Illuminatus!

What follows is an excerpt from Prop Anon's 11-29-20 MONDO 2000 piece entitled "To Mainline the Pure Dope of Illuminatus!: An Interview with Illuminatus TV Showrunner Brian Taylor":

I always used to tease Grant (Morrison)…like when American Gods came out, I was like “Grant did you get any royalties on that? Somebody else is making The Invisibles.” When you read Illuminatus! you’re like “oh shit man, this is the original! This is where The Invisibles came from. This is where everything came from!” A lot of things that I look for as an artist and a lot of my sensibilities were formed by that book without even knowing about it because it influenced so many things that influenced me. And there is that psychedelic quality that the book has where you just fall into it. When you read the book, you feel like a different person. It definitely has more of an effect on your life than a book normally does. It kind of takes you over a little bit, and when you’re finished reading it, there’s this period of coming out of it that which feels like you are coming out of a dream and back into reality. You realize that that book was taking you someplace else. But because it’s Illuminatus! and its Robert Anton Wilson, you think, “Well, I think I’m not coming out of reality, but maybe I was coming out of something else.”

One other thing. Illuminatus! is just so smart and funny. I found that I just missed him, and the world misses him. I’ve seen these interviews where he talked about the things he looked forward to and where he thought the world was going, and there was this whole alternate, intellectual, metaphysical kind of thought in the 90s about where things were going. The Terrence McKenna school — we are going to find a way to get free of these monkey bodies and we’re going to find a way to enter other dimensions and we’re going to expand intelligence and extend life. We’re going to break free of a lot of these things that have held us monkeys back for thousands of years.

There’s a sadness when you hear him talking about that now because it didn’t happen. The world now is even more fucked up than when he wrote Illuminatus! It just seems like we’ve been completely incapable of breaking free of that stuff. We’re still fighting the same pathetic cultural wars, the same primitive religious wars, despite our best angels pushing us forward to get better. The vast majority of humanity is just this epic failure. It’s sad. In a way, you miss him but it’s also like I’m glad he didn’t live to see this. Selfishly, I want him here because I want to hear his perspective. I want him to put it in a context that isn’t so scary and sad because he just kind of had a way of doing that.

To read the entire interview, click HERE.