Robert Shea (1933–1994)

With a quarter of the book being appendices and the characters realizing they're in a book this is where this series goes from metafiction into a winking declaration of Truth, or maybe fiction that might as well be fact. If you come into it expecting a conclusion that would make sense of the nonsense you've spent 600 pages trying to decipher you will be disappointed. Much like a koan, the book isn't supposed to make sense on the surface level, it's supposed to make sense to you, in a flash show more of enlightenment. Or illumination. show less

A classic bit of bogus balderdash wrapped up in sex, drugs and conspiracy theories. Writing style? Think James Joyce meets Ayn Rand and has a love child on acid. Fnord. What made it especially eerie this time around were the echos of today in yesterday. If you want to understand the zeitgeist of today's American politics, smoke this book from 50 years ago - it'll really get you out there.

[This review is dedicated to the anarchist and occasional friend Steve Ash who sadly died last year. This book meant a great deal to him.]

Wrongly sold as science fiction, this is an anarcho-libertarian bit of mischief mashing up some serious indirect philosophy and psychology with popular cultural memes, conspiracy theory, erotica, the occult and a lot of dated political satire.

It is so deliberately occult in places as to become occasionally (and ironically) a bit pompous, much like its show more 'hero' Hagbard Celine, the Captain Nemo of the story. The satire is somewhat jaded and the three novels taken together are too long and sometimes over-written.

But, having said this, the book is mostly a great deal of fun and, once you get used to the technique of having apparently disconnected tales flow into each other without any clear sign that the narrator has changed, easy enough to get through.

It is a classic text because it introduced into popular culture an entire alternative way of thinking about the world which, though sometimes as absurd as the 'morning of the magicians', is genuinely liberatory and, ultimately, 'true' or 'as true' as anything else.

We have to remember the time when it was written - the depressingly reactionary period in early 1970s America that emerged in response to the counter-cultural liberatory aspects of the 1960s.

Yes, the 1960s were an era of unorganised narcissism whose final result was Hillary Clinton but, in that specific context, Shea and Anton Wilson provide us with a cogent popular explanation of why anarchic narcissism may be the only appropriate response to authority.

The themes in these book - Lovecraftian, erotic, science fiction, conspiracy, new age - have, for better or worse, embedded themselves in the minds of those who will not accept that state authority is anything other than oppressive.

In this respect, the seeds laid by Shea and Anton Wilson in the 1970s act as counterpoint to those laid by Saul Alinsky, as alternative democratic sub-socialist and anarchic sub-libertarian responses to Leviathan, the State - or rather to Man's determination to submit.

The dominant model of political organisation in relation to the American State on the American Left is a sort of 'femininised' or beta male baring of the arse in order to be buggered in the hope that eventually the old beast will die and the buggered beast will inherit.

The anarcho-libertarian model seems to abandon all notions of Right or Left (which confuses the traditionalists of the Left) and laud the trickster, freethinker, pirate and even criminal against the very notion of order.

It is a view of human nature as good in the very end - or at least as less bad than when it is in under orders. The politics may be questionable but the psychological and philosophical insights are less so, even if presented in quasi-Zen parables and obfuscatory occultism.

The Trilogy (and the 'serious' Appendices, with no more 'truth' in them than any other part of the books) offers us versions of a number of theories questioning the reality that we create out of our sense perceptions and, in particular, social reality.

This questioning of social reality will last far longer than the political satire and the book's somewhat stock appropriation of cultural memes, such as Lovecraftian monsters and Nazis waiting to rise to make blood sacrifices to 'immanentize the eschaton'.

The book is justified by its bringing these thoughts about social reality subliminally to thousands of young people in every generation although, sadly, for every one who gets it, ten or a hundred will not and cease to be as functional in their own interest as they might.

Many observers have not noted that, as a book of constant paradox, the Trilogy, with its twists and turns has inherent fascistic aspects too - the elite eroticism, the leadership principle underpinning Hagbard, the cyclical views of history, the appropriation of traditionalism.

There is also implicit in the vision a disturbing sense of history as elites manipulating masses but without any real outrage being expressed - the Discordians seem simply to wish to play in the game on equal terms, disrupting the forces of order to restore 'balance'.

In this world view, there is still a hierarchical view of humanity. The masses could have their eyes open, and the Discordians devoutly wish that this would happen, yet a deep conservative pessimism in the game players leads them to accept that it will not.

The clever trick played in the book is that the naive reader who thinks he has 'got it' is really being manipulated into the false belief that, because he has 'got it', he is now part of the same elite that gave 'it' to him. He is not. The authors warn but not directly.

Look hard and there is a paragraph in the Appendices where an argument for human sacrifice of a most primitive type is made too plausible to be ironical, a nod perhaps to Evola, yet contrasted with horror at the mass immolations of war and that 1970s preoccupation, the Holocaust.

This is where the 1960s Generation can be seen to be bifurcating into an authoritarian and ideological optimism on the one side and a tendency to inverted rage and pessimism. The slave now adopts guerrilla tactics to undermine what cannot be destroyed frontally.

Magick and the occult in particular are the tools of the frustrated and the outsider and this book is heavily imbued with magical thinking.

Contemporary anarchism, Goth culture, popular horror, fantasy and the occult are now very much combined as a model for libertarian resistance to Leviathan - and the fantastic aspects do not stop police raids even today on those who withdraw from the system and wear black.

Culturally this is an important book, a tour de force in terms of its organisation of literary references and even plot. Its weaknesses are those of its time and we can only understand it by referring back to that time.

Beyond the politics, the book must be marked out as a text that introduced radically new ways of thinking to a mass audience - even if its subtleties have bypassed and will bypass those who read the New York Times and the Guardian and think they represent reality.

Related Review

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6146412-grimoires - the history of magical grimoires and their use as forms of resistance show less

This doorstop volume is something like a hipper, sexier version of the medieval novels of Sir Walter Scott. Its protagonist is a troubadour and Cathar sympathizer who goes on crusade to Egypt with Louis IX. Shea is best known for his co-authorship of the 1970s conspiracy romp Illuminatus!, and there are hints here of a great benevolent conspiracy, while the foreground is occupied by malicious conspiracies against the hero and the throne of France.

The pacing of the book is fast, covering six show more years at the middle of the thirteenth century, and the plot is engaging. The narrative style is pretty transparent, never getting in the way of the story. The historical elements are well-researched and credible. I enjoyed this read a great deal, and I would recommend it to fans of chivalry and/or heresy.

I read a withdrawn library copy in pocket paperback format. The thirty-year-old book was already well worn when I started reading it, and had literally gone to pieces when I finished. All Things Are Lights is out of print, but it has been published online by the author's estate under a creative commons license. Although not flagged as a sequel, there is a two-volume novel called The Saracen which features the son of the hero of All Things Are Lights. The Saracen is available for free download at Project Gutenberg, and I may eventually read it also. show less