The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

Endnotes

1. The tachyon is a hypothetical subatomic particle that moves faster than light.

2. Nikolai Kozyrev; see Glossary.

3. Peter Fitting, a leftist literary critic. His most important article on Dick, “Ubik: The Deconstruction of Bourgeois SF,” appeared in Science Fiction Studies 2, no. 1 (March 1975).

4. Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) was a Hungarian author on science and the paranormal. The quotation is from his Harper’s article “Order from Disorder.”

5. Dn 10:21, 12:1.

6. Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times (1968).

7. A nineteenth-century Irish peasant contacted by Virginia Tighe under hypnotic past-life regression in 1952; hypnotist Morey Bernstein’s account was a best-seller.

8. (German) Yes, yes, there is a savior.

9. The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas, a 1942 novel about the crucifixion.

10. The Exegesis is filled with hundreds of diagrams and doodles by Dick. The placement of the images selected for this edition corresponds to their location (folder, page number) in the original manuscript.

11. William Durant, Caesar and Christ (1944).

12. Appolonius of Tyana was a neo-Pythagorean philosopher and orator who lived in Asia Minor around the time of Christ.

13. Philip Purser, “Even Sheep Can Upset Scientific Detachment,” London Daily Telegraph, July 19, 1974.

14. P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) was a Russian esoteric philosopher known for his studies of George Gurdjieff and the fourth dimension.

15. Jn 3:3–8, a passage that recurs frequently throughout the Exegesis.

16. “For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens” (New Revised Standard Version).

17. “For it is attested of him, ‘You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek’ ” (New Revised Standard Version).

18. Acts 3:21.

19. Ellison is quoting the song “Lost in the Stars” from the musical of the same name.

20. French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, who commissioned Dick to adapt Ubik into a screenplay in 1974.

21. Jn 16:33.

22. 1 Cor 15:51.

23. 1 Cor 15:52.

24. Johannes Scotus Eriugena (815–877) was a theologian who revived interest in Neoplatonic thought and the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius.

25. Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) was an American historian, literary critic, and philosopher of technology.

26. Mt 13:31–33; Lk 13:18–20.

27. There is no Epistle of Thomas; it is likely that Dick means the apocryphal Acts of Thomas.

28. A paraphrase of Jn 12:24.

29. A paraphrase and interpretation based on Rev 22:13–16.

30. The opening line of a prayer of uncertain origin, but traditionally attributed to Teresa of Avila (1515–1582).

31. Malcolm Edwards’s review of Flow My Tears appeared in Science Fiction Monthly 1, no. 12 (1974).

32. From William Wordsworth’s “Lucy.”

33. Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was a controversial German psychologist, a student of Freud, and the originator of the notion of orgone energy.

34. See Jn 1:14.

35. The New Yorker’s brief interview with Dick appeared in the February 3, 1975, issue.

36. Angus Taylor was the author of the 1973 pamphlet “Philip K. Dick and the Umbrella of Light,” an early critical analysis of Dick’s work and its religious concerns.

37. From the Masnavi by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273), the great Persian Sufi and poet.

38. Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) was an Austrian mathematician most famous for his two incompleteness theorems.

39. Song from the 1974 Jefferson Starship album Dragon Fly.

40. Mu is Japanese for “not” or “nothing” and is featured in the opening case of the Zen koan collection The Gateless Barrier; wu is its Chinese equivalent.

41. John Allegro (1923–1988) was a controversial British Dead Sea Scrolls scholar and author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970), which argues on linguistic evidence that Christianity began as a psychedelic mushroom (Amanita muscaria) cult.

42. Possibly Joan Baez.

43. Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was an American psychologist famous for his concept of “peak experience” and the notion that humans are driven by a “hierarchy of needs.”

44. A Sufi magazine.

45. Jn 10:34–36 (New English Bible).

46. A variation of the fish sign that Dick glimpsed during one of his visionary episodes. Whale’s Mouth is also the name of the colonist planet in Dick’s 1964 story (and 1966 novel) “The Unteleported Man,” republished in an expanded form in 1984 as Lies, Inc.

47. In a later folder, Dick identifies this substance as STP, aka DOM (2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine), a long-lasting, LSD-like psychoactive.

48. The protagonist of Ubik (1969); see Glossary.

49. In his Principles of Psychology (1890), American psychologist William James characterizes the world of sense impressions as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”

50. Arthur Deikman was a psychologist who wrote about “deautomized” perception in Charles Tart’s landmark collection Altered States of Consciousness (1969).

51. In “The Song of the Happy Shepherd.”

52. Dick explains one of these early childhood references in a February 27, 1975, letter to Claudia Bush not included here: “I knew about the Fish sign, too, the Savior: I called him ‘Tunny,’ from a del Monte billboard for some canned food. We had to travel under the Oakland Estuary in the Alameda Tube, and I saw the tube like a can; at the end we emerged in the sunlight and I saw the billboard with ‘Tunny’ on it. I loved ol’ Tunny, the great fish. . . .”

53. 1 Thes 5:2.

54. Avicenna (980–1037) was an Arabic philosopher and physician who sought to reconcile Islamic doctrine with rational philosophy; he held that God exists above time.

55. 1 Cor 15:51–52.

56. The following is prefaced by a handwritten dedication and epigraph: “A Light struck meadow for Tony Hiss & the Real World. Hark! Each tree its silence breaks—Nicholas Brady, 1692.”

57. (Latin) I am seized with fear and trembling until the trial is at hand and the wrath to come: when the heavens and earth shall be shaken. (From the Libera Me of the Requiem Mass of the Roman Catholic Church.)

58. In his 1967 story “Faith of Our Fathers,” Dick attributes this quatrain to the thirteenth-century Arabian poet Baha’ al-din Zuhair; he most likely came across the poem, unattributed, in E. P. Mathers’s translation of the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night.

59. (Latin) Death and nature will marvel. (From the Dies Irae of the Requiem Mass.)

60. See note 46, page 100.

61. A set of logic problems thought to have been devised by Zeno of Elea (490–430 B.C.) to support Parmenides’ belief that change and motion are illusions.

62. Characters in Wagner’s Parsifal.

63. See Glossary.

64. Pulkovo was the Russian observatory where Nikolai Kozyrev carried out some of his research.

65. William James (1842–1910) was the American psychologist and philosopher who wrote the landmark book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

66. (German) Christ lay in the bonds of death. (Bach’s Cantata BWV 4, Christ lag in Todes Banden.)

67. Two hemispheres of metal designed by German scientist Otto von Guericke in 1650 to demonstrate the air pump; used by Indologist Heinrich Zimmer in The King and the Corpse (1956) to compare the relationship of inner and outer worlds.

68. This term originates with the International Community of Christ (ICC), which teaches that the sun’s light carries coded information. This and other terms in this entry are taken from The Decoded New Testament (1974) by Gene Savoy, head bishop of the ICC.

69. “Trust Your Body Rhythms,” Psychology Today (April 1975).

70. Two of the eight trigrams, corresponding to Earth and Lake, respectively, that form the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching.

71. The Catholic Agitator is the newspaper published by the Los Angeles Worker Community, a politically progressive, service-oriented group founded in 1970.

72. The Aeneid, Book IV.

73. “Leda and the Swan.”

74. 1 Kgs 17:17–18:40.

75. Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was an author and religious scholar who popularized a Jungian interpretation of world mythology in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and other books.

76. Polish mathematician Herman Minkowski (1864–1909) argued that the universe is an absolute, four-dimensional structure in which past, present, and future coexist.

77. Rollo May (1909–1994) was an American existential psychologist whose edited anthology Existence included material by Ludwig Binswanger, the source for Dick’s notion of the “tomb world.”

78. A small apocalyptic Protestant sect focused on Elijah, founded in the late eighteenth century in Rochester, New York.

79. International Community of Christ (see note 68, page 148).

80. A posthumously published H. P. Lovecraft novella whose hero is possessed by a deceased ancestor.

81. The Gospel of Thomas, saying 77.

82. Most likely a reference to Oberon’s line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act IV, scene 1: “Welcome, good Robin./See’st thou this sweet sight?”

83. Saying 22: “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside as the outside, and the outside as the inside, and the upper side as the lower; and when you make the male and the female into a single one, that the male be not male and the female female; when you make eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then shall you enter [the kingdom].”

84. Ps 118:22; Mt 21:42; Mk 12:10; Lk 20:17; Acts 4:11; 1 Pet 2:7.

85. Most likely a reference to the figure-ground relationship in Gestalt perception theory; its ambivalence is demonstrated in the famous young woman–old hag image.

86. Mt 18:3; Mk 10:14.

87. Gospel of Thomas, saying 77.

88. 1 Kgs 19:12.

89. From Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard.”

90. A telepathic Ganymedean slime mold in Dick’s novel Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964); he argues that caritas is the highest human value.

91. The 1975 supernatural film The Reincarnation of Peter Proud.

92. Mutual Broadcasting System, an American radio network.

93. See note 76, page 158.

94. (German) Wake up. (The phrase is drawn from Bach’s Cantata BWV 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme; Dick’s original title for the novel The Crack in Space (1966) was “Cantata 140.”)

95. Jn 16:20.

96. The Dark Night of the Soul is a devotional treatise by St. John of the Cross (1542–1591).

97. Jung discusses Eckhart extensively in Psychological Types ([1921] 1971).

98. Is 9:6.

99. Dt 31:6; Heb 13:5.

100. 1 Kgs 18:8.

101. I Ching hexagram 33 (Tun) changing into 53 (Chien).

102. I Ching hexagram Ming I, the ominous “Darkening of the Light.”

103. 1 Cor 15:51.

104. Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943), an Indologist and friend of Jung whose work emphasized the transformative power of mythological symbols; see note 67, page 147.

105. John Weir Perry (1914–1988) was a Jungian psychotherapist who argued that the reorganization of the self sometimes requires psychosis, which should therefore not be pathologized.

106. Sociologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) developed the notion of “participation mystique” to describe the “mystical” fusion with objects; the concept was also used by Jung.

107. 1 Cor 15:35–56.

108. The Creative (heaven); one of eight I Ching trigrams.

109. Jehovah’s Witnesses.

110. Dickian plural of krasis (Greek). See Glossary.

111. This snippet view of philosopher and Christian writer Sûren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Existentialism.”

112. A paraphrase of Mk 3:21.

113. “Dionysus in America” is a 1975 essay on the American counterculture by literary critic Eric Mottram, collected in Blood on the Nash Ambassador (1989).

114. Jesus curses a fig tree and causes it to wither in Mt 21:18–21 and Mk 11:12–21.

115. Simon Magus, or Simon the Magician, a figure from the apostolic period who appears in Acts 8:9–24 and is traditionally associated with Christian heresy.

116. The Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, an American Rosicrucian Order established in 1915 in San Jose, California, whose advertisements appeared in many popular magazines in the 1960s and 1970s.

1. See Glossary.

2. See note 3, page 6.

3. See note 36, page 73.

4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Brahma.”

5. “Greater Than Gods,” Astounding Science Fiction (July 1939).

6. See note 87, page 173.

7. See note 37, page 76.

8. (German) What have I seen?

9. Col 1:13.

10. These represent Wind and Fire, respectively.

11. (German) Father! Help! Oh my!

12. See note 105, page 194.

13. See annotation, page 52.

14. (Latin) Horse of god, who takes away the bad luck of the world, my friend—save me, lord. (An original prayer based on the Gloria from the Latin liturgy.)

15. (German) Brothers! The king comes!

16. Protagonist of Ubik (1966); see Ubik in Glossary.

17. In 1977, Dick gave a famously consternating speech at a science-fiction convention in Metz, France, later published under the title “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others.”

18. Heraclitus, fragment 93.

19. An allusion to the Golden Section; see Glossary.

20. See http://www.philipkdick.com/covers/scanner.jpg.

21. Dick was a signatory to a “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” petition that appeared in the February 1968 issue of Ramparts, a New Left magazine that opposed the Vietnam War.

22. Drugs consumed in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; see Glossary.

23. Numerous dates have been proposed as the “actual birthday” of Jesus; it is not clear how Dick arrived at this date.

24. (German) Help. I am so lonely. When will you come, my salvation? (Drawn from Bach’s Cantata BWV 140, Sleepers Awake.)

25. Jn 16:33.

26. Rom 8:22.

27. From Mrs. J.C. Yule, “I Am Doing No Good!” in Poems of the Heart and Home (1881).

28. Mt 13:31–32; Mk 4:30–32; Lk 13:18–19; also Gospel of Thomas, saying 20.

29. Jerusalem Bible.

30. (Latin) Voice of God.

31. (Latin) Mind.

32. In Maze of Death, Dick provides this definition: “Mekkis, the Hittite word for power; it had passed into the Sanskrit, then into Greek, Latin, and at last into modern English as machine and mechanical.”

33. Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was an inventor, engineer, and legendary eccentric best known for his development of alternating current; an important figure in outsider science.

34. George Berkeley (1685–1753) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose theory of immaterialism contends that physical objects exist only in the mind of the perceiver; famously refuted by Samuel Johnson kicking a stone.

35. Most likely a paraphrase or misremembered quote; compare Wisd of Sol 10:13–14.

36. Most likely refers to the Apocryphon of John, a Sethian Gnostic text in which a shape-shifting, post-Ascension Christ appears to the apostle John. Jesus pulls a similar trick in the Acts of Peter, the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, and other texts.

37. Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and A Maze of Death.

38. See Job 38:1–42:6.

39. Francis M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (1937).

40. See TMITHC in Glossary.

41. Katherine Kurtz (1944–) is a fantasy author most noted for her Deryni novels.

42. Also “Ayenbite of Inwyt,” translated as “Prick (or Remorse) of Conscience,” from Kentish Middle English. Dick’s spelling suggests his familiarity with the term is via Joyce’s Ulysses.

43. 1 Thes 5:2.

44. A paraphrase from Luther’s Commentary on Galatians (3:19).

45. Klingsor is an evil wizard in Wagner’s Parsifal.

46. Dick seems to be confusing Edwin Herbert Land’s (1909–1991) two-color projection system with Land’s later “retinex” theory of color constancy.

47. Jn 15:13.

48. Jn 16:33.

49. Dick’s two-source cosmogony later makes an appearance in the “Tractates Cryptica Scriptura” that append the novel VALIS, where it is explained that our universe is a hologram formed from the mixed signals of two hyper-universes, one male and one female, one alive and one dying or dead.

50. John Sladek’s short story “Solar Shoe-Salesman,” a Dick parody first published (under the name Ph*l*p K. D*ck) in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (March 1973).

51. Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) was a countercultural author, philosopher, and friend of Dick’s; his book The Cosmic Trigger features interesting parallels with 2-3-74.

52. In Reason in Science (1905), the Spanish-American pragmatist philosopher George Santayana wrote: “To be awake is nothing but to be dreaming under the control of the object; it is to be pursuing science to the comparative exclusion of mere mental vegetation and spontaneous myth.”

53. Dick is referencing Goethe’s Faust: “In the beginning was the deed.”

54. Nicholas Roeg’s 1976 The Man Who Fell to Earth, an inspiration for the film Valis in VALIS, stars David Bowie as the extraterrestrial Thomas Jerome Newton.

55. Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) was a social scientist and cyberneticist who wrote the popular 1972 book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. He spoke of immanent Mind in a naturalistic, nontheistic manner.

56. Brian Aldiss was a science-fiction author and critic who favorably surveyed Dick’s work in his 1973 study The Billion Year Spree.

57. A paraphrase of Mt 10:29.

58. Parsifal, act 3.

59. The Journal of George Fox, ch. 2.

60. The first phrase is from Jn 1:15, where John is referring to Jesus, not Jesus referring to the Paraclete; the latter meaning is better captured in the second citation, from Jn 16:7.

61. See note 30, page 64.

62. Acts 2:1–40.

63. In The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, Schopenhauer uses beehives and ant colonies as an example of the “will-without-knowledge” working in nature.

64. Friend of Dick’s during the late 1960s. In the note that begins A Maze of Death (1968), Dick writes that the novel “stems from an attempt made by William Sarill and myself to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists.”

65. Wilbur Mercer, the messiah figure of Mercerism, the empathy-based religion in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). See Androids in Glossary.

66. This is a reference to page 17 in the current folder (included herein), which Dick returned to note here after composing.

67. Paul Tillich (1886–1965), a German-American theologian and philosopher. This paraphrase probably draws from the introduction to Tillich’s Systematic Theology (1975), which discusses “the power of being which resists non-being.”

68. This refers back to the page upon which Dick noted the current discussion, creating a self-referential loop. See note 66, page 369.

69. Pen name of American S-F writer Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913–1966); several scholars have speculated that he was the fantasy-haunted patient Allen in psychologist Robert M. Linder’s best-selling The Fifty Minute Hour (1954).

70. R. Crumb (1943–), American illustrator and founder of the underground comix movement; anxiety and obsession drive much of his work.

71. (German) Eternal femininity. (Probably inspired by the last line of Goethe’s Faust, “Das Ewig-Weiblich/Zieht uns hinan” [The eternal feminine draws us upward], which is also featured in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony.)

72. Roger Caillois’s The Mask of Medusa (1964) challenges orthodox biology by suggesting continuities between animal mimicry and human behavior.

73. Microscopic species of green algae that forms spherical colonies.

74. In his poem “Brahma.”

75. (German) Worldview.

76. 1 Cor 15:51–52: “Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.”

77. (Latin) Voice of God.

78. From the entry “Macrocosm and Microcosm” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 5.

79. Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins (1961).

80. In a September 2, 1974, letter to the FBI, Dick warned the agency about SF critic Darko Suvin and “three other Marxists”: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner, an Austrian SF critic and the “official Western agent” for Polish SF author Stanislaw Lem, whom Dick accused of being a “total Party functionary.”

81. See note 54, page 336.

82. (Latin) I am made to tremble, and I am afraid. In that day, save me, Lord, who takes away the sins of the world. I believe but I am afraid. (All but the final phrase from the text of the traditional Requiem Mass.)

83. An alien creature who can invade and inhabit other life forms. Appears in Dick’s first published short story, “Beyond Lies the Wub,” Planet Stories (July 1952). Wubfur appears in a number of Dick’s works.

84. Telepathic, gambling-obsessed, silicon-based aliens from Titan, Vugs exert control over Earth via a game called “Bluff” in Dick’s novel Game-Players of Titan (1963).

85. Heraclitus, fragment 54.

86. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.”

87. The chief archon or evil demiurge of the Ophites and Sethian Gnostics. Also spelled Yaldabaoth.

88. See note 65, page 367.

89. Also known as the Hymn of the Soul, in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas.

90. Also known as the Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan, an Old Testament pseudepigraphical work from the fifth or sixth century C.E. that tells the story of Adam and Eve following their expulsion from Eden.

91. See the fictional essay “Non Serviam” in A Perfect Vacuum.

92. 1 Cor 15:51–52.

93. (Greek) Fan or fan-like shape. Dick associated rhipidos (one of the Greek words that came to him in his hypnogogic visions) with the fins of the fish, a symbol of Christ.

94. See note 58, page 128.

95. Though Dick generally refers to his more recent novels in the Exegesis, here he offers a list of short stories from the 1950s, with the exception of 1968’s “Not by Its Cover.”

96. See note 39, page 303.

97. (German) Watch out!

98. (Latin) All roads lead to death.

99. Poet Robert Bly (1926–) asserts that Jesus was an Essene in his innovative anthology Leaping Poetry (1975).

100. See note 41, page 83.

101. Diane Pike, wife of Jim Pike.

102. See note 115, page 203.

103. These comments show the unmistakable mark of Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery (1975).

1. (Latin) I fear this knowledge.

2. Communist Party.

3. Rosicrucians.

4. “Bichlorides” is a puzzling term that Dick received from the voice, and which he discusses in earlier pages excluded here.

5. “The Waveries” is an amusing apocalyptic tale of an electromagnetic alien invasion, written by Fredric Brown and appearing in Astounding Science Fiction in 1945; Dick loved the story.

6. “Bright White,” a pop folk-rock hit by Shawn Phillips, from the 1973 album of the same name.

7. The titular hero of Siegfried, the third opera in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, tastes dragon’s blood and gains the power to understand the language of birds.

8. Curious paraphrase of Heraclitus, fragment 52.

9. Though Dick apparently enjoyed all these artists, he truly adored the pop singer Linda Ronstadt (1946–), a dark-haired girl who lived large in his fantasy life and who inspired the character Linda Fox in The Divine Invasion.

10. (German) Here is Zebra again.

11. In the novel Ubik, Ella Runciter exists in half-life, a state of cryonic suspension that allows her to communicate with the living for a short period of time after death.

12. Paraphrase from Coleridge’s essay “Shakespeare’s English Historical Plays,” which appears in The Literary Remains of Samuel Coleridge, volume 2 (1836).

13. Extensive paraphrase drawn from Una Ellis-Fermor’s essay “The Equilibrium of Tragedy,” which appears in Shakespeare’s Drama (1980).

14. Ormazd (or Ahura Mazda) and Ahriman (or Angra Mainyu) are the two warring gods in Zoroastrianism, the world’s first dualist religion.

15. Real Elapsed Time.

16. Orange County Medical Center.

17. Folder 44 begins a continuously numbered entry of more than 1,200 pages. It was broken up into 200-page sections by Paul Williams and ends with folder 49, in January 1980.

18. Charles Platt interviewed Dick in May 1979 for his book Dream Makers, and Dick had made his own recording of the interview.

19. Covenant House was a homeless shelter for runaway children founded by the Franciscan friar Father Bruce Ritter. Dick donated a large sum to the shelter in 1979 after seeing a 60 Minutes segment about it; in some Exegesis entries he theorized that this action, in time-reversed causation, caused 2-3-74.

20. Adoptionism holds that Jesus was an ordinary mortal before being adopted by God at baptism; promulgated early on by the Ebionites, the view was later declared a heresy.

21. Inscription found at the end of “I,” a holy book described in the anonymous The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz (1616), one of the earliest Rosicrucian publications.

22. (German) I am the savior.

23. Paul discusses these “planetary powers,” who play a role similar to the Gnostic archons, in Gal 4:3 and 4:9.

24. This phrase illustrates the “fish-hook” theory of atonement, first proposed by the fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa. In this view, Jesus was the human bait and Christ the divine hook; with these, God caught and defeated Satan.

25. Jn 15:13.

26. (German) A mystery.

27. Marcus Antonius Felix was the Roman procurator of Judaea province from A.D. 52 to 58. The apostle Paul was tried before him; see Acts 24.

28. Jason Taverner, the protagonist of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. See Tears in Glossary.

29. A reference to Adam Kadmon, the primal cosmic anthropos of Jewish Kabbala.

30. The exhibit was “Adventure Thru Inner Space,” a corporate-sponsored attraction that ran in Tomorrowland until 1985.

31. “Via negativa” (the “negative way”) refers to apophatic theology, according to which God is absolutely ineffable. Human beings can understand and describe what God is not, but not what God is.

32. The Milesians were a pre-Socratic school of Greek philosophers who sought the unchanging and singular material principle (arche) of all things.

33. (Latin) Literally, “nature naturing”—i.e., nature in its creative or active, life-giving aspect.

34. (Latin) Literally, “nature natured”—i.e., nature in its already created or passive aspect. Both terms are associated with the philosophy of Spinoza.

35. (Latin) The capacity to reflect God.

36. (Latin) The son of God.

37. (German) Primal fear.

38. A paraphrase; the first half is from Prov 8:22 and the second from Prov 8:30.

39. (Latin) It is not, and I believe. Possibly a misquote or paraphrase of a famous Latin phrase that is itself a misquote—credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd)—from Tertullian, who in fact said, credibile est, quia ineptum est (it is to be believed because it is absurd).

40. A peculiar 1977 Robert Altman film about porous identity, starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule, based on a dream Altman had.

41. (Italian) Simple light. (The description of God in Paradiso 33:90.)

42. (German) A loving father must dwell above the starry canopy. (From Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” a version of which appears in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.)

43. “Cylum” is most likely Dick’s version of the Latin world caelum, sky.

44. The episode appears in 1 Kgs 18:16–45.

45. Mal 4:5–6.

46. 1 Kgs 19:12.

47. 1 Kgs 17:13–16.

48. (German) Awaken!

49. Beyond the Tragic Vision is Morris Peckham’s 1963 history of nineteenth-century Europe.

50. Olive Holt was the name of one of Dick’s childhood babysitters.

51. Citation extracted from “Talmud and Midrash,” Encyclopedia Britannica 3, Macropedia 17.

52. (Greek) Grace, kindness.

53. The citation is from Ex 2:22; Stranger in a Strange Land is also the name of Robert Heinlein’s influential 1961 novel.

54. “It was the devil’s envy that brought death into the world, as those who are his part ners will discover. But the souls of the virtuous are in the hands of God, no torment shall ever touch them.” The Book of Wisdom, also known as the Wisdom of Solomon, is a deuterocanonical book and not part of the Protestant canon; Dick likely knew it from the Jerusalem Bible, the Catholic translation cited here.

55. Presumably, a Quaker periodical.

56. (German) Cries of lamentation.

57. (Latin) Highest good.

58. This folder and the following folder consist of typed, individually numbered, and dated pieces.

59. Dick theorized that Thomas might be a thought control implant installed by the government; in this formulation, Thomas was referred to as Pigspurt.

60. An illustrated book of poetry for children by Blanche Jennings Thompson, published in 1925.

61. Jn 15:1, 4–5.

62. In this typewritten excerpt, Dick makes it clear that he is also keeping handwritten notes at this time, though these are not extant. They may include or constitute the 497 numbered, handwritten pages that presumably precede the page numbered 498 that initiates the following folder.

63. Lk 17:24; Mt 24:27.

64. Rom 2:29.

65. (German) Oh woe.

66. (Latin) Mystery of conjunction. (A Jungian term for the alchemical uniting of opposites.)

67. In Divine Invasions, Lawrence Sutin describes “Mello Jell-O” as a “disorientation drug” that Dick claimed had been stolen from the army and that may have motivated the 1971 break-in; possibly a reference to the notorious military deliriant BZ (3-quinuclidinyl benzilate).

68. Acts 24.

69. (Sanskrit/Pali/Buddhist) Right conduct.

70. Paraphrased citations from “Taoism,” Encyclopedia Britannica 3, Macropedia 17.

71. (German, obscure) Two cells (Zelle) live in my chest.

72. Phaedo 62:B.

73. Edward Hussey’s The Presocratics (1972): any map that includes a true representation of itself within its borders must lead to an infinite procession of maps-within-maps.

74. A koan attributed to the Ch’an master Yunmen Wenyan (862 or 864–949); it appears as case 21 in the Mumonkan.

75. (Chinese) Non-doing. (A manner of according with the Tao.)

76. For more on the self-assembly of the Cosmic Christ, see the Jerusalem Bible’s footnote at Eph 1:10.

77. Prajapati is a primal Vedic deity, lord of animals, and protector as well of the male sex organ.

78. See note 42, page 549.

79. The Best of Philip K. Dick (1977).

80. From Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides, The Bacchae.

81. Henry Vaughan, “The Night.”

82. See note 19, page 261.

83. (German, roughly) Pity’s greatest might. In addition to translating “Mitleid” as “compassion” rather than “pity,” Dick is conflating two lines from the second act of Wagner’s Parsifal,which run “Mitleids höchste Kraft/und reinsten Wissens Macht” (pity’s mighty power/and purest wisdom’s might).

84. During Dick’s breakup with his wife Nancy, he perceived Peterson as a romantic rival.

85. This rather chaotic folder appears to have been assembled by Dick himself. It contains, among a scattering of handwritten pages, a number of typed-up extracts from earlier folders. It also includes three pages of the manuscript of VALIS. Since it includes material from 1975 through at least 1980, we have opted to insert it chronologically according to the last dateable piece it contains.

86. (German) Effigy, idol.

87. The brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, the seat of a galactic communications hub in The Divine Invasion.

88. (Latin, paraphrase) I am made to tremble, and I fear. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Deliver me, Lord, on that day (from the Requiem Mass of the Roman Catholic Church).

89. 1 Cor 15:51–55.

1. (German) My own face; my own form.

2. STP, aka DOM (2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine), is an unusually long-lasting psychedelic compound first synthesized by Alexander Shulgin.

3. A Greek hymn in honor of Dionysus.

4. (German) The red flag.

5. A 1978 book by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck that argues that psychedelic substances were consumed at Eleusis.

6. See note 41, page 83.

7. See note 90, page 410.

8. This phrase originated in a talk that Ursula K. Le Guin gave at Emory University in early 1981, in which she reportedly discussed Dick’s preoccupation with “unresolvable metaphysical matters.” Michael Bishop, who was present at the talk, wrote to Dick, who responded in an open letter to the Science Fiction Review.

9. (Chinese) Permanent Tao.

10. This excerpt is drawn from a letter to Patricia Warrick.

11. An idea expressed by Islamic philosophers, most notably Al-Ash`ari and Al-Ghazali, but shared by many medieval Christian and Jewish philosophers as well. In the West, this idea is related to occasionalism, the view (most famously expressed by Nicolas Malebranche) that causality is an illusion and God is the efficient cause of all that exists.

12. (German) Friends, not these sounds . . . (The first line of Beethoven’s redaction of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in his Ninth Symphony.)

13. Real Elapsed Time.

14. (German) Who shall deliver me? (Most likely drawn from Bach Cantata BWV 4, Ich elender Mensch, wer wird mich erlösen.)

15. Over this and the following two folders, Dick outlines, writes, and reflects on The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

16. A version of the material in the following excerpt appears in the first chapter of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

17. The following fragment was incorporated into The Transmigration of Timothy Archer as one of Bishop Archer’s speculations.

18. Partly inspired by a dream recorded in [90:6A] above, the Book of the Spinners is a Dick invention that also appears in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

19. See note 51, page 330.

20. John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day.”

21. Ursula K. Le Guin.

22. “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” is a 1976 short story by John Varley. PBS adapted it into a TV movie in 1983 as part of the same project that produced the film version of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Dick tribute The Lathe of Heaven.

23. Existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger, from whom Dick drew the notion of “tomb world,” described three realms: Eigenwelt, Mitwelt, and Umwelt. See Glossary.

24. (German terms used by Martin Heidegger) Geworfenheit: thrownness, the quality of finding ourselves already thrown into existence, as if by accident. Das unheimlich: the uncanny; literally, “not at home.”

25. (German) Actual.

26. In The Ghost in the Machine (1967), Arthur Koestler defines “holon” as a self-organizing dissipative structure that is simultaneously a whole and a part of a larger whole, and ultimately of a “holarchy” of holons.

27. (Latin) I am afraid; deliver me, Oh Lord, on that day. (Adapted from the Requiem Mass.)

28. Dick is thinking here of the clinamen, the term the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius used to describe the indeterminate bustle and swerve of atoms in the void.

29. (Greek) Love of humanity.

30. The following three dated letters have been moved to this folder from folder 56 to preserve chronology.

31. Edmund Meskys was the editor—with Felice Rolfe at the time of Dick’s letter—of the long-running and award-winning S-F fanzine Niekas.

32. Dick sent copies of his so-called Tagore letter—the September 23, 1981, letter to Edmund Meskys reprinted here—to eighty-five people.

33. Karen Silkwood was a health and labor activist who died under mysterious circumstances in November 1974.

34. (Latin) Universal exemplars in the divine mind. (Analogous to Plato’s forms.)

35. This occurs in chapter 6 of The Divine Invasion, where Dick gives the character Galina the fish dream that he mentions throughout the Exegesis, beginning in 1975 (“the renewing fish that’s sliced forever”).

36. The Sepher Yetzirah, or The Book of Formation, is an early work of Jewish esoteric mysticism that describes the creation of the universe through numbers and Hebrew letters.

37. Luke and Acts are written by the same author and are frequently considered as a single work.

38. The practice of Manichaeism involved strict dietary laws. The elect avoided foods thought to be “dark” (including meat) in favor of foods containing more “light,” primarily light-colored fruits and vegetables. The process of digestion was considered to free the light particles trapped inside the food.

39. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (1963), p. 106.

40. (Latin) Law of retribution. (Frequently linked, though Roman in origin, to the legal principle of “an eye for an eye” from Ex 21:23–25.)

41. Hans Jonas wrote the seminal book The Gnostic Religion (1958), which links ancient Gnosticism to modern existentialism.

42. This is the first mention of The Owl in Daylight, the novel left unfinished at Dick’s death.

43. In Mt 27:46 and Mk 15:34, Jesus quotes the opening verse of Ps 22 from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

44. This entry, including the following dream and its subsequent analysis, is entirely typewritten.

45. In 1947 Dick roomed with and befriended a number of gay Berkeley artists and poets whom he met through his high school friend George Ackerman. These included the poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, who shared many of his esoteric, metaphysical, and literary interests. Vladimir Horowitz, one of the premier pianists of his day, was also gay.

46. The Eleatics were a school of pre-Socratic philosophers founded in the fifth century B.C. by Parmenides and including the paradox-loving Zeno.

47. (Greek) Cosmic mind.

48. The term “secrecy theme” refers to Jesus’s commands to his disciples not to reveal that he is the Messiah. Passages on the “Messianic secret” do appear in Luke (see 4:41 and 8:56), but the theme is most pronounced in the Gospel of Mark.

49. The public interest law firm that represented Karen Silkwood and journalists investigating the Iran-Contra affair. Its cofounder, William J. Davis, was a Jesuit priest.

50. Peer Gynt (1867) is a five-act play by Henrik Ibsen that combines surreal folklore, poetry, social satire, and realistic episodes.

51. Tales of Hoffmann (1881) was an opera by Jacques Offenbach, based on the short fantasy stories of German Romanticist E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822).

52. “The Pulley” by George Herbert, one of Dick’s favorite poets.

53. Maimonides (1138–1204) was the greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval period; his influential Guide to the Perplexed attempted to reconcile Aristotelian thought and Judaism.

54. (German) Community. (An apparent neologism based on Gemeinschaft.)

55. (German) Loneliness.

56. This may be the AI Voice trying out its German. Roughly, “Woman, sing for our friends.”

57. (German) Nearby.

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.