[Rob Instigator]

Robert Anton Wilson or RAW (January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was a prolific American novelist, essayist, philosopher, psychologist, futurologist, anarchist, and conspiracy theory researcher.

His writing, which often shows a sense of humor and optimism, is described by him as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations--to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models (maps) and no one model elevated to the Truth." And: "My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything."

Wilson was born in Methodist Hospital, downtown Brooklyn, New York, and spent his first years in Flatbush, moving with his family to Gerritsen Beach around the age of 4 or 5, where they stayed until he turned 13. He suffered from polio as a child but was cured.

He attended Brooklyn Polytechnical College and New York University, studying engineering and mathematics. He worked as engineering aide, salesman, and copywriter and was associate editor for Playboy magazine from 1965 to 1971. He received a Ph.D. in psychology from the online Paidea University in 1979; the reworked dissertation was published in 1983 as Prometheus Rising.

He married the freelance writer Arlen Riley in 1958. They had four children; their daughter Luna was killed in 1976. Arlen suffered a stroke and died after long illness in 1999.

On June 22, 2006, Huffington Post blogger Paul Krassner reported that Robert A. Wilson was under hospice care at home with friends and family. On 2 October 2006 Douglas Rushkoff reported that Wilson was in severe financial trouble. Slashdot, Boing Boing, and the Church of the Subgenius also picked up on the story, linking to Rushkoff's appeal. As his webpage reported on 10 October, these efforts succeeded beyond expectation and raised a sum which would have supported him for at least 6 months.

On the 6th of January, he wrote on his blog that according to several medical authorities, he was likely to have only between two days and two months left to live. He died five days later, a week before his 75th birthday, at 4:50 AM.


His best-known work, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), co-authored with Robert Shea and advertised as "a fairy tale for paranoids," humorously examined American paranoia about conspiracies. Much of the odder material derived from letters sent to Playboy magazine while Shea and Wilson worked as editors of the Playboy Forum. The books mixed true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called "Operation Mindfuck"; the trilogy also outlined a set of libertarian and anarchist axioms known as Celine's Laws, concepts Wilson has revisited several times in other writings. Although Shea and Wilson never partnered on such a scale again, Wilson continued to expand upon the themes of the Illuminatus! books throughout his writing career.

In Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) and other works, he examined Discordianism, Sufism, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, the occult practices of Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, the Illuminati and Freemasons, Yoga, and other esoteric or counterculture philosophies. He advocated Timothy Leary's eight circuit model of consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic engineering, which he also wrote about in Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and Quantum Psychology (1990), books containing practical techniques for breaking free of one's "reality tunnels". With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMI2LE).

Wilson also supported many of the utopian theories of Buckminster Fuller and the theories of Charles Fort (he was a friend of Loren Coleman), as well as those of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Neuro Linguistic Programming co-founder Richard Bandler, with whom he had taught workshops. He also admired James Joyce, and had written commentary on Finnegans Wake and Ulysses.

Ironically, considering Wilson long lampooned and criticized new age beliefs, his books can often be found in bookstores specializing in new age material. He claimed to have perceived encounters with magical "entities", and when asked whether these entities were "real", he answered they were "real enough", although "not as real as the IRS" since they were "easier to get rid of". He warned against beginners using occult practice, since to rush into such practices and the resulting "energies" they unleash can lead people to go "quite nuts". Instead, he recommends beginners start with NLP, Zen Buddhism, basic meditation, etc., before progressing to more potentially disturbing activities.

In a 2003 interview with High Times magazine, RAW described himself as a "Model Agnostic" which he says "consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory." More simply, he claims "not to believe anything," since "belief is the death of thought." He has described his approach as "Maybe Logic." Wilson wrote articles for seminal cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000.

While he had primarily published material under the name Robert Anton Wilson, he had also used the pen names Mordecai Malignatus, Mordecai the Foul, Reverend Loveshade, and other names associated with the Bavarian Illuminati, which he allegedly revived in the 1960s.

Wilson's writings connect to the madcap satirical fiction of Flann O'Brien in a several ways, including his free use of O'Brien's character De Selby. The views of De Selby, a would-be obscure intellectual, are the subject of long pseudo-scholarly footnotes in Wilson's novels as well as O'Brien's. This is entirely fitting, because O'Brien himself made free use of characters invented by other writers, allegedly because there are already too many fictional characters as is. O'Brien was also known for pulling the reader's leg by concocting elaborate conspiracy theories, and for publishing under several pen names.