By the way—in Book Six of the Aeneid, the Sibyl is possessed by the god, by Apollo. Paul Williams* when he was here showed me a passage from one of Ted Sturgeon’s novels which Paul felt showed that my experience had been precisely that of the early Christians. I do feel that it was under the aspect of Apollo, however, because my needs were for that, for syntonos and reason.
This happened not because of my needs—we all have needs—but because they are coming back. The Immortals. Here is a quote from Paul Williams’ book Turning Upward which I just came across (p. 237):
Men are coming, great men who are among us now, who will unite the extremes into an unshakeable structure, unshakeable not because of its suppression of the will of the people, but because of its perfect expression of that will. And from the present bewilderment, anger and chaos a true will must arise to replace that shadow of will, that vacant greed which is now called the will of the people by the clumsy dwarves who stumble where graceful giants ought to stride.
You should read Paul’s whole section in this book. I think it is all true, the above.
I get very frustrated writing to you about this because I have so much to say and can’t spit it out. Papers slide off my desk; books I’m quoting from fall shut; I type wrong letters entirely. I am so fucking excited, keyed up, high on all this, and terribly impatient, which is not cool—impatient to find people to tell this to, the Good News, so to speak. Claudia, an ancient promise made to us, made thousands of years ago, is now being kept. Who made it I don’t know, but it was made. He or they would come back eventually, and they fucking have, Claudia, they fucking have!!! I know it. Again and again in unmistakable ways they have assured me of this, and have in addition shown me glimpses of what we can expect. That which is rightfully ours, which was taken away, will be returned. They will see to that. As Paul called it, the “Time of Restoration of All Things”18—it is here now, Claudia. It took a hell of a long time, by our standards, but they did keep their ancient promise; they are back.
The Christians, with their exclusivistic, bigoted, narrow intolerance, believe salvation and intervention and restoration is only for them; they’re wrong; this is for our planet and all its people. There are saviors for all of us, everyone here. To the Immortals such distinctions as Christian versus atheist mean nothing; it is like Holstein cows versus Jerseys, and my spelling and typing are so shot now that I will sign off.
Next year in a book of Harlan Ellison’s that Harper and Row are bringing out, Harlan says:
Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson wrote, “Maybe God’s gone away, forgetting His promise He made that day: and we’re lost out here in the stars.” And maybe He/She’s just waiting for the right signal to come back, whaddaya think?19
Right on, Harlan.
In March I abruptly pierced through to the heart of things; I saw within, saw reality as it is, and saw the Immortals approaching. I saw the iron prison we live in, and I experienced first them and then vision after vision of what our world, our lives will be like when they join up the two parts: universe A and universe B. Ours is one part, and with them they tow the other. What they will do with our world, the macrocosmos, will be an analog of what they did with me and other isolated individuals or microcosms: in a flash they ignite and fuse everything and then imprint an entirely new eidos. It all happens without warning. In micro terms I experienced the entire trip which our world and all of us will experience: months of hunger and want, then growing fear and helplessness, then a renunciation of everything, knowing it to be lost forever—then the manifestation of the dazzling chromatic forms. From want and no hope and fear and a total giving up at once there will be a total rebirth, a restitution and a renaissance; life will start up anew, without warning.
In the visions of every Pythagorean in history (Euripides in The Bacchae, in Wordsworth’s “ode,” etc.) I discover the same visions that I have seen: what in Dante is called Earthly Paradise. (He is led to it and finds the lady singing and picking flowers; in dream after dream I’ve seen her and heard her singing; now I know who she is, and I know what the beautiful park which I see is. It is going to be here and not in the next world; it’s what Dante himself saw and depicted too clearly, and his vision is amazingly similar to that of the 6th century B.C. Greek Orphics.)
Well, I got to sign off because we have to replace all the cat boxes in the house now; the cats are grumbling, and when Chester grumbles, we all move into action.
Love,
Phil
➊ Astraea, or Justice, the last immortal to leave the Earth in the legend of the Saturnian age.
Letter to Claudia Bush, November 29, 1974
[4:112]
Dear Claudia,
Can I rattle on some more at you? Especially since the big blue cat we got ran away as soon as we let him out? Thank you.
I hope you had a nice Complaingiving.
Jean-Pierre who bought the Ubik screenplay hasn’t contacted me since October.20 Next Monday (on which day you’ll probably receive this) he owes me $2,500, which he didn’t have on November first, so we gave him another 30 days. I’ll bet he’s in Paris right now. I’m sure I already told you that Robert Jaffe suggested that maybe the Ubik purchase was laundered Soviet money, and the screenplay right now is in Krakow, Poland. Could be. I still maintain that there is some scientific principle in Ubik which I thought was fiction, but which is either a new discovery or more likely a rediscovery of one discarded long ago—Ubik, the force, itself. Ubik would roughly correspond to the universal immanent mind which Virgil mentions. Not only does it animate the universe and cause it to work, but since each of us is a piece of the universe (more properly the kosmos, as Pythagoras called it) each of us has inside him a spark of that universal mind. The Orphics in Greece were the first known group to express this idea, and the entire collection of mystery cults was seeking to find ways of bringing out or anyhow contracting that spark of divinity within. The God Apollo and such like would be links between the universal mind within and that in the kosmos around us; he would, so to speak, serve to ignite that spark within so that it fused or took over the total mind; this would be what possession by the god would more precisely be.
These categories obviously correspond to the three persons of the Trinity. Historically, god-above-the-universe is encountered first (the Umwelt of the European Existential psychiatrists), then god-with-us as a human (the Mitwelt, which for us would be the second period of man-god encounter: the encounter with Christ), then the third and finaclass="underline" God within, the Holy Spirit (the Eigenwelt). At the same time, as Jung points out, man is withdrawing his projections from the outer world. So these three steps are not only present historically but are psychologically logical and successive. We can no longer expect to encounter the divine—which is to say, the universal immanent mind—anywhere but within ourself although in a sense it is true that the prior two persons or forms of god still remain; nonetheless it is inside that we will find him, which is to say, as close to us as he could possibly get. I do think that the igniting of this spark so as to consume and so-to-speak overpower our own ego or consciousness is achieved from without somehow; it is an adventitious process, which means, it is not an intrinsic addition. It does not merely happen on its own, spontaneously, although everything is within us, except for the catalyst, which may be nothing more than an external disinhibiting stimulus. In my case I saw the dark-haired girl wearing the fish sign necklace in March of this year, and it acted as that catalyst.