Throughout history, secret societies have played a crucial role in shaping events that have created our world. Only an inner circle of power elite know the full extent of the influence of the conspiracy... It is Paris, 1772, and Sigismundo Celine knows he is destined to play an important part in this history-behind-history. The masons, the English nobility, the Jabobites, the Rosicrucians, the ruling clique of pre-Revolution France: these are but a few of the factions involved in the machinations and intrigue in which Sigismundo has become enmeshed. Thrown into the Bastille, shot at, assaulted by assassins, tortured, and brutally interrogated, he knows only what he is and what he must do to become the one spoken of in the old texts. But what he doesn't 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: the identity of The Widow's Son.

Novelist, Teacher and Former Playboy Editor Robert Anton Wilson