me of a similar Zen monk in Bob's Schrödinger’s Cat. I don't really think Dr. Sagan read Bob's novel, but I just read a bit in The Widow’s Son where Sigismundo reiterated the importance of coincidences. (Of course. Bob reported a dream of dancing to the music of Thelonious Monk in TSOG: The Thing that Ate the Constitution, but does that really seem relevant?)

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Much of Nature’s God deals with the twin concepts of the Willy and the will. Will Shakespeare dealt with various meanings of will in his Sonnet CXXXV:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy 'Will,'

And 'Will' to boot, and ‘Will’ in overplus;

More than enough am I that vex thee still,

To thy sweet will making addition thus.

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,

Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

Shall will in others seem right gracious.

And in my will no fair acceptance shine?

The sea all water, yet receives rain still

And in abundance addeth to his store;

So thou, being rich in 'Will,' add to thy 'Will'

One will of mine, to make thy large 'Will' more.

Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;

Think all but one, and me in that one 'Will.'

In Nature‘s God, Maria changes the history of the world by writing about the possibility of the Christian God’s Willy. In recent years I’ve read a fair amount of Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi. He seems very profound, yet I balk at his use of the male pronoun for God*

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* Of course, the science fiction fan in me still wants to spell that Ghod (Some science fiction fans in the 1940's worshiped a deity named Ghu who caused typos in fanzines. In his honor they inserted h's in various words: bheer, ghod, etc.)

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Lady Maria’s musings about the possible gender of God have caused me to ponder the nature of gender and the deity. Of course, Bob Wilson has written about this elsewhere as well. He even wrote about a biography of George Washington which said Washington never referred to God. He did refer to providence, however, and he would refer to providence as he, she and it at various times. Ibn ‘Arabi writes many wonderful things about the heart of the believer, but what of those of us who, like Sigismundo Celine, have become full of doubt?

My paperback Webster's New World Dictionary includes a variety of definitions of will, including determination. In The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic Israel Regardie sees persistence and determination as the keys to success in transforming the self. Webster's also includes the definition to bequeath by a will, which one might see as corresponding with Korzybski’s notion of time-binding. Robert Anton Wilson (and Shakespeare and Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, etc.) have bequeathed us certain language tools (books, poems, etc.). With these tools, along with persistence and determination, we can transform reality and all that resembles it. Where there seems a will, there seems a way.

April 30, 2010

Walpurgisnacht

Nature’s God

Book One

The world itself is the will to power — and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power — and nothing else!

— Nietzsche, The Will to Power



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1. Murder at Twilight

Clontarf 1014

Brian marched around Ireland constructing simulated lunar craters

A Danish Norseman or Norwegian Dane named Brodar, who wasn’t particularly brilliant or scintillating and never did anything else that got into the history books, killed an old man around the hour of sunset on April 23, 1014 in a bull-grazing field called Clontarf, on the north coast of Dublin Bay. Brodar, whatever elements of Danish and Norse were mixed in him, was a Viking and he killed the old man with an axe through the head. Vikings seem to have liked to kill people with axes. Historians agree that, when not combing the lice out of his beard or getting drunk, your average Viking preferred to spend his time cracking skulls with axes.

Incidentally, we know the Vikings spent a lot of time combing lice out of their beards because archaeologists have made careful scientific catalogs of the Danish and Norse artifacts found around Dublin Bay, and lice combs outnumber swords and all other implements of war about a hundred to one. As Sherlock Holmes would tell you, Observing thousands of lice combs, one deduces the existence of many, many lice When the Irish said, Here come those lousy Vikings again, they were probably being literal.

I know the movie people left the lice out of that epic adventure, The Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, but Hollywood has a tendency to glamorize things.

Although the historian Snorri Sturlusen has the kind of name you would expect to belong to a troll in a Norse myth, he appears to have been a real person, and he left us our best records of the Viking invasions or incursions in Ireland. All that the euphoniously titled Snorri chronicled about Brodar, besides his deed of valor in the Clontarf field that memorable April day in 1014 — it was Good Friday, curiously — is that Brodar was dark haired. The Irish tradition agrees, and calls Brodar a dhuv-gall, which in Irish means dark stranger. The Irish never knew whether the invaders were Norse or Danes, they just called them dhuv-galls or finn-galls * (dark strangers or blonde strangers) and generally ran like hell when they saw them coming.

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* Bob’s original spelling has been retained, but the editor would like the reader to note that the correct spelling in Irish would be dubh for black and fionn for blonde.  – The Mgt.

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The old man who got Brodar’s battle-axe through his brain — he was sixty-four actually, but still blonde and bursting with vinegar and venom, due to unusual genes — was named Brian Caeneddi of Borumu, but is usually remembered under the English version of his name, which is Brian Boru. He was not the sort who ran like hell when he saw the Vikings coming. In fact, Brodar killed him in revenge, because Brian (Caeneddi) Boru had just defeated the Vikings again, which was a nasty habit he had developed over the decades. Brian Caeneddi (Boru), in fact, had been killing and vanquishing Danes and Norsemen, all over Ireland, for forty-six years, starting in 968 when, at the precocious age of eighteen, he had led a small band of guerrillas to the Viking stronghold at Limerick, killed every Dane and Norwegian in sight, and then burned the whole town down afterwards, leaving nothing behind but cinders.

That was just for starters.

During the next forty-six years, Brian marched around Ireland constructing simulated lunar craters — large smoking holes in the earth, full of charred bones and ashes — wherever the Vikings had previously had towns and strongholds. If Brodar hadn’t axed him at sixty-four, Brian (Boru) Caeneddi might have gone on killing Danes and Norsemen for another ten or twenty years probably. Although much about that period of Irish history is clouded with legend and mystery, it is quite clear that Brian Boru had a distinct ethnic prejudice against Danes and Norsemen, or anybody with a Viking helmet on his head.

Some say one of these Scandinavian invaders had raped Brian’s mother, others, that he was simply an early Sinn Feiner and believed in Ireland for the Irish.

Brian of Borumu was also politically ambitious, and, starting out as a local king or chieftain in the Shannon River valley, had made himself High King of Ireland by bribing all the other local kings who could be bribed (of which Ireland had God’s plenty) and burying the ones who could not be bribed, and then persuading the previous High King, Malachi Ui Naill or O’Neill, to abdicate.

There are many different stories about how Brian Caeneddi persuaded Malachi O’Neill to give up the throne, and they are all incredible. The safest verdict is that Brian was a very persuasive talker, who could put even a radical idea like abdication across with enough unction and lubricating oil to make it go down smoothly, and besides, after Limerick, he never went anywhere without an army of about 500,000 loyal supporters.

After becoming High King, Brian Caeneddi of Borumu consolidated his genetic potential by marrying his sons and daughters into royal or noble families all over the British Isles and even in France. You’ve encountered his granddaughter in English Lit class; she was Lady Macbeth. The Caeneddi genes were actually carried by the later O’Neill kings, the royal Stuarts of Scotland and England, the Hapsburgs, the Lorraines, and, eventually, by the Hanovers, the Mountbattens and the Minority Whip of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill.

The name Caeneddi was by then spelled, English- fashion, Kennedy, and Brian Boru’s pugnacious and charismatic seed had found its way to the presidency of the United States.

An axe in the skull can stop even a man like Brian Boru, but it does not stop the genetic vector in time of which he is an expression.

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2. Rape Before Lunch

Lousewartshire 1776

The Union Jack hung proudly above the contest of constitutional law and pure reason

The Italian Englishwoman or English Italiana who was to overthrow the British Empire by 1950 did not have any of Brian Boru’s pugnacious genes, but she was unknowingly carrying some of Brodar’s, because Brodar’s clan had been among the Normans (Norse-French) who overran Sicily in the eleventh century and held parts of southern Italy, up to Napoli, off and on for a few hundred years. This lady became a revolutionary on July 4, 1776, but that marvelous dating did not surprise her when she noticed it later because she lived always in a web of synchronicity.

Of course, back in 1776, Lady Maria Babcock had no realization that she was becoming a revolutionary. The very word, revolutionary, hardly existed in her vocabulary, or anybody’s. The strongest word of that sort she knew was rebel, which was about one step up from the Norway rat, and rebels did not make revolutions, which signify basic change, but only insurrections, which signify a bloody but temporary nuisance. Rebels, everybody knew, were all mad and were quickly and efficiently apprehended and hanged throughout the Empire On Which The Sun Never Sets, and that was the normal end of their bothersome insurrections.

So Maria was not aware she was becoming a revolutionary, and certainly nothing in her twenty-six years had prepared her for such a role. She was, after all, Contessa Maldonado back in Napoli and a Lady of the Realm here in England. Her father, old Count Maldonado, was as liberal as was safe in Napoli, where the Holy Office of the Inquisition still had two spies in every household and one lounging by the lamppost on the corner; her husband, Sir John Babcock, was a Whig and therefore a bit of a philosophical radical — he thought Nature’s God was Newton’s ingenious clock-maker rather than the Bible’s Hanging Judge.

But both men were within the norm for their time and their society. Maria thought she was within the norm, too, and had no idea that she was about to launch herself on a career that would destroy both the morals and the morale of the Christian world, undermine the backbone of an Empire, and reverse the trajectory of two thousand years of history. It wouldn’t have stopped her if she had known. Maria Babcock was a feisty woman.

Maria’s revolution began, like most of the popular novels of the time, with a dark, handsome, but enigmatic nobleman; a pious, dull, and frightened snip of a servant girl; and — naturally — a little casual rape before lunch. If Richardson had been a little more honest and less sentimental, the incident might have been the climax of Pamela.

The dark, saturnine, and (in this case) alcoholic nobleman was Sir Vaseline Foppe-Wellington; the sweet and pious victim was a housemaid named Justine Case. The trial occurred at the courthouse in Lousewartshire and Maria, Lady Babcock, was there by accident. She had been in London that morning to buy a present for her daughter, five-year-old Ursula, and had stopped in the town to get out of her carriage for a few moments — the hot July sun had turned the carriage into a plausible imitation of an ironmonger’s oven, and Lousewartshire was a good place to rest and recuperate before the last twenty miles

Reviews for Nature's God

[randystafford · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My reactions this novel in 1992. Some spoilers may follow.Each of the three novels in this series has a different emphasis, a different style. The Earth Will Shake was pretty much a straightforward novel with an emphasis on the various warring Illuminati and the meaning of various occult symbols and initiations. That emphasis on symbology and initiation grew more in The Widow’s Son with less character development and a large element of philosophy and humor (in the footnotes especially). Nature’s God has large dollops of philosophy, mysticism, and humor I was bored by the ceremony where Maria Babcock and Sigismundo Celine mystically meet out of the body. I also was bored by Maria Babcock’s initiation into the craft of women. The whole misanthropic and iconoclastic chapter called “The Wilderness Diary of Sigismundo Celine” was interesting to read (and reminded me of Marcus Aurelius Meditations or Robert Heinlein’s The Notebook of Lazarus Long) and even had some things worth thinking about but plot and story screech to a halt during this long segment. I felt the same way about the chapter “My Lady Greensleves” dealing with Maria Babcock’s intiation into womens’ craft though you could argue that this is plot moving forward at least. By far the most interesting and best part of the novel was Seamus Muadhen and his experiences in the American Revolution. Wilson elegantly outlines the grueling experience of the war for the rebels who fought it. Thomas Jefferson’s and George Washington’s notion of Nature’s God as a giver of natural law, inalienable rights are contrasted with the Marquis de Sade’s notion of a meaningless, mechanistic universe where sadistic acts have as much value and meaning as anything else. Nature’s God is also contrasted with Celine’s view that all philosophy, all values derive from man. In Muadhen’s mind, as he fights the seemingly hopeless Revolution, he questions the existence of Nature’s God and his interest in his mind. In a sense, being a Rebel soldier is an initiation for Muadhen into higher truths just like the Babcocks and Celine have their initiations. Muadhen comes to see that reality can not be explained by any one system. And, in his mind, he comes to doubt the existence of Nature’s God, or, at least, a God concerned with man. Doubts, that is, till the timely rain which prevents the British retreat at Yorktown. Then he doubts his doubt. I also liked the image of Jefferson and Washington (quite profane in this book) as sorcerors enchanting men with their words. Why else would men endure so much so long for so hopeless a cause when paid just in glittering words? Washington may be a literal sorceror as he raps three times at sites around his siegeworks at Yorktown.