Explaining the Inexplicable -Guest Post from Jami Morgan

Hello friends of Philip K. Dick & Religion! Teddy asked if I would like to guest blog about incorporating “religion” into fiction. YES!, she answered immediately, because honestly this is how I discovered PKD. (Who is this she? ZenWoman? aka ej Morgan, PKD Otaku contributor and author of the novel, A Kindred Spirit.)
At the end, I’ll link to a piece I wrote about my own PKD “Big Bang” for those who are interested, but let me cut straight to the chase. When I read VALIS, my mind was blown. I guess because that was my first encounter with transrealistic writing. I didn’t know of that genre or concept when I read VALIS (or as I wrote AKS), but Philip K. Dick’s style completely resonated with me.
Fiction which incorporated so many weird, yet personal, and “religious”—philosophical, I would say—concepts, yet presented in such a straightforward factual way… well, it just drove me wild. I was literally up in the middle of the night, before I had even finished reading VALIS, pacing around. I knew I would write a sequel to it. This was really a far-fetched thought, considering I had never written a novel, or even any fiction, really. I was a journalist and had dabbled in what I called “rant writing” (pre-blogging essays.) I might have written one or two short stories, but a novel? Didn’t matter. I knew I had to. (I’ll explain the italics soon.)
For one thing, I wasn’t a life-long Phil fan (Dickhead) like many of you reading this blog. VALIS was my first exposure to Philip K. Dick, and that was 1996. Honestly, I knew nothing about the “break-in” (the actually one in 1971, where Phil’s house was ransacked and the cause of at least one suicide attempt.) And, only by reading VALIS, then D.I. and especially, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, did I get the big picture, about the pink beams, the Exegesis, and perhaps most importantly, Phil’s own struggle with the impulses that had taken over the latter part of his life.
Those impulses (motivations or compulsions), his hypergraphical style [defined as: communicating through the union of various forms, as an "ensemble of signs capable of transmitting the reality served by the consciousness, more exactly than the former fragmentary and partial practices…”] combined with his hypergraphia (fanatical, frenzied, non-stop writing), that was the mind-blower. I understood all that after reading In Pursuit of VALIS.
Clearly, I’m not alone in my reaction to the final Phil-phase, or there wouldn’t be a blog like this, or readers of Phil’s Exegesis. But to answer your question about why incorporate “religion” in fiction, neither Phil nor I could help ourselves. And, once Patrick Clark (Otaku Editor) introduced me to Rudy Rucker’s Transrealist Manifesto, I knew why. “The Transrealist novel grows organically, like life itself,” Rucker says. “Although reading is linear, the writing is not.” Like a maze, he says. Absolutely! (I used the maze on the cover of my novel, because Phil also frequently used that metaphor.)
I didn’t know what all was going to emerge in my novel, I just knew I had to start writing it. I think if Phil were here, he would say the same about VALIS, or at least about Radio Free Albemuth (his original Vali-system draft.) Why? Because once you’ve had inexplicable experiences, as a writer you think you can explain them. That, my friends, is the conundrum in a nutshell! Both mine and Phil’s, and why we simply could not escape writing about our synchronicities, anomalies, and insights.
So, while reading VALIS, and seeing that Phil knew some of the same things I knew, well, it wasn’t a choice to write about A Kindred Spirit, it was an obsession.
I don’t think I have to explain what I mean by KNEW to this audience, but in case I do, then perhaps you will want to read my PKD “Big Bang” (especially the last few Phildickian paragraphs.)
The final point I want to make about my novel is that it consists of two parts: my story (HerStory, as I call it) told in an embellished, transrealist way and the “rest of the story” about Phil, my fictionalized account of his afterlife. That was the concept that came to me that first night, while reading VALIS. Along the way, in writing AKS, I sort of riffed, if you will, on several of the weird topics Phil used in the VALIS “trilogy.” The anokhi was one of these. Phil mentioned it fifty times in TToTA. I spent most of yesterday analyzing this subject again, since these days I often forget what I “knew” when I knew it ;)

Per the previous posts on anokhi, Phil first refers to it as “pure Self-Awareness” in Chapter Five. But, in Chapter Six he actually refers to what John Allegro wrote in (and actually mentions Allegro) The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross: A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East. I did not re-read Allegro’s book this week, but essentially this is the source material for the exchange between Kirsten and Angel Archer, “You mean Jesus was a dope dealer?” And Tim Archer’s (aka Bishop Pike) ideas that the Zadokite’s were “a mushroom cult” and the Eucharist a left over sacrament from eating the bread, or the anokhi mushroom. Phil’s fifth and final wife, Tessa, confirmed Phil’s intrigue with Allegro in an interview I did with her. Bishop Archer was quick to remind Angel the mushroom would not have been used as dope, “they would have considered it medicine.” (You can search TToTA for every reference of anokhi, as I did, with a Kindle or online using Google books.)
I can’t go on about this any further without writing a book, which I already did ;)
ej “jami” Morgan

"Anokhi Mushroom" -- did Dick know that Anokhi means "I"?

Aharon Varady, on the Facebook group, pointed out that "Anokhi" means "I" in Biblical Hebrew. Here's the bit in Transmigration of Timothy Archer

"Apparently the anokhi mushroom was toxic but the Zadokites found a way to detoxify it, at least somewhat, enough so it didn't kill them. It made them hallucinate."
page 83

I don't know if Dick was aware that Anokhi means "I" in Hebrew. He got deep into the Bible in English, but I haven't seen much to indicate that he was much interested in learning biblical languages. "Anokhi" seems to have become one of the many special jargon terms PKD adopted based on a superficial acquaintance with the (already kinda weird) research. I haven't looked closely enough at Dick's sources like the Allegro book, or the evidence about James Pike's beliefs. But those would be good places to look to understand this problem better.

Best Review of the Exegesis So Far

"Dick’s choice of the name Eldritch to (anti)christen his villainous cyborg signals, I think, a purposeful wedding of the textures and tones of SF with those of Gothic horror. A term redolent of Lovecraftian slime, “eldritch” designates the uncanny quality of even the most advanced technologies, their apocalyptic infestation of the soul. Yet for Dick the decay of human identity under the lurid gaze of dark gods is not a primordial regression, as Lovecraft would have depicted it, but rather the outcome of technological progress itself; the notion of the perceptual world as a manipulable construct, amenable to technoscientific control, unites Gnostic theology with psychedelic experience in a particularly science-fictional way."
Rob Latham in the LA Review of Books

Boehme on Magic

"Magic is the mother of eternity, of the being of all beings; for it creates itself, and is understood in desire. It is in itself nothing but a will and this will is the great mystery of all wonders and secrets, but brings itself into imagination or figuration itself by the imagination of the desireful hunger into being. It is the original state of Nature. Its desire makes an imagination, and imagination or figuration is only the will of desire. But desire makes in the will such a being as the will in itself is."
-- Jacob Boehme (1575-1624)
(thanks to Phil Norfleet for the quote)

PKD Panel Needs Papers!

I'll be submitting a paper proposal on Philip K. Dick and Alchemy to
the Association for the Study of Esotericism conference this summer.
There is room on the panel (with me and Erik Davis) for more papers
about PKD. Any serious reader of the Exegesis who has an academic
lens to bring to the study would be perfect for this. Drop me a line
if you're interested and would like help workshopping a paper proposal.
Here is the link.

Philip K. Dick on the Religious Theme in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back

From "Universe Makers ... and Breakers" 1981: "I'm getting a little tired of people turning out to be robots, harmless-looking life forms evolving into stupendous but predictable space squids, and, most of all, World War Two's Battle of Midway refought in outer space. But I must admit that the eerie, mystical, almost religious subtheme in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back enchanted me."

thanks to Frank Hollander for posting this quote. Nice to know that the Joseph Campbell thing can make an exception for bad space opera.

and from Selected Letter vol 5 (p.120):

While I was there in Metz we saw the French premiere of STAR WARS and I was amazed at the theological implications of what, in the film, is called "the force". Have you seen the film? I then bought the novel. Beyond doubt there is a profound theological theme to it, and the audience is reacting to it. Also (and I tell you this witha certain hesitation) the description of "the force" in STAR WARS for unaccountable reasons resembles the entity or force which took me over during my religious experiences in March of 1974. That which I saw then, which I call VALIS or Zebra was a plasmatic energy

more from PKD on Star Wars in this post

Magic equals Science

“I was twelve [in 1940] when I read my first sf magazine…it was called Stirring Science Stories and ran, I think, four issues….I came across the magazine quite by accident; I was actually looking for Popular Science. I was most amazed. Stories about science? At once I recognized the magic which I had found, in earlier times, in the Oz books – this magic now coupled not with magic wands but with science…In any case my view became magic equals science… and science (of the future) equals magic.”
-Philip K. Dick, Self Portrait (1968)