The mystery's real origin is a closely guarded secret of the Justified Ancients of Mummu, which Simon had not attained the rank to learn. Dillinger, however, had attained this rank, and uses the formula quite correctly in the bank robbery scene in the Third Trip. It was printed by "Prater Perdurabo" (Aleister Crowley) in The Book of Lies (privately published, 1915; republished by Samuel Weiser Inc., New York, 1970). The text of the spell makes up the totality of Chapter 23 in that curious little book; and it reads:
(23)
SKIDOO
What man is at ease in his Inn?
Get out.
Wide is the world and cold.
Get out.
Thou hast become an in-itiate.
Get out.
But thou canst not get out by the way thou camest in. The Way out is THE WAY.
Get out.
For OUT is Love and Wisdom and Power.
Get OUT.
If thou hast T already, first get UT.
Then get O.
And so at last get OUT.
It is not permissible to explain this fully, but it may be stated guardedly that T is the union of sex and death, Tau, the Rosy Crucifixion; UT is Ugita in the Upanishads; and O is the Positive Void.*
* Fission Chips, like our other characters, was given a chance to peruse this manuscript before publication and correct any factual errors that may have crept in. Of this appendix, he said, "I think my leg is being pulled again, chaps. I suspect that Crowley wrote that in 1915 as a joke on his readers, and you blokes found it and inserted a reference to a magic formula used by Dillinger in your story just so you could then compose this appendix and 'explain' it." Such skepticism, straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, may be compared to the stance of the Bible Fundamentalist who avers that JHVH made the universe in six days in 4004 B.C. but included fossils and other false leads to make it appear much older. One could equally assert that the cosmos appeared out of Void one second ago, including us and our false memories of a longer duration here.
APPENDIX VAU: FLAXSCRIP AND HEMPSCRIP
Flaxscrip was first introduced into Discordian groups by the mysterious Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., in 1968. Hempscrip followed the year after, issued by Dr. Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S. (In the novel, taking one of our few liberties with historical truth, we move these coinages backward in time and attribute hempscrip to the Justified Ancients of Mummu.)
The idea behind flaxscrip, of course, is as old as history; there was private money long before there was government money. The first revolutionary (or reformist) use of this idea, as a check against galloping usury and high interest rates, was the foundation of "Banks of Piety" by the Dominican order of the Catholic Church in the late middle ages. (See Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.) The Dominicans, having discovered that preaching against usury did not deter the usurer, founded their own banks and provided loans without interest; this "ethical competition" (as Josiah Warren later called it) drove the commercial banks out of the areas where the Dominicans practiced it. Similar private currency, loaned at a low rate of interest (but not at no interest), was provided by Scots banks until the British government, acting on behalf of the monopoly of the Bank of England, stopped this exercise of free enterprise. (See Muellen, Free Banking.) The same idea was tried successfully in the American colonies before the Revolution, and again was suppressed by the British government, which some heretical historians regard as a more direct cause of the American Revolution than the taxes mentioned in most schdolbooks. (See Ezra Pound, Impact, and additional sources cited therein.)
During the nineteenth century many anarchists and individualists attempted to issue low-interest or no-interest private currencies. Mutual Banking, by Colonel William Greene, and True Civilization, by Josiah Warren, are records of two such attempts, by their instigators. Lysander Spooner, an anarchist who was also a constitutional lawyer, argued at length that Congress had no authority to suppress such private currencies (see his Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations and Frauds). A general overview of such efforts at free enterprise, soon crushed by the Capitalist State, is given by James M. Martin in his Men Against the State, and by Rudolph Rocker in Pioneers of American Freedom (an ironic title, since his pioneers all lost their major battles). Lawrence Labadie, of Suffern, N.Y., has collected (but not yet published) records of 1,000 such experiments; one of the present authors, Robert Anton Wilson, unearthed in 1962 the tale of a no-interest currency, privately issued, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the 1930s depression. (This was an emergency measure by certain local businessmen, who did not fully appreciate the principle involved, and was abandoned as soon as the "tight-money" squeeze ended and Roosevelt began flooding us all with Federal Reserve notes.)
It is traditional among liberal historians to dismiss such endeavors as "funny-money schemes." They have never explained why government money is any less hilarious. (That used in the U.S. now, for instance, is actually worth 47 percent of its "declared" face value). All money is funny, if you stop to think about it, but no private currency, competing on a free market, could ever be quite so comical (and tragic) as the notes now bearing the magic imprint of Uncle Sam-and backed only by his promise (or threat) that, come hell or high water, by God he'll make it good by taxing our descendants unto the infinite generation to pay the interest on it The National Debt, so called, is of course, nothing else but the debt we owe the bankers who "loaned" this money to Uncle after he kindly gave them the credit which enabled them to make this loan. Hempscrip or even acidscrip or peyotescrip could never be quite so clownish as this system, which only the Illuminati (if they really exist) could have dreamed up. The system has but one advantage: It makes bankers richer every year. Nobody else, from the industrial capitalist or "captain of industry" to the coal-miner, profits from it in any way, and all pay the taxes, which become the interest payments, which make the bankers richer. If the Illuminati did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them-such a system can be explained in no other way, except by those cynics who hold that human stupidity is infinite.
The idea behind hempscrip is more radical than the notion of private-enterprise currency per se. Hempscrip, as employed in the novel, depreciates; it is, thus, not merely a no-interest currency, but a negative-interest currency. The lender literally pays the borrower to take it away for a while. It was invented by German business-economist Silvio Gesell, and is described in his Natural Economic Order and in professor Irving Fisher's Stamp Script.
Gresham's Law, like most of the "laws" taught in State-supported public schools, is not quite true (at least, not in the form in which it is usually taught). "Bad money drives out good" holds only in authoritarian societies, not in libertarian societies. (Gresham was clear-minded enough to state explicitly that he was only describing authoritarian societies; his formulation of his own "Law" begins with the words "If the king issueth two moneys…," thereby implying that the State must exist if the "Law" is to operate.) In a libertarian society, good money will drive out the bad. This Utopian proposition-which the sane reader will regard with acute skepticism-has been seen to be sound by a rigorously logical demonstration, based on the axioms of economics, in The Cause of Business Depressions by Hugo Bilgrim and Edward Levy.*