The Widow's Son: Robert Anton Wilson

Book II of The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles. Paris, 1772. Sigismundo Celine knows he is destined to play an important part in this history behind history. The masons, the English nobility, the Jacobites, the Rosicrucians, the ruling clique of pre-Revolution France: these are but a few factions involved in the intrigues in which Sigismundo has become enmeshed. Thrown into the Bastille, shot at, attacked by assassins, tortured and brutally interrogated, he knows only what he is, knows the four souls of a human being and what he must do to become the one spoken of in the old texts. But what he does not know could kill him: the secret powers of Maria, the Italian beauty who has become an English Lady; the Irish fisherman Moon, who stumbles across the inner workings of an unsuspected cult; and the question they keep asking him - the identity of the Widow's Son. Cover art by Joe Burleson.