The possibly suppressed first edition.
While not as humorous as the Preface to the 2000 Edition, Wilson's 1987 Preface is a valuable addition to the text. As it seems that the New Falcon edition of the text was the first that would be widely available, Wilson adds some much needed context to the book and reveals the secrets of its composition that he was unable to in 1972 when it was published under the title Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits.
The anecdote about what Hefner supposedly said about Wilson's original title for the book, Sex, Drugs & the Occult, has always managed to elicit a chuckle and is one of the main things I think about when I think about Hefner. That and the scene from The Sex Magicians where the Hugh Hefner stand-in receives a blowjob while conferencing with one of his editors about how much he hates Spiro Agnew. As Wilson notes, the real Hugh Hefner was hard to pin down, as he was hidden behind an aura of the sophisticated lothario who shielded himself at the heart of his media empire. Over the years Hefner became a figure who reaped laughing accolades for maintaining his libidinous lifestyle until the end of his nonagenarian life. In the information-rich dissipative structure of the year 2022 E.V., a new docuseries supposedly reveals more salacious details about the publisher, including allegations of rape and bestiality. The myth continues to spawn questions, and now that the man is five years dead, it is unlikely we'll ever get to know much about the "real" Hugh Hefner. He is now firmly in the company of the imaginary rabbits listed by Wilson, although he casts a distinctly more sinister shadow.
Wilson's Greater Feast proceeded his former employer's by a decade and Wilson seems to have never met with Hef in the flesh, so less can be revealed about the potential suppression of Sex and Drugs during the Seventies. Wilson points out how rare the original edition of the book was, even for those who were seeking the title, and links its scarcity with the cessation of much of the underground press and a possible conspiracy on the part of the counter-revolution of that chaotic decade. I didn't live through the counter-revolution, but Wilson's books have made me fear a perhaps-imaginary period of American life where the vestiges of the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties were savaged by Nixon's dogs. My own hunch is the book was extremely niche and was most likely forgotten about; perhaps a few cases of the title were never distributed and pulped, but I'd imagine the original print of the book wasn't that expansive. If anything, the perhaps-imagined quote from Hefner would indicate that the title was simply published by the wrong company. If Hefner truly said that, well, that indicates that was how he was feeling on that particular day, but a mythical quote still indicates a general ethos in the Playboy realm against such unsophisticated shit as occultism. I could see the title having sold better under the auspices of Llewellyn, which contemporaneously released Louis T. Culling's A Manual of Sex Magick and The Complete Magickal Curriculum of the G.'.B.'.G.'., each of which will be mentioned in the forthcoming pages.
On a personal note, I do think Wilson's quick addendum about cocaine usage is why I never got into that drug and I thank him for that. Having seen a relationship and a friendship dissipate due to the increased usage of what are today called "party drugs," I deplore the effect that powders white and deadly can have on the course of life. I consider coke particularly pernicious because of the effect it has on Latin American countries who are terrorized by cartels and would bring up the karmic debt of a drug whose granules are disproportionately small compared to the blood each it is weighed against. This blood is obviously also on the hands of the United States government which fucked around with these countries and the drug's supply in a seeming bid to be as terrible as absolutely possible. Today, like Wilson says about sex in the era of AIDS, I would also urge any users, causal or habitual, to consider that using any powder without a testing kit in the era of fentanyl is like playing Russian roulette.
Wilson's entire oeuvre has a charming consistency, but his early work has an even clearer overlap of sources, favored anecdotes/examples and quotes. The original Introduction is prefaced with a quote form the Firesign Theater, albeit from a different album than the quote which prefaces Cosmic Trigger, and the 1987 introduction repeats Crowley's stunning introduction to Liber O which was used as an epigraph for Cosmic Trigger. Wilson's reasoning for considering cocaine "particularly pernicious" is the drug's linkages to the CIA/Vatican Bank conspiracy that fascinated Bob during the latter half of the eighties and early nineties and appears in his books, interviews and lectures.
After his rote, if apropos, discussion of American puritanism and pharmaceutical hypocrisy, Wilson spends a few pages defending the new title of the work, Sex, Drugs and Magick. Wilson's apologia for his interest in occultism is all too familiar to me as Wilson, I believe, is one of the greatest defenders of the non-faith's worthiness of study and has become the basis of my own arguments. I am even known to happily trot out that beaten horse from Hamlet, beloved of occultists from the 19th Century onward, that Wilson closes his original Introduction with. Wilson's preference for the usage of "magick" as opposed to "occultism" is salient, as is Moore's preference for "magic" as opposed to "magick" which influenced my own naming preference. If this point seems tedious to you, remember magic is a disease of language and naming things is very important in our symbol-language-viral load. The remainder of Wilson's preface is concerned with a discussion of Illya Prigogine's dissipative structures and his evangelism of optimism. While I typically would group such words as "evangelism" and "proselytize" in a distinctly different bubble than "Robert Anton Wilson," I do believe it is inarguable that our author was an irascible optimist, determined to spread the glad news until he shed his mortal coil.
My "fashionable pessimism" does want to scream out when Wilson inserts "(intelligent?)" between "information-rich" and "forms [of society]." To bring out my favorite whipping boy, I believe that we are living in an objectively information-rich world which is demonstrably unable to cope and is quite stupid. However, I agree with Wilson that the results are not in yet and there is still time for that damned horse to learn to fly. Amidst the farcical pageant of politics and cultural discourse, there are bastions of momentum that are trying to propel humanity forward towards a more courageous, creative and intelligent world.
Sex, Drugs and Magick: Introduction
After reading the thoughts of 1987 and 2000 Wilson, 1972 Bob doesn't seem as revolutionary as he should. It is unfair he has to appear on stage following those two warm up acts as he seems to be repeating their words. Yet, if one begins here, we return to the burgeoning, romantic figure of the Seventies Wilson who was much more radical than he gives himself credit for. There was a radicalism in maintaining an unusual but cohesive family structure while exposing himself to the furthest realms of thought he could project himself into. And there is the basic radicalism of the insidious nature of the thoughts that Wilson is feeding to his reader, subtly reprogramming their mind to question more and more of their basic precepts about society and reality.
Wilson also deplores radicals during one part of his introduction when he says that the idea that we shape much of our reality through perception would be offensive to "radicals" as it would seemingly imply that "poor people" could think themselves out of poverty instead of needing government assistance. Perhaps this is the lapsed libertarian or ever-present socialist tendencies in me but I rolled my eyes at this barb. Perhaps it is simply the tribalistic inability to take criticism of your impressions seriously, but my experience working with lower socioeconomic families does indicate that government assistance is necessary to help people move out of poverty. Indeed, a large part of that upwards momentum is due to attitude change and setting higher goals, but for those parts to be in place, basic needs must be met. In the words of Bertolt Brecht:
You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that's where it begins
You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on
So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
Not that Wilson was ever a "pull yourself up by the bootstraps” type of guy- he writes very bitterly about the necessity of social safety nets and those who would deny those systems in Cosmic Trigger. Nor was he ever the type of moralist that Brecht targeted in this song, and it is very necessary for those stuck in “the cycle” to disabuse notions of learned helplessness, but in this case, I believe the radicals would be right to be annoyed. Besides, the notion of “learned helplessness” only being applied to the poor is also ridiculous. The amount of learned helplessness in all levels of our society is astounding. Remember, in The Time Machine by perspicacious and farsighted Wells, that the Eloi with the withered arms are the descendants of the posh.
Furthermore, poor 1972 RAW, now robbed of his radicalism, is subject to silent editing by Wilson, as is 87’s Wilson, which leads to a couple bits of anachronism. In his 1987 Preface, Wilson notes that Ken Starr’s career is a perfect illustration of Menken’s definition of “puritanism.” While Starr had been a federal judge and Bush the Elder’s Solicitor General, I could find little about his career during those years. In my ignorance, Wilson must then be referencing the Starr Report, which left that barmy Christian bitch’s dubious mark on history. Starr is a particularly odious man who defended rich ephebophile Jeffrey Epstein, as well as Trump during 45’s first impeachment. This was after Trump had described the man as “a lunatic,” “terrible” and “a disaster” back when he was friends with the Clintons in the late-nineties. I wish I had Trump’s ability to make allies out of people I had previously disparaged. Capping off Starr’s litany of skeeviness is his shameful resignation from Baylor where he seems to have covered up sexual assault. A good, Christian man indeed.
The second anachronism can be found in the Introduction where Wilson cites “our current President” as an example of behavioral evidence that men enjoy fellatio. Wilson did love to speculate about the sex lives of world leaders; in Illuminatus! he memorably describes the sexual habits of the leaders of the United States, Soviet Union and China identically as having been impotent with their wives for nearly ten years yet being able to achieve “orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes." While Nixon was certainly the model of the President in Illuminatus!, and the man certainly was a cocksucker, I don’t recall him being as notorious for his enjoyment of oral sex as Bill Clinton, ergo the President Wilson would have been referencing in 2000. These “anachronisms” are trite observations, but I found them interesting.
In each Preface and the Introduction, Wilson encourages his reader to keep an open-enough mind to hear his arguments and try the experiments as well as to have hope for their and the world’s betterment. I am happy to follow the well retrodden footsteps of our staunch opponent of entropy. Perhaps there are more things in heaven and earth after all.
