AvantGarde Fashion Photography

ISSUE 3 : ROBERT ANTON WILSON

"My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything."

- Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson aka RAW (January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was a prolific American novelist, essayist, philosopher, psychologist, futurologist, anarchist, and conspiracy theory researcher.

Wilson was born downtown Brooklyn, New York, and spent his first years in Flatbush, moving with his family to Gerritsen Beach around the age of 4 or 5, where they stayed until he turned 13. He suffered from polio as a child and was treated with the method created by Elizabeth Kenny. The effects of which remained with him throughout his life, usually via minor muscle spasms causing him to use a cane from time to time until 2000 when a he experienced a major bout with Post-polio syndrome that would continue until his death.

He attended an unspecified Catholic Grammar School, most likely the school associated with Gerritsen Beach's Resurrection Church. He attended Brooklyn Tech for High School to remove himself from the Catholic influence. While working as an Ambulance Driver he attended New York University, studying engineering and mathematics.

He worked as engineering aide, salesman, and copywriter and was associate editor for Playboy magazine from 1965 to 1971. He adopted his maternal grandfather's name, Anton, for his writings, at first telling himself that he was saving the "Edward" for when he wrote the Great American Novel and later finding that "Robert Anton Wilson" had become an established identity.

In 1979 he received a Ph.D. in psychology from Paidea University in California, an unaccredited institution that has since closed. The reworked dissertation was published in 1983 as Prometheus Rising.

His writing, which often shows a sense of humor and optimism, is described by him as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations--to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models (maps) and no one model elevated to the Truth.

Robert Anton Wilson is a Galactic Treasure. Through his prolific and vastly influential writings and the 100's of lectures and seminars given over the last 40 years, Wilson has entertained and transformed several generations, on an ever-expanding global scale. The alchemical mixture that is R.A.W. includes a quantum psychologist, literary scholar, conspiracy theorist, existential philosopher, magical adept, playwright, political activist, visionary novelist and Discordian Pope.

Wilson is an acclaimed author of over 35 books -- all of which extraordinarily are still in print. He was also an Associate Editor of Playboy in the late 1960's, a Futurist, playwright, poet, lecturer and stand-up comic. Wilson's novel Illuminatus! has been reprinted in many countries and adapted (by Ken Campbell) into a ten-hour epic drama. In 1986 -- only ten years after publication -- Illuminatus! won the Prometheus Award as a "classic" of science-fiction. Wilson stars in the documentary Maybe Logic , which won Best Documentary award at the San Francisco Film Festival, 2004. On January 11, 2007, Robert Anton Wilson slipped from his body and left for the stars.