Robert Anton Wilson - Coincidance: A Head Test

Coincidance

A Head Test

Robert Anton Wilson

Introduction by
Alan Moore

Copyright 1988 Robert Anton Wilson

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Second Printing 199
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Fourth printing 199
Fifth printing 199
Sixth printing 200
Seventh Printing 2008

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I mention, as the most salient characteristics (of the collective unconscious) chaotic multiplicity and order; duality; the opposition of light and dark, upper and lower, right and left; the union of opposites in a third; the quaternity (square, cross); rotation (circle, sphere); and finally the centering process and a radical arrangement that usually followed some quaternity system...

C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy The mome rath hasn't been born that can outgrabe me.

James Thurber, The Thurber Carnival

The Doctor With the Frightened Eyes; Thirteen Choruses for the Divine Marquis ; and The Married Catholic Priests Convention were originally published in The Realist and are reprinted with permission of the publisher. [Subscriptions to The Realist are available at Box 1230, Venice, CA 90294.]

The Godfathers and the Goddess and Religion for the Hell of It were originally published by Hot Press , Dublin, Ireland and are reprinted with their permission.

The Synchronistic Samba: Dancing at the End of Language with James Joyce and Robert Anton Wilson.

By Alan Moore So, anyway, the incandescent and exquisitely mad Daisy Eris Campbell sent me the requested photo of her rainbow-coloured knickers as worn by the bronze bust of Carl Gustav Jung, which stands not far from the converging Liverpudlian streets glimpsed in Jungs vision of the city as the pool of life itself. Where once the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool had stood, this was also the former site of both the Cavern Club and Erics Bunnymen and Beatles within spitting distance of the man who built a theory of coincidence from ordinary pun-free beetles tapping at his study window. It was also the location from which Daisy had elected to announce her epic follow-up to her late dad Ken Campbells legendary 24-hour-long production of Wilson and Sheas three-part Illuminatus! , this being a similarly complex piece of psychedelic theatre modeled upon Robert Anton Wilsons subsequent and equally hallucinatory Cosmic Trigger trilogy. Following the announcement and in company of our friends the delinquent authors Ali Fruish and John Higgs, Daisy intended to pop down to the Swiss archetype-wranglers bust, there to deposit the aforesaid undergarments on his brazen head. Shed told me of her plan while we were filming and recording my own contributions to her new extravaganza, in the roles of the omniscient I-Ching slinging computer FUCKUP voiced in the original production, Im sure adequately, by this countrys previous leading thespian, Sir John Gielgud and the fallen angel Satan, both performances for which I was undoubtedly born ready. The reason I was so keenly supportive of Daisys polychromatic act of vandalism, and had asked for photographic evidence, was a longstanding grievance that I had with the professor over his unseemly cavalier approach towards a valued fellow long-term resident of my own town, Northampton, but we can come back to that at some point later. Im getting ahead of myself here.

I first encountered Robert Anton Wilsons writing in the Day-Glo punk fizz of the middle 1970s, a period when I was reconnecting with my teenage mentor, cherished friend and, it turned out, card-carrying Discordian pope Steve Moore after some years of bill-paying office work and marriage on my own part, during which wed been less frequently in touch. Steve seemed, to me, to be continually positioned at the very centre of the latest and most interesting fringe ideas, and was at this point heavily involved with that heroic nexus of intriguing oddness, The Fortean Times . In getting reacquainted we were keen to trade enthusiasms cultivated since the last time that wed seen each other, with me anxious to communicate my love for Edward Gorey, Richard Brautigan or Brian Eno, while Steve brought me up to date with an array of Fortean considerations, I-Ching scholarship, and the Illuminatus trilogy, which Steve was kind enough to loan me and which, Im ashamed to say, I dont recall returning to him. In my own defence, my consciousness had just been processed through the blender of Wilson and Sheas uproarious work, surely a gateway drug for postmodern anarcho-occultism, and my moral compass may have been disrupted by the resultant electromagnetic pulse.

Being a standard issue counterculture remnant of that period, I was primed to some degree by my previous readings Burroughs, Leary, Pynchon, Arthur Koestlers The Roots of Coincidence but was still staggered by the authors dazzling act of synthesis; the way theyd reinvented the neurotic sucking-bogs of paranoia and conspiracy as an illuminating intellectual game; how theyd transformed the debris of the psychedelic Left, its by-then threadbare touchstones and cannabinated folklore, into an exhilarating and empowering conceptual mosaic which connected previously isolated notions in a crackling synaptic web. Also, the scandalously funny narrative appeared to offer a new and sophisticated way of viewing magic which did not involve forfeiting rationality in favour of some frankly ludicrous pseudo-philosophy or other, and which apparently did not require an amputation of the sense of humour. Smitten, as in retrospect so many others must have been, I launched myself on an obsessive quest for any fresh Wilson material I could find, including any publications to which hed appended an obliging cover-blurb. At this point, let us introduce a training montage in which Im depicted gazing cretinously at a run of Robert Anton Wilson titles for some twenty years, until a slowly-dawning smile of comprehension breaks across my features and all my associates laugh and cheer and slap me on the back. This brings us up to 1996 and my discovery of RAWs Coincidance .

The intervening decades had seen many startling changes in the wider world and in my own personal circumstances, not the least of these having been my partially Wilson-influenced decision just a couple of years earlier to redefine myself as some variety of practicing magician. The shift of perspective, which had been perhaps the most immediate consequence of this experience, meant that I was at that time re-examining occult works which had previously been opaque or only partly understood to find they now made sudden, vivid sense. This, arguably, was the best possible humour in which to approach Coincidance not as a piece of intellectual theory to distantly contemplate, but as a practical guide to the stupefying Hermann Hesse Magic Theatre of the mind that Id but lately blundered into. Recommended by its jacket copy as a personal favourite of the author, this new volume promised much and, as I soon discovered, massively over-delivered on those promises.