VALIS and the 23 Current

Peter Smith

In 1974 e.v. Philip K. Dick experienced a bizarre and frightening "epiphany", or influx of disorienting information from an unknown source. This extraordinary transmission of complex and disturbing mental images lasted for eight hours; Dick describes the medium of transmission as a concentrated beam of laser-like pink light, rich with graphically-encoded data, and fired directly into the hemispheres of his brain. But perhaps most importantly, he suggests the point of origin of this data-stream as being located in the vicinity of the star system of Sirius.

Such was the intensity of Dick's extraterrestrial revelation that his mental equilibrium was damaged for some time after the event (perhaps even permanently). Nevertheless, he was able to employ the structure of his semi-autobiographical SF novel, VALIS, as a format for exploring the many and diverse symbolic elements and images of his protracted "epiphany".

In one particular paradigm explored in VALIS, the message received by the character Horselover Fat (a semantic pun on "Philip Dick") seems to have been concealed within certain ancient Hebraic texts in the form of a "homoplasmate" - a "logos" of sentient information capable of forming a replicating symbiotic relationship with the human central nervous system. In another possible scenario, the message has been "delivered" by a semi-gnostic "god", described alternately as VALIS and Zebra, which lurks hidden behind the "false" reality which we take for late twentieth-century existence (Dick suggests that in fact we are really still in the era of the early gnostic Christians, blinded by a kind of total reality screen originating from his personal vision of ultimate evil, the "Black Iron Prison"). Yet another exegesis involves elements from the Sirius-based mythologies of the African Dogon tribe and their extraterrestrial visitants, three-eyed, crab-clawed humanoids from a planet near Sirius.

Philip K. Dick also struggled to interpret this maze of imagery and information in terms of his own religious beliefs - a misguided attempt to comprehend his revelatory experience in terms of gnostic Christianity. Not surprisingly, Dick's intention of decoding his vision through the indoctrinated mental filters with which he was burdened was doomed to failure.

However, this does not lessen the very real importance of Dick's 1974 gnosis. The information presented in both the VALIS trilogy and interviews given by Dick before his death in 1982 opens up a whole new area of immediate concern to the E.O.D., touching upon some of its most central icons. The gray-robed figures which Dick describes in his vision of the Black Iron Prison as early gnostic Christians seem to prefigure oddly those of the followers of Dagon, the true interpreters of the messages from Sirius. In this context, the symbol of the fish was wrongly identified by Dick, for Dagon (or Oannes) was the original "fish-god", whose image was broken by the defilers of his temple. Likewise, the rediscovered Hebraic texts, the Nag Hammadi library, fulfill a similar role to that of Lovecraft's Necronomicon within the Cthulhu mythos, as a volume of arcane and preternatural knowledge whose very perusal can effect a kind of gnosis in the reader.

Dick's imperfect translation of the coded information projected into his brain can be rectified by comparison and attribution of this data to the system of "hidden knowledge" currently being explored and reified by the initiates of the E.O.D. His "Vast Active Living Intelligence System" and three-eyed aliens from Sirius are merely an overly simplistic expression of the actual, hyper-subtle influence of this stellar system upon our own.