The Illuminatus! Trilogy

ZWEITRACHT

In this discordant period, the Hodge and the Podge are in conflict, because a ruling class emerges which attempts to control the others. This correlates with hexagram 1,, Ch'ien, the all-powerful, in the I Ching. The six unbroken lines represent the severity and monotony of such a period, which is, above all, the age of the T-square, the building of fences, the division of lands by "boundaries" drawn on maps, and the imposition of one man's (or one group's) will upon all others. Typically, the earth is regarded as both flat and finite by the Zweitracht mentality, and there is much concern with dividing it up into portions (among themselves, of course). The "superstitious" terror of American Indians when first confronting maps was merely the reaction of a Verwirrung mentality to a Zweitracht mentality: The Indians could not conceive of people treating earth as a thing to be exploited rather than a mother to be respected.

Zweitracht associates with 3 numerologically because 3 is the totally male number, because all-male Trinities (Brahma-Vishnu-Siva, Father-Son-Spirit, etc.) are invented in such ages, and because the discord always has a minimum of 3 vectors, not merely 2. That is, the division into a propertied ruling class and an unpropertied governed class immediately sets in motion further cupidity; the ruling class soon falls to fighting over the spoils. Contrary to Marx, most of the strife in Zweitracht ages is not the conflict between proprietors and proles but between various proprietors over who gets the biggest share of the pie.

The governing Tarot card is trump 12, the Hanged Man. The cross on which he hangs is blossoming, to show that it is still organic and alive (the biogram); he hangs upside down, to show the reversal of nature. He represents both the burden of omniscience in the owning-governing class and the burden of nescience in the servile-submissive class: the total crucifixion of desire by Realprinzip and Realpolitik.

The astrological sign of this period is Pisces, the two fish swimming in opposite directions indicating the conflict of logogram and biogram ("body" and "spirit," astrologers say.) Typical Pisceans who have shown the Zweitracht personality are E. H. Harriman, the railroad magnate (who covered the United States with Ch'ien-style unbroken straight lines), Cardinal John Henry Newman, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts (an attempt to instill Piscean authoritarianism even in childhood), Admiral Chester Nimitz, John Foster Dulles, Anna Lee (founder of the world's most antisexual religion, the Shakers), industrialists like Kruger and Pullman, financiers like Cambell and Braden, Grover Cleveland, John C. Calhoun, Neville Chamberlain, Andrew Jackson (whose expulsion of the Cherokee Nation from its traditional lands onto the "trail of tears," where most of them perished, is the archetypal Zweitracht land-grab), William Jennings Bryan, and Frank Stanton of CBS.

Since all Illuminati with any academic leanings at all are encouraged to major in history, the tendency in most textbooks is not only to black out Verwirrung periods but to glorify Zweitracht periods as ages of Light and Progress. Indeed, they make entertaining reading: They.are ages of expansion, and there are always new people being discovered to be subjugated, "civilized," and converted to tax-payers and rent-payers. Almost any age described in glowing and admiring language in a history text will prove, on examination, to be a Zweitracht era, and the foremost butchers and invaders are treated as the outstanding heroes of humanity. A sympathetic reading of the biographies of these empire-builders almost always indicates that they were homo neophile individuals who turned their talents to destruction rather than creativity because of bitterness engendered by years of torment and baiting by homo neo-phobe types during their childhoods.

The ever-present conflict in a Zweitracht period eventually leads to the third stage.