Thanks to the boys for donating their time.  Also, all rewards are finally out!  Sorry to those last high tier supporters, the book content was pretty challenging as well as some of those busy celeb signatures for the prints.

thanks to all!

allan and becky

Our most recent Illuminate

My uncle Billy was one of the biggest influences on my life growing up; he lived with his wife Ina and four kids - my favorite cousins - in a council house in a working class area of Glasgow. The three bedroom house was home to a rambunctious zoo of free-roaming animals too, including cats, dogs, rabbits, tortoises and snakes. The children's bedroom ceiling featured a wall-to-wall mural painted in the style of Jack Kirby and depicted an astronaut deity descending from a flying saucer to deliver a thrilling beat-Biblical comic-balloon sermon which began - “I am thy man-god Elohim…” Billy, lover of all things esoteric, was a fan of comic books and science fiction, with a particular fondness for Steve Ditko's Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. 

One wall of the living room was given over to the library with dozens of rare and diverting books on mythology, psychology, and the occult; each volume a door that opened on a thousand new ideas and lifelong inspiration.  

It was Billy, himself - all but dismantled in a car crash that left one leg shorter than the other - who let me take the wheel of his battered white Bedford van down a country road when I was seven years old, which is probably the main reason why I never learned to drive. 

It was Billy who gave me Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris' Thoth Tarot deck on my 19th birthday and set me on the road to wonder and understanding.  

It was Billy who put headphones on his sleeping Boxer dog to teach the beast subliminal French. It didn't work, perhaps because the dog hadn't yet taken the first step of learning to speak English. It was Billy who rode home dead drunk on the same legendary beast's back one long ago madcap night. 

And Billy who rose like a rocket through the ranks of Masonry, on piled blocks of history and mystery architecture to luminous higher orders and degrees. Billy my Rosicrucian uncle, who limped like a sailor across the rolling deck of life, and made us laugh, and think, and who died in 2009 after a slow, bitter, and unwinnable struggle with Parkinson's. Ina, his wife and a nurse by vocation, was at his side all the way through to the hard end. His magical equipment - crystal sphere, Tarot cards and wand - those visible tools of his invisible trade were set about his coffin in a constellation of power and meaning that spoke to Eternity, denying death.  

Billy is a big part of the reason I got involved with Becky and Allan's project. If it can help in its own small way to prevent or alleviate the suffering and decline of other men and women who have illuminated the lives of relatives, friends and loved ones like my uncle Billy lit up mine, it will have done its job - and taken us one step closer to the day we eradicate all traces of this cruel disease from human experience.  

Grant Morrison 

Scotland  

September 2011