These three games, Hog in Trough, Cock on Dunghill and the Moloch Game, are all more or less pathological activities. The players who “win” win nothing that they can truly call their own. “Hog in Trough” may emerge twice as rich as Croesus only to find himself embittered, empty and unhappy, at a loss to know what to do with the wealth he has amassed. “Cock on Dunghill” may make himself so famous that everyone knows his name only to realize that this fame of his is a mere shadow and a source of inconvenience. Players of the Moloch Game may wade in blood up to their ears only to find that the victory or glory for which they sacrificed a million lives are empty words, like richly bedizened whores who lure men to their destruction. There is a criminal element in all these games because, in every instance, they do harm both to the player and the society of which he forms a part. So warped, however, are the standards by which men measure criminality that players of these games are more apt to be regarded as “pillars of society” than dangerous lunatics who should be exiled to remote islands where they can do no harm to themselves or others.

The Neutral Game

Between the higher and lower games is the neutral game, the Householder Game, the aim of which is simply to raise a family and provide it the necessities of life. One cannot call it either a meta-game or an object game. It is the basic biological game on which the continuation of the human race depends.

No Game

It is also possible to find, in every human society, a certain number of nonplayers, people who, due to some constitutional defect, are unable to find any game worth playing, who are, as a result, chronic outsiders, who feel alienated from society and generally become mentally deranged, tend to become antisocial and criminal.

The High Games

The meta-games are rarely played in their pure form.

The Art Game ideally is directed towards the expression of an inner awareness loosely defined as beauty. The awareness is purely subjective. One man’s beauty can be another man’s horror. The beautiful of one age can seem ugly to another. But bad players of the art game have no inner awareness at all. They are technically proficient and imitate those who have awareness, conforming to the fashion whatever that fashion may be. The whole Art Game, as played today, is heavily tainted with commercialism, the greed of the collector pervades it like a bad smell. It is further complicated by the tendency to show off that afflicts almost all contemporary artists, whether they be painters, sculptors, writers or composers. As all traditional concepts of the beautiful have been abandoned, anything goes, just so long as it is new and startling. This makes it almost impossible to tell whether a given work of art corresponds to some inner awareness of the artist of merely shows that he was trying to be clever.

The Science Game is also rarely played in its pure form. Much of it is merely jugglery, a tiresome ringing of changes on a few basic themes by investigators who are little more than technicians with higher degrees. The Science Game has become so complex, so vast and so expensive that more or less routine enterprises are given preference. Anything truly original tends to be excluded by that formidable array of committees that stands between the scientist and the money he needs for research. He must either tailor his research plans to fit the preconceived ideas of the committee or find himself without funds. Moreover, in the Science Game as in the Art Game there is much insincerity and a frenzied quest for status that sparks endless puerile arguments over priority of publication. The game is played not so much for knowledge as to bolster the scientist’s ego.

To the Art Game and the Science Game we must add the Religion Game, a meta-game played for an aim loosely defined as the attainment of salvation. The Religion Game, as played in the past, had a fairly well-defined set of rules. It was essentially a game played by paid priests of one sort of another for their personal benefit. To compel their fellowmen to play the game, the priests invented various gods, with whom they alone could communicate, whose wrath they alone could assuage, whose cooperation they alone could enlist. He who wanted help from the gods or who wished to avert their wrath had to pay the priests to obtain his ends. The game was further enlivened, and the hold of the priests on the minds of their victims further strengthened, by the invention of two after-death states, a blissful heaven and a terrible hell. To stay out of the hell and get into heaven, the player of the Religion Game had to pay the priests, or his relatives had to pay them after his death. This “pay the priest” aspect of the Religion Game has caused several cynics to define it as the world’s oldest confidence trick designed to enable certain unscrupulous individuals to make a profit out of the credulity and suggestibility of their fellowmen by interceding on their behalf with some nebulous god or ensuring their entry into an equally nebulous heaven. It was this aspect of the Religion Game that causes Sigmund Freud to exclaim, more in sorrow than anger: “The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that for one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life”.

A particularly hideous aspect of the Religion Game resulted from the insistence by certain priests that their brand of god was the only god, that their form of the game was the only permissible form. So eager were these priests to keep the game entirely in their own hands that they did not hesitate to persecute torture or kill any who happened to wish to play the game by other rules. The practice was started by the Jews, whose enthusiasm for their one and only and very jealous father-god justified those slaughterings the accounts of which constitute so much of the bulk of the Old Testament. The practice was eagerly adopted by so-called Christians, who, not satisfied with slaughtering Moslems and Jews, turned like rabid dogs on one another in a series of ghastly religious wars, Protestant versus Catholic. The Moslems, who borrowed the rules of their Religion Game from Jews and Christians alike, do not fail to copy the bad habits of both. Believers were exhorted in the Koran to wage war on the infidel the slaughter of the unbelievers being defined as one sure way of gaining entry into the Moslem heaven (a much lusher paradise than the rather insipid affair offered by their priests to conforming Christians).

It would simplify our account of the games if we could offer the above description of the Religion Game without further comment. Unfortunately, this is impossible. Simply to define the Religion Game as the world’s oldest con game is as “patently infantile” (to borrow Freud’s words) as it is to take seriously the anthropomorphic father-god floating in his bed sheet somewhere in the stratosphere surrounded by cherubs and seraphs and other improbable species of celestial fauna (the “gaseous vertebrate” so derived by Ernst Haeckel). For it must be obvious to any fair-minded observer that there is another element in the Religion Game besides that of the playing on the credulity of believers and selling them entry permits into a phony heaven. All the great religions offer examples of saints and mystics who obviously did not play the game for material gain, whose indifference to personal comfort, to wealth and to fame was so complete as to arouse our wonder and admiration. It is equally obvious from the writings and sayings of these mystics that they were not so naïve as to take seriously either the gaseous vertebrate or heaven with its golden harps or hell with its ovens. Obviously they played the game by entirely different rules and for entirely different aims from those of the priestly con men, who sold trips to heaven for hard cash and insisted on payment in advance (no refund if not fully satisfied, either).

The Master Game

What game did these mystics play? Within the matrix imposed by their religion, these players were attempting to the most difficult game of all, the Master Game, the aim of which is the attainment of full consciousness or real awakening. It was natural for these players to play their game within a religious matrix. The basic idea underlying all the great religions is that man is asleep, that he lives amid dreams and delusions, that he cuts himself off from the universal consciousness (the only meaningful definition of God) to crawl into the narrow shell of a personal ego. To emerge from this narrow shell, to regain union with the universal consciousness, to pass from the darkness of the ego-centered illusion into the light of the non-ego, this was the real aim of the Religion Game as defined by the great teachers, Jesus, Gautama, Krishna, Mahavira, Lao-tze and the Platonic Socrates. Among the Moslems this teaching was promulgated by the Sufis, who praised in their poems the delights of reunion with the Friend. To all these players, it was obvious that the Religion Game as played by the paid priests, with its shabby confidence tricks, promises, threats, persecutions and killings, was merely a hideous travesty of the real game, a terrible confirmation of the truth of the statement: “These people praise me with their lips but their hearts are far from me…. They have eyes but see not, ears and hear not, neither do they understand.”

So little did they understand that, at least within the matrix of the “Christian” religion, it actually became physically dangerous during several centuries to try to play the Master Game at all. Serious players found themselves accused of heresy, imprisoned by Inquisitors, tortured, burned alive. It became impossible to play the game openly. To survive at all, one had to adopt a disguise, pretend that one’s real interest was alchemy or magic, both of which were permitted by the priests, who did not understand the real significance of either.

Alchemy was particularly safe as its stated aim, the transmutation of base metals into gold, posed no challenge whatever to the authority of the priests. Therefore it was behind the mask of alchemy that many players of the Master Game concealed their real aims, formulating the rules of the game in an elaborate secret code in which the transmutations of substances within the body were expressed in terms of mercury,