41. John Allegro (1923–1988) was a controversial British Dead Sea Scrolls scholar and author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970), which argues on linguistic evidence that Christianity began as a psychedelic mushroom (Amanita muscaria) cult.
42. Possibly Joan Baez.
43. Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was an American psychologist famous for his concept of “peak experience” and the notion that humans are driven by a “hierarchy of needs.”
44. A Sufi magazine.
45. Jn 10:34–36 (New English Bible).
46. A variation of the fish sign that Dick glimpsed during one of his visionary episodes. Whale’s Mouth is also the name of the colonist planet in Dick’s 1964 story (and 1966 novel) “The Unteleported Man,” republished in an expanded form in 1984 as Lies, Inc.
47. In a later folder, Dick identifies this substance as STP, aka DOM (2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine), a long-lasting, LSD-like psychoactive.
48. The protagonist of Ubik (1969); see Glossary.
49. In his Principles of Psychology (1890), American psychologist William James characterizes the world of sense impressions as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”
50. Arthur Deikman was a psychologist who wrote about “deautomized” perception in Charles Tart’s landmark collection Altered States of Consciousness (1969).
51. In “The Song of the Happy Shepherd.”
52. Dick explains one of these early childhood references in a February 27, 1975, letter to Claudia Bush not included here: “I knew about the Fish sign, too, the Savior: I called him ‘Tunny,’ from a del Monte billboard for some canned food. We had to travel under the Oakland Estuary in the Alameda Tube, and I saw the tube like a can; at the end we emerged in the sunlight and I saw the billboard with ‘Tunny’ on it. I loved ol’ Tunny, the great fish. . . .”
53. 1 Thes 5:2.
54. Avicenna (980–1037) was an Arabic philosopher and physician who sought to reconcile Islamic doctrine with rational philosophy; he held that God exists above time.
55. 1 Cor 15:51–52.
56. The following is prefaced by a handwritten dedication and epigraph: “A Light struck meadow for Tony Hiss & the Real World. Hark! Each tree its silence breaks—Nicholas Brady, 1692.”
57. (Latin) I am seized with fear and trembling until the trial is at hand and the wrath to come: when the heavens and earth shall be shaken. (From the Libera Me of the Requiem Mass of the Roman Catholic Church.)
58. In his 1967 story “Faith of Our Fathers,” Dick attributes this quatrain to the thirteenth-century Arabian poet Baha’ al-din Zuhair; he most likely came across the poem, unattributed, in E. P. Mathers’s translation of the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night.
59. (Latin) Death and nature will marvel. (From the Dies Irae of the Requiem Mass.)
60. See note 46, page 100.
61. A set of logic problems thought to have been devised by Zeno of Elea (490–430 B.C.) to support Parmenides’ belief that change and motion are illusions.
62. Characters in Wagner’s Parsifal.
63. See Glossary.
64. Pulkovo was the Russian observatory where Nikolai Kozyrev carried out some of his research.
65. William James (1842–1910) was the American psychologist and philosopher who wrote the landmark book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
66. (German) Christ lay in the bonds of death. (Bach’s Cantata BWV 4, Christ lag in Todes Banden.)
67. Two hemispheres of metal designed by German scientist Otto von Guericke in 1650 to demonstrate the air pump; used by Indologist Heinrich Zimmer in The King and the Corpse (1956) to compare the relationship of inner and outer worlds.
68. This term originates with the International Community of Christ (ICC), which teaches that the sun’s light carries coded information. This and other terms in this entry are taken from The Decoded New Testament (1974) by Gene Savoy, head bishop of the ICC.
69. “Trust Your Body Rhythms,” Psychology Today (April 1975).
70. Two of the eight trigrams, corresponding to Earth and Lake, respectively, that form the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching.
71. The Catholic Agitator is the newspaper published by the Los Angeles Worker Community, a politically progressive, service-oriented group founded in 1970.
72. The Aeneid, Book IV.
73. “Leda and the Swan.”
74. 1 Kgs 17:17–18:40.
75. Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was an author and religious scholar who popularized a Jungian interpretation of world mythology in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and other books.
76. Polish mathematician Herman Minkowski (1864–1909) argued that the universe is an absolute, four-dimensional structure in which past, present, and future coexist.
77. Rollo May (1909–1994) was an American existential psychologist whose edited anthology Existence included material by Ludwig Binswanger, the source for Dick’s notion of the “tomb world.”
78. A small apocalyptic Protestant sect focused on Elijah, founded in the late eighteenth century in Rochester, New York.
79. International Community of Christ (see note 68, page 148).
80. A posthumously published H. P. Lovecraft novella whose hero is possessed by a deceased ancestor.
81. The Gospel of Thomas, saying 77.
82. Most likely a reference to Oberon’s line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act IV, scene 1: “Welcome, good Robin./See’st thou this sweet sight?”
83. Saying 22: “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside as the outside, and the outside as the inside, and the upper side as the lower; and when you make the male and the female into a single one, that the male be not male and the female female; when you make eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then shall you enter [the kingdom].”
84. Ps 118:22; Mt 21:42; Mk 12:10; Lk 20:17; Acts 4:11; 1 Pet 2:7.
85. Most likely a reference to the figure-ground relationship in Gestalt perception theory; its ambivalence is demonstrated in the famous young woman–old hag image.
86. Mt 18:3; Mk 10:14.
87. Gospel of Thomas, saying 77.
88. 1 Kgs 19:12.
89. From Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard.”
90. A telepathic Ganymedean slime mold in Dick’s novel Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964); he argues that caritas is the highest human value.
91. The 1975 supernatural film The Reincarnation of Peter Proud.
92. Mutual Broadcasting System, an American radio network.
93. See note 76, page 158.
94. (German) Wake up. (The phrase is drawn from Bach’s Cantata BWV 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme; Dick’s original title for the novel The Crack in Space (1966) was “Cantata 140.”)
95. Jn 16:20.
96. The Dark Night of the Soul is a devotional treatise by St. John of the Cross (1542–1591).
97. Jung discusses Eckhart extensively in Psychological Types ([1921] 1971).
98. Is 9:6.
99. Dt 31:6; Heb 13:5.
100. 1 Kgs 18:8.
101. I Ching hexagram 33 (Tun) changing into 53 (Chien).
102. I Ching hexagram Ming I, the ominous “Darkening of the Light.”
103. 1 Cor 15:51.
104. Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943), an Indologist and friend of Jung whose work emphasized the transformative power of mythological symbols; see note 67, page 147.
105. John Weir Perry (1914–1988) was a Jungian psychotherapist who argued that the reorganization of the self sometimes requires psychosis, which should therefore not be pathologized.
106. Sociologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) developed the notion of “participation mystique” to describe the “mystical” fusion with objects; the concept was also used by Jung.
107. 1 Cor 15:35–56.
108. The Creative (heaven); one of eight I Ching trigrams.
109. Jehovah’s
Witnesses.
110. Dickian plural of krasis (Greek). See Glossary.
111. This snippet view of philosopher and Christian writer Sûren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Existentialism.”
112. A paraphrase of Mk 3:21.
113. “Dionysus in America” is a 1975 essay on the American counterculture by literary critic Eric Mottram, collected in Blood on the Nash Ambassador (1989).
114. Jesus curses a fig tree and causes it to wither in Mt 21:18–21 and Mk 11:12–21.
115. Simon Magus, or Simon the Magician, a figure from the apostolic period who appears in Acts 8:9–24 and is traditionally associated with Christian heresy.
116. The Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, an American Rosicrucian Order established in 1915 in San Jose, California, whose advertisements appeared in many popular magazines in the 1960s and 1970s.
PART TWO
1. See Glossary.
2. See note 3, page 6.
3. See note 36, page 73.
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Brahma.”
5. “Greater Than Gods,” Astounding Science Fiction (July 1939).
6. See note 87, page 173.
7. See note 37, page 76.
8. (German) What have I seen?
9. Col 1:13.
10. These represent Wind and Fire, respectively.
11. (German) Father! Help! Oh my!
12. See note 105, page 194.
13. See annotation, page 52.
14. (Latin) Horse of god, who takes away the bad luck of the world, my friend—save me, lord. (An original prayer based on the Gloria from the Latin liturgy.)
15. (German) Brothers! The king comes!
16. Protagonist of Ubik (1966); see Ubik in Glossary.
17. In 1977, Dick gave a famously consternating speech at a science-fiction convention in Metz, France, later published under the title “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others.”
18. Heraclitus, fragment 93.
19. An allusion to the Golden Section; see Glossary.
20. See http://www.philipkdick.com/covers/scanner.jpg.
21. Dick was a signatory to a “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” petition that appeared in the February 1968 issue of Ramparts, a New Left magazine that opposed the Vietnam War.
22. Drugs consumed in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; see Glossary.
23. Numerous dates have been proposed as the “actual birthday” of Jesus; it is not clear how Dick arrived at this date.
24. (German) Help. I am so lonely. When will you come, my salvation? (Drawn from Bach’s Cantata BWV 140, Sleepers Awake.)
25. Jn 16:33.
26. Rom 8:22.
27. From Mrs. J.C. Yule, “I Am Doing No Good!” in Poems of the Heart and Home (1881).
28. Mt 13:31–32; Mk 4:30–32; Lk 13:18–19; also Gospel of Thomas, saying 20.
29. Jerusalem Bible.
30. (Latin) Voice of God.
31. (Latin) Mind.
32. In Maze of Death, Dick provides this definition: “Mekkis, the Hittite word for power; it had passed into the Sanskrit, then into Greek, Latin, and at last into modern English as machine and mechanical.”
33. Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was an inventor, engineer, and legendary eccentric best known for his development of alternating current; an important figure in outsider science.
34. George Berkeley (1685–1753) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose theory of immaterialism contends that physical objects exist only in the mind of the perceiver; famously refuted by Samuel Johnson kicking a stone.
35. Most likely a paraphrase or misremembered quote; compare Wisd of Sol 10:13–14.
36. Most likely refers to the Apocryphon of John, a Sethian Gnostic text in which a shape-shifting, post-Ascension Christ appears to the apostle John. Jesus pulls a similar trick in the Acts of Peter, the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, and other texts.
37. Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and A Maze of Death.
38. See Job 38:1–42:6.
39. Francis M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (1937).
40. See TMITHC in Glossary.
41. Katherine Kurtz (1944–) is a fantasy author most noted for her Deryni novels.
42. Also “Ayenbite of Inwyt,” translated as “Prick (or Remorse) of Conscience,” from Kentish Middle English. Dick’s spelling suggests his familiarity with the term is via Joyce’s Ulysses.
43. 1 Thes 5:2.
44. A paraphrase from Luther’s Commentary on Galatians (3:19).
45. Klingsor is an evil wizard in Wagner’s Parsifal.
46. Dick seems to be confusing Edwin Herbert Land’s (1909–1991) two-color projection system with Land’s later “retinex” theory of color constancy.
47. Jn 15:13.
48. Jn 16:33.
49. Dick’s two-source cosmogony later makes an appearance in the “Tractates Cryptica Scriptura” that append the novel VALIS, where it is explained that our universe is a hologram formed from the mixed signals of two hyper-universes, one male and one female, one alive and one dying or dead.
50. John Sladek’s short story “Solar Shoe-Salesman,” a Dick parody first published (under the name Ph*l*p K. D*ck) in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (March 1973).
51. Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) was a countercultural author, philosopher, and friend of Dick’s; his book The Cosmic Trigger features interesting parallels with 2-3-74.
52. In Reason in Science (1905), the Spanish-American pragmatist philosopher George Santayana wrote: “To be awake is nothing but to be dreaming under the control of the object; it is to be pursuing science to the comparative exclusion of mere mental vegetation and spontaneous myth.”
53. Dick is referencing Goethe’s Faust: “In the beginning was the deed.”
54. Nicholas Roeg’s 1976 The Man Who Fell to Earth, an inspiration for the film Valis in VALIS, stars David Bowie as the extraterrestrial Thomas Jerome Newton.
55. Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) was a social scientist and cyberneticist who wrote the popular 1972 book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. He spoke of immanent Mind in a naturalistic, nontheistic manner.
56. Brian Aldiss was a science-fiction author and critic who favorably surveyed Dick’s work in his 1973 study The Billion Year Spree.
57. A paraphrase of Mt 10:29.
58. Parsifal, act 3.
59. The Journal of George Fox, ch. 2.
60. The first phrase is from Jn 1:15, where John is referring to Jesus, not Jesus referring to the Paraclete; the latter meaning is better captured in the second citation, from Jn 16:7.
61. See note 30, page 64.
62. Acts 2:1–40.
63. In The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, Schopenhauer uses beehives and ant colonies as an example of the “will-without-knowledge” working in nature.
64. Friend of Dick’s during the late 1960s. In the note that begins A Maze of Death (1968), Dick writes that the novel “stems from an attempt made by William Sarill and myself to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists.”
65. Wilbur Mercer, the messiah figure of Mercerism, the empathy-based religion in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). See Androids in Glossary.
66. This is a reference to page 17 in the current folder (included herein), which Dick returned to note here after composing.
67. Paul Tillich (1886–1965), a German-American theologian and philosopher. This paraphrase probably draws from the introduction to Tillich’s Systematic Theology (1975), which discusses “the power of being which resists non-being.”
68. This refers back to the page upon which Dick noted the current discussion, creating a self-referential loop. See note 66, page 369.
69. Pen name of American S-F writer Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913–1966); several scholars have speculated that he was the fantasy-haunted patient Allen in psychologist R
obert M. Linder’s best-selling The Fifty Minute Hour (1954).
70. R. Crumb (1943–), American illustrator and founder of the underground comix movement; anxiety and obsession drive much of his work.
71. (German) Eternal femininity. (Probably inspired by the last line of Goethe’s Faust, “Das Ewig-Weiblich/Zieht uns hinan” [The eternal feminine draws us upward], which is also featured in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony.)
72. Roger Caillois’s The Mask of Medusa (1964) challenges orthodox biology by suggesting continuities between animal mimicry and human behavior.
73. Microscopic species of green algae that forms spherical colonies.
74. In his poem “Brahma.”
75. (German) Worldview.
76. 1 Cor 15:51–52: “Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.”
77. (Latin) Voice of God.
78. From the entry “Macrocosm and Microcosm” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 5.
79. Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins (1961).
80. In a September 2, 1974, letter to the FBI, Dick warned the agency about SF critic Darko Suvin and “three other Marxists”: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner, an Austrian SF critic and the “official Western agent” for Polish SF author Stanislaw Lem, whom Dick accused of being a “total Party functionary.”
81. See note 54, page 336.
82. (Latin) I am made to tremble, and I am afraid. In that day, save me, Lord, who takes away the sins of the world. I believe but I am afraid. (All but the final phrase from the text of the traditional Requiem Mass.)
83. An alien creature who can invade and inhabit other life forms. Appears in Dick’s first published short story, “Beyond Lies the Wub,” Planet Stories (July 1952). Wubfur appears in a number of Dick’s works.
84. Telepathic, gambling-obsessed, silicon-based aliens from Titan, Vugs exert control over Earth via a game called “Bluff” in Dick’s novel Game-Players of Titan (1963).
85. Heraclitus, fragment 54.
86. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.”
87. The chief archon or evil demiurge of the Ophites and Sethian Gnostics. Also spelled Yaldabaoth.
88. See note 65, page 367.