The
Modern Occultist
Interview #11
Eric Wagner
An Insider’s Guide to Robert Anton Wilson & Straight Outta Dublin
New Falcon, 2004 & Hilaritas Press, 2025
MODERN OCCULTIST
An Insider’s Guide to Robert Anton Wilson is as almost as much a memoir of a twenty-two-year correspondence and friendship with RAW as it is a critical guide to his work—you describe Wilson making you a hand-drawn Joycean map of Dublin, writing you letters about Finnegans Wake, encouraging your poetry newsletter.
In your experience, how did Wilson’s famous “maybe
logic”—his radical epistemic humility—actually manifest in his personal
relationships? Was he as genuinely uncertain in private as he was in print, or
was the philosophical stance partly a performance? (I’ll give a personal
opinion here: I think he was the real deal, but authors do often have a
persona…)
ERIC WAGNER
Bob seemed to me the real deal. He had internalized not
coming to premature certainty in general. Please note that I did not spend that
much time with him in person. We met a few times from 1987 through 2000. We
mostly communicated via snail mail and email with a few phone calls.
MO
The Insider’s Guide is structured in a distinctly
“Wilsonian way”—Joycean associations, kabbalistic numerology, the Law of
Fives bleeding into the very architecture of the book itself, etc. At what point did you realize you couldn’t
write about Wilson’s method without also writing through it? And did that
realization feel like a trap, a gift, or both?
EW
I had written a fair amount about Wilson before I wrote my first book, and I had experimented a lot using methods inspired by Wilson, Pound, Joyce, and Crowley, etc. It felt like a gift, but my Crowley work did seem like a trap. Crowleyean Kabbalah can reimprint the third circuit of the nervous system, but afterwards it seems hard to get out of that Crowleyean way of looking at the world. Like the zen student who meditated on an ox, my horns won’t fit through the door. I have deliberately avoided Crowley for the most part over the past 21 years, but I have not successfully replaced that third circuit imprint.
MO
You document Wilson’s lifelong devotion to Ezra Pound’s Cantos—the
phrase “hilaritas et amor” from the Paradiso section even became
Wilson’s email signature. Yet Pound is a deeply problematic figure—which both
you and Wilson acknowledged. How did Wilson square that particular tension, and
how do you square it as someone who has spent decades in both men’s work?
EW
Bob did a very good job of separating the dancer from the dance, as Yeats put it. He would learn from people despite their more problematical aspects, as one can see from his discussions of Pound and Crowley, etc. I started reading Pound in 1982, and I would to read a bunch of Pound, become disgusted, and leave him alone for a while. Then I would read a bit of Pound, go “Wow!”, learn a lot, read a bunch more by and about Pound, get disgusted, and leave him alone for a while. As with Crowley, Pound has influenced me very profoundly, more so than with Crowley. I have also had the good fortune to teach number of Pound’s books in high school and community college classes.
In the 1990’s Bob invited me to participate in a discussion
of Pound online at the Zero City Amphitheater. In our discussions there Bob
compared me to St. Paul because he found me too judgmental of Uncle Ezra.
MO
The Insider’s Guide was published in 2004 and revised in
2011, and Wilson himself passed away in 2007. Now, nearly two decades later,
Hilaritas Press is carrying his legacy forward and his readership feels
genuinely resurgent. Do you think Wilson anticipated the particular way the
21st century would make his ideas feel prophetic—the weaponization of
conspiracy, the collapse of consensus reality, the rise of reality tunnels as a
mass cultural condition—or would even he have been surprised by how darkly his
playful epistemology has been confirmed?
EW
Please note: The revised third edition of my book came out
in 2020. The 2011 second edition did not contain any major revisions. In answer to your questions, it beats me. I
suspect he would accept that some of his ideas do seem prophetic. I know Trump
and the pandemic deeply surprised me. I remember wondering in 2009 what Bob
would have thought of President Obama. In the early nineties Bob liked
President Clinton, but he became disillusioned as the decade continued. As 2007
recedes into the past, I feel less and less certainty that I could predict
Bob’s responses to our current situation.
MO
Wilson wrote the introduction to your book in one
sentence—“You just read it!”—a joke that is also a genuine philosophical
statement about the relationship between commentary and primary text. (I really
loved that!) What did he make of being the subject of such sustained, loving
exegesis? Did he ever push back, correct you, or say “you’ve got that
completely wrong”? And if so—what?
EW
I have heard that he liked my book and felt grateful for my efforts. He would push back (as with my judgements about Ezra Pound). In 1988 or so I asked him if the main action of Illuminatus! took place in 1976. He said no. A decade later I asked him what year that main action took place in, and he answered “1976.” Of course, by then I had begun working on my book, and he genuinely wanted to help with that. I had asked what he thought about me writing the book, and told me to do it and that he wanted to help. His introduction as “Mordecai the Foul” gives some of his corrections of my errors.
MO
In your
personal opinion—and to the benefit of new students and initiates—how would you
describe “Occult Philosophy”?
EW
I tend to think that occult
means hidden, so I think of hidden philosophy, ways of thinking that can get
one in trouble with the authorities.
MO
What was
your personal start on your own journey on this path (or chosen profession)?
EW
As a child I had an 8:00
bedtime, 8:30 if I read. That brainwashed me into becoming a constant reader.
At five I loved the cartoon Eighth Man where the android used the name
Tobor (robot backwards). A few years later I watched Son of Dracula
where Lon Chaney Jr.’s character uses the name Alucard. This prepared me for
Joyce, Wilson, and Crowley’s word games. Plus reading Phil Farmer and Phil Dick
as teen prepared me for reading Dr. Wilson.
MO
To this
magazine, the concept of “modern occultism” can (and should) be equally viewed
from both the academic and practical sides. What would you recommend to a
person only now coming along to these subjects, and is uncertain if an
objective academic career, or a true “practical path” may be right for them?
EW
Beats me. If you can get good
degrees and get paid for some publications, that seems a great blessing.
MO
What is
one book, film, lecture, or teacher that helped shape your journey and personal
philosophies that you would recommend to a new student or occult practitioner
(or historian / academic)?
EW
I love Rafi
Zabor’s books, and he and I have become friends. I started reading his writing
on jazz in Musician magazine in 1979, and I highly recommend his books.
MO
And
finally, what is one daily activity that you believe is a MUST for all seekers
of the occult philosophies and/or arts?
EW
I don’t know. I do Duolingo every day. I
think anyone interested the Kabbalah might enjoy using Duolingo to learn
the Hebrew alphabet (unless they already know it). I do Ibn ‘Arabi’s Prayers
for the Week, translated by Hirtenstein and Beneito, every day,
and I highly recommend them.
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