"Studies of the magic and ritual of Africa have...established with some certainty that all systems for the disturbance of consciousness practiced by the African Negro are derived from ancient Egypt"
Witchcraft (1965) - Pennethorne Huges
"Some unknown natural phenomenon occurs
which cannot be explained,
and a new local demigod is named."
-Zora Neale Hurston on the origin of new Loa
"Some unknown natural phenomenon occurs
which cannot be explained,
and a new local demigod is named."
-Zora Neale Hurston on the origin of new Loa
...If you must know, it all began 1000s of years ago in Egypt, according to a high up member in the Haitian aristocracy.
A certain young prince who was allergic to thrones attended a university in Nysa, a town in Arabia Felix (now Yemen). It was a land of dates coffee goats sheep wheat barley corn and livestock. Across the Red Sea were Ethiopia and the Sudan where the young man would commute bringing his knowledge of agriculture and comparing notes with the agriculturalists of these lands. There were agricultural celebrations; dancing and singing, and in Egypt this rhythm was known as the Black Mud Sound. At this time in history those who influenced the growth of crops and coaxed the cocks into procreation were seen as sorcerers. The theater accompanying these rites, these agriculturalists' rites, was a theater of fecundation generation and proliferation, a theater that Victorian Sir James Frazer of The Golden Bough calls "lewd and profligate." The processes of blooming were acted out by men and women dancers who imitated the process of fertilization.
The would play upon instruments, reeded stringed and percussive, as they acted out the process; open their valves and allow nature to pour through its libation. Osiris was so adept at the mysteries of agriculture that people began to circulate stories that his mother was the sky Nuit and the earth his father Geb.
As Osiris danced he would experiment, but the dances were not esoteric, they were in fact were quite basic and they caught-on. In the Sudan and Ethiopia he became known as "the man who did dances that caught-on," infected other people. Well, Osiris lived many years studying under the elders at Nysa until he returned to Egypt. (Some say he was driven out of Ethiopia, where his dances were banned.) In Egypt a dark cloud lay over the land. Cannibalism was still practiced.
Osiris was regarded by his brother Set as a dilettante a recipient of a far-out education and one who would not know how to deal firmly with the enemies of the Egyptian people. That was Set, the stick crook and flail man. Dealing firmly with enemies, holding them by the hair and chopping off their heads. Set wanted to use the death of their father as an excuse for invading foreign countries. Set hated agriculture and nature which he saw as soiled dirty grimy etc. He was arrogant jealous egotistical and when Osiris issued a ban on men eating men, introducing the techniques he learned from the long-bearded Black men in the university at Nysa, Set began to plot his brother's downfall. He was also jealous that Osiris was to marry their sister Isis. Fine as she could be. Firm breasts, eloquence, all of those qualities that are later to show up in her spiritual descendant Erzulie (love of mirrors, plumes, combs, an elaborate toilet) whom we in the United States call the girl with the red dress on. (Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker are 2 aspects of Erzulie.) People hated Set. He went down as the 1st man to shut nature out of himself. he called it discipline. He is also the deity of the modern clerk, always tabulating, and perhaps invented taxes.
The eating of barley wheat and corn spread through Egypt like a prairie fire and the people began to do the Black Mud sound, to do alchemical theater (theater of the "Black country"), and that got Set even more annoyed. The people would plant during the day and at night would celebrate dancing singing shaking sistrums and carrying on so that Set couldn't get sleep and was tired when he went out on the field and drilled marched and gave commands to others. 1 day Osiris performed a miracle. He danced so well that the vines began to imitate a particular slow sinuous movement and from that day to this we have the creeping vine. Osiris was called the Bull by the Egyptians who loved him and greeted him as he toured Egypt with his musicians and their sets of decoration having to do with procreation.
Set couldn't stand it. He would stand off to the side mad, balling his fists and spouting invective. He considered the music "loud" and "boisterous." Sometimes the dances were performed by pigmies Osiris imported from the South because they were able to execute the "dance of the Gods." 1 night Set went downstairs and told everybody to "cut out that racket." He was greeted only by catcalls and boos and when a young woman tried to persuade him to dance with her he hurried from the room to the general amusement of the court. And when later a guard came upon him trying out these dances himself in secret, the gossip leaked all over Egypt and he became the laughing stock of the country. Set can't dance became the cry.. Even Hully Gullying children on the street would point out Set as the man who can't shake it 'til he breaks it. The freak from Matovani. That did it. Set would show them. Happy all the time. Enjoying themselves when there was hard work to be done, countries to invade, populations to subjugate. Egypt was prospering under Osiris and there was peace.
People were eating good, the crops were abundant, things were going smoothly and Osiris and Isis were happily married. Their sister Nephthys and her husband, their brother Set, didn't make out so well. He spent most of his time "out with the boys"; legislators, an unpopular group of poets who went about Egypt telling Egyptians that they could do better that they weren't ready and that they ought to try to make something out of themselves. Make ready for what? 1 man asked at one of their whistle sops. Ready for progress? Invading foreign countries and killing? The people didn't go for it and sarcastically called them The First Poets because in Egypt at the time of Osiris every man was an artist and every artist a priest; it wasn't until later that Art became attached to the State to do with it what it pleased.
Then something strange happened. People began to do the dance of Osiris and it would interrupt their tilling of the soil. It would hit them at all times of the day and some of them would wander through the streets talking out of their heads and making strange signs. Set circulated a rumor that this was because Osiris didn't really know the alchemical arts and had brought a curse upon Egypt. Osiris was aworried and the people were grumbling. Well, there was a certain artist down near the harbor who painted arks. He was a man who had once made-out with Osiris' mother and had a big reputation for his decorative work. He called on Osiris 1 day and argued his theory that the outbreaks occurred because the mysteries had no text to turn to. No litany to feed the spirits that were seizing the people, and that if Osiris would execute these dance steps for Thoth he would illustrate them and then Osirian priests could determine what god or spirit possessed them as well as learn how to make these gods and spirits depart.
And so possessed, Osiris did his basic dances for many days until Thoth had them all down. A Book of Litanies to which people in places like Abydos in Upper Egypt could add their own variations.
Guides were initiated into the Book of Thoth, the 1st anthology written by the 1st choreographer.
Osiris toured the world with is International Nile Root Orchestra, dancing agronomy and going from country to country with his band; and a choir directed by a young up and comer named Dionysus whom you don't hear very much about in his Egyptian setting because the Egyptian writing is "royalty centered." With Thoth he taught people to permit nature to speak and dance through them, for so many 1000s of eyes looked through Osiris that he became known as "the many-eyed."
Just as fast as Osiris would teach these dances the people would mimic him and add their variations to fit their country and their clime. People began to welcome Osiris the Bull, the Seedman, and he became a familiar sight walking down the ramp or rather trucking down the ramp, his pet eagle "Jackie" perched on his shoulder, his faithful Birdman Thoth at his side, taking it all down. And people of all the many ports of the world where he traveled would say "Hey Seedman, what's going down?"
It was on his 2nd trip to South America that the rumors reached him. Because Osiris was teaching people how to make wine and if they didn't grow grapes, beer, Set was going about Egypt telling everybody that Osiris was a fraud and that he was traveling the world "drunk" and "fornicating," disgracing the name of the Fatherland. Set issued a challenge which travelers brought to Osiris. He was saying that if Osiris was so smart and a Human Seed and all, a Germ, would he perform the feat of the Germ. Could he be planted in the Nile and then spring from the waters. Surely if he had learned the arts of sagacious bearded Black men in Arabia Felix at the University of Nysa he could perform this act. He said if he would do this that he, Set, would go somewhere and sit down and never complain again if people danced and sang. He didn't want to go down in history as a "party pooper." The devil was even hitting on Isis because he had eyes for her but she would just look upon her brother with disgust, this man who was going around putting the bad breath on Osiris. Osiris at the time was in Teotihuacan in South America where people of all races and from all over the world had arrived to watch the space ships their astronomer predicted would land. They landed after Osiris made a side trip to Olmeca where he remained long enough to pose for a portrait which was done in terracotta. He attended a 2-week festival as guest of an Inca King. It was here that he practiced Set's challenge for days at a time. It was easy. Osiris had developed such a fondness and attachment for Nature that people couldn't tell them apart.
He had never performed this trick but he knew that Nature wouldn't let him down for long. When Osiris and his band returned to Egypt the people turned out to greet him, dancing and being possessed as the guides led them through. They laughed as Isis blushed because they knew that that night he would give her his "rod of authority."
Set and his followers watched from the windows. That isn't a bad piece of tail, Set said commenting upon the attributes of his sister in the presence of Nephthys whom he treated like a dog, and called her a bitch a tomato a heifer a cow and all other words related to farming he hated so.
That night Osiris and Isis made love and the result of this Union was the child Horus.
The next day was the day of the test. The people gathered at the mouth of the Nile as the legislators placed Osiris in the coffer and drove nails through it. Molten lead was used to keep it airtight. Osiris winked at the people before the lid was closed. The coffer was sunk into the water on October 24th.
That night the legislators came to the Nile and raised Osiris. They lifted the lid and saw Osiris lying thre smiling in a deep death-like slumber, a trick he had learned "down home" among the heavies in the Sudan and Ethiopia.
They mutilated him and made believe that he was torn in to 14 parts, and from that day forward fish have been considered evil in Egypt. On October 31st the people came and saw the mutilated corpse, parts of which had been washed up on the shore, and the open coffer lying not far away.
Set, stood there in triumph. There goes your Seedman eaten by fish, let's cut out all this farming jazz and go back to eating each other. Come here you, Set said in his John Wayne voice, swaggering toward a luscious woman, a succulent dish standing in the crowd.
Thoth knew this to be a lie. He had seen Osiris perform this act during their sojourn in South America. Among the Navajo Indians in North America, at Aztec festivals, around West African peoples who were known to repel an invader by "playing whistles and beating on drums," the news had circulated through many tribes that Osiris could perform this trick.
Thoth spoke up, demanding an autopsy, an investigation of Osiris' death. Set had Thoth arrested for his proposal. Thoth was taken into custody but escaped through the help of some of the guards who were still loyal to the memory of Osiris. Before going into exile, he ran to Isis and left his sacred Book in her hands; and then he went away. Some say he went into exile in the hills where he wrote magical books under a pseudonym which survived until the "Civilized" Romans burned the library at Alexandria.
Isis began to walk about Egypt, screaming lamentations for her husband. At the moment of his triumph Set began to hear unsettling stories. Osiris had been seen in the land. He had been seen wherever Isis had left a backbone, or a toe or an arm belonging to her dead husband. The people were beginning to call Osiris the Bull the Human-Seed as well, and wherever they found a Bull with a scarab under his tongue, an eagle on his back and a square on his forehead they began to celebrate Osiris' "living Spirit." When he heard of this, old Set ordered the murder of the Bulls and being a particularly mean cuss, ordered they be tortured 1st. (This led to the sport that the American writer Ernest Hemingway took such delight in.) But wherever the Black Bull God Apis appeared and was murdered another Bull would take his place. Well this was driving Set up the walls. This was October 31st, the night the people went about wearing masks, being whatever they felt like in honor of the man who Nature spoke through. Set sent out warrants for the Osirian guides who had learned The Work and they fled. Some of them fled to Down Home where they matched knowledge with the necromancers in Ife, Nigeria. Dionysus traveled to Greece where the Dance "spread like wildfire" although Homer doesn't mention it. He nevertheless helped himself to the stories Dionysus brought concerning Osiris, the man who traveled through the world and returned home to a wife under siege by conspirators. Dionysus kept the faith of his school chum and home boy. (Dionysus can be read as "God From Nysa.") When the King of Thebes forbade the feeding of Dionysus, the angry loa influenced the young people to revolt. When Proteus, King of Tiryns, closed a temple dedicated to Dionysus known as "the man of the black goatskin" a contemporary writer described the ensuing choreomania:
They rushed out of doors and in frenzied dance raged over the countryside, singing weird songs, tearing their garments, unable to stop dancing.
Dionysus taught the Greeks the Osirian Art which lasted until the Atonists in the late 4th century A.D. convinced the Emperor Constantine to co-sign for the Cross. Dionysus taught the Greek guides to identify the Nature that spoke through mankind. The Work. Listen Hippocrates:
If they imitate a goat, or grind their teeth, or if their right side be convulsed, they say that the mother of the gods is the cause, but if they speak in a sharper and more intense tone they resemble this state to a horse and say Poseidon [Neptune] is the cause.
NOTICE
NOTICE
RICHARD, CHUCK AND JOHNNY WISH TO REMIND CALIFORNIA'S ROCK FANS THAT THE STAGE IS VIRTUALLY INDESTRUCTIBLE. ONE MAY ATTEND WITH NO FEAR OF MORTAL INJURY, SHOULD HE OR SHE FEEL THE CALL TO COME FORTH AND DECLARE HIS OR HER SOUL TO THE GLORY OF ROCK 'N' ROLL
The Greeks established temples to these Egyptian-derived mysteries where people would go out of theri heads so that the gods could take them over. (About the 10th century the Atonist priests will call this diabolical possession or corrupt the Greek word daimon so as to have evil connotations. Freud, the later Atonist [according to 1 biographer, a big fan of Moses, Cromwell and other militarists], is to term this "hysteria.")
The Greek and Roman masses were crazy about the Egyptian mysteries and celebrated them in Temples of Osiris and Isis, much to the chagrin of the satirist Lucian, who in Dialogues of the Gods derided the animal figures associated with the royal couple; but religions were too popular for criticism to affect anything and the people danced and sang and were touched by the Spirits under the careful watching of trained priests of Dionysus the choir master. They, the Greeks, would have never though about calling these Hosts schizophrenics or catatonics, which were after all their own words. Paranoia and the like were clinical Atonist words invented by people who having lost the knowledge of what they were doing just kinda threw these terms out there. These rites lasted on up to A.D. 378 when the Atonists made havoc upon the temples of their opponents' "pagan" systems. Prior to their sacking, jealous politicians had burned the temples in 58, 50 and 48 B.C. Formerly the people could go to the temples and get away from it all through the guidance of a priest; now they were tortured and any Osirian behavior was seen as an escape from reality and such. All of the gods who were rivals of the 1 they called Jehovah (the cover-up for the Flaming Disc God, Aton) were driven underground and the many were reduced to 1; even Muhammad, 1 of Jehovah's allies in the priesthood, is depicted in a church carving as the devil.
The 4th century A.D. was crucial period for both Atonism and the mystery Dionysus had brought from Egypt. Atonist scholars up to their old yellow journalism of the Daily Heliopolitan decided to depict Osiris as Pluto, a castrated god of the underworld but they kept on Isis as Virgin Mary. In fact in many African locales the passion for Isis was transferred to the Atonists' Mary. This occurred in Africa and southern Europe. Mary was the mother of the Atonist compromise Jesus Christ. They made him do everything that Osiris does, sow like a farmer, be a fisherman among men but he is still a bokor, a sorcerer, an early Faust. Lazarus was a zombie! He was a sorcerer, a Maharishi yoga type who went around the countryside performing tricks. The quality of which the great man Julian the Apostate Emperor (called Apostate because he wanted in the 4th century, to revive the religions Dionysus brought to Greece) was to comment
The Greek and Roman masses were crazy about the Egyptian mysteries and celebrated them in Temples of Osiris and Isis, much to the chagrin of the satirist Lucian, who in Dialogues of the Gods derided the animal figures associated with the royal couple; but religions were too popular for criticism to affect anything and the people danced and sang and were touched by the Spirits under the careful watching of trained priests of Dionysus the choir master. They, the Greeks, would have never though about calling these Hosts schizophrenics or catatonics, which were after all their own words. Paranoia and the like were clinical Atonist words invented by people who having lost the knowledge of what they were doing just kinda threw these terms out there. These rites lasted on up to A.D. 378 when the Atonists made havoc upon the temples of their opponents' "pagan" systems. Prior to their sacking, jealous politicians had burned the temples in 58, 50 and 48 B.C. Formerly the people could go to the temples and get away from it all through the guidance of a priest; now they were tortured and any Osirian behavior was seen as an escape from reality and such. All of the gods who were rivals of the 1 they called Jehovah (the cover-up for the Flaming Disc God, Aton) were driven underground and the many were reduced to 1; even Muhammad, 1 of Jehovah's allies in the priesthood, is depicted in a church carving as the devil.
The 4th century A.D. was crucial period for both Atonism and the mystery Dionysus had brought from Egypt. Atonist scholars up to their old yellow journalism of the Daily Heliopolitan decided to depict Osiris as Pluto, a castrated god of the underworld but they kept on Isis as Virgin Mary. In fact in many African locales the passion for Isis was transferred to the Atonists' Mary. This occurred in Africa and southern Europe. Mary was the mother of the Atonist compromise Jesus Christ. They made him do everything that Osiris does, sow like a farmer, be a fisherman among men but he is still a bokor, a sorcerer, an early Faust. Lazarus was a zombie! He was a sorcerer, a Maharishi yoga type who went around the countryside performing tricks. The quality of which the great man Julian the Apostate Emperor (called Apostate because he wanted in the 4th century, to revive the religions Dionysus brought to Greece) was to comment
. . . Yet Jesus, who won over the least worthy of you, has been known by name for but little more than three hundred years: and during his lifetime he accomplished nothing worthy hearing of, unless anyone thinks that to heal crooked and blind men and to exorcise those who were possessed by evil demons in the villages of Bethsaida and Bethany can be classed as a mighty achievement.
Julian knew the difference between a houngan and bokor, having surrounded himself with the solidest post-Osirian priests of his day. And Julian fed the loas publicly, to the ridicule and scorn of his countrymen who had been converted to Christianity. On February 4, A.D. 362, he proclaimed religious freedom in the empire and ordered the pagan temples restored. But the Atonists were too powerful for Julian. He was assassinated on a Persian battlefield 12:00 midnight June 26, 363. He failed in his gallant attempt to reverse the Atonist challenge. He foresaw the Bad News it was going to bring to the world. John Milton, Atonist apologist extraordinaire himself, saw the coming of the minor geek and sorcerer Jesus Christ as a way of ending the cult of Osiris and Isis forever.
The brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis and Horus, and the dog Anubis hast.
Isis and Horus, and the dog Anubis hast.
Nor is Osiris seen
In Memphian grove, or Green
Trampling th' unshowr'd Grass with lowings loud:
Nor can he be at rest
within his sacred chest,
Naught but profundest Hell can be his shroud;
In vain with Timbrel'd Anthems dark
The sable-stoled Sorcerers bear his worshipt ark.
This from his Hymn in "On the Morning of Christs Nativity," which is nothing but a simple necktie party out to get Osiris' goat. And those "Timbrle'd Anthems dark" is the music that old Jethro played, the music of the worshipers of those festivals where they had a ball. Boogieing. Expressing they selves. John Milton couldn't stand that. Another Atonist; that's why English professors like him, he's like their amulet, keeping niggers out of the departments and stamping out Jes Grew before it invades their careers. It is interesting that he worked fro Cromwell, a man who banned theater from England and was also a hero of Sigmund Freud. Well the mud-slingers kept up the attack on Osiris, a writer Bilious Styronicus even rewriting Osirian history in a book called the Confessions of the Black Bull God Osiris in which he justified Set's murder to Osiris on the ground that Osiris made "illicit" love to Isis who, he wrote, was Set's wife. He was awarded the Atonists' contemporary equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for this whopper. Others went about calling Osiris, Moloch, which translated means "nigger cow."
Well the Atonist Church becomes stronger as the years pass but a strange thing happens. The rites associated with Osiris and other pagan gods continue underground. The only remedies the Church knew was to "beat the living shit out of them." Throwing those possessed by demons into dungeons, torturing and burning it out of them. They killed millions of people this way but it didn't put an end to the dance epidemics, heresies, witchcraft, infidels, and remnants of "pagan" religions. Well, if the Church had continued dealing with the foe in this manner, beating people up. raiding their apartments at 2:00 A.M., burning them at the stake, it would have wiped out a good portion of Europe's population. The rest of the population was being depleted by physical plagues. Much later came another Atonist compromise, Sigmund Freud, who refined the rhetoric of the Church and eased the methods of dealing with the problem. Freud saved many lives which would have ordinarily been dealt with by the Church in an inhumane manner. But when Freud came to America and saw what was going down over here it was too much for even this man. Freud fainted.
After the exile of the Osirians, Dionysus, Thoth and other members of that fabled entourage, Set had problems. Every time he'd got out on tour his convoy was stoned. He had outlawed Dancing. Everything that Osiris stood for he attempted to banish so that he would cut this figure out of his life forever. Next he banished Music. And as his mind deteriorated he banned Fucking.
And later even Life itself. He began to groove behind a real death cult that grew up around him. His legislators and their wives resembled a Billy Graham audience at Oakland Coliseum. The people began to grumble. There was talk of revolution. Talk that Horus had grown up in Koptos where Isis had gone into exile and was prepared to march on the old man. When the child was younger Set had dispatched an arch poisoner, but he failed because Isis was in possession of the Sacred Book and had developed some pretty strong garde.
Set decided that he would fasten his hold on the populace by performing a miracle the way Osiris used to. He had 1 of his bokors who practiced the art of the Petro Rites with the Left Hand to "come on up and give the folks a show." Well, being insufficiently trained the bokor didn't know what he was doing; he only knew Dirty Work and raised the temperature of Egypt to over 50,00 degrees resulting in something resembling and A-bomb explosion. Set and his followers fled to Heliopolis City of the Sun and decided to rule Egypt from there.
Set grew worse. The people began to return their old ways, dancing and performing the rites as they remembered them, but without the Text and someone to tell them what to do- Osiris' assistants now dispersed in West Africa, southern Europe, and elsewhere- it resulted in degeneration. Se began to develop a weird relationship with the Sun. If you can understand Los Angeles you can almost get the picture; imagine 2 or 3 Los Angeleses and you got Heliopolis. The legislators lay around in the Sun all day and developed a strange Body Building scene on the beach. Set decided that he would introduce a religion based upon his relationship to the Sun, and since he was a god then the Sun too would be a god. Of course this was nothing new because the Egyptians had worshiped the "heat, light, orbs, and rays," had worshiped the Sun in a pantheistic manner. With Set, the Sun's flaming disc eclipsed the rest of its parts.
He made the legislators serve as his writers, as Thoth had for Osiris. Maybe this would do it, he thought. And so the legislators went through the old texts and started rewriting things and doctoring them to make Set look good and Osiris look bad. By establishing his own religion based upon Aton (the Sun's flaming disc) he felt he would overcome the nature religion of Osiris. He would be the reverse of Osiris who was associated with fertilization and spring; he would become Aton the "burner of growing things," the Egyptian Jehovah who causes famine pestilence and earthquakes. Before he died he was in such a state that he believed that the Sun was dependent on him and thus he would walk around in circles all day thinking that when he walked the Sun made its course about the planet.
He really flipped. And he was to die watching the Bull God Apis rise all over the land. The Temples of Osiris and Isis were constructed in southern Europe, Nubia and the Sudan. It was becoming a world-wide religion. It was successful everywhere the remnant of the Osirian priesthood was; they knew what it was capable of and knew how to draw it out or make it depart. But in places where The Work wasn't known it would spring up unexpectedly and cause disastrous results or be mistaken for entertainment or be practiced with the Left Hand. Try as they may to popularize Atonism, the Egyptians weren't going for it. It became nothing but a club of old grumblers located in Heliopolis.
That was until Amenhotep 4 (about 1400 B.C.). He was a frail tall and weakling interior-decorator type who became an Atonist and changed his name to Akhnaton (devoted to Aton) while he spent sometime in Heliopolis hanging out on the beach the Atonists made popular, now a decadent, Joe Atlas scene.
When the fool moved the capital to Tel el Amarna they knew they had another Set on their hands and the Amon sect, the ones in charge of maintaining the Osirian mysteries, had the sucker offed. To make an uneasy pun they quit this 2nd Set.
Fortunately Tutankhamen came to power and the people were allowed to do their stuff, working out this way on the wall in the hall every which-a-way. That was until Thermuthis, the stubborn, self-indulgent daughter of a weak Pharaoh. 1 day while bathing she discovered a child in a basket and against the advice of Baria, an old HooDoo woman, brought the child into the palace. No 1 could tell her anything. Thermuthis had had her "been to": her expatriate fling in Europe. Hadn't she hung out in the cafes and listened to Greek, the language of "civilization"? Hadn't she learned how to be vague? To flim flam? She looked down on her own people whom she joined her friends in mocking as they went about "practicing that superstitious mess." The Osirian cult had lost its prestige and now did its stuff "way out on the outskirts of town." There were rumors of dancing and "getting happy" and singing out here in the roadside temples. At Thermuthis' request the Pharaoh would have them raided once in a while. But since the Osirians were giving the guard some "ice"- emeralds, diamonds, lapis lazuli- as soon as a priest, houngan and houngonikon or mambo or an elder and his sisters were arrested he was soon back on the street in circulation. Thermuthis and some of her Greek friends went down to these places one night and were appalled at the frankness of these rituals; the Pussies and Dicks on the walls as decoration, the low-down gut-bucket music. They were snobs. (The opening night crowd of charlatans at a racist N.Y. museum.) All day they stay around discussing such things as "If I stand in the water today am I the same person who stood there yesterday etc. etc." you know. Jiving the citizens of Egypt.
Her adopted son Moses (1350-1250 B.C.) had different ideas. He sneaked off to the Domain of Osiris every time he had a chance. Manetho the 3rd century B.C. Egyptian historian contends that he even became an Osirian initiate and changed his name to Osarsiph.
Nor can he be at rest
within his sacred chest,
Naught but profundest Hell can be his shroud;
In vain with Timbrel'd Anthems dark
The sable-stoled Sorcerers bear his worshipt ark.
This from his Hymn in "On the Morning of Christs Nativity," which is nothing but a simple necktie party out to get Osiris' goat. And those "Timbrle'd Anthems dark" is the music that old Jethro played, the music of the worshipers of those festivals where they had a ball. Boogieing. Expressing they selves. John Milton couldn't stand that. Another Atonist; that's why English professors like him, he's like their amulet, keeping niggers out of the departments and stamping out Jes Grew before it invades their careers. It is interesting that he worked fro Cromwell, a man who banned theater from England and was also a hero of Sigmund Freud. Well the mud-slingers kept up the attack on Osiris, a writer Bilious Styronicus even rewriting Osirian history in a book called the Confessions of the Black Bull God Osiris in which he justified Set's murder to Osiris on the ground that Osiris made "illicit" love to Isis who, he wrote, was Set's wife. He was awarded the Atonists' contemporary equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for this whopper. Others went about calling Osiris, Moloch, which translated means "nigger cow."
Well the Atonist Church becomes stronger as the years pass but a strange thing happens. The rites associated with Osiris and other pagan gods continue underground. The only remedies the Church knew was to "beat the living shit out of them." Throwing those possessed by demons into dungeons, torturing and burning it out of them. They killed millions of people this way but it didn't put an end to the dance epidemics, heresies, witchcraft, infidels, and remnants of "pagan" religions. Well, if the Church had continued dealing with the foe in this manner, beating people up. raiding their apartments at 2:00 A.M., burning them at the stake, it would have wiped out a good portion of Europe's population. The rest of the population was being depleted by physical plagues. Much later came another Atonist compromise, Sigmund Freud, who refined the rhetoric of the Church and eased the methods of dealing with the problem. Freud saved many lives which would have ordinarily been dealt with by the Church in an inhumane manner. But when Freud came to America and saw what was going down over here it was too much for even this man. Freud fainted.
After the exile of the Osirians, Dionysus, Thoth and other members of that fabled entourage, Set had problems. Every time he'd got out on tour his convoy was stoned. He had outlawed Dancing. Everything that Osiris stood for he attempted to banish so that he would cut this figure out of his life forever. Next he banished Music. And as his mind deteriorated he banned Fucking.
And later even Life itself. He began to groove behind a real death cult that grew up around him. His legislators and their wives resembled a Billy Graham audience at Oakland Coliseum. The people began to grumble. There was talk of revolution. Talk that Horus had grown up in Koptos where Isis had gone into exile and was prepared to march on the old man. When the child was younger Set had dispatched an arch poisoner, but he failed because Isis was in possession of the Sacred Book and had developed some pretty strong garde.
Set decided that he would fasten his hold on the populace by performing a miracle the way Osiris used to. He had 1 of his bokors who practiced the art of the Petro Rites with the Left Hand to "come on up and give the folks a show." Well, being insufficiently trained the bokor didn't know what he was doing; he only knew Dirty Work and raised the temperature of Egypt to over 50,00 degrees resulting in something resembling and A-bomb explosion. Set and his followers fled to Heliopolis City of the Sun and decided to rule Egypt from there.
Set grew worse. The people began to return their old ways, dancing and performing the rites as they remembered them, but without the Text and someone to tell them what to do- Osiris' assistants now dispersed in West Africa, southern Europe, and elsewhere- it resulted in degeneration. Se began to develop a weird relationship with the Sun. If you can understand Los Angeles you can almost get the picture; imagine 2 or 3 Los Angeleses and you got Heliopolis. The legislators lay around in the Sun all day and developed a strange Body Building scene on the beach. Set decided that he would introduce a religion based upon his relationship to the Sun, and since he was a god then the Sun too would be a god. Of course this was nothing new because the Egyptians had worshiped the "heat, light, orbs, and rays," had worshiped the Sun in a pantheistic manner. With Set, the Sun's flaming disc eclipsed the rest of its parts.
He made the legislators serve as his writers, as Thoth had for Osiris. Maybe this would do it, he thought. And so the legislators went through the old texts and started rewriting things and doctoring them to make Set look good and Osiris look bad. By establishing his own religion based upon Aton (the Sun's flaming disc) he felt he would overcome the nature religion of Osiris. He would be the reverse of Osiris who was associated with fertilization and spring; he would become Aton the "burner of growing things," the Egyptian Jehovah who causes famine pestilence and earthquakes. Before he died he was in such a state that he believed that the Sun was dependent on him and thus he would walk around in circles all day thinking that when he walked the Sun made its course about the planet.
He really flipped. And he was to die watching the Bull God Apis rise all over the land. The Temples of Osiris and Isis were constructed in southern Europe, Nubia and the Sudan. It was becoming a world-wide religion. It was successful everywhere the remnant of the Osirian priesthood was; they knew what it was capable of and knew how to draw it out or make it depart. But in places where The Work wasn't known it would spring up unexpectedly and cause disastrous results or be mistaken for entertainment or be practiced with the Left Hand. Try as they may to popularize Atonism, the Egyptians weren't going for it. It became nothing but a club of old grumblers located in Heliopolis.
That was until Amenhotep 4 (about 1400 B.C.). He was a frail tall and weakling interior-decorator type who became an Atonist and changed his name to Akhnaton (devoted to Aton) while he spent sometime in Heliopolis hanging out on the beach the Atonists made popular, now a decadent, Joe Atlas scene.
When the fool moved the capital to Tel el Amarna they knew they had another Set on their hands and the Amon sect, the ones in charge of maintaining the Osirian mysteries, had the sucker offed. To make an uneasy pun they quit this 2nd Set.
Fortunately Tutankhamen came to power and the people were allowed to do their stuff, working out this way on the wall in the hall every which-a-way. That was until Thermuthis, the stubborn, self-indulgent daughter of a weak Pharaoh. 1 day while bathing she discovered a child in a basket and against the advice of Baria, an old HooDoo woman, brought the child into the palace. No 1 could tell her anything. Thermuthis had had her "been to": her expatriate fling in Europe. Hadn't she hung out in the cafes and listened to Greek, the language of "civilization"? Hadn't she learned how to be vague? To flim flam? She looked down on her own people whom she joined her friends in mocking as they went about "practicing that superstitious mess." The Osirian cult had lost its prestige and now did its stuff "way out on the outskirts of town." There were rumors of dancing and "getting happy" and singing out here in the roadside temples. At Thermuthis' request the Pharaoh would have them raided once in a while. But since the Osirians were giving the guard some "ice"- emeralds, diamonds, lapis lazuli- as soon as a priest, houngan and houngonikon or mambo or an elder and his sisters were arrested he was soon back on the street in circulation. Thermuthis and some of her Greek friends went down to these places one night and were appalled at the frankness of these rituals; the Pussies and Dicks on the walls as decoration, the low-down gut-bucket music. They were snobs. (The opening night crowd of charlatans at a racist N.Y. museum.) All day they stay around discussing such things as "If I stand in the water today am I the same person who stood there yesterday etc. etc." you know. Jiving the citizens of Egypt.
Her adopted son Moses (1350-1250 B.C.) had different ideas. He sneaked off to the Domain of Osiris every time he had a chance. Manetho the 3rd century B.C. Egyptian historian contends that he even became an Osirian initiate and changed his name to Osarsiph.
The people, down at these places which bore the aroma of plants growing wild in the fields, called him Pharaoh. The Egyptian scribe Manetho also refers to him as Pharaoh, most likely the successor of Thermuthis' father. These orchestras of brass, sistrums and drums would play a music that was influenced by the stars. They played under the stars to 1000s of what they remembered of the Osirian Mysteries. Moses, the young Pharaoh-to-be, would sit in and join in with his brothers. The fingers of these men who worked the crops brought the electricity of the earth to their strings, these men who drank from the cold Blue Nile, whose lips had touched the waters of this magic river, brought this Nile sound to their instruments. Well 1 night they were sitting around and Moses asked them what was the heaviest sound they had ever heard. All the men agreed that it was old Jethro the Midianite who could still play the sounds of the spirits and had a legendary instrument that sounded like an orchestra and knew all the "old songs." It was rumored that he was
a descendant of an actual follower of Osiris who had gone into exile after Set's purge. They said that he could play so well that lions assembled on the ground of his farm and went to sleep, that the crops would weave their leaves toward the huts and climb into the bedroom window. That Nature had blessed him with daughters so that there would be more like him. Moses felt that he would have to study under this man. he would have to somehow gain this man's confidence and perhaps he would teach him everything he knew.
The next day Moses set out to see Jethro. When he came upon the town in whose suburbs Jethro dwelled he went in to the local Spirits Temple and made inquiries about Jethro. The Spirit Tasters told him all about Jethro and that he could see his daughters tending to Jethro's cattle if he went outside of town. They told him where and how far to go. Moses revealed himself as Pharaoh-to-be and hired the men to stage an episode for him. They would go and pretend to rustle Jethro's cattle and Moses would come riding out of the hills and divert them. (Moses really liked melodrama.) Well this was done and Moses came out of the hills and repelled the rustlers whom he had paid to perform such a stunt at the Temple of Spirits. The women took their rescuer home and introduced him to their father Jethro. Jethro was happy and persuaded Moses to remain at his home and "drink and eat as much as you and make-out with my daughters."
Why not? Moses thought. They weren't bad and he could just write down everything that Jethro said and when he returned to Egypt he would turn the place out. That night Jethro took out this instrument that must have had about 25 strings. He then put some kind of early styled harmonica in his mouth. And with his feet he beat on some kind of tinny thing. Then he started twanging on that many-stringed monstrosity and zipping his fingers up and down that thing and making that thing cry so that several times Moses leaped in the air and said, Damn! If he could learn that he could be the Hierophant of the surviving Osirian Order. Moses asked Jethro would he mind if he wrote all of this down. Jethro was grateful to the man. He almost considered him a son and told him that this would be fine.
Well the next few months Moses would help the women tend the cows, using them any way he desired, and at night, Jethro would play and Moses would write it all down. Soon they were doing duos as Moses slowly learned Jethro's art. Well when Moses had learned all of Jethro's songs and had made Jethro create upon these strange instruments he played, Moses packed his papyri instruments and was bidding Jethro goodbye. He said he would play his songs in the temples and while he was playing them he would always have a kind place in his heart for Jethro.
Just as Jethro was bidding Moses goodbye Jethro told him "It's too bad you're leaving because that's not enough. You must know the words to the songs and that's a family secret." Moses paused. "Family secret?" "Yes unless you know the words the music becomes 1/2 right, not all right." Moses told Jethro and his daughters that he was going to set out but the moon looked ominous. Perhaps he could remain with them for a few more days. That evening Moses asked Jethro to teach him the words. Jethro told him that they were family secrets. He would only pass them on to a son-in-law.
Well, the next day Moses told Jethro that he was in love with Zipporah and wanted to marry her. Jethro, trusting, was overjoyed because he had developed a great fondness for Moses. Moses married Zipporah and as her dowry Jethro taught Moses the family words. Well, Moses and his wife Zipporah were about to leave because he wanted as quickly to return to Egypt to "show off my lovely Black bride to my stepmother, The Pharaoh and my high-yellow sisters and brothers."
1 day when you return, Jethro said, you can take a trip to Koptos where there is in existence the Sacred Book said to have been written by Thoth himself.
What? Moses asked.
I said 1 of these days Isis will show you the real Book of Thoth-the original sound. The 1 located in her temple at Koptos, guarded by the deathless snake. It has to be gotten during the right moon or it will be the Book in its evil phase.
Moses sighed, Now he tells me! He told his father-in-law that Zipporah didn't look too well and that he would remain a few more days before they set out on such an arduous journey. Zipporah pleaded that she felt all right but Moses insisted. Jethro was pleased that Moses was so concerned for his daughter Zipporah and rebuked her for sassing her husband. Moses after a few weeks told Jethro, his wife and her sisters that he felt like going on a camping trip to get some air and that he would return soon.
Moses went into the woods and traveled to the mountains. He wanted to contemplate. He went atop Mount Horeb and fasted and meditated for days. On the night of the 12th day he was so weak, having lost many pounds, he thought he was doing to die. It was then a vision came to him. It seemed, the Specter, to be a man dressed in old-style Egyptian clothes 1000s of years before even Manetho had recorded the 30 Dynasties. He told Moses he knew his problem. He knew that Moses wanted to find out how to circumvent the deathless snake who guards the temple at Koptos: Isis and Osiris' Temple. The Specter said he knew that Isis would succumb to a certain line because it was "that time of the month." He said that he would tell Moses what to do, but first Moses had to promise he would restore the cult of Aton to Egypt.
Moses laughed. Man, the way people are into animal and vegetation rites and calling everything that moves a spirit, I would be the buffoon of Egypt restoring something as arid as that. The present mysteries, although frowned upon by the aristocracy, including my mother, are extremely popular with the masses. Why there would be revolution. The Specter began to fade-out when Moses reconsidered, i must play this Book! I must find it! He had developed a real thing about it.
Wait. Wait. Of course I will do what you say. How do I go about getting this Book?
You have to talk trash and feed her.
What is that? Moses said recognizing this as ancient dialect that would have to be revealed to him.
Set told him what he meant by these things and after Moses had gotten it all down he returned to Jethro's ranch looking like a new man. The next day Jethro was sitting on the porch, chewing on some herbs and swinging in a hammock he had made for himself. Some of the old red-eyed Black men from the hills were gathered about the master playing their stringed and percussion instruments, cowbells, mouth harps, calliopes.
Moses seemed like he was trying to tiptoe away when Jethro stopped him because by now Jethro knew he was being used.
Where are you going, son? Koptos?
The men ceased playing their instruments. It became so quiet you could hear the crickets for it was the crepuscule.
Aren't you taking Zipporah with you, said this man, his face a dark wood, his grey hair blue in the early twilight.
I'll . . . I'll er return for her before I go to Egypt, Moses said.
The men returned to playing their instruments. Jethro stopped them. He rose and addressed his son-in-law.
IF you get it out of her it will be useless to you; only a few things about converting rods to snakes; simple bokor tricks, the rest will be so awful that you wish you had never known The Work. Son, she's in that Aspect of herself with this Moon and you won't be able to receive the better side of her Book . . .
Look, leave me alone. Silly old man out here in the backwoods. How dare you talk to me that way. I'm a Pharaoh, or soon will be 1.
Moses jumped on his horse as tears came to Jethro's eyes. As he was about to ride away Moses rode to Jethro's porch where all the men were assembled and he dropped "a couple of bucks" on old Jethro.
Here's the copyright fee for the junk you taught me, he said sarcastically.
Jethro took the dollars and flung them at Moses who rode off into the night.
He wouldn't listen and now he will be merely a 2-bit sorcerer practicing the Left Hand.
It wasn't your fault, Jethro, you warned him, a friend consoled.
The old men resumed the playing of the instruments.
Moses arrived in Koptos a few weeks later. There were statues all over the town devoted to the ancient them of Isis and her child Horus who according to some versions returned and overthrew his father's murderer, Set. It is also said that Horus was the result of a coupling of Isis with the deceased Osiris. People were wearing emblems of the Mother and Child and their pictures were etched on coins. Moses was directed by a traveler to the Temple of Osiris and Isis. He walked until he came upon the temple outside town. He entered between 2 of its 6 columns. In the main room was a smoking pit, a retainer of sacrificial refuse; a statue of Osiris and Isis, holding the child Horus; and friezes depicting Sea Fights, the mysteries: Thoth, Nephthys, Horus, Anubis. Osiris the Eater of the Dead armed with two knives, Osiris Khenti, Amenti, Lord of Abydos and others. There were the animal-shapes: crocodiles serpents birds and rams. The colors of the room were green blue and yellow. Grains were scattered about the floor. The room was littered with tom toms pipes and drums. The air of funk was being dispersed by burning incense. It had been quite an afternoon. Several pigmy kings of about 4' 10'' had danced all afternoon intermittently, leaping into the air. Moses went into the kitchen and munched on some cereal that had been left in some ritual bowls. He drank some wine; he went past the dining room and into the bedroom of mysteries which was covered with pictures of male and female genitalia. Fatigued from traveling, Moses lay down on the bed and went immediately to sleep. At about 2 A.M. he awoke to someone running her hands through his hair and kissing him. It was Isis in the Petro aspect of herself. She was dressed in a scarlet see-through gauzy gown and covered with the odor of a strange perfume. He had never smelt anything so intoxicating to the brain. Her hair was giant black-bird feathers, her eyes blazing.
He would have to be careful. There was stories of mangled bodies carried through the air in the cruel beaks of giant birds. Men "bleeding like hogs," wandering about the temple senseless at dawn. There were tales of her victims condemned to traveling the world. Headless, pitiful men who brought the plague to cities.
I will give you what you want if you give me what I want.
She was so fine that if she dived down the abyss Moses would have plunged in after her. Moses was sweating as she removed her gown and began to make love with him. Moving her thighs about his legs, running her hands across his penis.
Well, Moses thought, as he responded to her caresses, I only hope the bird handles me gently.
Suddenly she leaped to her feet, her prominent firm black breasts swinging, her hands on her hips.
What have you brought for me?
Moses remove from his satchel everything Set instructed him to bring: brightly colored scarfs and liquors, jewelry and delicate chickens for her to eat. She handled the scarfs and tasted the liquor. Moses, when he saw her delighted expression, thought that he had passed the test but she hurled tht things to the ground with 1 gesture.
That isn't enough, she said, returning to the bed and lying next to him. You must talk to me. Baby, please talk to me.
Set knew his sister all right and Moses began to talk to her the way the Osirians talked to her in their rites. He told her how much he loved her and that he would die for her. Cut his throat swim in a river of thrashing crocodiles fight lions for her pussy. He said that he would cuss the day he was born if he couldn't have it and that he would walk all over Egypt crying like a baby. He said that he would gouge out his eyes and dust off the feet of all the dock workers in Egypt, jump off a cliff and lock himself in a cave for the rest of his life. And every time Moses would say another lie Isis would moan and sigh and whimper and purr like a kitten as Moses' hand moved down and touched her Seal. He fished her temple good. She showed him all her rooms. And led him into the depths of her deathless snake where he fought that part of her until it was limp on the ground. He got good into her Book tongued her every passage thumbing her leaf and rubbing his hands all over her binding.
When he was through he had gotten it all down. All down. Had it down pat. He left the goddess in slumber as he rose, collected his gear together and then set out for Egypt.
Well, Moses announced to the populace that he would give a concert with music and songs better than the Black Mud Sound, which was dying rapidly and played only by a few old fools in the hills. He said that this would be a dignified concert and that everyone would have to leave them old nasty-assed animal fetishes and "rattlers" and all those other "flesh-pipes" back home and that there would be no savage dancing. Don't be bringing none of that silly shit to my gig, Moses said. I'm the 1. For once music wouldn't just be used as a background to dancing but he would be a soloist and no 1 in the audience would be allowed to play a whistle or beat a drum or rattle a tambourine. The Osirians were furious. They knew this to be an Atonist trick and decided to disrupt the concert.
Well, the night of the concert the people were herded into the concert ground. (Non-attendance was equated with treason.) Moses began to play Jethro's songs but they weren't coming across like the way they had at the old man's fireplace. They sounded flat, weak, deprived of the lowdown rhythms that Jethro had brought to them. An applause sign was placed up and Moses received applause. A man who didn't go along was taken outside and beaten with flails and crooks. From a box seat, Thermuthis and her expatriate friends applauded loudest of all; 1 Greek said he would return to Greece and announce that Moses sounded even better than Osiris must have sounded himself. Moses then played the songs of Jethro with the words but his voice sounded feigned, his mimic of Jethro's dialect phony, and at this point some grain was thrown up on the stage and people were imitating snakes by HIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSIIIIIINNNNNGGGGGGGG. That corner of the park was beaten until blood streamed down the aisles.
Well, during the intermission Moses went back stage and his Atonist supporters, ass kissers who traveled with him everywhere he went since his return to Egypt, were drinking beer and told Moses how good he was and began to pat him on the back. Moses knew something was wrong. He was told by 1 of the ushers that fights were breaking out in the stadium and that they would have to call for the Army if the violence got out of control.
Don't worry, Moses said, I will do the songs and dances I learned from The Work, the sacred Book, and that way the people will rejoice and love me and young girls will follow me everywhere.
Well, Moses went on stage and began gyrating his hips and singing the words of the Book of Thoth, and a strange things happened. The ears of the people began to bleed. Some of them charged the stage and tried to get at Moses but the Atonist thugs beat them back. 1 Osirian priest could not longer take it. He and several others knew what Moses had learned and knew how it was using him.
Moses couldn't understand. Why hadn't the rites and the words and the dances congealed? Why hadn't the contagion broken out? Why weren't people talking in strange tongues and having happy convulsions?
Moses examined his guitar. Something was wrong. But then the Osirians rose from the rows they occupied and began blowing their whistles and the beautiful sounds filled the air. They didn't know The Work that Moses knew, but in his hands it wasn't doing him any good anyway. The people began to relax. Removed instruments of their own they had smuggled into the park and began playing them along with the Osirians who were marching toward the bandstand playing the instruments. The people began to dance. Moses couldn't stand it.
Arrest those men, he said as the men came closer to where he stood and began to mouth the steps. 1 Osirian-a Black Osirian, a crocodile wrestler known by his friends as "The Hunter"- lunged for Moses but the Atonist thugs surrounded him, stabbing him and making him bleed and then stomping him while he was down until he lay on the floor dead. Seeing this, the whole audience charged the bandstand and Moses was whisked away by some Atonists. People began stoning the royal chariots as they raced for refuge in the Palace. Looting and the killing of Atonists went on all night.
The people surrounded the Palace. Some of them leaped over the barricades set up by the Pharaoh's militia. They hurled missiles at the residence; inside, Moses' mother Thermuthis sobbed softly. She cried the way they did in Greece, civilized, dignified, not piercing walking from the viscera associated with the mourning of Isis who walked all over Egypt sharing her pathos with her people after husband's murder. (Thermuthis cried the way 1 of my relatives from Alabama described as "crying proper."-I.R.) The Greek friends were trying to reach the boats as quickly as they could- 2 of these loafers, brothers, thought of supporting themselves by selling an idea of frieze dealing with the murder of "The Hunter" at the hands of the Atonist thugs.
Moses thought that he could calm the multitude by going out to the balcony and "reasoning" with the people (his mother's sophist friends had gotten to his head too), warning them that he would not truck any rowdiness and that horrible punishments were in store for those who persisted in this unruliness.
Ladies and gentlemen of Egypt. I will unleash the Holocaust upon you this time if you persist in this action. We must have sanity and logic during these times of change and upheaval.
A rock busted the cat's lip.
In anger Moses flung his rod to the ground where it immediately transformed into a snake.
The people laughed. They called him mountebank and sorcerer, fakir in a pejorative sense of the Petro Asson, and other names associated with cheap charlatans who would raise the dead for 15 dollars and change.
The crowd began pushing into the Palace. Moses then ran back into the apartment where his mother was sobbing softly, touching her soft smooth flabby face with a handkerchief.
He berated her: For heaven's sake will you cut that out. I'm trying to concentrate.
Then the idea hit him. Moses ran into his apartment and removed a leaf from the Book Isis had given him. He returned to the balcony where below the crowds had taken trees and were now using them to pound on the Palace gate. Moses uttered The Work aloud. 1st there was silence. Then the people turned toward the Nile and they saw a huge mushroom cloud arise.
A few minutes later, screaming of the most terrible kind came from that direction. The crowd dispersed, trampling 1 another as they rushed for the shelter of their homes. This was a turning point in the Book's history.
The practice of the Left Hand has now arisen to the level of that of the Right Hand. As the distinguished musicologist Fats Waller was to comment later: "Formerly the right hand was given all the work and the left hand shifted for itself, thumping out a plain octave or common chord foundation; now it's more evenly divided and the left hand has to know its stuff."
Moses' explosion made even Set's magicians look small. The next day fish and other river creatures dead and dying washed up on the shores of the Nile.
The VooDoo tradition instructs that Moses learned the secrets of VooDoo from Jethro and taught them to his followers. H. P. Blavatsky concurs: "The fraternity of Free Masons was founded in Egypt and Moses communicated the secret teaching to Israelites, Jesus to the Apostles and thence found its way to the Knights Templar." But this doesn't explain why he received the Petro Asson instead of the Rada. My theory is that it was due to the fact that he had approached Isis at Koptos during the wrong time of the Moon and stirred her malevolent aspects thus learning of the Book. Others say that shortly afterward Moses and his Atonist followers went into exile.
When Jethro heard of the incidents occurring in the North, the nuclear attack and the outrage mob, he told Zipporah. She took it well. She was glad that Jethro hadn't, in a fit of rage, sent the white leprosy to Thermuthis, Moses' mother. Jethro was a good man and once you begin the Petro work it's hard to quit.
Many years later when Moses returned home 1 day from "communicating with his God" he found his children dancing before the despised Bull God Apis, the animal which carries the living spirit of Osiris. Moses heard the "heathen sounds" (timbrel'd anthems dark, boogie, jazz, down-home music, funk, gutbucket) he hadn't heard since his old days in Egypt. Moses grabbed the awful Book from his sons and daughters who were enjoying themselves, dancing their tails off. Moses wanted to get rid of the Book, having sworn off it, but was afraid to burn it. He feared The Work's power. So instead he hid it in a tabernacle where it was lost and become known as 1 of the "lost Books of Moses."..........
Centuries went by until 1118 [A.D.] when the Knights Templar built their headquarters on the site of Solomon's Temple. The organization was an imitation of Hasan-ibn-al-Sabbah's Assassins which had similar offices: Grand Masters, Grand Priors, Priors, Knights, Esquires, Lay Brothers, and the the Templars even adopted the Muslim colors so as to distinguish themselves from their rivals the Teutonics and the Hospitalers. They were a bunch of filthy ruffians, thugs and excommunicated "holy sinners" who wore their clothes until they rotted off their backs; maybe not so bad when you consider that this was a time when the King of France only changed his clothes 3 times a year. They were bully boys who justified their existence by harassing "sacriligers adulterers and others in the name of the Cross." (As usual they left themselves to be the judges of who was guilty of these vaguely defined crimes.) Their stock rose and when they saved the 2nd Crusade from annihilation they were in a position to write their own ticket. . . . One night while stacking books in the basement of the library [they] came upon a secret passageway which led down some concrete steps into an ancient room. It was here [they] came upon the Book of Thoth, the sacred Work Isis had given to Moses. The Work of the Black Birdman, assistant to Osiris......
The next day Moses set out to see Jethro. When he came upon the town in whose suburbs Jethro dwelled he went in to the local Spirits Temple and made inquiries about Jethro. The Spirit Tasters told him all about Jethro and that he could see his daughters tending to Jethro's cattle if he went outside of town. They told him where and how far to go. Moses revealed himself as Pharaoh-to-be and hired the men to stage an episode for him. They would go and pretend to rustle Jethro's cattle and Moses would come riding out of the hills and divert them. (Moses really liked melodrama.) Well this was done and Moses came out of the hills and repelled the rustlers whom he had paid to perform such a stunt at the Temple of Spirits. The women took their rescuer home and introduced him to their father Jethro. Jethro was happy and persuaded Moses to remain at his home and "drink and eat as much as you and make-out with my daughters."
Why not? Moses thought. They weren't bad and he could just write down everything that Jethro said and when he returned to Egypt he would turn the place out. That night Jethro took out this instrument that must have had about 25 strings. He then put some kind of early styled harmonica in his mouth. And with his feet he beat on some kind of tinny thing. Then he started twanging on that many-stringed monstrosity and zipping his fingers up and down that thing and making that thing cry so that several times Moses leaped in the air and said, Damn! If he could learn that he could be the Hierophant of the surviving Osirian Order. Moses asked Jethro would he mind if he wrote all of this down. Jethro was grateful to the man. He almost considered him a son and told him that this would be fine.
Well the next few months Moses would help the women tend the cows, using them any way he desired, and at night, Jethro would play and Moses would write it all down. Soon they were doing duos as Moses slowly learned Jethro's art. Well when Moses had learned all of Jethro's songs and had made Jethro create upon these strange instruments he played, Moses packed his papyri instruments and was bidding Jethro goodbye. He said he would play his songs in the temples and while he was playing them he would always have a kind place in his heart for Jethro.
Just as Jethro was bidding Moses goodbye Jethro told him "It's too bad you're leaving because that's not enough. You must know the words to the songs and that's a family secret." Moses paused. "Family secret?" "Yes unless you know the words the music becomes 1/2 right, not all right." Moses told Jethro and his daughters that he was going to set out but the moon looked ominous. Perhaps he could remain with them for a few more days. That evening Moses asked Jethro to teach him the words. Jethro told him that they were family secrets. He would only pass them on to a son-in-law.
Well, the next day Moses told Jethro that he was in love with Zipporah and wanted to marry her. Jethro, trusting, was overjoyed because he had developed a great fondness for Moses. Moses married Zipporah and as her dowry Jethro taught Moses the family words. Well, Moses and his wife Zipporah were about to leave because he wanted as quickly to return to Egypt to "show off my lovely Black bride to my stepmother, The Pharaoh and my high-yellow sisters and brothers."
1 day when you return, Jethro said, you can take a trip to Koptos where there is in existence the Sacred Book said to have been written by Thoth himself.
What? Moses asked.
I said 1 of these days Isis will show you the real Book of Thoth-the original sound. The 1 located in her temple at Koptos, guarded by the deathless snake. It has to be gotten during the right moon or it will be the Book in its evil phase.
Moses sighed, Now he tells me! He told his father-in-law that Zipporah didn't look too well and that he would remain a few more days before they set out on such an arduous journey. Zipporah pleaded that she felt all right but Moses insisted. Jethro was pleased that Moses was so concerned for his daughter Zipporah and rebuked her for sassing her husband. Moses after a few weeks told Jethro, his wife and her sisters that he felt like going on a camping trip to get some air and that he would return soon.
Moses went into the woods and traveled to the mountains. He wanted to contemplate. He went atop Mount Horeb and fasted and meditated for days. On the night of the 12th day he was so weak, having lost many pounds, he thought he was doing to die. It was then a vision came to him. It seemed, the Specter, to be a man dressed in old-style Egyptian clothes 1000s of years before even Manetho had recorded the 30 Dynasties. He told Moses he knew his problem. He knew that Moses wanted to find out how to circumvent the deathless snake who guards the temple at Koptos: Isis and Osiris' Temple. The Specter said he knew that Isis would succumb to a certain line because it was "that time of the month." He said that he would tell Moses what to do, but first Moses had to promise he would restore the cult of Aton to Egypt.
Moses laughed. Man, the way people are into animal and vegetation rites and calling everything that moves a spirit, I would be the buffoon of Egypt restoring something as arid as that. The present mysteries, although frowned upon by the aristocracy, including my mother, are extremely popular with the masses. Why there would be revolution. The Specter began to fade-out when Moses reconsidered, i must play this Book! I must find it! He had developed a real thing about it.
Wait. Wait. Of course I will do what you say. How do I go about getting this Book?
You have to talk trash and feed her.
What is that? Moses said recognizing this as ancient dialect that would have to be revealed to him.
Set told him what he meant by these things and after Moses had gotten it all down he returned to Jethro's ranch looking like a new man. The next day Jethro was sitting on the porch, chewing on some herbs and swinging in a hammock he had made for himself. Some of the old red-eyed Black men from the hills were gathered about the master playing their stringed and percussion instruments, cowbells, mouth harps, calliopes.
Moses seemed like he was trying to tiptoe away when Jethro stopped him because by now Jethro knew he was being used.
Where are you going, son? Koptos?
The men ceased playing their instruments. It became so quiet you could hear the crickets for it was the crepuscule.
Aren't you taking Zipporah with you, said this man, his face a dark wood, his grey hair blue in the early twilight.
I'll . . . I'll er return for her before I go to Egypt, Moses said.
The men returned to playing their instruments. Jethro stopped them. He rose and addressed his son-in-law.
IF you get it out of her it will be useless to you; only a few things about converting rods to snakes; simple bokor tricks, the rest will be so awful that you wish you had never known The Work. Son, she's in that Aspect of herself with this Moon and you won't be able to receive the better side of her Book . . .
Look, leave me alone. Silly old man out here in the backwoods. How dare you talk to me that way. I'm a Pharaoh, or soon will be 1.
Moses jumped on his horse as tears came to Jethro's eyes. As he was about to ride away Moses rode to Jethro's porch where all the men were assembled and he dropped "a couple of bucks" on old Jethro.
Here's the copyright fee for the junk you taught me, he said sarcastically.
Jethro took the dollars and flung them at Moses who rode off into the night.
He wouldn't listen and now he will be merely a 2-bit sorcerer practicing the Left Hand.
It wasn't your fault, Jethro, you warned him, a friend consoled.
The old men resumed the playing of the instruments.
Moses arrived in Koptos a few weeks later. There were statues all over the town devoted to the ancient them of Isis and her child Horus who according to some versions returned and overthrew his father's murderer, Set. It is also said that Horus was the result of a coupling of Isis with the deceased Osiris. People were wearing emblems of the Mother and Child and their pictures were etched on coins. Moses was directed by a traveler to the Temple of Osiris and Isis. He walked until he came upon the temple outside town. He entered between 2 of its 6 columns. In the main room was a smoking pit, a retainer of sacrificial refuse; a statue of Osiris and Isis, holding the child Horus; and friezes depicting Sea Fights, the mysteries: Thoth, Nephthys, Horus, Anubis. Osiris the Eater of the Dead armed with two knives, Osiris Khenti, Amenti, Lord of Abydos and others. There were the animal-shapes: crocodiles serpents birds and rams. The colors of the room were green blue and yellow. Grains were scattered about the floor. The room was littered with tom toms pipes and drums. The air of funk was being dispersed by burning incense. It had been quite an afternoon. Several pigmy kings of about 4' 10'' had danced all afternoon intermittently, leaping into the air. Moses went into the kitchen and munched on some cereal that had been left in some ritual bowls. He drank some wine; he went past the dining room and into the bedroom of mysteries which was covered with pictures of male and female genitalia. Fatigued from traveling, Moses lay down on the bed and went immediately to sleep. At about 2 A.M. he awoke to someone running her hands through his hair and kissing him. It was Isis in the Petro aspect of herself. She was dressed in a scarlet see-through gauzy gown and covered with the odor of a strange perfume. He had never smelt anything so intoxicating to the brain. Her hair was giant black-bird feathers, her eyes blazing.
He would have to be careful. There was stories of mangled bodies carried through the air in the cruel beaks of giant birds. Men "bleeding like hogs," wandering about the temple senseless at dawn. There were tales of her victims condemned to traveling the world. Headless, pitiful men who brought the plague to cities.
I will give you what you want if you give me what I want.
She was so fine that if she dived down the abyss Moses would have plunged in after her. Moses was sweating as she removed her gown and began to make love with him. Moving her thighs about his legs, running her hands across his penis.
Well, Moses thought, as he responded to her caresses, I only hope the bird handles me gently.
Suddenly she leaped to her feet, her prominent firm black breasts swinging, her hands on her hips.
What have you brought for me?
Moses remove from his satchel everything Set instructed him to bring: brightly colored scarfs and liquors, jewelry and delicate chickens for her to eat. She handled the scarfs and tasted the liquor. Moses, when he saw her delighted expression, thought that he had passed the test but she hurled tht things to the ground with 1 gesture.
That isn't enough, she said, returning to the bed and lying next to him. You must talk to me. Baby, please talk to me.
Set knew his sister all right and Moses began to talk to her the way the Osirians talked to her in their rites. He told her how much he loved her and that he would die for her. Cut his throat swim in a river of thrashing crocodiles fight lions for her pussy. He said that he would cuss the day he was born if he couldn't have it and that he would walk all over Egypt crying like a baby. He said that he would gouge out his eyes and dust off the feet of all the dock workers in Egypt, jump off a cliff and lock himself in a cave for the rest of his life. And every time Moses would say another lie Isis would moan and sigh and whimper and purr like a kitten as Moses' hand moved down and touched her Seal. He fished her temple good. She showed him all her rooms. And led him into the depths of her deathless snake where he fought that part of her until it was limp on the ground. He got good into her Book tongued her every passage thumbing her leaf and rubbing his hands all over her binding.
When he was through he had gotten it all down. All down. Had it down pat. He left the goddess in slumber as he rose, collected his gear together and then set out for Egypt.
Well, Moses announced to the populace that he would give a concert with music and songs better than the Black Mud Sound, which was dying rapidly and played only by a few old fools in the hills. He said that this would be a dignified concert and that everyone would have to leave them old nasty-assed animal fetishes and "rattlers" and all those other "flesh-pipes" back home and that there would be no savage dancing. Don't be bringing none of that silly shit to my gig, Moses said. I'm the 1. For once music wouldn't just be used as a background to dancing but he would be a soloist and no 1 in the audience would be allowed to play a whistle or beat a drum or rattle a tambourine. The Osirians were furious. They knew this to be an Atonist trick and decided to disrupt the concert.
Well, the night of the concert the people were herded into the concert ground. (Non-attendance was equated with treason.) Moses began to play Jethro's songs but they weren't coming across like the way they had at the old man's fireplace. They sounded flat, weak, deprived of the lowdown rhythms that Jethro had brought to them. An applause sign was placed up and Moses received applause. A man who didn't go along was taken outside and beaten with flails and crooks. From a box seat, Thermuthis and her expatriate friends applauded loudest of all; 1 Greek said he would return to Greece and announce that Moses sounded even better than Osiris must have sounded himself. Moses then played the songs of Jethro with the words but his voice sounded feigned, his mimic of Jethro's dialect phony, and at this point some grain was thrown up on the stage and people were imitating snakes by HIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSIIIIIINNNNNGGGGGGGG. That corner of the park was beaten until blood streamed down the aisles.
Well, during the intermission Moses went back stage and his Atonist supporters, ass kissers who traveled with him everywhere he went since his return to Egypt, were drinking beer and told Moses how good he was and began to pat him on the back. Moses knew something was wrong. He was told by 1 of the ushers that fights were breaking out in the stadium and that they would have to call for the Army if the violence got out of control.
Don't worry, Moses said, I will do the songs and dances I learned from The Work, the sacred Book, and that way the people will rejoice and love me and young girls will follow me everywhere.
Well, Moses went on stage and began gyrating his hips and singing the words of the Book of Thoth, and a strange things happened. The ears of the people began to bleed. Some of them charged the stage and tried to get at Moses but the Atonist thugs beat them back. 1 Osirian priest could not longer take it. He and several others knew what Moses had learned and knew how it was using him.
Moses couldn't understand. Why hadn't the rites and the words and the dances congealed? Why hadn't the contagion broken out? Why weren't people talking in strange tongues and having happy convulsions?
Moses examined his guitar. Something was wrong. But then the Osirians rose from the rows they occupied and began blowing their whistles and the beautiful sounds filled the air. They didn't know The Work that Moses knew, but in his hands it wasn't doing him any good anyway. The people began to relax. Removed instruments of their own they had smuggled into the park and began playing them along with the Osirians who were marching toward the bandstand playing the instruments. The people began to dance. Moses couldn't stand it.
Arrest those men, he said as the men came closer to where he stood and began to mouth the steps. 1 Osirian-a Black Osirian, a crocodile wrestler known by his friends as "The Hunter"- lunged for Moses but the Atonist thugs surrounded him, stabbing him and making him bleed and then stomping him while he was down until he lay on the floor dead. Seeing this, the whole audience charged the bandstand and Moses was whisked away by some Atonists. People began stoning the royal chariots as they raced for refuge in the Palace. Looting and the killing of Atonists went on all night.
The people surrounded the Palace. Some of them leaped over the barricades set up by the Pharaoh's militia. They hurled missiles at the residence; inside, Moses' mother Thermuthis sobbed softly. She cried the way they did in Greece, civilized, dignified, not piercing walking from the viscera associated with the mourning of Isis who walked all over Egypt sharing her pathos with her people after husband's murder. (Thermuthis cried the way 1 of my relatives from Alabama described as "crying proper."-I.R.) The Greek friends were trying to reach the boats as quickly as they could- 2 of these loafers, brothers, thought of supporting themselves by selling an idea of frieze dealing with the murder of "The Hunter" at the hands of the Atonist thugs.
Moses thought that he could calm the multitude by going out to the balcony and "reasoning" with the people (his mother's sophist friends had gotten to his head too), warning them that he would not truck any rowdiness and that horrible punishments were in store for those who persisted in this unruliness.
Ladies and gentlemen of Egypt. I will unleash the Holocaust upon you this time if you persist in this action. We must have sanity and logic during these times of change and upheaval.
A rock busted the cat's lip.
In anger Moses flung his rod to the ground where it immediately transformed into a snake.
The people laughed. They called him mountebank and sorcerer, fakir in a pejorative sense of the Petro Asson, and other names associated with cheap charlatans who would raise the dead for 15 dollars and change.
The crowd began pushing into the Palace. Moses then ran back into the apartment where his mother was sobbing softly, touching her soft smooth flabby face with a handkerchief.
He berated her: For heaven's sake will you cut that out. I'm trying to concentrate.
Then the idea hit him. Moses ran into his apartment and removed a leaf from the Book Isis had given him. He returned to the balcony where below the crowds had taken trees and were now using them to pound on the Palace gate. Moses uttered The Work aloud. 1st there was silence. Then the people turned toward the Nile and they saw a huge mushroom cloud arise.
A few minutes later, screaming of the most terrible kind came from that direction. The crowd dispersed, trampling 1 another as they rushed for the shelter of their homes. This was a turning point in the Book's history.
The practice of the Left Hand has now arisen to the level of that of the Right Hand. As the distinguished musicologist Fats Waller was to comment later: "Formerly the right hand was given all the work and the left hand shifted for itself, thumping out a plain octave or common chord foundation; now it's more evenly divided and the left hand has to know its stuff."
Moses' explosion made even Set's magicians look small. The next day fish and other river creatures dead and dying washed up on the shores of the Nile.
The VooDoo tradition instructs that Moses learned the secrets of VooDoo from Jethro and taught them to his followers. H. P. Blavatsky concurs: "The fraternity of Free Masons was founded in Egypt and Moses communicated the secret teaching to Israelites, Jesus to the Apostles and thence found its way to the Knights Templar." But this doesn't explain why he received the Petro Asson instead of the Rada. My theory is that it was due to the fact that he had approached Isis at Koptos during the wrong time of the Moon and stirred her malevolent aspects thus learning of the Book. Others say that shortly afterward Moses and his Atonist followers went into exile.
When Jethro heard of the incidents occurring in the North, the nuclear attack and the outrage mob, he told Zipporah. She took it well. She was glad that Jethro hadn't, in a fit of rage, sent the white leprosy to Thermuthis, Moses' mother. Jethro was a good man and once you begin the Petro work it's hard to quit.
Many years later when Moses returned home 1 day from "communicating with his God" he found his children dancing before the despised Bull God Apis, the animal which carries the living spirit of Osiris. Moses heard the "heathen sounds" (timbrel'd anthems dark, boogie, jazz, down-home music, funk, gutbucket) he hadn't heard since his old days in Egypt. Moses grabbed the awful Book from his sons and daughters who were enjoying themselves, dancing their tails off. Moses wanted to get rid of the Book, having sworn off it, but was afraid to burn it. He feared The Work's power. So instead he hid it in a tabernacle where it was lost and become known as 1 of the "lost Books of Moses."..........
Centuries went by until 1118 [A.D.] when the Knights Templar built their headquarters on the site of Solomon's Temple. The organization was an imitation of Hasan-ibn-al-Sabbah's Assassins which had similar offices: Grand Masters, Grand Priors, Priors, Knights, Esquires, Lay Brothers, and the the Templars even adopted the Muslim colors so as to distinguish themselves from their rivals the Teutonics and the Hospitalers. They were a bunch of filthy ruffians, thugs and excommunicated "holy sinners" who wore their clothes until they rotted off their backs; maybe not so bad when you consider that this was a time when the King of France only changed his clothes 3 times a year. They were bully boys who justified their existence by harassing "sacriligers adulterers and others in the name of the Cross." (As usual they left themselves to be the judges of who was guilty of these vaguely defined crimes.) Their stock rose and when they saved the 2nd Crusade from annihilation they were in a position to write their own ticket. . . . One night while stacking books in the basement of the library [they] came upon a secret passageway which led down some concrete steps into an ancient room. It was here [they] came upon the Book of Thoth, the sacred Work Isis had given to Moses. The Work of the Black Birdman, assistant to Osiris......
