Studying the Bible, along with this Qumran personality, Brady finds that the New Testament is in cipher. The Qumran personality can read it. “Jesus” is really Zagreus-Zeus, taking two forms, one mild, the other utterly powerful, on which his followers can draw when in need.
The Qumran personality, who, for fictional purposes, I call Thomas, gradually informs Brady that these are the Parousia, the Final Days. And to be prepared; Thomas will prepare him by reminding him of his own divinity — anamnesis, Thomas calls it. Thomas develops a special parity relationship with Brady, but evolves as a source of teaching for the incredibly ignorant Brady the entity known as Erasmus, who is in fact a station in the noosphere, which is now so fully charged around Earth that if you are aware of it you can consciously, rather than unconsciously, draw from it; these are the “Seas of Knowledge” that were known in ancient times and upon which the Sibyl at Delphi drew. But this is a cover, because Brady realizes that in point of fact, the Qumran men had as their god not the mythical Jesus but the actual Zagreus, and by doing research, Brady soon learns that Zagreus was a form of Dionysos. Christianity is a latter form of the worship of Dionysos, refined through the strange and lovely figure of Orpheus. Orpheus, like Jesus, is real only in the sense that Dionysos is becoming socialized; born here as a child of another race, not a human one but a visiting race, Zagreus has had to learn by degrees to modify his “madness,” which is now kept to a low ebb. Basically, he is with us to reconstruct us as expressions of him, and the MO of this is our being possessed by him — which the early Christians sought for, and hid from the hated Romans. Dionysos-Zagreus-Orpheus-Jesus was always pitted against the City of Iron, be it Rome or Washington, DC; he is the god of springtime, of new life, of small and helpless creatures, he is the god of mirth and frenzy, and of sitting here day after day working on this novel.
But in the novel, Thomas says, “The Final Days have come. The overthrow of the tyranny is that which, in lurid language, John described in Revelation. Jesus-Zagreus is seizing his own, now, one after another; he lives again.”
During winter, it was believed that Dionysos, the god of the vine plant, of vegetation, of the crop, slumbered. It was known that no matter how dead he seemed (James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a wonderful account of this, where they accidentally spill beer on the corpse and it revives), he was actually alive, though you’d never know it. And then — not to the surprise of those who understood him and believed in him — he was reborn. His followers knew he would be; they knew the secret (“Behold! I tell you a sacred secret,” etc.). We are speaking here of the mystery religions, all of them, including Christianity. Our God has been sleeping, during the long winter of the human culture (not for one year’s rotational cycle of seasons, but from A.D. 45 through the centuries of mental winter to now); just when winter holds all in its grip, the snow of despair and defeat (in our case, political chaos, moral ruin, economic ruin — the winter of our planet, our world, our civilization), then the vine, which was gnarled and old and seemingly dead, breaks into new life, and our God is reborn — not outside us as such, but in each of us. Slumbering not under snow over the ground surface but within the right hemispheres of our brains. We have been waiting, we didn’t know for what. This is it: This is spring for our planet, in a deeper, more fundamental way. The cold chains of iron are being thrown off, but by what a miracle. As with my character, Nicholas Brady — I’ve had Zagreus awaken in my right hemisphere, and felt the flooding of renewed life, his vigor, his personality, and his godlike wisdom; he hated the injustice he saw around him, and the lies, and he remembered “The dear one lands untroubled by men, where amid the shadowy green / The little ones of the forest live unseen” (Euripides). Dr. Ornstein, thank you for helping bring winter to an end, and ushering in — not just spring — but the living life of Spring alive but asleep inside us.
Really, I suppose that the clear line between hallucination and reality has itself become a kind of hallucination, and perhaps I am taking my dream experiences too seriously. But there is much interest now, for instance, in the Senoi tribe of the Malay Peninsula (vide Kilton Stewart’s article “Dream Theory in Malaya” in Charles T. Tart’s Altered States of Consciousness). In a dream I was shown that the word “Jesus” is a code, a neologism, and not a real name at all; those reading the text in those early days who were the esoteri (the Qumran men, possibly) would see “Zeus” and “Zagreus” combined into the integer “Jesus.” It is a substitution code, I think they call it. Now, ordinarily, one would not give much credit to such a dream, or rather to any dream insofar as it might be an actual entity, an AI system, for instance, giving you accurate information that you otherwise would not have available to you. But as I went to one of my textbooks the other day to check a spelling, I found these remarkably similar textual passages, the first of which we all know, since it concludes our own sacred writings, the New Testament: “. . . I am the root and scion of David, the bright morning star” (Revelation 22:16, Jesus describing himself). And:
Of all the trees that are
He hath his flock, and feedeth root by root,
The Joy-god Dionysos, the pure star
That shines amid the gathering of the fruit
(Pindar; a favorite quatrain of Plutarch, circa 430 B.C.)
What are names? This is the god of in-toxication, taking in the sacred mushroom (cf. John Allegro) or wine, or finding a joke so terribly funny that you lose all reason laughing and crying, as when you see one of the slapstick silent comedies. In the one short stanza of Pindar we have flock, we have trees, we have in addition to these two major symbols of Jesus, terms by which all the esoteri recognize him, yet two more inner terms: the root and star.
The reference to “root and star” might be taken as equal to a spacial extension of the time extension of “I am Alpha and Omega,” which is the first and last. So “root and star” indicate: I am from the chthonic world up, and the starry heaven downward. But I see something else in star, in bright morning star: I think he was saying, “The signal that the springtime for man is here, that signal comes from another star.” We have friends and they are ETI, and it is as He told us, a bright and morning star: the star of love.
“If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (1977)
May I tell you how much I appreciate your asking me to share some of my ideas with you. A novelist carries with him constantly what most women carry in large purses: much that is useless, a few absolutely essential items, and then, for good measure, a great number of things that fall in between. But the novelist does not transport them physically because his trove of possessions is mental. Now and then he adds a new and entirely useless idea; now and then he reluctantly cleans out the trash — the obviously worthless ideas — and with a few sentimental tears sheds them. Once in a great while, however, he happens by chance onto a thoroughly stunning idea new to him that he hopes will turn out to be new to everyone else. It is this final category that dignifies his existence. But such truly priceless ideas. . . perhaps during his entire lifetime he may, at best, acquire only a meager few. But that is enough; he has, through them, justified his existence to himself and to his God.
An odd aspect of these rare, extraordinary ideas that puzzles me is their mystifying cloak of — shall I say — the obvious. By that I mean, once the idea has emerged or appeared or been born — however it is that new ideas pass over into being — the novelist says to himself, “But of course. Why didn’t I realize that years ago?” But note the word “realize.” It is the key word. He has come across something new that at the same time was there, somewhere, all the time. In truth, it simply surfaced. It always was. He did not invent it or even find it; in a very real sense it found him. And — and this is a little frightening to contemplate — he has not invented it, but on the contrary, it invented him. It is as if the idea created him for its purposes. I think this is why we discover a startling phenomenon of great renown: that quite often in history a great new idea strikes a number of researchers or thinkers at exactly the same time, all of them oblivious to their compeers. “Its time had come,” we say about the idea, and so dismiss, as if we had explained it, something I consider quite important: our recognition that in a certain literal sense ideas are alive.