Chapel Perilous: Exploring the Life and Intellectual Journey of Robert Anton Wilson
A Maverick's Journey Through Counterculture, Philosophy, and Radical Thought
Robert Anton Wilson emerges as a fascinating intellectual maverick whose life traversed multiple worlds of counterculture, writing, and philosophical exploration. Born in Flatbush, Brooklyn in 1932 during the Great Depression, Wilson would go on to become a multifaceted writer, editor, and thinker who challenged conventional intellectual boundaries.
From his early days working at Playboy magazine to his deep dives into psychedelic experiences and philosophical investigations, Wilson's life story is a testament to radical intellectual curiosity and unconventional thinking. Journalist John Wisniewski met up with author Gabriel Kennedy to discuss this latest work and interested him in the project.
1. Could you tell us how "Chapel Perilous" your new book on Robert Anton Wilson began, Gabriel? What interested you about his life and how did you research the book?
Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson began as a hopeful book about Wilson’s philosophy, but it transformed into a biography when I realized that it’d be really interesting to chart Wilson’s thought process over time. I then said, “Ok, let me just sketch together a quick timeline,” but that obviously turned into this biography. This happened because the more I looked at his life, the more interesting it became. So, I decided to write about both his life and his ideas, i.e., “thought crimes.” I sought to root specific ideas he wrote about to where he was living and what was going on in the world around him when he wrote about those things. For instance, I was always curious where exactly Bob was living on July 23, 1973. For those familiar with RAW, that is the day he said he “contacted” or achieved “Knowledge and Conversation” with his Holy Guardian Angel. His life was forever after shaped by that day, so much so that the Mayor of Santa Cruz, CA, where he lived as an old guy, declared July 23rd “Robert Anton Wilson Day,” in 2003.
Zeroing in on July 23, 1973. Magically speaking, one could argue that it’s important to know where he physically was on that day. Crowley recommended, as do many other magicians, to keep meticulous notes—including weather conditions, location, etc. right down to your states of mind when you do ceremonies. In other words, my desire to study Wilson’s life was born out of wanting to contextualize his thoughts in a wider intellectual framework than the milieu he was placed in while alive.
In terms of research for the book, I studied all his books for many years, I interviewed over 50 people, each multiple times, I accessed a number of Special Collections Libraries that are scattered across the United States to find never before printed correspondence as well as unpublished manuscripts of his, and long-lost articles. I even cracked the file that the Chicago Red Squad, Chicago Polics Department’s clandestine branch that spied on Commies and rabble rousers in Chicago during the 1960s. Researching the book was thoroughly rewarding, fun, and I feel smarter for doing it!
Could you tell us about Robert's early life-what jobs did he have before he became known as a writer. Where did he grow up?
When I interviewed Bob Wilson in 2003, he told me that he’d once met Ernest Hemingway at the bookstore he worked at as a teenager. Wilson was behind the register when Hemingway approached with a book for purchase. I said to Bob, “What did you say?” To which he replied, “I told him that I thought he was one of the greatest living writers.” Hemingway nodded and quietly left, but Bob was inspired.
He may have worked at this job close to where he was living as a teenager in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Bob was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, so out of economic necessity, his parents moved to a bungalow village on the southernmost shores of Brooklyn called Gerritsen Beach. When Bob was accepted into Brooklyn Tech High School as a teenager, his family moved to Park Slope so Bob could have an easier train commute to school. A couple of years after High School, Bob got a job at Ebasco, a big engineering firm, as a sort of entry level engineer. Ebasco paid for college classes and Bob jumped at the opportunity for more education. He eventually ended up at the NYU where he had plans to become an English teacher. During this time, he worked as a hospital orderly at a hospital in East Harlem, NY. At this job he’d often ride in an ambulance and bring people to the hospital. At the moment I find this interesting because Hemingway worked as an ambulance driver in WW1.
After Bob and Arlen married, Bob worked as a copyeditor, a door-to-door salesman for the company that would eventually become J Crew, and later at a schlock house magazine company that pumped out pulp, porn, and tabloid magazines. After that he ended up working at Playboy magazine as an associate editor. So, Bob had some interesting jobs in his life.
How did Robert meet Robert Shea?
I write about this in my book, Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, but I can share a little bit about that. RAW and Bob Shea met on Wilson’s first day of work at Playboy magazine in the 1960s. RAW and Shea had the same jobs while working for Playboy, so they worked together on constructing funny and smart responses to the questions presented to the Playboy Forum from people stating outlandish stuff and that, over time, became the skeleton for their book Illuminatus! Trilogy. They remained friends for the remainder of Shea’s life. Sadly, before Shea suddenly passed, they were writing their sequel to Illuminatus! and the first few chapters, which were printed in the Trajectories newsletter, were extremely promising. I write about this in my book because their story idea for the sequel was so awesomely entertaining and fun.
Was Robert interested in the work of Timothy Leary? Did Robert experiment with drugs in his early days?
RAW was not only interested in the work of Timothy Leary, but he was also one of the biggest cheerleaders! Bob first learned about the work of Leary from Alan Watts in the early 1960s. Soon after he interviewed Leary and the two became friends. When Leary went to prison, Wilson was one of his most out-spoken supporters.
RAW definitely experimented with psychedelics in his early days. He actually mentions in an interview he did that was published as Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything that he smoked hemp rope at the age of around six with his other Brooklyn buddies. But a more formalized psychedelic usage began in the early 1960s. In the early part of that decade, while living in Yellow Springs, OH, Bob bought a shit load of peyote buttons, doing so was fully legal at the time, and he spent the next year tripping frequently on peyote. During that time, he also experimented with Belladonna, in which I tell a story about in my book Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson.
Bob also took prescription pills through the years. He relied heavily on anti-anxiety medication in his twenties and into his late thirties, however over the years, he came to depend less and less on those pills. Bob’s wildly radical use of his own Raja Yoga that allowed him to let go of those meds.
How did Robert become interested in Discordianism?
RAW was introduced to Discordian through its founders Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill. RAW met Thornley though correspondence while he worked in the Playboy forum letters section for Playboy magazine. The two hit it off and became friends. From there Thornley and Hill told Bob about Discordianism and RAW ran with it.
I go into further detail in my book, about the specifics of RAW linking with the Discordians, and then Shea joining the crew and from there RAW and Shea become inspired to write Illuminatus! and making Discordianism a major part of that book.
What I did not cover in the book, but I did a fair bit of research around this, was Bob and Kerry’s strange connections to the JFK Assassination. RAW writes about this in his Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1. Bob also mentions his weird connection to the JFK Assassination came in the form of his family’s dentist when the Wilson’s were living in Yellow Springs, Ohio in the early 1960s. The family dentist had a sister names Ruth Paine, although Bob spells her last name as “Payne” in Cosmic Trigger, whose house was the last place Oswald slept before JFK was murdered on November 22, 1963. So, during my research I fell deep down a Ruth Paine/JFK Assassination rabbit hole. At the end of that I contacted the Wilson family doctor. I conducted a phone interview with him, but the guy is nearly one hundred years old now. Although he was “with it” so to speak he did not remember Wilson and did not have much to say about the assassination of JFK. So, none of that made it into Chapel Perilous but I tend to categorize such research as an overlap with my Kerry Thornley information.
Low and behold, Bob’s interest in Discordianism coincided with his own philosophies of Taoism and Anarchism. It was a match made in Chaos!
6. Tell us about Robert writing "William Reich in Hell"? Was it a controversial play?
Wilson wrote Wilhelm Reich in Hell while he was living in Dublin Ireland in the 1980s. He had been a fan of Reich’s notion of the emotional plague—which was Reich’s grand narrative theory that thousands of years ago humans became emotionally scarred and since that time have been passing it on to the younger generation for millennia—so that is not unusual as far as RAW’s interests go. What made the writing of Wilhelm Reich in Hell significant was that he wrote it while living in Ireland during “the Troubles,” which was a period of nearly 30 years of war happening just ninety miles north of Dublin. During those 30 years, approximately 3,000 died. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but Ireland is a small country and as the great Irish journalist Ed Moloney writes, if a similar conflict had happened in America the equivalent death toll would have been over 600,000 people. So that’s a warzone that was happening mostly in one small part of Ireland (the north) while Bob and Arlen were living in “the south” of Ireland. (I think calling the north of Ireland ‘Northern Ireland’ is bullshit, by the way.) The Troubles struck close to home when Bob was writing the play and there were bombs set off by the Loyalist terror group known as the UFF in some garbage bins near his cottage. Bob was suddenly hit with the realization, basically, that anyone at any time can be a victim of terrorism and war and that as far as humanity has progressed since the Enlightenment, we’ve also progressed in our ability to annihilate larger groups of people than ever before in history. Of course, all this played in the back of his mind as he wrote a play about a scientist who claimed to identify the deepest psychological problem with humanity, the emotional plague! The emotional plague is what makes us forget the sanctity of every human life. It manifests in what Reich called “armoring” where parts of one’s body are “numb,” this inability to actually register your body’s feelings will dump you into secondary drive mode and, says Reich, much of the secondary drives end up in violence.
I would not say the play was controversial in that it did not elicit the cries for censorship from any Irish critic, like say the works of Sean O’Casey and JM Synge had done, but the play is a highly engaging and breaks the fourth wall in a fun way!
Did Robert meet William Burroughs?
I believe that Wilson and Burroughs first met in 1965, when Wilson interviewed him for a magazine for whim he was working. It’s interesting too because I found a letter that Wilson wrote Burroughs (postmarked) 1965. In the letter, Bob mentions the twenty-three etc. Like Bob tells Bill that he is teaching a class the Free University of New York and their mutual acquaintance Ed Sanders, the Beat poet and co-founder of The Fugs, was also teaching a class there. And oh, here’s Sanders’ phone number, but alas no number 23, indicating that Burroughs shared with RAW his ’23 Enigma’ yarn. (I have added information, or a research discovery, about the 23-Engima in my book that will make readers think twice about that whole story.) In his book Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1, RAW says that Burroughs first told him about the 23-Engima in 1966. I think RAW was mistaken and was really 1965 when Bill told him that tale.
RAW and WSB remained friends, the remainder of Burroughs’ life. RAW mentioned, and I’m not sure if I put this in the book, Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson that the title for his book Right Where You Are Sitting Now was a title name that Burroughs had thought of first, but Bob asked him if he could use the title for something and Burroughs said sure. But this indicates that they were friends, you see. Bob spoke at a giant party/conference dedicated to WSB that took place in NYC in the late 1970s. And again, as I said, they remained friends for the rest of Burroughs’ life.
Tell us about Robert writing The Cosmic Trigger Series?
RAW’s Cosmic Trigger series consists of three books, he like trilogies, that he published over a couple of decades. Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1 is his most successful and well-known of the series, yet his two other installments are also great reads. This trilogy became Bob’s auto-biography books, basically, and I referred to all three books religiously while writing Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson wrote the first volume in the 1970s and that book is really a smash up of at least three different books RAW was writing at the time. I would deem the first Cosmic Trigger an American classic. I think Penguin should reprint the book as such for many reasons, but mostly because RAW presents an important piece of new journalism in that book. I explain further why I think it’s a classic in my book.
Cosmic Trigger Vol. 2 came out in the early 1990s and it’s also great. RAW, ever the experimentalist, presents his chapters for the book in what he called a “scattershot” method, meaning the autobiographical details of the work do not progress chronologically. By doing this, RAW made this text exponentially more engaging as now you can pick the book anywhere and tune into a small snippet of Wilson’s life. This book is not nearly as well known as the first, but for fans of RAW there are some great things in there, especially concerning his thoughts while living in Dublin, Ireland during the 1980s.The subtitle of this book is “Down to Earth,” which I think means that RAW came back down off that super high he got on during the ‘70s in California.
Cosmic Trigger Vol. 3 is another terrific book. This was published in the latter half of the 1995 and that subtitle was “My Life After Death.” Which shows how hip RAW was because he produced that title two years before Biggie Smalls out his second album called Life After Death. Maybe that was the vibe of the late ‘nineties though. This book is also great as it really grapples with living in a world where one cannot tell the real from the fake anymore. Although many understood what RAW was contemplating in that book, we are now living in that world as computer technology also for the proliferation of fake images and counterfeit words.
Who were some of Robert's favorite science fiction writers?
Let me preface this answer with the statement that I claim to have zero authority in knowing every book and author that RAW liked. So, I many know of some, and other scholars may know of other writers Wilson liked. Bob read a lot. He initially was interested in fantasy and horror tales which he discovered in Weird Tales which he began reading at 13 years old. It’s in this pulp where his interest in H.P. Lovecraft was born. Bob probably became interested in sci-fi at the same time. So, I sometimes blur these two genres together because that is what much of RAW’s fiction was, a mix of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi and pulp detective novels. So, as a youth his thirst for Sci-fi began with Weird Tales, then Theo Sturgeon and Lovecraft. Later Bob liked Robert Heinlein, of course Philip K. Dick, Ursula le Guin, and Doris Lessing.
Was it difficult writing about Robert Anton Wilson, this being your first book, Gabriel?
Yes and no, to be honest. I spent a number of years before beginning this biography of Wilson writing about many of his ideas. I began two other completely different books dealing with RAW’s philosophy before I zeroed in on the biography. Once I landed on the biography, many things clicked, and I progressed fairly quickly.
That being said, I spent many years before starting even those books struggling with “writing my first book.” I had friends who were writers, and they pumped out books like mixtapes. There were many years where I hung out with artists, from writers to musicians who all had careers doing this cool shit, and I was still “paying my dues.” But all during that time, I kept writing.
Once I decided on the biography format, I knew that I would depend on four major areas of research: Wilson’s writings, interviews I conducted with people who knew Bob, the correspondences he kept with other writers, and various police, FBI, and CIA reports. Then constructing the book became like a construction job for me. I had to build the foundation, erect the structure, then floors, drywall, etc. etc. So, like some early drafts were super choppy. But I let all that be, knowing that I would eventually get to the part of smoothing over my text and making it all flow more eloquently.
Honestly, writing the biography itself was not the most difficult part of this process. It was the amount of physical stress I was under nearly the whole time writing the book.
I moved around more than I ever have before or since during the process of drafting the book. In many ways I was jettisoned into Chapel Perilous during the entire process of writing Chapel Perilous, which makes sense. And then the entire world entered Chapel Perilous as I wrote this book, which trips me out but also makes complete sense.
In the end, I authored a book that I wanted to read and I’m a fairly demanding reader.
I also wanted to create two books in one, kind of like how Wilson did it in his book The Widow’s Son. At first, I tried doing it like RAW did in his book, so I had a shit ton of footnotes. Far too many. So, I cut back on that idea, though there are still many footnotes. Then I thought it would also be cool to have appendixes like how Illuminatus! has all those great appendixes. So, my book has forty pages of notes and “appendixes” at the end of the biography. I did this because I want the book to function as an academic reference copy as well as a hell of a good read!
As far as the writing itself, the greatest struggle I faced was making the whole book flow at the level that I like to read. It just became a matter of making the writing and completion of this book my mission and I could not stop until it was done. Period. The book became my ballast as the world around me spun into chaos. So, with this total and complete commitment to the completion of this book, I knew that it was just a matter of time, and all physical discomfort felt during the writing of the book would be nothing compared the glory of producing a kick-ass piece of prose!
What will your next book be about?
Well, I am putting together a short book comprised of many, maybe around twenty-three, of the interviews I did for Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton. There are some interviews that I did, like the one with Saul-Paul Sirag, the particle physicist, writer, and friends with RAW, had so much amazing information about Quantum Physics that just did not make it into the book. S-P was so giving with his time and patiently tutored me in Quantum Physics during my research. I would really love to get his words into print. Saul-Paul is significant in Wilson’s story for many reasons, but one that I love is the fact that he gave RAW the chart that Wilson put in his Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1. I had many email exchanges with S-P about all that’s discussed in that chart, which held special significance for me, because something about reading that chart in Cosmic Trigger the first time and reading RAW’s explanations and extrapolations of the contents of the chart was so damn inspiring to me. However, as I said, there’s pages of conversation discussing Quantum Physics that did not make it into the book, but I think fans of RAW and physics would find absolutely fascinating to read. I am also going to release an audible version of Chapel Perilous, so be on the lookout for that. Also, I would like to get at least one of those other RAW focused books I have been working on out into the world. So, I’d like to get much of my RAW related work out there and then move on to the next project. You can check out all my current work on my websites Chapelperilous.us and Prop-anon.com. I am currently envisioning the book tour for my book so that’s on the agenda as well. Gabriel's "Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson" is a comprehensive biography exploring the intellectual journey of Robert Anton Wilson. The book delves into Wilson's multifaceted life, from his early jobs in Brooklyn to his work at Playboy magazine, his collaborations with Robert Shea, and his deep involvement with counterculture movements like Discordianism. Wilson's experiences with psychedelics, his friendship with Timothy Leary, and his philosophical writings are meticulously researched through interviews, special collections, and personal correspondence, offering an intimate portrait of a radical thinker who challenged conventional intellectual boundaries. For more, visit Amazon.