Ong's Hat: Incunabula

by Joseph Matheny

23. (Anonymous).

  A Collection of Cult Pamphlets, Flyers, Ephemera & Curiosa from the Library of a Traveler

  (Loose-leaf portfolio of photocopied originals) sold by lot

  The unknown compiler of this Collection (whom for convenience we’ll call “X”) left it behind when he “vanished”, whence it came into our possession. We know something of the compiler’s career from an untitled document written by him and found with the Collection, which we call The Poetic Journal of a Traveller (#24 in this list), as well as a pamphlet believed to be by the same author, Folklore of the Other Worlds (#25). (The Ong’s Hat Color Brochure was also discovered in the same cache, and is sold by us as #13.)

  The Collection contains the following items:

  1) A History & Catechism of the Moorish Orthodox Church, which traces the origins of the sect to early (1913) American Black Islam, the “Wandering Bishops”, the Beats of the 50s and the psychedelic churches movement of the 60s — deliberately vague about the 70s and 80s however.

  2) The World Congress of Free Religions, a brochure — manifesto arguing for a “fourth way”, a non-authoritarian spiritual movement in opposition to mainstream, fundamentalist and New Age religion. The WCFR is said to include various sects of Discordians, SubGeniuses, Coptic Orthodox People of the Herb, gay (“faery”) neo-pagans, Magical Judaism, the Egyptian Church of New Zealand, Kaos Kabal of London, Libertarian Congregationalists, etc. Q and the Moorish Orthodox Church. Several of these sects are implicated in the Conspiracy, but no overt mention of the Travel Cults is made here.

  3) Spiritual Materialism, by “the New Catholic Church of the Pantarchy, Hochkapel von SS Max und Marx”, a truly weird flyer dedicated to “Saints” Max Stirner and Karl Marx, representing a group claiming foundation by the 19th century Individualist Stephen Pearl Andrews, but more likely begun in the 1980s as a Travel Cult. Uses Nietzsche to contend that material reality itself constitutes a (or the) spiritual value and the principle of Infinity “which is expressed in the existence of many worlds. ” It argues for a utopia based on “individualism, telepathic socialism, free love, high tech, Stone Age wilderness and quantum weirdness”! No address is given, needless to say.

  4) The Sacred Jihad of Our Lady of Chaos, this otherwise untraceable group calls for “resistance to all attempts to control probability.” It quotes Foucault and Baudrillard on the subject of “disappearance”, then suggests that “to vanish without having to kill yourself may be the ultimate revolutionary act ... The monolith of Consensus Reality is riddled with quantum-chaos cracks ... Viral attack on all fronts! Victory to Chaos in every world!”

  5) The Temple of Antinous, a Travel Cult of neo-pagans devoted to Eros and Ganymede. (Warning: this leaflet contains some just-barely-legal graphic material.) “Wistfully we wonder if the boygod can manifest only in some other world than this dreary puritanical polluted boobocracy — then, gleefully, we suddenly recall: there ARE other worlds!”

  6) A Collage, presumably made by X himself, consisting of a “mandala” constructed from cut-outs of Strange Attractors and various Catastrophic topologies interwoven with photos of young women clipped from Italian fashion magazines. Eroticizing the mathematical imagery no doubt helps one to remember and visualize it while operating the Egg.

  24. (Anonymous).

  Poetic Journal of a Traveller; or, A Heresologist’s Guide to Brooklyn

  (Incunabula Press, pamphlet, Believed to be by “X”, the compiler of the Collection, & transcribed by us from manuscript.)

  Apparently X began this MS with the intention of detailing his experiences with a Travel Cult and eventual “translation” to the various alternate-world settlements, but unfortunately abandoned the project early on, possibly due to PCF interference.

  It begins with a summary account of X’s spiritual quest, largely among the stranger sects of his native Brooklyn: Santeria in Coney Island, Cabala in Williamsburg, sufis on Atlantica Avenue, etc. He is disappointed or turned away (and even mugged on one occasion). He becomes friendly with a Cuban woman of mixed Spanish, black, amerindian and Chinese ancestry who runs a botanica (magical supplies and herbs). When he asks her about “other worlds”, she is evasive but promises to introduce him to someone who knows more about such matters.

  She orders her grand-daughter, a 14-year-old named Teofila (see the graphic novel, page 160 of this book for a rendition of Teofila by artist Tony Talbert), to escort X through the “rough neighborhoods” to the old man’s shop. The girl is wearing a t-shirt that says “Hyperborean Skateboarding Association”, and indeed travels by skateboard, “gliding on ahead of me like Hermes the Psychopomp.” X is clearly attracted to Teofila and becomes embarrassedly tongue-tied and awkward.

  The old man, called “the Shaykh”, who claims to be Sudanese but speaks “pure Alabaman”, runs a junk shop and wears a battered old Shriners fez. His attitude toward X is severe at first, but X is enchanted by his rather disjointed rambling and ranting — which reveal a surprisingly wide if erratic reading in Persian poetry, the Bible, Meister Eckhardt, William Blake, Yoruba mythology and quantum mechanics. Leaving the girl in the shop, the old man takes X into his back office, “crowded with wildly eclectic junk, naive paintings, cheap orientalismo, HooDoo candles, jars of flower petals, and an ornate potbellied stove, stoked up to cherryred, suffusing waves of drowsy warmth.”

  The Shaykh intimidates X into sharing a big pipe of hashish mixed with amber and mescaline, then launches into a stream-of-consciousness attack on “Babylon, the Imperium, the Con, the Big Lie that there’s nowhere to go and nothing to buy except their fifth-rate imitations of life, their bullshit pie-in-the-sky religions, cold cults, cold cuts of self-mutilation I call ‘em, and woe to Jerusalem!” X, now “stoned to the gills”, falls under the Shaykh’s spell and bursts into tears. At once the old man unbends, serves X a cup of tea “sweetblack as Jamaica run and scented with cardamon”, and begins to drop broad hints about “a way out, not to some gnostic-never-land with the body gone like a fart in a sandstorm, no brother, for the Unseen World is not just of the spirit but also the flesh Q Jabulsa and Jabulqa, Hyperborea, Hurqalya Q they’re as real as Brooklyn but a damn sight prettier!”

  Late afternoon; X must return home before dark, and prepare to take leave of the Shaykh Q who gives him a few pamphlets and invites him to return. To X’s surprise, Teofila is still waiting outside the shop, and offers to escort him to the subway. The girl is now in a friendlier mood and X less nervous. They strike up a conversation, X asking about Hyperborea and Teofila answering, “Yeah, I know where it is — I’ve been there.”

  The main narrative ends here, but we have added some other poetic fragments included with the original MS, despite the fact that they might offend some readers, in light of the importance of the “tantrik technique” of other-world Travel. (And let us remind you that a statement of age must be included with every order from Incunabula Inc.). These rather pornographic fragments suggest that X, too shy to attempt anything himself, was in fact seduced by Teofila, and that his subsequent “training” for Egg-navigation consisted of numerous “practice sessions for double-“yolking” with a very enthusiastic young tutor.

  We believe that X subsequently made an extended visit to America2 and Java2, that he returned to Earth-prime on some Intelligence or sabotage mission for the GFP, that he composed a paper on Folklore of the Other Worlds (see #25), that he and Teofila somehow came to the attention of PCF agents in New York, aborted their mission and returned to Java2, where they presumably now reside.

  25. (Anonymous).

  Folklore of the Other Worlds

  (Incunabula Press, pamphlet, By the same author as #24, transcribed by us from manuscript.)

  Our anonymous Traveller from Brooklyn appears to have composed this little treatise after his first extended stay in E2. It deals with tales of Travellers and inhabitants of the other-world settlements, pioneers’ experiences and the like. Of great interest is the cla
im that ESP and other paranormal abilities increase in the parallel universes, that the effect is magnified by passing through the series of discovered “levels”, and that a small band of psychic researchers has therefore settled on Java7, the present frontier world. The “temple” of Hurqalya (or whatever these vast buildings may have been) are used for sessions of meditation, martial arts and psychic experimentation. X claims that telepathy is now accepted as fact “over there,” with strong evidence for telekinesis and perhaps even Egg-less Travel.

  Also intriguing are various accounts of “spirits” seen or sensed around the settlements, were-animals supposedly glimpsed on higher levels, and legends which have arisen concerning the lost Builders of Hurqalya. Something of a cult has grown up around these hypothetical creatures who (it is said) are “moving toward us even as we move toward them, through the dimensions, through Time — perhaps backwards through Time”!

  X points out that this legend strikes an eerie resonance with “complex conjugate wave theory” in quantum mechanics, which hypothesizes that the “present” (the Megaverse “now”) is the result of the meeting of two infinite quantum probability waves, one moving from past to future, the other moving from future to past — that space/time is an interference effect of these two waves — and that the many worlds are bubbles on this shoreline!

  26. Eliade, Mircea.

  Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

  (Univ. of Chicago Press), Pb

  This “bible” of the modern neo-shamanic movement also served as a metaphorical scripture for the pioneers of interdimensional consciousness physics and alternate-world explorers. Not only does it contain innumerable practical hints for the Traveller, as well as a spiritual ambience conducive to the proper state of mind for Travel — it is also believed that Eliade’s mythic material on the prototypal Stone Age shamans who could physically and actually visit other worlds, offers strong evidence for the possibility of Egg-less Travel — which however so far remains in the realm of “folklore”, speculation and rumor.

  27. Lorde, John.

  Maze of Treason

  (Red Knight Books, Wildwood,NJ,1988), Pb, 204 pp

  You may remember that after the Patty Hearst kidnapping it was discovered that a cheap pornographic thriller, published before the event, seemed to foretell every detail of the story. Jungian synchronicity? Or did the Symbioses Liberation Army read that book and decide to act it out? It remains a mystery.

  Maze of Treason is also a pornographic thriller, complete with tawdry 4-color cover, sloppy printing on acidulous pulp, and horrendous style. It’s marketed as Science Fiction, however. And there is no mystery about the author’s inside knowledge. “John Lorde” not only knows about the Conspiracy, he’s obviously been there. This book is probably a roman a clef, as it appears to contain distorted portraits of Sohrawardi and Harjanto (depicted as Fu-Manchu-type villains) as well as several actual agents of both the GFP and PCF — and even a character apparently based on the real-life “X”, author of several titles in our list (#s 24 & 25).

  The hero, Jack Masters, is an agent of an unnamed spyforce of American patriots who jokingly call themselves the Quantum Police. Their mission is to regain control of the alternate worlds for “the forces of reason and order” and “make trouble for agents of chaos in every known universe.” The Q-Cops’ secret underground HDQ contains a number of Eggs granting access to hidden bases on the other worlds, including “the Other America” and “the Other Indonesia”.

  Jack Masters is investigating the activities of a Chaote named Ripley Taylor, a “child-molester and black magician” who runs a Travel Cult out of a comic book store in a “racially mixed neighborhood” of New York. The Cops hope to catch Taylor with his “juvenile delinquent girlfriend”, blackmail him and turn him into a double agent.

  The hero now becomes involved with Amanita, a beautiful woman performance artist from the Lower East Side who seems to know a lot about Taylor and the Travel Cult, but also seems quite attracted to the virile Jack Masters. At first he suspects her of duplicity, but soon decides he needs to “convert” her by making her “fall for me, and fall hard. ” Jack’s problem is that his own “talent” will not suffice for solo Travelling, and in fact he has never managed to “get across” — since the Cops do not practice Tantrik techniques! He suspects her of being an “Other-Worlder” and hopes she can convey him thence via the “infamous ‘double -yolk’ method.”

  Meanwhile Taylor has laughed off the blackmail attempt, burned down the comic shop and escaped “into the fourth dimension — or maybe the fifth.” Masters heats up his affair with the artist Amanita, and finally convinces her to “translate” him — after three chapters of unininterrupted porno depicting the pair in many little-known ritual practices, so to speak. (The author rises above his own mediocrity here, and attains something like “purple pulp”, an inspired gush of horny prose, especially in the oral-genital area.) Masters now rises to the occasion for yet a fourth chapter in which a “government-issue Egg” becomes the setting for a “yab-yum ceremony of searing obscenity. ”