Mumbo Jumbo

by Ishmael Reed

  Set knew his sister all right and Moses began to talk to her the way the Osirians talked to her in their rites. He told her how much he loved her and that he would die for her. Cut his throat swim in a river of thrashing crocodiles fight lions for her pussy. He said that he would cuss the day he was born if he couldn’t have it and that he would walk all over Egypt crying like a baby. He said that he would gouge out his eyes and dust off the feet of all the dock workers in Egypt, jump off a cliff and lock himself in a cave for the rest of his life. And every time Moses would say another lie Isis would moan and sigh and whimper and purr like a kitten as Moses’ hand moved down and touched her Seal. He fished her temple good. She showed him all her rooms. And led him into the depths of her deathless snake where he fought that part of her until it was limp on the ground. He got good into her Book tongued her every passage thumbing her leaf and rubbing his hands all over her binding.

  When he was through he had gotten it all down. All down. Had it down pat. He left the goddess in slumber as he rose, collected his gear together and then set out for Egypt.

  Well, Moses announced to the populace that he would give a concert with music and songs better than the Black Mud Sound, which was dying rapidly and played only by a few old fools in the hills. He said that this would be a dignified concert and that everyone would have to leave them old nasty-assed animal fetishes and “rattlers” and all these other “flesh-pipes” back home and that there would be no savage dancing. Don’t be bringing none of that silly shit to my gig, Moses said. I’m the 1. For once music wouldn’t just be used as a background to dancing but he would be a soloist and no 1 in the audience would be allowed to play a whistle or beat a drum or rattle a tambourine. The Osirians were furious. They knew this to be an Atonist trick and decided to disrupt the concert.

  Well, the night of the concert the people were herded into the concert grounds. (Non-attendance was equated with treason.) Moses began to play Jethro’s songs but they weren’t coming across like the way they had at the old man’s fireplace. They sounded flat, weak, deprived of the lowdown rhythms that Jethro had brought to them. An applause sign was placed up and Moses received applause. A man who didn’t go along was taken outside and beaten with flails and crooks. From a box seat, Thermuthis and her expatriate friends applauded loudest of all; 1 Greek said he would return to Greece and announce that Moses sounded even better than Osiris must have sounded himself. Moses then played the songs of Jethro with the words but his voice sounded feigned, his mimic of Jethro’s dialect phony, and at this point some grain was thrown up on the stage and people were imitating snakes by HIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSIIIIIINNNNNGGGGGGGG. That corner of the park was beaten until blood streamed down the aisles.

  Well, during the intermission Moses went back stage and his Atonist supporters, ass kissers who traveled with him everywhere he went since his return to Egypt, were drinking beer and told Moses how good he was and began to pat him on the back. Moses knew something was wrong. He was told by 1 of the ushers that fights were breaking out in the stadium and that they would have to call for the Army if the violence got out of control.

  Don’t worry, Moses said, I will next do the songs and dances I learned from The Work, the sacred Book, and that way the people will rejoice and love me and young girls will follow me everywhere.

  Well, Moses went on stage and began gyrating his hips and singing the words of the Book of Thoth, and a strange thing happened. The ears of the people began to bleed. Some of them charged the stage and tried to get at Moses but the Atonist thugs beat them back. 1 Osirian priest could no longer take it. He and several others knew what Moses had learned and knew how it was using him.

  Moses couldn’t understand. Why hadn’t the rites and the words and the dances congealed? Why hadn’t the contagion broken out? Why weren’t people talking in strange tongues and having happy convulsions?

  Moses examined his guitar. Something was wrong. But then the Osirians rose from the rows they occupied and began blowing their whistles and the beautiful sounds filled the air. They didn’t know The Work that Moses knew, but in his hands it wasn’t doing him any good anyway. The people began to relax. Removed instruments of their own they had smuggled into the park and began playing them along with the Osirians who were marching toward the bandstand playing the instruments. The people began to dance. Moses couldn’t stand it.

  Arrest those men, he said as the men came closer to where he stood and began to mount the steps. 1 Osirian—a Black Osirian, a crocodile wrestler known by his friends as “The Hunter”—lunged for Moses but the Atonist thugs surrounded him, stabbing him and making him bleed and then stomping him while he was down until he lay on the floor dead. Seeing this, the whole audience charged the bandstand and Moses was whisked away by some Atonists. People began stoning the royal chariots as they raced for refuge in the Palace. Looting and the killing of Atonists went on all night.

  The people surrounded the Palace. Some of them leaped over the barricades set up by the Pharaoh’s militia. They hurled missiles at the residence; inside, Moses’ mother Thermuthis sobbed softly. She cried the way they did in Greece, civilized, dignified, not the piercing wailing from the viscera associated with the mourning Isis who walked all over Egypt sharing her pathos with her people after her husband’s murder. (Thermuthis cried the way 1 of my relatives from Alabama described as “crying proper.”—I.R.) The Greek friends were trying to reach the boats as quickly as they could—2 of these loafers, brothers, thought of supporting themselves by selling an idea of a frieze dealing with the murder of “The Hunter” at the hands of the Atonist thugs.

  Moses thought that he could calm the multitude by going out to the balcony and “reasoning” with the people (his mother’s sophist friends had gotten to his head too), warning them that he would not truck any rowdiness and that horrible punishments were in store for those who persisted in this unruliness.

  Ladies and gentlemen of Egypt. I will unleash the Holocaust upon you this time if you persist in this action. We must have sanity and logic during these times of change and upheaval.

  A rock busted the cat’s lip.

  In anger Moses flung his rod to the ground where it immediately transformed into a snake.

  The people laughed. They called him mountebank and sorcerer, fakir in a pejorative sense of the Petro Asson, and other names associated with cheap charlatans who would raise the dead for 15 dollars and change.

  The crowd began pushing into the Palace. Moses then ran back into the apartment where his mother was sobbing softly, touching her soft smooth flabby face with a handkerchief.

  He berated her: For heaven’s sake will you cut that out. I’m trying to concentrate.

  Then the idea hit him. Moses ran into his apartment and removed a leaf from the Book Isis had given him. He returned to the balcony where below the crowds had taken trees and were now using them to pound on the Palace gate. Moses uttered The Work aloud. 1st there was silence. Then the people turned toward the Nile and they saw a huge mushroom cloud arise.

  A few minutes later, screaming of the most terrible kind came from that direction. The crowd dispersed, trampling 1 another as they rushed for the shelter of their homes. This was a turning point in the Book’s history.

  The practice of the Left Hand had now arisen to the level of that of the Right Hand. As the distinguished musicologist Fats Waller was to comment later: “Formerly the right hand was given all the work and the left hand shifted for itself, thumping out a plain octave or common chord foundation; now it’s more evenly divided and the left hand has to know its stuff.”

  Moses’ explosion made even Set’s magicians look small. The next day fish and other river creatures dead and dying washed up on the shores of the Nile.

  The VooDoo tradition instructs that Moses learned the secrets of VooDoo from Jethro and taught them to his followers. H. P. Blavatsky concurs: “The fraternity of Free Masons was founded in Egypt and Moses communicated the secret teaching to Israelites, Jesus to the Apostles
and thence it found its way to the Knights Templar.” But this doesn’t explain why he received the Petro Asson instead of the Rada. My theory is that it was due to the fact that he had approached Isis at Koptos during the wrong time of the Moon and stirred her malevolent aspects thus learning this side of the Book. Others say that shortly afterward Moses and his Atonist followers went into exile.*

  When Jethro heard of the incidents occurring in the North, the nuclear attack and the outraged mob, he told Zipporah. She took it well. She was glad that Jethro hadn’t, in a fit of rage, sent the white leprosy to Thermuthis, Moses’ mother. Jethro was a good man and once you begin the Petro work it’s hard to quit.

  Many years later when Moses returned home 1 day from “communicating with his God” he found his children dancing before the despised Bull God Apis, the animal which carries the living spirit of Osiris. Moses heard the “heathen sounds”* (timbrel’d anthems dark, boogie, jazz, down-home music, funk, gutbucket) he hadn’t heard since the old days in Egypt. Moses grabbed the awful Book from his sons and daughters who were enjoying themselves, dancing their tails off. Moses wanted to get rid of the Book, having sworn off it, but was afraid to burn it. He feared The Work’s power. So instead he hid it in a tabernacle where it was lost and became known as 1 of the “lost Books of Moses.”

  Centuries went by until 1118 when the Knights Templar built their headquarters on the site of Solomon’s Temple. The organization was an imitation of Hasan-ibn-al-Sabbah’s Assassins which had similar offices: Grand Masters, Grand Priors, Priors, Knights, Esquires, Lay Brothers, and the Templars even adopted the Muslim colors so as to distinguish themselves from their rivals the Teutonics and the Hospitalers. They were a bunch of filthy ruffians, thugs and excommunicated “holy sinners” who wore their clothes until they rotted off their backs; maybe not so bad when you consider that this was a time when the King of France only changed his clothes 3 times a year. They were bully boys who justified their existence by harassing “sacriligers adulterers and others in the name of the Cross.” (As usual they left themselves to be the judges of who was guilty of these vaguely defined crimes.) Their stock rose and when they saved the 2nd Crusade from annihilation they were in a position to write their own ticket. Hinckle Von Vampton was the Templar librarian. One night while stacking books in the basement of the library he came upon a secret passageway which led down some concrete steps into an ancient room. It was here he came upon the Book of Thoth, the sacred Work Isis had given to Moses. The Work of the Black Birdman, an assistant to Osiris. (If anyone thinks this is “mystifying the past” kindly check out your local bird book and you will find the sacred Ibis’ Ornithological name to be Threskiornis aethiopicus.)

  He showed the Book to Hugues de Payens, their leader, who was feeling heady because it was shortly after his trip to the Church Council of Troyes where he had won for the Templars immunity from excommunication. They began to translate the hieroglyphics but the Book was not going to be their whore any more and gave them the worst of itself. It was saving all of its love and Rada for when it united with its dance and music. What they derived from the Book were strange ceremonies which were called the “Rule of the Temple”… a rule scholars claim has been lost. They practiced these Petro rites in secret and this is when their fortunes reversed. The great Black Sultan of Egypt and Syria named Saladin also known as Salāh-al-Dīn-Yūsuf ibn-Ayyūb with an army of 70,000 men drove them from the “Holy Land” in 1187. Hinckle Von Vampton fled with the sacred Book.

  This was only the beginning of their downfall. In alliance with kings of Europe they attempted to regain Jerusalem in 1244 but this time they were massacred by Mongols by 1248; and in 1250 the Arabs once more defeated them. In 1303 they lost their function completely because by this time there was no “Holy Land” to protect, all of it having again come under control of the Muslims.

  Philip 4 of France, a king the Templars had saved from a Paris mob, despised the Templars. Some say he was inept and jealous because they wouldn’t admit him to the Order: he wasn’t strong enough to pass the qualifications. They were also moneylenders and when he hit on them for a loan they refused. Finally he approached their then leader Jacques de Molay with a plan. They would launch another Crusade in alliance with their rivals the Hospitalers and this time it would be directed by the Prince of France. Philip thought this a clever way of disposing of their wealth. When Jacques de Molay refused the offer, Philip got his pope, Clement, a “sick man,” to bring them to trial. In 1307 Pope Clement ordered the kings of Europe to arrest all Templars within their territories. Philip arrested de Molay on the charge of practicing strange rites of a blasphemous nature which involved worship of the Black god Baphomet. The Templars were merely exercising their rites according to the way the Book had deceived them. 37 Knights Templar were immediately burned at the stake in Paris and 50,000 were rounded up throughout Europe and slain. The 2 leaders were executed and died with curses on their lips concerning the king and pope. Hinckle got away. The Templars went underground. A corrupt form of their rites continued as Masonry, which you will notice also traces its origin to the Temple of Solomon.* Wherever Hinckle traveled in Europe he was hidden by sympathizers from generation to generation. This went on for 100s of years until he came to America in the 1890s and all of the symptoms of Jes Grew were here so they began to rise as they sensed a potential coming together with the Text. Years passed. The Wallflower Order, a secret society of enforcers established when the Atonists triumphed in the West, was hot on his trail; scouts were thinning out all over America looking for the Templar librarian. The Wallflower Order was closing in on Hinckle because, since the Book of Thoth was lying fallow, wherever Hinckle traveled J. G. would rear its head. That was when Hinckle Von Vampton got the bright idea. He selected 14 J.G.C.s and paid them a monthly salary just to send the Text around to each other in a chain, each time changing the covering so that the authorities wouldn’t get suspicious. The conditions were that they not cultivate friendship with 1 another.

  So it went around in circles, this private express. Hinckle Von Vampton got a job with the New York Sun and it was then that he sent out the feeler to the Wallflower Order in the shape of that headline exposing their Holy War in Haiti after their mouthpieces in America had been informed that the story would not be played up. Of course the Wallflower Order investigated to find out who had the goods on them and it turned out to be Hinckle. 1st they ransacked his apartment because they wanted the Book more than they wanted his corpse. They felt that by burning the Book they would sterilize the Jes Grew forever. He made a deal with them to the effect that his Order would have to be in charge of the Crusade against Jes Grew in order for him to return the Book, if indeed this is what Jes Grew craved. Well 1 of the 14 people on the list, we don’t know who, gave the book to Abdul. The Text became stationary as Abdul began to translate The Work and this is when Jes Grew brought it on up and started to move toward Manhattan.

  With its Text Jes Grew would become Rada instead of the Petro of Moses and the Templars. Well, when Hinckle wrote letters to the 14 asking them to return the Text (they accepted the money thinking that he was just another eccentric millionaire, the kind who leaves all his money to his cat) he learned through his columnist W. W. Jefferson that Abdul was in possession of a Book whose description matched the one he had sent out. He approached Abdul for the Book and when Abdul resisted he murdered him. Abdul left behind an epigram on American-Egyptian Cotton

  Stringy lumpy; Bales dancing

  underneath this center lies

  the Bird.

  We deciphered this to mean that the Book was buried beneath the center of the Cotton Club, the nightclub where Abdul had been arrested for loitering and for attacking the flappers. The night he was arrested he apparently had just finished hiding the sacred Book there. He translated the Book before he died and a copy of his translation was in the hands of a publisher who rejected the Book but the original treasure was safe underneath the Cotton Club. When we dug up the box c
ontaining the Book we found the Templars’ seal on the top and we traced it to Hinckle Von Vampton as the scout the Wallflower Order of the Atonist Path had assigned to create a Talking Android; the 2nd phase of the Wallflower plan, that of creating a “spokesman” who would furtively work to prepare the New Negro to resist Jes Grew and not catch it. It was the seal on the box of the Book that connected us with Hinckle Von Vampton and if you will just look he is wearing it right now.

  The guests turn to Hinckle, who manages a weak smile, his face red, clutching the pendant he wears about his neck: 2 knights riding a horse, a symbol of the Templars’ poverty vow. When we heard that tonight he was scheduled to introduce “the only Negro poet with any sense,” it all became clear and we rushed right over.

  Studies of the magic and ritual of Africa have…established with some certainty that all systems for the disturbance of consciousness practised by the African Negro are derived from ancient Egypt.

  Witchcraft (1965)—Pennethorne Hughes

  Is such an etymology to be trusted? One of the fragments of myth still to be found in Haiti makes Guede the first dead man to be saved by Legba, who called his soul up from beneath the waters. If the baton wielded today by the Guedes is the counterpart of Osiris’ severed penis, which fathered Horus upon Isis, the matter may have something in it…

  The Invisibles: Voodoo Gods in Haiti—Francis Huxley

  * Introduction to African Civilizations—John G. Jackson, with introduction by John Henrik Clarke.

  * Book of Moses: 8, 9, and 10th—Henri Gamache.

  * Concise History of Freemasonry—Calvin I. Kephart

  54

  A HUSH FALLS OVER the gathering. The Hostess, having been given smelling salts, comes around but when she sees LaBas, Herman and T Malice and the 6 Python men standing next to them she faints again and has to be taken by 7 men into the Louis 14th “Sun King” bedroom upstairs.