Adaptations
An audacious proposal by the English experimental theater director
Ken Campbell to stage
Illuminatus! in its entirety at
The National Theatre in London was met with surprisingly open arms, particularly given its inordinate length: a cycle of five plays—
The Eye of the Pyramid,
Swift Kick Inc.,
The Man Who Murdered God,
Walpurgisnacht Rock and
Leviathan—each consisting of five 23-minute-long acts.
[34]
Sir Peter Hall, director of the National at the time, wrote of Campbell in his
Diaries, "He is a total anarchist and impossible to pin down. He more or less said it was a crime to be serious."
[35]
The adaptation became the very first production at the National's
Cottesloe Theatre space, running from 4 March to 27 March 1977. It had
first opened in
Liverpool on 23 November 1976.
The first night of the London version featured Robert Anton Wilson, accompanied by Shea, as a naked extra in the
witches' sabbat
scene. Wilson was delighted with the adaptation, saying: "I was
thunderstruck at what a magnificent job they did in capturing the exact
tone and mixture of fantasy and reality in the book. I've come to the
conclusion that this isn't literature. It's too late in the day for
literature. This is magic!!
[7]
The 23-strong cast featured several actors, such as
Jim Broadbent,
David Rappaport and
Chris Langham, who went on to successful film, stage and television careers. Broadbent alone played more than a dozen characters in the play.
[36] Bill Drummond designed sets for the show, and it was eventually seen (when it moved to London, with
Bill Nighy then joining the cast) by the young
Jimmy Cauty. Drummond and Cauty later went on to form the
Illuminatus!-inspired electronica band
The KLF.
In thanks, Wilson dedicated his
Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) to "Ken Campbell and the Science-Fiction Theatre Of Liverpool, England." The play was later staged in
Seattle, Washington in 1978.
[37]
An attempt was made to adapt the trilogy in
comic book
form beginning in the 1980s, by "Eye N Apple Productions" headed by
Icarus!-23. Icarus! met with Wilson in 1984 and subsequently obtained
permission from Wilson's agent to adapt the trilogy.
Illuminatus! #1 was issued in July 1987, then reissued in substantially revised form later that year by
Rip Off Press (who had published the original 4th edition of the
Principia Discordia in 1970).
A second issue followed in 1990, and a third in March 1991, after which the venture stalled (although several
ashcans of the as yet unpublished Fourth Trip were distributed at
comic book conventions in the Detroit and Chicago areas between 1991 and 2006).
Each comic covered one "trip" from the original trilogy, so had
further issues followed this pattern, there would have been ten issues
in total. The "new first issue" contained a letter from Bob Shea, who
had seen the first issue and the materials for the next two. He wrote in
part, "I'm delighted. I think it is very faithful to the novel and does
a wonderful job of translating the spirit of the novel into a visual
medium."
[38] The creators of the comic also made an
Illuminatus! discussion room on
Citadel bulletin board systems.
Influence
The infamous 1980s computer
hacker Karl Koch was heavily influenced by
The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Besides adopting the pseudonym "Hagbard" from the character
Hagbard Celine,
he also named his computer "FUCKUP," after a computer designed and
built by that character. He was addicted to cocaine and became extremely
paranoid, convinced he was fighting the Illuminati like his literary
namesake. In 1987 he wrote a rambling seven-page "hacking manifesto of
sorts, complete with his theories on Hagbard Celine and the Illuminati."
[39] The
1998 German motion picture
23 told a dramatized version of his story;
Robert Anton Wilson appeared as himself.
A
card game inspired by the trilogy,
Illuminati was created by
Steve Jackson Games. Using the
Illuminatus! books as "spiritual guides but not as actual source material," it incorporated competing conspiracies of the
Bavarian Illuminati and
Discordians and others, though no characters or groups specific to the novels.
[40] A
trading card game (
Illuminati: New World Order) and
role-playing game supplement (
GURPS Illuminati) followed. The instruction booklets' bibliographies praise the novel and Wilson particularly, calling
Illuminatus!
in part "required reading for any conspiracy buff". Robert Shea
provided a four-paragraph introduction to the rulebook for the
Illuminati Expansion Set 1 (1983), in which he wrote, "Maybe the
Illuminati are behind
this game. They must be—they are, by definition, behind
everything." Despite this initial involvement, Wilson later criticized some of these products for exploiting the
Illuminatus! name without paying royalties (taking advantage of what he viewed as a legal loophole).
[41]
The Illuminatus Trilogy! is steeped with references to the 1960s popular music scene (at one point a list of 200 fictional bands performing at the
Walpurgisnacht
rock festival is reeled off (including a handful of actual bands of the
60s), and there are numerous references to the famous rock and roll
song, "
Rock Around the Clock"), and has influenced many bands and musicians. One of the aliases of anarchic British band
The KLF was named after a secret society from the trilogy.
[42] They released much of their early material under the name "
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu"/"The
JAMMs", cf. "The Justified Ancients of Mummu"/"The JAMs" from the
trilogy, and much of their work was Discordian in nature. They mirrored
the fictional JAMs' gleeful political tactics of causing chaos and
confusion by bringing a direct, humorous but nevertheless revolutionary
approach to making records. The American band
Machines of Loving Grace took the name of a sex act performed by one of the main characters during a
Black Mass for the title of their song "Rite of Shiva" on their
eponymous album.
[43] UK chillout maestro
Mixmaster Morris also named his band
The Irresistible Force after one that appears at the festival in the last part of the trilogy. Together with
Coldcut he organised a huge Robert Anton Wilson Memorial Show at the
Queen Elizabeth Hall in London on 18 March 2007.
In general,
The Illuminatus! Trilogy can be credited with popularizing the genre of
conspiracy fiction,
[44] a field later mined by authors like
Umberto Eco (
Foucault's Pendulum) and
Dan Brown (
Angels and Demons,
The Da Vinci Code,
The Lost Symbol), comic book writers like
Alan Moore (
V for Vendetta,
From Hell),
Dave Sim (
Cerebus) and
Grant Morrison (
The Invisibles), and screenwriters like
Chris Carter (
The X-Files) and
Damon Lindelof (
Lost).
[45] In particular, the regular use of the
Illuminati in popular culture as shadowy central puppet masters in this type of fiction can be traced back to their exposure via
The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
[46]
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