The first omnium gatherum, a study group organized by Wheeler with members of one of the mega-churches in Rio Blanco, at which Wheeler occasionally took communion even though he didn’t have much faith in the decidedly practical mysticisms of Protestantism, was notable for its absence of omnium. Turnout, that is, was light. Every convert to the cause was hand selected, and with great effort. According to the literature of these early pre-institutional days, the group consisted of a woman with a type II bipolar diagnosis, Christine, whose husband was really uncomfortable with all of her Wheeler-inspired babbling; a death metal vocalist from the suburbs, called Stig; and one of Wheeler’s best friends, a quiet and retiring mathematician called Louise Anselm, who felt that apocalypsis was probably mathematical more than anything else, and who wanted to study it as a kind of teleological reply to the numerical excesses of infinity. Wheeler assigned reading to each of these participants from one of the mystery cults or from heretical sects such as might be found in the Nag Hammadi papyruses, come to that which God has revealed, the idea being to generate some kind of reservoir for all possible descriptions of apocalypse, yet man says will I live again, and to begin to organize these in a database of apocalyptic imagery and longing. The original members of the group were uncommitted to the project, but they were good people, and they were four, which is a numeral of genuine interest, describing, for example, the square, and each of the four, each of the line segments of the square of omnium gatherum, the superstructure in which the group would be built, exemplified the dictum Happiness Is Submission to God. Coincidences abounded!
Stig, whose vocal polyps had temporarily sidelined him, resulting in his being forced out of the band he had formed himself, gave the first presentation at the omnium gatherum, namely a paper on connections between Joachim of Fiore, the twelfth-century architect of numerical exegesis, and the number of words in the fragments of the Oxyrhynchus 1224 Gospel, with special attention to the first line fragment: “… in every… To you I swear…” These six words, according to Stig’s very serviceable paper, indicated revelatory strains that ran straight from the dawn of civilization up through the canonizing impulse of early Christianity, rising to a pinnacle in the twelfth century, where these six words collided with Joachim and his numerical obsessions, whereupon the particular numerical sequence, as well as the devotional importance of the word every, likewise the avowal of “To you I swear,” with its carnal implications, were suppressed for several centuries while Europe bathed itself in blood and plague, not to appear again until discovered by the decadents of the end of the nineteenth century, who equated, according to Stig, love and le petit mort with the end of civilization, at which point the impulse was again suppressed, according to Stig, until the soul music from the late twentieth century, beginning with the African American jazz-soul singer Nina Simone, traveling through some old-fashioned hip-hop and neo-soul, these generations-old soul music evocations, according to Stig, presenting both a carnal and a revolutionary fervor, as in the Trotskyite upheavals of early-twenty-first-century Kazakhstan. Stig’s reasoning, it was clear, was not terribly sophisticated, and there were improbable leaps whose rhetorical force would not be immediately apparent to readers who weren’t already informed on matters of the apocalypsis, but for thumbnail history it wasn’t bad, and it’s important to note that Stig, when he destroyed his voice for good, became a religious-studies professor, one of the first popularizers of omnium gatherum in the religious left; see, for example, his wealth of papers on the decentered and anti-authoritarian structure of governance in omnium gatherum, its emphasis on service and rotating leadership, its oral tradition, its attempts to generate its own language and alphabet, its resistance to traditional ritual. These position papers became so central to the public relations of the omnium gatherum that there was a schismatic subdivision of the group that insisted that Stig was the de facto founder and institutional genius behind everything that was and has been lasting about omnium gatherum.
As additional converts began attending meetings, Zachary Wheeler began to conceive of the omnium gatherum, despite its scriptural, textual, and interpretive zeal, as something that had to be accomplished in real time, which is to say that it needed to take place only at actual gatherings, not in people’s homes, not in solitude. It needed to have a dramatic, communal, performative modality. This emphasis came to repel certain kinds of Christian folks, though the omnium gatherum declared itself in harmony with their practices. The Christians, it seemed, mainly wanted to talk about the Book of Revelation. They had been led to believe that only certain interpretations were authorized with respect to their text. Zachary Wheeler was chagrined to lose, in the larger omnium gatherum community, the more obsessive members of the evangelical world — especially evangelical persons with a history of psychotic symptoms, since Wheeler believed that psychosis was an important ideological tool, one that needed to be included in the dialogue of faith.
Then: snakes. The continuum of vermin. Beginning with sewer roaches, moving up through scorpions, and the tarantulas, perhaps including the coyote and the javelina, the brown recluse spider, the diamondback rattlesnake. If Zach Wheeler never woke to find a snake in his bed, or a snake waiting for him in the bathroom, it was only by chance, because who didn’t come here, to the desert, but to reckon with the sound of the rattlesnake and the application of its venom to a calf or an ankle? Who didn’t find himself, or herself, listening for the sound of the rattlesnake? The omnium gatherum was ephemeral, was lightweight, if it didn’t involve snakes, if it didn’t have workshops where there would be biting, where there would be willing victims of rattlesnakes and a period of waiting before the antivenin was administered. Wheeler himself was the first to volunteer, and he invited people from the community to watch, which only emboldened his estranged sister, a social worker in Oregon, to note in the press that Wheeler had always been “sick, egomaniacal, and passive-aggressive,” and that, as a child, he’d performed for his ex-military father by playing with electrical sockets. Students of snakebite ecstasy will have noted that the venom of local snakes, Sonoran snakes, has been mutating over the years, and that the sidewinder and the diamondback have both graduated to a level of poisonousness that has led the local police to attempt to intercede when, at least, they have been tipped off about wildlife encounters.
Wheeler, however, had made a lifetime study of the creation of ecstatic religious groups, and he’d gone to the mega-churches, and he knew that he stood for something. It was important to get people around him who could look after the organizational details of the omnium gatherum, such as the creation of foundational documents, so that he might simply go out into the desert, as all the great monastic thinkers had done, and organize his party, year in and year out, allowing for sculpture, for ritual burning, for music, for performance. It was as if the slogan Happiness Is Submission to God wrote its history in situ. The omnium gatherum, like its founder, was unruly, badly scripted, had no rules, and was often thought to be more theme park than philosophical system. Perversely, it grew more quickly during bad times.