Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson; 1932-2007) was an American author, futurist, psychologist and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews1. In 1999 he described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth"2. Wilson's goal was "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything"3.
In addition to writing several science-fiction novels, Wilson also wrote non-fiction books on "extrasensory perception, mental telepathy, metaphysics, paranormal experiences, conspiracy theory, sex, drugs, and what he called quantum psychology"4.
Following a career in journalism and as an editor, notably for Playboy, Wilson emerged as a major countercultural figure in the mid-1970s, comparable to one of his coauthors, Timothy Leary, as well as Terence McKenna.
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David G. Robertson, "Making the Donkey Visible: Discordianism in the Works of Robert Anton Wilson", in ed. Carole M. Cusack and Alex Norman, Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 421-441. ↩︎
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Patricia Monaghan, "The Booklist Interview: Robert Anton Wilson", Booklist 95, no. 18 (15 May 1999): 1680. ↩︎
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Jeffrey Elliot, "Robert Anton Wilson: Searching For Cosmic Intelligence", Literary Voices #1 (October 1980), reprinted in Starship (Spring 1981), accessed 11 June 2024. ↩︎
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Dennis Hevesi, "Robert Anton Wilson, 74, Who Wrote Mind-Twisting Novels, Dies", The New York Times (13 January 2007), accessed 12 June 2024. ↩︎
This article is derived from the English Wikipedia article "Robert Anton Wilson" as of 29 Apr 2024, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.