Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson was born in Brooklyn on 18 January 1932 and died on 11 January 2007. He was an associate editor at Playboy from 1966 to 1971; with Robert Shea he wrote The Illuminatus! Trilogy, published in 1975, which entered the Prometheus Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1986; and he went on to publish Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) and Prometheus Rising (1983). Across fiction and non-fiction alike, one preoccupation runs: not what to believe, but how to hold anything at all.

The stance he named for it is model agnosticism — his phrase for "never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial". Cosmic Trigger puts it into practice as literature: a book crowded with conspiracies, synchronicities, occult orders and UFOs — it opens with a line from Aleister Crowley — that refuses to tell the reader which parts it endorses. Wilson sharpened the point in the preface he wrote for the 1986 edition: belief, he argued there, is the death of intelligence, and the book, he said plainly, does not teach that readers can create their own reality by thought; in his usage "reality" is always plural and mutable. The ambiguity is the method, stated by the author himself.

That intent is what separates the work from a belief programme, and the line holds even where the work looks most like one. Illuminatus! is a novel built to make certainty ridiculous — reading it as a manual misses that it is the joke it is making; Prometheus Rising (1983), introduced by Israel Regardie, offers exercises for examining one's own assumptions, offered as Wilson's proposals for readers to try and nothing more. No claim of effect is made for them here, because none was ever established, and Wilson's own habit was to speculate rather than assert — as he put it, he was more of a speculator. Satire that dissolves dogma works only while it stays satire.

What remains useful is the grip. A model held as a model can be revised the moment it stops fitting; a model hardened into certainty starts choosing the evidence, and the person stops noticing. Wilson's practical question — which map am I currently mistaking for the territory? — is worth asking about every picture a person holds of themselves, since an identity statement believed at 100 per cent behaves exactly like a prohibition. Hold the map; walk the ground; expect to redraw.