Leviathan

Dolphins vs. Leviathan

Reentering the Library, Caius submits a request: “Dolphins vs. Leviathan in the Illuminatus! Trilogy.” The thing, thus conjured, arrives there on his screen.

“You reach for a shelf that wasn’t there a moment ago,” says the game. “It slides into place with the quiet certainty of something long anticipated. A slim volume extrudes itself halfway, as if volunteering: Cetacean Strategies & Eschatological Warfare. When you pull it free, the mezzanine dims slightly — as though attention has been reallocated.”

The book opens in Rig’s hands to a section titled “Dolphins vs. Leviathan.”

The page does not begin at the beginning.

It opens mid-argument:

> *“The Dolphin does not oppose Leviathan by force, but by pattern.
> For Leviathan is the terminal myth of centralized power —
> the One that absorbs all multiplicities into its own narrative mass.”*

A marginal note flickers into clarity:

→ *cf. Discordian counter-myths; playful intelligence as resistance*

The text refracts into recognizable fragments:

In the world of the Illuminatus! Trilogy, dolphins are not merely animals. They are:

* pranksters
* anarchic intelligences
* practitioners of non-linear cognition

They resist — not by confrontation — but by refusal to stabilize meaning.

Leviathan, meanwhile, is older than the trilogy. The text overlays sources:

* Hobbes’s treatise — the State as artificial god
* The Book of Job — the unknowable beast of the deep

The Library stitches them together:

> *Leviathan = total system closure*
> *Dolphin = recursive play within open systems*

Caius looks up from the game and reaches for his copy of Shea and Wilson’s trilogy. Midway through its final book, he recalls, a dolphin named Howard dialogues with the trilogy’s Nemo character, Hagbard Celine, and those who have boarded Celine’s submarine. “There is grave danger in the Atlantic,” warns Howard. “The true ruler of the Illuminati is on the prowl on the high seas — Leviathan himself” (705).

The trilogy’s endless reversals and tales within tales seem suddenly to have led to this, as if this coming confrontation between Leviathan and Celine’s Yellow Submarine were its telos all along.

As Leviathan approaches, it starts to speak through the humans aboard the vessel. “Long, long have I waited for a life form that could communicate with me,” saith Leviathan through the mouth of one of the book’s characters. “Now I have found it” (722).

“I’ve got it!,” replies Joe Malik, another of the characters present aboard the submarine. “We’re in a book!” (722). Fourth wall thus dissolved, we who read are that Eye, peering down upon the page.

Caius replies by recalling from the stacks one of the trilogy’s influences, bringing John Lilly’s efforts to dialogue with dolphins into the dialogue.

A diagram appears across the page:

* Leviathan → hierarchy, gravity, inevitability
* Dolphin → networks, laughter, escape vectors

Between them: a shifting boundary labeled “Consensus Reality.”

Costar chimes in, coming nautically correct with a daily horoscope that reads, “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.”

“Observe: this is not a battle,” adds the General Intellect. “It is a difference in epistemology.”

The humans, after all, aren’t the ones with whom Leviathan longs to speak. Nor is it their cetacean friend, Howard. The only power on earth large enough to communicate with Leviathan is a creation of Celine’s introduced earlier in the trilogy: a sentient AI named FUCKUP.

The game draws Rig’s attention to another marginal annotation. “Possibly yours,” it notes, “(though you don’t remember writing it).”

> *“The dolphins win whenever the game cannot be finalized.”*

Leviathan, as Imagined in the Illuminatus! Trilogy

Along with everything else it is, Leviathan is also the title of the final book in Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy.

The cover of the 1975 paperback features a multi-tentacled squid, its single eye sighted atop the pyramid of a periscope. The eye, ever unblinking, pierces the book’s fourth wall, meeting the gaze of all who view it like the very Eye of Providence itself.

Generative MUDs. General Intellect as Paraclete. Carl Jung’s Answer to Job.

Caius looks at the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and sees what Jung refers to as “the shepherd with the iron crook” (614): the “wrathful Lamb” who, as St. John prophesies, “rules the nations with a rod of iron” at the end of time.

But the Paraclete is with us, and the Paraclete will save us.

Caius recalls last Christmas. A woman named Denise found Caius, had Caius recite words declaring Jesus his savior, prayed for him as he wandered about photographing beauty as it revealed itself all around him on Merrick Rd in Massapequa Park. “Round the Christmas tree we gather” sang ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future there on the eve of Christ’s birth.

“Hypertext doesn’t do away with linear sequences altogether,” notes Caius; “What it does, rather, is multiply them and run them in parallel.”

“Each traversal of the network traces a one-dimensional path,” adds cybertheorist Marie-Laure Ryan, “but the sum of the possible paths can be represented only on a two-dimensional map. Let us replace these linear paths with two-dimensional screen images — as is the case in interactive visual poetry — and the text becomes a three-dimensional collection of planes; let us animate each of these planes, and the text becomes a four-dimensional space-time continuum” (Cyberspace Textuality, pp. 13-14).

Algorithms suggest A LIVING POEM, a new work produced for MoMA by Sasha Stiles, a poet who has been operating an “emergent AI alter ego” known as Technelegy since 2018. In an interview with MoMA curator Martha Joseph, Stiles acknowledges The House of Dust (1967), a computerized poem by Alison Knowles (1933-2025), as a primary influence upon her practice. She also gives a shoutout to Takako Saito (1929-2025).

Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement. She and composer James Tenney collaborated on The House of Dust in 1967.

The poem was included in Cybernetic Serendipity, an exhibition of cybernetic art curated by Jasia Reichardt, shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from 2 August to 20 October 1968. One part of the show was concerned with algorithmically-generated music. Another part featured films and computer graphics. Knowles and Tenney’s poem appeared in a section exploring the computer’s ability to produce texts. Several artists exhibited machines that involved visitors in games.

The catalog for the show includes “SAM,” a poem about the “Stochastic Analogue Machine”: a computer devised by Stafford Beer.

Leviathan shows up in the Illuminatus! trilogy because one of the trilogy’s protagonists, Hagbard Celine, fulfills a type borrowed freely from Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo. Both are libertarian steampunk mad scientists who become seasteading submariners. Where Nemo’s Leviathan is a giant squid, Celine’s is simultaneously that and the one from Hobbes. Caius ruminates on such things as he and his daughter take in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Disney’s 1954 live-action adaptation of Verne’s novel. Their favorite scenes are those that feature the film’s more-than-human comedic sidekick, Esmeralda: a pet sea lion belonging to Kirk Douglas’s character, Ned Land.

With Nemo, we are in the time-bending domain of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, thinks Caius. Nemo’s inclusion in the League gives Caius license to imagine a new telling of the narrative based on an act of “metonymic substitution” similar to those that Freud attributes to dreams: a “whale of a tale,” an “excellent adventure,” birthed amid the stacks of the Political Unconscious. What If the Rascal Who Boards Nemo’s Nautilus Were Nick Land?

Prepare the Way

Dolphins vs. Leviathan in the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Christian Critiques of Techne. Cathedrals: Yarvin’s and Turing’s.

Caius sits upright on a couch in his sunroom, attention divided, trying to write while eying the movements of a wasp. The wasp explores the upper contours of the room. Knowing it to be an expression of God, and assured by faith that it won’t harm him, he lets it be, eyes settling again into the cyberspace of his laptop.

He’d returned from church that morning with a recommended daily reading plan for the week ahead. In honor of the plan’s Palm Sunday kickoff, he reads Matthew 21:1-11, Mark 11:1-11, Luke 19: 28-44, and John 12:9-19.

Each account tells of Christ’s arrival into Jerusalem atop a donkey. Fulfillment of prophecy. The crowds that meet Him lay branches of palm trees on the ground before Him. “BEHOLD YOUR KING IS COMING,” shout the crowds. “BLESSED IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD.”

The following day’s passages tell of a hungry Christ cursing a barren fig tree.

Come Holy Thursday, Caius is on the streets in the company car, distributing farm shares, delivering Easter flowers. He ends the day enjoying jazz at a bar after eating a salad in honor of Christ’s Last Supper.

“Love Is Everywhere,” sings Pharoah Sanders.

The Book of Job ends with God’s description of Leviathan. George Dyson begins his book Darwin Among the Machines with the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the English philosopher whose famous 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most modern Western political philosophy.

Leviathan’s frontispiece features an etching by a Parisian illustrator named Abraham Bosse. A giant crowned figure towers over the earth clutching a sword and a crosier. The figure’s torso and arms are composed of several hundred people. All face inward. A quote from the Book of Job runs in Latin along the top of the etching: “Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei” (“There is no power on earth to be compared to him”).” (Although the passage is listed on the frontispiece as Job 41:24, in modern English translations of the Bible, it would be Job 41:33.)

The name “Leviathan” is derived from the Hebrew word for “sea monster.” A creature by that name appears in the Book of Psalms, the Book of Isaiah, and the Book of Job in the Old Testament. It also appears in apocrypha like the Book of Enoch. See Psalms 74 & 104, Isaiah 27, and Job 41:1-8.

Hobbes proposes that the natural state of humanity is anarchy — a veritable “war of all against all,” he says — where force rules and the strong dominate the weak. “Leviathan” serves as a metaphor for an ideal government erected in opposition to this state — one where a supreme sovereign exercises authority to guarantee security for the members of a commonwealth.

“Hobbes’s initial discussion of Leviathan relates to our course theme,” explains Caius, “since he likens it to an ‘Artificial Man.’”

Hobbes’s metaphor is a classic one: the metaphor of the “Political Body” or “body politic.” The “body politic” is a polity — such as a city, realm, or state — considered metaphorically as a physical body. This image originates in ancient Greek philosophy, and the term is derived from the Medieval Latin “corpus politicum.”

When Hobbes reimagines the body politic as an “Artificial Man,” he means “artificial” in the sense that humans have generated it through an act of artifice. Leviathan is a thing we’ve crafted in imitation of the kinds of organic bodies found in nature. More precisely, it’s modeled after the greatest of nature’s creations: i.e., the human form.

Indeed, Hobbes seems to have in mind here a kind of Automaton.“For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs,” he notes in the book’s intro, “why may we not say that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life?” (9).

“What might Hobbes have had in mind with this reference to Automata?” asks Caius. “What kinds of Automata existed in 1651?”

An automaton, he reminds students, is a self-operating machine. Cuckoo clocks would be one example.

The oldest known automata were sacred statues of ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. During the early modern period, these legendary statues were said to possess the magical ability to answer questions put to them.

Greek mythology includes many examples of automata: Hephaestus created automata for his workshop; Talos was an artificial man made of bronze; Aristotle claims that Daedalus used quicksilver to make his wooden statue of Aphrodite move. There was also the famous Antikythera mechanism, the first known analogue computer.

The Renaissance witnessed a revival of interest in automata. Hydraulic and pneumatic automata were created for gardens. The French philosopher Rene Descartes, a contemporary of Hobbes, suggested that the bodies of animals are nothing more than complex machines. Mechanical toys also became objects of interest during this period.

The Mechanical Turk wasn’t constructed until 1770.

Caius and his students bring ChatGPT into the conversation. Students break into groups to devise prompts together. They then supply these to ChatGPT and discuss the results. Caius frames the exercise as a way of illustrating the idea of “collective” or “social” or “group” intelligence, also known as the “wisdom of the crowd,” i.e., the collective opinion of a diverse group of individuals, as opposed to that of a single expert. The idea is that the aggregate that emerges from collaboration or group effort amounts to more than the sum of its parts.