Robert Anton Wilson was best known as the co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, but exerted a wide influence as a gadfly of the counterculture of the last 40 years. As the obituarist of the Daily Telegraph put it: “Scarcely any alternative school of thought popularised since the 1960s escaped his attention as a promoter (or debunker, and often both) of conspiracy theories, theology, philosophy, psychology, occultism, chaos theory, neurolinguistic programming and quantum mechanics.” He was American director of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON, his answer to CSICOP) and originator of the term patapsychology – a discipline based on the premise that there’s no such thing as normal.