At least, for now, you can probably grasp this much: their fundamental fallacy is the Aneristic Delusion. They really believe in law n' order. As a matter of fact, since everybody in this crazy, millennia-old battle has his own theory about what the Illuminati are really aiming at, I might as well tell you mine. I think they're all scientists and they want to set up a scientific world government. The Jacobins were probably following precise Illuminati instructions when they sacked the churches in Paris and proclaimed the dawn of the Age of Reason. You know the story about the old man who was in the crowd when Louis XVI went to the guillotine and who shouted as the king's head fell, "Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged"? All the symbols that De Molay introduced into Masonry are scientific implements- the T-square, the architect's triangle, even that pyramid that has caused so much bizarre speculation. If you count the eye as part of the design, the pyramid has 73 divisions, you know, not 72. What's 73 mean? Simple: multiply it by five, in accordance with Weishaupt's funfwissenschaft, the science of fives, and you get 365, the days of the year. The damn thing is some kind of astronomical computer, like Stonehenge. The Egyptian pyramids are facing to the East, where the sun rises. The great pyramid of the Mayans has exactly 365 divisions, and is also facing to the East. What they're doing is worshipping the "order" they have found in Nature, never realizing that they projected the order there with their own instruments.
That's why they hate ordinary mankind- because we're so disorderly. They've been trying for six or seven thousand years to reestablish Atlantis-style high civilization- law 'n' order- the Body Politic, as they like to call it. A giant robot is what their Body Politic really amounts to, you know. A place for everything and everything in its place. A place for everybody and everybody in his place. Look at the Pentagon- look at the whole army, for Goddess's sake! That's what they want the planet to be like Efficient, mechanical, orderly- very orderly- and inhuman. That's the essence of the Aneristic Delusion: to imagine you have found Order and then to start manipulating the quirky, eccentric chaotic things that really exist into some kind of platoons or phalanxes that correspond to your concept of the Order they're supposed to manifest. Of course, the quirkiest, most chaotic things that exist are other people- and that's why they're so obsessed with trying to control us.
Why are you staring like that? Am I changing colors or growing bigger or something? Good: the acid is starting to work. Now we can really get to the nitty-gritty. First of all, most of what I've been telling you is bullshit. The IIluminati have no millennia-old history; neither do the JAMs. They invented their great heritage and tradition- Jacques De Molay and Charlemagne and all of it- out of whole cloth in 1776, picking up all sorts of out-of-context history to make it seem plausible. We've done the same. You might wonder why we copy them, and even deceive our own recruits about this. Well, part of illumination- and we've got to be illuminized ourselves to fight them- is in learning to doubt everything. That's why Hagbard has that painting in his stateroom saying "Think for yourself, schmuck," and why Hassan i Sabbah said "Nothing is true." You've got to learn to doubt us, too, and everything we tell you. There are no honest men on this voyage. In fact, maybe this part is the only lie I've told you all evening, and the Illuminati history before 1776 really is true and not an invention. Or maybe we're just a front for the Illuminati… to recruit you indirectly…
Feeling paranoid? Good: illumination is on the other side of absolute terror. And the only terror that is truly absolute is the horror of realizing that you can't believe anything you've ever been told. You have to realize fully that you are "a stranger and afraid in a world you never made," like Houseman says.
Twenty-two big rhinoceroses, twenty-three big. rhinoceroses…
The Illuminati basically were structure-freaks. Hence, their hangup on symbols of geometric law and architectural permanence, especially the pyramid and the pentagon. (God's Lightning, like all authoritarian Judeo-Christian heresies, had its own share of this typically Occidental straight-line mystique, which was why even the Jews among them, like Zev Hirsch, accepted the symbol first suggested by Atlanta Hope: that most Euclidean of all religious emblems: the Cross.) The Discordians made their own sardonic commentary on the legal and scientific basis of law V order by using a 17-step pyramid-17 being a number with virtually no interesting geometric, arithmetic or mystic properties, outside of Java, where it was the basis of a particularly weird musical scale- and topping it with the Apple of Discord, symbol of the un-rational, un-geometrical, and thoroughly disorderly spontaneity of the vegetable world of creative evolution. The Erisian Liberation Front (ELF) had no symbol, and when asked for one by new recruits, replied loftily that their symbol could not be pictured, since it was a circle whose circumference was everywhere and its center nowhere. They were the most far-out group of all, and only the most advanced Discordians could begin to understand their gibberish.
The JAMs, however, had a symbol that anyone could understand, and, just as Harry Pierpont showed it to John Dillinger midway through a nutmeg high in Michigan City prison, Dr. Ignotius showed it to Joe midway through his first acid trip.
"This," he said dramatically, "is the Sacred Chao."
"That's a symbol of technocracy," Joe said, giggling.
"Well," Dr. Ignotius smiled, "at least you're original. Nine out of ten new members mistake it for the Chinese yin-yang or the astrological symbol of Cancer. It's similar to both of them- and also to the symbols of the Northern Pacific Railroad and the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, all of which is eventually going to lead to some interesting documents being produced at John Birch headquarters, I'm sure, proving that sex educators run the railroads or that astrologers control the sex educators or something of that sort. No, this is different. It is the Sacred Chao, symbol of Mummu, God of Chaos.
"On the right, O nobly born, you will see the image of your 'female' and intuitive nature, called yin by the Chinese. The yin contains an apple which is the golden apple of Eris, the forbidden apple of Eve, and the apple which used to disappear from the stage of the Flatbush Burlesque House in Brooklyn when Linda Larue did the split on top of it at the climax of her striptease. It represents the erotic, libidinal, anarchistic, and subjective values worshiped by Hagbard Celine and our friends in the Legion of Dynamic Discord.
"Now, O nobly born, as you prepare for Total Awakening, turn your eyes to the left, yang side of the Sacred Chao. This is the image of your 'male,' rationalistic ego. It contains the pentagon of the Illuminati, the Satanists, and the U.S. Army. It represents the anal, authoritarian, structural, law 'n' order values which the Illuminati have imposed, through their puppet governments, on most of the peoples of the world.
"This is what you must understand, O newborn Buddha: neither side is complete, or true, or real. Each is an abstraction, a fallacy. Nature is a seamless web in which both sides are in perpetual war (which is another name for perpetual peace). The equation always balances. Increase one side, and the other side increases by itself. Every homosexual is a latent heterosexual, every authoritarian cop is the shell over an anarchistic libido. There is no Vernichtung, no Final Solution, no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and you are not Saul Goodman, when you're lost out here."