The Illuminatus! Trilogy полностью

We accept Bugs Bunny as an exemplar of Mummu here, too, but otherwise we have little in common with the SSS. That's the Satanist, Surrealists and Sadists- the crew who began your illuminization in Chicago. All we share with them actually is use of the Tristero anarchist postal system, to evade the government's postal inspectors, and a financial agreement whereby we accept their DMM script-Divine Marquis Memorial script- and they accept our hempscript and the flaxscript of the Legion of Dynamic Discord. Anything to avoid Federal Reserve notes, you know.

It'll be a while yet before the acid starts working, so I'll just chat like this, about things that are more or less trivial- or quadrivial, or maybe pentivial-until I can see that you're ready for more serious matters. Simon's in the chapel, with a woman named Stella who you'll really dig, getting things ready for the ceremony.

You might wonder why we're called the Norton Cabal. The name was chosen by my predecessor, Malaclypse the Younger, before he left us to join the more esoteric group known as ELF-the Erisian Liberation Front. They're the Occidental branch of the Hung Mung Tong Cong and all their efforts go into a long-range anti-Illuminati project known only as Operation Mindfuck. But that's another, very complicated, story. One of Malaclypse's last writings, before he went into the Silence, was a short paragraph saying, "Everybody understands Mickey Mouse. Few understand Hermann Hesse. Hardly anyone understands Albert Einstein. And nobody understands Emperor Norton." I guess Malaclypse was already into the Mindfuck mystique when he wrote that.

(Who was Emperor Norton? Joe asks, wondering if the drug is beginning to work already or Dr. Ignotius just has a tendency to speak more slowly than most people.)

Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. San Francisco is proud of him. He lived in the last century and got to be emperor by proclaiming himself as such. For some mysterious reason, the newspapers decided to humor him and printed his proclamations. When he started issuing his own money, the local banks went along with the joke and accepted it on par with U.S. currency. When the Vigilantes got into a lynching mood one night and decided to go down to Chinatown and kill some Chinese, Emperor Norton stopped them just by standing in the street with his eyes closed reciting the Lord's Prayer. Are you beginning to understand Emperor Norton a little, Mr. Wabbit?

(A little, Joe said, a little…)

Well, chew on this for a while, friend: there were two very sane and rational anarchists who lived about the same time as Emperor Norton across the country in Massachusetts: William Green and Lysander Spooner. They also realized the value of having competing currencies instead of one uniform State currency, and they tried logical arguments, empirical demonstrations and legal suits 'to get this idea accepted. They accomplished nothing. The government broke its own laws to find ways to suppress Green's Mutual Bank and Spooner's People's Bank. That's because they were obviously sane, and their currency did pose a real threat to the monopoly of the Illuminati. But Emperor Norton was so crazy that people humored him and his currency was allowed to circulate. Think about it. You might begin to understand why Bugs Bunny is our symbol and why our currency has the ridiculous name hempscript. Hagbard Celine and his Discordians, even more absurdly, call their money flaxscript. That commemorates the Zen Master who was asked, "What is the Buddha?" and replied, "Five pounds of flax." Do you begin to see the full dimensions of our struggle with the Illuminati?