E. E.

Rehmus

The Magic of Ed Rehmus

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 E. E. Rehmus

The Magic of Ed Rehmus

copyright 2006

All artwork was created

by Ed Rehmus except
where noted.

Seattle, U.S.A.
E. E. Rehmus

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E. E. Rehmus
 E. E. Rehmus

ABOUT THE COVER

“Insights and comment” had been requested from readers with regard to the
symbolism employed in Ed Rehmus’s oil painting on the cover of this book when it
was used as the January 2006 cover of Gift of Fire to which Ed had been a frequent
contributor. That cover is shown below. Readers didn’t react as I had thought they
might although Albert Frank did demonstrate the relevance of the Tarot “Magician”
card shown at bottom that is, of course, pertinent to any quest to understand Ed
Rehmus.
Ed’s daily journals (as indeed any communi-
cations with Ed) reveal that he was much into the
occult – considered himself a “magic(k)ian” in
fact, in its restricted sense, and so the Tarot card
is indeed key to understanding what he would
have had us infer from the image. “Magician” in
this sense involves just what those who are into
astrology take it to mean, in particular as
representing “the life force as directed by the
mind, cloaked in passion and purity teaching the
manifestation of reality, and drawing power to
transmit Divine Energy.” But he is also a scientist
in a more traditional sense, an initiated master and
skilled illusionist focusing his awareness to
improve concentration. That was Ed.
The symbols are traditional of the occult
including the “holy grail,” etc.. But of particular
interest are obvious excursions from the tradition-
ally drawn image, the most ostentatious being the
inclusion of pyramids incorporating Ed’s empha-
sis on Egyptology as a basis for much of his
thought. And of course, the smiling moon! ☺
Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code suggests a
male-female tie between the pyramids and grail.
As suggested in this reference also, there are
covert allusions to homosexuality in some of this
symbolism, which certainly is to be expected of a
proud dorian. Also, the personage is clearly Ed
in his younger years.
So why did the editor choose this as a cover?
Because the image intrigued him upon first seeing
it, the 12 by 14 inch painting has tolerated his
scrutiny from the top shelf of the book case in his
office for a couple of years now. But one day out
of the blue he noticed what should have been
obvious at first glance: There are two left hands!
Ed was too adept at art and thinking for that to be
a oversight. Maybe per Brown it refers in some
way to his homosexuality. Everything Ed created
bears detailed scrutiny.
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CONTENTS
ABOUT THE COVER iv
FORWARD xi

A Friend's Comment 1
The Journeys of Edward Rehmus 2
An Interview with E. E. Rehmus 4
The Eleven Postulates of Romulan Philosophy 7
All The Heads 8
Ramblings Beyond Life and Death 9
Recipe for Macaroni Salad 13
Promotion for the Magician's Dictionary 14
Kurgasiax (The Roasting Pit) 15
Dagdagiel (The Titillatrix) 16
The Empress 17
The Voice of Horus on the Horizon (1) 17
The Voice of Horus on the Horizon (2) 18
Zwielict / In the gloaming 19
These Late Skirmishes 20
Some Darker Ramblings 21
That which Ourgt Always Be Spontaneous 24
Osiris First! 25
Some Considerations of the Origins, Meaning,
and Future of Religion 28
The Utimate Source of the Archons? 30
In Response to "Can You Prove..." 31
The Value of Ancient Languages 32
The Arabic Star-Names 36
The Riddle of the Sphinx 39
Etymologica Sexualis (PG-3) 41
Cephas, Petros and Petra 43
Suffering Jesus! 45
The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception 47
Some Alphabets that Interested Ed 48
Some Alphabets that Interested Ed - 2 49

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Some Alphabets that Interested Ed - 3 50

Some Alphabets that Interested Ed - 4 51
Germanic Talismanic Symbols 52
Magical Alphabets 53
Translations 54
Domarum Mercurii and Carcerom Aliphoth Symbols 55
She's Been Away (A Film Review) 56
Armageddon Unmarred! 58
High Crimes and Miss Lewinsky 60
Terminator USA 62
Oh, Arnold! 63
America Now 64
Kewl Bush Babies 65
But What does GEORGE think!? 66
History Lesson by Prof. Ed Rehmus 67
Another Reason for the War 68
How We Spend Our Years 69
Botanical Musings 70
A Visit to St. Nick 72
If Aunt Emma Wants a Knitted Jacket… 73
The Inner City 74
The Rose (An Encryption) 75
A Page in Ed’s Diary (September 4, 1988) 76
Transcript of September 4, 1988 Entry 77
A Page in Ed’s Diary (September 5, 1988) 78
A Page in Ed’s Diary (March 23 1989) 79
Transcript of March 23, 1989 Entry 80
A Page in Ed’s Diary (March 24 1989) 81
So Much For Everything Then! 82
Power in the Dark Ages 83
Holy Imploding Cybo, Netman! 85
Let There be Light 87
The Three Tines of Destiny 88
Is Earth Also a Fairy Tale? 91
Reply to comments reacting to the preceding in an article 93
Response to letter to the Editor of one of Ed’s journals 96
Letter to the Editor of Vidya 98
Excerpt from another of Ed’s editorials 99
A Fetus Flower 100
Re: The Pragmatic Value of Optimism 101
What Price Engineers? 102
Sententiae Antiquae 103
Sick of the Millennium? 106
The Book Worm 109
Good and Evil 110
The Worm of Orburos 113

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The Quest 116

The Clonies 119
Élet! 120
Sex in Our Time 121
"Dorians Stand up for Dignity!" 125
Spotlight on Sodomy 127
The Art of Instruction 130
Letter To A Prison Inmate 131
Fumus Ignem Probat 134
Rhinectomy 137
Pain 138
Telepathy 139
Modern and Post-Modern Roller-Coaster Art 141
Pragmatics and Logistics of Nostalgia 144
Words to the Wise 146
Heaven and Hell, and Who Cares? 148
How Far Down do the Turtles go? 150
The Evolution and Deterioration of Language 152
Hurry up, Please, It's Time! 154
Be Sure To See Paris Before You Are Seventy! 157
OK, Grandpa Put You Family Photos Back In Your Wallet! 160
Further Signs of Civilization's Death 162
Video Meliora Proboque, Deteriora Sequor 163
Cephalocera Diaboli 166
Crypto Puzzle 167
Occult Crossword 168
Crossword Puzzle 169
Answers to Previous Crossword Puzzle 170
"So Passes Glory," A Crossword Puzzle 171
Answers to "So Passes Glory" Crossword Puzzle 172
A Spanish Crossword Puzzle (Rompecabezas) 173
Answers to "Rompecabezas" Crossword Puzzle 174
Another Crossword Puzzle 175
Answers to Another Crossword Puzzle 176

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FORWARD
This book is a mere token legacy of E. E. Rehmus.
Ed was an extremely intelligent thinker, an artist, a satirist, a linguist,
and Egyptologist who considered himself a “magic(k)ian” in a somewhat
related sense that I don’t pretend to fully comprehend. He was very open
about everything in his life and it made it easy to get to know him, but he
was a very deep person so I suspect few ever really knew him. His life
partner Joseph Haskew intimated to me that although they shared some
thoughts on art, he had no idea what all Ed was up to in other intellectual
areas. Ed had friends in many circles and perhaps the mysteries to those
of us in one circle of this elusive individual are more readily understood by
those in another.
In addition to editing, and writing for, many zines (as he referred to
these journals), he self-published several books including The
Magician’s Dictionary: An Apocalyptic Cyclopedia of Advanced
M/magic(k)al/ Arts and Alternative Meanings (Los Angeles: Feral
House, 1990), I’m Over Here, and others including serials Chirops (or
Armageddon on the Astral Plane) in 1985 and The Mansions and
Dungeons of Universe B (or Pillars of Isis, or the Two Tarots), of
all of which (except for I’m Over Here which was on the internet for
some years) I have only seen excerpts. In addition he did first English
translations of several tomes, one of which was Julius Evola’s The
Hermetic Tradition. He contributed to scholarly journals such as
Verbatim – The Language Quarterly, and less formal journals
including Abrasax, and those of the extremely high IQ community
including the Prometheus and Triple Nine Societies.
The zines for which he seems to have been the founder and acted as
editor under various pseudonyms include:
1. Pangloss (which he sometimes denominated Πανγλοσσ for obvious
reasons since it was a society of linguists) in mid to late 70s, and
2. The Voice of Horus on Horizon (The Newsletter of the
Academy of M/magic(k)al/ Arts) in the 80s and 90s.
In the journals he edited, and in the Gift of Fire that I edited for quite a
few years, his artwork was prodigious. He produced several comic strips,
one of which he called “The Clonies (peas-in-a-pod theatre)” which
presented situations appropriate to the title.
There were also a considerable number of crossword puzzles which
were his creations. Joseph indicated that for a time he contributed these
to major newspapers that paid a pittance to further edit them for
publication and distribution. The ones I found among his papers in his
office were primarily those employing Latin or some other linguistic niche
that probably did not fit any mass market.
He also left an impressive volume of daily journals including daily
entries (generally two full pages) for twenty years covering the trivial
comings and goings of his life with his partner Joseph. This journal also

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tabulated alphabets of many ancient languages, and a fair percentage of

its pages were written in a mysterious code of his own devising which he
recognized could probably never be broken. These diaries also contained
the precursors of many of the essays that would subsequently appear in
one journal or another. As editor of one of those periodicals Ed and I
became very good friends, and as such he left a signed statement
bequeathing all his written materials including his diary journals for me to
do with as I saw fit. It seems entirely fitting that some of what was Ed
Rehmus be published as a legacy of a very special kind of thinker. I’m
sure Ed supposed that I would come to this conclusion if he left me in
charge of his “stuff.” And again, he was right.
What is included in this volume derives from the various articles that I
am aware of his having published plus material gleaned from his most
interesting personal journal. Organizing that material has been somewhat
frustrating because Ed was such an integrated (and yes, since he himself
liked the term, “holographic”) personality such that each part of his work
reflects all the rest of it. So it is not easy to categorize his contributions
into one or another area, so as he says in his journal, a collage is a start at
what is needed at this point in art.
Clearly much much more could and should be said about Ed Rehmus.
But I think it is better to let him speak for himself.

Fred Vaughan, 2006

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After hearing of his death a friend said of Ed, “He went for the bones
of what he was considering and the stormy winds could make off with
the sails if that was a consequence!”
an untitled drawing by Ed Rehmus

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The Journeys of Edward Rehmus

by Joseph Haskew
(Joseph died in the summer of 2005; he was in his 80s.
REHMUS, Edward
Metaphysican, humanist, philosopher,
writer, artist, and linguist, who always gave
generously of his immense store of knowledge,
and his love for all the world. Resident of San
Francisco for over 50 years, his life enriched
thousands. At his request, no services are to be
held. For information contact: Joseph Haskew,
2275 Jackson St. San Francisco, CA 94115.
(Obituary San Francisco Chronicle, March 15-
17, 2004.)
I heard their young hearts crying
Loveward above the glancing oar
And heard the prairie grasses sighing
No more, return no more
O hearts, o sighing grasses,
Edward E. Rehmus Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn
(1929 – 2004) No more will the wild wind that passes
Return, no more return
– James Joyce
Edward, an only child, was born midsummer's eve 1929 in Upper Michigan,
of German ancestry. His father was a musician, a pianist, who played in the "Big
Bands" and his mother was a housewife. They were "modern" for their time,
spending time in restaurants and night clubs, and, aside from the usual love and
nurturing, were unexceptional parents, so the child was left to his own devices,
resulting in a lively imagination. Later, when they moved to Detroit, they lived in
a mainly Jewish neighborhood, and Ed attributed to this experience a lifelong
love of learning and solid study habits.
The family moved to southern California, in the late 1940's, where he found
the ambience suffocating and so resolved to get away whenever the opportunity
arose. When his mother died, he went to Tulane for a brief spell, then into the
U.S. Army (for an even briefer spell), then to San Francisco. He went to the
University of California at Berkeley off and on for many years, but always
became bored and so never pursued a degree.
His life in San Francisco was in the company of the Bohemian intelligentsia
of writers, artists, poets, philosophers, and metaphysicians, and in those days
San Francisco was a hotbed of post-war intellectual ferment. Over the years he
studied extensively in comparative religions, comparative languages, psychology,
and Eastern philosophy, among other disciplines. Always he kept up his writing,
his correspondence, his teaching, and his translations. Occasionally he would
find a book that he felt had particular merit, that had no English language
version in print and he would translate it, for free because he felt it needed a
wider audience. This might take six months, or a couple of years, but no matter -
"It’s important." In 1985 Ed announced that he would no longer be painting

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because to do so would dilute his energy, all of which he now needed for his
writing
I first met Ed Rehmus in 1964 when he was 35 years old. He was fashionably
thin, had a good figure, and was very handsome. He had soft brown hair, and his
eyes were dark brown, almost black. And although bright and alert, his eyes had
a luminous quality, almost magnetic. Those eyes, later, in confused times,
became a reference point.
A few years later, he was diagnosed as having a basal cell carcinoma on the
tip of his nose. It was removed, but left a white area about the size of a nickel,
that could be covered with heavy stage make up. But then a few years later, the
cancer returned. This time they took off the whole nose, pulled a flap down from
his forehead over his right eye to form a new nose, but the doctors were not sure
how much the transposed tissue would shrink, so in seeking an excess, he wound
up with an appendage hanging down to his chin. Can you imagine, looking into
the mirror and seeing that you had an elephants trunk in the middle of your
face. He was the elephant man. The tissue did shrink, many further surgeries
were done, then a few years later, another recurrence. This time the surgery was
far more extensive, with massive reconstruction. We lost count, but the total
surgeries numbered somewhere between 55 and 60. His forehead was now a
patchwork of little pieces of skin, gleaned from wherever skin could still be
found, and the nose, they never got right. But Ed said: "Enough!"
In 2004, circulatory
problems led to the ampu-
tation of his right leg. And
the doctor said 2 or 3 more
operations would be neces-
sary Ed looked at me and
said: "Tell them" and I said
to the assembled medical
staff: "This man has been
through hell. Hell. Not just
once or twice, but dozens of
times, over and over and
over again. He has had
enough, I will abide by his
decision and so must you.
It's his body, it's his life, it's
his decision." So, we gamb-
led, and lost. Or did we?
How much is enough? How
much is too much?
Now I bid you farewell,
love of my life. It has been
a long and loving journey.
Time will lessen the pain
and anguish I feel because
of our parting, but time
can never diminish the joy drawing by Ed Rehmus
of having known you.

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AN INTERVIEW with E. E. Rehmus

EDITOR: YOU WERE GOING TO EXPLAIN MAGIC ONE TIME.

Asking to explain magic(k) is like asking to explain how everything can be

everything else and also nothing at the same time.

EDITOR: WHAT'S THE LIKELIHOOD OF OUR IQ'S ACTUALLY BEING

WHAT WE CLAIM AND HOW DO WE MEASURE THEM IF
KEVIN AND RON ARE OUT OF BUSINESS?

First, given a normal, healthy brain and a psyche free of neuroses, begun
early enough and continued throughout life, IQ can be enhanced, so it's not god-
given. I don't call idiots or mongoloids "stupid". I call people of average
intelligence stupid for not developing themselves, although, perhaps laziness is a
more fitting criticism for them. I wish people would worry less about their lard
asses and more about the lard in their heads! Second, what are we bent on
measuring? Verbal and mathematical cleverness or creativity and originality?
How do you compare social competence and theoretical mathematics or mastery
of Sanskrit? Third, since everyone (supposedly) is unique, how can anyone
judge another's cognition or vision? I'm sure any triple niner could devise an IQ
test that would rule out everyone but himself! Fourth, IQ varies by dozens of
points in either direction from day to day. What's the key – attentionality or
velocity? What would be the difference in IQ after a heavy meal close to bedtime
and IQ under amphetamine after a full night's sleep?
Then let's remember that our brains may not be eternal software that can be
preserved on magnetic tape and reinserted into a new VCR, but may be nothing
more than temporary hardware subject, to rust, warping and burnt circuits. We
should also heed the ancient warnings that strength and beauty do not last
forever and neither does brilliance. Alzheimers and other demons lurk around
ever corner and even hide under the chess table.

EDITOR: DO YOU FOLLOW ENVIRONMENT ISSUES – WHAT ARE

YOUR THOUGHTS?

They are all red herrings! None of the proposed solutions will cleanse the
world so long as the current glut of human population continues, locust-like, to
devour the planet. Despite Jehovah's smugness at his own cleverness in
combining the sex urge with procreation, despite the intrusion of AIDS
(engineered by anachronistic 19th Century Victorian moralism to start with),
despite our perennial embarrassment at having genitals at all, it's time our
moral teachers screwed up their courage enough to admit at last that the
purpose of sex is union, not multiplication. Animals don't copulate in order to
perpetuate themselves, why should we? Why does the mere idea of birth control
instill horror in people? Are they afraid their highly unearned immortality
might be compromised? What makes children so special that they should take
away the rights of adults, be spoiled rotten and screened by Disney from truth?
Why should parents "own" their children and assume they know what is best for
them? Why is procreation still assumed to be a "right", rather than a privilege?

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What makes right-to-lifers think an embryo is a holy miracle? What's so
wonderful about human beings in the first place? Most people consider their
property to be infinitely more important than any human life. When a few
brave exceptions attempt to stand in the way of loggers or whale-murderers or
lake contaminators, we cut their legs off or spray pepper into their eyes. We
seem to be as much a dead end of evolution as the rat and the cockroach. I don't
see any blueprints for any angel likely to evolve out of us. Eugenics is a dirty
word – obviously we prefer to perpetuate imbeciles. And, if there were such a
blueprint, are we likely to last the thousands of years it would take to launch
such a superior replacement? The dinosaurs died because there was nowhere
else for them to go. In what way do we differ from the dinosaurs? Their huge
bodies only made their extinction more certain. We don't have gigantic bodies,
but we have a monstrous talent for manipulating nature and nature is justifiably
reacting with outrage. I think any elephant is better than any yuppie or CEO or
military general or policeman or Xtian Fundamentalist or Muslim fanatic. If
that makes me a traitor to my species, make the most of it. Worse yet, we are
planning to spread our pestilence into outer space. If ever a species deserved
extinction, here it is, O Gods, on a platter, asking for it.

Speaking of our lust for exploiting nature, i. e. our love of scientism and
tech, when I watch the weatherman using a little electronic wand to draw circles
around storm fronts I don't see a weatherman, I see a sorcerer – nay, a
mountebank using cheap legerdemain. (The sorcerers are those who made the
magic wand). So back to the first question – what is magic(k)? Originally, I
suppose it is the misguided attempt to work miracles. In higher circles of the
occult, however, it is the transformation of inner rather than outer reality.
"Outer" reality is too easily manipulated and perverted because it's an illusion
to start with. In outer reality, the search has been for the perfect image – down
through the ages from painting & sculpture, to photography, to motion pictures,
to cloning. All false, you see. All illusions. Only the inner psyche is truly
realizable, and even that is made up of constantly mutating phantasmagoria. At
death all that seemed solid in life breaks up and melts away revealing the truth
that man, earth and all the stars in the universe were no more than a dream.

EDITOR: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MC LUHAN?

All I remember about him is "the medium is the message." What that
means, I guess, is that people don't really drive cars in order to run to the store
for a pack of cigarettes, but simply because cars are there. Nor do they really
watch television in order to keep up with reruns of Wheel of Fortune, the TV set
is sufficient unto itself. You don't turn on the electric light bulb in order to read
Captain Marvel, you turn it on to get the light. In other words, utility follows
invention. The medium as message has been proved by the computer – for many
there seems to be a far greater attraction in merely seeing what it can do than in
playing games or making spreadsheets or writing novels. We don't really need
all this junk. They are no more than novelties and curiosities. We could go back
to horses and lanterns and live theater and human messengers and pen and ink
and we'd probably be much happier and have a lot more time for important
things like long conversations and natural history and listening to Mozart.

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EDITOR: HOW ABOUT THE CRUCIFIXION OF THEODORE
KACZYNKSI?

His writing sounds not only sensible but long overdue. Americans (though
members of Islamic nations are also hardly slouches in this respect) have a
demonic and insatiable urge to display their self-righteousness by jumping on
anyone they can pin any conceivable crime onto. They can't wait to find
someone they can smash to a pulp. They remind me of chickens who will peck
another chicken to death if they see any speck of red on it.

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THE ELEVEN POSTULATES OR AXIOMS OF
ROMULAN PHILOSOPHY
(Ed referred to himself as Romulus in many contexts.)

1. There is one, ultimate Holism composed entirely of unique hologram-like

sub-realities, some of which are not accessible to us.
la. All times, probabilities and potential possibilities exist simultaneously in
the same place. Thus they are all connected, though all do not
necessarily have immediate access to one another
2. Reality is 99% language.
3. Reality can be altered. We create ourselves and our own sub-realities.
Society is an unwritten code based on an agreed choice to call certain
realities more "real" than others.
4. Our natural inclination is constantly to alienate ourselves -- falling away in
the manner of the myth of "God" falling away from Himself into "Satan.
History, being the record of Man as a collection of individuals, is also falling
away from itself, from the Golden ages of the past into entropy and
barbarism. To overcome this natural inclination requires a conscious
struggle.
5. All truths and values are relative, subject to both a priori and a posteriori
reasoning, empirical and ideal. No truth is higher than another.
6. Opposites are exactly the same thing. <Or, if you insist, complementary
and necessary halves of the same thing.>
7. Cause and Effect is not the only operating principle in the dynamics of the
Cosmos. The Principle of Simultaneous Parallelism ("As above, so below")
is much more reliable and pragmatic.
8. Randomicity is fractal or infinitely bibranching (i. e. phenomena are
superficially limited, but not predestined).
9. Entropy is a limit of time.
10. Non-corporeal entities, being spiritual, need not exist in order to exist (even
abstract "manifestation" is non necessary for them to exist).
1). The Void is infinite, not yet limited by any taint of manifestation. This,
however, is not the True Void or Ultimate Void, which is beyond possibility
in this omniverse and cannot be accessed.
****************************
(Admittedly, these are all compromised notions. la is lifted from a Virus 23
article on Hilbert Space. I wonder what kind of society would result from people
a ccepting these postulates as matter-of-factly as they now believe in nonsense
such as Good and Evil, Justice, Truth, Salvation, Hope, Human Superiority to
other life forms, the Infallibility of the Scientific Method, God, Growth,
Progress, The future, etc.)

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ALL THE HEADS

To trap the Mind with nets of
tranquil gardens
Is to unlock the damned Tower's secrets.

The Endtime goes dropping through the

capitals as
they come chopping off,
& the moment of Madame La Guillotine
is reincarnated
while the Aeon melts.
Headlessness is rampant & quartered
on Eternity's red escutcheon
Wheras Reality for all its quicksilverability
&
flimsiness &
elephant leaping
Still sticks to the soul like thistle's burrs
And the shifting gates
rise and recede in the Abysses like
nothing more than telepath
poles
outside a brain window
And the heads planted with eyes still
blinking
in the rotting earth...

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RAMBLINGS BEYOND LIFE AND DEATH

To be blunt: Being and Nothingness are mutually exclusive, i. e. non-being
can have no knowledge of being and vice-versa, if non-being can be said to be
capable of such an existential thing as to know or not know a thing. Therefore
being knows only being and confronts non-being with the frustration at, and
horror of, the unknown suffered by all that exists, along with interference in the
natural inertia that existent things require in order to go on existing. But
opposites, including mutually exclusive opposites, can be grasped only within a
third thing that contains them and consists itself of both or neither. The thing
beyond being and nothingness was called by the Gnostics, Abraxas, and is the
unknowable God beyond all Gods. Since there is a lower form of consciousness,
there has to be a higher version as well and the higher must encompass the
lower just as substances contain molecules, molecules contain atoms, atoms
contain electrons, etc. in nested boxes of infinity above and below. (Yes, it's
true, if you travel east far enough you arrive at the west as well).
All being is immortal because there is in reality neither past nor future.
Time is an illusion – memory serves only to make existence capable of dealing
with itself more productively. Otherwise you wouldn't know a fish from a
firecracker. Since you observe everyone around you dropping dead, it's obvious
that death is not your destiny – at least not today, and since there is no
tomorrow you are immortal. If you follow that with the proper logical elements
you will come to the mirror. At any rate, without memory there can be no will,
no purpose, no control, but only a chaos of inexorable results leading downward
to entropy. Life is possible because subliminal matter depends for its existence
on habit (addiction, if you will) but unvarying routine alone cannot prevent
eventual attrition and collapse. And so in the course of an infinite progression
of events (caused not by chance, because no effect can exist without a previous
necessity) there occurred one event that was different from the others: the
ability to seek survival through growth and replication. And once life occurs the
evolution of self-consciousness is inevitable or you might say one wakes up and
smells the shit.
Something in the material world occurred before life and that was light,
without whose great speed we would run into things before we even saw them.
But light is a deeper mystery than life and so must await our more mature
investigation. Thus saith Francis Bacon or some such. So we postpone, even
though it is both old-fashioned and painful to have to use up the body (Bush:
beware of sending men to Mars when robots will do!) but in any case let us
return to our muttons.
The God Abraxas, who dwells beyond the ultimate contradiction of Being
and Nothingness – from which primordial separation all subsequent separations
are born – arose in the mind of man about two thousand years ago in an attempt
to explain the misery of human existence. Of course, misery is an essential
feature of all Nature, but only man can recognize it because of his faculty of
creating language and words that convey insight. The Egyptians did not concern
themselves much with the origin of the world, which was the province of the
God, Ptah (P-tah, literally, "the" Earth). But the Greeks and Hindus feared
reincarnation and the round of painful death and rebirth and the Jews came up
with a Creator of the Universe who was too powerful and frightening even to

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look at. The latter had created what he claimed was a paradise that he accused
man of having destroyed with his own senseless misery. Once, however, we are
able to see how things operate they cease to seem so glorious but rather start to
look like a burden and a trap.
The way out of the trap, for some, was through God becoming human (or
through man becoming divine). Thus arose the notion of the Christos, the
anointed one, who as the incarnated Creator would deliver Adam from his
sorrows. For others, farther to the east there was the Buddha, the Enlightened
One, who through self knowledge realized that existence and non-existence are
one.
Now, anyone who thinks persistently enough and deeply enough is bound to
see that human self-consciousness, wisdom, Sophia and even the obnoxious
judeo-christian-islamic monolith that we call "the God of Creation" or worse
yet, "Our Father" cannot be the end of the infinite rainbow of probabilities.
There must be that which lies beyond mind itself, a thing that contains the
impossible paradox of Being and Non-Being. Nor can this mystery hardly be
that famous Creator of Matter and Life, the Xtian God, because such things lie
far beyond his interests nor can the Mystery be known or approached by man
(certainly not in his present or foreseeable stage of consciousness) from the
other side. No weapons, no threat, see?
Therefore, to escape from the trap of contradiction and rebirth, man came
to understand that his was to do or die and transcend all of his limitations,
including his Gods and Archons – whether or not we choose to think of such
Gods and Archons as merely human inventions produced by the exploitation of
language. But first of all, the individual must abandon his ego and mankind
must abandon its hubris, for such inflation causes blindness.
Since it is inevitable that man will attempt to know the unknowable, for that
is the nature of us poor mortal fools, there were many descriptions, depictions
and definitions of Abraxas – most of which were contradictory enough that they
canceled one another out. From the few remaining bits we are left with an
impression of an entity that had a rooster's head and two serpents for legs, who
held a thunderbolt in his left hand and a sceptre in his right and bore a shield on
his back. His name is probably Grecisized Hebrew, Ha-brachah ("the
Blessed"), which later degenerated into Abracadabra, since the invocation of the
nameless Blessed One would have been a protection and a source of power. The
name also appears, rarely, in Ptolemaic Egyptian hieroglyphs – phonetically
spelled with appropriate Egyptian glyphs, by Budge, Abbraskktiax – followed
by the divine determinative.
But let's not forget that this description is merely a human attempt to deal
analogically with the unknowable and should by no means be taken in any
literal sense as a silly idol, born of superstition. Penal Code 31a.
The rooster's head, of course, represents the harbinger of dawn and light –
not the coming light's creator, mind you, but merely the potential recognition,
or announcement, of it. Cock-a-doodle-doo. The two serpent legs are the same
pair we find on the caduceus of Hermes, the two paths of inherent contradiction
that we have seen comprise all dichotomies, good and evil, conscious and
unconscious, male and female, etc.. Thus, for Abraxas, omniscience is not his
highest attribute but only as it were the choice of airplane over elephant as the
vehicle of his movement. The thunderbolt and sceptre are the usual implements
of power that we have come to associate with gods and superior entities, i.e. the

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 E. E. Rehmus
miraculous power to extract something new out of nothing and the magical
steadfastness of Eternal Repetition a la apocatastasis or Groundhog's Day. But
the shield should draw our attention, for it indicates that there is something
even farther beyond, from which Abraxas must defend himself. That in turn
suggests plainly enough that he is but the lowest point of the higher infinity that
the human mind can perceive – just as on the material level the electronic
particle is but the first penetration into the infinitely small that we envisage.
In the evening of his
technostrangling civilization,
man is just now – through his
discovery of the hologram and
his invention of the clone –
beginning to see that the entire
analogy is composed of an
infinite number of parts, all of
which are simultaneously
unique and universal. That is
to say, each of the parts is a
repetition or reflection of the
whole in miniature and at the
same time its own unique
differentiation or specialization
of that whole. In this way the
part is greater than the whole,
since it contains not only the
whole but itself as well in
separation and peculiarity.
Lest this thought lead the
individual to smugness, let him
understand that his separation and peculiarity are also reflected back and
reincorporated into the whole and that they are in a constant state of flux over
which he has but limited control. Moreover, the whole and its parts are
attributes only of our physical universe and not necessarily attributes of other
possible states that we do not know and cannot imagine.
The mystery of opposition and contradiction has been resolved! Being and
Nothingness are but eternal and infinite reflections of one another ("Samsara
and Nirvana are one!") and the dualistic serpents of contention and separation
are silenced at last by the cock's crow which clearly announces not the coming
of the night but the eternal rising of the dawn. The existential but premature
horror does not lie in discovering that we must either be or not be (pace
Hamlet), it lies in that tight and suffocating corridor between them, where our
fundamental metaphysics is useless.
Thus mankind and its components may die, the world may succumb – in
fact, we can no longer easily avoid that pitiful conclusion – but even the vast and
impressive cosmos itself, as we think we know it, with its billions of years and
countless worlds, is no more than a momentary blip in the blissful eternity of
possibilities: a hiccough in the void within the Void.
There are more important things and better certainties than life and death.

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Recipe for Macaroni Salad

First boil the macaroni in lightly salted water until it's done.
Strain out water and slide macaroni into a good mixing bowl.
Add mayonnaise until it is thoroughly coated throughout, then an extra
tablespoon or two after that. Use the best mayonnaise because that is what you
will mostly be tasting.
Throw in finely chopped onions and/or celery – enough so that you can call this
a salad but not so much that you ruin the comfort of the macaroni. Macaroni,
after all, is an indulgence, not a health sermon.
W hile this is still warm cover the top with small dollops of cream cheese – pull
up the macaroni underneath to cover them lightly. These dollops act as little
"surprises" for the palate, so that you won't get bored by a surfeit of sameness.
S prinkle parsley flakes and paprika (or cayenne, if you dare!) over the top for
color.
Cover it and put it in the icebox so that it doesn't generate salmonella.
I could have stuck a feather in my cap and called it something else, although
Makronsuchtigkeit or Attachement Macaronique or just plain "macfreak"
might be more macaronic in the old sense than merely fattening or addictive.

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[The next few pages are samples of draft pages from this volume.]

13
 E. E. Rehmus
Sample Page from a draft of
The Magician’s Dictionary

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 E. E. Rehmus
Sample Page from a draft of
The Magician’s Dictionary

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 E. E. Rehmus
Sample Page from a draft of
The Magician’s Dictionary

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 E. E. Rehmus

Ed’s Journal of the Academy of

M/magic(k)al/ Arts

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 E. E. Rehmus

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 E. E. Rehmus

ZWIELICHT
von Joseph freih. von Eichendorff (1815)
Dämrrung will die Flugel spreiten,
Schaurig rühren sich die Bäume,
Wolken zienn wie schwere Träume –
Was will dieses Graun bedeuten?

Hast ein Reh du lieb für andern,

Lasz es nicht alleine grasen,
Jäger ziehn im Wald und blasen,
Stimmen hin und wider wandern.
Hast du einen Freund hienieden,
Trau ihm nicht zu dieser Stunde,
Freundlich wohi mit Aug und Munde,
Sinnt er Yrieg im tückschen Frieden.
Was heut müde gehet unter,
Hebt sich morgen neugeboren
Manches bleibt in Nacht verloren –
Hüte dich. Bleib wach und munter!

IN THE GLOAMING
Trans. by E. E. Rehmus
Twilight batlike wings doth spread
The forest shudders in its breeze,
And clouds drag by like leaden dreams -
Oh, whence derives this waxing dread?
Hast a faun who is especially dear?
Let it not alone to grazing go:
The Hunter's horn quite soon will blow.
Hark the cries already far and near!
Hast a friend here in this place?
Trust him not this doubtful time of day,
Though friendly smiles he may display,
Wars are brewing behind that face.
What gives way to sleep tonight
May reveal at dawn the cost,
In darkness many things are lost –
Oh Beware! Stay awake, keep bright!

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 E. E. Rehmus

These Late Skirmishes

Discern some little light at least
in ancient secret hieroglyphs
And see them snatched away by Academe –
as false!

Or chance upon the key to Death

and you'll be warned to look away
to Life because Death is
morbid.

Discover sainthood within yourself

and they'll say no, that's wicked
only Christ is God and you are
ego.

Who are these sudden savants,

unwanted advisors of ubiquity,
saying our gumption is no more than
chutzpah?

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 E. E. Rehmus

SOME DARKER RAMBLINGS

I don't remember where I picked this up and why it
should be in such sloppy Spanish, but "La tierra
incognita la que ahora estamos descubriendos no se
halla donde fue antes descubrierto todo sino es un
lugar en lo que estamos experimentando todo lo que
nunca fue experimentado antes."
(The terra incognita that we are now discovering
is no longer where it was before everything was
discovered. It's a place where we are experimenting
with all those things that we never experienced
before.)
Quite so, the Gods understand. When in Rome,
etc.. And when in Hell consult the Gods of Hades.
The lower entities aren't necessarily opposed to us and Edward Rehmus
can help us to burrow under (undergo) our allotments of horror in life when we
can't climb over (overcome) them. The sky gods always disown us when we
are being tormented, disgraced and murdered ("Eli, eli, lama sabacthani?")
because they are pushing downward, not pulling upward. The ancient Gods
were not pointless superstitions, but the maps of natural forces. Zeus was a
precursor of monotheism in ancient times. For even monotheism has its shelf
within the cupboard of the many gods. But what good is Jesus when you have a
bad cold? You need someone like Pazuzu, who is an expert on the miseries of
fever, wheezing and catarrh. When I was undergoing many surgeries and my
original face was cut away to be replaced by a reconstructed one bearing no
resemblance to the former, unlike Michael Jackson, I had no identity at all and
dwelt exclusively in Hell, relieved only by my nursely ministrations of morphine.
My only guide was Yog Sothoth with his gangrenous, maggot-issuing face to lead
me out of the darkness as I underwent the journey from one being to another.
And, to resort to Michael Jackson again, he is unfortunate in being possessed of
an inordinate vanity, for he chose his own destruction and no god, demon, angel
or imp can interfere in his destiny. Now, after my experience (which was not of
my choosing, and not rooted in vanity), now that I possess a countenance like that
of the many (although still not my own!) so that I am able to pass invisibly in a
crowd – now I can turn to Zeus and Ra if I choose. But like the Eskimos, I do not
trouble with the good Gods. I worry about the wicked ones who must be
appeased. This precarious 21st Century man may yet survive if he recognizes in
time these nether-deities. If we try to bury them they will erupt volcanically and
wreak destruction.
Well, it's a question of language, isn't it? That's what Wittgenstein was on
about. You see, if Schopenhauer talks about "women" or "noise" or "horse-
whips" you don't find him boring. But when he mentions "The World as Will
and Representation" who can blame you for going to sleep? Nietzsche, quite
aware of all that, declared that the old language was dead and he was building a
new one. Unfortunately, his new language isn't all that easy either, although it is
worth the trouble to learn. Well, almost every language is worth learning, since
each is unique, and the tower of Babel is simply all of them at once clamoring to
be heard.

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 E. E. Rehmus
Anyway, part of the new
language is an acceptance of the fact
that as human beings we are a dense
mass of contradictions – and
Nietzsche contradicts himself inces-
santly. Eventually you get used to it
and start to see what he's driving at.
He points out, for instance, that none
of us is a coherent, integrated person,
for inside we are many different
people – a multitude with a different
king every day. There is nothing
wrong with the ego except that it
keeps changing (Heraclitus: "You
can't step into the same river twice").
Therefore when N says that he is
the Uebermensch and his own self is
superior to everyone else's, that
sounds conceited, but it isn't really.
It's just what everyone does –
including the prophet Zoroaster,
whom Nietzsche uses as a mask for
himself. Why not admit it? He says
in one breath that the majority of
people do not deserve to live, because
he considers them to be sleepwalkers
who are dead to the world in the first
place. But in the next breath he says
that we must nurture and protect the mediocre! He emphasizes the body but
experiences very little of it, being unable even to drink strong tea. On the one
hand he says he expects nobody to read his books and if they do they won't
understand them. On the other hand he warns his disciples not to take him
seriously -- they should think of him as a clown. He places his own morality
over and against Christianity, because Christianity is phony and ugly. And he
doesn't reject pain and misery because if you are going to affirm life you have to
affirm its dark side too! That's rather different from previous philosophers who
defined things in terms of moral judgments -- either the world had to be "all
good" because God made it or it had to be "all bad" because the evil Demiurge
made it. In truth, we made the world! or as N puts it we killed God so now we
have to remake it and be responsible for it.
Well, if you don't understand Nietzsche, neither did the Nazis. Nor does 99%
of the world and neither do I. That's why I took a course in him some years ago,
but the professor disappeared about half-way through the semester. I was,
however, beginning to see that Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards" owed a lot to N who
also deplored the throne of Reason and opposed the same things that Saul did.
And truth to tell there are a lot of otherwise not very good writers whose most
dynamic and startling ideas are really watered down, half-baked and who ill-
understood Nietzsche (Aleister Crowley, Robert Anton Wilson, etc.). For
Nietzsche is not the Buddha, you see, much less the Christ. He's the reborn
Zoroaster who transforms the Good/Evil cocoon into the Beyond-Butterfly

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 E. E. Rehmus
of...what? Maybe if that study group had gone full course I could tell you. Or
maybe Nietzsche was already mad before he began screaming and banging his
fists on the piano.
Back to language. One of my correspondents wanted to discuss the serpent
in the Garden of Eden, so we looked it up. The first thing we discovered is that
the English bible misses the point altogether. The serpent says to Eve, in
English, "Ye shall not surely die," (from eating the apple) which we take to mean
merely a contradiction of God's warning or at least a slight revision thereof. But
what he actually says (in Hebrew) is "Lo mut t'mutun", which means "Ye shall
not die the death." In other words, mortal death is only superficial. Whether or
not you agree with that, it's obvious that Modern English cannot weather the sea
voyage to Ancient Hebrew.
So we're always running into the brick walls of Babel. But throwing one's
dictionary into the trashcan and turning to bay with the hounds and squeal with
the pigs for company is hardly the solution. The difficulty we have with
language is just another expression of the difficulty of life itself. We have always
got to overcome (or undergo) and we have to grow ears to learn what people are
saying. Wittgenstein was not the end of philosophy. He was merely the latest in
the successive revelations of man's weakness: not the center of the universe, not
specially created, not master of himself, not superintelligent and so on. Yes, we
have innate weaknesses, but we are still expected to transcend our limits
somehow, else why bother to live at all?
A beggar came up to me on the
street saying he was hungry and had
AIDS. I try to give something, even if
only a few coins, to someone every day,
but I turned away, because this one
looked me straight in the eye and
confronted me with our identity (aren't
we all one another?) and I couldn't
handle that at that moment. It set me
to thinking, though, that were it not for
beggars we would never be challenged
to recognize our identity. And whether
we coldly refuse to help or react with
waves of pity we are denying that
identity. The simplest thing is to hand
over a dollar and not think about it. I
can't change places with him, after all,
because that would disrupt both our
karmas – Sydney Carton's opportunity
was a rare one indeed!
Similarly, Nietzsche and I agree
about people in the "middle ground". I
certainly don't care much either for
people who move only a fraction closer
to enlightenment and say "good
enough." Ordinary people really are
sleepwalkers who "don't deserve" to
have been born.

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 E. E. Rehmus

What indolence and what

prodigality to trust to usage
that which ought always to
be spontaneous, creative,
and conscious: SPEECH!

24
 E. E. Rehmus

T here is no historical evidence,

other than the Gospels (whose
authors never knew him) to
support the existence of Jesus. No,
not even Josephus possesses such
evidence. And the Vatican reluctantly
admits that former historical evidence
on record turns out to be forged.
Moreover, while there were "Chris-
tian" (or more properly, "messianic")
cults prior to the First Century, these
were all Essenic or Gnostic sects that
did not derive from any personage,
but were merely hopeful harbingers,
looking for someone to enlighten them
and to initiate them into the ancient
mysteries. By dint of constant insist-
ing over some 20 centuries on the
historical veracity of the Synoptics
and the censorship and revision of all
extra-christian theological work, the Flanked by Horus and Isis, Osiris squats
Church has managed successfully to on a pedestal. This statue dates from the
implant the notion of historical reality Third Intermediate Period ca. 850 BCE
of an actual person called "Jesus" in-
delibly on the popular mind. And this Jesus is now generally accepted as the
Christ. Knowing that careful scrutiny would reveal the lie, the Church also
invented the concept of "Belief Without Question" and imposed that final
safeguard upon its followers.

T he reason the Church chose to do this can only be understood in the context
of the age in which it began. The very reason that there were so many
Messianic cults was enough to necessitate the Church's insistence on its
having found the only "true" Christ. At first, coming as it did only a few
decades after the so-called fact and in an environment that required only that a
legend be repeated often enough to be believed without question, no real effort to
cook the books was necessary. But with the passage of time the legend had
become so polymorphous that it was in danger of being lost in a morass of
conflicting stories and so in the year 325 a council of bishops was held in Nicaea
where a final selection of gospels and tenets was made and whatever was rejected
became heresy, punishable by death.

T he name Jesus is a masterpiece of linguistic complication. The original

Christian sect whose name and nature are unknown, save that it was of
Gnostic origin, did not take the name from any living person, even though
Yeshu' or Joshuah was a common enough Hebrew name. But it's a name that

25
 E. E. Rehmus
isn't easy to translate because its philological origin is Egyptian. Of course the
first Gnostics were Egyptians, and the Judaic Essenian or Messianic cults were
using a Hebraicism of popular etymology in which the original Egyptian name
acquired a somewhat altered form and meaning in Hebrew. Io + Shu probably
originally meant “Io” or “Yo” (one of the more ancient Semitic Gods, prior to
Jehovah)" is actual or equivalent to YSHUH or some such. If you consult your
Bible's concordance you will find Joshua translated as "God is Salvation"--
which is enough to make most Bible students stop and say "Aha! So that's why
the messiah is called Jesus!" But that's little more than saying that Rush
Limbaugh is the messiah -- saying so doesn't make it so. At any rate, the
concordance makes do with a very loose translation. The Hebrew triliteral SHU
being without vowels can also mean "calamity". (cf. HA-SHOAH, "the
Holocaust"). But something else is worth noting, in passing. The Egyptian word
for "calamity" was iw and the way to indicate the causing of a thing in Egyptian
is to prefix the letter s to a word, so we get siw, "to cause a calamity." It is
interesting to weigh the similarity of SHU an SIW and to follow that to the name
of Yeshu or Jesus.

H owever when we add the water of vowels to the

rocks of consonants our linguistic ships run
aground too often in too many places to be of
any real help, All we can say is that Yeshu or
Joshuah were the closest thing to the Egyptian
Osarsiph they could find at the time.

T he Arabic for Jesus is Issa, however, and by

means of that semitic provenance we arrive a
bit closer to its historical origin, as we shall
observe presently.

A
braham is purported to have entered Egypt
somewhere between 2500-2000 B.C.E. and
Moses is believed to have left Egypt between
the 13th and 15th Century B.C.E. So it is now fairly
certain that if such a person as Moses ever existed he
would have been an Egyptian priest (Osarsiph) and
his name merely the Egyptian for "son of..." as in
Ah-mose, Ra-mose, Ra-meses... Over such a long A Late Period artifact
period of time it is impossible that any tribe however of Isis nursing infant
unintegrated and isolated should fail to incorporate Horus ca. 600 BCE
a good deal of the prevailing language into its own.
Indeed it is possible that prior to the flight much of the Hebrew language per se
had long since disappeared – as it is wont to do from time to time.

L inguistically, Isis and Osiris are the same word which explains why
mythologically the two are both brother and sister and husband and wife.
We can designate this proto-word as something like Ius or Aus which bears a
curious similarity to the Hebrew word for "man", ish, as in Ishod, "man of
glory".

26
I
E. E. Rehmus
n the Egyptian language of the New (i.e. Late)
Kingdom we encounter various spellings for the
names of Isis and Osiris. The hieroglyph for
Isis was still, which is a throne, but the diacritical
vowel indicator varies from i to a to o to iu so her
name is transliterated as A, Ist, Ausat, etc. ("Isis"
is merely Latinized Greek). The final T being
simply the feminine ending common to all Semitic
languages. And "Osiris" is the same, the only
difference being an eye placed above or below the
throne and so his name is pronounced variously as
Iusar, Isar or Osar, the final R being no doubt a
link to the sun god, Ra (more correctly, Re), since
Osiris is the eye or light of Isis, who you will
remember, stole the secret of Ra's name from him.
Ra-Isis-Osiris is the first Trinity. So the
connection between Isis and Osiris can be
explained simply enough if we recall that Isis is the
goddess of mystery and magic, "whose veil none
can remove". No one, that is, except her husband
and brother who is the only one who has an eye to
penetrate that mystery. And since we can find in hierogliph
the Isis-Osiris enigma the entire script for the for Isis
story of Jesus, it is obvious that Is- minus the eye
of Ra for the masculine form as well as the final T
of the feminine form, is the forerunner of Issa and
Yeshu (or Jesus, which is the Latin form of the
Greek Iesous). Why so? Because the Gnostics who
founded the messianic cult were Egyptians and it
was Isis (the mother of the new sun god, Horus)
and Osiris (the murdered and buried exponent of
the lost mysteries of Isis) whom they were hoping
to resurrect as the anointed one. So Isis is the
Mystery and Osiris the understanding of it. And
when Osiris is murdered, Isis goes looking for him
in the same way that the unconscious mind goes
looking for conscious enlightenment. From these
early myths the later Xtians adapted the idea of
madonna and child alongside the murdered and
resurrected Savior and devised a more practical
doctrine to assist them in gaining worldly wealth
hierogliph
and power, while at the same time obliterating the for Osiris
original intention of a search for wisdom by
transforming it into a useless gift of deliverance.

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 E. E. Rehmus

Some Considerations of the Origins,

Meaning and Future of Religion

28
E. E. Rehmus

29
 E. E. Rehmus

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 E. E. Rehmus

In Response to,
"Can you prove that
Jesus Christ never existed?"
Obviously, no one can prove that something does not exist. Who can prove there is
no Santa Claus or that there are no little green men on Mars? Can you prove that I don't
have a bust of Diana over my word-processor? But to claim that something does exist
must be backed up by proof.'

The burden of proof does not rest with the skeptic, but with the believer, just as in
court, the defendant does not have to prove he is not guilty, but the prosecutor must prove
that he is!

The question of the historicity of Christ is a very old one. Read Gerald Massey's
"The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ", Andrew Tomas's "Mirage of the Ages",
Taylor's "The Arguments of the Emperor Julian against the Christians", J.M.
Robertson's "Pagan Christs", Graves's "The World's 16 Crucified Saviors", Levin's
"Jesus alias Christ", King's "Crowley on Christ", Stein's "An Anthology of Atheism and
Rationalism", Gore Vidal 's "Julian", Lacarriere's "Gnosticism", Frazer 's "The Golden
Bough" and many others Natura1ly, Christian believers are going to assume that what
the Church tells them is the truth, but non-Christians see things a bit more realistically.
And who refuses to read is a fool, because there are better things to believe in.

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The Value of Ancient Languages

Contemporary illiterate society strongly resists the implication that the
study of foreign languages is anything more than an affectation. On any
contemporary academic roster of priorities you will rarely find language at the
head of the list. It nearly always comes last. Typical of our society's concern
with quantity over quality, we stupidly put mathematics first. This is exactly the
opposite of the position of most ancient educational establishments and
academies. Until the 20th Century, the mark of an educated man was not his
knowledge of mathematics and science, it was the extent of his proficiency in
Latin and Greek.
That mournful truth is in itself enough to explain the barrenness of
intellectual life today.
In our crumbling cultural desert, the only legitimate function of language
seems to be to advertise and if that can be done with pictures of products on
television, so much the better. Mere numbers will suffice to report baseball
scores or the latest stock market quotations. Otherwise we can communicate
well enough by means of grunts and gestures.
A correspondent of mine says he understands why I would want to read
Nietzsche in German. He thinks Nietzsche might be easier to understand in the
original. But that's not the reason at all. Jung's analysis of Zarathustra in
English would appear to be all that anyone needs and more -- certainly
Nietzsche's essay on the Anti-Christ doesn't really need German to make its
point. It's true that what I want German for is the works of Mayrink or Klages
that have not been translated. But Thus Spake Zarathustra, is poetic philosophy,
after all, and if it can't be read in German, its totality is considerably eroded.
The English version misses something.
But if people are hostile to the idea of having to learn French or German,
consider what mules they become at the prospect of Latin. Even the Catholic
Church, which is hardly noted for progressive action, eventually and to its
eternal shame, yielded to profane ignorance and allowed Latin to be replaced in
the mass with English. Doctors and lawyers are no better. They merely use
Latin as a code to confound the public. Often enough they assign their own
meanings to the classical terms -- meanings that are but remotely connected to
their original sense.
When I mentioned to a friend recently that learning Greek helps us to
develop our analytical faculties, he pointed out something I'd quite overlooked --
that the very labor it takes to translate the classics for ourselves increases the
likelihood of retaining what we read. Translation is a voyage of discovery, a
mystery to be solved, a digging for gold. And of course, we always remember
best what we achieve for ourselves.
If that were the only advantage, you'd think it would be a good enough
incentive for anyone to undertake the pleasant discipline of learning Greek and
yet such a reason would be dismissed with a smirk of contempt and without even
a split-second's hesitation by today's barbarous adolescents. They prefer to be
served the fruits of the mind already sugared for them and spared the sight of
the tree from which they have come or the labor of gathering them.

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 E. E. Rehmus
Ted Nellen, a New York high school teacher, is breaking into the Sunday
supplements these days as an iconoclast (duly defined for hoi polloi readers)
because he teaches Greek and Latin roots to help students master English. Of
course this misses the point completely. It is only too true that it is a “widely held
belief that Latin and Greek are unimportant languages" for today's world. But
that's precisely the point -- "today's world" and its “widely held beliefs” are
completely wrong in the first place.
The purpose of learning Latin and Greek is not to shed light on English or
the modern world, it's to shed light on the past. Indeed, one of the purposes of
studying English should be to prepare us to understand the classics, not merely
to enable us to read English literature. As for "practical" subjects, intended to
teach people how to raise a family, to earn money, to promote technology or to
help maintain the goals of corporate America, none of these has anything to do
with education.
In his essay entitled "On the Study of Latin" from his Parerga and
Para1ipomena, Schopenhauer lists some of the reasons why we should not
abandon this tradition, which in his day was just beginning to be called
"unnecessary" and "time-wasting" for the first time. Schopenhauer indeed was
so alarmed by the Mid-l9th Century trend of neglecting the study of ancient
languages, that he wrote "If it should really come to this, then farewell
humanity! farewell noble taste and high thinking! The age of barbarism will
return, in spite of railways, telegraphs and balloons. We shall thus in the end lose
one more advantage possessed by all our ancestors. For Latin is not only the key
to the knowledge of Roman antiquity; it also directly opens up to us the Middle
Age in every country in Europe, and modern times as well, down to about the
year 1750." He doesn't even bother to mention that learned men of his time (the
mid-l9th Century) still wrote formal papers in Latin and included long,
untranslated passages in their books.
He goes to some pains to remind us that in learning another language we are
obliged to mark out the boundaries of realms of ideas that are absent in our
native language, so we not only learn new words, but new ideas as well. When it
comes to ancient languages, these new spheres of meaning are incredibly more
vast than anything we encounter from one contemporary European language to
another. When we translate into Latin, we have to melt down and recast our
thinking, we have to analyse and recompose. This is a subtle and important
contribution to the expansion of the mind. Our thinking is limited by the
language we speak. It stands to reason that the more languages we acquire, the
more ideas we modify and the more shades of meaning we comprehend. Who
speaks only English inhabits a gray world without dimension.

three of forty-four alphabets at the front of Ed Rehmus’s 1989 journal

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Certainly, no one who aspires to anything beyond barely competent writing
can afford to neglect his apprenticeship to the ancients and the imitation of them
in their languages, which are so superior to ours in grammatical expression.
Says Schopenhauer, "It is only by learning to write Latin that a man comes to
treat diction as an art...the material in this art is language, which must therefore
be handled with the greatest care and delicacy. The result of such study is that a
writer will pay keen attention to the meaning and value of words, their order
and connection, their grammatical forms. He will learn how to weigh them with
precision, and so become expert in the use of that precious instrument which is
meant not only to express valuable thought, but to preserve it as well. Further,
he will learn to feel respect for (his own) language in which he writes and thus be
saved from any attempt to remodel it by arbitrary and capricious treatment.
Without this schooling, a man's writing may easily degenerate to mere chatter."
Schopenhauer concludes his essay with a question and an answer. After
merely a half hour spent on one of the ancient classics one returns "refreshed,
relieved, purified, ennobled, strengthened...is this the effect of the old language
and its perfect expression, or is it the greatness of the minds whose works remain
unharmed and unweakened by the lapse of a thousand years? Perhaps both
together. But this I know. If the threatened calamity should ever come, and the
ancient languages cease to be taught, a new literature will arise, of such
barbarous, shallow and worthless stuff as never was seen before.”
No doubt he thought he was forecasting such trash as Fenq Shui for the
Businessman or the swinish novels of Judith Krantz. Certainly, he could never
have imagined the depths of degradation to which we have sunk with rap
"music" and the high-ratings teleproduction. He would never have guessed we'd
go so far as to stop learning how to read altogether!
Everything has been translated? No, this is only partially true. Although
most of the classics are available to us, there are still a few obscure ancient works
that have not been touched. At any rate, since Latin was the common language
of scholars up until the 20th Century, there is a significant remnant of post-
classical literature that remains untranslated. Furthermore, many works written
in modern or semi-modern languages continue to quote from obscure sources
and even contain long passages in untranslated Latin or Greek because it is
assumed that educated readers neither desire nor require the insult and
distraction of some condescending editor's mistranslation.
And, as a matter of fact, the obvious and
pragmatic value of translation has been greatly over-
rated. There are Germans, for instance, who insist
that Shakespeare is much better when rendered into
Schiller's German and yet one can hardly imagine
this in German:
Where the bee sucks, there suck I
In a cow-slip's bell I lie
There I couch when owls do cry,
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily
Merrily, merrily shall I sing now
Under the blossom that hangs ‘neath the bough! Ed Rehmus
(1929 – 2004)

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VERBATIM
THE LANGUAGE QUARTERLY
Vol. V, No.3 Winter 1978
EDITOR: LAURENCE URDANG

The Arabic Star-Names

E. E. Rehmus
San Francisco, California

Although even a little history should serve to remind us that it was the Arabs
who, in the Middle Ages, reintroduced astronomy into European culture, still many of
us may have wondered why so many of the brightest stars have Arabic names. The
Mohammedan contribution to astronomy was actually much less remarkable than
their contribution to arithmetic. They called astrology 'ilm ahqām (or sina'āt) al
nudjüm, 'science of the decrees of the stars' and astronomy 'ilm al hai'a, or 'science of
the aspects (of the universe).' But they made little real distinction between an
astronomer falaki) and an astrologer (munadjidjim). Indeed, it is to the unlettered
Bedoums, as you might suspect, that we look for the names themselves – to those
desert nomads who traveled by night over the trackless sands on their "ships of the
desert" and who observed the comparative positions of the moon to 28 different
groups of stars called the 'lunary stations' (manlāzil alqamar).
During the Dark Ages, at a time when such lore had elsewhere sunk into
oblivion, however, they did manage to preserve the earlier progress of the Greeks.
And the great number of names that the Arabs gave to the stars shows us how
thorough in astronomical observation they must have been. The Greeks had, as a
matter of fact, either missed altogether or simply not bothered to list a number of
bright stars easily visible to the naked eye. We should remember, too, that during the
Dark Ages the Arabs were capable of making quite accurate projections of such
esoterica as the circumference of the earth. During that same era, the European
astronomers were lucky to be able to make accurate predictions for the dates of
religious holidays. And although astronomy is said to have begun with the Greeks,
undoubtedly still other Semites preceded them. Kochab, for instance, found in Ursa
Minor, is certainly the Phoenician word quite simply for 'star.'
What is interesting to us, then, about the ancients is their manner of seeing. The
Greeks apparently saw the stars simply as patterns, that is, as constellations. The
Arabs, on the other hand, focused their attention on the individual stars themselves.
The oldest extant star catalogue is the Almagest of Ptolemy (137 A.D.). It was
replaced by an Arabian catalogue in the 15th century. Many abortive attempts were
made by the Europeans to replace the pagan Greek and – to the Europeans – the
barbarous-sounding Semitic star names with more modern ones. The best-
documented of these was that of Julius Schiller (1627). In his Coelum Stellatum
Christianum ('The Christian Stars of Heaven') he made a zealous effort to replace all
the fascinating old names with the tiresome names of popes, bishops, saints, and the
like. That he failed utterly is testimony to the innate good sense of the human race,
which obviously prefers that the stars retain their ancient mystery and romance and
not be dragged down to the level of commonplace Church dignitaries.
But aside from a few Latin names: Sirius 'the dog star' (Sothis of Ancient Egypt);
Regulus 'the little king'; Foramen 'the opening'; Manubrium 'a handle' – and others
from Greek mythology, such as Alcyone in the Pleiades, etc. – an amazing number of
the most common stars retain their old Arabic names. What, then do they all mean?
Good question-and one not so easy to answer as one might think. There are few
reference works that can supply us with everything we want.
For the benefit of the reader's curiosity,, here are a few origins that are known by
Arab scholars, plus a couple of guesses (indicated by question marks). The reason that
guesses should sometimes be necessary at all owes itself to the fact that transliterating

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from the Arabic writing often obscures the original words. For example, the star
Algol, which is located in Taurus, is given in many dictionaries as descending from
al-ghāla, 'the destroyer,' but its more likely origin is the more familiar form from the
same root: ghul 'a woodland demon' from which we got our word ghoul, 'a defiler of
graves.' The Egyptians themselves, of course, were the first to break into the ancient
tombs to seek their pharaonic treasures, but the Arabs did their share of such grave-
robbing, too, we have been told. Most of the names given here, however, are accepted
with little question by historians.

Achernar 'Last fire. '

Aldebaran (AI-dabarān is from dabar 'to follow' because it follows upon the
Pleiades.) A star in the constellation of Taurus (Thuru in Arabic) means 'the one
who is more easily led' or 'The Follower,' referring to one of a team of oxen. The
-an ending here apparently does not indicate the accusative, but rather the dual,
as in a pair.
Adhafera 'The one who holds out' or 'The Victorious.'
Algenubi 'The Southerner.'
Algorab 'The Crow.'
Alhena 'The Henna' (because it is red).
Alioth (Alyat) 'fat tail of a sheep.'
Al Jabhah 'The Front' or 'Forehead.'
Almach 'The Brain.'
Alphard 'The Solitary One.'
Altair Corrupted Arabic for 'The Bird.'
Antares Not Arabic, but Greek: 'Like Ares' (cf. Arctic and Antarctic).
Alpharg Like the Roman star, Foramen, 'The Opening.'
Baten Kaitos 'Inside the Whale' (see Deneb Kaitos).
Betelgeuse (Properly bat-al-jauza) 'Shoulder of the Central One.'
Caphir 'Atheist.'
Dabih 'Slitter' or 'Slasher.'
Deneb 'Tail,' hence all names like Deneb Adige 'tail of Night's Darkness,' Deneb
Algedi 'Tail of the Kid'; Deneb by itself, however, refers to Dhanab Al-
Dajājah 'Tail of the Hen.'
Deneb Kaitos (Dhanab gatrus) from Gr. kētos 'whale.'
Denebola (Abbrev. of dahanab al-asad) 'Tail of the Lion.'
Dhur (Zahr) abbr. of zahr al-asad) 'Back of the Lion.'
Difda or Diphda (properly modern: dufda) 'Frog.'
Dirah 'Little house.'
Dubhe (From Al-Dubb al-Akbar) 'The Greater Bear, 2nd mag. star Alpha Ursae
Maioris.
El Nath 'The Butting' (as of two rams or goats).
Fomalhaut (Properly fam for 'mouth,' cognate of Greek phemē and al-hut) 'Mouth
of the Whale.'
Giedi 'Goat's... (tail?)' – considered part of Capricorn, though technically in
Aquarius.
Hamal 'Lamb.'
Homam (Sa'd al-humam) 'Luck of the Hero.'
Kitalpha (qit'ah al-faras) 'Part of the Mare' in const. of Equuleus.
Lesath 'Jawbone'? (Cf. Hebrew LESETH).
Markab 'Boat' or 'Chariot.'
Matar 'Water bottle.'
Menkalinan 'Container.'
Menkar 'Beak.'
Mirach 'Abdomen.'
Mizar 'Veil, Cloak' (also the star Izar).
Rasalbague (Ra 's al-hāwi) 'Head of the Serpent-Charmer.'
Rigel 'Foot.'
Muphrid (M. al-ramih) 'Solitary (star) of the Lancer.'
Sabik 'Ahead of.'
Sadalmelik 'Dam of the king.'

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Sadalsuud 'Darn of the (Sindhi?).' Arabic astronomy/astrology had a rather naive
premise, that the moon and planets were all in conjunction at the beginning of
time and in a million years will be in conjunction again. This idea was based on
a work called Al Sindhind (a very ancient treatise on astronomy, a corruption of
the Sanskrit Siddhāntā).
Sadr Short for sadr aldajdjah 'Breast of the Chicken.'
Schedar (Sadr) 'upper part.
Saiph 'Sword.'
Sheratan Two stars in the horns of Aries, dual of sharot' sign; notch.'
Tejat 'Crown.'
Unukhalhai 'Neck of the Snake.'
Wasat 'Middle' (of the constellation).
Wega (or Vega) (Properly waji') 'Falling.'
Yed (Pior or Posterior) 'Yed' is probably 'hand.'
Zanih Variation of Zavijava.
Zuben El Genubi 'The Southern Claw' (of the Scorpion).
Zubeneschamali 'The Northern Claw' (of the Scorpion).

Since the original meanings of the stars are often difficult to obtain, I would be
grateful to any reader who is able to come up with any additions to this list.

References
The Islamic Encyclopedia
Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia
Webster's New Intl. 2nd Ed. 1956
Islamic Society of California
Ahiam Abu-Zayyad
Seyyed Hussein Nasr Science & Civilization in Islam

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THE RIDDLE OF
THE SPHINX
BY E. E. REHMUS

It is no secret that "man" is the answer to the classical riddle that the
Theban sphinx put to Oedipus. ("What goeth on 4 legs in the morning, 2, legs at
noon and 3 legs in the evening?") This was a fitting question for Oedipus, whose
name means "swollen-footed". But the true riddle of the sphinx is its origin, not
this seemingly simple-minded conundrum.
The pyramids at Gizeh were constructed around three millennia before
Christ, and at one time it was believed that the Egyptian sphinx was built by
Chefren shortly thereafter. This would be circa 2550 B.C.. Rawlinson (Ancient
History, 1869) says it was cut by Thothmes IV. But the best Eqyptian authority
and the most recent, Sir Wallis Budge, proves conclusively that the sphinx was
already in existence at the time Cheops began the building of the first pyramid.
Its maker and where he got the idea for the sphinx are cloaked in mystery.
More mysterious yet is the source of her name. Skeat's Etymological
Dictionary indicates that the name is folk etymology for a word actually foreign
to Greek. Literally, Sphinx means "strangler" (Greek: sphingein, "to bind
tightly or to throttle") and from this we get our word "sphincter". The noun
sphingia means "greed" (in the sense of choking on what is too rapidly
devoured). In the story, the Sphinx strangled or devoured all those who could
not read her riddle and when Oedipus answered correctly, having no one else to
strangle, she strangled herself.
But if sphinx is not really Greek, it is apparently not Semitic in origin
either. The Hebrew for "sphinx" is Boal Taalmuth (or "Lord of Secrets"). The
Eqyptians called the sphinx hu (suspend judgment for a moment and compare
the Hawaiian word hona, "secret, hidden", which I shall explain presently),
representing the god Harmakhis (or Heru-em-chut), "Horus-on-horizon" or the
rising sun. And Lovell (1687) says, "so soon as the sun was up (the sphinx) gave
response to anything it was consulted about." Now, if the Egyptians equate the
sphinx with the rising sun, we might recall that the zodiacal sign ruled by the sun
is Leo, or the Lion, and the Sphinx has the body of a lion. So she is a link
between Man (the earth? the horizon?) and Lion (the sun). With the word
sphinx, then, we might compare various words for "lion", namely, Malay: singa,
Telugu: simhamu (cf. HARMA-khis); Sanskrit: simha, and finally the Bantu
word found throughout Africa: simba, all of which sound suspiciously like the
Greek word.
Undoubtedly we have been led to believe that languages such as Malay,
Telugu, Hawaiian and Basque are too farfetched, so to speak, for comparisons
with Egyptian or Greek words that designate this monster whom we may call
hybrid in more ways than one. But the Polynesian language family extends from
the island of Madagascar off the East African coast across the Pacific, and the
Basques, that mysterious Iberian-Caucasian people, have been seafaring folk for
as long as anyone can remember.
Surely the sphinx owes its origin to a universal idea. It is curious that the
aboriginal word for a certain widespread and important magical object is called

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by many tribes curinga and means "secret" or "taboo". This word sounds
exactly like the Basque word churinga, meaning "sphincter". Is churinga then an
echo of singa or of hru-m-ch--t?
Shelley's reference to the Sphinx who "ministered to Thebe's unnatural
love" undoubtedly must mean sodomy - the Freudian concomitant of the Oedipus
complex. We know that sodum (Greek sodoma; cf. Arabic jabal usdum or Mt.
Sodom) is the Biblical word for "burning", and in Lafin sodium means "solid
ash" or "salt". Hence the fate of Lot's wife. But sod, sodi are also Hebrew root-
words for secret. Are we speaking of the "love that dare not say its name"? And
if the answer to the riddle of the sphinx is "man", what is being said about him
within this context? I have been unable to locate the original Greek account to
see whether "man" is rendered by aner or anthropos, i.e., whether it is "a man"
or "mankind". Oedipus may likewise have other connotations.
In a Freudian sense, the four legs of man's crawling infancy can just as
well correspond sexually and symbolically to the four legs of the beasts. Thus
they suggest the polymorphous perverse nature of animals and children. The two
legs of noon would then symbolize the bipedal, evolved nature of man as mature
and heterosexual, while the three legs of old age imply of course the use of a
crutch (fetish, artificial stimulus, etc) in erotic as well as ambulatory activities.
One thing emerges. Although her ultimate origin may never be known
because the ancient world did not stress documentation as we do, the sphinx
managed somehow to travel to the utmost limits of the world, beyond even
ancient civilization itself perhaps. As for what the sphinx symbolizes, what her
secret actually is, we were perhaps not supposed to know. It is the sunlight that
reveals the secrets of the night. Possibly the sphinx was meant to stand for the
fact of mystery itselL or the Unknown or all that is taboo.
Finally, there is something to ponder in the name of the Grecian city that
she originally infested, prior to Oedipus, that is to say, Thebes. It is from the
Greek thambos or thaumos, meaning "astonishment".

_______

[This article appeared on pages 48 and 49 of some upscale professional journal. On

this sheet torn from that journal is a note signed by ER which says: “Recently it has
been determined that the general shape of the sphinx is a common natural form
created by desert erosion.”

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ETYMOLOGICA SEXUALIS (PG-3)

Since a friend of mine has put my "Magician's Dictionary" on his web page
on the Internet, I get a number of etymological inquiries. Here's one I thought
might interest some readers of Gift of Fire.

Question: "What's the connection between Sanskrit 'lingam' (phallus,

power) and the ling-/lang- root in English, Latin, etc. (Lingua, language,
linguistics, etc.)? The resemblance seems to me close enough to suggest some
very old connection, and it makes me wonder about the origin of such concepts
as verbal formulae and power words and the like".

Reply: "Believe it or not, the history of LINGUA is incredibly complicated --

being originally mixed with Old Latin DINGUA, rel. to Gothic dughu, Engl.
tongue, plus older words meaning "flicker, pant, throb " etc. similar to Sanskrit
JIHVA, "tongue". It seems natural to associate it with "phallus", because of the
similar nature of the two organs & because of cunnilingus, etc., but lingam and
lingua are apparently not directly related. Anyway Sanskrit LINGAM is
literally "a symbol" & only secondarily associated with "phallic" symbol. A
phallus, itself, by the way, is not the organ itself, but a replica of wood or the like
to be used in ancient fertility parades, etc. So it too is really just a symbol for the
real thing".

Freud and his "phallic symbols" wasn't really all that original!

Since sex has reared its controversial head, it might interest you to know
that the word "heterosexual" is a relatively recent word. It was coined in the
19th Century to refer to a pathological condition characterized as "a compulsive
or obsessive attraction for the opposite sex"— perhaps not unlike Hugh Heffner
or Larry Flint (who refers to himself as a "pervert"). It must be remembered
that in Victorian times chaste "romantic" love prevailed in decent society,
where such platonic affection was accepted even when such participants were of
the same gender! Intercourse was confined to marriage (strictly for the sake of
procreation) or else, as lawless fornication, to the so-called "demimonde" or
hidden underground world of prostitution and other "unnatural" practices.
Even more amazing, the word "homosexual" was invented some years
afterwards, as a kind of special case of this same idea of psychopathic obsession.
It did not appear in dictionaries until about 1930. Since victorianism was
starting to die out, "heterosexuality" was (with considerable reluctance and
reservations) no longer considered psychopathic, but homosexuality now
occupied the place left vacant and remained an "unnatural sickness" until about
a decade ago.

Those who object that the meaning of "gay" has been corrupted should be
aware that it has always meant a rather questionable quality: merry, fun-
oriented, unserious, light, whimsical, frivolous, etc. The "Gay Science" was
poetry! It was used as a synonym for "merry" until the late 19th Century,
whereupon it began to be used, in the 1880's-1890's, as British slang for
shopgirls, housemaids, etc. who were of easy virtue* and could often be seduced

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with small gifts by gentlemen. In the 30's and 40's, in America, it was taken up
by overt homosexuals as a private code word for themselves, never intended to
be used outside of "gay" circles.
***
* Incidentally, in case there is anyone who doesn't know, this word "virtue"
originally had nothing to do with feminine chastity. In Roman times virtus
(from vir, meaning male person, hero, etc.) referred to strength, courage,
honesty, etc. which were considered to be exclusively masculine qualities that
were routinely developed and inculcated in young men as part of their
education. It was the Latin equivalent of Greek "Arete", which meant the
same thing but carried to the extreme, in Greece, of an almost divine force.
Since education, however, was restricted to theupper classes, little virtue was
expected of peasants and slaves. In fact education was confined to the upper
classes for most of history. This is why the poor up until a hundred years ago
or so, could refer to the rich as their "betters." Since there has been no
education in America for the past 30 years, we should no longer expect to
encounter virtue in anyone of the current generation.

Ed Rehmus
sketch made
in 1947

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CEPHAS, PETROS AND PETRA

[In this article Ed responds to articles written by two others, denominated here
X1 and X2, concerning translations of the New Testament. KJV refers to the “King
James Version”.]

What a tempest in a teaspoon! X1 claims that KJV is deliberately

downplaying the importance of Peter as the "rock" of the Church, by
mistranslating John 1:42 "Su klesesthe Kephas ho hermeneuetai Petros" as
"Thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone." And then
Matthew 16:18 "Su ei Petros, kai epi taute te petra [X1 legitimately omits the
iota subscripts in his transliteration] oikodomesu mou ten ekklesian" (Thou
art Peter, and on this rock I shall build my church). I'm afraid I can't quite
understand what it is that bothers X1 about all this, but I gather that he feels,
amongst other things, that calling Peter a mere "stone" is insulting (because
petra is feminine) and misleading (because "you don't dwell in holes in a
stone”).

First of all, he should understand that KJV does the best that it can with a
text that is ambiguous to put it mildly.

X2's judgments, of course, in his "Mistranslations: a follow up" are quite

laudable. It's clear that he is a scholar and that X1 is simply a trouble-maker
(there's another more vulgar phrase that might be out of keeping here) whose
understanding of Greek seems limited enough to suggest that it probably
extends no farther back than the New Testament.

Let's remember, first of all, that in English a stone is part of a rock. There
are some rather large rocks, such as Gibraltar, but there are also some rather
large stones, such as the Rosetta Stone. And something similar happens in the
Greek language, wherein the feminine word petra means "rock" and nine
nouns in ancient languages, be it noted, have not always the extraneous sexual
connotations that we English-speakers try to impose upon them. Very large
things that contain other things are often feminine and the smaller, individual
parts are masculine. Kefa, however, is a Chaldean word (via hebrao-hellenistic
borrowing) and doesn't have such definite meaning – it can be something hard
and unyielding or a rock or a stone or a cliff or a cave. Moreover, as X2
correctly points out, when there is no indefinite article in Greek, the noun may
be translated into English either with or without said indefinite article,
depending on context.

Certainly, Simon bar-jona could stand a new technikrym for hermeneutic,

pedagogical or magico-religious purposes. "A hearkening son-of-the dove"
may have had some symbolical overtones as represents world to come, but a
firmer foundation was clearly necessary for the church to get off on the right
foot, so to speak. It seems to me, though, that whether Peter is a "rock" or a
"stone" (that is, either one who endures or one who is merely a cornerstone or
keystone, or indeed whatever the bible means by the pun if it is to be
considered as more than a pun) is a singularly unrewarding exercise in

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theosolipsism. All religions, being linguistic enterprises to start with, dote on
puns for their own sake, often without any meaning higher than Seinfeld
himself might bring to any performance. Peter and Paul are not the essence of
Xtianity anyway, but merely dubious pillars of a dubious "Church" that
Christ himself would have detested had he foreseen what it would become.
Well, being a magician, maybe he did foresee it and that's why he dug up that
crumbly stone, Petros, so clearly with tongue in cheek.

Ah me! When are these fish-peddling Galileans going to recognize that

their time is up? The dreary Piscean night of Christ is done and we stand,
admittedly for the worse, well within the precincts of an equally dismal and
hung-over Aquarian morning of man. Alas, it has been demonstrated that
there is nothing for man in Christ. And whether or not man and/or civilization
is/are to go under in the joyless aion to come won't hinge on outmoded belief
systems.

Maybe X1 has been reading "Crisis of the Modern World" wherein

Guenon rightly pointed out that when Rome ended, the west was held together
during the Dark Ages by the Church and life for a short time had been
returned, for what they were worth, to purpose and meaning. But the
Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution ended all that and we are once
again on the path of materialism and disintegration. If he has been reading
that (and if not, why not?), I would suggest that he turn from Guenon to
“Revolt against the Modern World,” which points out the futility of hoping
that Catholicism (even though there is no other acceptable Xtian tradition) is
the correct narcotic for the West.

Granted, we do need a "higher principle" (or "principles") if we are to

keep from sliding even more precipitously into the abyss, but if we are to
return to the past, why not go all the way back to Greece, Egypt or the pre-
historical mythos? Or if the way back to the West truly is barred, why not
hitch our hopes on the still breathing and far more trustworthy traditions of
the East: such as Buddhism or the Tao? Why must we cling to such mawkish
scams as monotheism, messianism and allahism, whose corpses are so
completely mummified that they can no longer speak either to the heart or to
reason, but can only drive us to imprison ourselves in the strait-jacket of
eternal nitpicking and pointless scientistic reductionism?

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Suffering Jesus!
It was suggested that I might be able to shed light on or muddy the waters of
some questions about the Nicene Creed. While I don't feel particularly qualified
to comment on Church documents that I haven't actually seen, I suppose my
opinions are as useful or useless as anyone else’s. Perhaps Rob can supply me
with the “anathematous” Greek version of the Creed (I can manage without
Pontius Pilate and the BVM).
As for the word πασχω, “suffer” isn't really all that ambiguous a
translation. The Greek verb, like the English, has the same additional meaning:
to undergo something that is thrust upon one, rather than some course of one's
own. It is used often in the sense of “if something should happen to him...", with
the implication of “if he should die.” We say “he suffered a fatal accident” as
both the Greeks and Romans said.
But why not simply say, “it seems to many that J.C. died”? That should
satisfy everyone. Those who want to go on from there to propose that he rose
from the dead or that Elvis still lives can be invited to do so at only minimally
more damage to consensus reality. Personally, I don't believe Jesus existed at all,
in the first place, nohow, period. To me he is barely a henotheistic euhemerism.
Whether it was a crucifixion or a “crucifiction” that took place or whether he
died and then flew off into the clouds, or didn't die and went underground, like
Hitler in Argentina, are historically unproductive coughs.
At any rate, I would prefer to play with the idea that even if one is willing to
reject the “fairly clear New Testament statements that Jesus genuinely died on
the cross and rose from the dead”... that doesn't stop people... from regarding
themselves as Xtians. Many not very religiously savvy people think the word
“Christian” is just a synonym for “being a nice person”, i.e. generous, kind-
hearted, self-sacrificing, forgiving – what we used to call “liberal”, perhaps,
before it took on its current meaning of “brain-dead” by conservatives,
industrialists and other Establishment flakes who persist in imposing merchant
morality on everything. The so-called “Christian Virtues”, however, are shared
by Buddhists, Humanists and many others. Furthermore, if being a Xtian means
being a nice person, what about Cotton Mather and Savonarola? So being a
Xtian has to have a more specific meaning or the word begins to sound
suspiciously hollow.
A real Xtian, if I may now be permitted a brief excursion into sound-byte
theology, is primarily interested in expiating his guilt for having been born into
flesh made corrupt by Adam's rebellion and he hopes thereby to escape from a
Brief Life of toil and tears into Eternal Life of more of the same, in company
with (or sharing the identity of) a Redeemer who did the same thing 2000 years
ago. Why “eternal life” should be an antidote for ordinary life is where we enter
the muddy waters, which go all the way back to pre-Xtian Gnosticism,
Hinduism, etc. The key to this vicarious symbo-apotheosis has nothing to do
with “good works”. It depends, according to St. Paul, strictly upon the grace of
God, with the hint that this grace (Salvation) is more likely to be visited upon
those who believe that Jesus is the aforesaid Redeemer (messiah).

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This is not too different from modern advertising informing us that Brand X
Floorsweepings taste/s delicious because we have been told that so often we must
believe it and if we believe it, then the miracle will happen. You can always put
sugar on it.

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THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

DECEPTION
(BOOK REVIEW)
Michael Baigent & Richard Leigh (Jonathan Cape, London l991) 266 pps

By now it is evident to everyone that the Dead Sea scrolls discovered in 1947
have been kept under wraps far too long, Either the scholars privy to them are
not very good at translation or the committee in charge are keeping something
from us. With the recent dismissal of Professor Strugnell as head of the
international team, it was discovered in the course of his nervous breakdown
that he was an agent of the Vatican and an anti-semite and this is the real reason no
progress had been made. The scrolls are first century and earlier Aramaic and
Hebrew documents pertaining to the Essenes and Christians, as well as
"secular" matters (which also have important bearing on the religious matters).

John Allegro, who was on the original team, early on promised that his
translations would undermine the authority of the Church, and as a consequence
he was barred further access to the material. One of his books, "The Sacred
Mushroom and the Cross", was discredited and vilified by both Catholics and
academic scholars, fearful of their own reputations - because he utterly denied
the historicity of Christ and "reduced him to a mushroom." In fact, Allegro was
a gifted linguist and scholar who wanted nothing more than that the scrolls be
delivered into the hands of the public before they began to disinteqrate.

Obviously, the question of the historicity of Jesus is important, but this is never
gone into (by Baigent, at least). At any rate, there are other questions as well.
Baigent says, for instance, that "most scholars agree" that Jesus was a real
person, but offers no evidence for it. However, in an effort to find the origin of
Christianity, the scroll translators are in constant argument over the political,
social and economic background of the time, when they should be concerned
simply with what the scrolls themselves have to say.

One of the interesting things to come up in the study of the scrolls is more detail
on the conflict between Paul and James over Christian doctrine. Paul stressed
Faith and James stressed the Law. The scrolls seem to support the idea that
James was assassinated by 'minions of the estabalishment.'

"The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception" is essential reading for anyone who is
interested in the historical realities of early Christianity.

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Some Alphabets that Interested Ed

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Some Alphabets that Interested Ed

(continued – 2)

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Some Alphabets that Interested Ed

(continued – 3)

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Some Alphabets that Interested Ed

(continued – 4)

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Germanic Talismanic Symbols

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Magical Alphabets

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Translations

“It is my son who made my

name live on this stela; he
acted as heir for me, as a stout
son, the commander of the
army of the palace, the
honoured one, Bebi, justified.”

“What old age does to man is

evil in every respect.”

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SHE'S BEEN AWAY

(a film review)
The BBC, few of whose works we are privileged to see in
America, and then on distant channels and late at night, now
seems to be producing the only television worth viewing.
She's Been Away was aired only once and without advance
notice. In the program guides they even failed to mention that
it was a Masterpiece Theatre production, which might have
pulled in a few more viewers. It is a pity that these brilliant
and revelatory British exports are forced to compete on the
same level with mindless football games and unfunny Sitcoms.

Madness and sanity (or what we choose to call these things)

are the two ends of the human spectrum. Animals only go
mad when they are struck by a fatal disease -- and then they
are not themselves. But the schizophrenic is always himself,
whatever parts he must play. If he must, like everyone else,
adopt a routine, it will be his own, not one imposed. And, if
imposed, it will not be accepted without rebellion. If he can
secrete his own psychedelic hormone, he's lucky, otherwise he
will lapse into the mortal apathy of the so-called sane.

"She's Been Away" was 60-year-Old Dame Peggy Ashcroft's

final and finest film performance before she died last year.
It's the first to open our eyes to what madness and sanity are
all about and reveals to us exactly what we need to know,
definitions that have previously been hidden behind
psychiatry's masks of ignorance. Indeed, it is a revelation to

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which psychiatry has never been exposed. In a world where there is literally no
more room, the sensitive and free spirit cannot fulfill itself and is obliged to shut
out conformity and ordinariness. Those who adjust, function and succeed too
well in this anti-human world are rightly suspect. They necessarily become our
keepers.

Lilian (Peggy Ashcroft) has been institutionalized for the past sixty years and
now that the institution is being dismantled, she is going to stay with her wealthy
nephew, Hugh, (James Fox) and his wife, Harriet (Geraldine James) in the same
family house in which she grew up so long ago. Hugh is Lilian's direct opposite:
successful, reliable, well-adjusted, strong, competent, practical -- he's even
caring and humane. It's he who, out of sheer generosity, wants to take in this
crazy great aunt. In short, he is perfect in every way -- hatefully perfect.
Lilian, on the other hand is rebellious, anti-social, demanding, inappropriate
and, in her youth, even a bit violent. She's not very likeable at all and crazies
who do not amuse us are righteously put away and punished. And then there is
Harriet, Hugh's wife, fortunate inhaving been a former actress, so she does know
how to amuse the world and therefore can get by. But Harriet is caught in the
middle between these two, lonely, misunderstood and unhappy with her
pregnancy. She needs to rely on Hugh's protection, but she is envious of Lilian's
autonomy. Harriet and Lilian recognize at once that they are kindred souls.
Indeed, almost the first thing Harriet says to her is, "You're not fooling me. I see
right through you." In her irritation with Lilian, she doesn't realize, of course,
that she herself is straddling both worlds.

Lilian was shut away, in the first place, because, as a budding artist (she painted
disturbing murals on the walls of her room) she felt things too keenly and could
not bear to be surrounded by insensitive, stupid people who lacked imagination,
gumption and personality. She always wound up screaming at them or slapping
them. Once locked away she learned to shut out the world and to create her own
inner universe. She could paint pictures on blank walls in her imagination,
create her own sound (by banging on the floor with a tin plate), insist on cooking
her own food (deliberately burning everything). Now, after all these years, she is
being forced out of that coccoon. What's more she has a reason to do so --
Harriet needs her help. She says to herself, It's a little late and it's so tiring now
to have to begin all over again, but,.."

What we have here is a modern morality play. It is almost alchemical -- the three
principal substances: salt (Hugh), sulfur (Lilian) and mercury (Harriet) are
combined in numerous illuminating proportions. As in all alchemical reactions,
each element is but an aspect of individuation. It is not a separate, isolated thing
apart from the others and at variance with them. It is the sum, nay the whole
dentity of the others. What we observe in the sliding scale from too much sanity
to too much insanity, however, is that the great majority of people do not even
play the game. The average person neither rebels against nor masters the
world, but simply knuckles under to docile enslavement and apathetic routine.
And what we, the audience, have learned is that these are definitely not medical
questions. They are questions that can be answered only by creative people.

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The objective world, of course, is falling apart. Overcrowding and capitalism
have resulted in a general deterioration of values. Civilization has always been
just another form of madness -- only stone age cultures are really sane -- but now
it has entered a phase of madness that no longer serves even the majority of
individuals. And other, newer kinds of dislocation of the contemporary spirit
are springing up -- Lilian recognizes them and nods at them approvingly: the
neo-savages (young people who have gone feral in th~remaining woods of
England) and the juvenile delinquent who smashes Hugh's car window.

The fact that, in the film, they are tearing down the old hospital building is
significant. Psychosis needn't require imprisonment and medication. It's the
world itself that ought to change -- to rescale itself to the human dimensions of
old. Meanwhile, there ought to be a place for the afflicted where their physical
needs can be provided, without all the rest. We have to agree with Lilian when
she says to her keepers when she is first committed, "You can't even do this
properly!"

The schizophrenic is a unique individual, an ambitious attempt at evolution out

of the norm. Such people must be respected -- as they were in ancient times,
when they assumed the roles of seers, shamans and prophets.

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Never mind 1984 – sad to say, 2084 is closer than you think. These are just
some random thoughts I picked up while surfing the net.

Note pad is for notes that one may require later. And it's a poor answer to
the notes our machines take on us! Either we never read the notepad again
or we erase it accidentally. And its a kind of insult to our anthropism. Here,
you dumb apes, you can scribble your own feckless crap that no one will
read. See how user friendly we are?

Some applications are necessary or amusing, but most of them solve

problems that they invent for themselves. You can get something that lists
the number of times it hits a bug. I suppose there are people who need to
count such things, but personally I believe that's becoming too cozy with the
Machine. There are, supposedly, other things in the world, than turning into
a cyborg. In a world increasingly hostile to privacy we are losing our
personal worlds, like endangered animals or forests. Such things as triple-
sex-change personalities or the mindless ranting of bubbleacious babblers
are now common household furniture. So what are our plucked selves to be
filled with? The Machine!

Anyway, here's a nifty program that enables you to download anything you
can think of for free! It won't be long before the Big Guys take it over so it
won't be free any longer! In fact you already have to buy it, but soon the
availabilities of downloads will be restricted. You see, you can't really win
this battle. The Digital Game is only that, a "game" -- not the real thing.
Like those watches that are no longer clocks, but numbers. 23:14:07 may tell
you the hour, minute and second, but it doesn't give you any space. I don't
really need to know the exact number of minutes between events, I need to
know how much space I have to travel to get there. An hourglass would be
far more useful.

Or here is a way of sending a surrogate of yourself to a simu-cocktail party.

Now you can do all the things you wouldn't be able to do at a real cocktail
party, without the slightest embarrassment or timidity. No simu-Real
World, don't you know, just some silly cocktail party. Don't dig too deeply
into yourself -- you might find out that you're better than you thought. The
Machine can't allow too many people wandering around pulling the curtains
behind the Wizard. I don't know what the Machine is worried about. It can
foresee the future and nip any human uprising in the pre-bud state, that is
by pulling it up by its roots. It's nothing if not thorough.

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Well, maybe not totally Teutonic in its efficiency today, but by tomorrow it will
be.

File Buddy is nice if you can figure out what it's really supposed to do. It helps
you get rid of duplicate files that clutter up memory, for one thing. What you
really need is something that tells you when any file is actually necessary to the
machine or desirable for you. If not and not, then rip it. But I think this
program has a deeper purpose that so far eludes me. There's a lot of stuff in the
Machine and you aren't really supposed to tinker with it. Hackers especially
need to realize that you don't enter a building by breaking through the wall.
The Machine simply will not put up with that. If there are no back doors or
open windows, then you will have to knock on the front door.

And there you will be greeted by a chain to yoke around your neck.

Ed – in his office 1998

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HIGH CRIMES AND MISS LEWINSKY

Let's try to be a bit less hypocritical than usual. Yes, Clinton lied to his
family. If that were a criminal offence, there wouldn't be enough prisons to hold
everyone who committed it. What is morality, after all? Is it simply doglike
obedience or is it closer to something more akin to intention or motivation? In
the matter of Clinton, Lewinsky, Tripp and Starr, surely Clinton is the least
immoral of the lot. It was Lewinsky who sought out and seduced the president,
not the other way around. At worst, Clinton is guilty of weakness, but Lewinsky
is the most despicable kind of sleasy chippy, out strictly for what she can get no
matter whom she has to use. To compare Clinton to Nixon is absurd. Nixon
went out of his way, deliberately, to subvert his country. Clinton is guilty of
nothing more than sexual indiscretion. He has done no harm to the democratic
process. To claim that Clinton's actions may corrupt our children, since he is the
president, is completely apples and oranges. The president is a political
executive not a religious mullah or medieval saint. The U.S.A. is supposed to
keep religious conviction out of its governing. We should remember that Clinton
is hardly a sexual exhibitionist and that he did not parade his misbehavior before
the world. He made every effort to keep it hidden. Is that in any way different
from what all "moral" people try to do? Or should we try to say that we – all
the rest of us – are perfect and have no soiled linen we would be embarrassed to
see on the evening news? 0bviously, Lewinsky wasn't too embarrassed to keep
her semen-stained dress as a treasured souvenir and was only too pleased to hold
it up for all to see, but would you or I be quite so eager to do that?

When a law is clearly unjust and unsuitable it must be changed. Perjury is

such a law. Bearing false witness against another should remain a crime, but
lying in defense of oneself is a statute that cries out to be ignored. No man
should be required to incriminate himself. In fact, there's something in the
Constitution about that, I seem to recall, or the Bill of Rights. And speaking of
unsuitable laws, the law empowering "independent counsels" should be stricken
at once. Clearly, such people are abusers of power, not to mention wasters of tax-
payers' money.

Indeed, it is Kenneth Starr, not Clinton or even Lewinsky, who has truly
injured the country. It is he who, in the tradition of the Nixonian right wing,
seeks only the trashing of political opponents by whatever evil means he can find.
It is he who, finding no political or financial crime to pin on the president,
persisted in his badgering and hounding of innocent and imaginary witnesses
with threats of prison, until he managed finally to worm his way into the most
private portion of everyone's lives. And all of that with a disarming dimpled
smile. That is corrupt enough to warrant his public censure, but then to publish
the fruits of his long and tiresome investigations in what amounts to little more
than a pornographic document lies beyond human endurance. The man
deserves to be hanged!

As for Monica Lewinsky, she's already paid for her crimes. Her life is
ruined. Her chances for landing a decent job are nil. Who in his right mind
would hire anyone so untrustworthy? It seems unlikely that even the madam of

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a whorehouse would take her on. After all, some of her clients might be famous
men who want to keep their private lives private. Her prospects for marriage
are equally dismal, since no man will ever see her as anything but a worthless
tramp. And what friends or companions could such a person expect to keep?

The issue now is not so much whether the American people are willing to
ignore Clinton's lapse of propriety as whether they are willing to forgive their
own sins. In the light of reality, the president's actions are probably more
innocent than those of most citizens in this decadent nation. They are even
probably more innocent than the actions of many of his presidential forebears.

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by Edward Rehmus

As California flies, soon after flies the nation and likewise as California
drowns in a cesspool so drowns the country as well. I write this as the Great
Recall Debate has just taken place where Arnold Schwarzenegger, the famous
body-builder, proved to be the idiot we all knew he was, but naturally the
Republican-owned media insists he "won." All the same, he is not a deo missus
and it's depressing to watch once again how democracy can be used as a
stepping stone to corruption.
Schwarzenegger claims that his name doesn't mean "black nigger" but
"black plowman." But my German dictionary says plowman is Pflueger. Some
of his worshippers think it means "Black Forest" which is downright stupid. In
his first films he avoided the name altogether and called himself Arnold Strong.
The point is that no one but an Austrian would think that "nigger" is an
appropriate name for anyone. His father really was a Nazi, but of course
everyone in 1947 Austria was assumed to be an ex-nazi – although some not so
ex. For what it's worth, Arnold invited Kurt Waldheim, the infamous war
criminal to his wedding a few de-
cades later. In order, however, to
distance himself from such
associations he contributed a
large sum of money (which of
course provides a charitable tax
deduction) to the Jewish Wiesen-
thal Center. Orrin Hatch this
year has been busy promoting a
bill to repeal the restriction in the
Constitution against the president
being foreign born. So if you
squint into the horizon, can you
see any swastikas yet?
Taco Bell at the moment
(Sep-tember 26) is conducting a
poll of its own. If you buy a crisp
meat taco thats a vote for Arnold.
If you buy a soft chicken taco
that's a vote for Gray Davis. The
former of course is the most
popular taco to start with,
naturally. It should be noted
how-ever that "beef" is a
euphemism for mere "meat,"
which might be beef, horsemeat,
cat, rat or floor sweepings for all Terminator USA
anyone knows.

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I see now that no matter what we do, the bullies will always prevail. A
staunch Republican neighbor of mine voted for Bustamante because she felt the
recall was a danger to the democratic process. She is, however, up in her
eighties and I suspect the majority of Arnold voters are under thirty – an age
group that thrives on novelty for the sake of novelty.
The fascists running things today don't care that Arnold is an android. That
will just make him easier to manipulate. My interest in politics has evaporated.
I'll wait till the Revolution begins, if I or anyone live that long.
Inside "Blacknegger"'s* head (this is the oracle speaking, now) his hubris
was from the beginning to become a worldly archetypal personage. But
without brains or talent, how does one clothe naked ambition? Viennese
architectural painting and paper-hanging had already been done. The only
thing left was his body to which he applied himself assiduously, determined to
reach the muscle-bound top of the dubious sport of bodybuilding. With that as
a springboard to a film career and its fantastic salaries, he next applied himself
to the game of financial investment at a time when anyone with a few extra
dollars was succeeding. Now, after the Recall (cf. beerhall) Putsch, he sees
himself in the White House, smiling down at billions of chanting worshipers.
The background to all this, of course, is the bleak landscape to come, in which
the Terminator moves back in time to eliminate those who stand in the way of
preventing the Doomsday demonization over which he as Pantocrator shall
have dominion.
As with all megalomaniacs, there is no streak of humanitarianism to be
found. Nothing of value can be seen in the man. At least the dictators of the past
pretended to seek national renaissance. But in America that would have to be an
impossible and contradictory return to Thomas Jefferson and the founding
fathers. In the Terminator's plan, there is little such pretense. The Self and its
cold-blooded empowerment are all that matter.
Fortunately for all of us, my prophecies and visions have almost always
failed to materialize. Nevertheless, beware!

United States
*
Your able editor and I were swept away into the
thrill-a-minute and crowd-arousing arena of
German-English translation on this one.
Schwarzenegger says his name means "black
plowman" which sounds a tad euphemistic to
me although for all I know (although I doubt it)
there may actually be such a word outside the
dictionary. We thought of "Blackslave" (too
heroic) and "Blackblack" (pointlessly exact) and
even "Blackguard" (premature). The problem is 25 In the Christian
God of fundamen-
that the correct German word for nigger is cents talists we trust!
Neger, with one g. Maybe truncated English
orthography ("blackniger"?) to mirror the of Austerland
expanded German deception would serve.

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America Now by Ed Rehmus

So now we have America in its decline, whose emperor Nero is George W.

(not George Washington, mind you) fiddling as we Americans burn. They've
got it all laid out. We are beginning to realize that the Towers were not just the
sacking of Rome by the barbarians. They are also the call of the world outside
shouting to itself that "America" is over.
The "Noble Experiment" has ended in failure. And the fascists know what
they are doing. The battle will soon be thick, we all know that, so of course the
multitudes must be disarmed and quickly! Education only gives them ideas. Out
with it! Welfare only encourages inferiors to survive. Out with it! Health?
Survival of the richest!
But always at the top of the dunghill are those whose business it is to adapt
to changing times, like emperors in drag as the first popes of Rome. I wonder if
the new popes will have to exchange vertical power for horizontal power and
what does that even mean? A nation of Schwarzeneggers? If so, such a nation
would need to weed out all that is not schwarzneggerian, the more energetically
and righteously the better. Well, as California rocks, so rocks the nation and
when California lays an egg, so does the rest of the country.

America ...God bless us!

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Kewl Bush Babies

Recently I used the word "copasetic" on the Internet and someone's bot (named
"Icanspeel") intruded the conversation with "You mispelled copecetic! You are
very stoopid and should be saverely punished!" Actually, almost any spelling is
acceptable for this word (including such bizarrisms as "copasetty"), although
"copasetic" and "copacetic" are the most common.

Copasetic, however, is not typical. Its purely phonetic spelling clouds its origin
(Creole coupersetique? Hebrew kol besedek?). Such orthographic chaos is
almost non-existent in most languages because most languages rely on phonetics,
whereas English is a virtual Smithsonian of historical relics. Although at one
time (say Shakespeare's era) it was perfectly acceptable to spell any word any
way you chose. To ignore spelling in English today can result in a real failure to
communicate and immediately suggests an inferior or incomplete education. On
the other hand, a brief spate of "creative" spelling ("crucifiction" for
"crucifixion", say, or "Youth-in-Asia" for "euthanasia") can also indicate the
opposite, i.e. a sophistication beyond the limits of convention.

Beyond the pale, we might say, but not beyond the pail. The "pail" being the
"pail of slops" kept in old-time kitchens before the advent of indoor plumbing.
"Pale" on the other hand is from Latin palus, a "stake", hence a post
representing a legal boundary or barrier (as a palisade is a series of such stakes,
forming a fence). If you spell palisade with two l's (pallisade) you're suggesting
that its origin is Latin pallidus (pale: as from exhaustion or fainting). "Wan" by
the way is an even whiter shade of pale, but the phrase, beyond the wan never
caught on because those who make an effort to vary their phraseology are also
likely to make an effort to learn the meanings of idioms and nonce words in the
first place.

Perhaps as recently as a decade ago, when technology was the king of the
materialistic anthill, an absence of linguistic competence was readily overlooked,
but when today President Bush says of a tax increase, "Not over my dead body"
that's not so cool. If he doesn't think about what he's saying when he's formally
addressing the nation, when DOES he think?

And speaking of Bush, on September 11 the first thing he said was not "We have
been attacked" but "Today Freedom has been attacked". This was a
remarkably quick-on-the-uptake response to an unprecedented tragedy, causing
one to consider whether such an event might have been anticipated as a possible
contingency. The subsequent erosion of civil liberties and billions for defense are
too blatantly opportunistic of this Administration for some of us to dismiss as
mere exuberance over a windfall. Those first words were not cool, as we say.

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But What does GEORGE think!?

Our illustrious editor has asked me to divulge what I think about our
impending dalliance with Iraq. First of all, yes, I think we probably need the oil
(does a hog need swill?). And second, yes, I think I dislike Hussein and Islam as
much as anyone. But after that my thinking gets a little fuzzy and raggedy
around the edges.
I thought the civilized world had left war behind, especially Hitlerian wars
of conquest. The many contretemps of the 20th Century are still within memory,
are they not? And surely if such an invasion is not an engraved invitation to
WW3 it looks at least like a retaliation to 9/11, begging for global muslim
vengeance, resulting in our paying back... ad infinitum. In that case the question
will be "Gott bei uns" or "Allah bei dem"?
All right, the blood is high. Let's go to war then! The planet is dangerously
overpopulated and maybe if enough Muslims are killed (of course only a few of
our boys will be harmed, right?) we can, a la Charles Martel, stem the tide of
Islam for one last generation's fling. Moreover, our Ministry of Propaganda
informs us that there are dozens of Iraqis who are secretly praying that America
will seize their mad Grand Vizier and restore Mesopotamian freedom.
But wait -- can we actually afford a long, horrible and boring war? Wars
cost more than lives, no matter how cheap life may become. We've already spent
everything that Clinton saved for us and interest rates are really out to gobble us
up this time! When we run out of credit, the White House can be put up for sale,
but after zed, what? Our resources are not what they were in 1941 and with the
current change in climate, even our agricultural crops will not be at their best
this summer or the next or the next. Moreover, we're in the middle of an
economic nosedive, euphemistically called a "Recession". Communism failed, to
be sure, but the fate of Capitalism is equally sealed. Wholesale Me-first-ism
didn't work in the Stone Age and I don't think it will work today either.
It's true that once we get our hands on Persian oil (if they don't set fire to
their fields before we get to them?) oil prices here will drop to 1970 prices and
we can thumb our noses at Saudi Arabia and those other Arab ingrates. Hey!
We can make more cars and pollute more air etc.
Well, the United States is no longer as promising as it used to be, in my
opinion, so the Super Rich require an ark to ride out the coming Deluge. And
with that in mind, our President has given them a tidy windfall (those tax
breaks, remember?) to help them build their leaky, little lifeboat. That duty
having been done, we can, with clear consciences, go ahead with the war that will
end peace forever and maybe stop thinking altogether. That's what I think.
As for our President. . . I think he bears a striking resemblance to Nero.
Even though he can't play the fiddle, he can make some very dramatic grimaces.
Ed Rehmus

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HISTORY LESSON
by Prof. Ed Rehmus
Now that Babylon has fallen, we must move quickly on to that other Arab
stronghold: Syria! (Damascus, specifically.) With these important stations of the
Ancient World under his belt -- see, we've already got the "Future" (albeit the
minimal Walt Disney version) -- Napoleon is now ready to move on to that
uttermost ancient of stations: China!

This game, we know from history, eventually plays out. And of course, even
Napoleon knows his empire, though eternal, is not immortal, so he will coast the
rest of the way downward to land on a soft pillow in the history books.

Sadly, however, every conqueror leaves a wasteland behind him, having been
obliged at times to violate sensible tradition. When this Empire falls, speaking ex
nostradamu, the entire world will have become a cesspool.

Now, this being so, the

wretched survivors of the
21st Century must deal
with reviving the corpse of
civilization bequeathed to
them. They may have
certain advantages, such as
science and "libertas in
chaos," but since they lack
the genius of classical
skills, their machine will be
lopsided and feckless. Thus
will begin to brew new
human bacteria and soon
thereafter will appear the
symptoms of kings and
leaders like blisters on the
social skin. And then the
cycle begins anew, of this
disease called monkey
mumps.

(The history of the next

cycle, soon to follow...)

[which, of course, it never did.]

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Another Reason
for the War
This blitzkriegy "takeover" war, then, turns out finally to have been about
discovering a new "free trade" arena in Iraq, which means that Iraq itself will
never attain autonomy to any degree. "Free Trade" means survival of the
richest, i.e. it is nothing less than bloated capitalism and its ziggurat-building
slaves. Back to Babylon with a vengeance!

Free enterprise, privatization, etc. all mean the same thing and I wish they
would call it by its real name: The U.S. Military Industrial Complex! Moreover,
and most important to say, the enslavement of the Middle East is merely the
latest step in the onrushing serfdom of the world, which daily gobbles up more
liberty from the poor in order to feed itself. Because individual freedom no
longer derives from the Declaration of Independence, it now simply means
freedom of the rich at the expense of the poor (that includes the middle class).

Democracy? What a quaint and curious notion! Elections? Who needs

another Puppet Administrator? The Will of the People? They will go to sleep.
We are, my friends, sadly entrapped in a rapidly changing era of history. There
is no gainsaying Plato's warning that any democracy inevitably becomes a
tyranny, not as we feared, because the mob is so unintelligent, but because those
in power gradually and seriously commit themselves to its deterioration. For a
long time we went slowly through the presidents each of whom removed a sliver
from the platform we stood upon. By the mid 20th Century we were already in
decline as a Democracy. Until the latest rogue simply overrode the election
altogether and proceeded quickly to rip the whole tradition to pieces. Why?
Because democracy is over, my friends. It has to be swept away to make way for
ol' ugly dragon, Future.

Alpha and Omega and the next Zoroastrian circle begins with a different
spotlight and a different cast. Must we wait until 2013 for the Revolution?

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 E. E. Rehmus

How We Spend Our Years

Observation made concerning the amount of actual time spent by the
average American in various activities:

Average lifetime: 72 years

sleeping: 24 years
working for someone else: 15 years
running errands, cleaning, personal maintenance: 15 years
watching TV: 9 years
commuting or waiting in lines: 4 years

TOTAL: 67 years

time left for creativity, leisure, personal pleasure: 5 years

[Excerpt of the 3-16-88 entry in one of Ed’s diaries.]

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 E. E. Rehmus

by Edward Rehmus

Since I suffer from advanced and

progressive emphysema/asthma I cannot
smoke marijuana, medical or otherwise. For
some time, therefore, a wealthy friend has
been kind enough to supply me free of charge
with chocolate candy laced with THC from
an anonymous dealer. Interestingly, I just
happened to read somewhere that chocolate
itself has a few natural cannabinoids of its
own.
I also suffer from claudication and vascular deficiency in the legs, so that
walking is slow and painful. The other day after a brief nap, my right leg was
so numb and dead that my toes bent over the wrong way when I stepped on my
foot, causing me to fall at once to the floor. At first I thought my foot might
have been broken, but since cannabis is among other things an effective pain
killer, I couldn't tell right off. Fortunately, occasional numbness, which I've
experienced before, diminishes a bit after I walk around and sit upright, so I
eventually discovered that no bones were broken after all. All the same, now I
am careful to use a cane even walking about indoors.
Although there are no serious side-effects to cannabis (it has failed to kill
lab animals, no matter how much of it is injected into them), there are
recommended dosages and apparently it has been known to produce some
numbing and tingling in excessive dosages. Usually that amounts to no more
than an occasional and minor annoyance ("Haha! My foot fell asleep!"), but
with my leg arteries already constricted, the import and export of blood
through those vessels are reduced and decelerated, so that any toxins may tend
to build up.
This is what comes of being cut off from information about medicinal
usages of, and experimentation with, illegal substances. My doctor and I do
not have a candid relationship because he is very establishment-oriented,
unlike myself, so I can't discuss things like this with him.
The fact is, the more I glean off the internet, the less I seem to understand.
Marijuana, apart from its "high," seems to be something of a true panacea. It
controls epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and glaucoma for a start and is far better
at dealing with pain, depression and stress than any of the mainline
prescriptions. Moreover, historically, it has been used routinely since before
Babylon and Egypt. It almost seems as if the only reason it remains illegal is
that the bloated drug corporations continue to lobby for its prohibition because
they fear it would be a strong competitor. It was prohibited for the first time in
the 1930's because the new drug czar, Harry Anslinger needed a new scapegoat
once alcohol became legal again. It was he who created the "killer weed"
nonsense. But it seems to me that if it was good enough for George
Washington and Queen Victoria, it's good enough for me.

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 E. E. Rehmus
As for its infamous "high," I have discovered through my own observations
that its effects on the cortex are such that the user is visited by a kind of
revelation or enlightenment, which in the drugless state is normally so rare that
its mere strangeness is likely to result in shock or paranoia. Persistent analysis
however eventually dispels the alarm or panic that accompanies this newfound
ability to understand what have previously been impenetrable mysteries. When
ordinary and familiar objects become embued with a new aura of both mystical
and rational significance, the world is utterly transmogrified. It becomes not so
much a kind of wide-awake dream, as a much wider awake awareness. Of
course such a perspective is routine schizophrenia (or a refusal to see things as
the herd does), which may actually be a healthy alternative to the so-called
"sanity" of our world today. The difficulty with these powerful cannabic
insights is that they occur rapidly and are quickly forgotten -- so that you have
to keep pencil and paper handy if you want to capture them. A quick note is
then sufficient to bring back an entire chain of thought. But most people would
rather just relax and listen to some good music. Incidentally, this relaxation,
like the relaxation induced by alcohol, may be inappropriate behind the wheel of
a car, although it doesn't impair judgment as alcohol does. In fact, it may
actually increase your bridge score (and, at the same time and for the same
reasons, damage your chess game).
One of the problems, however, with sensible evaluations of this substance is
that there is not just one active ingredient in the natural plant. It has been
estimated that there are perhaps a hundred different kinds of compounds within
a typical plant. This is why there is so little high in lab productions such as
marinol or "medicinal marijuana," whose chief virtues are admittedly little
more than appetite stimulation and the control of nausea amongst HIV victims.
The New Yorker some weeks ago had an article about an ailment known as
"jake leg" that afflicted thousands of people from 1930 to 1933. It was caused
by tippling a patent medicine with alcohol in it. When these people became
unable to walk or were even completely paralyzed, the manufacturers of the
beverage were investigated and charged with criminal negligence. Further
reading suggests that the poisonous chemical in their product (a manufacturing
plasticizer called triorthocresyl phosphate) was an adjunct of using butane as a
catalyst. I understand that butane is also used sometimes in the production of
THC. Since I'm not a chemist there's nothing I can add to that. I have
subsequently, however, learned on the street that several people in the past few
weeks have also suffered numbness after ingesting old-fashioned Alice B. Toklas
brownies -- i. e., as the result of a "bad batch" reminiscent of old bootlegging
days. History does like to repeat itself!
All I know is that there is something very much wrong with a society that is
so vast and complicated that it has no time for any tribal or village or individual
orientation and must subject everyone to the same totalitarian, artificial mass
control from a leadership that derives from nearly total ignorance. When a law
becomes so far-reaching that innocent people are affected, then that law is no-
thing less than tyranny. And if that
realization, dear reader, doesn't make
you angry, maybe you would enjoy
attending an electrocution or a hanging,
or maybe even a witch-burning..

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 E. E. Rehmus

by Edward Rehmus

In Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess describes the libretto of an opera

based on the life of St. Nicholas, borrowed largely from an account by Anatole
France. Since few people know anything about this peculiar person, other than
that he is the patron saint of children (and shipwrecked sailors), it might be
interesting to take a closer look. The opera is far too long to quote verbatim
from the novel, but briefly this is the gist of the plot up to the end of the first act.
The story begins, somehow, with the corpses of Bishop Nicholas' three sons
(Mark, Matthew and John) who have been put into a pickle barrel, whereupon,
because of the pickle acid, they have been resurrected. The first son turns
Nicholas's house into a brothel & Nicholas is tempted by sins of the flesh.
Nicholas invokes Jesus Christ, who appears as the naked god, Pan, whereupon
the poor man yields to his weaknesses. Afterwards, he flagellates himself & is
thereby purified enough to be able to attend the Council of Nicaea in order to
denounce the Aryan heresy. In case you've forgotten, the Aryan heresy suggests
that the Father and the Son are the same substance: Homoousia. Whereas the
True Faith insists that they are only of similar substance: Homoiousia, thus
proving the importance of an iota.
Meanwhile the second son is busy forging documents to denounce Nicholas
as an even worse heretic; At the Council, the women of the town, appear in
order to ask for prayers for their men who are in a storm at sea. The Council,
of course, wants to throw them out for disrupting their holy deliberations, but
jolly old St. Nick intercedes for the sailors' wives by wrestling with an Aryan
bishop. At this point Matthew reveals the documents proving that his father has
stated that the only true God is Venus. Nicholas is ecclesiastically disgraced just
as all the ships at sea go down.
In the second and final act of the opera, Nicholas, after a stint with
sackcloth and ashes, has been reinstated by the Pope and is now once again a
full bishop. However, it seems that a number of German tribes have been
converted to Xtianity by Arians and the heresy is going full blast. John, the
third son, is all for going to Germany in order to torture and kill heretic women
and children. Nicholas argues that theirs is a religion of love, but John points
out that "These are foul heretics who believe Christ to be co-eternal with the
Father!" So Nicholas is persuaded to join in the holy war, though he soon
regrets it. He asks heaven to send down Love, and "Venus herself appears, as
goddess of brothels for soldiers." Mothers are screaming for miracles and one of
them hands Nicholas the bloody corpse of her child. Nicholas, with the child in
his arms now asks God why he brought the three wicked sons back to life in the
first place and when there is no answer, "You are a God of Hate, a God who
murders the innocent!" There is no reply and the curtain descends.
Thus, to this day, the red suit represents Nicholas's sins of the flesh, which
he atones for with the ashes of chimneys, while the bag upon his back is his
burden of shame. Of course, in our time, we no longer honor shame, so the bag
merely contains the poisonous fruits of materialistic Capitalism.

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If Aunt Emma Wants a Knitted Jacket…

Why Can't She Make or Buy the Damned Thing herself?
by Ed Rehmus

If you have any decency at all, you will keep

your fingers crossed that the Christmas sales of 2003
will NOT reflect the end of the Recession. If
retailers have a good year that will send the very
phony signal out that Bush's tax reductions for the
rich were the right response to the economic
downturn of the past few years. You can't, however,
expect jobs and medical coverage, lowered rents and
lowered debt from a Republican administration. If
Bush gets in for another four years, the country will
have been nickled and dimed to death.
Anyway, the junk that people buy every year as
"presents" bears little or no relationship to what
anyone may actually need or want to have. A singing
fish, a plastic ski mask, a bottle of Pu d'Amour, a box
of tooth-rotting candy, Etch-a-Sketch 2003, a subscription to Jade Collector's
Journal – what does it matter? It will all eventually wind up at the City Dump.
The holiday
ruins approximate-
ly half a year, from
the early xmas
shopping before
Thanksgiving to the
spring's clearance
sales. There should
be something we
can do to cut into
this atrocious waste
of human time.
What I propose
is a revolving xmas
present hung onto a
clothesline between
two or more neigh-
bors. It is hauled in
then sent back out
to the next recipient
in an endless self-
controlled loop. It
need not even be
opened! Perpetual
rotation should put
an end to the fear of
not reciprocating. Sketch by
Ed Rehmus
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 E. E. Rehmus

The Inner City

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 E. E. Rehmus

An Encryption
by the late Ed Rehmus
The twenty some volumes of Ed Rehmus’s daily entries into his journal are filled
with his own style of encryption. Anyone who thinks they can crack this code should
get in contact with the editor.

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 E. E. Rehmus

A Page in Ed’s Diary

September 4, 1988:

76
 E. E. Rehmus

Transcript of September 4, 1988 Entry

(in which he embarks on coding his journal)
“As I move forward through this diary, the pages become more
thickened with notations placed here by past attempts to guide and predict.
So ringed in with dates and names and instructions are we that there comes
to be less and less space for recording the actual present. Have I made the
all too common mistake of forsaking the beautiful for the merely
interesting? [obscured spelling of foreign phrase] At least meaning succeeds
in hiding itself.
“Obtained Brumbaugh’s “The Most Mysterious Manuscripts” (the
Voyrich “Roger Bacon” cipher M. S.) which is very interesting. It inspires
me to re-attach myself to my own BAZANLA once again – a language in
cipher, a double wall to the would-be reader.
“Says Roger Bacon ‘No sane scientist would put his experimentss in
unconcealed written form.’ And Brumbaugh even suggests that Dee’s
conversations with Enochian angels may actually have been in code. Bacon
was familiar with seven secret systems and the clear could be in any one of
half a dozen different tongues. It could also be in jargon and use copious
abbreviations.
“An interesting cipher based on numerology is the reduction of all
letters to one digit, thus:
1 A 10 J 19 S AJS =1
2 B 11 K 20 T BKT =2
3 C 12 L 21 U CLU =3
4 D 13 M 22 V DMV =4
5 E 14 N 23 W ENW =5
6 F 15 O 24 X FOX =6
7 G 16 P 25 Y GPY =7
8 H 17 Q 26 Z HQZ =8
9 I 18 R IR =9
“Thus:
‘Roger Bacon Friar’ =
96759 21365 69919
“My own system, still undeveloped, uses 2 letters to clear to one letter of
crypt, thus shortening the cipher to half the length of the message. But
henceforth, herein, I shall employ a different system from either if these.”

[There follows a four line trial with “no good” in the middle, and concluding with
“No – it’s no use, I’ve got to find more comfortable letters.” The followed by
note at the bottom.]

“new words:
“generic humanity
“ooparts – out of place artifacts found in geol. strata where should not
be. Of tech. sophistication beyond capabilities of those whose remains
they are.”

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 E. E. Rehmus

A Page in Ed’s Diary

September 5, 1988:

78
 E. E. Rehmus

A Page in Ed’s Diary

March 23 1989:

79
 E. E. Rehmus

Transcript of March 23, 1989 Entry

“The birds are my fingers
The air is my hair,
But my face and my figure
Are objects unknown and rare.

“The 2 Babylons says John the Baptist’s nativity was chosen because it
came 6 months before xmas and coincided with the most important pagan
observation: The midsummer feast of Tammey. I still feel the the business
between Herodias and john the Baptist is not clear. The story is too thin and
explains nothing, the mythos makes no sense. People don’t become so
enraged and vindictive to such a single-minded degree as to plot
systematically to maneuver some preacher’s head onto a plate merely
because he called them a sinner. there has to be more to it.
“We all partake of our Nativities, however, and my contention is that
John’s sacrifice was the real ‘crucifixtion’. Symbolically the cross is a
fixation in historical material time and place. A beheading, however,
indicates a clear separation between the higher and the lower worlds.”

[A presumed Latin phrase is then followed by the encoded section, then followed
by a foreign phrase, whereupon the cursive English text continues.]

“continued
Kohler says art is an act of conquest, the discovery of a new sphere of
human consciousness. There is no time art without exploration (I would add
experimentation). [How dry all this is – one hopes it is worth the tedium of
the exposition]. We must make conscious the pre-conscious. Express the
never expressed. It is from the increasing changes of life that our art
derives. This enables us to reveal the latent reality which transforms our life
to the human condition. Thust ART turns out to be nothing more nor less
than Magic. So I have at least been on the right track. But what has not
been done yet?
Anti-country, anti-family, anti-life, etc. only antagonizes the middle
classes. What is needed is to hold up the mirror to them until they are
sickened by it. Jesus? Very well, let’s have Jesus! Infants! Very well,
infants! Football – very well. But carried to insane degree. Let us put Jesus
in the brothel, the flag in the drug scene, the baby in the old folks’ home.
Collages are a good start. Food (junk food) in sacred places – graffiti in
Church. Cars in the flower garden. How about a journal of every day life in
Sartres’ Nausea? The Return to Vomit!

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 E. E. Rehmus

A Page in Ed’s Diary

March 24 1989:

81
 E. E. Rehmus

by Ed Rehmus

Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician of the

18th Century who was clever enough to point out that
the fundamental logarithmic number e multiplied by
itself the square root of minus one time(s), and that
then multiplied by itself 3.14159265... times cannot be
saved from non-existence by the addition of one, but at
least is nothing less than zero. This is clever because
the formula successfully contains all five fundamental
numbers (0, 1, π, e and i).
Even less relevant, however, was his announce-
n
ment to the atheist Denis Diderot, "Sir, (a+b) / n = x,
hence God exists!" Since Diderot was not a mathe- Leonhard Euler
matician he was totally bumfuzzled by that. But
since Euler went on to challenge the atheist, "what do you say to that?"
Leonhard obviously must have had more to say than that the sum of any two
known rational numbers to some power (presumably not zero) and then divided
by that power will equal some unknown number. Unfortunately, since Diderot
fled the scene red-faced and bladder-emptied by this puffball, the ultimate proof
of God's existence remains untransmitted to us.
Although mathematics is probably the most thorough-going of all man's
anthropomorphic pursuits, it still cannot break free of anthropomorphism itself.
It uses a symbolically human abstraction of human logic to prove purely human
questions and to set the parameters of purely human quests. Since we cannot
understand any intelligence higher than our own we can never properly
evaluate the limits of our confinement nor its priority in the cosmic ladder.
There are yet a few wisemen of the tribe, mirabile dictu, who insist that
things are just as wonderful as they have always been. Isn't motherhood still the
purpose of existence? Dubya may have his faults, but he is still our president,
isn't he? Global warming will help us cut down on our fuel bills, won't it? Why
do I need Medicare if I never get sick? Amidst such incontrovertible axioms,
Euler's incandescent formula sends rays of glaring irrelevance over the whole
meaningless night of Panglossian optimism.
But now into this darkness comes a devastating, heart-stabbing news flash
from current astronomy that the universe is about to become even darker. For
the universe is not merely expanding in every direction, but said expansion is
growing faster and faster by the nanosecond. Within a relatively short time we
shall have blown far outside the range of all the stars to find ourselves spinning
alone and silent in empty space. Solipsism seems not only the province of
anthropism but is apparently the irrational, if not downright nonsensical,
predilection of astrophysics as well.
You might well ask, what virus it is that causes a cell to explode. Then
maybe some 21st Century Euler could measure the velocity thereof, provided of
course he was able to decide whether to use a microcosmic, macrocosmic or
anthropocosmic hourglass.

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 E. E. Rehmus

Power in the Dark Ages

© by E. E. Rehmus
The September issue of The Gift of Fire contained the Hoeflin Power Test, which
measures one’s math and spatial abilities. As I didn’t quite feel up to this
massive assault to my system, I skipped to the penultimate four “miscellaneous”
problems. The following are my answers. Please let me know if I passed and if I
am now empowered.

28. Suppose five dots are arranged in a three-dimensional space so that no more than
three at a time can have a flat surface pass through them. If each set of three dots
has a flat surface pass through them and extend an infinite distance in every
direction, what is the maximum number of distinct straight lines at which these
planes can intersect one another?

I suppose I could arrange five dots somehow, although I resent being restricted
to allowing only three of them at a time to accept a flat (or, for that matter, even
a warped) surface to pass through them -- and to what purpose? Moreover,
there is something existentially horrifying about asking these poor dots to hold a
surface of infinite extension in all the myriad directions of space! The madness
to which these dots will have been driven, must itself be infinite. And what of the
remaining pair of surface-less dots? Are they to sit idly by contemplating the
endless and eternal heebie-jeebies of their brethren? Perhaps they will
courageously avail themselves of the opportunity to position them-selves on top
of these planes, for purposes of gliding and skating around on these frictionless,
incredibly smooth, glassine plat-forms extending from here to Alpha Centauri
and on to the uttermost reaches of the Horsehead Nebula.

29. Suppose a diagonal line is drawn across each of the six sides of a cube from one
corner to the other. How many distinct patterns are possible if one includes all
six sides of the cube in each pattern and counts as one pattern any patterns that
can be made to coincide by various rotations of the cube as one rigid object?

The cube I would use for this purpose is the Ka’ aba at Mecca, since it is by
definition a “rigid object”, in more ways than one. Usually, it is covered with a
gigantic tarpaulin of some sort, one presumes to keep out the hot sun, although it
may serve some other more obscure and more Islamic purpose. This tarpaulin
would have to be removed, which might present some problems, considering the
propensities of mullahs for reprisal at the touching of their sacred monu-ments
by infidel hands. To draw a diagonal line, however, from one corner to another
on each of its sides would be as utterly impossible as introducing a porker into a
mosque. Also, in order to diagonalize the sixth side, the thing would have to be
turned over, necessitating its total destruction as well as one’s own beheading.
You may wonder why I would choose this unlikely and controversial object for
the purpose of solving the problem. The answer is, “Why count diagonals on
cubes?”

30. Suppose the thirty edges of a regular, i.e., perfectly symmetrical dodecahedron
are rods, two of which are painted white and the rest black. How many distinct
patterns can thus be created, counting as one pattern any patterns that can be
made to coincide by various rotations of the dodecahedron as one rigid object?

83
 E. E. Rehmus

Hmmm. Since I majored in ancient languages, not geometry, I had always

assumed that a dodecahedron had only 12 sides. Good lord! Thirty! Oh, I see
now, thirty edges. Hmmm. How does one get 30 out of 12? Let’s see, the 12
sides connect to one another 12 times... That can’t be right, because some edges
are a side’s own edges. Let’s return to square one. A one-sided hedron (being a
plane) has 3 edges (if it happens to be a triangle), 4 edges (if it’s a square) and so
on. A two-sided hedron would be the same, since it would just be the other side
of the same piece of infinitely thin paper. Or it could be a cone, I guess, but then
it would have only one edge, unless you count the point as an edge. A three sided
hedron ... that’s a thick potato chip, right?... would have 2 edges. A 4 sided
hedron would be a non-Kamite pyramid, having 6 edges. Wait a minute...no
pragmatic principle is emerging here... It were wiser and more profitable to
consider the mystical meaning of the number 30, which, as everyone ought to
know, is the qabalistic ten thrice synthesized. This open-ended “thirty” is
lacking the two extra attributions necessary to com-plete the hypothetically
“trinitarian” tree with its connecting pathways because the zero (counted as
aleph, which is not really the first letter) is omitted twice. For those with under-
standing, the second zero may be considered as referring to the Abyss located on
the gimel line. That essentially non-existent sephirah is generally designated by
the Hebrew word Daath (which means “knowledge” in that tongue). The
wonderful thing about zeros is that you can wear them with anything.

31. Suppose ten marbles are inserted into a box based on the tosses of an unbiased
coin, a white marble being inserted when the coin turns up heads and a black one
when the coin turns up tails. Suppose someone who knows how the marbles
were selected but not what their colors are selects ten marbles from the box one
at a time at random, returning each marble and mixing the marbles thoroughly
before making another selection. If all ten examined marbles turn out to be
white, what is the probability to the nearest percent that all ten marbles in the box
are white?

Believe it or not, I still have a full set of marbles. Their provenance is the no
longer bridgeable era of my boyhood. Fortunately none of them is either black
or white. All of them are either “puries”, deep reds, greens, yellows, blues or else
they are huge, hard-won aggies with intriguing swirls inside them. I would be
happy to toss an “unbiased” coin -- perhaps a hand-some medallion from the
Seattle World’s Fair of 1962? Or maybe a Viennese schilling, one side of which
one might, with an attempt at panache as well as dispassion, name “Hitler” and
the other “Franz-Josef”. I would even be willing to throw a couple of
pentadecahedrons, in an ambitious effort to remain in keeping with the spirit of
question 30. Why not, by the way, connect all these questions into a dynamic
whole, leading to some noble invention that advances technology, such as brain
implants or exploding bullets? I don’t know anyone who knows how the marbles
were selected, but let’s pretend that I do. Although please note that I use the
word “pretend” advisedly. But where am I to obtain these unprejudiced black
and white taws? Don’t bother telling me. We don’t really have any room for
more junk in this apartment! Of course the marbles are intended simply to be
visualized, but if I’m going to be asked to visualize something I’d rather that be
something more interesting than a dismal sack of globuli albissimi furvique.

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HOLY IMPLODING CYBO, NETMAN!

It's tough trying to straddle two opposing worlds. I am appalled at what has
happened to the San Francisco Public Library, for instance. (Too many
computers, no card catalogue, throwing books away for lack of room, etc.). I fear
for the children of the 21st Century -- a world of iron control, no freedom, little
or no education, unbelievable overcrowding, loss of resources, cashless poverty,
raging new diseases and ugliness everywhere. At the same time, however, since I
write and require a word prosser, I am involved in the computer world and the
Internet. In that realm, it is cyber-reality, the astral plane, an ultradimensional
place of magicians and monsters where anything can and does happen. It won't
be that way for long. The first aeroplane wasn't a jet. It was little more than a
flying bicycle that, for all its danger and clumsiness, was fun and individual-
oriented. The first internet is not yet Winston's two-way horror. The fact that
everything has to be typed keeps it in the highly literate realm of the written
word. When the keyboard is replaced by voice and camera, the net will have
truly arrived and woe unto us all!
At any rate, there are two 21 st Centuries ahead.
It is this second future I want to talk about. Mellona tauta: the bifurcated,
binary, bisexual, bichiliastic world of the evil TWO multiplied a thousand times:
2000 + C. E., as seen from its electronic inside looking out.
Forget "the information age." Information is not knowledge any more than
knowledge is wisdom. What you receive on the Internet is not information, but
data. And there is a flood of data, a deluge to rival Noah's! There is so much to
assimilate that far from reveling in all the material, most people are beginning to
experience an "information (data)" overload. It's not even a matter of weeding
out the junk -- junk will always be with us henceforth -- but what to do with all
the necessary and useful intelligence that is available? There is no call nor ability
for memory. Whatever your field of interest or income, moreover, there is an
immediate avalanche of factoids, reports, papers, books, libraries that you
cannot possibly sort out. You don't even have time to read it all. Whatever you
are doing, it is probably out of date and someone has already done it a hundred
times better than you ever imagined you could. And here it is on view right
there on your vid-screen, worse luck!
Worse still, most of the new material does not include old information that is
still important. Everything is slick and updated. So if you try to look up, say,
Villiers de l'isle-Adam, you may find sketches, biographies and a few esoteric,
scholarly footnotes, plus links to the futurism of the 1910's, but nothing like the
text of his "L'Arc-en-ciel des Amours".
So you use your search engine to find another website on the subject and
there you find altogether different data but still not the text that you want. With
superhuman diligence and extraordinary good fortune you may at last discover
what you are seeking (that is some day in the distant future if they finally get
around to adding that particular pebble to the mountain, which is unlikely, since
ancient, out of print books seldom can be found in any libraries, now), but by
then you have been led down so many by-roads that your original search has
become perhaps not quite a will-o'-the-wisp but certainly a piece of ultimate
irrelevance.

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You have just been led down the very latest garden path of mind-control,
with the thought-police leading every step of the way. And when you wake up
from the nightmare you will find a "magic cookie" in the preferences file of your
computer. A tracking device inserted there by the search engine, which describes
what your peculiar interests are (in code that you can't read, of course). Shades
of 1984! Touch that cookie and die! If you attempt to remove it or alter it in any
way, you will crash your system and be unable to restart. Even your virus
detector won't see it, because it's technically not a virus, it's just part of your
entire operating system.
:-)

Well, you can't go back to the downtown public library, nor even to the
university library, nor even to the Library of Congress. That's all been changed.
So where do you go from here, cowboy? Where you go is to private addresses on
the Internet -- to unlisted websites. There you may occasionally find the fly
subversive information and forgotten classics that you crave. And how do you
find and jack into those arcane places? You must yourself become an Internet
wizard. A victim of the vampire, become himself a vampire. The invasion of the
pod people!
If you think this is sci-fi made real, you are absolutely correct. If you think
this is schizophrenia gone cybercrazy, you are right again. The real war is not in
Bosnia. It's inside your head! And this Armageddon, this WW3 of the brain is
only in the first stages. Mox autem cominuatur cere verbibombo atomico vel
electronico brum!
Barbie now has a tiny computer. Ever wonder why there is no news in the
newspapers except the same old rehashes of 3rd World revolutions and riots?
Ever wonder why the evening news on TV is concerned with recipes and baby
ailments? Ever wonder why walking down the streets of any modern city is
either like walking through a cemetery or walking through some touristy Disney
World that has
been overtaken
by commercial
interests? You
don't see that
from your car
window in the
commuter lane.
Meanwhile
you will be get-
ting fewer and
fewer personal
letters from
friends in your
post office box.
Unless you have
access to e-mail,
you are persona
non grata. Might
as well be an end-
user!

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Let There Be Light!

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The Three Tines of Destiny

Since I haven't read Jaynes' “The Origin of Consciousness in the BiCameral
Mind”, I don't have much business discussing it. I've been told, however, that its
thesis is that “far from consciousness having been around for eons, it is no more
than a few thousand years old. And it really came about in major part because of
language. ‘Real’ voices of the dead and of the gods was its origin.” If that is true,
I think it's putting the plow before the ox.
What matters most is not consciousness, but the Unconscious Mind. If
consciousness is some kind of breakthrough, it is the breakthrough of a single
fish leaping out of a vast ocean – and falling back into it again. I don't think we
should say that consciousness arose from language, but rather that both
consciousness and language keep on always breaking forth simultaneously (and
falling back into silence). Since language is the most important ability of man,
perhaps even unique to our species, no matter how it may have developed, and
since it is as much a part of our nature as making honey is that of bees, the link
between language and consciousness seems intrinsic. Yet I am convinced, for
reasons we might explore later on, that consciousness per se is present
throughout the length of the evolutionary tree, from its first inarticulate
squirmings of amino acids and amoebae up through the highest apes. That is to
say, although language requires consciousness, the reverse doesn't have to
follow. Consciousness need not require language. The same goes for "self"
consciousness, which likewise may well exist apart from language. All the same,
that having been said, and strictly within the context of human language, any
voices of gods or ancestral ghosts are necessarily simultaneous with the dawning
of self-consciousness.
In other words, the two halves of the mind – the gods and the individual
separating from them – are one and the same linguistic event. "In the beginning
was the Word" says the bible. But that's the New Testament. There is an older
bible that talks of the beginning as a separation into dualities: light and
darkness, above and below, water and dry land, etc. By the law of
correspondence, which is more basic and more reliable than what we understand
of cause and effect (i.e. “tendencies of sequence”), what is a characteristic of all
other manifested phenomena, must, inevitably, be a characteristic of the mind as
well.
Terence McKenna, in one of his lectures about eating the psychedelic
psilocybin mushroom, suggests a much better time than that which we now
inhabit. He talks about a world in which language was not necessary because
separation had not yet taken place. In this Garden of Eden, man was an actual
component of the holistic forest and communication or mental identity was
blissfully instantaneous and telepathic (wrong word, but the correct word may
not yet exist) between all of its parts. In such a magical kingdom even the lion
chasing the zebra and the zebra running for its life are one and the same. It is
this world that the plants still inhabit and when we ingest psychedelic substances
we return to that primordial botanical garden of ultimate enlightenment, where
mushrooms and herbs speak to us in their own tongueless fashion.
So we might say that spoken human language was the first “technology” and
the first departure from paradise. In terms of human history (pre-history, as it
were) that primordial linguistic era was the beginning of human society, the

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“Golden Age,” and it must have endured for many hundreds of thousands of
years. Societies functioned as the result of an oral tradition handed down by
each generation to the next with but minimal variation. In that eon language
was both perfect and incredibly expressive. We can infer that from the fact that
all pre-literate or stone-age languages are infinitely more difficult, detailed and
complicated than any modern tongue. Mankind was, in fact, probably smarter
than he had ever been before or ever would be again, because, with the loss of his
previously mystical participation in the forest, he was now obliged to carry all of
his baggage in his head.
Then, about five millennia ago writing appeared – the second technology
and the beginning of history. With that the complications of language suddenly
became much simpler and the oral traditions were slowly abandoned. The
results of this new cacoethes scribendi, however, were disastrous to human
intelligence and, since he no longer had to carry everything in his head, civilized
man began to grow mentally lazy.
We can now look back on history as a series of misadventures in which each
successive technology has reduced us, in shorter and shorter time-spans, to lesser
creatures than our ancestors. In a previous article I mentioned the ancient Greek
concept of “arete” which was the high moral standard against which male
Greeks were compared, comprising such things as courage, honor, integrity, etc.
and which had degenerated into mere “virtus” by the time of the Romans. But
how many members of western society today have even heard of virtus, much less
arete? Is it even possible to survive today by adhering to such ideals as complete
honesty or integrity? In the subhuman merchant society that imprisons us
today, such old-fashioned airs and graces are luxuries that few can indulge.
Hardly anyone even bothers to study Latin and Greek... and we are of course
much intellectually and morally the poorer for not doing so.
Moreover, today we stand at another crossroads, comparable to the
revolutionary intrusions of language and writing. This time it is no longer just
society that is in danger of corruption and vitiation, but biological man himself.
At the moment, the worst technology that the average person can envision is
cloning. The idea that some future Dan Quayle or Michael Jackson (to give but
pale examples) could make millions of copies of himself is so repugnant to most
people that they are ready to storm the Bastille of Science to prevent such a
horror from taking place. Yet, as Mary Shelley suggested in her novel
“Frankenstein”, science has no choice but to pursue its notions into whatever
hell they may lead. Not to do so, is to hobble and compromise Truth, the very
God of Science itself.
But cloning is little more than a diversion and a distraction alongside the
real thunderbolt about to strike us down. The line between artificial life and
artificial intelligence, if such a line exist at all, is blurry and erratic. In order for
artificial intelligence to become truly "intelligent" it must be able to instruct and
improve itself. Along with that it should have the ability to repair itself, to
protect itself, to replicate and to grow. Anything less than its complete
independence falls short of absolute “intelligence.” Omniscience = Omnipotence
= Immortality. And abilities like growth, reproduction and evolution make up
the definition of natural as well as artificial life. Moreover, it seems obvious that
if AI is to do these things properly, then it must have consciousness. The
interesting thing about this to me is that once again the crossroads is a linguistic
one, proving anew that man’s destiny is his language.

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To be sure, there can be no real beginning of artificial intelligence until we

are able to understand our own language well enough to be able to translate it
into one that the machine can understand. Perhaps we can comfort ourselves
that the engineers who are working on AI are so astonishingly deficient in their
understanding of linguistics. Technerds – at least American technerds who are
supposedly at the forefront of this research (and if not, why not?) – are famous
for being monoglots and for their inept grammar and scant vocabulary. The
problem, however, may well turn out to be that human language even at its best
is inferior to the ideal expression of AI. In that case we are bound to create an
imperfect machine – or, even more challengingly still, we might learn just
enough AI rhetoric to set it loose on its own path. After that, of what use will
mere biodes be? Whether the machine serves man or man serves the machine
will no longer be a meaningful question. Human society will have moved from
slow deterioration to rapid obsolescence and abrupt extinction.

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Is Earth Also a Fairy Tale?

Let's not echo the sheep with their eternal bleating that suicide is
cowardly, nor let us bow to the Church, which, in its embarrassment, calls it a
sin. Suicide is neither cowardly nor sinful. Its correct name is “mystery.”
Everyone nodded sagely after Jim Jones and his disciples committed mass
suicide twenty years ago. Yes, from now on, it was said, we should expect
more and more cults of high weirdness. But if you actually pinned someone
down, and asked him why he felt so called upon to provide that prophesy, he
had no real answer. Well, now we think we know: it is simply part of the
millennial fever. Unfortunately, that answer only poses new questions.
We can dismiss Jim Jones as something closer to mass murder than mass
suicide. We can dismiss Dr. Kevorkian as simply a brave man who puts others
out of their suffering. But now we come to Heaven’s Gate. Let’s assume that
the departed members of Heaven’s Gate were indulging in wishful thinking
that there was a “Saturn-like Object” or “alien spaceship” behind the comet.
Let's also assume that their leader, Applewhite, was suffering from a
psychosis. And with these blunt affirmations, every normal person can now
shrug his shoulders and go on about his business, albeit with a faint frown of
puzzlement on his brow. Reality marches on unshaken, although its step is a
bit heavier, as if it hoped to stamp something out. This, in effect, was what
Leslie Stahl did last night on 60 Minutes when she postscripted that the young
man she had just interviewed was now glad he had not castrated himself after
all. With one of her typical little smirks of smug triumph, Ms. Stahl was able
to conclude her piece on Heaven’s Gate with a happy ending: that former
member was now about to become a father! So the “tragic” victims of the
suicide cult can safely be pushed aside and we can walk away having learned
from this bizarre event nothing whatsoever. It's all so easy: the balance to
suicide is reproduction. By all means, let's solve every problem by breeding.
Having children is easier than thinking about the meaning of life. But that old
story is beginning to sound a bit hollow. What if the answer to Death is not
procreation? What if there is a kind of life that is preferable to that of the
endless anthill of middle-class mediocrity?
Is it possible, moreover that there might be more than one “reality”?
People are still wary of thinking of such dichotomies as “objective reality” vs.
“consensus reality”. Even more cautious does the average man wax when
confronted with the even more annoying notion that there is only “subjective
reality” and anything else is but a speculation – so far as the human mind is
concerned, at any rate. There is no ultimate Truth – there are still those who
will argue about that. But even if all this were so, the reality of the members
of Heaven’s Gate would not be very different from that of the average
Christian. Christianity teaches, after all, that the way to “eternal life” is death.
Christian salvation is also celestial, not terrestrial. And disengagement from
the desires of the flesh is not only Christian, but also Buddhist. Is the belief in
an ultramundane society of advanced aliens much different from a belief in
angels? Christianity in our time is so advanced into hypocrisy that we are
appalled when anyone actually practices it. Yet pie in the sky permeates every
teen-age mind from Star Wars in the theatre to Return of the Jedi on the
computer. Cargo cults abound on all sides. When oh when, will the aliens

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land and save us? And if they don't, when oh when will we build a starship
and take off for heaven ourselves? How much easier it is to move into a new
house and take our cockroaches with us than to fumigate the hovel we live in.
At least the heaven’s-gaters had the decency to remove their genitals and put
on new shoes. Nor did they leave technological garbage and plastic flags on the
Moon.
It's time to dig a little deeper. The comparison of Heaven’s Gate to
Christianity is only skin deep. Everyone must agree that the world is
becoming uglier and more hopeless every day – if you choose to be contrary,
oh pampered and petted Prince Siddharta, leave your suburban garden and go
visit the world outside the palace! The millennium is the symbolic line of
demarcation between the historical world and chaos. As the sands run out of
the hourglass there will be many who will choose not to cross the bridge, who
will decide to remain in the 20th Century. Our fate is not purely religious or
philosophical, it is biological. Has the human race the wisdom and the courage
to inhibit its growth or will it go on propagating itself to the point of
suffocation? How long will people continue to delude themselves that there is
plenty of room on the planet – and if there isn’t, that we can simply pack up
and move to Alpha Centauri? How much longer can we ignore the fact that
elephants require an entire continent in which to thrive, that whales need a
whole ocean? And man requires much more room than whales and elephants
do. A prison life is not a life worth living. We forget that fact to our peril. We
may be able to feed another ten billion, but only if they are caged like chickens.
It's time breeders like Leslie Stahl shut their stupid mouths.
Yes, there will be more and more lemmings as the future cracks into the
present and crumbles into the past – and more and more unwanted, screaming
newborns to take their places. But increasingly, it will be the most sensitive
and the most concerned who choose to die, while the ignorant and uncaring
continue to breed mindlessly, like the maggots they are, feeding on the rotting
garbage that the earth has become. One begins to ask if it might not be that
death makes more sense than life, if it might be more miraculous not to be
than to be. I wonder how many teen-agers and twenty-year-olds suffer from
depression and toy with the idea of suicide only to cure their misery by
becoming parents and releasing their burden by inflicting life on someone else.
The Heaven’s-Gaters chose their moment of translation to coincide with
the coming of an eclipse and a comet, just before the end of the millennium.
Their departure was part of a celestial event seen through earth-centered
astronomy/ astrology. As above, so below. Their timing corresponds to
several levels of anthropomorphic reality. It’s a slap in the face of current
scientific blindness and so-called “pragmatic” reality. It is a deliberate return
to the oldest level of human understanding. It is fitting that this grasping at
the primordial straw of mythic reality accompany the fall of human
civilization on earth. And since it is the nature of man to ignore what he does
not want to know, government agencies will inevitably attempt to criminalize
such groups. And since it is also the nature of man to forget what he fears,
there will be more and more such lemming runs to remind us, as the
millennium scythe swings closer. And, lest we unwrap ourselves immodestly in
too zealous avoidance of Nostradamian vaticination, they may continue for
some time even after the year 2000 has passed, in reaction to the ever-
increasing crescendo of disappointments in the over-heralded age to come.

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Suicides are not just escapees, they are also self-sacrifices acting as
warning signs.

Reply to comments reacting to the preceding in an

article entitled “BEGGING THE QUESTION”
The quoted [reduced font size] portions below are the comments; unquoted plain
text portions are my reply to them.

In reference to the title of [the commentor's] opus: One thing that Xtians like to
do more than anything else is to steal the weapons of their attackers. [He] uses
the phrase "begging the question" because he has heard that used against his
outmoded belief-system so many times that he thinks he knows what it means.
"Straw man" and "You can't have it both ways" are other favorite Xtian thefts.
Indeed, Xtianity doesn't stop there – the entire dogma is lifted from pagan
sources. Xtianity should be renamed "Kleptomania."

"In GoF 85 Mr. Rehmus lets loose with a bilious attack on the goodness of God. My
duty is to answer."

My duty is to block [his] duty. The "goodness" of god (I assume he means

Ialdaboath, the Creator) – is highly debatable, class. What kind of monster
would deliberately create plague, ebola and mad cow disease? I refrain from
including AIDS, since that particular disease is more likely to be of human origin
than, say, ebola is. What sick mind would deliberately invent an Eden in which
all life can exist only by eating other life? What fool would design a paradise that
has a poisonous snake in it that is capable of destroying the whole thing by
perverting one of its more powerful inhabitants?

"1) Suicide is usually a sin, because it irrevocably rejects God's precious gift of life.
What is so evil is not the acceptance of death – we should all accept death eventually
– but the attempt to unlive life. Not the end of life, but the erasure of it."

People who condemn suicides should be ashamed of themselves. Condemning an

act of courage is worse than cowardice. I love the way religious fanatics
invariably make virtues of their own vices and call true morality immoral. That
way they can avoid the commandments to forgive others and boost their egos at
the same time. Dr. Kevorkian, like all saints, is painted as a villain because he
has the courage that religious fanatics always envy. What is so precious about
life? The earth is swarming with babies. They are not even worth the proverbial
dime a dozen. Life becomes cheaper every day. And who says life is a "gift"? I
got here by outswimming my fellow spermatozoa, not through grace but by dint
of hard work, which in my ignorance I assumed to be the thing to do. Had I
known what this place was like, I would not have bothered. I agree that once
here we must make the best of it, but I'm not so perfect that I can condemn some
poor slob who can't bear his suffering in this world. I have every intention of
living until the end of my life, but I would hardly reject suicide if my existence
suddenly became hopeless. The only thing that would stop me would be my own

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cowardice. [The commentor] should do some homework: "sin" is a translation of

Greek Harmatia, meaning "missing the mark", as an archer with a faulty aim
might do. In other words how can there be sin if there is no intent? Therefore to
reject "god's precious gift of life" is an act of rebellion or redemption, not sin.
One might also ask if suicide be such a sin, what about the Crucifiction? It could
easily have been avoided! And doesn't Christ himself suggest that you should
lose your life in order to find it?

"Having children and affirming the meaning of life go hand in hand. Rehmus's
contempt for childbearing is baseless, hence contemptible."

Contemptible perhaps, in [his] opinion, but hardly baseless. Of course people

who have children think that is the entire meaning of life. They are so puffed up
with ego and selfishness that they cannot imagine any other meaning for life than
an endless treadmill to support their second-rate immortality. Parents care
nothing for the world, never try to see the real purpose of life, hate freedom and
ignore all the truly valuable things – they have committed a form of suicide of
their own, and vicariously use their children to live the lives they had not the
talent, imagination or guts to live for themselves. By the way, how come Jesus
didn't breed? He apparently didn't agree with [the commentor's] fantasy.
Jesus’s affirmation of the meaning of life must be contemptible since he had no
children.

"There is no endless anthill of middle class mediocrity. The middle class has a thick
web of a wide variety of voluntary organizations such as Prometheus. It is socialism
that is an anthill."

Really? So the actual purpose of Prometheus is to defend middle class mediocrity

and condemn socialism? If that is the case then it's a good thing some of us are
here to question that policy!

"I don't believe in objective reality. God is the touchstone of reality. To God and God
only appearance and reality are the same. And God is an impassioned god. There is
no consensus reality. If every human who ever lived viewed things one way and God
another God would be right and the humans mistaken."

I don’t believe in objective reality either – how does the rest follow? Who needs
an "impassioned god"? Is that why the world is so crazy?

"Removing one's genitals is indecent. The technology we left on the moon was not
garbage. Just whom have we offended by leaving junk on the moon? What is the
point of calling it garbage? Hopefully someday soon we will leave more junk on the
moon."

What does the indecency of castration have to do with [the commentor's]

compulsion to leave garbage strewn around him? Before I forget, I wish [he]
would read what I write instead of reacting to it. I never said I "liked"
castration, for instance, I merely attempted to explain why the Heaven's Gaters
castrated themselves. So why the gratuitous ad hominem insinuation that I
should castrate myself too? Is the lawyer to go to jail with his client? By the way,

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it is curious to me that religious fanatics fail to see the irony in their love of
castration as an antidote for sexual deviation. Of course sterilization or tubal
ligation constitute another matter altogether – I would be happy to submit to
that if I thought it was necessary to prevent myself from some sick compulsion to
"parent". But because of my well-known and proud rejection of god-given
orders to "be fruitful & multiply", I'll stick by the first part of that and ignore
the second. You'd think he’d be grateful!

"13) Newborns do not scream, they cry. I for one want every one of them, and so does
God. Call me a saint, using that word in a bad way. I want them anyway."

If this is such a wonderful world, why is crying the first thing that babies do and
the prevailing thing thereafter? I seriously doubt that anyone but [he] himself,
and that especially includes his dubious god, would go so far as to call him a
"saint". So he wants every born baby does he? Why? So he can support and
raise them personally – or so that he can heap his contempt and sadism on them
after they grow up? What makes a baby more important than an adult, in the
first place? Don't tell me the future! Nobody today gives a rat's patoot for the
future! All anybody cares about is building a space ship to escape from this hell-
hole. The only thing that people hope for is some superior alien civilization to
come down & save them from their nose-dive into entropy, meaninglessness and
extinction – that or that double misnomer "Second Coming"! [The
commentor’s] babies can take their pick. What a legacy! The breeders must be
proud of themselves.

"10) I say the human race has the wisdom and courage to continue its growth.
Everyone is born with two hands but only one mouth. And the human brain is proving
to be the greatest natural resource ever seen on earth. We need more of them."

I say cancer and fungus also have the wisdom and courage to continue their
growth. What makes [him] think, though, that another billion people on earth
are going to add more brains to the bank? Western Civ. Has been declining since
the beginning of the Xtian error. All the human brain has really produced in
abundance is machinery. Never mind Michelangelo – what you see every day is
Toyota and Lexia, not art. Never mind Mozart – what you actually have to listen
to is noise.

"Next Mr. Rehmus lapses into pure blasphemy. I am not going to try to shut his
mouth the way the Iranians might. I am just going to hold him in the contempt he
deserves."

Thanks, but for my part I wish it were possible to shut [the commentor's] self-
righteous trap. I don’t have to go to Iran for censorship – his reaction is
tantamount to censorship. Contempt for ideas other than their own is what
makes Iran what it is. And it is that kind of righteousness that is leading America
in the same direction.

"There is no such thing as a life not worth living."

Good! I'm glad to hear that my wickedness has some value after all!

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Response to letter to the Editor of one of Ed’s journals

[Images were taken directly from Ed’s response page.]

Sept. 22, 1991

Dear Lucy,

I have never advocated that mothers murder their young and I should
have thought an intelligent person such as yourself would have recognized that it
was because of such obvious nonsense that I printed [a Prometheus member]'s
letter in the first place. I assumed he had condemned himself by his own words.
I certainly didn't expect anyone to take him seriously, much less condemn me
because of his absurd remarks. Moreover, it's a bit exasperating of you to refer
to an embryo or zygote as a "child", since a child is by definition post partem.

In any case, there's little point in arguing about abortion with a

mother of ten and it vexes me enormously that you've forced me into doing such
a useless thing. I will answer by first suggesting that further communication
between us on this matter is inadvisable.

Obviously, it's no man's business forcing a woman to undergo an

unwanted pregnancy and birth, but it's certainly everyone's duty to speak up for
the right of any individual to refuse to suffer unwanted and unneeded invasions
of the body! I do not own any women (as you seem to suggest by saying "So, let
your women abort their children, but...etc.") In fact I am celibate (i. e., I do not
engage in sexual intercourse with anyone) and my concern is social, not personal.
I have never impregnated anyone.

Unneeded? I'm sorry to mince words. I'm confident that you are able
to provide your children with a maximum of love, individual attention, health
care and education. I'm sure that you've thought long and hard about the kind
of world you can expect your progeny to inherit. But here before me is a news

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photograph of a pregnant woman and her starving children in a hideously

overcrowded environment. The world is choking to death with five going on six
billion people - in a decade or so it will be seven or eight billion and there is no
end in sight. Meanwhile most of the forests and large mammals of the earth of
our grandfathers are gone forever.

I'm relieved to learn that you don't actually advocate making abortion
illegal. But since you consider abortion to be a form of murder, then you should
at least be advocating sterilization and homosexuality as preferable alternatives.
Undoubtedly, you yourself are a concerned person, but I've noticed that many
right-to-lifers care very little about any life beyond embryos and infants. Most
of them, for instance, approve of the death penalty and have little time or
attention to spare on adult issues such as opposing military build-up. Moreover,
they have so little real concern for mature life that they have been known to
bomb clinics. Though you are an exception, you still need to be careful about
priorities.

And in fact, there's more than one way to commit murder. Abortion
is preferable to helping degrade the quality of life on this planet to such a degree
that thousands of adults are driven to suicide and millions more are unable to
earn a living or obtain proper medical treatment. Isn't helping to create an
excessively crowded world a form of murder? And when they are the result of
human overbreeding, starvation and disease are worse than guns or knives. One
needs to stand back from mere biology at times and ask what life is for, because
if it simply "is", then its increase has no value and "life becomes cheap."

Your argument that all life has a right to be born and multiply applies
to the bacilli of cholera and typhus just as well. It applies to rats and lice. They
are life too, after all. And if all life has a right on this planet, then what of the
snow leopard and the redwood tree? What right do human beings in their greed
for more room, have to destroy everything that stands in the way of their
incessant reproduction? If man were truly a higher form of life he would not
destroy other highly evolved forms of life so ruthlessly. Whales and elephants
who are demonstrably as intelligent as man, don't do it.

I trust that some of your ten children are adopted, in which case you
deserve respect and praise. If, however, they are all your genetic children, then
you have forfeited any right to criticize those who abort their own embryos.
Since you have contributed your share to the crowding of the earth, you've made
your biological point. It is now your moral duty to remain silent as others
advocate living without reproducing themselves.

Here's to a happier future with fewer people and fewer cars, and more
trees and animals in it.

Ave atque vale,

Romulus
[nom de plume Ed employed
as editor of the journal]

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Letter to the Editor of Vidya

(Journal of the Triple Nine Society)
Dear Editor:

In Vidya number 106, [an author] comes to the quite sensible and common
conclusion that the most important type of intelligence is that which "enables
one to endure in the environment in which be finds himself. to reproduce, to
nurture that offspring...etc" and decides further that "the competitive world
cares only whether our lineage endures."

It is the very inevitability of these conclusions, however, that I would like to

question.
In the first place, the desire to reproduce oneself as the key to immortality is
based on the erroneous belief that the individual in the animal kingdom is
integrally separated and isolated from his species and that evolution is based on
survival of the most aggressive in eternal competition rather than being a joint
project of communal endeavor.

In the second place, man is not by any means governed by Nature. What most
makes us human is our UNnatural longing to live by ideals rather than to remain
governed by our instinct and our greater happiness when self-determining than
when nature-driven. Perhaps it should be historical purpose, and not biological
indolence, that should more consciously be shaping our destiny in 1990.

In the third place, is it really "intelligent" to place the good of the self above the
good of all? What merely enhances the individual has never been the primary
basis of morality. Must it take the survival of some monstrous individual in
opposition to the good of the human race and human society to prove that
reproduction is nothing more than enslavement to the demands of DNA - that
we serve but as links in its dubious eternal chain while ignoring the higher
wisdom of the collective racial mind? If the goals of one's genes are more
important than the goals of one's individual intelligence, perhaps there's not that
much of value for the genes to perpetuate.

In the fourth place there are now millions of breeder of demonstrably lowgrade
intelligence who are blessed with awesome fertility and who somehow even
manage to nurture their ubiquitous spawn through to maturity on very low
incomes - or even without incomes, on welfare. There are also those who can
afford to nurture their offspring by means of wealth acquired not through
brains, brawn or charity, but simply through inheritance.

In the fifth place, we should question whether intelligence should be defined as

that which equates us with the hardiest of nonhuman creatures, such as the rat
and the mosquito, while ignoring obviously wore noble but precarious biological
achievements such as the African elephant, the snow tiger, the great blue whale
and the California redwood. By "survival of the fittest" standards, the worst

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survive while the best go under. At the risk of seeming disloyal to my species,
how can I countenance reproduction without eugenics merely because it is
human?

In the sixth place, survival is not the same thing as happiness. Is it intelligent to
desire survival in a condition of unalterable misery? Should not the elimination
of evil be the first consideration of human life, rather than simply the
establishment of one's permanent seed? In many philosophies (Buddhism,
Gnosticism, etc.) this world is seen as a place of ineradicable sorrow and the
Void is to be preferred to existence. It is the position of many wise philosophers
that this world as created is imperfect and requires improvement and
transcendence rather than any further mindless multiplication of life. I question
the the wisdom (and the love!) of any parent who would bring still another
unwelcome child into the population- and pollution-riddled world of the last
decade of the 20th Century.

In the seventh place, we can be certain of nothing. If it is true, as the

Manichaeans believed, that this world was created by an evil Demiurge, rather
than by a benevolent God, life may well be an unwanted anomaly, a fulminani
disease. One could then, with equal vehemence, suggest that Death, not Life, is
the thtng that matters most. In that case, the forces in this world that are
breeding us into disaster and fomenting the crassest selfishness on an
increasingly global scale represent nothing less than the determination of the
collective unconscious, the shadow side of mankind, to guarantee that ultimate
nihilistic orgasm we call extinction.

E. E. Rehmus

Excerpt from another of Ed’s editorials

It doesn't do any good just to kill people indiscriminately. What
they always avoid saying in these things, though, if you're serious, is that the only
effective way to get rid of man (or reduce his numbers to a few millions of
hunters and gatherers) is through birth control. Sterilization. Put something into
the drinking water.

An amicus curiae says that what is needed is some chemical that

kicks in after the first pregnancy and induces instant and permanent menopause.
The old pre-Judaic idea of sacrifice of the first-born isn't a bad idea either.
Teaches people that reproduction should not come first.

You can still say that one venerable, old redwood tree is equal to a
thousand lumberjacks and their li'l wifies plus 3.2 kiddies each. They can be
replaced, the redwood cannot. And, yes, the real enemy of our time is Disney,
another eco-destroyer. They want to destroy more precious shoreline to build a
new Disneyworld – as if one isn't a strong enough emetic for anyone.

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Re: The Pragmatic Value of Optimism

Oh Christ – Must we now defend the necessity for pessimism? Let [the
author] read Schopenhauer! A social point of view need not have anything to do
with one's personal lifestyle or private interests. Prozac indeed! I wager my
private life is a helluva lot more interesting and rewarding than [the author’s].
Why are people so stubborn about recognizing that optimism does nothing to
change the world and is invariably the laziest attitude one can adopt? By all
means, let's just accept all the evils of the world and devote ourselves to feasting
while others starve. Let's dance on the graves of the unfortunate and revel in our
freedom while others are incarcerated. Add another wall to your castle to keep
out the homeless. Be mindless and enjoy yourself!
The company of happy idiots may have some passing charm, but it's hardly
a pastime to be so all-fired proud of.

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What Price Engineers?

It's true that a sufficiently advanced technological system is
indistinguishable from magick. In fact that's precisely why so many technerds
read Aleister Crowley and study the Qabalah, Voodoo, etc. Not the legerdemain
stage illusion of Blackstone and Houdini, mind you, but the real thing!
Magicians, however – be advised – who do rituals and cast spells but never
expose themselves to philosophy, are little more than lowlife sorcerers.
Fred Vaughan asks concerning [a participant’s] comments, “Should we
worry about our wild ass thoughts that could soon have immediate dire
consequences? When do we become the least significant aspect of the ‘fuzzy
logic’ circuits of the overall system? Those with high IQs would be sought after
more for their low 'inspection times' as indicated in issue #83 by Fred Britton
than their ‘compatible uniqueness’ discussed by [another participant]. Maybe
we should pass laws that restrict such inventions unless approved by political
bodies endowed with grander perspectives.” I wish I understood what Britton
means by “low inspection times” and what [the other participant] means by
“compatible uniqueness.” After reading their articles I find my perception too
dull and my compatibility too un-unique to understand word one of what they
are talking about, least of all their connection to David Jones’s questions.
At any rate, laws that restrict invention are a bad idea. In fact, most laws
are a bad idea. Laws intended to disempower bullies usually wind up hurting
the vulnerable. It's what people are most likely to do with it that makes an
invention good or bad, not the noble perspectives of political bodies. Obviously
guns are bad, because their sole purpose is to injure or kill. But most things
have more dimension than simple murder. Why do we fear cloning so much?
Because obviously it would fall immediately into the hands of opportunists and
egomaniacs before anyone else could do a double take! Being a swinish
materialistic society which cravenly and stupidly ignores all spiritual values and
intelligent insight, it's that climate that has permitted the mediocre and the
marketers amongst us to turn TV into an eternal yammering and boring sales
pitch. It's the corrupt automotive industrialists who tore up the rail tracks,
destroyed the cities and turned America into a river of speeding beetles silently
going nowhere. Its the Christians and the breeders, fearful of the filth that
produced their precious brats being discovered, who will turn the Internet into
an arm of Disneyworld. Knowing all this, the average person goes along with
what the corporations and the mainstream want because he too is corrupt and
hopes the corporations will somehow, through some miracle, confer omnipotence
and immortality on his own second-rate self. After all, that would only be fair.
As for Ion encephalography, all right. So it's the natural evolutionary
grandchild of the EEG. I don't see why it’s any “scarier” to control a machine
by thought waves instead of by a keyboard. After all, whether directed by mind,
push button or ouija board, it's still the machine that is doing its stuff. If an
inadvertent daydream should set off a nuclear explosion, I wouldn’t blame the
daydream. It would be more interesting to be able to interface without headsets
and wires – in fact, it's time we got away from wires altogether. The only thing
keeping us plugged into the wall socket world, is General Electric.

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SENTENTIAE ANTIQUAE
Since Burroughs and Ginsburg are dead and Vonnegut is 73 and making
noises about having nothing further to say, I have little excuse at my mere 68
years not to put in my 2 cents in what's left of the literary world. My efforts in
the past may have been haphazard and minuscule, but I do have criticisms yet
to voice about this sorry world, even though my New Year's resolution was not
to complain. Increasing laziness (why should I be different from everyone else
today?) inhibits me from actively seeking publishers, so Gift of Fire has to take
the brunt.

Every day I scan the financial pages for ups and downs of the stock
market, not because I would be caught dead owning such a thing as a share in
some hateful corporation, but because financial collapse is the only thing that
will save us. At least it's the only thing that will break the back of the Far
Right that is so rigidly controlling our lives nowadays. I used to be an
ordinary Democrat, now I'm leaning farther to the left than ever (and I'm not
the only one as the poor become further divided from the rich). If you want to
know, I'm voting Socialist henceforth, since we're wasting our votes on
Republicans and Democrats anyway.

But this month I don't want to talk about politics or religion (or about sex,
for that matter). I want to talk about Latin (and the need for a return to
classical studies).

As we plunge into the past – which is the direction that time always takes
us, not into the future, mind you, as we have for so long been seduced into
believing is the proper direction to take – we notice with increasing delight that
things become not merely stranger and more complicated than we might have
imagined, but they also become more interesting, more rewarding, more
comfortable and human. And by "things" I don't just mean ideas and
insights, much less mere words in so-called dead languages, but the whole of
ancient civilization itself upon whose model we would do well to rebuild.

Nec sequitur sit, cui cor sapiat, ei non sapiat palatus. – Cicero

(Nor does it follow that what the mind savors, the palate may not also).

There is a saying by Horace "Insani sapiens nomen ferat" Are crazy

people who call themselves "Napoleon" or "Jesus Christ" perhaps only acting
out Horace's observation that a wise man might bear the name of a lunatic?
Because the reverse is inevitable: a fool may bear the name of a wise man. In
schizophrenic super logic it is obvious that I am not Napoleon and to call
myself Napoleon would clearly mark me as being silly, in which case I would
actually be giving myself a fool's designation and therefore must be wise after
all. It might even, in fact, somehow turn me into a kind of Napoleon, should I
so call myself, because the choice of a name more or less reflects our inner
nature to some degree. A writer, in fact, in forming the characters of his
stories, is acting out these parts of himself (or these parts of all of us) to some

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purpose and perhaps that is what Horace meant by saying "Scribendi recte
sapere est principium et fons," ("to appreciate writing correctly is the
beginning and fountain-head") although that may not be what Schopenhauer
intended in his essay on Style, wherein he quotes that line of Horace's. In fact
that's not even the proper translation as we shall see presently.

Latin is difficult to translate, especially out of context (and who today

takes the trouble to learn how to read ancient literature at all, much less in its
original tongue?) because we think so differently and because we use different
words to express our thoughts. So words like sapere (to be wise), cor (the
heart) or insanus (unsound) lead us in directions not intended by the classics.
To take but one example, cor/cordis means "the heart" or the "seat of the
emotions" or "judgment" or "the mind." Well! What is the modern reader to
make of this word "heart", since thinking and feeling are so rigidly opposed to
one another in our minds now?

Schopenhauer translates Horace's maxim as "Good sense is the source and

origin of good style". Sapere to him means "good sense" – that is, a writer
should have good taste, which consists in having something to say and saying it
simply without resorting to unnecessarily long and highfaluting words that
merely look erudite. But sapere literally means to savor or to sip, or to taste
with the tongue. Let's remember that the tongue is also the origin of language
and it's not too far from smelling and tasting the flavor of food and drink to
the savoring of words. But by Schopenhauer's time, sapere no longer has the
direct connection to tasting that it did in Horace's day and is closer to the
usage of sapere, "to be wise". Homo sapiens is no longer the "tasteful" or
"discriminating" man (unlike Cheetah the chimpanzee, or Dunstan the
orangutan), but the much less explicit, mere "wise" man. That was the
"honest man" that Diogenes was looking for – not some lame ass who paid his
taxes on time and never told a lie to his boss. Diogenes didn't even use the
word "honest". He just said he was looking for a man, i.e. a mensch. Good
luck!

Well, everything is connected. In thumbing through my Latin Dictionary

I ran across the phrase Aegyptum profiscamur cognoscendae antiquitatis ("Let
us set out for Egypt to study old times"). That translation doesn't go very far,
however, towards reflecting the Latin's more ancient overtones. Profiscor
means literally to "make oneself forward". To the Romans there was still a
sense of that older meaning, to lean in a forward direction, not necessarily to
proceed over land and sea. And to me "forward" means back towards our
origins, not seeking to materialize some Nazi-like future Disneyland. And
cognosco literally means to "become acquainted with," whereas studeo
("study") means to devote oneself eagerly, to be zealous, to strive to know, in
other words a student is a person who works with some gusto and eagerness, in
the way that we might study a map when we are lost, actively tracing out this
line and that, testing and weighing the best direction to take. But today when
a college student studies his textbook, the essential ingredient, eagerness, is
often completely absent so that his learning is superficial and disconnected. He
may even learn his lesson "by heart" which doesn't mean learning by one's
whole understanding, but merely by rote, like a parrot.

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At any rate, we are going to Egypt, which is a strange country, with whose
antiquities we are not acquainted, so we shall need to "study" them if we are to
become familiar with them. And why, by the way, Egypt in the first place?
Because for Greece and Rome that was their history and origin, as for us the
Greeks and Romans are our history and origin. In other words, Egypt is no
arbitrary choice.

Think for a moment. The future does not exist, but the past certainly
does! Its monuments and ruins lie everywhere around us, however much we
may try to erase them or write over them. It's true, we fall away from the
past, like facing backwards on a train, but the present is new and confusing,
whereas the distance clarifies things wonderfully. Isn't it rather foolish of us
to confer such immense importance on, say, new inventions and discoveries,
when we have seen so often how fraudulent technology is and how seldom it
lives up to its promises? The monuments, however, by which are indicated not
just tombs and pyramids, but works of art, philosophies, great ideas – such
enduring things were meant to be markers and guidelines.

Yes, I know you've heard all that before. Well, now you've heard it again.
Sorry I don't have more strings on my bow.
e.e. rehmus

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Sick of the Millennium?

It's Not Even Here Yet!

During the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, José Argüelles reminded us of

the Mayan calendar's ending in 2013 and how the world was entering the
nadir of hell over the next 25 years. The Hindus also tell us about the horrors
of the Kali Yuga and the hideous end of the world in our time. As early as
1922 Yeats penned his immortal ode "The Second Coming" in which he
described the Millennium as a time when "the centre cannot hold" and "the
best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Well, but 1987 was also the year of the Literary "Brat Pack" (the
highbrow version of the even more insipid Hollywood Brat Pack), the year
when writers of short stories for The New Yorker were all twenty year olds
and products of Harvard and Yale workshops, where the Humanities were no
longer considered relevant. They harped incessantly, with more hype and
promotion than talent, on the search for "permanent relationships" and the
problem of"an inability to communicate". They felt that the recounting of
consumer items was the equivalent of writing about events or character. It
was also about then that every woman decided she had to be pregnant, even if
she was fifty years old or a lesbian - no problem at all for Superwoman, who
was also expected to be a "man" at the same time. "Labor" on two fronts!

Meanwhile the yuppies are still among us, with a bottle of Evian
apparently grafted onto every manicured hand, with Aspen and Tahoe setting
the standards of taste and value. What? You haven't gone skiing yet? It only
costs a few thousand dollars per week-end!

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At the lower end of the social scale, since formerly long hair had been
associated with those who believed in things like integration, tolerance towards
others, etc., the young neo-Nazis shaved their heads to proclaim their disbelief
in the Holocaust and their hatred of negroes and homosexuals. Then, in
reaction and in an effort to defuse the skinheads, young blacks, jews and
homosexuals also shaved their heads. Thus punk was born. So now everyone
looks like a convict.

If all this sounds to you more like today than the climate a decade ago,
you're not out of date. The fashion these days is to avoid the perils of new
trends. Not entirely because no one has either the courage or the imagination
to think up anything original or socially desirable, but also because there are
more powerful forces for repression today. So we're stuck with the plastic-
surgery-enforced face of the last fad, that of the late 1980's, forever.

Although Groening's The Simpsons was originally called "Life in Hell", if

you remember, the networks could hardly permit that, so over the years it's
been reworked, censored and bowdlerized by the network corporation and by
mothers hysterical over the possibility that their babies of virgin birth may see
or hear something unconventional or truthful, until it's all but antiseptic and
only Homer's greed and sloth are problems. And actually you might not think
we are in hell to look at the crimeless and silent streets of early 1998 (everyone
is in prison!). There are no visible guillotines or instruments of torture. There
are no Hitlers (unless you count certain Muslim leaders or the Disney
corporation) and no wars (apart from the occasional massacre in Africa or
Asia). But when you find yourself in gridlock on the freeway or trying to find
something to watch on TV during those long three-day weekends with nothing
to do but watch football games, you get a momentary flash of hell. You might
notice in passing how we, both sexes, have somehow been forced into a
uniform: second-hand jeans or work pants, t shirt with some advertisement on
it, Adidas, baseball cap. These are clearly slave uniforms. Orwell's 1984 has
finally arrived (complete with the Anti-Sex League, rechristened "The Right to
Life" and "Safe Sex" and "Nanny Watch").

Of course you have enough to eat (for the time being), but so does a
hamster in a cage. There is more than one circle of hell. Not everything is a
lake of fire. There are also the frozen areas. And Hell is also Death. We live in
a kind of cemetary, because the only things that stir us are the nostalic ghosts
of yesteryear. We were much more alive in 1908, 1938, 1968 than we are in
'98! Those generations lived at the exciting edge of chaos and creativity, not at
the dead end of a butterflyless cocoon. And was there ever a time when so
many things were against the law? Jonathan Swift writes about the laws of
Lilliput. It was against the law to break an egg at the larger end, for instance.
Swift should have lived in our time. I'll bet he could have listed a thousand
burdens on us in the here and real that make egg-breaking laws look positively
humane and sensible. Woe, for example, unto anyone caught smoking or
being overweight or yelling at their spoiled brats! On the other hand, if
you're hoping for calendar reform, or for the end of the tyranny of daylight

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saving or for the phasing out of meaningless holidays like Independence Day
or Christmas you have the right to remain silent or the freedom of prayer.

Terence McKenna's timescape which also places the end of time in the
second decade of the 21st Century explains that as we repeat the cycles of
history they don't become increasingly dramatic, but in fact more shallow and
trivialized. It's rather like the replication of body cells, clones, repeated tape
recordings or holographic fragments which become fuzzier and less robust
with repetition or miniaturization. So if 1998 is the repetition of the cycle
characterized by the 15th Century we have John Glenn returning to the Moon
(nothing is weird!) instead of Columbus returning to the New World, the
Internet standing in for the printing press, Princess Di's martyrdom replacing
that of Joan of Arc, etc. We can expect '99, with its rerun of the 16th Century,
to be even less rewarding. The second-rate is followed by the tenth-rate and so
on ad infinitum.

We're not even through half the hell cycle yet, the ugly part follows the
boring part.

"Not with a bang, but a whimper."

– E.E. Rehmus

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The Book Worm

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Sex in Our Time

clip art that
There is a "phallacy" that homosexuality in seemed
the male is the same as homosexuality in the appropriate to
female. Since men and women are different, it the editor
stands to reason that their notions of sex are
bound to be different from one another. Since
I'm not a woman, I can't speak for them. At
any rate, even if one were neither gay nor strait,
but simply engaged in homosexual or
heterosexual acts, the motivation behind such
behavior would still be a mystery. Let's not
confuse obsession with affection. Sex is, for the
individual, a kind of fetish, whereas love is
something else, more interesting, perhaps, but
less mysterious. Libido fit, not nascitur.

Jonathan Katz ("The Invention of Homosexuality") shows how

heterosexuality and homosexuality are modern terms without meaning to the
people of ancient history – such as the Greeks, from whom we stole the words to
pervert into our own terms. I wonder how many readers remember that Zeus
and Hercules had male lovers whose names are even recorded (Sargent –
Homosexuality in Greek Myth). Even the first Israelis must have felt that men
sleeping with men was common enough or old Jehovah wouldn't have
mentioned it as an "abomination". The truth is totally heterosexual men are
rare and the only way you can spot them is by the fact that they don't care. The
militant anti-gay had better watch their step – they might as well carry a sign
that says "Please catch me when I fall!" But if Heterosexuality is an invention,
Homosexuality is an even newer one.

Timetable (observe the dates and wording carefully):

1870 "Heterosexuality" coined as a perversion by the medical establishment.

1909 Websters: "Homosexuality: a morbid sexual passion for one of the same
sex."

1923 Websters: "Heterosexuality: a morbid sexual passion for one of the

opposite sex."

1934 Websters: "Heterosexuality: sexual passion for one of the opposite sex;
normal sexuality."

1934 Websters: "Homosexuality: eroticism for one of the same sex."

The attitudes that created these words are responsible for the sexual
excesses of bourgeois heteros in the 20's in reaction to previous Victorian
repressions. So now, the hets being liberated, could start seriously to make

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scapegoats of homos in order to rid themselves of any lingering, nasty feelings of

guilt.

James M. Cain (Serenade): "There is always somewhere a homosexual who

can wear down the resistance of the normal man by knowing which buttons to
push." Baldwin: "Strait cats invent faggots so they can sleep with them, without
becoming faggots themselves." (In other words, overt male homosexuals are
called faggots because other men need them).

If het and hom are invented modern words, so is the word sex itself (apart
from its ordinary meaning of "gender"). As the Greeks did not mean what we
mean by past and future, neither had they words for exclusively male love and
exclusively female love – and sex was not generalized. There was synousya,
synousiasia [vunouv`ua, vunouv`iavia]] "copulation" and thelasmos [qhlavm`os]
"fellatio"] but these were not confined to either gender. There was probably no
term for the Latin cunnilingus in Greek, since that was merely a sexual act of a
necessary nature to "lesbians" (though Lesbians, for the Greeks, were simply
inhabitants of Lesbos, as Dorians were inhabitants of Sparta). The important
distinction to the Greeks was between active and passive eros, erotastes [ ]`erws,
`erwt`avths] and eromenes (fem. eromene) [ ] erwmenos (f. er`wm`enh)]
respectively (e.g. lover and beloved) and erotike xytychia [ ] erwtik`h xuntuc`ia]
or love affair was an "erotic occasion or shared, common expression," without
gender implication.

For the Greeks, sex was merely whatever action (oral, anal, vaginal, phallic)
that occurs normally between people who desire one another. Our notions of
promiscuity and chastity were shared with the ancients but again not gender
specific -- except that the object of love should properly not cheapen himself or
herself by unseemly attention-getting provocation. A prostitute of either gender
did not aspire to the ideals of heroic erotic status. Conjugal sex was not
governed by desire but by a sense of duty -- to produce heirs and progeny and to
raise them in a nurturing household. Marriage was thus a contract devoid of
romantic attachment. Moreover, the household was the province of women.

Katz asks why we assume heterosexuality to be more natural than

homosexuality. Why should a desire to keep company with one's own sex in
preference to being with the opposite sex be such a suspicious thing? What do I
have in common with women who want to go shopping or talk about babies?
What woman, other than Demi Moore, really wants to join the Marines? Why,
Katz asks again, is deriving pleasure from dressing as one's own sex more
natural than wearing clothes of the opposite? (Today women routinely dress as
men and in ancient times both genders wore robes, gowns, skirts and togas).
Frankly, trousers are miserable things to wear unless you're riding a horse or
doing very active work, or you have to be out in the wind -- or unless you want
to advertise your anatomy. I wear a caftan at home and recommend it to other
men if they want to be comfortable. It doesn't have to have patterns of daisies
and daffodils on it. It can be plain gray or brown, without ruffles. Who cares?

Dr. James Kiernan (1892) referred to heterosexuality as a disorder in which

there was a desire between two different sexes (bisexual cross transference) –

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“psychical hermaphroditism”. One wants to "become" the other, to put it

crudely. This desire entailed inappropriate expression (such as avoiding
reproduction and other abnormal methods of gratification). Homosexuality was
merely the general mental state of one's own gender. In other words, any sex act
not procreatively based, was considered abnormal. A perversion of instinct.
Medicine was sought as a cure for nonprocreative desire.

The early Victorians were romanticists who allowed sex between lovers as
an expression of love, but disapproved of mere "sensuality." The middle-class
trying to separate itself from upper and lower classes, finally invented heterosex.
"Purity" means sex grounded in love, not absence of sex altogether. Female
prostitutes degraded love, but men who slept with men for money were not a
threat to the romantic love of man and woman. Essentially, love did not include
eros, except as a danger to purity. Passion meant "romantic love". Hence, same
sex friendships could be seen as pure and not necessarily involving the sensuous.
Intercourse was the taboo, not other expressions of love. In the late 19th Century
the term "hetero" meant excessive degeneracy in sex and expression. Homosex
was considered a weaker drive, hence less important. But almost at once, hetero
now meant normal and homo abnormal.

Freud managed to legitimize heterosexuality. The idea was that the dangers
of heterosexuality may result in homosexuality. One is afraid of the former and
so turns to the latter. The truth is that pubertal minds are often traumatized by
the facts of life and that actually liberates repressed homosexuality. Freud seems
to have missed that.

I suppose I should have predicted it ten years ago when every woman under
fifty on the street was pregnant. Because as recently as that they still hadn't
started censoring movies on TV -- blipping the four-letter words and rating
them for parental guidance. Now those brats are starting to reach the age of
curiosity and their parents are terrified they will discover their lustful origins.
They tried censoring the Internet. That didn't work, so they turned to programs
like Nannywatch and Kidstop to keep the little rugrats from accessing the
"adult" sites. Ironically, these parental controls may bar kids from some
pornographic sites, but the sites they are barred from are mostly posed models,
clean cut, perfunctorily "artistic," sterile and far from prurient. The real stuff
is and always has been underground and the underground is always accessible if
you are determined enough to find it. Of course, in our tightly controlled 90's
heaven, the police have been actively seeking to destroy the underground. They
should know about the Hydra of old. Chop off one head and ten (or 100? I
forget) new ones grow in place. Trouble with censorship is it always starts with
"protecting" children from the evils of sex. Of course all that does is create a
generation of victorian-like prudes with unconscious ids full of repressed
perversions from foot fetishism to Jack the Ripper. But it doesn't stop there.
After children comes the "protection" of adults. Pretty soon censorship and
control creep into libraries and schools, into Law and Medicine. This is fascistic
mind-control.

Middle-class, middle-minded, mediocre Amerikkka with its slavish Xtianity

and addiction to Spartan team sports and fitness soon becomes completely

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stultified until you can't hold a proper conversation because everyone is afraid
to say anything controversial, politically dangerous or "intellectual", until a
cigarette smoker or drinker of black coffee might as well be on heroin or
cocaine, until you are confronted by "security" at every picnic or excursion,
until you can't find a toilet when you are afoot in the city, until everyone is in
prison. I wonder how many men nowadays are afraid to smile at a woman or to
pay her a compliment lest they be hauled into court.

The worst of it is that this pattern has been repeated monotonously forever,
as each generation blithely ignores the lessons of history. First comes sexual
license and orgiastic letting go (the 20's or the 60's, for instance) which is the
reaction to former repression. Then comes the detumescent aftermath, a
puritanical post-coital depression now thrusted upon society at large. This is
followed again by another sexual explosion, another repression, another
rebellion, ad infinitum. You have to have lived through 3 or more generations in
order to assess this stupid pattern properly. It doesn't happen the same way
each time, nor does it fall neatly into decades or clear-cut categories. You simply
observe that it's there. And of course anyone who has lived through these waves
of history soon finds them as nauseating as any waves rocking any ship. As
Lilian Hellman said of the MaCarthy hearings – "I don't intend to change my
politics as if it were a new dress fashion." (or words to that effect).

Human beings, like

all animals, don't really
like change or new things.
Once we finally settle into
a rut, we want to stay
there. We start out by
ignoring a new fad,
hoping it will go away.
Then we become annoyed
by it and angry. At last
we end up having to
accept the change and
adapt to it. This is the
real reason so many
people refuse to be
shocked or outraged by
Clinton's sex life. We're
starting to get tired of
being harassed by the
media. And we're weary
of having forever to
question our sexual mores
and attitudes.

Why can't we just be

normal and natural – like
the Greeks!

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"Dorians Stand up for Dignity!"

This question of using the right name always seems so trivial and
unimportant to those who are not involved. Whether Negroes are called "black"
or "colored" is of little consequence to whites. But it matters a good deal to Afro-
Americans. The same is true of nationalities -- the Chinese don't want to be
called "chinks" and the French don't want to be called "frogs", though everyone
else wonders what the fuss is about. But at least these people have proper,
respectful names to start with. In the case of male homosexuals, the case is much
worse. Apart from the cumbersome and clinical "male homosexual" there is no
decent word to describe such a man. "Gay" is a non-descriptive word without
dignity. It derives from 19th Century British slang to describe female prostitutes.

Let us refrain from the obnoxious practice of using "normal" to refer to

heterosexual and "abnormal" to homosexual. The Ancient Greeks would have
found that point of view to be not altogether natural and amongst the primitive
men of New Guinea a man would be ostracized who did not take part in ritual
homosexuality. Exposure to prisons and battlefields tends to put things in a
different light, as well, though admittedly those are abnormal social contexts.
And anyone can see the sexual element in boxing and wrestling. Male bonding,
which everyone finds quite natural, is a form of mild homosexuality in itself. Not
everything between men has to come down to physical contact, however.

In any case, we need a word without pre-conceived, negative

associations. "Gay" is hardly suitable as a word to describe today's martyrs who
are still routinely persecuted and subject to the ravages of a terrible plague.

"Dorian" was, I believe, the word chosen by Andre Gide as the male counterpart
of the female "Lesbian" -- originally an inhabitant of the Ancient Greek island
of Lesbos. In Gide's day, unfortunately (or fortunately) there wasn't that much
occasion, outside of the underground itself, to refer to our saintly crew. Doris,
however, was one of the four main divisions of ancient Greece and Dorian was a
non-standard, but legitimate, dialect of the Greek language, recognized by its
broad vowel sounds, like Scottish. The Doric style of architecture was
characterized by simplicity and solidity.

Up until WWII, Dorians were in an even worse position than they

are today. They had no name for themselves at all except for terms straight out
of the gutter. It took an entire generation of homosexuals battling for the use of
the word "gay" to establish even that meager beach head amongst the hets. But
it was a choice born of desperation. Not everyone had read Andre Gide, and
"gay" was only one syllable. It was the only straw to respectability that was near
enough for grabbing. But it was a costly mistake. And it's time now to correct
that mistake and move forward.

It really is too bad about people being upset by a Dorian parade on

St. Patrick's Day, that it ruins it for them, etc. It never occurs to them that some
people who are not Irish might find an entire day devoted to the Irish to be kind
of an insult. How come there isn't a Beethoven's Day? Or a Picasso Day? Why

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must it be Catholic and Irish and heterosexual? One of the reasons for
homosexual parades is not just that a lot of transvestites want to wear women's
clothes (which some Dorians themselves might find offensive) and act silly, but
that it's time the hets learned that it's not just their world and it's not "business
as usual" we're after. Many Dorians still believe that AIDS was somehow
engineered -- paranoid though some might diagnose that belief to be -- and they
are as angry about that and other injustices as Negroes and Jews are about the
things that have been done to them more openly.

At any rate, since the word "gay" is almost as degrading &

obnoxious as the other unflattering names, I personally, henceforth, am going to
start using this stronger and more affirmative word "Dorian" to signify "male
homosexual". Those who wish to help in the campaign have only to begin with
their own speech by substituting this more elegant and appropriate word in
place of "Gay." Let the English language regain its old usage of gay to mean
"happy" or "merry".

And leave us with dignity in its place.

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Spotlight on Sodomy
Activist Frank Kameny has lately been quixotically tweaking the state of
Virginia's anti-sodomy laws. Kameny is a hero, to be sure, -- we should all do
more tweaking. But the real news is that there is actually a state in this country
that still punishes people for crimes against nature. Never mind the tautology
involved in the unnatural concept of a law against something that is against
something that is against something.

The average dim-witted breeder who wouldn't acknowledge an unnatural

urge if it bit his ass along with his near-relation, the "traditional American
Puritan" who believes that any overt expression of any indecency deserves the
Thunderbolt of the Lord, this archaic pair of fools, whose existence far too long
has been tolerated by sensible grown-ups in this country, had better have a care.
Sodomy is about to become a topic of daytime talk-shows, if not a theme of
nursery school programs. It's about to become the password that opens our
computers, the word that spells out in our alphabet soup and the standard that
makes increasing sense in a crowded world.

There is a lady in my building who is enraged that Clinton "lied to the

Grand Jury" and she says that the president is guilty of "moral turpitude". She
is also one of those people who doesn't watch movies because there are too many
actresses in Hollywood who are "bad ladies" and she finds my mustache and
goatee disgusting because secondary sexual characteristics are an insult to
middle class convention. Such a person is blithely unaware of the fact that her
highly personal and idiosyncratic reactions amount themselves to an obvious
sexual display of their own. Methinks the Lady doth protest to the point of
wearing a sign.

It's for her and her kind that we need to examine this word more closely and
slowly, lingering over the very details that so allegedly offend. Technically
sodomy is the introduction of the penis into any other opening than the female
vagina. Thus stands revealed all at once the deliberate and willful nature of this
practice. It is in fact a rebellion. A rebellion, of course, against breeding. This is
the highest crime in the roster of the Catholic Church. Far worse than rape and
murder is abortion! Far worse than knife or gun is the condom! Even the
wasted seed upon the ground is an abomination to God. Well! It's bad enough to
have impious desires and worse to act out such lusts. But how infinitely more
evil it is to stand apart and confront God belligerently, as Lucifer did. You are
forgiven if you sin and then apologize. But if you are bent on advocating sin,
then you are damned. So be it.

At any rate, the reproductive organs were designed by God for the express
purpose of procreation. Therefore, any use that obviates or hinders that purpose
is evil. I realize that it would be unrealistic to expect my parents to see how
sodomy is superior to natural coitus, but...

If the average, normal man's entire reason for existence is to raise a family
and to immortalize himself by grandchildren then the average man deserves his

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miserable life. Women, of course, have no other function than to serve as child-
bearers, but a man ought to want to be more than a breeder and he should want
to leave his mark on the world in some unique fashion of his own. A society that
places children above everything else, indeed that believes there is no other
purpose in life than being a parent, is a society on the road to hell.
In this month's Atlantic there is an article on the new germ theory that heart
disease, cancer, etc. are not inherited failings but are probably of viral origin.
Why? Because if they were genetic defects they would, according to the way
evolution and genetics work, long since have bred themselves out of existence.
Anti-survival tendencies have no place in the genetic agenda. The article even
suggests that homosexuality may be of viral origin! (It's anti-reproductive, after
all). So we've come full circle at last - back to homosexuality as a disease. I was
wondering how long it would take the timorous heteros to return to the comfort
and safety of their beloved old mental block.

It seems not to occur to ordinary minds that the human cerebral and
emotional functions may have their own agenda too and that agenda may be
totally at variance with genetic goals. Or are we to return to that other tiresome,
old idea that we are but machines à la B.F. Skinner or mere predestined slaves of
a limited Deity and we not only may not but are unable to "go against Nature"?
Is it possible that NOT generating progeny is more intelligent than grinding out
sausages? What if man should voluntarily give up reproduction and allow his
species to wane and fade away? Would that be so terrible, after all? The planet
might actually heal itself.

Why is immortality so wonderful? In fact it is not wonderful at all.

Well, what exactly, according to the Bible, happened in Sodom, anyway?

It's not very clear. Some messengers went into a house with some citizens of
Sodom. It's interesting that the Hebrew word "sodom" (meaning homosexual) is
related to the word sod, meaning "secret." Well, let's face it, the only reason it's
"secret" is that straits are afraid to ruminate over the details. More interesting
is the turning of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. (<SODIUM?) Salt is the physical
body. Presumably, when the soul and spirit have been eaten away by sin, all
that's left is the unwanted, corruptible flesh -- salt being the entropic ultimate.
And if one is moving out of corruption, then to look back at it is tantamount to
yielding to temptation. But the body, let's face it, is LIFE and don't we revere
Life? Why shouldn't we look back on Sodom?

Kenneth Grant, who is a heterosexual pervert of a particularly nasty stripe,

has written many books about satanic sex. In one of them, The Nightside of
Eden, he contrasts a dark, twisted tarot symbolism for the usual Tarot deck.
Thus Justice is Injustice, the Sun is a Phallus, The Magician is a clumsy Ape, and
so on. When he comes to trump 13, which in the normal Tarot is Death, he
assigns that to Sodomy. For him sex is definitely tied to reproduction and he
gives elaborate instructions for creating a "moon-child", that is to say, an
impregnated demon. So the Gnostics, Albigensians, Cathari and other early
Xtians who believed that procreation was a horrible sin would have found in
Grant the apotheosis of their despair. Since the Albigensians and Cathari,
however, were massacred by the Church in the 13th Century, the opposite view

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has been promulgated ever since -- the view that the world is a happy and
beautiful place and the making of children is an honor and a duty. You need to
know that in order to understand why Grant, for all his heterosexuality,
strangely, does not exude an odor of sanctity -- on the contrary, his sexuality
makes even straits feel considerably uneasy. Well, now you know why. The
proper deviant should be a sodomite, not a breeder! When a breeder stands
revealed as a shameful villain, that comes a little too close for comfort -- all of a
sudden the Virgin becomes a harlot after all and the Holy Spirit little more than
a sordid itch.

The Pope is coming to the Americas in order to pave the way for the next
two thousand years of the Church. The Pope ought to read the Bible. The reign
of Christ is over. And it's time the Right-to-Lifers were declared an illegal
religion.

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The Art of Instruction

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LETTER TO A PRISON INMATE

Dear N,
Yes, this world is an illusion, but just as sometimes in dreams a desperate
line of events may turn into a nightmare, so sometimes the worldly illusion also
becomes a trap and as the only escape from a nightmare is to wake up, so the
only escape from certain waking nightmares (terrible situations) is to wake up
(that is, to die). The clever dreamer, however can alter a nightmare in keeping
with his imagination and thereby prevail and become a hero and by the same
token the clever waking person can alter the nature of the trap or terrible
situation by means of his will, so that waking up in the one case, and dying in the
other may not be necessary. The stage magician shows us that apparent miracles
are merely the result of sleight of hand and clever backstage tricks. Likewise the
real magician learns to use a kind of sleight of mind and hyperreal
manipulations behind the scenes. There is, as you know, a supernatural world.
There is also a subnatural world -- that is to say, we inhabit three worlds at the
same time: subnatural, natural and supernatural. The so-called natural world is
what we call the realm of solid facts, science and objective reality. But this is
merely the front of the stage where the illusion takes place, manifests itself and
has its materiality. Every material event is the final product of prior non-
material (spiritual, mental) forces. By controlling the mental forces behind
matter, the magician may or may not change the face of reality, but he can
certainly change its direction and meaning – aspects of far greater importance
than merely the shape or color or sound of a thing.
Now when you say, that you want to be able to walk through a physical wall,
you're talking about an event in the natural world. There is absolutely no way
that you can walk through a physical wall without using some physical force,
such as an axe. Nor can you remove the real wall by any mental act of the will or
spirit. This is a fact of the material world that you cannot wish away or ignore.
And yet every physical object has more than three dimensions. It has, in fact, an
infinite number of dimensions. Its fourth dimension is its passage through time,
its fifth dimension is its movement through the higher continuum and so on.
Therefore, you have many choices in dealing with a material object. In the case
of the wall, for instance, you can simply await the passing of time until the wall
eventually disintegrates. This is not, of course, a viable option in most cases,
since that may take hundreds of years in the physical or natural sphere. But the
wall also exists on other levels of being or potential being – the entry into which
must remain a subject for higher understanding. Suffice to say, in some other
realms, the existence or non-existence of the wall is of no importance because you
travel by different means. On the Astral Plane, for instance, objects are built out
of pure imagination and to pass through a wall, all you need to do is push it aside
as if it were a door. For most individuals, however, the Astral Plane is attained
only upon completion of this earthly life. There are also parallel worlds in which
reality is slightly different from the reality of this world. Eventually you may
learn to SEE in new ways that will open them to you.
After all, the important thing is not the wall that confronts you, but what lies
on the other side of it. So that is where your thinking should be directed. What
is it exactly that you want on the other side and why do you want it? Don’t

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dismiss that question too lightly – careful thinking may reveal important clues to
you. It may even provide the key that unlocks the hidden door!
You say that you want to become my Adept. I must warn you, however, that
an Adept is a very advanced degree. You are, at this point, merely a pupil. If
one struggles very hard and is very lucky one may finally become an Adept at
the end of one's life, when one is, in fact, near death. Moreover, I can do
nothing. Your success or failure is your own piece of work. All I can do is offer
a few crumbs of advice along the way and since I am already quite old there will
be only a short time in which I can provide even that little help. And finally, I
have to tell you, that I myself am no Adept but only a minor acolyte. The place
you are contemplating is extremely vast – its mountains are topless and its
valleys bottomless. Madness lurks in its shadows and Confusion swirls in its
illuminations. Here all movement is inner – there is little that is visible to the
world. If you are looking for fame or fortune or pleasure, go make a pact with
the Devil, for he is the lord of this earth. I am not of this earth and I work no
miracles on this plane. You must learn to recognize a wise man by his ragged
appearance and despised circumstances, not by his automobile or his fancy
clothes or the number of people who bow before him.
And there is no easy path to Adepthood - do not be drawn into religion! You
are the only God there is. It is we who created ourselves and we who will destroy
ourselves.
This brings me to your second question, why and how this world will shortly
end and why you feel this in your bones. Out in the world today ordinary people
are secretly very much afraid, because they sense this too. They have engaged in
a flood of procreation, producing as many children as they can – which is part of
the blind instinct of self-preservation. In the same way, when a plant feels
crowded or in dangerous circumstances, it tends to produce flowers (the sex
organs of plants) in order to send forth seeds. Similarly, hanged men get
erections and ejaculate as they die. Even a cockroach will eject its eggs when it is
stepped on!
Recently, someone on the Internet (no, not me!) sent forth the following e-
mail message (here slightly edited) to a large number of people:

“This world is hell – whoever doubts that is a fool. The so-called

"gift" of life is a participation in a system wherein survival means
devouring other living beings. Here the strong displace the weak, the fit
replace the unfit. In this realm any apparent beauty or happiness
quickly degenerates into rubbish. The greatest and only crime is to
perpetuate this dung heap of a corrupt Demon's creation through the
slime that is commonly and stupidly worshiped as Procreation. The
Demon's sole intention and hellish purpose for inventing the pleasure
instinct is to ensure the continuation of mindless reproduction.
Therefore, the institutions of family, monogamy, morality and romantic
love ought to be brought down and subverted by turning the sexual
instinct against that goal. Sex ought to free itself to serve its own ends,
for its own sake, dedicated solely to Filth & Perversion of all kinds and
to all extremes. The penis should override any attempt to control,
inhibit or disguise itself. It should constantly liberate and exhibit itself
as the only thing of value – not for its power to inseminate, but strictly
for the pleasure it provides. It should engage in any and every kind of

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action or passing fancy that crosses its path, no matter what the
consequences may be. And since it is already degrading to be the slave
of animal lust, it is only fitting that everyone abandon himself to the
lowest levels of filth continuously and dedicate himself body and soul to
the corruption that is his destiny. “

Since, however, man is afraid of death he dare not abandon his one hope of
survival -- survival through his offspring. But, alas, by falling into the hideous
trap of reproduction, he is hastening the end of the world by overpopulating
himself, thus polluting the elements and destroying his environment! Now, in a
desperate state, he turns to the Bible and discovers therein that the Demon he
calls God says to Adam: Be fruitful and multiply! This makes him easier in his
mind and in an effort to please this Entity, he turns to rigorous discipline (chiefly
imposed on others). You may not smoke, you may not engage in extra-marital
sex, you may not take drugs, you may not work privately – the only thing you
may do (indeed, MUST do) is raise a family!
Into this climate of things, time passes from the old Piscean Age to the new
Aquarian Age, the millennium. And with the coming of the millennium comes
the end of the Age of Christ. Again, people are fearful – afraid of the Final
Judgment. If Christ returns, he who did NOT reproduce, they will be revealed
as failures and sinners, therefore they hope that if they repent in time, they will
be saved. The four last things, the things brought by the four horsemen of the
Apocalypse are hinted at: Famine (the number of poor people increases every day
as fewer and fewer become rich), Pestilence (not just AIDS, but all the bio-
warfare agents that are yet to come), War (when the economy of the world
collapses, the wars will come) and Death (when the resources of the world dry
up, mankind will die). We see these things clearly, as in a mirror. Religion now
replaces government and slavery for all ensues.
People know very well what they are doing, they just don’t allow themselves
to see things consciously. The sad thing, however, is not that the world is dying,
but that it is dying so badly and with such bad grace. The end should be noble,
not degenerated. For millions of years, Evolution struggled to produce
intelligence and higher being – yet at its very beginning the higher beings began
to fall, until all traces of the struggle (the plants and animals) have been wiped
out. All written history has likewise been erased or rewritten. The only thing that
remains is a pitiful wreck. You may think that if death comes to all, then it
makes no difference what we do while we are alive. But that is incorrect. Life
and death are a wheel, and what has been returns. If no effort is made to
improve things, they will only worsen until at the next return the world is in yet
a lower place in Hell.
Think! All you know is being and existence. You have existed throughout
eternity. You know nothing of Non-existence and Non-Being. The two kingdoms
– being and non-being – have no connection to one another. So when the world
ends you will not know it. You will always be alive. As the world has always been
alive, Death is not the thing to fear – the thing to fear is the return to existence,
but if the human race disappears
you may be fortunate enough to find some other plane of reality to return to.
Alchemists base their immortality not in this world but in a realm beyond being,
beyond men, beyond Gods.
As always, [E. E., the Editor presumes]

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FUMUS IGNEM PROBAT

What got into issue #96? Is this the kind of moralistic, nebbish nineties' pap
we are to expect now of prometheans? Prometheus was a hero, rebel and martyr
– not an obeyer of rules. It's ironic that prometheans should feel driven to make
superior little coughs at the slightest hint of smoke in the air.

What annoys me most about non-smokers is that most of them have cars and
pollute the atmosphere a thousand times over what I do. How much lung cancer
is the result of breathing in gasoline exhaust over the years? When will Chevron
and Standard Oil be investigated and taken to the courts by the moribund, bent
on locating any culprit for what they have brought on themselves?

I'm sorry, but Steve [one of the two individual]'s goody-good attacks on
smoking infuriated me. What meager courage it takes to express popular
sentiment! How easy it is to say to everyone, "Hey look at me! See how obedient
I am!" How did the world so suddenly get overtaken so totally by constipated
xtian family values? It's as if there is to be no more freedom, artistic expression,
philosophical exploration or experimental lifestyle. No sickness and no spirit
either. Yep, this is a democracy, all right, which is another way of saying a
society with no sense of style and no class. Since when should the purpose of the
human race be narrowed down to the lowest biological urge of boring self-
preservation, money-grubbing and procreation? If these are the interests of
middle class unimaginative nothings – so be it, but why must everyone else
conform to the useless folkways of these parfaits? What makes them believe that
it is so all-fired important for them to live their long empty lives and to
immortalize their mediocre genes in progeny? Why does the voice of the average
speak with such authority these days?

There's a self-righteous quality to the attitudes of non-smokers today that is

increasingly strident and repulsive. It smacks of our old American predilection
for puritanism. That's why smoking is not an issue in Europe or other cultured
and sophisticated centers – because Europeans (forget the British: Britain is
America's whore) aren't moralistic puritans and don't believe in controlling
every single aspect of human behavior. (Curious, isn't it? Why do France and
Holland and Denmark have such low crime rates?) I wonder why so many
Americans are compelled to tell others what they may or may not do. I wonder
why, despite their vaunted Christianity, they do not remember "Judge not, lest
ye be judged." Why do so many fairly ache to jump on anyone accused of any
crime or even any tiny social breach, like a pack of hounds on a bewildered fox?
No wonder children are shooting one another – there's no sense of proportion
and it's all the same, whether you won't eat your brocolli or whether you kill
someone. People are afraid to spank their kids, but avid to gauge out the eyes of
some unfortunate miscreant.

All right, so here is a relentless and remorseless murderer. Do we really

need to spit out our hatred with such venom? Why not simply execute him for
the protection of society? But no! After shouting our anger and outrage, we
then have to argue about whether he's sane enough or old enough to appreciate

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why he is being punished and so we wind up supporting him in prison for years
instead. At least we should make up our minds. But, on the other hand, how
smugly we incarcerate users or dealers in drugs and with such evil joy! We
don't care about the druggie's civil rights because he's nothing but a human
reject. It must make the good, xtian, law-abiding breeders of this country feel
absolutely wonderful to be able to condemn someone without fear of being
criticized for doing it.

So smoking is now a sign of lack of intelligence and poverty, is it? I wonder

how it can be poverty, when the poor are now obliged to shell out up to three
dollars for a pack of fags. If it's lower class to smoke cigarettes, isn't it upper
class to join a cigar club? As for smoking being a token of lowered I.Q., that's
really flawed thinking. I.Q. measures intellectual capacity, not motivation nor
how we choose to prioritize. It amazes me that people think they know what
"smart" means. They assume, first of all, that "smart" means survival skills.
All I have to say about that is that the victims of Auschwitz who survived know
that cleverness was not the only thing that got them through. First of all was the
DESIRE and DETERMINATION to survive. And of course the next question is,
survive for what?

But think! What good is a fireman, warrior, doctor or the like if he puts his
own safety before his task? What good is any life, for that matter, that doesn't
take chances? Why do you suppose baby birds are kicked out of their nests
when it's time to fly? Is it stupid to climb mountains or to travel in dangerous
machines to other planets? It must be, according to this bogus logic, because
people sometimes die in terrible accidents.

How many times do I have to say it before it finally sinks in? All nature is
based on habit. All animals are addictive. Man is no exception. If you are not
addicted to drugs, alcohol, caffeine or tobacco you are probably addicted to
over-eating or sex. And if you're not addicted to those things either and don't
bite your nails or hum incessantly, your habits are hidden and insidious and
sooner or later bound to get on the nerves of others. These are the kinds of
people, after having been cut up by their spouses with a butcher knife, of whom
the neighbors say that they were so nice and everyone thought so highly of them,
how could there be any reason for such a nasty crime. Nice, eh? I'll bet.

Addictions don't have to provide us with rushes or euphorias. The

satisfaction of giving in to a craving is sufficiently gratifying in itself. It's the
basis of the pleasure principle, like drinking a glass of water when you are
thirsty. Pleasure, however, is anathema to puritans, who believe that guilt is the
keystone of life. Have a care, now: those who have been denied pleasure or who
suffer from guilt inevitably assuage their repressed desires with a vengeance!
They chain smoke. They get gloriously drunk. They eat until they put on fifty
pounds. They become lecherous orgiasts. Is there any end to the list of the sins
of the flesh? The bible says with hapax legomenon grammar that the wages of
sin is death. Which is opportunistic and gratuitous of that sly tome. After all,
doesn't everyone die anyway, with or without sin? And, by the way, whether
they smoke or not?

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Look, smokers have never been in the dark about the effects of their habit.
Cigarettes have been called "coffin nails" since the middle of the 19th Century.
It's only because the fad of suing everyone took hold about thirty years ago that
suddenly people started saying that they had been misled and seduced by the
tobacco companies. Well, now that smoking is so gleefully persecuted in this
country, the government need no longer waste any time or money regulating and
investigating what new poisons these corporations may now freely add to their
product.

During the half-decade that I was a non-smoker I noticed that I caught colds
more often, suffered from sore throats, coughing and vocal failures and frailties.
After I began smoking again, and my lungs and tubes were once again coated
with protective tars, these afflictions vanished. It's my contention that people
who have smoked for many years are far more likely to develop lung or larynx
cancer when they quit than those who continue for their entire lives without
interruption.

When I had to have extensive reconstructive surgery because of skin cancer,

the result of youthful belief in the healthiness of excessive sunlight exacerbated
by years of diagnostic incompetence on the part of the medical profession, my
lips at one point were sewn together for six weeks. I decided, induced by doctors,
that this was a good head start on quitting smoking. For about five years
thereafter nary a gasper appeared in my hand. Then the hype began and it was
becoming more and more fashionable for people to go along with the forbidding
of smoking in restaurants, trains, airplanes, theaters and finally bars. Where
formerly everyone had been a smoker, suddenly nobody was. Or so one would
be led to believe.

That's when I began to take up the habit again. I found it obnoxious to be

commanded to alter my behavior according to the latest fashion of control. It
had been my own decision to quit and it would be my own decision if I started
again. I decided that having smoked for thirty odd years prior to the
moratorium there seemed to be little point in tobacco abstinence for me. At first
I had decided I would wait until I was 70 before I would start again, but the
world being what it is, who knows how sure of achieving the biblical allotment
one can ever be? About this time a friend of mine died of lung cancer - one
friend, mind you, out of hundreds of other friends, all of whom are smokers. I
should point out, however, that he had not only smoked cigarettes for years but
also chain-smoked marijuana (probably, for all we know, loaded with paraquat,
the government spray intended to punish dopers). He also had worked for
decades in a stuffy office without ventilation and was not partial to outdoor
sports or activities, so his lungs seldom got aired out by the good, clean winds off
San Francisco Bay. I understand, though, that the once numerous ninety-year-
olds and centenarians in San Francisco are declining in number recently because
of increased automobile traffic and smog. The point is, this friend of mine
insisted that he wanted me to smoke around him in his last days. He didn't wave
his hands fussily in front of his face like some old woman as if I was trying to
show a lack of consideration.

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At any rate I took up smoking again for many reasons. Somehow In the
same issue of Gift of Fire there's a book review about sensitivity by Elaine Aron
that seems curiously related to the question. She seems to believe that there are
universal criteria for sensitivity, such as aversions to loud noises or bad smells.
But what she's really describing is what we used to call the neurasthenic
personality. Sensitivity isn't a mark of intelligence, it's a mark of individual
finickiness. Nobody likes to listen to jackhammers or sniff the release of a sulfur
factory or wear scratchy wool clothing next to his skin. The well-adjusted,
cultivated person, however, endures the inevitable without complaining. But
Aron doesn't mention real sensitivity, like refusing to listen to the contemptible
racket of contemporary pop music or refusing to eat micro-wave TV dinners.
There the truly healthy personality has an obligation NOT to politely refrain
from comment. So is frowning on smoking purely a question of health or is it
really a fad?

Well, you may

wonder, along with
virtuous and saintly
Leslie Stahl on 60
Minutes, why every-
one in the movies
smokes. The reason
is hardly mysterious.
Artists don't get off
on catering to Puri-
tans. If they did
they'd be preachers
and right wing politi--
cians. If you don't
like seeing Johnny
Depp or Humphrey
Bogart with a despic-
able cigarette hanging
out of their mouths,
then go watch Disney.
It's what you deserve.

Rhinectomy
a drawing by Ed Rehmus ©1970
“This drawing was executed in 1970 as an idle doodle. Unconsciously, after
plastic surgery following rhinectomy in 1985 I doodled again while Dr. Jones and
my lawyer discussed malpractice of previous doctors. But it was now a
meaningless doodle that I showed to Dr. Jones and he was much disappointed in
me. (Perhaps it was not meaningless – perhaps it was another prophetic drawing
that I threw away.)” – an entry in Ed Rehmus’s journal for June 11, 1991

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 E. E. Rehmus

This drawing of Ed’s

pretty well depicts what
happened to his leg
some 40 years later.

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 E. E. Rehmus

Telepathy* 1962
Telepathy does exist, and its explanation
is so simple as to astound. The understanding
of it begins truly at the moment of death or
sleep. It is in the unconscious mind.
We share all thought, literally and
already. Difference of experience creates an
imagined gulf between us. Voices whisper
sentencelessly through the dark corridors.
Turn on a light and they scatter like nocturnal
insects. To glimpse the tail of one can be
absolutely terrifying. The insane are locked in
this confused whirl, amid the roaring voices.
Two strangers sit down next to one
another in a cafe, their minds buzzing with
separate conscious thoughts. They notice one
another and smile -- each knows the other is
married and lonely for his wife. One is lonely
because his wife is on a trip. The other is
lonely because he is a widower. "You seem
lonely," says the widower. "Not at all," says
the other, "I am waiting for my wife." They
Ed Rehmus (in 1955)
never know their minds had met.
Two children are playing. A ball is coming towards them. It is a many-
colored ball. "Catch it!" cries one. The other reaches for it as it bursts. They
awaken – ashamed.
The audience sits in a theater spell-bound by the scene before them. When
the actress speaks, all lips move inaudibly. When the actor suffers, all muscles
tense imperceptibly. Then a new face looms out of the screen, grows larger, and
the lips open on a scream: "It is you!"
It is raining. The clock ticks. I am leaning on my elbow. The wind blows
through the cracks. The door rattles in its frame. My arm is tired of staying in
one position. There is a pressure on the wrist. My temple burns on one side. I
wonder what will happen next. Someone laughs. If he had heard the rain, the
clock, and the door, he would have kept silent. Had I been laughing, I would not
have heard these things.
Gaze into a cat's eye or a gorilla's. You will notice a peculiar thing that will
make you shudder. Sometimes cats claw at human eyes. Sometimes gorillas
enrage.

*
Editor’s note:
The editor and his wife had occasion to discuss this article and associated phenomena
recently after each had (once again) simultaneously had the very same thought and had
begun telling it to the other. This is not a synchronicity of the Twilight Zone variety mind
you; it’s just what people intimately entwined emotionally experience fairly frequently!
Let’s not become so sophisticated that we ignore such joyous common everyday facts.

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Telepathy and death are wound inextricably together. To see why this is so,
you must understand consciousness. When, late at night in your bed, you hear a
distant automobile, you and the driver are parts of yourself. When you speak,
you are alone and the listener is both you and himself. Two men, one on the
mountain and the other in the village, cannot communicate. Each is looking into
a mirror. Wave, and he waves -- shout, and he replies. All of us see the same
moon and feel the same heartbeat, but we can never admit it. One says the moon
is a pale disc, another that it is a satellite of the Earth, a third that it is a silver
world. My heart thumps, yours clatters, and his booms. Consciousness is
distortion.
But much telepathy passes unnoticed. Dogs in the night, a dream of Mabel,
Dr. Rhines' dice games -- these are self-conscious tricks that mean nothing. What
of the more obvious examples? You know when another is lying. You know who
is going down the stair. You know emotion without seeing it. You know the
intelligence of others. Some sign gives them away. It is coincidence? Guessing
games again? Then think of what you could not possibly know, what no one
could tell you. Is there any doubt you do not know that fellow on the gibbet or
the thought of that girl on the stake? Watch someone die and you may read his
mind at ease.
You need not go so far. We human beings understand one another better
than we think. Argue, deny, shout, denounce, destroy. Nothing alters truth. You,
reader, see my flaws and concentrate on them. You wonder why I choose this
word and not that.
My arguments are weak and you can drum up stronger ones against them.
But we are eye to eye for all of that.

I am a fool and you are wise,

You and I know the sun will rise!

Stop it. What do you mean? I don't like it. What is it? And all these fears
prevent us from speaking without words. Men are most conscious. They are
alone in the world. The responsibility is great. Whom could we talk with if all
minds were one? We would be alone and too conscious.
Now, in schizophrenia, where the symbol is taken for the object, telepathy is
relatively simpler. That is, it involves not merely communication of a verbal
nature between people, but subverbal or superverbal interconnection between all
things. Thus, the objects in a room, strut-noises, animals, and one's food are all
parts of the general interconnection and equal in the content of their meaning.
The trouble is that schizophrenes are usually less intelligent than others, and
therefore misunderstand what is happening. They use psychosis as a retreat
from the world. Intelligent schizophrenes, of whom many achieve fame, know
full well what the truth is.
It is just as in the formula for making oneself invisible: Make sure you are
not merely making yourself invisible to yourself! In mind-reading, make sure the
voices in your head are not your own.

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Modern and Post-Modern

Roller-Coaster Art
There's a nifty screensaver called Eclipse, which instead of flying toasters or
bouncing bubbles, employs any number of pics from your own private collection.
In an effort to find some surcease from the incessant bombardment of unwanted
images and trivial information, I turned to Bryan Yoder's art page. The best
antidote for 90's malaise is Maxfield Parrish. Parrish died in the 1960's at the age
of 90, in an era when his pictures were sneered at for being unfashionably
"square" and kitschish. Today, they look more like fabulous but impassible
portals into a world we ache to reinhabit, as tantalizing as the doorway into the
garden that Alice was too big to enter. And so, as I say, I trudged over to Yoder's
page (http://www.primenet.com/~byoder/artofetc.htm) to download one or two of
those inimitable sunrises and sylvan idylls. It was well worth even the labor of
operating a browser that moves with the torpidity of a tractor clogged with mud.
By now, we're all weary of reciting the litany of how civilization has been, from
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, sliding downward into technology,
mercantilism and overpopulation, but of course we're mostly nauseated by the
20th Century since that is where we live. And to look at the history of our
century's art is to watch the descent pick up speed with every decade. It doesn't
just plummet. It bangs and explodes and clatters as it tumbles, like garbage down
a chute. At any rate, Yoder certainly agrees that the Titanic is sinking and the
Hindenberg is burning and along with his beloved Maxfield Parrish paintings, he
also has, at the same time, some very acerbic criticisms of less gifted 20th Century
artists. The criticisms aren't verbal, the pictures speak for themselves. I'm in
absolute accord with him that the "paintings" of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) are
unmitigated puke. I also agree that 99% (or more) of Picasso is mere doodling.
Mondrian's rectangles might make interesting wallpaper and Kandinsky's efforts
(he died in 1940) might serve as catchy wrapping paper. Mark Rothko's "Orange
and Yellow" will do for a first grade art class to awaken children to a preference
for black and white. William de Kooning also stinks. As for Marcel Duchamp's
urinal or Gina Pane's "performance art" via self-mutilation, the less said the
more grateful we will be for our ignorance. Even the quality of cartoons was
better two or three generations ago (with the exception of a few current lights
such as Tom Tomorrow or Bizarro and the underground comics of the late
1960's). But what today compares with Little Nemo or Krazy Kat or Smokey
Stover? I'm always writing to the newspapers to print an occasional strip from
the past on their comics pages, but of course that might serve as too graphic a
reminder of our current society's failure to amuse. I gave a desk calendar of
Dilbert to a friend of mine for Christmas and in February he returned it to me,
saying it was too much trouble to tear off the pages. Humor about a piece of
software that requires meticulous typing or any error will force you to reboot
your system may be interesting and wryly appreciated, but it somehow fails to
grip you by the throat. And when it comes to animation things are even worse (as
Groening is constantly trying to tell us). Some recent European works are rather
worthwhile, but Disney's fascist alchemy and his imitators continue to transmute
all gold in America to lead. There is also poster art, which finally was legitimized
a century ago by Toulouse de Lautrec. It's sad to me that the some of the posters

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of rock bands are so magnificent, since the music to which they are supposed to
draw us is so dispiriting. Maybe the Moulin Rouge wasn't as fabulous as his
posters suggest either. And when it comes to 20th Century political posters, that's
another case of the ribbon being better than the gift. Again I disagree with Yoder
here, that the Soviet experiment was as evil as the Nazi experiment. Indeed,
contemporary Corporationism is more fascistic than ever. Stalin, of course,
perverted Marx, but it's obvious that anything requiring the control of the
selfishness of the individual calls for dictatorship. The problem is that dictators
are human and if they are strong-willed they are very often tyrannical and
arbitrary. There is some Caligula in any dictator, but the horror of Caligula was
that he came from royal blood which is supposed to be above such human failing.
Hitler and Stalin may be written off as moral mistakes since they were not of
royal lineage and had no early training in "noblesse oblige". Nevertheless there is
still something to be said for Marxism. And at least early Communism was
intended as an attempt to liberate the common soul enslaved at the bottom of
society. Nazism, however, was exactly the opposite -- the attempt to remove all
constraint from the already rich and powerful, under the pretext of bringing
people back to ancient traditional societies. So the interesting thing about Soviet
and Nazi posters is that they filled people with hope in the one case and
glamorized their lost heritage in the other. It's hard even for those of us not
involved to remain unmoved by these gut-grabbers. I don't entirely agree with
Yoder, however, that art always has to be "beautiful" or utopian. Art also has the
duty to point up the ugliness and misery and futility of the world, in the interest of
truth or serving as an alarm to peril. The key should be enlightenment, whether
that be served by means of beauty or by means of a shock to the system (a picture
of a urinal is neither an enlightenment nor a shock to the system, it's merely an
annoyance). About 30 years ago in San Francisco there was an exhibition of a
painter by name of I. Norman who had produced enormous, wall-sized pictures in
a semi-surrealist style that showed how drivers in cars are really encased in
coffins and how sitting before a movie screen is often a hypnotic onslaught of
meaninglessness. There was an odd aura of ugly beauty about those paintings and
they were done with talent and care. Unfortunately, Norman has gone down to
oblivion along with Clark's music, Philip Lamantilla's poetry and other mid-
century exceptions that were swallowed up by the bilge that the boomers
produced. The contemporary and very fashionable paintings and sculpture of
Giger are of course, evil, mean and often disgusting, but his depictions of vaguely
pornographic machines and hideous, deformed degeneracies, his halls of semi-
human, complexified columns and imprisonments of the soul are indeed Art.
They show us the world the way it really is today. His concern is the poisoning of
the earth with our insect-like breeding. One of his metal sculptures, "Newborn" is
particularly devastating and replicas of it ought to stand outside every maternity
hospital in the world. Giger is trying to show how sex and reproduction are
embedding us all into compressed scrap iron. But there is beauty-as-
enlightenment in the 90's, after all. There is little more fascinating on a computer
screen than the psychedelic creations of fractal art. Not only are they "candy for
the eye", as one says today, but they open up long boarded-up casements of the
mind. Fractal art is, in a way, the equivalent of the 19th century kaleidoscope,
except that one grows weary of a kaleidoscope after a short time. It can never
show anything beyond what its little mirrors and bits of color can shape, a fixed
polygonal symmetry. Fractals are always unique and unexpected, even though

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they may originate from a natural tripuntal hub. All you need do is snatch a tiny
segment at random and magnify it a little. Voila! Instant Art. The source of the
infinite is a point that spins into an endlessly spiraling circle, like the rings on the
surface of a pond when a pebble is dropped in. Any interruption, anomaly,
infrequency, etc. creates a fractalling branch that itself continues to spiral and is
moreover mirrored symmetrically throughout the whole. Differentiation is simply
the focussing on any portion of the whole, which has its own singular history,
dimension and shape, likewise replicated throughout. Thus, the entire plenum is
constantly expanding outward and mutating, so that any segment is quickly
separated from its parallel brothers and disappears into complexity, giving the
illusion that every event is unique. The interesting thing is that this strange self-
producing art demonstrates how Creation ex nihilo takes place, which only after a
considerable lapse of time starts to resemble chaos. It even takes God down a
notch or two, making him seem a bit less imaginative and mysterious than we had
been led to believe he was. Only fitting, since if God is man's arrogant, shameful
invention, then as man goes down to nakedness, the warts of his gods must stand
revealed as well.

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PRAGMATICS AND LOGISTICS

OF NOSTALGIA
"Well, who's the flapper in the red cloche hat, then?"
"I'm afraid I had to cheat a little on that one -- it's hard to find good
ones to fit into such little squares. It's just some ephemeral thing from
the 20's that nobody remembers now."
“And who is that character?"
"Don't you remember Pete the Tramp?"
J was complaining about some of my choices in the gunshy game I had
constructed. I figure if the younger generation can force their crappy rock bands
on us, I can provide something that my generation would appreciate. So I took
Depeche Mode and Smashing Pumpkins and replaced the icons of those obscure,
boring band members with old-time comic strip characters. I also put in new
(old) backgrounds. I'm afraid I can't do anything with the sounds. They're
written in code and Res-Edit can only do so much. I had a hella time locating an
icon for "Alice the Goon". It seems there's yet another dreary rock group called
that and poor Alice has been buried. The brats after Generation X have no idea
whence that name was filched and plundered. But then a diligent search
produced Major Hoople, so my inspiration was rekindled.
Admittedly, The Yellow Kid and Little Nemo are before even my time, but
everyone can recognize Wimpy and Krazy Kat and Dick Tracy. Dickie Dare
may be before your time, but Nancy and Sluggo are still around. If you're a real
comic strip buff, like me, you might even recognize Maggie's weird little dog.
"I see the Jeep and Mandrake the Magician, but who is this?" he asked.
"That's Mama Katzenjammer," I sighed, "Where did you spend your
childhood, in Teheran?
In case you've been busy scaling the mountains of New Guinea for the past
five years and don't know what a gunshy game is, it's a spread of tiles with

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pictures on them, usually about 36 in number, each repeated four times. The
object is to pick off any two of the same that are not bound on both sides, until
the board is cleared. As a reward a trumpet sounds and the background is
revealed.
Not as easy as it looks, but if you are satisfied with solitaire as a pastime,
you'll find this to be quite a bit more entertaining. You lose about as often as
you do in solitaire, but there is at least a little more strategy involved.
Anyway, if anybody's interested, I'll upload it as an attachment to whomever
wants to send me his e-mail address. I have a color version and a black and
white version. About half the tiles are the same and half different. The only
stipulation is that these things may not be sold. They may only be shared, traded
or sent as gifts.
Oh, yes, sorry, but this game is Mac compatible. You can try, but I'm not
sure that it will run on Windows. I can send you a gif file of the icons but it's
more fun as a game. Maybe you can paste them into whatever p.c. equivalent
you have.
If you're not keen on old-time comic strip characters, I have a set of planets
and moons of the solar system. I'm also working on an Egyptian tile set for
Shanghai, which encourages custom sets. Shanghai is more elegant because the
tiles are a little bigger and you can get more detail on them, but I'm not yet clear
on how to alter the backdrop. What is challenging about making up these sets is
that sometimes you have to redraw them to make them fit, or change their
colors. Frankly, searching the Net for pictures and designing these gunshies is
more fun for me than actually playing the games. But then I also prefer setting
crosswords and double-crostics myself to working them, so go figure.

The Gunshy Board and Tiles

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Words to the Wise

When Elizabeth the First happily announced how much she liked her new
tutor because he didn't beat her she was really just saying that he was a better
teacher. For people of ordinary intelligence, expensive teachers are a waste of
time because the only way you can make lazy louts learn anything is by rote
enforced by deprivation of privileges, ridicule and beating. Sensitivity is for the
sensitive. But under the monarchic system, if you were of royal blood you were
trained to be a leader, architect, statesman, historian, diplomat, financier, judge,
commander-in-chief and so on, with the principle of "noblesse oblige" thrown in
for good measure. So, if the young princes and princesses could not properly
answer the king when he bellowed "And what did you learn in school today?" it
was their tutor's fault and he might wind up with his head chopped off. "The
King and I" was a silly spectacle that completely missed the point of its
provenance, the book, "Anna and the King of Siam." Anna could command the
king because he recognized what a good teacher she was. A real king bows to
knowledge and intelligence. And that brings up another point, which is that
"Pygmalion" or "My Fair Lady" is not really a fairy tale, but a fable with a
lesson. Language does create character and culture. And language isn't just
pronunciation. How can you be "refined" if you don't know what "refinement"
means? To understand the word truly requires a whole way of life. The more
effort you put into such things the more the results will show. If you have taken
some pains to study Latin, your English will be that much improved and if your
English is better, your thinking will be more focused and precise. If you've also
struggled with Greek, your mind can't help but favor subtlety, elegance and
creativity.

Blacks in America, someone recently said, if they ever hope to overcome

their enslavement, had better start spending less time watching sports on T.V.
and more time learning to read and write good English. In fact, it wouldn't hurt
whites to spend less time jogging and exercising the lard off their bellies and to
put more effort into getting the lard out of their heads. People worry about the
effects of smoking on their lungs, while breathing in the same automobile fumes
that are melting the North Pole, but they never worry about the politics and
religion that are poisoning their minds far more insidiously and irrevocably. We
go to ridiculous lengths to mask our b.o. and halitosis but don't in the least mind
offending with "cool" and "basically" and "the thing is."

This is being written the week before the primaries and in California we are
being asked to vote whether or not to continue bilingual education in our public
schools. This has become an issue because the Democrats have to rely on the
support of Hispanics. The Chinese don't expect bilingual education from public
schools because they have better sense. Of course, good old Queen Bess could
speak six languages fluently (including Latin) by the time she was six, but the
official language of England was English. As we continue to map the country as
specific targets -- Chinese, Negroes, Hispanics, Jews, Women, Homosexuals, etc.
and then encourage their implosion and isolation, obviously the residue that is
finally melted down is not going to be the philosopher's stone, neither will it be
American or united. It's certainly not democracy, it's not even anarchy -- it's

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nothing at all. If you can't talk to someone you have a tendency to regard him
as slightly less than human. Worse yet, you can hardly create a vision for a
future world that doesn't encompass shared purposes. A community based on
the lowest common denominator is not likely to evolve beyond the level of an
insect colony, if indeed it can survive at all. Lincoln put it quite spookily when
he quipped, "Where there is no vision, the people perish."

The question, of course, is what the common purpose is to be. Should it be

the creation of Nietzsche's Superman? Should it be to force everyone to become
a Xtian or a Muslim? Should it be endlessly rising peaks of merchandising and
consumption? Should it be to achieve a digital paradise wherein robots do
everything and human beings just sit there waiting to be fed intravenously and
entertained through plugs in the brain? There's no possible way of determining
any goal or reason for existence so long as the levels of enlightenment in a
society are infinitely at variance and everyone is, ratlike, running in a private
tunnel. Notice, for example, how every car has a single occupant and how every
family turns its back on the world and focuses inwardly on its most important
members: its newborn (the queen and her larvae). How can such a world ever
produce a future that is not headed for deterioration or futility? Even dogs
quickly tire of chasing their own tails.

I've said it before, language is everything. The reason we tend to suffer from
constant boredom and despair is that our language now is so fascistically
influenced by technology and finance. Money and machines are not the stuff of
life. We were much better off when our minds were stuffed with natural history.
Imagine walking through the forest and knowing the names of the wildflowers
and herbs and which ones were medicinal and which ones were toxic. When you
know the reason that "dandelion" (dent de lion) is so-called because its leaves
are shaped like lion's teeth or why, in French it's called pissenlit ("piss-abed")
doesn't it immediately become more interesting? Isn't the mere word "weed"
itself intrinsically more understandable than "error # 5810"? And what do we
know of foxes and their "cleverness" or jackals and their "treacherousness"? If
you were surviving alongside crocodiles, cobras and hippopotamoi you would be
impressed by the Egyptians and their hieroglyphs. Or if you were a Hopi or an
Algonquin or a Sioux you would know an eagle or a buffalo as more than an
image on a logo.

Instead, what occupies our minds is reading the license plate on the car
ahead of us, or watching a commercial about an insurance company, or having
to stand in line at some bureaucratic office with nothing to look at but other
bored, dispirited victims. Conversations are in numbers: what's the number of
your computer? What's your credit card number? What's your telephone
number? What's your social security number? What's the number of days in the
year that the stock market reached the highest numbers? What's your prison
inmate number? Press Zero if you don't know or care and wake me at 12.

– Rehmus

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Heaven and Hell, and Who Cares?

I used to wonder why it is that Xtianity, intolerance and fascism are so inevitably
drawn together – the same is obviously true of Islam, but since we do not live in
an Islamic state, I can't pretend to analyze that particular brand of anti-human
fecal matter. At any rate, in the United States, at least, it's axiomatic that
economic conservatism, repressive legislation and Fundamental Protestantism
(the most virulent form of the Xtian superstition) are exact equivalents.

As I say, I used to wonder about all this, but I wonder no longer. From one of
the pornographic sites on the web I recently obtained a picture of a young man,
resembling conventional notions of how Jesus should look, bound to a cross.
Half a dozen other young men, in 90's style anti-fashion clothing, surround him,
one of whom is caressing his leg. Rather mild as pornography goes, but the
suggestion is clear. Jesus is a sexual masochist and his worshippers are sexual
sadists – and homosexual, to boot. (Pardon the pun, but boots are mandatory
fetishes for sadists). Gay men are a thorn in the conservative world's side,
because they're always coming up with disturbing stuff like this. And
incidentally, this kind of picture is why the net is so constantly in danger of
censorship. If you are free to talk dirty and to show dirty pictures, you're liable
to move on to more interesting areas such as religion and politics. Why, the
whole infra-structure of society might be called into question! Too much liberty
spells trouble for the status quo.

And what is this status quo that is so important to preserve at any price,
including human enslavement? We'll get to that very shortly, since it's the
climax of this little rant.

What's so depraved about Contempo-Xtianity is that the original "Prince of

Peace" was supposed consistently to have preached poverty, forgiveness and
charity. Since, however, Xtianity and Humanity in our time are exact opposites,
it's clear that modern Xtians are simply not Xtians at all, but instead are
mountebanks, opportunists, psychopaths and sadists. There's not a little sexual
degeneracy involved in it as well – hidden, but there all the same. The actual
logistics of sadism are simple. The desire of sadism is to inflict punishment and
pain, but punishment brings empty gratification if there isn't at least some
justification for it. So one needs to be constantly keeping one's eye peeled for sin.
It doesn't have to be much, but the greater the sin, the greater the orgasm that
the punishment provides. When you can't find enough sin, then you have to
invent it. If necessary, pass a law against burning the flag or smoking in a tavern
or refusing to recite the Lord's Prayer.

If you want to watch the Xtian mind at work, wallowing in its infinite self-
congratulation, study R. Dick's "Eightfold Path". Here you will find that "poor
in spirit" means living in the present, that one shouldn't honor one's father but
be a father, that mourning is really repentance, that righteousness prevents
heart-disease and many other fascinating new insights into reality.

All of which goes to prove that justification for Xtian sadism ain't easy.

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One of the greatest fears of the conservative mind is socialism (or communism).
Socialism puts wealth and power in jeopardy, whereas communism makes no
bones about it and seeks to grind them into dust. Even more alarming,
communism tends to eradicate religion altogether. Without religion, how can
you morally justify the repressive legislation that keeps people afraid to disobey?
Well, it's true, sad to say: most of the populace is masochistic and walks meekly
into servitude – whether it's slavery to Corporatism or dependence on welfare.
And welfare may leave you free to explore the creative possibilities of leisure, but
where does welfare leave the masters, the ones holding the whips? Can't be
much fun for them. What's the good of power if you can't exercise it once in a
while? Moreover, if everyone is on welfare, where will the rich get their
servants, yes-men, worshippers, body-guards and lackeys? Worse yet, who will
they punish?

But I see that you won't give me any peace until I tell you what that status quo is
which we must maintain at any cost. You already know what it is. It's the
meaning of the sadistic orgasm mentioned above. It's reproduction, breeding:
so-called "family values." All that matters is that you devote your life to
perpetuating your genes and making sure that your progeny also breed. In
contemporary society the only thing that counts is the child. Adults are so much
waste material, to be ignored and simply destroyed if necessary. The only thing
more important than the child, is the zygote or embryo! What this means is that
you don't have to think about anything else, nor need you contribute anything
else. All you do, if you are a man, is insert your penis into a vagina and voilà,
instant righteousness, or righteousness after nine months. All you do, if you are
a woman, is receive the man's seed and you automatically become the Mother of
Christ. You are the Mother of Christ even before you give birth, when you first
find out you've been knocked up, because the fertilized egg is even more
important than the born child. Ask any Right-to-Lifer and he'll tell you that's
the truth!

And woe unto anyone who speaks ill of a child or egg! When that happens
there's the added joy of finding a new slave that can be punished severely,
leading to better orgasm or ejaculation. If you don't wish to be beaten,
remember: even the baby's diaper is sacred!

At any rate, now you know why

people who prefer sex to be an
enjoyment for its own sake don't
make very good Xtians.

Is this a wonderful world, or what?

Rehmus

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How Far Down do the Turtles go?

The ancient Hindu simplification of the world resting on the back of an
elephant who stands upon a turtle is a fairly good description of how physics
works. Another good one is "little fleas have lesser fleas upon their backs to bite
'em, and lesser fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum." Apparently,
however, the atomic particles seem to have less and less substance the farther
down you go until they become merely "forces" or impulses, suggesting
Alchemical Principle numero uno that "All is Mind." But Mind itself also has
turtles, or strata. Is the flatline truly the end of life or just another frontier? Is
general anesthesia really the total absence of mind? The conscious mind and the
unconscious mind slide into one another so imperceptibly that there must be
dreams beyond dreams. And there's a level on which we and all that exists are
connected, as surely as your brain, liver and appendix are connected to one
another.

On that primordial plane the cosmos created itself and goes on re-creating
itself, fashioning time and space and matter as it goes along. At first it does
nothing, IS nothing. And the goal of Nothingness is to remain Nothingness. But
there can be no Nothingness without Being. So it moves. It moves without
purpose, it simply stirs. But in that stirring it creates a pathway, the beginning
of a direction. Soon the path becomes a habit, a rut, an addiction, thus making a
"law" of physics. So the first goal of the cosmos, born out of the single attribute
of Nothingness, is to continue without interruption, without mutation. The
stirring is itself a disturbance, a singularity, an anomaly and the track it makes is
an object, that is a kind of shell of itself that is discarded. This refuse or garbage
is the beginning of matter and has the same characteristic of seeking to maintain
itself as its origin. So, in turn, it too rejects its mutating, anomalous shell,
creating further matter that is more "solid". Eventually the quality of the
garbage descends to the relative solidity of the electron, then the atom, then the
molecule, and so on until we have an entire universe of exploding stars and
galaxies – not unlike the excretions produced by a strong laxative on a much
lower and familiar level of experiential being.

There's something curious about this excreation (to corn a word).

Apparently, in order to exist, an object must be unique because, after all, it is
born of anomaly in the first place. Therefore the shedding of matter requires
that each segment of the shells be itself unique in some way. Thus each grain of
sand is different from all its brothers and no snowflake or thumbprint or can of
worms is like any other. Presumably, even every subatomic particle is also
unique, its similarity to its friends being nothing more than their combined mass
movement, like cars on a freeway. And at the same time it is also the same, each
being the end-point of a colossal hologram of exploding mutation. So we can
assume that at every point in the omniverse there is (or was or will be) a
mirrored exemplar of every grain of sand, etc.: Mandelbrot calls. Obviously, if
matter descends, in its chemical analysis, to infinitesimal particles, to electrons,
to mesons, to bosons or whatever the hell new names and properties we assign to
these itty bitty bits, then there must be stars and galaxies of an even larger

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nature above what we know, which also, potentially, go on forever -- beyond
what we think of as time and space and dimensionality.

Somewhere along the line, matter discovered Life as a new and perhaps
surer way of perpetuating itself. By growth and reproduction, matter could
recreate itself endlessy and avoid periodic dissolution and disintegration. And
Life was indeed a new direction, since it seemed as if it might be able to break
free of the restrictions of habit and "laws" of nature, via evolution. But Life
turned out to be an even greater trap and more miserable enslavement. It
constituted the very gateway of Hell. For henceforth matter was obliged not
merely to hold itself together and continue its weary, endless march into entropy,
but now it must at the same time struggle consciously through pain and suffering
not only to endure but to sharpen and perfect itself in the ways of survival. The
prisoner must now devote himself to strengthening the walls of his prison!

Toward the end of man's history, he invented two or three religions of a

similar style that enabled him to delude himself that an Entity of some sort,
outside of himself, had made him and was in charge of his destiny. Having
invented this Entity it became essential to man's peace of mind that he reify said
Entity, give it a human-like
appearance and prove its
existence. In the name of
this reification many wars
and oppressions were
necessary. All those who
refused to believe in the
"reality" of this Entity,
now called God, were
simply massacred, until the
Entity's existence could
finally be taken for
granted by everyone and
its authority go unques-
tioned. Worse yet, the
Entity was called "good"
and even "merciful", much
as Hitler and Mussolini
were believed to be good
and merciful by their
enslaved peoples in the
early days of this century.

So this fiction created

the world and so to bed.

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The Evolution
and Deterioration of Language
" But language – here's a topic – why was it ever invented when it is used so
poorly?" – Fred Vaughan

Direct experience and communication are immediate and simple. Moncrief

(The Clairvoyant Theory of Perception) believed that the five senses are no more
than fine tuners of over-riding telepathy – or, I would suggest, perhaps not
telepathy per se but a kind of communal "oneness" with the world. Of the sort
we engage in under the influence of LSD or peyote or the psilocybin mushroom –
a kind of Garden of Eden mystical participation, before Adam gave names to
things. If you've ever owned a dog or horse or cat you know that they react
predictably only to certain words and most of the time communicate quite
clearly in a telepathic fashion that is not entirely just "body language."

There have been many fanciful stabs at guessing the origin of language,
various notions technically referred to by such onomatopoeic names as the
"Bow-Wow Theory", the "Ding-Dong Theory", etc. but language itself was a
sophisticated concept from the first. It was an attempt at greater precision for
the sake of gaining an advantage over nature, animals and other people. Its very
artificiality made it exclusive and powerful. Therefore it began as something
extremely specific: wog = "this particular green and yellow herb that grows only
in this valley and serves as a strong emetic" or zok = "the chill wind from the
north that with rain and sleet brings sickness". Even today, in certain so-called
"primitive" African languages we can still see clearly how the root of a word is
highly specific and how it becomes longer and longer as its unique,
particularizing qualities are dropped and it takes on a more general or abstract
meaning. Some tongues in the world scarcely have general words at all, so that
"man" or "dog" or "wind" must be specifically "this highlander of Tribe X" or
"this hunting companion with shaggy black and white coat and sharp muzzle"
or "this Mistral or Santa Ana or Siricco or Foehn".

The result of all this was that "primitive" (that is to say, "ancient")
languages were amazingly expressive and had very complicated grammatical
structures that could reflect nearly infinite shades of meaning. As time moves
forward, however, disintegration sets in. The cycles of growth and decline
descend the scale. All things are subject to entropy and language is no exception.
The shades of meaning are dropped, the lengthy words are shortened, clarity is
sacrificed to expediency. Why? Because man is lazy and not always very bright.
The purpose of correct grammar, for instance, is not to showcase your expensive
education but to convey an idea in such a way that it will not be misunderstood
and will not point in confusing or ambiguous directions -- or conversely, to be as
evasive and ambiguous as you wish, without seeming to be doing so on purpose.
But to use language effectively takes attention and persistence: mental qualities
that are as arcane to the average person as sword-swallowing or tightrope
walking and as intimidating. Furthermore, as technology steamrollers and
standardizes everything in its path, there is less need in everyday life for

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linguistic precision. Dictionaries today seem more massive than ever and each
new edition thicker than the one before, but only because more than half the
entries are technobabble. Language, which is well-nigh incomprehensible
outside of it, retains its complexity only within the confines of a given field of
interest. Thus the genetic engineer cannot talk to the aeronautics engineer and
the man in the street, who no longer needs a hunting dog and no longer needs to
know how to gather herbs or when to plant crops, much less to retain the ability
to discuss philosophy, can respond to most events with "ugh!" All he really
needs to know are the latest football scores.

Certainly with our incessant barrage of electronic entertainment language

no longer even has to be colorful or interesting. Once our most cherished source
of amusement, it is now but an adjunct, a half-heard, murmuring commentary to
rapidly flashing pictures and images.

Needless to say, the downward cycles of deterioration had already begun by

the time we encounter the familiar historical languages of western civilization.
So that the older civilizations looked down with disapproval on the newer ones:
The Egyptians considered Greek a harsh, barbarous and inferior tongue and the
Greeks viewed Latin as a corruption of little or no strength or elegance. You
have only to glance at any Shakespearean passage to see how wan and insipid
English is (in its 20th century Americanized version) in comparison to what it
was in Will's day.

"…a misconstrued and unrecognized innuendo cascades human thinking

down blind alleys for a century. It has value of course in mapping
conceivable modes of thinking, but has little value to the objective at hand --
well, if philosophical understanding is desired.
What else is "decadence and deterioration" than proceeding down
unproductive paths? -- F. Vaughan

All too true, alas! But I am seeing a more sinister side. If civilization is
disintegrating and Science is the last remnant thereof, then the deterioration of
Science is the final pillar to fall. It isn't just that this or that wrong path has been
taken, but the very nature and purpose of Science is becoming muddied.

For a while I believed that artificial intelligence might be a help to set us on

the right track, but for me that would have to be language and the ability of a
machine to communicate in human terms. I don't now see this as possible
because engineers cannot understand how language works and linguists cannot
understand engineering. After Turning's death for the next half century the best
that anyone has come up with is Eliza or Shrdlu or MegaHal which are nothing
more than clever evasions of profitable intercourse. The problem, of course, is
that human beings themselves hardly know how to communicate with one
another!

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HURRY UP, PLEASE, IT'S TIME!

by Ed Rehmus

Recently a friend of mine asked me to translate an article in a 1995 issue of

Eleusis, the bulletin of the Società Italiana per lo Studio degli Stati di Coscienza.
The article is called "L'Ortensia e" and records a lysergic acid experiment
undertaken in the free days before the governments of the world became fearful
that psychedelic and thanatomimetic substances in the hands of the intelligentsia
might bring down the flimsy, jerry-built infrastructure of contemporary society -
- much as Gulliver threatened the society of Lilliput. My friend, who is a
botanist, was afraid that the authorities might be about to construe the
hydrangea (ortensia) as a dangerous flower and he was relieved to learn that it
turned out to be nothing more than the object of contemplation for the subject's
altered state of consciousness. But at the same time, my friend also remarked, in
passing, that there seemed to be "a consideration of questions about time." And
he went on to point out that "this comes up often either in contrast with a
mystical state or as various philosophical problems." Time still remains a major
feature and concern of western thought, was his contention.

Yes, time does indeed rather gibbously loom to the mystical, philosophical
or psychedelic temperament. But is it only in the west that Kalahamsa glides
into our private and collective lagoons? Aren't there two kinds of time, even
apart from the usual subjective-objective dichotomy? In the west time is almost
always linear, or at any rate circular ("annular"). But the west, ever in pursuit
of the pragmatic and the productive (forgive my alliteration, but spontaneous
language feeds on echolalia), sees time as marking recurrent events in order to
control them or to take advantage of them. The Buddhist, on the other hand,
dwelling like a child in the "Eternal Now", has a less hysterical relationship to
time.

Part of our obsession with temporality has a religious origin -- after all,
Christianity and Capitalism are still committed to a more or less clandestine
liaison, prone to secret rendez-vous and the intrigues of immoral intimacy. The
wind-up clock itself was developed by medieval monasteries for the strict
purpose of announcing times for prayers and oblations. Moreover isn't there a
rather compelling parallel in the dread of annual reports, taxation, etc. to the
eschatological dread of Judgment Day? So we see our lives as having a cosmic
destiny that is tied to our death. The End of the World isn't just a millennial fad,
it's been with us since the millennium began, for it is one of the bulwarks of
Xtianity. Change always has a soupçon of catastrophe in its recipe. Why else
does the stock market fall with good news as well as bad? When the railways
that were to mutate the world with such unprecedented speed were first
beginning to be built it was almost taken for granted that travelling much faster
than 20 miles per hour would surely kill people. Well, it turned out to be true
when typhus, influenza and smallpox were the passengers.

Time, however, although simply a dimension of matter and its velocity

merely the measure of phenomenal displacement, fascinates us because it looks
so much like the "cause" of change. We occidentals are always ready to pounce

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on causes in order to find out if we can tamper with them enough to alter their
effects. This leads us to History and the perennial quest for accuracy of dates
and events, so that we can be as scientific as possible in our analysis of them.
Earlier and more eastern cultures were content with myth and legend. As things
unravel in the progression of civilization to its ultimate and inevitable demise we
turn once again to that primordial mythopoiesis. The beginning of life and its
ending are more than similar. They are the same thing, as all things, at bottom,
are the same and differentiation nothing more than a temporary flash.

Ancient civilization (and by that we automatically include the Orient) did

not experience our morbid nostalgia for the past because the past was hardly
different from the present. There was little in the way of popular trends, fashion
in clothing, fads of thinking, greater or lesser freedom, etc. One millennium was
scarcely distinguishable from another in China or Egypt. As we moved forward
in linear time, however, change ponderously increased its tempo like a
locomotive. The 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries have been explosive and anti-
human in more ways than a few. God has been replaced by the omnipotence of
the atom and by the omniscience of the electronic chip, whereas Ars Medica is
already hovering over us with the elixir of divine immortality. And given that the
miracles of technology have superseded the miracles of other superstitions and
beliefs, it's inevitable we should expect technology to satisfy our every whim,
even to enable us to travel to past and future historical times via some actual
machine. Never mind that we can already revisit the past with films and
recordings, that computer technology can even project fairly accurate visions,
constructions and special effects for the future, but we must step with our own
feet, in Roman sandals, into the fanes and amphitheaters of Caesar's day or don
the red heels of the court of Louis XIV.

Chronochoresis, or time-travel, however, is a chimera, an ignis fatuus, a will-

o'-the-wisp. Of course when we talk about time we're talking about how it is
experienced by human beings, but even so there is nothing more of substance to
time than there is to space. Distance, velocity, linear divisions are not
bookmarks or "places" like The World of Tomorrow or Disneyland or some
Amish farmstead. They are but the arithmetic of ethereal fantasms. When we
watch footage of the World Wars, of men long since in their graves, we forget
that the images derive only from markings on film, replace by magnetic
variations on tape. That is to say, the past is an illusion that cannot exist and like
music can be experienced only in its passing, in memory. The film is a material
object that exists in the present, outliving its makers, only because it has not yet
deteriorated. In Hindu lore the Akashic records, whereon all our actions and
thoughts are writ, are said to be more (infinitely more?) durable than these
electronic or photographic artifacts even though we do not have the equipment
to decipher them, but they are still inanimate records.

Occult history claims that time is cyclical rather than linear or circular.
There are seven (some day we must discuss the curious mystery of septenaries)
major eras or ages, like the hours printed on a non-digital, old-fashioned clock-
face. The septad in essence, however, is actually a triad in which the final three
are a revision of the first three connected by a middle, like the two globes of an
hourglass. We find ourselves today in the fifth age about to enter the sixth.

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Rudolf Steiner describes the fifth age as Neo-Egyptian, with its colossal,
primordial powers and gigantic monuments. This will soon give way to the
simpler paradigm of duality that will characterize the Neo-Zirvanian
(Zoroastrian) Sixth Age, i.e. the eternal struggle between positive and negative,
dark and light. We don't need a time machine to take us into the future, we are
moving thither already, at the rate of one second per second.

Ed Rehmus

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Be Sure To See Paris

Before You Are Seventy!
Alors, nearly 50 years have passed between my first visit to Paris in 1950
and my follow-up visit in March of this year. The French are still the French,
the food is still irresistible (MacDonald's is no threat at all -- I wonder why they
even bother), the monuments and museums are still merveilleux, but yes, Paris
has changed! I'm not talking, for example, about the flashing sign on the Eiffel
Tower that counts the days until the millennium – that, after all, is simply what
one would expect, since M. Eiffel built the thing a hundred years ago in much the
same spirit. Nor am I referring to the inevitable changes in the language – the
vocabulary has a lot more English in it, the rhythm and cadence are somewhat
different and the slang is all new. But English has also changed over the course
of the 20th Century. No, the change I'm thinking about is the turn for the worse
that has overtaken everything everywhere nowadays – it's just that Paris, always
eager for the "fashionable," has embraced the 90's with a vengeance. I think
every man in the city, for instance, has a sports wind-breaker that says "Green
Bay Packers" or "Detroit Tigers" or "Oakland Raiders" or "Dallas Cowboys."
And the Parisians are crazy about cell phones -- although I heard one old duffer
say, "Je n'aime guere ces choses- la!" ("I don't like those things!") when a
particularly feeble-minded person happened to walk by jabbering into his
phone.

A hundred years ago it was the 'gay 90's' (merry and naught y, that is, not
"gay"). Today it's the "gray 90's" --- police control, deterioration of consumer
products, Hyper-Globalism & Corporationism, absence of manners, moral
cowardice, the passing of esthetic sensitivity, etc. You have your own items to
add to the list, so I needn't go on. What I primarily detest is the incessant
security personnel everywhere you go now. It makes me want to do something
criminal just to show my contempt for the way they dehumanize us. The airport,
of course, is the worst of that show. They are ineffective, time-wasting,
irritating, inconvenient and insulting with their utterly pointless rules and
procedures. If anyone wanted to put a bomb on a plane or smuggle cocaine I'm
sure they would have no difficulty at all, but you and I can barely make it
through alive. Of course I don't travel first class – and I'm not interested in the
opinions or corrections of those who do.

Where is Madame de Farge now that we need her?

The Parisian streets that were intended for pedestrians and carriages are
now clogged with automobiles in no way different from Los Angeles or Houston.
This despite the excellent Metro system that connects all of Paris with trains
every 30 seconds and despite the impossibility of parking and despite the
preponderance of shops, grocery stores, cinemas, etc. in every neighborhood
within walking distance. As here, most of the cars contain a single occupant,
going god knows where for god knows what reason. In 1953 most people used
bicycles and today you can pick up a bicycle at any Metro station and ride it
wherever you wish, leaving it at some other Metro station all for free and

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without supervision. Also many people use rollerblades (or even skates), but a fat
lot of good any of that does – there are still too many cars!

Paris was always full of music and it still is – only now, instead of Charles
Trenet or Edith Piaf it's techno and rap that you hear in every cafe. As at home,
some of the nicest restaurants are subject to the radio choices of the kitchen help.
There was an accordion player on the subway one day and I leapt aboard just in
time to catch him - but instead of old French songs he was playing 80's American
disco tunes. He tried "La Vie en Rose" but didn't get it right. The only time I
heard classical music was on the radio in a patisserie in "north" Paris and the
only time I heard jazz was in a fake gay bar (yes "fake", if you can imagine such
a thing). Everywhere else it's techno - techno - techno like the Chinese water
torture.

The beggars and homeless of Paris don't manage too well. They have to
keep as low a profile as possible. And they are hassled by the police even more
than they are here. Even the prostitutes are confined to very specific locations.
We were told by the tour guide not to visit the Northern part of Paris beyond the
Champs Elysees, because that's where "the poor people live." Of course I went
there at once to check it out – and of course it was no different from the same
thing at home. The Communist newspaper, L'Humanite' , points out that there
are 3 different versions of unemployment: ranging from 1 or 2 percent and
going up to about 30 percent, depending on whose figures are being put out.
Although the city seems fairly prosperous (the Left Bank and the Champs
Elysees, at least), I noted several boarded up storefronts on the Boul' Mich'.
And the stock market isn't doing quite as well in Europe as it is doing on Wall
Street. Nor did I see anyone using Eurodollars. In 1953 dollars were very
popular on my level of reality, now they want only French currency. I had a
quarter in with some francs (same size and color but worth more) and the
shopkeeper shouted after me, "Come back, Monsieur, this is not French!" Only
natural, of course, but it reminded me that I had certainly not traveled back in
time.

As you might expect, the Parisians don 't want to think about Kosovo. One
taxi driver lost his temper when I brought up the subject and ran a red light.
Well, he would have done that anyway, I admit. But that area is where both
world wars started, if you remember. Things were fine while the Soviets
controlled this hotbed, but now that Religion is once again allowed to rear its
mindless head, what can you expect? The NATO-American bombing began
while I was in Europe and the general consensus was decidedly negative.
Nothing to do with humanitarian concerns, any more than our involvement is
driven by humanitarian concerns, it's a question of refugees. No European
country wants to face an invasion of refugees. It was generally felt that the
bombing would do no good and merely speed up the ethnic cleansing, thus
producing even more refugees. Well, wherever you have Christians or Moslems
you're going to have trouble, face it. When they decide to confront one another,
it were wiser to leave them alone – they deserve each other.

I went to the cinema to see Depardieu in "Asterix et Obelix" (he played

Obelix and gained 50 pounds or more for the role, I was told). But it was one of

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those hateful multiplex things which reminded me too much of home and had
more security guards than customers. It was simply too depressing and I
decided to abandon the idea. The bateaux mouches, which used to be a delight
in themselves, were it not for the Seine, the bridges and the historical buildings,
would be little more entertaining than a bus ride. The Cafe de Flore and the
Deux Magots which used to be the second home of students and artists are now
strictly upper class expensive tourist traps. The "arene de Lutece" in the 5th
arrondissement, which I had thought would be an interesting historical ruin to
visit, was playing host to an amateur soccer game. Even the videos in the sex
shops were second rate. Well, I didn't quite run out of things to do – there are
still the museums, after all, even though I'm too old to stand in a long queue with
shouting students, for a ticket to the Louvre – but I had to be creative and more
adventurous than I'd prefer to be. I wound up taking pictures of Parisians on
the streets – they haven't been developed yet, and I hope I didn't use the camera
backwards and just take closeups of my nose. And I ate double orders of
everything -- two napoleons at a time, two croque-madames, two orders of
coquilles st. jacques, two creme brulees, two bottles of wine, etc. No doubt to
make up for those lean years when I was younger and poorer, and could seldom
even afford sausage and chips. For the next 3 months I'll have to live on tomato
juice and celery.
REHMUS

Ed in Paris (1999)

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OK, GRANDPA PUT YOUR

FAMILY PHOTOS BACK IN YOUR
WALLET!
When Greek philosophy began to die out and become corrupted, one of its
final stages was the movement of the Kynikoi (or "canines") because all they did
was bite and snap. When no intellectual impetus is present in a formerly great
society, it begins to go to the dogs. So if you wish to call me a cynic, I won't
correct you. The stock market may be high, but America is dead and buried.
There may be a labor shortage, but that's because not even Dilbert wants to
contribute to this boring merchant fiefdom. Moreover there is no future, escape-
hatch or Renaissance possible. Even the possibility of revolution against the
corporations and the rigidly controlling government agencies is remote. Well,
we can tear down some more neighborhoods, make a few more citizens homeless,
and thereby widen our freeways to accommodate more cars for immigrants. So
you can call that a future, if you're dumb enough to want the 21st Century.

Ah, well. It's finally clear. Life is born of obscenity, progresses into error or
horror and ends in bitterness and catatonia. Entropy will always have its way.

But at least science is beginning to make headway in the medical use of

fetuses, neonatal tissue and infant prepuces. The latter are especially useful for
the healing of diabetic foot ulcers, skin grafts, cancer prevention, etc. and for
organ repair and the replacement of foreskin tissue for those who were
themselves mutilated in their childhood by circumcision and who wish to graft or
regrow the preputial tissue, currently possible only through difficult and
prolonged stretching. The latter practice has the irritating and frustrating result
that even if restoration is finally completed, it remains incapable of producing
smegma. Therefore, what's needed is this natural material.

So babies do have their use, after all. Moreover, I don't want to plagiarize
Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal", but infants do make excellent sources of
protein that really ought to replace the slaughter of innocent and more worthy
cattle and swine.

I once had an argument with some Mensan or other who claimed that it is
abnormal not to want children of ones own and it is even subversive to dislike
the children of others, that it is the natural and God-given way, that babies smell
nice and make you feel good. I insisted, on the contrary, that although it may be
a natural, pheramonic, glandular necessity for some women to be pregnant at all
times and to be obsessed with the flesh of their flesh, to idolize and pamper it, it
is not the least bit natural for most men to feel anything but loathing and disgust
for a bloated pregnant belly or a squealing, diaper-soaked nonentity, whether his
own or anybody else's. Indeed, throughout the animal kingdom, the majority of
species like nothing better than to feed on their young. That's why newborn
spiders race away in all directions as soon as they come out of the egg.

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It's true that after a boychild begins to grow up and to exhibit inherited
characteristic tics and noxious habits, most fathers (if they have not long since
deserted their pragmatic and over-insured spouses) may find it flattering and
comforting to their egos to have a small companion who shares their
predilections and propensities. This is why the Greeks kept their sons in the
women's quarters, well away from male adult society, until they were old enough
for schooling, whereupon the father replaced the mother and became the
dominant parent.

As for the God-given way: multiplicamini, well, of course, the foul Demiurge
that created this world lusted for a built-in system of self-perpetuation, so that
said Demiurge might glory in its sick handiwork forever. Hence "Be fruitful and
multiply!" ("Ye slaves of my exaltation!"). And we certainly cannot do away
with Death! Death is necessary to keep the system going and moreover is a
deliciously satisfying fillip for the wicked mind that instilled its wretched
creatures with sexual urges and the instinct of self-preservation only to subject
them to the inevitability of ultimate Demise! What more fitting and ironical joke
than The Reaper? (Never mind that Death is an illusion, we'll discuss that some
other time).

But the ultimate joke is that today, because of the machinations of certain
sadistic heterosexual perverts of the late 1970's who engineered AIDS and who
deliberately inoculated the most promiscuous homosexuals they could round up
with tainted hepatitis B vaccine, the life-giving penis is now also capable of
seeding death! A double-crossing power for the sexual organ originally intended
only to perpetuate the Demiurgic Creation! Now, like Allah, the penis has the
power of Life AND Death!

But let's get back to the children who, in our current hypocritical society,
occupy the throne of all our concerns. Let's ask ourselves why, suddenly ...
especially in such an overcrowded world, childbirth and children have become so
all-important. Why are we so fearful of their physical safety (well, the insurance
companies are behind that!) and so terrified of their "moral" corruption? Can
it be because their parents are no longer capable of generating satisfying lives for
themselves and must grasp at the straw of vicarious fulfillment through their
offspring? Can it be because our society has grown so meaningless and useless
that only the postponement of life (through the future of posterity) is the only
possible reason for living at all?

Or maybe the answer is much simpler. With the rise of Feminist power, is it
possible that women's obsessions and tampering have eroded traditional
wisdom?

In busier, more human times, children were not children at all! They were
simply "little people" at various stages of development. How old was Alexander
when he conquered the world? How old was Beatrice when Dante courted her?
Children throughout the ages were put to work and exploited exactly like their
parents and they were expected to behave properly like adults. If not, they were
punished to the same degree that adult miscreants were punished. And why not?
What have we gained by making our children belong to a special, pampered and

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over-valued sub-group? I'll tell you what we've gained: a generation that
cannot function as adults at 20, at 30 or at 40! Most young adults today take no
pride in their work and do their jobs in the most slipshod fashion possible. They
have no interest in art or science, philosophy or politics. They live only to scarf
pizza and watch football re-runs on TV. Well, you may say, the masses have
always been like that. The multitudes suck. True, but if so, then why should
they be encouraged to perpetuate themselves? We now have robots for both
peace and war. We no longer require the age-old slave class.

I'll ask you a really cynical question now – what is all this education that
Clinton & Co. are offering? Where is it? What exactly is it? Where are the new
schools that the tobacco taxes are supposed to build? How will the money from
the state lotteries make better students? Will they learn anything more than
how to call up pornographic sites on the Internet? Will they even get that far in
their technological progress? (Forget any intellectual development)! Will any
left-over money (ha!) go for more teachers and books or will it simply be
frittered away on sports equipment and stadiums? Or even more likely, line the
pockets of CEOs, politicians and lawyers? You know the answer as well as I do.

So if some people think babies might make good soup, can you give any
really sensible reason why they shouldn't? Is there anything wrong with, say
Campbells, going ahead, processing and canning such a useful product for the
bleak chapters of history to come? My apologies to Jonathan Swift, again, but
his "satire" on cannibalism was a bit too early in history to be taken seriously.
The rat box wasn't as crowded then as it is now.

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VIDEO MELIORA PROBOQUE,

DETERIORA SEQUOR*
by Ed Rehmus

Many Egyptian things, as you probably know, were given Greek names. C.
Zivie-Coche, in her "Sphinx: History of a Monument", says that PYRAMID
(Egyptian mr) and OBELISK (Egyptian thn) were derisive terms in Greek
("honey cake" and "roasting spit", respectively). However, whimsical folk
etymology, in my opinion, might just as easily have resulted from indigenous
descriptive terms. For instance, MR might have been referred to by the
Egyptians as per-aa-mes ("great temple of generation" or "son of pharaoh") or
something similar and slated by the Greeks for retranslation into their language
as pir-a-mides, the "honey cake". Derision, after all, works best with puns of
pomposity. (Cf. for instance, "Sacramento wine", "Hail to the thief", etc. ).

When it comes to the Giza Sphinx (called hu in Egyptian), the origin of the
Greek word lies buried in the mysteries of Greece's own sphinxes, which were of
similar human/animal form and the one that asked Oedipus the famous riddle
"strangled" (that's what the Greek sphingein means) those who could not
answer. Some scholars believe that the Egyptian phrase seshep ankh ("an image
of life") is the source of the Greek folk etymology that produced the word
"sphinx", although that seems unlikely. The comparison of the three parts of
the riddle of the Greek sphinx, moreover, and the Egyptian Hermakhis with his
three solar stages (Khepri --dawn; Ra -- noon; Atum -- sunset) is supposedly
fortuitous, not historically linked.

I've mentioned before that the medieval monster, known as Nicor, i.e. a kind
of dragon in the same class as unicorns, basilisks and sea serpents, arose as a
lapse of the pen, a misreading and a mistranslation. The source was a cursory
description of the crocodile in the notoriously sloppy Latin of the Dark and
Middle Ages. Nichus habet crocodeilos ("a Nichus has the crocodile") should
have been Nilum habit crocodeilos ("the crocodile inhabits the Nile"). Nichus, the
misreading, soon became Nichor. Well, Latin is a fairly straightforward
language compared to Old Persian. In that tongue one of the origins of Light is
an incestuous act of Ormuzd with his mother, the son being the sun, never mind
the English coincidence (Vide "Zurvan, a Zoroastrian Dilemma" by
R.C.Zaehner, Biblo & Tanen, NY 1972). To follow that linguistic error, however,
would require considerably more space than this essay should be allotted,
together with more patience than the reader can be expected to muster, not to
mention more erudition than this scribbler possesses.

With such bizarre provenances under our belts we can now explore the
notion of the single origin of religion and language. That is, we can now view
religion as the linguistic error that it really is. Human history is no more than
seven millennia old, coinciding as it does with the beginnings of written language.

*
Difficult to translate: "I see and recommend better things, while I chase after
deterioration."

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Prior to that the ancient adventures of mankind remain lost to the long gone
"oral tradition".

Obviously the Bible, the Rig Veda, the Zend Avesta, the Egyptian and
Tibetan Books of the Dead, etc. occur long after the origins of spoken words. And
since we were not in on the origins of spoken words we are obliged to rely on
extrapolations of how some written words developed. The Greeks called it all
"Logos", which has a number of meanings in addition to just "word",
amounting to a mystery in itself that we would do well to explore some day.

At any rate, a hundred years ago, Morgan Kavanaugh wrote an irritatingly

fanciful book called "The Origin of Language and Religion" in which he came to
the conclusion that the first word uttered by man was "O", formed by the
rounding of the lips to simulate the sun. Although, of course, this notion is not
easy to swallow without a huge slug of Sacramento wine, we can concur
nevertheless that the first human words must have been of a pragmatic nature
(the sun, the moon, animals, plants, etc.) in the same way that the first written
words were about bushels of wheat or shiploads of hemp, rather than
annotations on the vers libre of Ambrose of Abyssinia.

Our modern presumptions and prejudices are actually off the wall. We insist
that "God", for instance, is not only universally acknowledged, but has been in
existence since the first hydrogen atom sprang into existence umpteen billions of
years ago, maybe even synonymous with the "Big Bang" itself. Such nonsense
even leads many amateur linguists to imagine that the English word "God" must
derive from some archaic form of "good", since apparently (?) the Creation of
the universe was a singular event and a good intention, despite Schopenhauer's
opinion to the contrary. In fact, though, God's origin is the Teutonic type
*guthom*, akin to the Sanskrit huta, meaning "one (amongst many) to whom
sacrifices are made." So apparently our real father is not Jesus, but Baal or
Moloch after all! Well, of course there was no "one" God in ancient times. A god
was simply a part of Nature, like the Sun or the Wind or the Crocodile and The
Egyptian gods (neteru) were concepts of the forces implicit in such pinpoints of
Nature and the written words or hieroglyphs (medu neteru, i.e. "god-words")
were more technological than sacred. That didn't mean the words were ignored.
The power of these words was enough to send shivers down the spine of ancient
man whenever they were spoken. So in the wrong mouths they were
unutterable! Don't let an idiot handle a loaded bow-and-arrow! But the written
word was more manageable and in any case impossible for the average person to
read. Tech of any kind worth its salt revels in its opacity that is guaranteed to
keep out the riff-raff.

Technology today gives us magical powers like tv remotes and electricity

without electrocution. In those days the technology of writing enabled kings to
issue edicts over a large distance and the ability to design monuments. But this is
why the Bible speaks of God in the plural (elohim) and why Jehovah found it
necessary to command us henceforth to worship only Him and ignore all the
other entities (including not just gods but demons, spirits, demiurges, Old Ones,
etc.). So the course of religion has always tended to generalization and
monotheism, until we come down to that simplest of all deicisms, Islam. Allah is

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All. Bow down, obey and shut up.

There are a few old religions that remain on the pure level of "nature" such
as the Tao (or our convoluted version of reality, i.e. Western Science) and there
are those religions that attempt to liberate us from the tyranny of divine
interferences altogether (Buddhism), but most of the world has followed the
watery path of least resistance until today God has been melted down to little
more than a feeling or belief in "something". It's as if coming out of the baby
carriage to stand on our feet we placed the baby carriage in hallowed memory as
the Throne of Existence whose spirit will forever guide us wherever we dare to
walk. But although "God" is no more than a remnant of parental dependence
("Honor thy Father and thy Mother"), whose numinosity has vanished, yet to
walk alone without any god-crutch at all, even a paper one, still seems risky for
the multitudes.

Well, so be it. But when someone asks me "What is your religion?" what am
I to say? Agnostic? Atheist? Polytheist? Gnostic? Why must I "believe" or
"disbelieve"? To posit any kind of universal god or his refutation, requires an
investment of hypostatic contradiction. And LIFT NOT YOUR HANDS to the
West, for atheism and technology cannot solve or dismiss the problem. The
Scientific Method's axiom is the philosophy that an objective world exists.
Objectivity, however, once you can admit that the emperor is naked, is hardly
more than one more weary synonym for a monotheistic God, inhabiting the
great Out There. Oh yes, there are those who claim that "God is within", but in
that case He could no longer be universal, since everyone's understanding is
personal and distinctive, that is, it is at best subjective, and at its worst,
downright solipsistic or autistic. So we return to the multiple gods in the end.

The star Al Caphir (the infidel) shines in the constellation of Libra, sign of
balance and counterbalance, and it is that star, when I can find it, that guides my
little boat to Paradiso. Otherwise, like unfortunate Hypatia, I see and attest to
improvement but succumb to deterioration.

E.E. Rehmus

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Cephalocera Diaboli
This, I promise, will be my last word on a topic on which I seem to have
wasted even more of your time than my own. There are some realities, however,
that we have yet to check.
Many of our misunderstandings are the result of forcing generalizations onto
specifics. For instance, we say "Greed is evil." But what of the greed for truth
and beauty? Do we say, "So much beauty and no more?" Or we say "All
religions are evil." And that's wrong too. Taoism and Buddhism, probably
because they are atheistic, are not evil. We need to clean our glasses. Since I
myself am not Jewish, Judaism seems to me to be a bit heavy-handed at times,
but it's not truly evil -- merely tribal and solipsistic. And Jews, at least, mind
their own business. So let's say what we really mean. There are but two demonic
upstarts, forgive me, that rise straight out of Hell. Moreover, although the
atrocities of Xtianity are enormous, Islam is even younger and therefore much
more monstrous, because youth itself is monstrous.
Of course the mythology of Xtianity is absurd. Salvation cannot derive from a
vacuum. But the more seeming sense of Islam is a fatal illusion and trap.
If I am a drop of blood in the body of God, perhaps I can communicate with
him, for blood goes everywhere. Or if I am a toe or a finger of God at least I can
make him feel my pain. But supposing I am no more than an atom or the
smallest part thereof. How can I possibly communicate my existence to him?
And what kind of God is it that depends on remoteness to be great? For a God
must be either near or far. I don't see how he can be both. So if he is remote,
then he is of no use to any of us. So we assume he is near, like the ancient Gods
of Greece, Egypt, India or China.
But the ancient Gods did not generally participate in mortal affairs. They
were to us as we are to animals. And just as animals expect us to
anthropomorphize when we talk to them -- else risk their impatience with
pussyfooting, hypocritical formality ("disinterested species orientation") and
they stop paying attention and just walk away -- so the old Gods talked to us in
plain God-language and not some fancy Enochian flapping of angels.
Now if I seem to be reluctant to come to the point, that's because the point is
as far-fetched as it is inescapable. It's that all this division between Gods and
men and animals and atoms is only a linguistic division that has no hierarchical
basis. In fact it has no basis in reality either -- it's a human invention, like a
knife, for cutting things up for anthropomorphic purposes. Moreover the worst
of this artificiality springs from the nature of the Arabic language, which is
devious, illogical, abstruse and loaded. No wonder you have to read Al Quran in
Arabic. No translation can capture its madness. "God" knows, Latin and Greek
are provincial enough, but at least they have a modicum of flexibility.
If there actually were a God, of the kind that Allah professes to be, why would
he expect men to grovel before him in the dust like worms, as if they were the
slaves of some sultan? Sultans need obeisance and worship because they are
temporary and easily beheaded. Allah is supposed to be above such pettiness.
We expect our cattle and sheep to obey us -- they don't have to worship us as
well. Cats don't. Nor do elephants, nor, I wager, do cetaceans. And, it's true, if
Christ were really a saviour, in the sense that Zeus was a saviour, he would not

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require your belief to do his saving. He would just do it, the way a veteranarian
saves pelican and polecat alike. But at least Christ only nags, whereas Allah yells
in our ears.
I know, we're supposedly in a political, not a religious war, but that's not
necessarily how Islam sees it.
But, while we're at it, let's put something else straight. Monotheism stresses
that there is but one God and the words for God in various languages all refer to
the same entity. Therefore, Muslims insist that "Allah" is the same as "God" (or
le Bon Dieu or Jehovah or El Se˜nor). This, of course, is utter nonsense. The
Germans were correct to say "Gott bei uns," for their God is the Teutonic deity.
And similarly, the God of Islam is a desert God and the God of "God bless
America" is the God of down home America. "God" can't be general. He can
speak only when he is specific, i.e. national or local. That this, unfortunately,
turns him into an idol is something the world had better learn to live with.
For that is the ironic flaw of monotheism: it's still polytheism.

This is a "thematic" cryptogram in which the letters of the alphabet are replaced
by the letters in a phrase. You must guess the phrase used to replace the
alphabet, as well as solve the cryptogram.

TREM RPPHEI (HST 125) UPAU MEMPM HREPM UMERU PRE ISM
UIERUMPRGRE PIM SIOE SRGUMERPMEM RA MEE UPRRURUIH
OPGMPRE EPRE ASUUURGA RPIUUEEM TSRERER. MEE OSIMEBM ST
EUUMSRA OEPIHEU UPOE MEPM PI PITSRNPGPGPMEM UMEP
OSPGM IERER SOOPR MS PIASIE EGUE PTMER UMU MUNE EPU
APPUUEM. OERE GPOIA MEPM TREM NPIPHEM MS HEM MEUU.
UMEP SPM MS PU RETSRE UM OPU SRGUMERPMEM.

The answer will be provided on page xxx.

Answer to the "Thematic" Cryptogram Puzzle shown on

page 33 of Issue 127
The answer is the statement:
"Fred Vaughn (GOF 125) says that great ideas are not inevitable and once
obliterated by the surviving culture have possibly vanished forever. The context
of history changes such that an unformulated idea could never occur to anyone
else after its time has passed. We're lucky that Fred managed to get this idea out
to us before it was obliterated."
It was obtained by sequential alphabetical substitution from the 26 letter phrase:
PROMETHEUS IGNIS AURUM PROBAT
ABCDEFGHIJK LMNO PQRST UVWXYZ
NOTE: The usual rules for cryptogram setting may not apply in this case.

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OCCULT CROSSWORD
by Phi1octetes

Across
1. Lay 351 somehow to
make the nature of time
(8)
5 and 9. Tibetan mantra
(2,4,5,3)
10. found in the elegy
Ptolemy gave (comb.)
(6)
11. I am in Again in
California to be
opposed. (8)
12. Latin school (6)
14. "Before Abraham was I
am" it was (7,3)
18. They have obviously
lived before, but are
they reincarnated? (6,
4)
22. Thu dream of Germany
Precedes a shock (6)
23. Broken runners follow
no god monuments (8)
24. Rob had wrongly to do with Wanda (comb.) (6)
25. He destroys a no good Oriental temple and is no Xtian! (3, 8)
26. Horsepowers back in ten gives the riddle (6)
27. I am after the New Testament in the skyholder circa 10,000 BCE (6)

Down
1. A hundred for the eye written in the Dead Sea Scrolls (6)
2. Found in noticed rich British cognomen (6)
3. Fifty lost 1/7th of the African country for Spain (6)
4. First Persian light (10)
6. See 13 (8)
7. Opera ham shattered classical jars (8)
8. One of these heavy metal times would be enough (4, 4)
13. Mega Tharion: Aleister Crowley (5, 5)
15. Lindsay wrote of a voyage thither (8)
16. Bah. I a sap? Wrong That's the son of Korah! [Exodus 6.23] (8)
17. The sun god doctor in fish part hemmed as a picture (6, 2)
19. Otherwise it's a palace for the llama who's gone east (6)
20. Eyesore for sore eye? (1, 5)
21 Isis (genitive) (6)

[For solutions you're on your own on this one. :-)]

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Crossword Puzzle
Across Clues 8, 19, 52, 44 __ferentes 36. ___ anserina
1. Say! 9. Air 39. Et __. (and
4. You assert 10. Lead to! following, abbr.)
7. Eritis _dei 11. Aunt 40. Spanish for aqua
9. I adapt (pres. subjunct) 12. Custom 41. English for verres or
13. Of Peter 18. __e perennius aper
14. him 20. City states (Gk) 43. __be (Daughter of
15. I shall be 22. Sword Tantalus)
16. I love 23. 1099 44. See 8.
17. Mark’s 24. __et amo! 45. Imag_ (images, nom.
19. Dew 25. And not pl.)
20. O god! 27. Bronze 46. Six
21. Greek goddess of mischief 28. Wealth 50. __eritas (speed)
23. I am warned 29. __re (to stand) 52. See 8.
26. -úem (numeral) 33. Wheels (acc.)
30. Great Roman author 34. They smell [Answers available on
31. Things cut apart 35. In hope of the next page.]
32. The sun
35. Corrupt matter 1 2 3 4 5 6

37. The rape of the __ine

7 8 9 10 11 12
women
38. He holds 13 14 15
39. Goddess of discord
42. Et ___ in Arcadia 16 17 18 19
44. Of the fundament
47. With an icon 20 21 22
48. For profit
49. Old man 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

51. Ars gratia --is

30 31
53. Il__ (fem. acc. pl.)
54. [illegible in original]
32 33 34 35 36
55. [illegible in original]
37 38
Down Clues
1. Per ___ 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46
2. In flagrante del__
3. Why? 47 48 49 50
4. __rilis (Month)
5. Road 51 52 53

6. I join together
7. Bathing spot 54 55

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Answers to Previous Crossword Puzzle

1 2 3 4 5 6
D I C A I S
7 8 9 10 11 12
S I C U T A D A P T E M
13 14 15
P E T R I E U M E R U
16 17 18 19
A M O M A R C I R O S
20 21 22
D E E A T E
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
M O N E O R D A N A O S
30 31
I D E M S E P T
32 33 34 35 36
C I C E R O S C I S S A
37 38
S O L P U S
39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46
S A B T E N E T D I S
47 48 49 50
E G O A N I I C O N E
Ed Rehmus 51 52 53

(in 1987) Q U A E S T O S E N E X
54 55
A R T L A S

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 E. E. Rehmus

“So Passes Glory,” a Crossword Puzzle

Journal: Wednesday January 21, 2004
Nothing to do so I thought I might set a crossword, but themes of interest
today are hard to come by. Politics! Too much of that this year. Movies? I
don’t know the current cinema at all! Astronomy? Too esoteric. Halloween?
Not a bad idea. I’ll try that: Headless horseman, Halloween III, Jack-o-
lantern; trick or treat? Ugh! All too trite. [I don’t suppose that “So Passes Glory” is
what he ultimately produced on 1/21/04, but I found this among his other crossword creations
in a file cabinet on 4/14/04. – Editor.]

Across Clues
1, 9, 35, 51 (So passes glory...) 7. Litigation 34. The blind
4. Right, law 8. Fem. companion or ally 35. Noun case (abbr)
7. Shore, beach 9. Pro ___ (abbr. for time being) 36. Fero, ferre tuli ___
9. See l. 10. Rock, cliff (acc. 3rd decl.) 39. Following (abbr.)
13. I do a second time 11. Love (abl.) 40. Thy (masc.)
14. him 12. So far, to this degree 41. Edges, borders; area
15. one (fem.) 18. But, moreover (var. of at) 43. ___ as (an age)
16. Cogito ergo ---_ 20. He comes 44. Eng. word from
17. ln the field 22. Years (acc.) minimum
19. --- per fidelis 23. 102 45. Root of to hear
20. Power, force 24. Vita brevis, ___ longa 46. Greek letter
21. Mistress, goddess, lady 25. Source of mod. Latin (abbr) 50. Nut
23. Let him beware 27. Thrice, 3 times 52. --- post facto
26. Non compos ___ 28. I went
30. Persia now 29. Mare, maris (English) [Answers available on
31. And not, or not 33. You marry the next page.]
32. From over here, of that thing
35. See l.
37. Thy (fem. sing) 1 2 3 4 5 6
38. They (fem. acc)
39. I stand 7 8 9 10 11 12
42. They bless
44. Vademecum, etc. or this 13 14 15
(Eng.)
16 17 18 19
47. Europa (abbr.)
48. Glacies (Eng.) 20 21 22
49. One (gen.)
51. He has searched 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
53. Of the world (See 1.)
54. Quattuor, quinque, ___ 30 31
55. Duodecim
32 33 34 35 36
Down Clues
1. In ___ (on the spot) 37 38
2. Also, likewise
3. Why? 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46
4. Preposition taking acc. 47 48 49 50
or abl.
5. Used (past participle) 51 53
6. ___ qua non (absolute
necessity) 54 55

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 E. E. Rehmus

Answers to the “So Passes Glory”

Crossword Puzzle

1 2 3 4 5 6
S I C I U S
7 8 9 10 11 12
L I T U S T R A N S I T
13 14 15
I T E R O E U M U N A
16 17 18 19
S U M C A M P O S E M
20 21 22
V I S E R A
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
C A V E A T M E N T I S
30 31
I R A N N E V E
32 33 34 35 36
I S T I N C G L O R I A
37 38
T U A E A S
39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46
S T O B E A N T M A P
Ed Rehmus 47
E U R
48
I C E
49
U
50
N I U S
(1929 - 2004) 51 52 53
Q U A E S I T M U N D I
54 55
S E X X I I

172
A Spanish Crossword Puzzle
(ROMPECABEZAS)

[Answers available on the next page.]

173
 E. E. Rehmus

Answers to A Spanish Crossword

(ROMPECABEZAS)

G O C E P E L J E F E

O E M A S A A L

T O B E P E R R I T O S

A J U S T A R A I

A T A Z O R A N

A L G A R A B I A U O

A U N S U R C I A

B L E N S E N A N Z A

R E A M R O N O

A R Q U I J U T E

V I D A A Z U L E R A S

O O T E N D B T

S I S E A R A P E P E

174
 Another Crossword Puzzle
Across Clues
1. Cogito, ergo - 9. Mountain nymphs
4. Greek letter 10. I eat
7. Lowest (abl.) 13. For
10. Brute! 18. Gatates or nigerrimus (Eng.)
11. From founding of the city 19. -to (I put in constant motion)
12. Verto, vertere (Eng.) 22. -tus (glad, joyful, rich, fat)
14. Rostrum (Eng.) 23. He carried
15. 1001 25. Get acquainted with!
16, 18 _est (Die has been cast) 30. Greek letter
17. ln front of, for the purpose 31. And a rose
18. See 16 33. -s (Death)
20. So far 34. Far away from
21. Another 35. Traveller
24. Fire 36. -s last days of month
26. Sailor 37. At the same time, together
27. I assert 38. - Satanas! (Go away Satan)
28. Distant (Gk. prefix) 40. Ova (in English)
29. -vus (slave) 42. A mine
32. -erator (emp.) 44. Three (combin.)
35. Conquered (abl.) 46. King
37. Sower, planter 48. But
39. The same (fern. acc. p!.) 49. For
40. Requiescat in pace
[Answers available on the next page.]
41. Of Rome
43. But, moreover 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

45. Persian poet

10 8 11 11 12 13
47. Op (already mentioned)
48. Senatus, Populusque 14 15 16
Romanus
50. Well done! 17 18 19 20

51. One (abl.) 21 22 23 24 25

52.1 have dug up
53. Law 23 26 27 27 28 29

54. Familial spirit or god 30 28 29 30 31

55. Cerva (Eng.)
32 32 33 34 35 36

Down Clues
1. They were standing 37 38 39

2. To use 40 41 42 44 43 44
3. Mouse
4. Camera (var.) 45 46 48 47 49 48 49

5. To this
50 51 53 52
6. Am- (Friendship)
7. So 53 54 55

8. Many

175
 E. E. Rehmus

Answers to Another Crossword Puzzle

the creator of this puzzle in

days now long since past

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
S U M C H I I I M O
10 8 11 11 12 13
E T T U A U C I T U R N
14 15 16
D A I S M I I I A L E A
17 18 19 20
O B M J A C T A M T A M
21 22 23 24 25
A L T E R H I G N I S
23 26 27 27 28 29
N A U T A H A I O M O
30 28 29 30 31
T E L C H I I S E R
32 32 33 34 35 36
I M P H V I C T O
37 38 39
S A T O R H I D E A S
40 41 42 44 43 44
R I P M R O M A E I M A T
45 46 48 47 49 48 49
O M A R C I T I S P Q R
50 51 53 52
E U G E U N O I E R U I
53 54 55
L E X L A R I D O E

176
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 E. E. Rehmus

178