”Perhaps the final
secret of the Illuminati is that you don´t know you´re a member until it´s
too late to get out.” Robert Anton Wilson, in Cosmic Trigger I – Final Secret of the
Illuminati (page 88)
Cosmic Trigger I is the first
book in the Cosmic Trigger series, first published in 1977 and the
first of a three-volume autobiographical and philosophical work. It has a
foreword by Timothy Leary, which he wrote in the summer of 1977. The first volume was published without numbering, as
the second volume did not appear for nearly 15 years.
Wilson is one of many
psychologists who want to be philosophers instead of the philosophers. The book
deals with Wilson's experiences during a time in which he put himself through a
process of "self-induced brain change" as well as vignettes of his
earlier life. The main discovery of this process—which, he tells us, is known
in certain traditions as Chapel perilous—is that
"reality" is mutable and subjective to the observer.