Hagbard has parallels to
Jules Verne's character,
Captain Nemo. Both are genius captains aboard a fantastic submarine. Both are rogues who have mostly broken off from society, yet help the oppressed. Some have even theorized that Hagbard Celine is Captain Nemo, though Verne's
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas is set in the second half of the nineteenth century. He is also comparable to a degree to
Ragnar Danneskjold, a libertarian pirate in
Ayn Rand's novel
Atlas Shrugged, which is spoofed in the chronicles as "
Telemachus Sneezed". Like Danneskjold, Hagbard participates in the black market, exploiting and resisting governments, and both characters have Norwegian roots. Hagbard is a notorious prankster and liar (telling one character not to trust anyone with the initials H.C.). This character trait is displayed throughout
Illuminatus!. Celine tends to give misinformation about himself and his intentions and that he faked the death of an actress, implied to be
Marilyn Monroe,{{cite web A
Discordian anarchist, he fights the Illuminati from a golden submarine, the
Leif Ericson (named after
the Viking explorer). The submarine was supposedly designed and built by himself, stolen from the
United States Navy, or a gift from
the Mafia. Despite its size—the equivalent of five city blocks long with a three-story-high
conning tower—it has so far remained undetected. He has a Norwegian mother and a Sicilian father, physically resembling
Anthony Quinn. In a section printed in the introductions of volumes I and II of the trilogy, though not reprinted in the single-volume compilation, the narrator mentions that he has a raft of Irish relatives in Ohio named McGee and Marlowe. Wilson also implies in
The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles that Hagbard is related to one of the central characters, Sigismundo Celine. He speaks Norwegian, Italian, English, German, Latin, Greek and Swahili. He graduated
from Harvard with a somewhat strange
double major in
contract law and
naval engineering. A former
naturalized United States citizen, Hagbard supposedly
relinquished his citizenship after representing a
Mohawk reservation in court against the
Bureau of Indian Affairs. Hagbard generally told people he was an engineer building a dam during his time with the Mohawk because he was ashamed of being a lawyer. He later became a citizen of
Equatorial Guinea, of which
Fernando Poo is a part, having papers referring to this by the time of the
Walpurgisnacht rock concert. The appendix to the trilogy mentions that Hagbard builds a
starship and leaves to explore
Alpha Centauri in the year 1999. Hagbard designed a supercomputer called the First Universal Cybernetic Kinetic Ultramicro-Programmer. Among other things, he used to calculate the chances of
World War III starting, which it does by throwing virtual
I Ching sticks. His manifesto is called ''Never Whistle While You're Pissing
, containing his Definitions and Distinctions'', an anarchist interpretation of capitalist concepts.{{cite web ==See also==