89. Also known as the Hymn of the Soul, in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas.
90. Also known as the Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan, an Old Testament pseudepigraphical work from the fifth or sixth century C.E. that tells the story of Adam and Eve following their expulsion from Eden.
91. See the fictional essay “Non Serviam” in A Perfect Vacuum.
92. 1 Cor 15:51–52.
93. (Greek) Fan or fan-like shape. Dick associated rhipidos (one of the Greek words that came to him in his hypnogogic visions) with the fins of the fish, a symbol of Christ.
94. See note 58, page 128.
95. Though Dick generally refers to his more recent novels in the Exegesis, here he offers a list of short stories from the 1950s, with the exception of 1968’s “Not by Its Cover.”
96. See note 39, page 303.
97. (German) Watch out!
98. (Latin) All roads lead to death.
99. Poet Robert Bly (1926–) asserts that Jesus was an Essene in his innovative anthology Leaping Poetry (1975).
100. See note 41, page 83.
101. Diane Pike, wife of Jim Pike.
102. See note 115, page 203.
103. These comments show the unmistakable mark of Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery (1975).
PART THREE
1. (Latin) I fear this knowledge.
2. Communist Party.
3. Rosicrucians.
4. “Bichlorides” is a puzzling term that Dick received from the voice, and which he discusses in earlier pages excluded here.
5. “The Waveries” is an amusing apocalyptic tale of an electromagnetic alien invasion, written by Fredric Brown and appearing in Astounding Science Fiction in 1945; Dick loved the story.
6. “Bright White,” a pop folk-rock hit by Shawn Phillips, from the 1973 album of the same name.
7. The titular hero of Siegfried, the third opera in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, tastes dragon’s blood and gains the power to understand the language of birds.
8. Curious paraphrase of Heraclitus, fragment 52.
9. Though Dick apparently enjoyed all these artists, he truly adored the pop singer Linda Ronstadt (1946–), a dark-haired girl who lived large in his fantasy life and who inspired the character Linda Fox in The Divine Invasion.
10. (German) Here is Zebra again.
11. In the novel Ubik, Ella Runciter exists in half-life, a state of cryonic suspension that allows her to communicate with the living for a short period of time after death.
12. Paraphrase from Coleridge’s essay “Shakespeare’s English Historical Plays,” which appears in The Literary Remains of Samuel Coleridge, volume 2 (1836).
13. Extensive paraphrase drawn from Una Ellis-Fermor’s essay “The Equilibrium of Tragedy,” which appears in Shakespeare’s Drama (1980).
14. Ormazd (or Ahura Mazda) and Ahriman (or Angra Mainyu) are the two warring gods in Zoroastrianism, the world’s first dualist religion.
15. Real Elapsed Time.
16. Orange County Medical Center.
17. Folder 44 begins a continuously numbered entry of more than 1,200 pages. It was broken up into 200-page sections by Paul Williams and ends with folder 49, in January 1980.
18. Charles Platt interviewed Dick in May 1979 for his book Dream Makers, and Dick had made his own recording of the interview.
19. Covenant House was a homeless shelter for runaway children founded by the Franciscan friar Father Bruce Ritter. Dick donated a large sum to the shelter in 1979 after seeing a 60 Minutes segment about it; in some Exegesis entries he theorized that this action, in time-reversed causation, caused 2-3-74.
20. Adoptionism holds that Jesus was an ordinary mortal before being adopted by God at baptism; promulgated early on by the Ebionites, the view was later declared a heresy.
21. Inscription found at the end of “I,” a holy book described in the anonymous The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz (1616), one of the earliest Rosicrucian publications.
22. (German) I am the savior.
23. Paul discusses these “planetary powers,” who play a role similar to the Gnostic archons, in Gal 4:3 and 4:9.
24. This phrase illustrates the “fish-hook” theory of atonement, first proposed by the fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa. In this view, Jesus was the human bait and Christ the divine hook; with these, God caught and defeated Satan.
25. Jn 15:13.
26. (German) A mystery.
27. Marcus Antonius Felix was the Roman procurator of Judaea province from A.D. 52 to 58. The apostle Paul was tried before him; see Acts 24.
28. Jason Taverner, the protagonist of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. See Tears in Glossary.
29. A reference to Adam Kadmon, the primal cosmic anthropos of Jewish Kabbala.
30. The exhibit was “Adventure Thru Inner Space,” a corporate-sponsored attraction that ran in Tomorrowland until 1985.
31. “Via negativa” (the “negative way”) refers to apophatic theology, according to which God is absolutely ineffable. Human beings can understand and describe what God is not, but not what God is.
32. The Milesians were a pre-Socratic school of Greek philosophers who sought the unchanging and singular material principle (arche) of all things.
33. (Latin) Literally, “nature naturing”—i.e., nature in its creative or active, life-giving aspect.
34. (Latin) Literally, “nature natured”—i.e., nature in its already created or passive aspect. Both terms are associated with the philosophy of Spinoza.
35. (Latin) The capacity to reflect God.
36. (Latin) The son of God.
37. (German) Primal fear.
38. A paraphrase; the first half is from Prov 8:22 and the second from Prov 8:30.
39. (Latin) It is not, and I believe. Possibly a misquote or paraphrase of a famous Latin phrase that is itself a misquote—credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd)—from Tertullian, who in fact said, credibile est, quia ineptum est (it is to be believed because it is absurd).
40. A peculiar 1977 Robert Altman film about porous identity, starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule, based on a dream Altman had.
41. (Italian) Simple light. (The description of God in Paradiso 33:90.)
42. (German) A loving father must dwell above the starry canopy. (From Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” a version of which appears in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.)
43. “Cylum” is most likely Dick’s version of the Latin world caelum, sky.
44. The episode appears in 1 Kgs 18:16–45.
45. Mal 4:5–6.
46. 1 Kgs 19:12.
47. 1 Kgs 17:13–16.
48. (German) Awaken!
49. Beyond the Tragic Vision is Morris Peckham’s 1963 history of nineteenth-century Europe.
50. Olive Holt was the name of one of Dick’s childhood babysitters.
51. Citation extracted from “Talmud and Midrash,” Encyclopedia Britannica 3, Macropedia 17.
52. (Greek) Grace, kindness.
53. The citation is from Ex 2:22; Stranger in a Strange Land is also the name of Robert Heinlein’s influential 1961 novel.
54. “It was the devil’s envy that brought death into the world, as those who are his part ners will discover. But the souls of the virtuous are in the hands of God, no torment shall ever touch them.” The Book of Wisdom, also known as the Wisdom of Solomon, is a deuterocanonical book and not part of the Protestant canon; Dick likely knew it from the Jerusalem Bible, the Catholic translation cited here.
55. Presumably, a Quaker periodical.
56. (German) Cries of lamentation.
57. (Latin) Highest good.
58. This folder and the following folder consist of typed, individually numbered, and dated pieces.
59. Dick theorized that Thomas might be a thought control implant installed by the government; in this formulation, Thomas was referred to as Pigspurt.
60. An illustrated book of poetry for children by Blanche
Jennings Thompson, published in 1925.
61. Jn 15:1, 4–5.
62. In this typewritten excerpt, Dick makes it clear that he is also keeping handwritten notes at this time, though these are not extant. They may include or constitute the 497 numbered, handwritten pages that presumably precede the page numbered 498 that initiates the following folder.
63. Lk 17:24; Mt 24:27.
64. Rom 2:29.
65. (German) Oh woe.
66. (Latin) Mystery of conjunction. (A Jungian term for the alchemical uniting of opposites.)
67. In Divine Invasions, Lawrence Sutin describes “Mello Jell-O” as a “disorientation drug” that Dick claimed had been stolen from the army and that may have motivated the 1971 break-in; possibly a reference to the notorious military deliriant BZ (3-quinuclidinyl benzilate).
68. Acts 24.
69. (Sanskrit/Pali/Buddhist) Right conduct.
70. Paraphrased citations from “Taoism,” Encyclopedia Britannica 3, Macropedia 17.
71. (German, obscure) Two cells (Zelle) live in my chest.
72. Phaedo 62:B.
73. Edward Hussey’s The Presocratics (1972): any map that includes a true representation of itself within its borders must lead to an infinite procession of maps-within-maps.
74. A koan attributed to the Ch’an master Yunmen Wenyan (862 or 864–949); it appears as case 21 in the Mumonkan.
75. (Chinese) Non-doing. (A manner of according with the Tao.)
76. For more on the self-assembly of the Cosmic Christ, see the Jerusalem Bible’s footnote at Eph 1:10.
77. Prajapati is a primal Vedic deity, lord of animals, and protector as well of the male sex organ.
78. See note 42, page 549.
79. The Best of Philip K. Dick (1977).
80. From Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides, The Bacchae.
81. Henry Vaughan, “The Night.”
82. See note 19, page 261.
83. (German, roughly) Pity’s greatest might. In addition to translating “Mitleid” as “compassion” rather than “pity,” Dick is conflating two lines from the second act of Wagner’s Parsifal,which run “Mitleids höchste Kraft/und reinsten Wissens Macht” (pity’s mighty power/and purest wisdom’s might).
84. During Dick’s breakup with his wife Nancy, he perceived Peterson as a romantic rival.
85. This rather chaotic folder appears to have been assembled by Dick himself. It contains, among a scattering of handwritten pages, a number of typed-up extracts from earlier folders. It also includes three pages of the manuscript of VALIS. Since it includes material from 1975 through at least 1980, we have opted to insert it chronologically according to the last dateable piece it contains.
86. (German) Effigy, idol.
87. The brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, the seat of a galactic communications hub in The Divine Invasion.
88. (Latin, paraphrase) I am made to tremble, and I fear. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Deliver me, Lord, on that day (from the Requiem Mass of the Roman Catholic Church).
89. 1 Cor 15:51–55.
PART FOUR
1. (German) My own face; my own form.
2. STP, aka DOM (2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine), is an unusually long-lasting psychedelic compound first synthesized by Alexander Shulgin.
3. A Greek hymn in honor of Dionysus.
4. (German) The red flag.
5. A 1978 book by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck that argues that psychedelic substances were consumed at Eleusis.
6. See note 41, page 83.
7. See note 90, page 410.
8. This phrase originated in a talk that Ursula K. Le Guin gave at Emory University in early 1981, in which she reportedly discussed Dick’s preoccupation with “unresolvable metaphysical matters.” Michael Bishop, who was present at the talk, wrote to Dick, who responded in an open letter to the Science Fiction Review.
9. (Chinese) Permanent Tao.
10. This excerpt is drawn from a letter to Patricia Warrick.
11. An idea expressed by Islamic philosophers, most notably Al-Ash`ari and Al-Ghazali, but shared by many medieval Christian and Jewish philosophers as well. In the West, this idea is related to occasionalism, the view (most famously expressed by Nicolas Malebranche) that causality is an illusion and God is the efficient cause of all that exists.
12. (German) Friends, not these sounds . . . (The first line of Beethoven’s redaction of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in his Ninth Symphony.)
13. Real Elapsed Time.
14. (German) Who shall deliver me? (Most likely drawn from Bach Cantata BWV 4, Ich elender Mensch, wer wird mich erlösen.)
15. Over this and the following two folders, Dick outlines, writes, and reflects on The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
16. A version of the material in the following excerpt appears in the first chapter of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
17. The following fragment was incorporated into The Transmigration of Timothy Archer as one of Bishop Archer’s speculations.
18. Partly inspired by a dream recorded in [90:6A] above, the Book of the Spinners is a Dick invention that also appears in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
19. See note 51, page 330.
20. John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day.”
21. Ursula K. Le Guin.
22. “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” is a 1976 short story by John Varley. PBS adapted it into a TV movie in 1983 as part of the same project that produced the film version of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Dick tribute The Lathe of Heaven.
23. Existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger, from whom Dick drew the notion of “tomb world,” described three realms: Eigenwelt, Mitwelt, and Umwelt. See Glossary.
24. (German terms used by Martin Heidegger) Geworfenheit: thrownness, the quality of finding ourselves already thrown into existence, as if by accident. Das unheimlich: the uncanny; literally, “not at home.”
25. (German) Actual.
26. In The Ghost in the Machine (1967), Arthur Koestler defines “holon” as a self-organizing dissipative structure that is simultaneously a whole and a part of a larger whole, and ultimately of a “holarchy” of holons.
27. (Latin) I am afraid; deliver me, Oh Lord, on that day. (Adapted from the Requiem Mass.)
28. Dick is thinking here of the clinamen, the term the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius used to describe the indeterminate bustle and swerve of atoms in the void.
29. (Greek) Love of humanity.
30. The following three dated letters have been moved to this folder from folder 56 to preserve chronology.
31. Edmund Meskys was the editor—with Felice Rolfe at the time of Dick’s letter—of the long-running and award-winning S-F fanzine Niekas.
32. Dick sent copies of his so-called Tagore letter—the September 23, 1981, letter to Edmund Meskys reprinted here—to eighty-five people.
33. Karen Silkwood was a health and labor activist who died under mysterious circumstances in November 1974.
34. (Latin) Universal exemplars in the divine mind. (Analogous to Plato’s forms.)
35. This occurs in chapter 6 of The Divine Invasion, where Dick gives the character Galina the fish dream that he mentions throughout the Exegesis, beginning in 1975 (“the renewing fish that’s sliced forever”).
36. The Sepher Yetzirah, or The Book of Formation, is an early work of Jewish esoteric mysticism that describes the creation of the universe through numbers and Hebrew letters.
37. Luke and Acts are written by the same author and are frequently considered as a single work.
38. The practice of Manichaeism involved strict dietary laws. The elect avoided foods thought to be “dark” (including meat) in favor of foods containing more “light,” primarily light-colored fruits and vegetables. The process of digestion was considered to free the light particles trapped inside the food.
39. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (1963), p. 106.
&
nbsp; 40. (Latin) Law of retribution. (Frequently linked, though Roman in origin, to the legal principle of “an eye for an eye” from Ex 21:23–25.)
41. Hans Jonas wrote the seminal book The Gnostic Religion (1958), which links ancient Gnosticism to modern existentialism.
42. This is the first mention of The Owl in Daylight, the novel left unfinished at Dick’s death.
43. In Mt 27:46 and Mk 15:34, Jesus quotes the opening verse of Ps 22 from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
44. This entry, including the following dream and its subsequent analysis, is entirely typewritten.
45. In 1947 Dick roomed with and befriended a number of gay Berkeley artists and poets whom he met through his high school friend George Ackerman. These included the poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, who shared many of his esoteric, metaphysical, and literary interests. Vladimir Horowitz, one of the premier pianists of his day, was also gay.
46. The Eleatics were a school of pre-Socratic philosophers founded in the fifth century B.C. by Parmenides and including the paradox-loving Zeno.
47. (Greek) Cosmic mind.
48. The term “secrecy theme” refers to Jesus’s commands to his disciples not to reveal that he is the Messiah. Passages on the “Messianic secret” do appear in Luke (see 4:41 and 8:56), but the theme is most pronounced in the Gospel of Mark.
49. The public interest law firm that represented Karen Silkwood and journalists investigating the Iran-Contra affair. Its cofounder, William J. Davis, was a Jesuit priest.
50. Peer Gynt (1867) is a five-act play by Henrik Ibsen that combines surreal folklore, poetry, social satire, and realistic episodes.
51. Tales of Hoffmann (1881) was an opera by Jacques Offenbach, based on the short fantasy stories of German Romanticist E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822).
52. “The Pulley” by George Herbert, one of Dick’s favorite poets.
53. Maimonides (1138–1204) was the greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval period; his influential Guide to the Perplexed attempted to reconcile Aristotelian thought and Judaism.
54. (German) Community. (An apparent neologism based on Gemeinschaft.)
55. (German) Loneliness.
56. This may be the AI Voice trying out its German. Roughly, “Woman, sing for our friends.”
57. (German) Nearby.