Celine's Laws are a series of three laws regarding government and social interaction attributed to the fictional character Hagbard Celine from Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy. Celine, a gentleman anarchist, serves as a mouthpiece for Wilson's libertarian, anarchist and sometimes completely uncategorizable ideas about the nature of mankind. Celine's Laws are outlined in the trilogy by a manifesto titled Never Whistle While You're Pissing. Wilson later goes on to elaborate on the laws in his nonfiction book, Prometheus Rising, as being inherent consequences of average human psychology.
A piece entitled Celine's Laws appears in Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminati Papers, which features articles written by Wilson under the guise of many of his characters from the Illuminatus! Trilogy alongside interviews with the author himself. One article pulls from another, as well as from the original Trilogy.
Celine, in his manifesto, recognizes these are generalities, but also says that their basic principles can be used to find the source of every great decline and fall of nations, and goes on to claim they are as universal as Newton's Laws in applying to everything.
Read more about Celine's Laws: Celine's First Law, Celine's Second Law, Celine's Third Law
Famous quotes containing the word laws:
“If woman alone had suffered under these mistaken traditions [of women’s subordination], if she could have borne the evil by herself, it would have been less pitiful, but her brother man, in the laws he created and ignorantly worshipped, has suffered with her. He has lost her highest help; he has crippled the intelligence he needed; he has belittled the very source of his own being and dwarfed the image of his Maker.”
—Clara Barton (1821–1912)