"Coincidence is a superstition created by scientists to explain synchronicity"
- paraphrased from Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea.
Sincere apologies to the two, but allow me to go on a bit of a tangeant.
Quote:
Dear Joe:
I'm back in Czechago again, fabulous demesne of Crookbacked Richard, pigbaschard of the world, etc., where the pollution comes up like thunder out of Gary across the lake, etc., and the Padre and I are still working on the heads of the local Heads, etc., so I've finally got time to write you that long letter I promised.
The Law of Fives is all the farther that Weishaupt ever got, and Hagbard and John aren't much interested in any further speculations along those lines. The 23/17 phenomenon is entirely my discovery, except that William S. Burroughs has noted the 23 without coming to any conclusions about it.
IU'm writing this on a bench in Grant Park, near the place I got Maced three years ago. Nice symbolism.
A woman just came along from the Mothers March Against Polio. I gave her a quarter. What a drag, just when I was trying to get my thoughts in order. WEhen you come out here, I'll be able to tell you more; this will obviously have to be somewhat sketchy.
Burrough, anyway, encountered the 23 in Tangiers, when a ferryboat captain named Clark remarked that he'd been sailing 23 years without an accident. That day, his ship sunk, with all hands and feet aboard. Burroughs was thinking about it in the evening when the radio newscast told him that an Eastern Airlines plane, New York to Miami, had crashed. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the plane was Flight 23.
. . .
When Burroughs told me that, I flipped, because I was 23 that year and lived on Clark Street. Besides, I immediately saw the application to the Law of Fives: 2 + 3 = 5 and Clark has 5 letters.
I was mulling this over when I happened to notice the shipwreck in Pound's Canto 23. That's the only shipwreck mentioned in the whole 800-page poem, in spite of all the nautical voyages described. Canto 23 also contains the line, "with the sun in a golden cup," which Yeats says inspired his own lines, "the golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon." Golden apples, of course, brought me back to Eris, and I realized I was onto something hot.
Then I tried adding the Illuminati Five to 23, and I got 28. The average menstrual period of the Woman. The lunar cycle. Back to the silver apples of the moon - and I'm Moon. Of course, Pound and Yeats both have five letters in their names.
If this be schizophrenia, I said with a P. Henry twist (one better than an O. Henry twist), make the most of it!
I looked deeper
. . .
The act of conception, of course, the father contributes 23 chromosomes and the mother contributes another 23. In the I Ching, hexagram 23 has connotations of "sinking" or "breaking apart," shades of the unfortunate Captain Clarks. . . .
Another woman just came by, collecting for the Mothers March against Muscular Dystrophy. I gave her a quarter. Where was I? Oh, yes: James Joyuce has five letters in both his front name and his hind name, so he was worth looking into. A Portrait of the Artsist has five chapters, all well and good, but Ulysses has 18 chapters, a stumper, until I remembered that 5 + 18 = 23. How about Finnegans Wake? Alas, that has 17 chapters, and I was bogged down for a while.
Trying another angle, I wondered if Frank Sullivan, the poor cluck who got shot instead of John at the Biograph Theatre that night, could have lingered until after midnights, dying on July 23 instead of July 22 as usually states. I looked it up in Toland's book, The Dillinger Days. Foor Frank, sad to say, died before midnight, but Toland included an interesting detail, which I told you that night at the Seminary bar: 23 people died of heat prostration that day in Chicago. He added something else: 17 people had died of heat prostration the day before. Why did he mention that? I'm sure he doesn't know - but there it was again, 23 and 17. Maybe something important is going to happen in the year 2317? I couldn't check that, of course (you can't navigate precisely in the Morgensheutegesternwelt), so I went back to 1723 and struck gold apples. That was the year Adam Smith and Adam Weishaupt were both born (and Smith published The Wealth of Nations the same year Weishaupt revived the Illuminati: 1776)
Well, 2 + 3 = 5, fitting the Law of Fives, and 1 + 7 = 8, fitting nothing. Where did that leave me? Eight, I reflected, is the number of letters in Kallisti, back to the golden apple again, and 8 is also 2^3, hot damn. Naturally, it came as no surprise when the 8 defendants in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, which grew out of our little Convention Week Carnival, were tried on the 23rd floor of the Federal Building, amid a flurry of synchronicity - a Hoffman among the defendants, a Hoffman as judge; the Illuminati pyramid, or Great Seal of the U.S. right inside the door of the building. and a Seale getting worse abuse than the other defendants; five-letter names and proliferating - Abbie, Davis, Foran, Seale, Jerry Rubin (twice), and the clincher, Clark (Ramsey, not Captain) who was torpedoed and sunk by the judge before he could testify.
I got interested in Dutch Shultz because he died on October 23. A cluster of synchronicity, that man: he ordered the shooting of Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll (remember Mad Dog, Texas); Coll was shot on 23rd Street when he was 23 years old; and Charlie Workman, who allegedly shot Schultz [sic], served 23 years in prison for it (although rumor has it that Mendy Weiss - two five-letter names, again - did the real shooting.) Does 17 come in? You bet. Shultz was first sentenced to prison at the age of 17.
Around this time I bought Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, thinking the plot might parallel some Illuminati operations. Imagine how I felt when Chapter Two began, "23 hours and 17 minutes ago, a flying saucer landed in Iowa. . ."
. . .
A woman from the Mothers March Against Psoriasis just came by with another collection box. I gave her a quarter, too. The marching mothers are going to strip Moon of his bread if this keeps up.
Where was I? I meant to add, in relation to the Dutch Shultz shooting that Marty Krompier, who ran the policy racket in Harlem, was also shot on October 23, 1935. The police asked him if there was a connection with phlegmatic Flegenheimer's demise and he said, "It's got to be one of them coincidences." I wonder how he emphasized that - "one of them coincidences" or "one of them coincidences"? How much did he know?
That brings me to the 40 enigma. As pointed out, 1 + 7 = 8, the number of letters in Kallisti. 8 x 5 = 40. More interestingly, without invoking the mystic 5, we still arrive at 40 by adding 17 + 23. What, then, is the significance of 40? I've run through various associations - Jesus had his 40 days in the desert, Ali Baba had his 40 thieves, Buddhists have their 40 meditations, the solar system is almost exactly 40 astronomical units in radius (Pluto yo-yos a bit) - but I have no definate theory yet . . .
. . .
Burroughs, incidentally, although he discovered the 23 synchronicity principle, is unaware of the correlation with 17. Thi makes it even more interesting that his date for the invasion of earth by the Nova Mob (in Nova Express) is September 17, 1899. When I asked him how he picked that date, he said it just came to him out of the air.
Damn. I was just interrupted by another woman, collecting for the Mothers March Against Hernia. I only gave her a dime.
W, the 23rd letter, keeps popping up in all this. Note: Weishaupt, Washington, William S. Burroughs, Charlie Workman, Mendy Weiss, Len Weinglass in the Conspiracy Trial, and others who will quickly come to mind. Even more interesting, the first physicist to apply the concept of synchronicity to physics, after Jung published the theory, was Wolfgang Pauli.
Another suggestive letter-number transformation: Adam Weishaupt (A.W.) is 1-23, and George Washington (G.W.) is 7-23. Spot the hidden 17 in there? But, perhaps, I grow too imaginative, even whimsical. . . .
. . .
All the Helen Hokinson types are out today. ANother one just hit me for the Mothers March Against Dandruff. I gave her a nickel.
1923 was a very interesting year for the occult, but the way. Not only did Hitler join the Illuminati and attempt the Munich putsch, but, glancing through the books of Charles Fort, I found quite a few suggestive events. On March 17th - which not only fits our 17-23 correlation but is also the anniversary of the defeat of the Kronstadt rebellion, the day the Lord Nelson statue was bombed in Dublin in 1966 and, of course, good Saint Patrick's holy day - a naked man was seen mysteriously running about the estate of Lord Caernarvon in England. He appeared several times in the following days, but was never caught. Meanwhile, Lord Caernarvon himself died in Egypt - some said he was a victim of the curse of Tut-Ankh-Amen, whose tomb he had burglarized. (An archeologist is a ghoul with credentials.) Fort also records two cases that May of a synchronistic phenomenon he has traced through the centuries: A volcanic eruption coinciding with the discovery of a new star. In September, there was a Mumiai scare in India - Mumiais are invisible demons that grab people in broad daylight. Throughout the year, there were reports of exploding coal in England; some tried to explain this by saying the embittered miners (it was a time of labor troubles) were putting dynamite in the coal, but the police couldn't prove this. The coal went on exploding. In the summer, French pilots began having strange mishaps, whenever they flew over Germany, and it was suggested that the Germans were testing an invisible ray machine. Considering the last three phenomena together - invisible demons in India, exploding coal in England, invisible rays over Germany - I guess somebody was testing something. . . .
. . .
Another interruption. This time it was the Mothers March Against Muzak. Since that seems the most worthwhile cause I've been approached for all day, I gave the lady $1. I think that if Muzak can be stamped out, a lot of our other ailments will disappear too, since they're probably stress symptoms, caused by noise pollution.
Anyways, it's getting late and I might as well conclude this. One month before our KCUF experiment, that is, on September 23, 1970 - Tomothy Leary passed five federal agents at O'Hare Airport here in Chicago. He had vowed to shoot rather than go back to jail, and there was a gun in his pocket. None of them recognized him . . . And, oh, yes, there was a policeman n amed Timothy O'Leary in the hospital room where Dutch Schultz [sic] died on October 23, 1935.
I've been saving the best for last. Aldous Huxley, the first major literary figure illuminated by Leary, died the same day as John F. Kennedy. The last essay he wrote revolved around Shakespeare's phrase, "Time must have a stop" - which he had previously used for the title of a novel about life after death. "Life is an illusion." he wrote, "but an illusion which we must take seriously."
Two years later, Laura, Huxley's widow, met the medium, Keith Milton Rinehart. As she tells the story in her book, This Timeless Moment, when she asked if Rinehart could contact Aldous, he replied that Aldous wanted to transmit "classical evidence of survival," a message, that is, which could not be explained "merely" as telepathy, as something Rinehart picked out of her mind. It had to be something that could only come from Aldous' mind.
Later that evening, Rinehart produced it: intructions to go to a room in her house, a room he hadn't seen and find a particular book, which neither he nor she was familiar with. She was to look on a certain page and a certain line. The book was one Aldous had read but she had never even glanced at; it wa an anthology of literary criticism. The line indicated - I have memorized it - was: "Aldous Huxley does not surprise us in this admirable communication in which paradox and erudition in the poetic sence and the sense of humor are interlaced in such an efficacious form." Need I add that the page was 17 and the line was, of course, line 23?
(I suppose you've read Seutonius and know that the late J. Caesar was rendered exactly 23 stab wounds by Brutus and Co.)
Brace yourself, Joe. Worse attacks on your Reason are coming along. Soon, you'll see the fnords.
Hail Eris,
P.S. Your question about the vibes and telepathy is easily answered. The energy is always moving in us, through us, and out of us. That's why the vibes have to be right before you can read someone without static. Every emotion is a motion.
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- Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, The Eye in the Pyramid, Book 1 of the The Illuminatus Trilogy
Keeping all that in mind, also noting that this book was written in 1975, note that the current president of the United States is known by the 23rd letter of the alphabet, and as well, note of 9/11/2001:
9 + 11 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 1 = 23
Silliness,
Dave "It was in the year they finally immanentized the eschaton" Leckie
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Oct 22, 03
