Note: this link’s to Tony’s piece on the Anarchist United Mystics/ St. James St squat.
The sun is not shining today in south west Scotland, so my son Callum is annoyed. Which means not much time to more than sketch this out. What I would like to do is make a link between the criticism of anarcho-punk as self-indulgent ‘lifestylism’ – the “What about the Miners Strike?”stuff and the KLF’s 1997 ‘Fuck the Millenium’ bash – which included participation by striking Liverpool Dockers… via Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus trilogy and the work of Eric Voegelin.
But that will have to wait… what I have done is find what I think is the original of the critique, made by the short lived Anarchist Workers Group in 1989. It is here on greengalloway.
Meanwhile, watch this bit of KLF
Note: The phrase ‘immanentize the eschaton’ was first used by Eric Voegelin in 1952 in ‘The New Science of Politics’ and is is referred to fifteen times in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, the first of which is the first line of the novel, “It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton.”
The phrase was also used in the debut single (“All You Need Is Love”) by the Illuminatus!-inspired British band The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu: “With this killer virus who needs war? Immanentize the Eschaton, I said shag shag shag some more!”.
The Justified Ancinets of Mu Mu were the earliest incarnation of the Drummond / Cauty collaboration that had most success as the Kopyright Liberation Front (KLF). The name comes from the Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea books, “The Illuminatus! Trilogy”. The Justified Ancients of Mummu (JAMs) were the underground (underwater!) anarchist collective spearheaded by Hagbard Celine, who fights the Illuminati from a golden submarine, the Leif Ericson. In the book, Mu is another name for the vanished Atlantis and Lemuria. Drummond was involved in the stage production of “Illuminatus!” in 1976.
AL Puppy
razorsmile
February 14, 2008 at 5:37 pm‘Immanentise the eschaton’ is also the (afaik) unofficial slogan of the Illuminates of Thanateros…always struck me as a funny old phrase since I’m sure most people read it as ‘imminent’ rather than ‘immanent’, the meanings of which are quite different (ah, what a boring comment 😉
alistairliv • Post Author •
February 14, 2008 at 7:39 pmNot boring! Once upon a time I may (or may not) have been associated with the Illuminates of Thanateros, but don’t remember anyone using ‘immanentize the eschaton’, although maybe Dave Lee? He was a sixties counter-culture man (but not a hippy)… Chaos International used the phrase ‘Nothing is True , Everything is Permitted’ on every page for many years. (I used to write for it).
But I could be wrong…
Penguin
February 14, 2008 at 10:26 pmPerfect timing…Valentines Day, check post 86 section…
alistairliv • Post Author •
February 15, 2008 at 12:01 amI have. And they do sing/ shout ‘immanentize the eschaton’.
Hail unto thee, oh mighty penguin one.
razorsmile
February 15, 2008 at 11:18 amdifferent positions produce different visions no doubt and it’s all true ish – I suppose it’s maybe just one of the oddities of my own connection, those I’ve worked with and bumped into seemed to use the phrase and I got the impression it was something generalised, interesting to hear that’s not the case
the wikipedia entry is vaguely amusing, maybe some of this stuff here should be added (KYPP could be cited as the source…)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanentize_the_eschaton
there’s another piece over here by Fenwick Rhysen and I’m not surprised then that I have this connectiuon since my route into active CM was via the Fotamecus rites
http://ftp.fortunaty.net/org/chaosmatrix/chaos/texts/fen-eschaton.html