Illuminatus! Excerpt: Five stages

Now for a few words about the "real truth," at least as the Illuminati understand "real truth." 

Every society actually passes through the five stages of Verwirrung, or chaos; Zweitracht, or discord;
Unordnung, or confusion; Beamtenherrschaft, or bureaucracy; and Grummet, or aftermath.
Sometimes, to make comparison with the exoteric Hegel-Marx system more pointed, the esoteric
Illuminati system is defined as: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, Parenthesis, and Paralysis. The public
Hegel-Marx triad is also called the tricycle, and the arcane latter two stages are called the bicycle;
one of the first secrets revealed to every illuminatus Minore is "After the tricycle it comes always the
bicycle." (The Uluminati are rather prone toward literal translations from Weishaupt's German.) 

The first stage, Verwirrung or chaos, is the point from which all societies begin and to which they all
return. It is, so to speak, the natural condition of humanity—an estimation which the reader can
confirm by closely observing his neighbors (or, if he has the necessary objectivity, himself). 

It is, therefore, also the fundamental Thesis. The Illuminati associate this with Eris, and also with
other goddesses from Isis to Ishtar and from Kwannon to Kali—with the Female Principle, yin, in
general. This correlates with hexagram 2 in the I Ching: that is, K'un, which has the meanings of
receptivity, nature (in contrast to spirit), earth (in contrast to sky), female (in contrast to male). Thus,
although this is the first stage chronologically, it has the mystical number 2, which is always
associated with the female in magic; and it correlates with the 2nd trump in Tarot, the High Priestess,
who represents not only maternity and fertility but gnosis. The sign of the horns represents
Verwirrung because the fingers make a V shape; and the planet or the symbol of Venus, also
designates this stage. On the Zodiac: Aquarius.  

The second stage, Zweitracht, begins with the appearance of a ruling or governing class. This is the
Antithesis of chaos, of course, and leads directly into discord when the servile class discovers that its
interests are not the same as the interests of the ruling class. This correlates with Osiris, Jehovah, and
all masculine deities; with the symbol of the All-Seeing Eye; with hexagram 1 in the I Ching: Ch'ien,
the creative, the heavenly, the strong, the powerful; with the male principle, yang, in general; with
the number 3, symbolizing the all-male Christian trinity; with the 12th trump of the Tarot, the
Hanged Man,  symbolizing sacrifice, schism and schizophrenia; and with the planet or symbol of
Mars,  . Naturally, a Zweitracht period is always replete with "internal contradictions," and
somebody like Karl Marx always arises to point them out. On the Zodiac: Pisces.

   
The third stage, Unordnung or confusion, occurs when an attempt is made to restore balance or
arrive at the Hegelian Synthesis. This correlates with Loki, the Devil, Mercury (god of thieves),
Thoth in his role of Trickster, Coyote, and other spirits of illusion or deception; with hexagram 4 in
the I Ching, Meng, youthful folly or standing on the brink of the abyss; with the number 11,
signifying sin, penance, and revelation; with the 21st trump in the Tarot, the Fool who walks over the
abyss; and with the planet or sign of Mercury,  . It represents that attempt to restore the state of
nature by unnatural means, an annihilation of the biogram by the logogram. On the Zodiac: Cancer.

 
The fourth stage, Beamtenherrschaft or bureaucracy, represents the Parentheses that occur when the
Hegelian Synthesis does not succeed in reconciling the opposites. This correlates with Void (absence
of any divinity); with I Ching hexagram 47, K'un, oppression or exhaustion, superior men held in
restraint by inferior men; with the number 8, indicating balance and the Last Judgment; with the 16th
Tarot trump, Falling Tower, representing deteriorations and the Tower of Babel; and with the
planetoid or sign of the moon,  . On the Zodiac: Libra.   

The fifth stage, Grummet or aftermath, represents the transition back to chaos. Bureaucracy chokes
in its own paperwork; mind is at the end of its tether; in desperation, many begin to deny the
logogram and follow the biogram, with varying degrees of success. This correlates with
Hermaphrodite; with I Ching hexagram 59, Huan, dispersion, dissolution, foam on the water; with
the number 5, union of male and female; with the 6th trump of the Tarot, the Lovers, indicating
union; and with the sun or its symbol,  . On the Zodiac: Virgo.

Since the association of these references, and their bearings on history, may be a bit unclear to some
readers, we will give further details on each stage.

VERWIRRUNG

In this chaotic period, the Hodge and the Podge are in dynamic balance. There is no stasis: The

balance is always shifting and homeostatic, in the manner of the ideal "self-organizing system" of

General Systems Theory or Cybernetics. The Illuminati, and all authoritarian types in general, dislike

such ages so much that they try to prevent any records of their existence from reaching the general

public. Pre-Chou China was one such period, and its history (except for some fragments in Taoist

lore) is largely lost; we do know, however, that the I Ching was reorganized when the Chou Dynasty

introduced patriarchal authoritarianism to China. It was then that the hexagram K'un, associated with this period was moved from the first place to its present, second place in the Ching.

Every line in K'un is broken (yin), because this is a feminist and prepatriarchal form of society, and

because yin correlates with the agricultural rather than the urban. Always linked to darkness by mystics, this K'un style of sensibility is also linked, by the Illuminati, with dreck (dung) and everything they find messy and intolerable about ordinary human beings. (The Erisians, of course,

take the opposite position, connect this with Eris, the primordial goddess, and regard it as ideal.) 

Verwirrung is numerologically linked with 2, not only because of K'un's shift from first to second

place in the Ching, but because it is the balance of Hodge and Podge. Thus, even though it is the first

stage chronologically, it is never linked with 1 in magic sense, because 1 signifies the erect penis, the

male principle in isolation, and such authoritarian games as monotheism, monopoly, monogamy, and

general monotony. This dynamic 2-ness of Verwirrung is also implicit in its Tarot card, the 2nd

trump or High Priestess, who sits between a black pillar and a white one (cf. The Hodge and Podge)

and who represents mystery, magic, mischief, and Erisian values generally. She wears the balanced

(solar) cross, rather than the unbalanced (Christian) cross, to emphasize the unity of opposites in

such a historical period. 

Typical Aquarians who have manifested Verwirrung values are Aaron Burr, Christopher Marlowe,

Hung Mung, Charles Darwin, Willard Gibbs (who incorporated chaos into mathematics), Mrs.

Patrick Campbell, Elizabeth Blackwell (pioneer woman physician), Anna Pavlova, Mozart, Lewis

Carrol, Robert Burns, James Joyce, Lord Byron, David Wark Griffith, and Gelett Burgess, author of

the classic Erisian poem: 

I never saw a purple cow I never hope to see one But I'll tell you this anyhow: I'd rather see than be one. 

The Verwirrung phase of European history is identified with the Danubian Culture, so called because

most of its relics have been found along the shores of the Danube. According to archeologists, the Danubian culture was agricultural, pre-urban, worshipped a female rather than a male god, and never

invented anything remotely like a state. The pre-Inca society of Peru, the Minoan civilization, the

pre-Chou period of China already mentioned, and many American Indian tribes still surviving also

represent a Verwirrung social framework. The synthesis of Hodge and Podge, and especially of

biogram and logogram, in such cultures is indicated by the amazement of explorers from authoritarian societies when first encountering them. The usual words about the "grace" and "spontaniety" of the natives merely represent the lack of authoritarian conflict between biogram and logogram: These people sit, like the Tarot High Priestess, between opposite poles, without tilting one way or the other. 

But the fact that this is a dynamic and not a static balance means that eventually (after 73 permutations, according to Weishaupt) the second stage must evolve. 

ZWEITRACHT

In this discordant period, the Hodge and the Podge are in conflict, because a ruling class emerges

which attempts to control the others. This correlates with hexagram 1, Ch'ien, the all-powerful, in the I Ching. The six unbroken lines represent the severity and monotony of such a period, which is, above all, the age of the T-square, the building of fences, the division of lands by

"boundaries" drawn on maps, and the imposition of one man's (or one group's) will upon all others.

Typically, the earth is regarded as both flat and finite by the Zweitracht mentality, and there is much

concern with dividing it up into portions (among themselves, of course). The "superstitious" terror of

American Indians when first confronting maps was merely the reaction of a Verwirrung mentality to

a Zweitracht mentality: The Indians could not conceive of people treating earth as a thing to be

exploited rather than a mother to be respected. 

Zweitracht associates with 3 numerologically because 3 is the totally male number, because all-male

Trinities (Brahma-Vishnu-Siva, Father-Son-Spirit, etc.) are invented in such ages, and because the

discord always has a minimum of 3 vectors, not merely 2. That is, the division into a propertied

ruling class and an unpropertied governed class immediately sets in motion further cupidity; the

ruling class soon falls to fighting over the spoils. Contrary to Marx, most of the strife in Zweitracht

ages is not the conflict between proprietors and proles but between various proprietors over who gets

the biggest share of the pie. 

The governing Tarot card is trump 12, the Hanged Man. The cross on which he hangs is blossoming,

to show that it is still organic and alive (the biogram); he hangs upside down, to show the reversal of

nature. He represents both the burden of omniscience in the owning-governing class and the burden

of nescience in the servile-submissive class: the total crucifixion of desire by Realprinzip and

Realpolitik. 

The astrological sign of this period is Pisces, the two fish swimming in opposite directions indicating

the conflict of logogram and biogram ("body" and "spirit," astrologers say.) Typical Pisceans who

have shown the Zweitracht personality are E. H. Harriman, the railroad magnate (who covered the

United States with Ch'ien-style unbroken straight lines), Cardinal John Henry Newman, Sir Robert

Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts (an attempt to instill Piscean authoritarianism even in

childhood), Admiral Chester Nimitz, John Foster Dulles, Anna Lee (founder of the world's most

antisexual religion, the Shakers), industrialists like Kruger and Pullman, financiers like Cambell and

Braden, Grover Cleveland, John C. Calhoun, Neville Chamberlain, Andrew Jackson (whose

expulsion of the Cherokee Nation from its traditional lands onto the "trail of tears," where most of

them perished, is the archetypal Zweitracht land-grab), William Jennings Bryan, and Frank Stanton

of CBS. 

Since all Illuminati with any academic leanings at all are encouraged to major in history, the tendency in most textbooks is not only to black out Verwirrung periods but to glorify Zweitracht periods as ages of Light and Progress. Indeed, they make entertaining reading: They .are ages of expansion, and there are always new people being discovered to be subjugated, "civilized," and converted to tax-payers and rent-payers. Almost any age described in glowing and admiring language in a history text will prove, on examination, to be a Zweitracht era, and the foremost butchers and invaders are treated as the outstanding heroes of humanity. A sympathetic reading of the biographies of these empire-builders almost always indicates that they were homo neophile individuals who turned their talents to destruction rather than creativity because of bitterness engendered by years of torment and baiting by homo neo-phobe types during their childhoods. The ever-present conflict in a Zweitracht period eventually leads to the third stage. 

UNORDNUNG

Humanity has been transformed during a Zweitracht age, by placing logogram in governing authority

over bio-gram. Unordnung is an attempt to restore balance by revolutionizing the logogram; there is

no thought about the biogram, because contact with this somatic component of personality has been

lost. (This loss of contact has been variously described by pre-Celinean observers: It is "the veil of

Maya" in Buddhism, the "censor band" or "repression" in psychoanalysis, the "character armoring"

and "muscular armoring" in Reichian psychology, etc.) 

The I Ching hexagram for this stage is Meng, or Youthful Folly. The yang line at the top

indicates the continued supremacy of logogram, even though some biogram elements (the yin lines)

begin to reassert themselves. The traditional reading is "mountain above water"; that is, the rigid

logogram still repressing the Aquarian element as it seeks to liberate itself. The usual Chinese

interpretation of this hexagram is "The young fool needs discipline," and the leaders of all rebellions

at this stage always heartily agree with that and demand unquestioning obedience from their

followers. This is a time of turmoils, troubles, and tyrannies that appear and disappear rapidly. 

The mystical number is 11, which means "a new start" in Kabalism and "error and repentence" in

most other systems of numerology. 

Tarot trump 21, The Fool, symbolizes this age as a dreamy-eyed youth unknowingly walking over an

abyss. The Hitlerjugend, and the disciples of various other fuehrers and messiahs, immediately come

to mind. That this card is disputed by various Tarot experts, and is given a numerical value of 0

rather than 21 by the wisest, indicates the confusion in all Unordnung periods. The dog who barks to

warn the Young Fool, like the yin lines in the hexagram, represents the desperate attempts of the

biogram ton break through the repression or censor-band and make itself heard. 

Typical Cancerians who exemplified Unordnung are Julius Caesar, Mary Baker Eddy (whose

philosophy was an explicit denial of the biogram), Albert Parsons, Emma Goldman, Benjamin Peret,

Vladimir Mayakofski, Henry David Thoreau, Durrutti, P-J Proudhon, Brooks Adams, General

Kitchener, Luigi Pirandello (the literary master of ambiguity), Erich Ambler (the literary master of

conspiracy), Calvin Coolidge (who issued the classically muddled Cancerian statement "Be as

revolutionary as science and as conservative as the multiplication table"), Andrei Gromy-ko, Nelson

Rockefeller, John Calvin, Estes Kefauver, and Rexford Tugwell. 

An Unordnung period has always been thought of (even before Hegel provided the words) as a

synthesis between the thesis of Verwirrung and the antithesis Zweitracht; since it is a false synthesis

on the logogrammic level only, it always gives birth to the fourth stage, the Parenthesis. 

BEAMTENHERRSCHAFT

This is the age of bureaucracy, and to live at this time is, as Proudhon said, "to have every operation,

every transaction, every movement noted, registered, counted, rated, stamped, measured, numbered,

assessed, licensed, refused, authorized, endorsed, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed,

corrected ... to be laid under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from,

exhausted, hoaxed, and robbed." The governing I Ching hexagram is 47, K'un, oppression or

exhaustion, the dried-up lake, with the usual reading of superior men oppressed by the inferior. This

is the time when homo neophobe types most rigorously repress homo neophile types, and great

heresy hunts and witch trials flourish. This correlates with the number 8, signifying the Last

Judgment, because every citizen is to some extent a State functionary, and each is on trial before the

jury of all. The traditional Chinese associations with this hexagram are sitting under a bare tree and

wandering through an empty valley— signifying the ecological havoc wreaked by purely abstract

minds working upon the organic web of nature. 

The 16th Tarot trump, The Tower, describes this age. 

The Tower is struck by lightning and the inhabitants fall from the windows. (Cf. the Tower of Babel

legend and our recent power failures.) The traditional interpretations of this card suggest pride,

oppression, and bankruptcy. 

This correlates with Libra, the mentality which measures and balances all things on an artificial scale

(Maya). Typical Libras who have manifested Beamtenherrschaft characterists are Comte de Saint

Simon, Justice John Marshall, Hans Geiger, Henry Wallace, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kenneth

Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Dewey, and Dr. Joyce Brothers. 

In Beamtenherrschaft ages there is ceaseless activity, all planned in advance, begun at the scheduled

second, carefully supervised, scrupulously recorded— but inevitably finished late and poorly done.

The burden of omniscience on the ruling class becomes virtually intolerable, and most flee into some

form of schizophrenia or fantasy. Great towers, pyramids, moon shots, and similar marvels are

accomplished at enormous cost while the underpinnings of social solidarity crumble entirely. While

blunders multiply, no responsible individual can ever be found, because all decisions are made by

committees; anyone seeking redress of grievance wanders into endless corridors of paperwork with

no more tangible result than in the Hunting of the Snark. Illuminati historians, of course, describe

these ages as glowingly as Zweitracht epochs, for, although control is in the hands of homo neophobe

types, there is at least a kind of regularity, order, and geometrical precision about everything, and the

"messiness" of the barbaric Verwirrung ages and revolutionary Unordnung ages is absent. 

Nevertheless, the burden of omniscience on the rulers steadily escalates, as we have indicated, and

the burden of nescience on the servile class increasingly renders them unfit to serve (more and more

are placed on the dole, shipped to "mental" hospitals, or recruited into whatever is the current analog

of the gladiatorial games), so the Tower eventually falls. 

GRUMMET

The age of Grummet begins with an upsurge of magicians, hoaxers, Yippies, Kabouters, shamans,

clowns, and other Eristic forces. The relevant I Ching hexagram is 59, Huan,  , dispersion and

dissolution. The gentle wind above the deep water is the Chinese reading of the image, with

associations of loss of ego, separation from the group, and "going out" in general. Yin lines dominate

all but the top of the hexagram; the forces leading to a new Verwir-rung stage are pushing upward

toward release. This is also called Paralysis by the Illuminati, because, objectively, nothing much is

happening; subjectively, of course, the preparations for the new cycle are working unconsciously. 

The mystic number is 5, union of male (3) with female (2) and final resolution of conflict between

Verwirrung and Zweitracht. 

The governing Tarot trump is number 6, the Lovers, in which the woman looks upward at the angel

(Eris, the bio-gram) and the man looks at the woman (the logogram, yang, reaches synthesis with

biogram, yin, only through reconciliation with the female). Hence, the upsurge of feminism in such

periods, together with a renewed emphasis on clans, tribes, and communes. 

Typical Virgos manifesting Grummet traits are Charlie Parker, Antonin Artaud, Louis Lingg, Edgar

Rice Burroughs, Grandma Moses, Lodovico Ariosto, Greta Garbo, Hedy Lamarr, and Goethe and

Tolstoy (who manifested strong yin values while never quite getting reconciled with the women in

their own lives. Tolstoy, however, as the classic dropout, is an archetypal Grummet persona and

almost completed the Sufi course of "quit this world, quit the next world, quit quitting!"). 

After Grummet, of course, authority has collapsed entirely, and the biogram stands on equal footing

with the logogram. Hodge and Podge being once again in dynamic balance, a new Verwirrung period

begins, and the cycle repeats. 

Since Weishaupt dreamed this schema up while he was under the influence of several hallucinogenic

drugs, one should regard it with some skepticism. It is certainly not true in every detail, and there is

no theoretical or empirical demonstration that each of the five ages must always have 73

permutations. The fact that Grummet-Virgo personalities (and all other of the five personality types)

are born in all ages, even if they come to dominance in their appropriate epochs, leaves many

mysteries still unsolved. In short, all that a sober scholar can say of the Illuminati theory of history is

that it makes at least as much sense as the exoteric Marx-Hegel, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin

theories. 

The A.A., who regard all Illuminati theories as false projections onto the external world of inner

spiritual processes, are particularly skeptical about this one, since it involves several false

correlations between the I Ching and the Tarot, the Zodiac, etc. 

Finally, it should be noted that of all the people Hagbard employed as resonance for the vibes used

against the Saure family in Ingolstadt, only Lady Velkor, Danny Pricefixer, and George Dorn were

not Virgos. Hagbard evidently believed that the Illuminati magical links work when Illuminati

activities are occurring in a given area—and, hence, virtually all of "his" people at the festival were

Virgos and thereby linked with the Grummet/Huan-59/Trump 6 chain of astrological associations.

On the other hand, the presence of three non-Virgos shows Hagbard's pragmatic approach and his

refusal to be ruled even by so exact a science as astrology.* 

* This sentence may manifest a lapse into mockery or mystification by otherwise sober

authors.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.