Every day is a good day - Robert Shea

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Edited by Tom Jackson

2025

The small graphic of a G with a line through it used throughout this book was borrowed from Robert Shea’s zine, No Governor, where it served there as a section-dividing glyph

Introduction

Robert Shea died in 1994

Patricia Monaghan, a writer and scholar and Shea’s widow. She died in 2012

This book, coming out about 30 years after Shea’s death, is an attempt to make that planned collection of Shea’s short pieces a reality.

Since 2010, I have published a blog at RAWIllumination.net

it was not considered commercially possible for Dell to publish the work as one large volume (Illuminatus! Trilogy), particularly a work by two unknown editors, but Robert Anton Wilson fought the decision to publish the work as a trilogy, while Shea accepted it. When I interviewed him for my blog, former Dell editor David M. Harris remembered, “I do clearly remember Bob Wilson as one of the most difficult authors I ever worked with. He seemed to think of me as his enemy, rather than his ally in getting the book into print.

After the trilogy was published, Wilson soon left Playboy to pursue his dream of being a freelance writer and pundit. Although Shea had always wanted to work as a novelist, he stayed at Playboy magazine and only became serious about writing novels when he was laid off from Playboy in 1977.

Robert Anton Wilson writes in Cosmic Trigger 3 about what happened: “When Playboy fired him, Shea endured terrible anxiety about keeping his house, and dashed out a few novel outlines while looking for another job. He sold his first novel before finding a job and never stopped writing again.”

That first novel was Shike, which was published originally in two volumes, with the first one coming out in June 1981. Set in medieval Japan, China and Mongolia, it was the first of a series of historical novels, many of them featuring Illuminatus! style secret societies as a plot element. The other novels were All Things Are Lights, The Saracen published as two novels (like Shike), and Shaman.

While Wilson remains a writer with a strong cult following, I believe Shea’s solo work also deserves to be read and remembered; this book is part of my contribution to that ongoing effort.

Tom Jackson, Berea, Ohio, December 202

Introduction to Illuminati game

When Robert Anton Wilson and I first became aware of the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria, and the extent of their conspiratorial power over historical events, we soon realized there was nothing to stop them from taking over the world completely. Why, then, did they choose to lurk behind the scenes

we told each other, "They don't want to rule the world, they just want to play with it." (We often talk to each other in chorus.)

Little did we reckon then that some twisted mind would come forward with something even sicker – a game in which people could play at being Illuminati playing at ruling the world

And if the person or persons who made up this game can be accused of whistling Dixie in the face of universal awfulness, what are we to say about the kind of people who would sit around and play such a game while outside, and maybe inside their doors, the world is going to pot? An even more chilling thought: maybe the Illuminati are behind this game.

Illuminatus! and the Prometheus Award

science fiction awards, the Prometheus, given for science fiction that emphasizes individual liberty, is one of the oldest. It began as a onetime award, created and given in 1979 by the libertarian science fiction writer L. Neil Smith. That first award was presented to F. Paul Wilson for his novel, Wheels Within Wheels, and the master of ceremonies for that first award was Robert Anton Wilson. Smith was heavily influenced by Illuminatus! and often referenced the trilogy in his own fiction.

I feel somewhat sheepish about having nominated my own novel. I am not claiming that Illuminatus! is as good as the novels that have already been chosen for the Hall of Fame. There are at least two books on this year’s list of nominees that I would vote for before voting for Illuminatus! But I do believe it deserves to be nominated and considered.

Acceptance speech

I would not be doing this today were it not for the other half of the team, one of the wittiest, most erudite and lovable people I've ever met, a man capable of sawing the most difficult ideas in two without hurting them, making them jump through hoops, walk into cabinets and disappear and pop out of trick top hats, a man with a universe up each sleeve. He is my very good friend and I miss his presence here today more than I can say – Robert Anton Wilson

I sometimes think it's remarkable that anybody at all read Illuminatus! When it first came out in 1975 the publisher decided to label it "Science Fiction," which meant that it would be put in an obscure corner of the bookstore where, as we all know, only a handful of weird people ever venture. On the other hand, the editors of all the science fiction magazines then extant refused to review Illuminatus! on the grounds that it was not science fiction – by whatever definition they were using that year

Wilson and I initially had it in mind to write a fairly short international espionage paperback thriller based upon the conspiracy theories in the air at that moment, particularly those about the Bavarian Illuminati and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Well, things got rather out of hand. Bob sometimes puts forward the notion that our minds were taken over by a bunch of super-intelligent dogs living on a planet circling Sirius

But my own more prosaic idea is that the madness of Illuminatus! was implicit in our decision to satirize the theories we were using as premises

we carefully mixed strange things that were true with strange things that were not true. We put into the book things we believed and things we did not believe, things one of us believed and the other did not and things we sometimes believed and sometimes did not. And while writing the book, and afterwards as well, we often forgot which was which. Eventually it dawned on us that we were trying to make a statement about the nature of reality

In Illuminatus! we made a deliberate attempt to blur that distinction, to suggest that fact may be fiction and fiction may be fact

I hope and think it is plain that the message of Illuminatus! is an anarchist message.

We say in the novel that the original Illuminati were dedicated to religious and political freedom and that this secret organization somehow became perverted so that in recent centuries the Illuminati had become a vehicle for a monstrous authoritarianism. Thus the myth of the Illuminati is an archetype for every political movement

People can be fooled in this way because they are not sure what freedom is

In Illuminatus! we suggest that freedom begins in your right to define yourself and to insist on the validity of your own perceptions and your own thoughts. To change to a new point of view because you find it convincing is, of course, merely an exercise of that freedom. But freedom is lost when you are coerced or frightened into denying your own way of seeing reality and into accepting a point of view you cannot really believe in, be it that of a family, a teacher, a boss, a party, a church, a state. And an amazing thing is that when each of us insists on his or her own vision, it does not divide us. It unites us as no externally imposed unity ever could. It unites us in reverence for that inner light which we can only find by knowing ourselves, never by denying ourselves, that light by which each one of us can truly be said to be illuminated – the true Illuminati

Questions About Illuminatus!

there’s another level beyond that, where the fantasy blends in with the reality to the point where it’s not that easy to determine whether you’re being put on or whether it’s real. I myself keep changing my judgment about which parts of the book are real and which parts are fantasy

What the powerful call Utopia is now the condition for human survival. Bob Shea: The point is to appropriate the technology and use it

I’ve come round to the conclusion that this isn’t literature. It’s too late in the day for literature. This is magick!

Robert Shea on The Dispossessed

A debate raged for years within the group whether Ursula K. LeGuin should receive the group’s Hall of Fame Award. LeGuin had predicted the book would never get the award, but she was wrong

After reading the two commentaries on Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed in the Summer 1987 Prometheus, I had to offer my opinion. I was happy to vote for The Dispossessed for the Hall of Fame award this year. I think Le Guin does a remarkably good job of portraying a real live anarchist society

The objections I've seen to this novel as libertarian science fiction seem to come from people I would call right-wing anarchists – I can think of no more efficient way to describe them – who believe that freedom is impossible without private property. If Le Guin had portrayed everything as hunky-dory in her anarcho-collectivist society their criticisms would be easier to understand, although The Dispossessed would in that case be a small, flat, banal, propagandistic book. But Le Guin's novel is primarily about the things that have gone wrong in this society.

Annares has oppressive institutions, but not because Le Guin fails to understand the nature of freedom. She understands freedom quite well. The Annaresti, in their struggle to survive on an inhospitable planet, came up with solutions that later led to more problems. Le Guin knows that the business of any revolution – perhaps especially an anarchist revolution – is never finished.

George Orwell pointed out in an essay on Gandhi that in an anarcho-pacifist society people would be subjected to the most pervasive tyranny of all, the unlimited power of collective opinion. Orwell, who created the archetype of tyrannies that rule by force and fraud, might have given us a novel about tyranny by guilt and shame had he developed his insight. What Orwell did not do, Le Guin has done.

The Dispossessed is a cautionary tale for anarchists

Outworlds Interview

I lead an almost eerily quiet life in a small suburb of Chicago. We are not far from Waukegan, which produced Ray Bradbury and Jack Benny, and Chicago, of course, is where Buck Rogers originated, so it’s not an alien place for me

I was born and raised in New York

The day I was born – Valentine’s Day 1933

I remember the day the Hindenburg blew up and crashed

I’ve been a science fiction fan as long as I can remember

For some reason I’ve never cared as much for fantasy as I have for science fiction

I’ve read very little H.P. Lovecraft. The use made in Illuminatus! of Lovecraft’s material is largely Wilson’s contribution. I do like what I know of Lovecraft, but for some reason he’s not one of those authors who have turned me on

I am very interested in Zen Buddhism. That isn’t very fashionable any more, but I think most of the Americans who took up Zen in the 50s and 60s barely scratched the surface. Zen, as I understand it, doesn’t involve any belief in the supernatural. It’s more like a kind of psychotherapy. All religion is psychotherapy, I think

Mysticism as practiced in Zen seems to me to offer the benefits of a religion without the drawbacks. So I have been meditating every day for the past two years – the zazen method of meditation – counting exhalations up to ten and then starting over again

I am also an adherent of Discordianism, the worship of the goddess Discordia – known in Greek as Eris. We believe that the fundamental principle in the universe is chaos, and that there is so much chaos around, somebody must have put it here. Trying to impose order on chaos is a disastrous error – it’s one of the fundamental errors of the Illuminati

Dell didn’t start advertising the book until it began to look like the first printing – without the help of advertising – was selling out

Any chance that the uncut version will ever see print?

The anarchist philosopher with whose views I most agree is Max Stirner. He said that the individual is all there is, and any claim that anything is bigger or more important than the individual is sheer bullshit. I believe that the cause of most human misery is people’s efforts to impose the rule of state and organized religion on one another. A society without coercion, in which individuals were guided by their own conception of their own best interests, would be a happy, harmonious society

I’m not a pacifist, but I think anarchists should not talk about armed revolutions, because such a revolution would be, in effect, a government – imposing its will on others by force – regardless of whether it called itself anarchist. So anarchists should work toward a society without government by means of nonviolent resistance and education.

As for the right vs. left split in anarchism, I think those people are wasting too much time arguing about economic arrangements. After the state is abolished, people will operate as capitalists or collectivists, whatever suits them best. The important thing, though, is to get rid of government. First things first.

Illuminatus! is dedicated to Gregory Hill and Kerry Thornley

They are two of the most creative people I know. They invented the religion of Discordianism

Subsequently, or shortly thereafter, they discovered the existence of the Bavarian Illuminati and what they had to say about Discordianism got all mixed up with what they said about the Illuminati

Anyway, Kerry Thornley was in the Marines – I don’t have the exact dates in front of me – and met and conversed with Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was a Communist and Thornley was an Objectivist. By the time they parted company, Oswald wasn’t speaking to Thornley. Kerry was quite shocked when his old barracks buddy was arrested for the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Kerry continues to write a bit, and his long epic poem Illuminati Lady was published in installments in The St. John’s Bread Wednesday Messenger

Gregory Hill and Kerry were high school friends. Greg is by vocation an artist, and one of his works of art is the Paratheoanametamystikhood of Eris Esoteric – P.O.E.E., which is his personal movement within the Discordian Society. The Discordian Society is for everybody, but P.O.E.E. is – or was – Greg’s personal voice

Bob Wilson said that the When-Atlantis-Ruled-the-Earth sections of Illuminatus! were 99 percent Shea. Are you a longtime Atlantis buff? Do you think an Atlantis-type civilization in prehistory very likely? SHEA: For a while, as a kid, I was fascinated by the idea of Atlantis

I used it in Illuminatus! to present my own pet theory of the Genesis story. The Atlanteans are a kind of mythical golden age of humanity, living in peace, prosperity, freedom and happiness. They have a highly developed technology, no morality and no government

How about the theories Erich Von Däniken has made popular in recent years? Do you think extraterrestrial “ancient astronauts” might have once colonized Earth? SHEA: Von Däniken’s notions only satisfy people who have a very low opinion of humanity

Finally, he gets to the point where he no longer believes that any of human civilization was created by people like ourselves. All the basic inventions were given to us by higher intelligences. Von Däniken is just catering to the wish some people have to grovel before imagined higher powers. Illuminatus! was written, in part, to make fun of such wishes

surprised to find there really is an island named Fernando Poo. Was there really an historic explorer who discovered it in 1472 as Simon Moon implied? SHEA: Yep, and his name was Fernando Poo. You can find him in the Encyclopedia Britannica, along with the Illuminati. When he discovered the island, he called it Formosa, which means “beautiful” in Portuguese. Later the Portuguese named it after him

Do you have as strong an interest as Wilson does in such things as immortality, colonization of space or Timothy Leary’s mind-expanding Neurologic and Hedonic Engineering?

In 1960 Eisenhower and Nixon were saying that space exploration was crazy Buck Rogers stuff. Then Kennedy made it a national goal to put a man on the Moon, and nine years later we put a man on the Moon. What this proves is that technology doesn’t just happen. It has to be imagined – perhaps by people who have no idea how to do it – and promoted, and the particular form has to be foreseen and shaped

Wilson and Leary are putting forward a particularly sane, humane, libertarian vision of how to develop these things so that they will enhance human life rather than become new ways of oppressing us.

Wilson and I have been billed as experts on conspiracy and Illuminatus! as a conspiracy book. Actually, Illuminatus! began with the idea of satirizing conspiracy mania

From time to time it turns out that somebody’s conspiracy theory is true. I used to laugh at left-wingers who claimed the CIA and the FBI were spying on all of us. If somebody in the early 1960s told me the CIA and the Mafia were conspiring to have Castro assassinated with the tacit support of the president of the U.S., I would have hooted. But there’s a qualitative difference between investigating allegations of individual conspiracies and conspiracy theory.

The true paranoid conspiracy theory ties things together until everything happens as a result of one gigantic conspiracy. This is the state of mind we were trying to satirize in Illuminatus!

The thing is, of course, that conspiracy mythology is a cop-out. It’s a way of evading our responsibility for history

The structure and texture of the book certainly makes it more difficult to read. But they also will help the conscientious reader to get a gut-level realization of the ultimate truth behind space, time and the human personality. Readers who have kept up with – and experienced – the discoveries of the last decade or so in psychology, philosophy and religion will enjoy the way the book is put together

Wilson says Illuminatus! was communicated to you telepathically by intelligent beings from Sirius, the dog star. What’s your story?

Vladimir Nabokov says he sees his novels as already existing in another universe, and he has to reconstruct them in this universe by putting together the fragments that come into his mind

The Principle of the Good Soup

The ward he was admitted to is a locked ward. The people held in it have been using alcohol, drugs or both to the point where somebody thought they ought to be hospitalized whether they wanted to be or not

Now any good anarchist would have to disapprove of this. Here is a man being deprived of his liberty, treated without his consent, imprisoned

A few days later he told me the doctors had discovered that there was a tumor the size of a plum growing in the middle of his brain

He now leads a more-or-less normal life. He is still recovering from the operation in some ways

The person who instigated the hospitalization saved our friend’s life. And he did it by taking an action I think most anarchists would condemn – involuntary commitment

I have come to feel that sticking to religious, philosophical or ideological principles in situations like this is a kind of insanity. There are times when an immediate need must be met.

Perhaps the key word in Eckhart’s statement is “love.” In the late 60s a school of thought called situation ethics attracted the attention of people interested in religion and morality

There is only one absolute moral commandment, the situation ethics philosophers claimed, and that is always to act out of love. They quoted Augustine: “Love, and do what you will.” They thought that no moral system could cover every situation; therefore, what the good is in any situation can only be determined by the person who is in that situation and must do the choosing.

Personally I am not attracted to anything that presents itself as religion or morality, but I think the situation ethicists had a point that applies to any code of conduct, even the non-supernatural principles that many anarchists adopt and by which they judge their own behavior and that of other anarchists. Situation ethics might also be a good basis for interpreting those puzzling Zen stories in which the masters merrily flout Buddhist principles

But perhaps we must give a name to this ultimate sanity so we can talk about it. How about calling it the Principle of the Good Soup?