Happy Maybe Day - Robert Anton Wilson Music & TTRPG Connections
Sly Flourish, DJ Steve Fly, The MC5, The KLF, GURPS Illuminati
Today (the 23rd of July) is the 6th annual Maybe Day, which is a “celebration of the lives and ideas of Robert Anton Wilson.” RAW is my favorite author, so to celebrate I am sharing some connections with his work to music and roleplaying games.
Robert Anton Wilson’s most popular work is The Illuminatus! Trilogy from 1975. He co-authored it with his friend and fellow Playboy editor Robert Shea. We can make our first tabletop roleplaying game connection here as Shea’s son, Mike, is the mastermind behind Sly Flourish. Mike is “a writer and designer for tabletop roleplaying games best known as the author of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.”
To begin examining the music connections, let’s start with the comic book adaptation of The Illuminatus! Trilogy called Tales of Illuminatus! created by Bobby Campbell. The first issue was excellent, and he recently crowdfunded the second one. You can still order both as late pledges here.
As part of this project, DJ Steve Fly produced a soundtrack album called The First Trip. The First Trip functions as an in-world artifact as it is described as “an album of songs taken from the Ingolstadt Rock Festival Singles Collection (1976).” Within The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Ingolstadt is the location of the Walpurgisnacht rock festival.
One of my favorite parts of the third book in the trilogy is the list of all the bands playing the festival. When I first read the trilogy as a teenager, I had fun trying to separate the “actual” bands (whatever that means) versus the fictional ones. Fantasy RPG fans might appreciate that one of the bands is called Frodo Baggins and his Ring. Some of my other favorite band names include King Kong and his Skull Island Dinosaurs, The Golems, Bugs Bunny and his Fourteen Carrots, The Sirens of Titan, and The Thing on the Doorstep.
Legendary Detroit band the MC5 and their classic song “Kick out the Jams” figure into the plot of The Illuminatus! Trilogy as well. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction explains:
Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's trilogy of Illuminatus! novels make reference to this song, as, according to them, one of the ways the shadowy Illuminati attack a rival cult called the "JAMS" or "Justified Ancients of Mummu" (according to Wilson and Shea, the Illuminati control popular music as Secret Masters and manipulate it for their nefarious ends).
The Illuminatus! Trilogy has influenced bands periodically since its publication. A notable example are two music collectives led by Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond: The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (AKA The JAMs) and The KLF. As explained in this thoroughly researched article by Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Hayward, the JAMs “derived from Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus trilogy of novels in which the aforementioned “ancients” were a secret brotherhood involved in combatting the rival Illuminati, who originated in Atlantis.”
Before getting into music, Jimmy Cauty was a visual artist heavily connected to fantasy literature. Dig this excerpt from the Fitzgerald/Hayward article:
Cauty was a high school dropout and amateur artist who achieved success with a painting of Gandalf, the wizard from Tolkien’s fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, when it became one of the most successful posters ever produced by the British Athena company. The painting represented Gandalf, a member of the mystical Istari order and leader of the Fellowship of the Rings, as standing wise and resilient in a highly stylised mountainous landscape.
Rounding out the Robert Anton Wilson music connections, RAW recorded a punk rock album as explained in this Dangerous Minds article:
Recorded while Wilson was living in Ireland in the mid-’80s—avoiding Reagan’s presidency, if memory serves—The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy is the first LP by Irish garage-psych rockers the Golden Horde. Wilson contributed vocals (spoken) to most of the songs, and he wrote the lyrics to “Black Flag” and “Lawrence Talbot Suite.”
The most direct TTRPG connection to Robert Anton Wilson is likely through Steve Jackson Games and their Illuminati card game and Illuminati GURPS supplement.
The concept for the card game was initially inspired by The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which is also listed in the “Bibliography” for the GURPS supplement along with Wilson’s Historical Illuminatus Chronicles. In fact, much of the content in the Illuminati GURPS supplement derives from concepts that were popularized by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, and they are likely under-acknowledged.
Most of the music and RPG connections to RAW stem from The Illuminatus! Trilogy. RAW’s legacy and importance, however, are so much more than that one work. Other ground breaking “fictional” works by Wilson include the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, and Masks of the Illuminati. Even more important is RAW’s non-fiction. Books like Prometheus Rising, Quantum Psychology, Coincidance, and the three Cosmic Trigger volumes rewired my brain.
I’m unqualified to provide an adequate summary of the range, depth, and impact of his writing, so I will instead quote from Grant Morrison:
“Dramatist, philosopher, satirist, playwright, author, stand-up, Wilson has influenced generations of counterculture names and faces, sparked vision quests and self-deprogramming workouts, motivating a secret psychedelic insurrection of punks, Discordians, pagans, Chaotes, acidheads, all dancing to the beat of Wilson’s rousing, intelligent, undogmatic prose.”
(Excerpted from the Foreward of Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson by Gabriel Kennedy)
To ensure you have both the Hodge and the Podge perspective, here is a longer examination of RAW from Alan Moore:
I was very fortunate to be a student at the online Maybe Logic Academy in 2004-2006, where I took classes taught by Bob including the following:
Non-Euclidean Politics
Quantum Psychology
Illuminatus!
Ideogrammic Method
Conspiracy, Coincidence, & Code
Crowley 101
Tale of the Tribe
Although I never met him in person, I was honored to have an ongoing email correspondence with him. I was struck by how kind, funny, and curious he was.
For more information about Robert Anton Wilson, I strongly recommend the biography Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson by Gabriel Kennedy.
-Amor et Hilaritas
Was it a coincidence that this post was made on the 23rd?
Great Stuff! Thank you for Shout Out!!!
Hail Eris!!!