Talk:Venerable Council of Seers

Annotation:- Again this appears to link to a name of one of the many competing secret and occult societies, which appear in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy of novels.

Shea and Wilson, in their masterpiece trilogy dealing with paranoia and the nature of conspiracy theory, draw a world-picture of competing secret societies seeking to wrest control of the world from each other, whilst remaining obscure to established governments and the general public. (Sounds just like the infighting between the Orders at Unseen University in the pre-Ridcully days, doesn't it...)

The Justified Ancients of Mummu is a secret society pledged to the worship of the Chaos goddess Eris (All Hail Discordia!) and pledged to fight the humourless anal retentive control freaks of the Illuminati by any and all means possible. (Otherwise known as the Erisian Liberation Front, it is no accident a pop group of the same name had a hit with "Justified Ancients of Mummu", with one Lulu contributing vocals and making the best of some rather inscrutable lyrics.)

Naturally, the JAMS claim an unbroken ancestry going back even further than Atlantis, to the even earlier sunken continent of Lemuria, aka Mummu, and are guided by the immortal and extremely venerable Nine Unseen Seers/Nine Unknown Ancients who survived the fall of Mu, and who sit in council in a secret Himalayan fastness, invisibly guiding the affairs of the world. Although it is possible they are not being serious about this.)

To those of us who have read and appreciated the Illuminatus! cycle, the thought occurs that Terry Pratchett cannot be unfamilar with these books, as the Discworld novels are packed with sly allusions...