by Rob Brezsny
“No, I regret to say that I do not. But then, as I said, I only know a part of your destiny’s overall scheme.”
“Do you know the part about how I’m the reincarnation of Mary Magdalen?”
For the first time since we met, Jumbler seemed to have become shy or evasive. He wouldn’t look me in the eyes.
“I am going to take you to the holiest, most beautiful place in all of Marin County,” he said with a weird fierceness as we passed a Pizza Hut. “It is very close now.”
“I refuse to go to the holiest, most beautiful spot until you say what you have against me being Mary Magdalen.”
“I am sure I will get used to the idea in time.”
“But what’s the problem? Aren’t you happy for me?”
“It is just that if what you say is true, I have been kept in the dark about a very, very large piece of the puzzle.”
“Who’s the mysterious and powerful puzzle-master, anyway? Who’s doling out these pieces so stingily?”
“You know,” he said mournfully, “when you were dying—I mean when you were dying as Artaud—you refused to see me. I even visited the hospital, and you put your palms over your eyes and your fingers in your ears until I went away. But I forgive you. I forgave you then. In the hour when you died, a few days later, I woke up from a nap dreaming that you were wrestling a cloud for the right to block the sun.”
“And why did I refuse to see you?” I asked.
“Because I loved you too much.”
Up until this point, Jumbler had seemed superhuman in his glib mastery of the flow. He had been dashing, confident, relaxed. But now his face looked defeated. I felt sorry for him. My first impulse was to help him get back to the state he had been in.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “ ‘I loved you too much?’ ”
“It means I loved you more than you loved me. And it was not the first time.”
“You had a desperate unrequited crush on me when I was Paracelsus, too?” I said, trying to lighten his mood.
“Do not mock me, my dear.”
“Maybe the problem started with you being my great helper without me being your great helper. That would create an imbalance of power, don’t you think?”
“But I have never had the expectation that you should pay me back. My gifts must have no strings attached. I am a bodhisattva.”
“But why shouldn’t I be in cahoots with your holy guardian angel, as you are with mine? What if I wanted to give to you as much as you gave me? How could I be so narcissistic as to let our relationship be one-sided?”
“It is not right for me to ask for your blessings to rain on me, or even to yearn for you to be in my special service.”
I felt a sudden rage. “Maybe that’s why I was so mad at you,” I cried. “Maybe that’s even why I couldn’t love you as much as you loved me: because you set it up so that I wasn’t allowed to give you as much as you gave me. That was selfish of you, don’t you see? It was cruel. You wanted to be the big giver, bigger than me, and you trapped me in the role of the receiver. You made me into the objectified idol so you could be the holy devotee.”
I couldn’t believe what I was saying. Where were these ideas coming from? It felt like I was picking up a centuries-old conversation with Jumbler. I was trembling with the bizarre familiarity of it all.
We had arrived in the parking lot of Goodwill, a store that sold recycled clothes and furniture and other miscellaneous stuff. Jumbler set his books and bags down near a dirty white trailer that was parked next to the rear wall. It was the back half of a large truck, which presumably housed raw donations before they were processed. At one end it rested on two pairs of tires, and at the other on thick metal stilts.
Jumbler’s eyes were closed as he leaned against the trailer. The rapid twitching of his eyelids indicated that he was following a stream of inner images. I could well appreciate the state he was in and wanted to give it all my respect. When he tottered and started to slide down, I grabbed him as best I could to guide him. He ended up seated with his back against the tires of the trailer. I sat next to him with my hand on his knee. The smell of diesel fuel and motor oil was pervasive at first, but faded as my nostrils got used to it.
We remained almost motionless in that position for a long time, maybe half an hour. Now and then he would twitch or mumble as if he were asleep and dreaming of adventures. I felt, ironically, that I was extemporaneously fixing the age-old imbalance. All my energy was pouring into him unconditionally, all my attention. I had no inclination to tune into my own inner dialogue, but wanted to make myself available to him in whatever way he needed me.
After a long time, he spoke words that were intelligible. “All these centuries, I have been trying to atone.”
“Atone for what?” I asked.
“Atone for my failure to make you my equal in the new religion we spawned. I did not make it clear enough how crucial you were. I did not work hard enough to wear away the resistance of the male disciples. And so our successors distorted everything we worked together to accomplish.”
I could not for a moment believe that the person sitting next to me, as inscrutably magical as he might be, was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Yet that is exactly what his vision seemed to have told him. I was willing to play along with this fantasy, as I had been responsive to his other improvisations, but I regarded it as inconceivable that he could have been ignorant of this amazing facet of his destiny until now.
“The world was not yet ripe for me,” I said simply. “But it is now.”
Jumbler rose and stretched and gave an exultant sigh.
“Yes,” he agreed. “And that is why I must declare an end to my compulsive atonement. It is time to stop feeling guilty and start letting you help me do what we set out to do so long ago.”
He circled around to three big cardboard box-fulls of fresh junk that lay at one end of the trailer. Apparently some donor had deposited the stuff here after the store closed. Jumbler pawed through it purposefully until he found something he liked.
“Sumptuous carpets for the sanctuary,” he announced, holding up an ugly green cashmere sweater and purple wool women’s pants along with a grocery bag of other old clothes. “With these I lay the new foundation.”
He crouched down under the trailer, which was a space about waist-high, and spread out the garments on the oil-stained asphalt. When he was done, he plucked two plates and some silverware from the boxes and arranged them on the “carpet.” Darkness had fallen, but two lights outside Goodwill’s back door provided dim illumination.
“Come, my dear,” he cooed. “Let us build a tabernacle in the wilderness.”
I was brimming with curiosity. What exactly had he experienced during his vision? Had he felt and used the psychic energy I’d fed him? Why was he so sure that the scenes he saw proved beyond a doubt that he himself was Jesus? (My training taught me to evaluate shamanic epiphanies with the same skepticism I brought to all raw data.) Had he received any revelations that filled in the gaps in his knowledge about my destiny?
But I decided to forgo this line of inquiry for the time being. Sooner or later, I promised myself, I would indulge, but for the foreseeable future I would suspend my desire to frame our adventure with my questions. I wanted to be in a fully surprisable mode, not as much in control as I had been all my life.
Over the next few minutes, I helped him fill the space beneath the trailer with other discarded goods. There were pyramid-shaped salt and pepper shakers, Christmas ornaments with angel themes, a handpainted wooden egg within an egg within an egg within an egg, an Etch-a-Sketch, artificial sunflowers, a book of poetry by Sylvia Plath, a toy metal alligator, pipe cleaners, a rod and attached copper ball from inside a toilet, a roll of biohazard warning stickers, a troll doll wearing a doctor uniform, and a ripped print of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
As a finishing touch, Jumbler lit the candles he’d bought at the market and placed the food around the two plates. An elegant
if campy shrine now filled the cramped, dusty space.
Briefly, I worried that we might be caught by someone. But I reasoned that we weren’t breaking any law. And though there were many cars whizzing by on the busy street where one side of the parking lot ended, we were well hidden from them by the trailer’s double sets of tires. I hadn’t seen any pedestrians in the vicinity since we arrived.
“It is show time, O Queen,” he said then. “The sacred space is designed beautifully. The lighting is perfect. The mood is pregnant. So let us begin the ritual feast. Dessert first, of course.”
He opened the box of Extraño, the jalapeño popsicles. Each one was a double barrel, with two sticks. As we sucked the cold yet hot green treats, he told me a tale.
“Long ago, near Hereford, on the banks of the Wye River in merry old England, there lived an odd little creature named Robin the Mouth. The people of the town could not remember when Robin had first appeared, nor how she had come to do the strange job that everyone needed done but no one else wanted to do. Sometimes she seemed to be a ghost flitting at the edge of their dreams—until that dire moment when they put out an urgent call for her flesh-and-blood presence.
“For Robin the Mouth was a Sin-Eater. That is to say, she took on the sins of recently deceased persons by ingesting food imbued with the last gasps of their departing spirits. Whenever a death occurred, Robin was called to the side of the corpse, upon whose chest lay a funeral biscuit and bowl of requiem ale. As she fed on this sepulchral nourishment, she pledged to pawn her own soul on behalf of the deceased, who might thereby find an unimpeded path to the kingdom of heaven.
“But there was a hitch. Have you heard the saying, ‘No good deed goes unpunished?’ Never was that more truly said than in regards to Robin the Mouth. The moment the Sin-Eater was paid, the corpse’s relatives and friends chased her from the house amidst curses and threats, and often with sticks and stones as well. She was feared and hated for having such weird power to heal. And yet she would be asked to perform the same service the next time the community lost one of its members.
“Robin loved her job, despite its drawbacks. It was exciting to be so necessary during the greatest rite of passage of all. She was proud of how unique she was. Indeed, in time she grew ambitious to become even more unique. And when the opportunity presented itself, she began to innovate. No longer content simply to do as she was required, she ate the sins of those who were still alive.
“A wise, restless woman named Lethe was Robin’s first experiment. How did it come about? A chance meeting between the two in the woods on All Hallow’s Eve led to the discussion of forbidden topics and wild ideas. The Moon was conjunct Jupiter and Mars and Sun in Scorpio on that afternoon, and both women were in the darkly fertile time of the month when the blood flows. Surely these conditions invited them to plumb more deeply than either might have been normally inclined.
“The next evening Robin came to the cottage where Lethe lived, and the two conducted a rite that had never before been done.
“ ‘Relieve me of my lapses, my malice, my thoughtlessness,’ Lethe beseeched Robin. ‘Devour my mistakes so that I may be born afresh.’ And as Robin nibbled the biscuit and sipped the ale that lay on her chest, Lethe felt a great purification come over her, a release from the losses that had bent and twisted her destiny. ‘This is high magic,’ she exclaimed. ‘You have made my heart light again. I feel endowed with the power to forgive myself.’
“In this way, Robin the Mouth discovered the rest of her calling. Secretly at first, she bestowed her gift on a few mavericks and odd folk. As she beheld the renewal she wrought, the burdens she lifted, she became emboldened to act more openly. That was her downfall, of course. If her healing had been barely tolerated before, now it became a menace.
“One spring morning, she ate the sins of the blacksmith’s son, who then testified to all who would listen that he had been marvelously cleansed as not even the eucharist had ever done. Horrified, the townspeople went mad. Hunting the Sin-Eater down in her hut in the woods, they hurled sticks and stones at her with such force that she breathed no more.
“For in the end Robin was seen as a rival to Jesus himself. Was there not a perverse homology between their functions? In church, the supplicants ate the symbolic body and blood of Christ so as to have their sins absorbed and burned away by the devoured God. Robin, on the other hand, ingested the symbolic bodies and blood of the supplicants so as to take their sins into herself, that they might become closer to Christ.
“As I end this tale, my dear Rapunzel, I will ask you to guess what meaning it has for you.”
The story had roused unfathomable emotions in me. They were huge and pungent but mostly out of the reach of my ability to articulate. The only words I could find that captured even a bit of the sensations in me were triumphant sadness.
At the same time, there was something dear and familiar about the Sin-Eater. I identified with her. I thought maybe it had to do with a theme I’d wrestled with for as long as I could remember: how risky it is to be a force for good; how delicate an operation it is to help people in a way that doesn’t invite chaos and ruin.
Rocking gently back and forth, Jumbler was waiting for my reply to his question.
“Don’t tell me you mean to imply that I was Robin the Mouth in one of my previous incarnations?” I asked tentatively.
“Not implying. Stating as fact.”
“Antonin Artaud. Paracelsus. Eumolpus. And now Robin the Mouth. Anyone else I’ve been that I should know about?”
“Do not change the subject.”
“I must admit I feel a certain resonance with Robin.”
“You just ate her sins, by the way. I arranged for them to be contained in that jalapeño popsicle I gave you.”
Almost unconsciously, I had begun to perform a gesture I’d done hundreds of times back home inside my redwood tree. I was rhythmically stroking two popsicle sticks together. Jumbler was doing the same with his.
“What were Robin’s sins?” I asked.
“Her biggest sin was that she was too proud of her innovation. That kept her from being cagey enough to stay alive, which in turn prevented her from developing her new art to its utmost. Had she been able to continue, she would have become a master not just in swallowing but in thoroughly digesting the sins she ate. That was the special destiny she should have had, you see. Though there were many other sin-eaters in old Europe, most of them turned into pitiful martyrs by the time they reached the end of their days. They were hapless scapegoats, after all, not illumined Christs. They did not possess the soul force to process the demonic waste they regularly absorbed.
“But Robin had stumbled upon the transformative trick of Jesus: how to use the devoured psychic poison as fuel; breaking it down so as to neutralize its danger even as she tapped into the vital force that had been trapped therein.”
“I don’t understand what that means.”
“The task the sin-eaters performed was not merely symbolic. The stuff they absorbed in the act of ‘eating’ was real. Not real, of course, in the eyes of those modern folks who believe the material world is all there is. But absolutely real according to most other cultures, which have always accepted the objective existence of a subtler form of matter—the stuff that composes the spirit realm.”
“My people and I have always referred to it as the prima materia,” I said, finally feeling a need to insert some of my own vernacular.
“But what the sin-eaters absorbed from their clients was not just any old kind of prima materia,” Jumbler said. “It was the trashiest effluvia—all the most ignorant, unripe, nasty aspects of the departing souls.”
“What Carl Jung described as the shadow,” I interjected.
“Exactly right. Now for most sin-eaters, this was a horrible burden. They gradually became bloated garbage heaps. But Robin was unlike her fellows, who by the way were almost exclusively men. She had the shaman’s skill of breaking down the garbage into its component elements, t
hereby gaining access to the libidinous charge at the raw core of all psychic energy.”
Now I saw what he was driving at. My Goddess Persephone is renowned for her power to dissolve distorted and outworn forms, returning their constituent matter to its “virginal” state. In the tradition of the Pomegranate Grail, if not of the patriarchy, Persephone is the very archetype of the Virgin.
“According to the alchemists,” Jumbler added, “dissolution is the secret of the Great Work.”
“According to Jung,” I said, “fabulous treasure lies hidden amidst the unlovely shadow.” I was exhilarated to be able to contribute to the unfolding revelation with my own cherished beliefs.
“So you’re saying that I—as Robin the Mouth—was a Christ-like character?” I continued. “I freed people from their sick karma without myself being infected by their gross poisons?”
“You were not a lost soul victimized by those you served. You were a skilled alchemist who thrived on turning lead into gold. Or at least you were headed in that direction. But you never arrived there. You got yourself killed before your work was done. Fortunately, now you are ready to pick up where you left off.”
“I’m supposed to pick up where Robin left off and where Artaud left off? I’m going to be a sin-eater in the Theater of Cruelty?”
“Blend the two, my dear, and you get the next phase in the evolution of both the sin-eater and the Theater of Cruelty: The Eater of Cruelty. All we have to do to get there is take the Theater of Cruelty and add an extra ‘e’ after the ‘Th’ in ‘Theater.’ Theater of Cruelty transforms into The Eater of Cruelty.”
I was seduced by the elegance and intricacy of Jumbler’s theories about my destiny. Though they seemed at odds with everything I’d been taught, I struggled to integrate them. There was not necessarily a contradiction between being Mary Magdalen, I reasoned, and all the characters he had paraded out. None of his candidates were alive in the first century Anno Domini.
Searching my own experience for some link with the Sin-Eater and The Eater of Cruelty, I fell into a reverie about Madame Blavatsky in the Drivetime. I recalled the pungent, astringent taste of the “wine” she had shot into my mouth with the Supersoaker. That was certainly a cruel thing to imbibe.