58. (German) Friends; joy.
59. Ted Sturgeon’s 1971 story “Dazed” involves a transcendent being incarnated in order to restore the balance of yin and yang.
60. Dick here is fusing and/or confusing Eleusis with the Elysian Fields, the most pleasant environs of the ancient Greek Underworld.
61. Benjamin Crème (1922–) is a long-standing New Age apocalyptic prophet who has often spoken of the coming of Maitreya, or the World Teacher. In 1982 he proclaimed that Maitreya, aka the Christ, was living within the Asian community of Brick Lane in London and would shortly announce himself to the world media.
62. The Age of Aquarius is an astrologic epoch based on the precession of the equinoxes and a popular theme in many New Age accounts of contemporary spiritual transformation. It follows the current Age of Pisces, whose fish symbolism has often been associated with Christianity.
63. See note 116, page 205.
64. Helena Patrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) cofounded the Theosophical Society, an esoteric order that held that world history is directed by invisible hidden masters.
65. The Glimmung is a godlike alien from Plowman’s Planet (aka Sirius Five) in Galactic Pot-Healer (1969), one of Dick’s more Jungian works.
66. This brief but valuable segment has been moved here from folder 55 to preserve continuity.
67. (Greek) Savior.
68. Sepher Yetzirah, or The Book of Creation, a sacred text of Kabbala Judaism, in its 1887 translation by W.W. Wescott.
69. Here Dick uses Greek letters (similar to those in the word Σωτηρ [soter], which he inscribed above) to write sorer, which resembles soror, the Latin word for sister.
Glossary
2-3-74, sometimes 2-74 or 3-74: A series of extraordinary events, beginning in February 1974 and continuing through March and beyond, that forms the main subject of the Exegesis.
acosmism: A doctrine that denies the apparent reality of the universe as something apart from God or the Absolute.
Acts: The Book of Acts in the New Testament, written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke, tells the history of the early apostolic age following the death and resurrection of Christ. It is sometimes called “The Gospel of the Holy Spirit,” owing to its depiction of the role played by the Holy Spirit in the growth of the early church. Dick asserts a significant and unintended correspondence between Acts and his novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974).
agape (Greek): One of several Greek words for love, as distinguished from eros (sexual love) and philia (friendship); often used to describe God or Christ’s love for mankind. In Dick’s use, which draws on the apostle Paul’s description of transcendent love in 1 Corinthians 13, the term is identified with empathy.
Ahura Mazd, Ahura Mazda, or Ormazd: The highest god of Zoroastrianism, the creator and sustainer of truth. In The Cosmic Puppets (1957) a small town is discovered to be the battleground between Ormazd and his eternal opponent, Ahriman.
AI Voice: Artificial Intelligence Voice, sometimes called “Voice” or “Spirit.” A term coined by Dick for the hypnagogic voice that he heard often in 1974–75 and intermittently until his death. Many of the voice’s sayings are recorded in the Exegesis. Despite the term, Dick does not consistently hold that the voice is technological in nature. He often characterizes it as “female” and sometimes attributes it to the Gnostic goddess Sophia and his own sister Jane.
ajna chakra: The so-called Third Eye, one of seven chakras or “wheels” described in Hindu tantric and yoga texts.
als ob (German): As if.
anamnesis (Greek): Recollection, abrogation of amnesia. For Plato, anamnesis—the recollection of the world of ideas in which the soul dwelled before incarnating in human form—explains the human capacity for understanding abstract, universal truths, such as the geometric theo rems of Euclid. In Dick’s more Gnostic understanding, it also implies the recollection of the soul’s origins beyond the fallen or occluded world.
ananke (Greek): The blindness that follows hubris; also, a chthonic goddess who personifies necessity and compulsion.
Androids: One of Dick’s most morally complex novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was optioned and produced as the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner (1982). Left on the cutting room floor was the novel’s fictional religion, “Mercerism,” whose adherents technologically and empathetically merge with Wilber Mercer as he climbs a hill, is stoned to death, descends into a tomb world, and arises, in an endless cycle.
anima (Latin): Translation of Greek term psyche, meaning “life” or “soul.” Psychologist Carl Jung used the terms anima and animus to describe the true inner self of human beings; for men, the anima is generally a female figure.
Anokhi (Hebrew): A form of the personal pronoun meaning “I” or “I myself.” In Dick’s use, it refers primarily to Exodus 20:2: “Anokhi YHWH Elohekha” (“I [am] YHWH your God”). More generally for Dick, anokhi stands for self-awareness and consciousness. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) features discussion of the “Anokhi mushroom,” a hallucinogenic drug that enables communion with the divine.
Archer, Angel: Protagonist of Dick’s final novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).
Asklepios: Greek god of healing and medicine; his temples were also sites of oracular dream incubation.
astral determinism: The belief that the destiny of individual human beings is governed by the stars or planets, which in some Gnostic cosmologies are personified as the lower planetary rulers or archons.
Atman (Sanskrit): The eternal Self or divine core of the human being, distinct from the ahamkara (literally, the “I-maker”) or ego with which we normally, and falsely, identify. In Vedanta, Atman is identified with Brahman.
Attic Greek: A dialect of ancient Greek spoken in Attica.
Augenblick (German): Literally, “eye view”; moment.
Augustine (C.E. 354–430): Bishop of Hippo, Saint and Doctor of the Church. In the Exegesis, Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of Revelation is contrasted with literalistic millenarianism.
Bacchae, The: Roman name for the maenads, female figures of Greek mythology who follow the god Dionysus and pursue religious ecstasy through intoxication, dance, and ritual sacrifice. Also a play by Eu ripedes, in which Dick saw parallels to Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974).
Bardo Thödol: Commonly known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, this Tibetan Buddhist text, traditionally considered to be written by Padmasambhava, describes the experiences the mind undergoes as it transits between death and rebirth, an intermediary period known as bardo. Dick was familiar with the text through its initial translation by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, whose reissue in 1960 featured an important introduction by Carl Jung.
Bergson, Henri (1859–1941): A French philosopher who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, Bergson was known for his theories of duration and élan vital, the lively impetus that distinguishes living systems from machines. With his concept of duration, Bergson hoped to describe the qualitative nature of the subjective experience of time rather than the objective measurements of the clock. Dick’s experience of “non-linear” incursions of time from the future and his meditations on the distinction between living organisms and machines found resonance in Bergson’s work.
bicameral: Term taken from Julian Jaynes’s popular book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). Jaynes argues that our minds were originally split along hemispheric lines, which allowed voices from one side of the brain to be heard by the other as if they were external commands or the voices of gods.
Black Iron Prison, also BIP: Dick’s term for the prison world of political tyranny and determinism he glimpsed beneath the veneer of Orange County in March 1974. He later wrote that upon perceiving it, he realized that he had been living in it and writing about it his whole life. In his dualistic cosmologies, the BIP is opposed to the Palm Tree Garden, or PTG.
Boehme or Böhme, Jacob (c. 1575–1624): German shoemaker and mys
tic whose 1600 vision was induced by the play of light on a pewter dish. His esoteric theory of higher and lower triads anticipated Hegel’s dialectic, and his notion of Urgrund was important to Dick.
Boucher, Anthony (1922–1968): Science fiction editor, author, and friend of Dick’s. As editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Boucher purchased the first story Dick sold, the tale “Roog” (1953).
Brahman: A concept from the Vedic tradition that generally refers to the uncreated substance of the universe that pervades all things; also the precursor to the creator god Brahmā. The Advaita Vedanta of Sankara insists on the ultimate identity of Brahman and Atman.
Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600): Italian astronomer, mathematician, and hermetic philosopher whose theories about the infinity of the universe anticipated modern cosmology. Bruno is chiefly remembered for having been burned at the stake in Rome.
BTA: “Bishop Timothy Archer,” working title for The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).
Buber, Martin (1878–1965): Austrian-born Jewish existentialist philosopher. See I-It and I-Thou relationship.
Buckman, Felix: Character in Dick’s novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). A police official in a militaristic state, he experiences an unexpected and compassionate epiphany in the novel’s conclusion.
Burroughs, William S. (1914–1997): Experimental Beat writer. Burroughs’s notions of reality as a control system and language as an extraterrestrial virus clearly resonated with Dick, who, in 1978, experimented with the cut-up method developed by Swiss artist Brion Gysin and deployed by Burroughs.
Calvin, John (1509–1564): French Protestant theologian. In the Exegesis, Calvin appears primarily as a proponent of the idea that prelapsarian human beings had extraordinary capabilities.
“Chains of Air,” or “Chains . . . Web”: The short story “Chains of Air, Web of Aether” (1980), later revised and incorporated into The Divine Invasion (1981).
Claudia: Claudia Krenz Bush, a graduate student at Idaho State University who corresponded with Dick while working on her master’s thesis. Dick later refers to his early Exegesis as “mostly letters to Claudia.”
Corpus Christi (Latin): Body of Christ. Dick also uses the term in the more theological sense of the mystical body of the Church.
crypte morphosis (Greek): Latent shape or form. One of the Greek phrases that came to Dick in his dreams in 1974. In the Exegesis he interprets the phrase in light of Heraclitus’s fragment 54, “Latent form is the master of obvious form,” and fragment 123, “The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself.”
cybernetic: Term coined by Norbert Wiener for the science of communication and control in human and machine systems; earlier coined by the French scientist André-Marie Ampère to denote “political science.” Wiener drew the term from the ancient Greek term kybernetes, for “steersman” or the “art of steering.”
Dasein (German): Martin Heidegger’s term for being, especially human being.
Deus Absconditus (Latin): Hidden God. The term comes from Isaiah 45:15 in the Vulgate.
Deus sive substantia sive natura (Latin): A dictum of Spinoza on the unity of God and nature; in an interview, Dick translated this concept as “God, i.e., reality, i.e., nature.”
dibba cakkhu (Pali): The divine eye, one of the six features of higher or enlightened knowing described in the Pali Buddhist canon.
Dionysus, also Dionysos: The Greek god of wine, vegetation, and ritual ecstasy. His death and resurrection were important in a number of mystery religions.
Ditheon: A neologism Dick develops in later Exegesis entries to describe the life form that results from the union of two minds within a single body. Similar to homoplasmate.
dokos (Greek): Deception, lack of true perception. Dick employs this term as a cognate for maya.
Eckhart, Meister (1260–1327): A Dominican scholar and preacher whose radical mystical teachings, which stressed the immediate presence of God in the individual soul, were condemned by Pope John XXII shortly before he died.
eidos, eidola, sometimes misspelled edola (Greek): Ultimate form or idea. In Platonic philosophy, the forms constitute the world of ideas, which in turn are the source of all being.
Eigenwelt (German): The inner realm. One of the three types of world described by the existentialist psychologist Ludwig Binswanger; see Mitwelt and Umwelt.
einai (Greek): From the Aristotelian phrase to ti en einai (roughly, “the what-it-was-to-be”): the eternal essence of a thing.
Eleusinian Mysteries: The most important of the ancient mystery religions, these secret initiation ceremonies were held annually in ancient Greece for over a millennium. “The Hymn to Demeter” is the only existing textual source for the rites, which centered on the story of Persephone’s abduction into the Underworld. In The Road to Eleusis (1978), Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck advance the theory that psychedelic substances were used to produce the transformative effects of the rites.
Empedocles (c. 490–430 B.C.E.): Pre-Socratic philosopher and naturalist. Empedocles theorized that change in the universe is the result of the interaction between the forces of love and strife. The last philosopher to write his work in verse, Empedocles has been described by some scholars as a shaman as much as a philosopher.
enantiodromia (Greek): Sudden transformation into an opposite form or tendency. The term was used by Heraclitus, but Dick was probably exposed to it through his reading of C.G. Jung, who employs the term to describe the psyche’s tendency to overcome deep-seated resistance, es pecially to the unconscious, by shifting (seemingly suddenly) to the opposite pole of an attitude, belief, or emotion. Dick also sometimes uses the term flip-flop.
Encyclopedia Britannica, EB, or Brit 3: In late 1974, Dick purchased a set of the newly released fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, also known as the Britannica 3. The encyclopedia is divided into three sections: the one-volume Propedia (a general outline of all human knowledge), the twelve-volume Micropedia (containing brief reference entries), and the seventeen-volume Macropedia (containing in-depth articles on important subjects).
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or E. of Phil.: Edited by Paul Edwards and still admired today, this is a major reference work for the Exegesis. According to VALIS, Dick was using the eight-volume work published in 1967 by Macmillan rather than the four-volume 1972 reprint.
engram: The biophysical imprint of events on memory. An important word in Dianetics, where it refers to the “recordings” stored in the reactive mind, the term is generally used in the Exegesis to denote the latent patterns that predispose the mind to respond to the trigger events that produce anamnesis. In VALIS (1981), Dick uses engram to describe a ritual in which Thomas prepares to “reconstitute himself after his physical death.”
entelechy: A term in Aristotelian thought meaning fully developed or actualized. In his use of the term, Dick also reflects the work of German philosopher Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch, who used entelechy to indicate a life force distinct from the physical body.
epistemology: The philosophy of knowledge, dealing with what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and how we know what we know. Sometimes contrasted with ontology, which philosophically studies the nature of being and the existence of things.
Erasmus (1466–1536): Dutch Catholic priest, theologian, Renaissance humanist, and satirist. Perhaps best known for his essay The Praise of Folly (1509), which mocks the superstitious errors and absurdities derived from Catholic doctrine and practice.
Essenes: A Jewish sect, active from roughly the second century B.C.E. to the end of the first century C.E., that held messianic and apocalyptic beliefs and engaged in ascetic practices. It is generally believed that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the library of a community of Essenes; John the Baptist was likely to have been influenced by them. See Qumran Scrolls.
ETI: Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.
Firebright: One of Dick’s terms for ultimate, living wisdom; see plasmate.
Fremd (German, English): Strange (adjective) or stranger (noun); both rarely used.
“Frozen Journey”: Original name for the story “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon” (1980).
GABA fluid: Gamma aminobutyric acid, an endogenous inhibitory neurotransmitter in the human nervous system. Some studies show that increased levels may reduce the mental decline associated with aging.
Galápagos turtle: In a 1981 interview with Gregg Rickman, Dick describes a nature documentary he viewed in the 1960s in which a female Galápagos turtle crawled the wrong direction after laying her eggs in the sand and began to die from exposure while still moving her limbs. That night Dick heard a voice tell him that the turtle believed that she had made it back to the ocean, adding, “And she shall see the sea.” It was one of Dick’s few experiences with the “AI Voice” previous to 2-3-74. A supposed Reuters news item about the death of an old Galápagos turtle provides the epigraph for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).
Gestalt: A German term describing an entity’s holistic essence or form. Gestalt psychology attempts to characterize how our minds and brains select whole forms from a background of possible partial perceptions; this relationship is characterized as “figure” and “ground,” which Dick generally recasts as “set” and “ground.”
Gnosis, Gnostic (Greek): Knowledge. The term Gnostic, which is controversial among scholars, describes a wide range of religious sects of the ancient world. Broadly speaking, these sects believed in a strong dualism of matter and spirit, often holding that the material world was a prison or trap for the soul associated with an inferior creator, or demiurge. The attainment of secret knowledge (gnosis) was proscribed as the means of salvation. The Nag Hammadi library was an important group of Gnostic texts discovered in 1945.
golden fish: On February 20, 1974, a young woman working for a local pharmacy delivered a bottle of prescription Darvon tablets to Dick’s apartment in Fullerton, California. She was wearing a necklace with a golden fish pendant, an ancient Christian symbol that had been resurrected by the countercultural “Jesus movement” in the late 1960s. According to Dick, the sight of the emblem triggered the events of 2-3-74; he connected the design with other figures, including DNA’s double helix and the human eye.