THE MODERN OCCULTIST INTERVIEW
with Eric
Wagner M O D E R N O C C U LT I S T 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 himself 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?
MODERN OCCULTIST MAGAZINE
A N I N S I D E R’ S G U I D E T O RO B E RT A N T O N W I L S O N & STRAIGHT OUTTA DUBLIN NEW FALCON, 2004 & HILARITAS PRESS, 2025
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.
SUMMER SOLSTICE 2026
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