Valis (23 page)

"A pot," I said.

"I saw it in a museum at Athens. It's authentic. That's not a matter of my opinion; I'm not qualified to judge such matters; its authenticity has been established by the museum authorities. I talked with one of them. He hadn't realized what the design shows; he was very interested when I discussed it with him. This form of vase, the
krater,
was the shape used later as the baptismal font. That was one of the Greek words that came into my head in March 1974, the word
'krater.'
I heard it connected with another Greek word:
'poros.'
The words 'poros krater' essentially mean
'limestone font.'"

There could be no doubt; the design, predating Christianity, was Crick and Watson's double helix model at which they had arrived after so many wrong guesses, so much trial-and-error work. Here it was, faithfully reproduced.

"Well?" I said.

"The so-called intertwined snakes of the caduceus. Originally the caduceus, which is still the symbol of medicine was the staff of -- not Hermes -- but
--
" Fat paused, his eyes bright. "Of Asklepios. It has a very specific meaning, besides that of wisdom, which the snakes allude to; it shows that the bearer is a sacred person and not to be molested... which is why Hermes, the messenger of the gods, carried it."

None of us said anything for a time.

Kevin started to utter something sarcastic, something in his dry, witty way, but he did not; he only sat without speaking.

Examining the 8 X 10 glossies, Ginger said, "How lovely!"

"The greatest physician in all human history," Fat said to her. "Asklepios, the founder of Greek medicine. The Roman Emperor Julian -- known to us as Julian the Apostate because he renounced Christianity -- considered Asklepios as God or a god; Julian worshipped him. If that worship had continued, the entire history of the Western world would have basically changed."

"You won't give up," I said to Fat.

"No," Fat agreed. "I never will. I'm going back -- I ran out of money. When I've gotten the funds together, I'm going back. I know where to look, now. The Greek islands. Lemnos, Lesbos, Crete. Especially Crete. I dreamed I descended in an elevator -- in fact I had this dream twice -- and the elevator operator recited in verse, and there was a huge plate of spaghetti with a three-pronged fork, a trident, stuck in it... that would be Ariadne's thread by which she led
Theseus out of the maze under Minos after he slew the Minotaur. The Minotaur, being half man and half beast is a monster which represents the demented deity Samael, in my opinion, the false demiurge of the Gnostics' system."

"The two-word mailgram," I said. "'KING FELIX.'"

Fat said, "I didn't find him."

"I see," I said.

"But he is somewhere," Fat said. "I know it. I will never give up." He returned the photos to their manila folder, put it back in the briefcase and closed it up.

Today he is in Turkey. He sent us a postcard showing the mosque which used to be the great Christian church called St. Sophia or Hagia Sophia, one of the wonders of the world, even though the roof collapsed during the Middle Ages and had to be rebuilt. You'll find schematics of its unique construction in most comprehensive textbooks on architecture. The central portion of the church seems to float, as if rising to heaven; anyhow that was the idea the Roman emperor Justinian had when he built it. He personally supervised the construction and he himself named it, a code name for Christ.

We will hear from Horselover Fat again. Kevin says so and I trust his judgment. Kevin would know. Kevin out of all of us has the least irrationality and, what matters more, the most faith. This is something it took me a long time to understand about him.

Faith is strange. It has to do, by definition, with things you can't prove. For example, this last Saturday morning I had the TV set on; I wasn't really watching it, since on Saturday morning there's nothing but kids' shows, and anyhow I don't watch daytime TV; I sometimes find it diminishes my loneliness, so I do turn it on as background. Anyhow, last Saturday they ran the usual string of commercials and for some reason at one point my conscious attention was attracted; I stopped what I had been doing and became fully alert

The TV station had run an ad for a supermarket chain; on the screen the words FOOD KING appeared -- and then they cut instantly, rushing their film along as fast as possible so as to squeeze in as many commercial messages as possible; what came next was a Felix the Cat cartoon, an old black-and-white cartoon. One moment FOOD KING appeared on the
screen and then almost instantly the words -- also in huge letters -- FELIX THE CAT.

There it had been, the juxtaposed cypher, and in the proper order:

KING FELIX

But you would only pick it up subliminally. And who would be catching this accidental, purely accidental, juxtaposition? Only children, the little children of the Southland. It wouldn't mean anything to them; they would apprehend no two-word cypher, and even if they did they wouldn't understand what it meant, who it referred to.

But I had seen it and I knew who it referred to. It must be only synchronicity, as Jung calls it, I thought. Coincidence, without intent.

Or had the signal gone out? Out over the airwaves by one of the largest TV stations in the world, NBC's Los Angeles outlet, reaching many thousands of children with this split-second information which would be processed by the right hemispheres of their brains: received and stored and perhaps decoded, below the threshold of consciousness where many things lay slumbering and stored. And Eric and Linda Lampton had nothing to do with this. Just some board man, some technician at NBC with a whole stack of commercials to run, in any order he saw fit. It would have to be VALIS itself responsible, if anything had arranged the juxtaposition intentionally, VALIS which itself was information.

Maybe I had seen VALIS just now, riding a commercial and then a kids' cartoon.

The message has been sent out again, I said to myself.

Two days later Linda Lampton phoned me; I hadn't heard from the Lamptons since the tragedy. Linda sounded excited and happy.

"I'm pregnant," she said.

"Wonderful," I said. "How far along are you?"

"Eight months."

"Gee," I said, thinking, It won't be long.

"It won't be long now," Linda said.

"Are you hoping for a boy this time?" I said.

Linda said, "VALIS says it'll be another girl."

"Is Mini
--
"

"He died, I'm sorry to say. There was no chance, not with what he had. Isn't it wonderful? Another child?"

"Do you have a name picked out?" I said.

"Not yet," Linda said.

On the TV that night I happened to catch a commercial for dog food. Dog food! At the very end, after listing various kinds of animals for which the company makes food -- I forget the name of the company -- a final coupling is stated:

"For the shepherd and the sheep."

A German shepherd dog is shown on the left and a great sheep on the right; immediately the station cut to another commercial which began with a sailboat silently passing across the screen. On the white sail I saw a small black emblem. Without looking more closely I knew what it was. On the sail the makers of the boat had placed a fish sign.

Shepherd and the sheep and then the fish, juxtaposed as had been KING FELIX. I don't know. I lack Kevin's faith and Fat's madness. But did I see consciously two quick messages fired off by VALIS in rapid succession, intended to strike us subliminally, one message really, telling us that the time had come? I don't know what to think. Maybe I am not required to think anything, or to have faith, or to have madness; maybe all I need to do -- all that is asked of me -- is to wait. To wait and to stay awake.

I waited, and one day I got a phonecall from Horselover Fat: a phonecall from Tokyo. He sounded healthy and excited and full of energy, and amused at my surprise to be hearing from him.

"Micronesia," he said.

"What?" I said, thinking that he had reverted back to the koine Greek again. And then I realized that he was referring to the group of small islands in the Pacific. "Oh," I said. "You've been there. The Carolines and Marshall Islands."

Fat said, "I'm going there; I haven't been, yet. The AI voice, the voice which I hear -- it told me to look among the Micronesian Islands."

"Aren't they sort of little?" I said.

"That's why they call them that." He laughed.

"How many islands?" I asked, thinking ten or twenty.

"More than two thousand."

"Two thousand!" I felt dismay. "You could look forever. Can't the AI voice narrow it down?"

"I'm hoping it will. Maybe to Guam; I'm flying to Guam and starting there. By the time I'm finished, I'll get to see where a lot of World War Two took place."

I said, "Interesting that the AI voice is back to using Greek words."

"Mikros
meaning small," Fat said, "and
nesoi
meaning islands. Maybe you're right; maybe it's just its propensity for reverting to Greek. But it's worth a try."

"You know what Kevin would say," I said. "About the simple, unspoiled native girls in those two thousand islands."

"I'll be the judge of that," Fat said.

He rang off and I hung up the phone feeling better; it was good news to hear from him, and to find him sounding so hearty.

I have a sense of the goodness of men, these days. I don't know where this sense came from -- unless it came from Fat's phonecall -- but I feel it. This is March again, now. I asked myself, Is Fat having another experience? Is the beam of pink light back, firing new and vaster information to him? Is it narrowing his search down?

His original experience had come in March, at the day after the vernal equinox. "Vernal," of course, means "spring." And "equinox" means the time when the sun's center crosses the equator and day and night are everywhere of equal length. So Horselover Fat encountered God or Zebra or VALIS or his own immortal self on the first day of the year which has a longer stretch of light than of darkness. Also, according to some scholars, it is the actual day of birth of Christ.

Seated before my TV set I watched and waited for another message, I, one of the members of the little Rhipidon Society which still, in my mind, existed. Like the satellite in miniature in the film
Valis,
the microform of it run over by the taxi as if it were an empty beer can in the gutter, the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum. Or so I told myself. Kevin had expressed this thought. The divine intrudes where you least expect it.

"Look where you least expect to find it," Kevin had told Fat one time. How do you do that? It's a contradiction.

One night I dreamed I owned a small cabin directly on
the water, an ocean this time; the water extended forever. And this cabin did not resemble any I had ever seen; it seemed more like a hut such as I had seen in movies about the South Pacific. And, as I awoke, the distinct thought entered my mind:

Garlands of flowers, singing and dancing, and the recital of myths, tales, and poetry.

Ilater remembered where I had read those words. In the article on Micronesian Cultures in the
Britannica.
The voice had spoken to me, reminding me of the place to which Horselover Fat had gone. In his search.

My search kept me at home; I sat before the TV set in my living room. I sat; I waited; I watched; I kept myself awake. As we had been told, originally, long ago, to do; I kept my commission.

Tractates Cryptica Scriptura

1. One Mind there is; but under it two principles contend.

2. The Mind lets in the light, then the dark, in interaction; so time is generated. At the end Mind awards victory to the light; time ceases and the Mind is complete.

3. He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed.

4. Matter is plastic in the face of mind.

5. One by one he draws us out of the world.

6. The Empire never ended.

7. The Head Apollo is about to return. St. Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before. The Buddha is in the park. Siddhartha sleeps (but is going to awaken). The time you have waited for has come.

8. The upper realm has plenary
¹
(
¹
Var. plenipotentiary)
p
owers.

9. He lived a long time ago, but he is still alive.

10. Apollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistos, said, "That which is above is that which is below." By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term.

11. The great secret known to Apollonius of Tyana, Paul of Tarsus, Simon Magus, Asklepios, Paracelsus, Boehme and Bruno is that: we are moving backward in time. The universe in fact is contracting into a unitary entity which is completing itself. Decay and disorder are seen by us in reverse, as increasing. These healers learned to move forward in time, which is retrograde to us.

12. The Immortal One was known to the Greeks as Dionysos; to the Jews as Elijah; to the Christians as Jesus. He moves on when each human host dies, and thus is never killed or caught. Hence Jesus on the cross said,
"Eli, Eli, lama Sobachthani,"
to which some of those present correctly said, "The man is calling on Elijah." Elijah had left him and he died alone.

13. Pascal said, "All history isone immortal man who continually learns." This is the Immortal One whom we worship without knowing his name. "He lived a long time ago, but he is still alive," and, "The Head Apollo is about to return." The name changes.

14. The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space or time. The information fed to us we hypostatize into the phenomenal world.

15. The Sibyl of Cumae protected the Roman Republic and gave timely warnings. In the first century c.e. she foresaw the murders of the Kennedy brothers, Dr. King and Bishop Pike. She saw the two common denominators in the four murdered men: first, they stood in defense of the liberties of the Republic; and second, each man was a religious leader. For this they were killed. The Republic had once again become an empire with a caesar. "The Empire never ended."

16. The Sibyl said in March 1974, "The conspirators have been seen and they will be brought to justice." She saw them
with the third or
ajna
eye, the Eye of Shiva which gives inward discernment, but which when turned outward blasts with desiccating heat. In August 1974 the justice promised by the Sibyl came to pass.

17. The Gnostics believed in two temporal ages: the first or present evil; the second or future benign. The first age was the Age of Iron. It is represented by a Black Iron Prison. It ended in August 1974 and was replaced by the Age of Gold, which is represented by a Palm Tree Garden.

18. Real time ceased
in
70 c.e. with the fall of the temple at Jerusalem. It began again in 1974 c.e. The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind. "The Empire never ended," but in 1974 a cypher was sent out as a signal that the Age of Iron was over; the cypher consisted of two words: KING FELIX, which refers to the Happy (or Rightful) King.

19. The two-word cypher signal KING FELIX was not intended for human beings but for the descendants of Ikhnaton, the three-eyed race which, in secret, exists with us.

20. The Hermetic alchemists knew of the secret race of three-eyed invaders but despite then: efforts could not contact them. Therefore their efforts to support Frederick V, Elector Palatine, King of Bohemia, failed. "The Empire never ended."

21. The Rose Cross Brotherhood wrote,
"Ex Deo nascimur, in Jesu mortimur, per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus,"
which is to say, "From God we are born, in Jesus we die, by the Holy Spirit we live again." This signifies that they had rediscovered the lost formula for immortality which the Empire had destroyed. "The Empire never ended."

22. I term the Immortal one a
plasmate,
because it is a form of energy; it is living information. It replicates itself -- not through information or in information -- but as information.

23. The plasmate can crossbond with a human, creating what I call a
homoplasmate.
This annexes the mortal human permanently to the plasmate. We know this as the "birth from above" or "birth from the Spirit." It was initiated by Christ, but the Empire destroyed all the homoplasmates before they could replicate.

24. In dormant seed form, the plasmate slumbered in the buried library of codices at Chenoboskion until 1945 c.e. This is what Jesus meant when he spoke elliptically of the "mustard seed" which, he said, "would grow into a tree large enough for birds to roost in." He foresaw not only his own death but that of all homoplasmates. He foresaw the codices unearthed, read, and the plasmate seeking out new human hosts to crossbond with; but he foresaw the absence of the plasmate for almost two thousand years.

25. As living information, the plasmate travels up the optic nerve of a human to the pineal body. It uses the human brain as a female host in which to replicate itself into its active form. This is an interspecies symbiosis. The Hermetic alchemists knew of it in theory from ancient texts, but could not duplicate it, since they could not locate the dormant, buried plasmate. Bruno suspected that the plasmate had been destroyed by the Empire; for hinting at this he was burned. "The Empire never ended."

26. It must be realized that when all the homoplasmates were killed in 70 c.e. real time ceased; more important, it must be realized that the plasmate has now returned and is creating new homoplasmates, by which it has destroyed the Empire and started up real time. We call the plasmate "the Holy Spirit," which is why the R.C. Brotherhood wrote,
"Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus."

27. If the centuries of spurious time are excised, the true date is not 1978 c.e. but 103 c.e. Therefore the New Testament says that the Kingdom of the Spirit will come before "some now living die." We are living, therefore, in apostolic times.

28.
Dico per spiritum sanctum: sum homoplasmate. Haec veritas est. Mihi crede et mecum in aeternitate vive.

29. We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent. It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms which tells us we have sinned. "The Empire never ended."

30. The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind.

31. We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.

32. The changing information which we experience as world is an unfolding narrative. It tells about the death of a woman. This woman, who died long ago, was one of the primordial twins. She was half of the divine syzygy. The purpose of the narrative is the recollection of her and of her death. The Mind does not wish to forget her. Thus the ratiocination of the Brain consists of a permanent record of her existence, and, if read, will be understood this way. All the information processed by the Brain -- experienced by us as the arranging and rearranging of physical objects -- is an attempt at this preservation of her; stones and rocks and sticks and amoebae are traces of her. The record of her existence and passing is ordered onto the meanest level of reality by the suffering Mind which is now alone.

33. This loneliness, this anguish of the bereaved Mind, is felt by every constituent of the universe. All its constituents are alive. Thus the ancient Greek thinkers were hylozoists.

34. The ancient Greek thinkers understood the nature of this pan-psychism, but they could not read what it was saying. We lost the ability to read the language of the Mind at some primordial time; legends of this fall have come down to us in
a carefully-edited form. By "edited" I mean falsified. We suffer the Mind's bereavement and experience it inaccurately as guilt.

35. The Mind is not talking to us but by means of us. Its narrative passes through us and its sorrow infuses us irrationally. As Plato discerned, there is a streak of the irrational in the World Soul.

36. In Summary: thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements -- change -- in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize. We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another. But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it -- i.e. it as information, which is what it is. The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself).

37. We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But something has gone wrong. All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can't read outside and can't hear inside. So I say, we have become idiots. Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language. Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts. The origin of the word "idiot" is the word "private." Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level. Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness.

38. From loss and grief the Mind has become deranged. Therefore we, as parts of the universe, the Brain, are partly deranged.

39. Out of itself the Brain has constructed a physician to heal it. This subform of the Macro-Brain is not deranged; it moves through the Brain, as a phagocyte moves through the cardiovascular system of an animal, healing the derangement of the Brain in section after section. We know of its arrival here; we know it as Asklepios for the Greeks and as the Essenes for the Jews; as the Therapeutae for the Egyptians; as Jesus for the Christians.

40. To be "born again," or "born from above," or "born of the Spirit,"
means to become healed;
which is to say restored, restored to sanity. Thus it is said in the New Testament that Jesus cast out devils. He restores our lost faculties. Of our present debased state Calvin said, "(Man) was at the same time deprived of those supernatural endowments which had been given him for the hope of eternal salvation. Hence it follows, that he is exiled from the Kingdom of God, in such a manner that all the affections relating to the happy life of the soul are also extinguished in him, till he recovers them by the grace of God... All these things, being restored by Christ, are esteemed adventitious and preternatural; and therefore we conclude that they had been lost. Again: soundness of mind and rectitude of heart were also destroyed; and this is the corruption of the natural talents. For although we retain some portion of understanding and judgment together with the will, yet we cannot say that our mind is perfect and sound. Reason... being a natural talent, it could not be totally destroyed, but is partly debilitated..." I say, "The Empire never ended."

41. The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.

42. To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.

43. Against the Empire is posed the living information, the plasmate or physician, which we know as the Holy Spirit or Christ discorporate. These are the two principles, the dark
(the Empire) and the light (the plasmate). In the end, Mind will give victory to the latter. Each of us will die or survive according to which he aligns himself and his efforts with. Each of us contains a component of each. Eventually one or the other component will triumph in each human. Zoroaster knew this, because the Wise Mind informed him. He was the first savior. Four have lived in all. A fifth is about to be born, who will differ from the others: he will rule and he will judge us.

44. Since the universe is actually composed of information, then it can be said that information will save us. This is the saving
gnosis
which the Gnostics sought. There is no other road to salvation. However, this information -- or more precisely the ability to read and understand this information, the universe as information -- can only be made available to us by the Holy Spirit. We cannot find it on our own. Thus it is said that we are saved by the grace of God and not by good works, that all salvation belongs to Christ, who, I say, is a physician.

45.
In seeing Christ in a vision I correctly said to him, "We need medical attention." In the vision there was an insane creator who destroyed what he created, without purpose; which is to say, irrationally. This is the deranged streak in the Mind; Christ is our only hope, since we cannot now call on Asklepios. Asklepios came before Christ and raised a man from the dead; for this act, Zeus had a Kyklopes slay him with a thunderbolt. Christ also was killed for what he had done: raising a man from the dead. Elijah brought a boy back to life and disappeared soon thereafter in a whirlwind. "The Empire never ended."