The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

Glossary

2-3-74, sometimes 2-74 or 3-74: A series of extraordinary events, beginning in February 1974 and continuing through March and beyond, that forms the main subject of the Exegesis.

acosmism: A doctrine that denies the apparent reality of the universe as something apart from God or the Absolute.

Acts: The Book of Acts in the New Testament, written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke, tells the history of the early apostolic age following the death and resurrection of Christ. It is sometimes called “The Gospel of the Holy Spirit,” owing to its depiction of the role played by the Holy Spirit in the growth of the early church. Dick asserts a significant and unintended correspondence between Acts and his novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974).

agape (Greek): One of several Greek words for love, as distinguished from eros (sexual love) and philia (friendship); often used to describe God or Christ’s love for mankind. In Dick’s use, which draws on the apostle Paul’s description of transcendent love in 1 Corinthians 13, the term is identified with empathy.

Ahura Mazd, Ahura Mazda, or Ormazd: The highest god of Zoroastrianism, the creator and sustainer of truth. In The Cosmic Puppets (1957) a small town is discovered to be the battleground between Ormazd and his eternal opponent, Ahriman.

AI Voice: Artificial Intelligence Voice, sometimes called “Voice” or “Spirit.” A term coined by Dick for the hypnagogic voice that he heard often in 1974–75 and intermittently until his death. Many of the voice’s sayings are recorded in the Exegesis. Despite the term, Dick does not consistently hold that the voice is technological in nature. He often characterizes it as “female” and sometimes attributes it to the Gnostic goddess Sophia and his own sister Jane.

ajna chakra: The so-called Third Eye, one of seven chakras or “wheels” described in Hindu tantric and yoga texts.

als ob (German): As if.

anamnesis (Greek): Recollection, abrogation of amnesia. For Plato, anamnesis—the recollection of the world of ideas in which the soul dwelled before incarnating in human form—explains the human capacity for understanding abstract, universal truths, such as the geometric theo rems of Euclid. In Dick’s more Gnostic understanding, it also implies the recollection of the soul’s origins beyond the fallen or occluded world.

ananke (Greek): The blindness that follows hubris; also, a chthonic goddess who personifies necessity and compulsion.

Androids: One of Dick’s most morally complex novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was optioned and produced as the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner (1982). Left on the cutting room floor was the novel’s fictional religion, “Mercerism,” whose adherents technologically and empathetically merge with Wilber Mercer as he climbs a hill, is stoned to death, descends into a tomb world, and arises, in an endless cycle.

anima (Latin): Translation of Greek term psyche, meaning “life” or “soul.” Psychologist Carl Jung used the terms anima and animus to describe the true inner self of human beings; for men, the anima is generally a female figure.

Anokhi (Hebrew): A form of the personal pronoun meaning “I” or “I myself.” In Dick’s use, it refers primarily to Exodus 20:2: “Anokhi YHWH Elohekha” (“I [am] YHWH your God”). More generally for Dick, anokhi stands for self-awareness and consciousness. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) features discussion of the “Anokhi mushroom,” a hallucinogenic drug that enables communion with the divine.

Archer, Angel: Protagonist of Dick’s final novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).

Asklepios: Greek god of healing and medicine; his temples were also sites of oracular dream incubation.

astral determinism: The belief that the destiny of individual human beings is governed by the stars or planets, which in some Gnostic cosmologies are personified as the lower planetary rulers or archons.

Atman (Sanskrit): The eternal Self or divine core of the human being, distinct from the ahamkara (literally, the “I-maker”) or ego with which we normally, and falsely, identify. In Vedanta, Atman is identified with Brahman.

Attic Greek: A dialect of ancient Greek spoken in Attica.

Augenblick (German): Literally, “eye view”; moment.

Augustine (C.E. 354–430): Bishop of Hippo, Saint and Doctor of the Church. In the Exegesis, Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of Revelation is contrasted with literalistic millenarianism.

Bacchae, The: Roman name for the maenads, female figures of Greek mythology who follow the god Dionysus and pursue religious ecstasy through intoxication, dance, and ritual sacrifice. Also a play by Eu ripedes, in which Dick saw parallels to Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974).

Bardo Thödol: Commonly known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, this Tibetan Buddhist text, traditionally considered to be written by Padmasambhava, describes the experiences the mind undergoes as it transits between death and rebirth, an intermediary period known as bardo. Dick was familiar with the text through its initial translation by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, whose reissue in 1960 featured an important introduction by Carl Jung.

Bergson, Henri (1859–1941): A French philosopher who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, Bergson was known for his theories of duration and élan vital, the lively impetus that distinguishes living systems from machines. With his concept of duration, Bergson hoped to describe the qualitative nature of the subjective experience of time rather than the objective measurements of the clock. Dick’s experience of “non-linear” incursions of time from the future and his meditations on the distinction between living organisms and machines found resonance in Bergson’s work.

bicameral: Term taken from Julian Jaynes’s popular book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). Jaynes argues that our minds were originally split along hemispheric lines, which allowed voices from one side of the brain to be heard by the other as if they were external commands or the voices of gods.

Black Iron Prison, also BIP: Dick’s term for the prison world of political tyranny and determinism he glimpsed beneath the veneer of Orange County in March 1974. He later wrote that upon perceiving it, he realized that he had been living in it and writing about it his whole life. In his dualistic cosmologies, the BIP is opposed to the Palm Tree Garden, or PTG.

Boehme or Böhme, Jacob (c. 1575–1624): German shoemaker and mystic whose 1600 vision was induced by the play of light on a pewter dish. His esoteric theory of higher and lower triads anticipated Hegel’s dialectic, and his notion of Urgrund was important to Dick.

Boucher, Anthony (1922–1968): Science fiction editor, author, and friend of Dick’s. As editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Boucher purchased the first story Dick sold, the tale “Roog” (1953).

Brahman: A concept from the Vedic tradition that generally refers to the uncreated substance of the universe that pervades all things; also the precursor to the creator god Brahmā. The Advaita Vedanta of Sankara insists on the ultimate identity of Brahman and Atman.

Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600): Italian astronomer, mathematician, and hermetic philosopher whose theories about the infinity of the universe anticipated modern cosmology. Bruno is chiefly remembered for having been burned at the stake in Rome.

BTA: “Bishop Timothy Archer,” working title for The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).

Buber, Martin (1878–1965): Austrian-born Jewish existentialist philosopher. See I-It and I-Thou relationship.

Buckman, Felix: Character in Dick’s novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). A police official in a militaristic state, he experiences an unexpected and compassionate epiphany in the novel’s conclusion.

Burroughs, William S. (1914–1997): Experimental Beat writer. Burroughs’s notions of reality as a control system and language as an extraterrestrial virus clearly resonated with Dick, who, in 1978, experimented with the cut-up method developed by Swiss artist Brion Gysin and deployed by Burroughs.

Calvin, John (1509–1564): French Protestant theologian. In the Exegesis, Calvin appears primarily as a proponent of the idea that prelapsarian human beings had extraordinary capabilities.

“Chains of Air,” or “Chains . . . Web”: The short story “Chains of Air, Web of Aether” (1980), later revised and incorporated into The Divine Invasion (1981).

Claudia: Claudia Krenz Bush, a graduate student at Idaho State University who corresponded with Dick while working on her master’s thesis. Dick later refers to his early Exegesis as “mostly letters to Claudia.”

Corpus Christi (Latin): Body of Christ. Dick also uses the term in the more theological sense of the mystical body of the Church.

crypte morphosis (Greek): Latent shape or form. One of the Greek phrases that came to Dick in his dreams in 1974. In the Exegesis he interprets the phrase in light of Heraclitus’s fragment 54, “Latent form is the master of obvious form,” and fragment 123, “The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself.”

cybernetic: Term coined by Norbert Wiener for the science of communication and control in human and machine systems; earlier coined by the French scientist André-Marie Ampère to denote “political science.” Wiener drew the term from the ancient Greek term kybernetes, for “steersman” or the “art of steering.”

Dasein (German): Martin Heidegger’s term for being, especially human being.

Deus Absconditus (Latin): Hidden God. The term comes from Isaiah 45:15 in the Vulgate.

Deus sive substantia sive natura (Latin): A dictum of Spinoza on the unity of God and nature; in an interview, Dick translated this concept as “God, i.e., reality, i.e., nature.”

dibba cakkhu (Pali): The divine eye, one of the six features of higher or enlightened knowing described in the Pali Buddhist canon.

Dionysus, also Dionysos: The Greek god of wine, vegetation, and ritual ecstasy. His death and resurrection were important in a number of mystery religions.

Ditheon: A neologism Dick develops in later Exegesis entries to describe the life form that results from the union of two minds within a single body. Similar to homoplasmate.

dokos (Greek): Deception, lack of true perception. Dick employs this term as a cognate for maya.

Eckhart, Meister (1260–1327): A Dominican scholar and preacher whose radical mystical teachings, which stressed the immediate presence of God in the individual soul, were condemned by Pope John XXII shortly before he died.

eidos, eidola, sometimes misspelled edola (Greek): Ultimate form or idea. In Platonic philosophy, the forms constitute the world of ideas, which in turn are the source of all being.

Eigenwelt (German): The inner realm. One of the three types of world described by the existentialist psychologist Ludwig Binswanger; see Mitwelt and Umwelt.

einai (Greek): From the Aristotelian phrase to ti en einai (roughly, “the what-it-was-to-be”): the eternal essence of a thing.

Eleusinian Mysteries: The most important of the ancient mystery religions, these secret initiation ceremonies were held annually in ancient Greece for over a millennium. “The Hymn to Demeter” is the only existing textual source for the rites, which centered on the story of Persephone’s abduction into the Underworld. In The Road to Eleusis (1978), Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck advance the theory that psychedelic substances were used to produce the transformative effects of the rites.

Empedocles (c. 490–430 B.C.E.): Pre-Socratic philosopher and naturalist. Empedocles theorized that change in the universe is the result of the interaction between the forces of love and strife. The last philosopher to write his work in verse, Empedocles has been described by some scholars as a shaman as much as a philosopher.

enantiodromia (Greek): Sudden transformation into an opposite form or tendency. The term was used by Heraclitus, but Dick was probably exposed to it through his reading of C.G. Jung, who employs the term to describe the psyche’s tendency to overcome deep-seated resistance, es pecially to the unconscious, by shifting (seemingly suddenly) to the opposite pole of an attitude, belief, or emotion. Dick also sometimes uses the term flip-flop.

Encyclopedia Britannica, EB, or Brit 3: In late 1974, Dick purchased a set of the newly released fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, also known as the Britannica 3. The encyclopedia is divided into three sections: the one-volume Propedia (a general outline of all human knowledge), the twelve-volume Micropedia (containing brief reference entries), and the seventeen-volume Macropedia (containing in-depth articles on important subjects).

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or E. of Phil.: Edited by Paul Edwards and still admired today, this is a major reference work for the Exegesis. According to VALIS, Dick was using the eight-volume work published in 1967 by Macmillan rather than the four-volume 1972 reprint.

engram: The biophysical imprint of events on memory. An important word in Dianetics, where it refers to the “recordings” stored in the reactive mind, the term is generally used in the Exegesis to denote the latent patterns that predispose the mind to respond to the trigger events that produce anamnesis. In VALIS (1981), Dick uses engram to describe a ritual in which Thomas prepares to “reconstitute himself after his physical death.”

entelechy: A term in Aristotelian thought meaning fully developed or actualized. In his use of the term, Dick also reflects the work of German philosopher Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch, who used entelechy to indicate a life force distinct from the physical body.

epistemology: The philosophy of knowledge, dealing with what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and how we know what we know. Sometimes contrasted with ontology, which philosophically studies the nature of being and the existence of things.

Erasmus (1466–1536): Dutch Catholic priest, theologian, Renaissance humanist, and satirist. Perhaps best known for his essay The Praise of Folly (1509), which mocks the superstitious errors and absurdities derived from Catholic doctrine and practice.

Essenes: A Jewish sect, active from roughly the second century B.C.E. to the end of the first century C.E., that held messianic and apocalyptic beliefs and engaged in ascetic practices. It is generally believed that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the library of a community of Essenes; John the Baptist was likely to have been influenced by them. See Qumran Scrolls.

ETI: Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

Firebright: One of Dick’s terms for ultimate, living wisdom; see plasmate.

Fremd (German, English): Strange (adjective) or stranger (noun); both rarely used.

“Frozen Journey”: Original name for the story “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon” (1980).

GABA fluid: Gamma aminobutyric acid, an endogenous inhibitory neurotransmitter in the human nervous system. Some studies show that increased levels may reduce the mental decline associated with aging.

Galápagos turtle: In a 1981 interview with Gregg Rickman, Dick describes a nature documentary he viewed in the 1960s in which a female Galápagos turtle crawled the wrong direction after laying her eggs in the sand and began to die from exposure while still moving her limbs. That night Dick heard a voice tell him that the turtle believed that she had made it back to the ocean, adding, “And she shall see the sea.” It was one of Dick’s few experiences with the “AI Voice” previous to 2-3-74. A supposed Reuters news item about the death of an old Galápagos turtle provides the epigraph for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).

Gestalt: A German term describing an entity’s holistic essence or form. Gestalt psychology attempts to characterize how our minds and brains select whole forms from a background of possible partial perceptions; this relationship is characterized as “figure” and “ground,” which Dick generally recasts as “set” and “ground.”

Gnosis, Gnostic (Greek): Knowledge. The term Gnostic, which is controversial among scholars, describes a wide range of religious sects of the ancient world. Broadly speaking, these sects believed in a strong dualism of matter and spirit, often holding that the material world was a prison or trap for the soul associated with an inferior creator, or demiurge. The attainment of secret knowledge (gnosis) was proscribed as the means of salvation. The Nag Hammadi library was an important group of Gnostic texts discovered in 1945.

golden fish: On February 20, 1974, a young woman working for a local pharmacy delivered a bottle of prescription Darvon tablets to Dick’s apartment in Fullerton, California. She was wearing a necklace with a golden fish pendant, an ancient Christian symbol that had been resurrected by the countercultural “Jesus movement” in the late 1960s. According to Dick, the sight of the emblem triggered the events of 2-3-74; he connected the design with other figures, including DNA’s double helix and the human eye.

golden rectangle, also golden section: Figures associated with the golden ratio or divine mean, a mathematical pattern of relationship that has been recognized since Pythagoras. The golden ratio (an irrational number approximate to 1:618034) occurs when the ratio between the sum of two unequal quantities and the larger quantity is equivalent to the ratio between the larger quantity and the smaller. Geometric plotting of the recursive Fibonacci sequence also produces the golden rectangle, as does the growth of a nautilus shell.

Hartshorne, Charles (1897–2000): American philosopher and theologian who developed the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead into process theology, which emphasizes the relationship between an ever-changing God and a creation in constant development.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1770–1831): German philosopher of dialectical idealism. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit offers readers an epic quest toward self-understanding as the thinker explores the limits and dynamics of rational thought learning to reflect on and comprehend itself. Hegel’s dialectic was influential on Karl Marx, who famously “turned Hegel on his head” with the invention of dialectical materialism.

Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976): German philosopher whose work attempted to overcome what he perceived as the “forgetfulness of being” in the history of philosophy. Heidegger argued that habits of thought inherited from the Greeks induce human beings to focus on “beings” rather than “being”—particular entities rather than that which enables entities to exist at all. Heidegger’s conception of Dasein, or “being-there,” distinguished between the activity of being and a subject or a self—the center of philosophical analysis since René Descartes. Heidegger is the most referenced twentieth-century philosopher in the Exegesis.

heimarmene (Greek): Fate, or the personification of fate; for Dick, also the deluding, entrapping power of spurious everyday reality.

Heraclitus (c. 535–475 B.C.E.): Ancient Greek philosopher from Asia Minor. The most dynamic of the pre-Socratics, Heraclitus comes down to us through a collection of fragments that radiate a vision of reality in which all is change, opposites coincide, and fire is the essential process at the heart of the world flux.

hermetic: An important strand of Western esoteric thought and experience, hermeticism derives from the Corpus hermeticum, a set of texts from late antiquity whose mystical and magical philosophy is perhaps best summarized in the famous dictum from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus: “As above, so below.”

homeostasis: The stable, balanced condition maintained by a dynamical system regulating its own development through time; usually, a living organism regularly adjusting itself to changing environmental conditions.

homoplasmate: A Dickian neologism describing a human being who has cross-bonded with an influx of living information bestowed or transmitted by a higher source of wisdom. See plasmate.

Ho On, or Oh Ho: The name of a clay pot made for Dick by a friend. In an early hypnagogic vision, Dick heard the pot, which identified itself as “Oh Ho,” speak to him in a brash, irritable tone about spiritual matters. Later, Dick theorized that the name “Oh Ho” might be related to the Greek phrase Ho On, meaning “He Who.” The phrase “ho on” appears in Exodus 3:14, when God identifies himself as “I AM WHO I AM” (in the Greek of the Septuagint, Ego eimi ho on).

hylozoism: The belief or philosophical proposition that material things can be alive, or that life and matter are inseparable.

hypnagogic, or hypnogogic; and hypnopompic: Hallucinations, both visual and auditory, that occur on the boundary of sleep and often feature a significant and sometimes alarming sense of reality. Hypnagogic hallucinations occur while one is falling asleep, hypnopompic hallucinations while one is waking.

hypostasis (Greek): Literally, “beneath-standing” or “underpinning.” A term for the basic reality of a thing in Greek philosophy. Plotinus used it to describe the three principles that underlie phenomenal reality: the One, the noös, and the World Soul, or Logos. The term was also batted around within the ecumenical councils as they tried to clarify the nature of the Trinity.

I Ching: An ancient Chinese text used as a tool for divination. The Book of Changes is based on a binary system of broken (yin) and unbroken (yang) lines; six such lines make up a symbolic hexagram linked to various commentaries. Dick, who owned the original two-volume Bollingen edition of the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, consulted the I Ching frequently and claimed to have used it to resolve turning points in the plot of The Man in the High Castle (1962), which also features an oracular book written using the I Ching.

idios kosmos and koinos kosmos (Greek): Literally, “private world” and “communal world,” respectively. The two phrases come from fragment 89 of Heraclitus: “The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” In Dick’s scheme, it is often used to contrast an individual’s reality system from collective social reality.

I-It and I-Thou relationship: Terms, taken from Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923), describing two forms of relationship. In the first, the individual treats the world and other individuals as objects with use value; in the second, the individual enters true relationship with the world and other individuals as other subjects rather than objects. Buber conceives the latter form of relationship as the model of God’s interaction with the world.

Isidore, Jack: Protagonist of Dick’s novel Confessions of a Crap Artist (written around 1960; published 1975). Isidore engages in relentless amateur scientific inquiry, not unlike Dick’s practice in the Exegesis.

James-James: Evil or deranged demiurgic figure that Dick encountered in a dream in 1974 or 1975; described in chapter 18 of Radio Free Albemuth (1985).

Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202). Theologian and mystic from Sicily. His concept of the three ages of history, which posits an imminent “Age of the Holy Spirit” when God will communicate directly with humanity without the mediation of the clergy, helped fuel a number of millenarian, utopian, and radical ideas and movements, including Marxism.

Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804): German philosopher whose transcendental idealism sought to integrate knowledge based on experience (empiricism) with knowledge based on reason (for example, mathematics). Kant called for and in many ways achieved a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy by placing the modes of human perception at the center of inquiry; for Kant the structures of the human mind order the sense data of experience, limiting our ability to apprehend the Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself.

kerygma (Greek): Preaching or pronouncement, especially of the message of Christ contained in the New Testament.

King Felix: A two-word “cypher” that Dick discovered in the text of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). On page 218 of the Doubleday hardcover, in the section describing Felix Buckman’s visionary dream, the words king and Felix appear vertically juxtaposed between two lines of text. Dick became convinced that this happenstance phrase had a secret meaning and would be read and recognized by people or forces unknown. “Felix” is Latin for “fortunate” or “happy.”

Kozyrev, Nikolai, NK, or Dr. NK (1908–1983): Russian astrophysicist who carried out research at the Pulkovo Observatory. His 1967 article “Possibility of Experimental Study of the Properties of Time” theorizes that time is a force with active causal properties.

Krasis (Greek): Blending or mixture; used by the pre-Socratic philosophers Empedocles and Anaxagoras in their accounts of the creation of the material world.

Lem, Stanislaw (1921–2006): Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire. Contributed “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans” to Science Fiction Studies in 1975, an article that praised Dick and especially Ubik (1968). The two corresponded, and Lem worked on a Polish translation of Ubik.

Liebniz, Gottfried (1646–1716): A German mathematician and philosopher who contributed significantly to the development of mechanical calculators, infinitesimal calculus, and binary mathematics (whose anticipation in the I Ching he recognized). His notion of the monad was important to Dick.

Logos (Greek): Word, account, reason. Heraclitus used the word in the sense of order; in Christianity, an important tradition derives from the Gospel of John, in whose first lines Christ is identified as the Logos, the eternal “Word” or “Reason” of the cosmos through whom God created the universe.

ma’at: Ancient Egyptian concept of truth, balance, and law; also personified as a goddess.

macrometasomakosmos, also MMSK: Dick’s term for the ultimate, genuine structure of reality; a cognate for the Platonic world of ideas. In terms of its Greek roots, this neologism breaks down into Great-Ultimate-Body-of-the-Cosmos.

Maitreya (Sanskrit): The future Buddha foretold in Buddhist eschatology. In the late nineteenth century, the Theosophists began using the term to describe a coming World Teacher, and the term appears in a variety of New Age movements.

Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715): French philosopher and natural scientist who synthesized Cartesian philosophy with Augustinian thought. Malebranche held that we see external objects by means of ideas in God’s mind; he also embraced the doctrine of occasionalism, which holds that God is the only real cause of all action.

Mani (c. 216–276 C.E.): The prophet and founder of Manichaeism, a syncretistic religion that combined Zoroastrian and Gnostic ideas and became one of the most dominant religions in the world between the third and seventh centuries. Sharply dualistic, Manichaeism held that the material world is a realm of darkness from which spiritual light must be extracted through ritual and practice.

Marxism: Political philosophy and social movement based on the writings of German political economist Karl Marx (1818–1883). Anticipating the intensification of capitalism’s internal contradictions, and calling for a revolutionary awareness among the working classes, Marx prophesied the end of the capitalist world order and the emergence of a classless society.

maya (Sanskrit): Illusion, especially the illusion of the phenomenal world; sometimes also considered an aspect of the Divine Mother.

Maze: A dark Gnostic fable also inspired by the Bardo Thödol, A Maze of Death (1970) tells the story of fourteen colonists who emigrate to the planet Delmak-0, only to be murdered, one by one. It emerges that the colonists are immersed in a computer simulation they are running to distract themselves from despair as their failed spaceship orbits a dead star. Delmak-0’s digitally programmed religion represents Dick’s most developed theological systematizing prior to 2-3-74, and it closes with arguably the most explicit theophany in any Dick novel.

Mitleid (German): Compassion, pity.

Mitwelt (German): The immediate environment. One of the three terms for world used by the existentialist psychologist Ludwig Binswanger. See Umwelt and Eigenwelt.

MMSK: See macrometasomakosmos.

moksa (Sanskrit): Ultimate release, liberation.

monad: The philosopher Leibniz described the things in the world as independent but interconnected entities—which he called “monads”—operating according to a pre-established divine harmony.

mystery religions, or mystery cults: Religious cults in the ancient Greco-Roman world whose members engaged in esoteric rituals, often involving the ritual and ecstatic reenactment of a mythical narrative. The most influential and long-lived of these rites were the Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece.

Nag Hammadi: Egyptian town near the site of the 1945 discovery of thirteen ancient leather-bound codices hidden in a sealed jar. Dating from the second century, these Coptic manuscripts probably belonged to the library of a Gnostic Christian community. One of the most notable Nag Hammadi texts is the only complete copy of the Gospel of Thomas, an important source for Dick’s religious reflections.

negentropic: Bringing order to a disordered or entropic system.

noös, or nous (Greek): Mind, reason, divine or human. Associated words are noetic (adjective; “of the mind”) and noein (verb; “to think or realize”).

noösphere: Geophysicist Vladimir Vernadsky argued that, along with the biosphere, lithosphere, and atmosphere, the earth has acquired a mental or psychic “sphere”: a noösphere created through thought and focused attention. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin popularized the concept of noösphere in his treatment of “Point Omega.”

NT and OT: New Testament and Old Testament.

ontogon: A neologism meaning an individual being or object, as contrasted to an ideal or Platonic form. See phylogon. Dick coins the terms from phylogeny and ontogony, used in evolutionary theory and depth psychology to describe the relationship between individual and species life.

ontology: The philosophy of being; ontologists ask questions about the nature and function of reality itself and about what it means for things to exist.

Ornstein, Robert (1942–): American psychologist, author of The Psychology of Consciousness (1972). His views on the brain’s hemispheres and their differing roles in consciousness were brought to mainstream attention when he was covered by Time magazine in 1974.

Orphics: An ancient Greek and Hellenic mystery cult devoted to the poet Orpheus, as well as Dionysus in the form of Zagreus; Orphic myths and rituals were particularly concerned with death and resurrection.

orthogonal time: Moving perpendicularly to the conventional and spurious sense of linear time, orthogonal time is, for Dick, time in its genuine mode. In a 1975 essay, “Man, Android, and Machine,” Dick describes orthogonal time as containing within a simultaneous plane “everything which was, just as grooves on an LP contain that part of the music which has already been played; they don’t disappear after the stylus tracks them.”

Owl: Dick’s unfinished final novel, The Owl in Daylight.

palintropos harmonie, or palintonos harmonie: A term used in Heraclitus’s fragment 51, which compares the mutual adjustment and harmony of variant things and processes to the relationship of bow and lyre. Variant sources supply palintropos (backward-turning) or palintonos (backward-stretching) as the first word. Dick uses the term in both its variants in the Exegesis.

Palm Tree Garden, or PTG: The spiritually redeemed and ontologically genuine world, revealed to Dick in January-February 1975, when southern California seemed to transform into the Levant. In chapter 18 of Deus Irae (1976, co-written with Roger Zelazny), the vision of Dr. Abernathy—written by Dick alone—represents the Palm Tree Garden.

Palmer Eldritch: Industrial magnate who unleashes psychedelic havoc in Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) after he returns from the Proxima system as a drug-dealing demiurge. Eldritch’s “three stigmata” are based on the vision of a “vast visage of perfect evil” that Dick saw in the skies over Marin County in 1963, which also induced in him a spell of regular Episcopalian worship at a local church.

panentheism: A metaphysical and religious doctrine holding that God (theos) is both transcendent and immanent, both beyond all and yet “in all” (pan-en-). This teaching is sometimes portrayed through the image of the cosmos as God’s body, God’s relationship to the universe being roughly analogous to the mind’s relationship to the body—again, both “in” and “beyond” at the same time.

pantheism: A metaphysical and religious doctrine that holds that God is identified with everything in the world and that everything in the world is God. This is in striking contrast to traditional theism, which holds that God transcends ordinary reality.

Pantocrator (Greek): “Almighty,” a name of God that accents his omnipotence.

Paracelsus (1493–1541): A Swiss Renaissance hermeticist, alchemist, and physician with the remarkable full name of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. Through empirical experiments and innovative occult theories, Paracelsus broke the reigning orthodox concepts of disease, explored botanical remedies, and pioneered the use of minerals and chemicals in medicine.

Paraclete, sometimes Parakletos (Greek): Literally, advocate or helper; in Christianity, the Holy Spirit.

Parmenides (c. early fifth century B.C.E.): Pre-Socratic philosopher and founder of the Eleatic school. In his poem On Nature, he describes reality as a mixture of two forms: the truth of the One and the mere appearance of the world of multiplicity, about which we can hold only opinion. As one of the first philosophers to consider the abstract principle of Being, he is considered a founder of metaphysics.

parousia (Greek): Presence, advent; in Christianity, the term generally refers to the Second Coming of Christ.

Parsifal: A three-act opera by Richard Wagner (1813–1883), based on the epic Germanic poem Parzival, about the titular knight’s quest for the Holy Grail. In Wagner’s story, which is also influenced by legends of the Buddha, Parsifal embodies a “holy fool” who helps initiate the powerful act of redemption that closes the opera.

Philo of Alexandria (20 B.C.E.–50 C.E.): A Hellenistic Jew who used a variety of Greek philosophical concepts to interpret and defend the Jewish scriptures. His writings were particularly important to the early Church fathers, who were probably influenced by his association of Logos with the governing plan of creation and the “word of God” that bears the Lord’s message in the Hebrew Bible.

phylogon: A neologism referring to a general principle or archetype, as contrasted to an individual object or being; roughly analogous to Plato’s forms. See ontogon.

Pike, James (1913–1969): American Episcopalian bishop, writer, and friend of Dick’s. Pike, who questioned traditional doctrines such as the Trinity and the virginity of Mary, was accused of heresy and resigned his Cali fornia post in 1966. His son Jim committed suicide the same year, and Pike held’séances, one of which was attended by Dick and Nancy Hackett, in an attempt to contact his son’s spirit. Pike died in the Israeli desert while researching the Essenes and the historical Jesus. Dick fictionalized the last years of his life in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).

Pinky: Dick’s cat, who died of cancer in 1974.

pistis (Greek): An ardent faith or fidelity; in Christianity, faith in Christ.

plasmate: A Dickian neologism roughly equivalent to “living knowledge” and another cognate for VALIS. Dick often felt that he had bonded with the plasmate in 2-3-74 and that, as a result, he had a second self dwelling within his psyche, making him a homoplasmate. Dick often regarded the plasmate as the living transmission of the Gnostic goddess Sophia.

pleroma (Greek): Literally, “fullness”; in Gnostic texts the term refers to the distant ideal realm inhabited by the divine powers, or aeons, who transcend creation.

Plotinus (c. 205–270 C.E.): Ancient Roman philosopher in the tradition of Plato whose notion of the One gave Dick a way to integrate some of the phenomena he perceived through the lens of VALIS. Plotinus’s One is both the undivided source of all entities and the goal of contemplative thought; the mystic philosopher’s search for the One is famously described as “the flight of the alone to the alone.”

pronoia: In theology, and in the writings of Philo of Alexandria in particular, pronoia refers to God’s governance of creation. It is roughly analogous to the concept of divine providence. More recently, the term has assumed a psychological valence as an inverse to paranoia, so that it denotes the belief that the universe is a conspiracy on one’s behalf.

psyche (Greek): Originally “breath,” “life,” subsequently “soul” or “self.” Aristotle’s treatise on the psyche in On the Soul deals with the various types of forces that characterize living things. The goddess Psyche was represented as a butterfly in ancient Greece, perhaps to symbolize the capacity of life and the self for transformation.

Pythagoras (c. 570–490 B.C.E.): Ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician, perhaps the first to call himself a philosopher or “lover of wisdom.” Generally acknowledged as the source of the Pythagorean theorem that lies at the basis of trigonometry, Pythagoras elevated mathematics to a metaphysical system founded in part on the ratios between musical pitches. Pythagoras supposedly deduced these relations when he wondered at the different tones produced by a group of blacksmiths working at an anvil; analysis revealed that the different tones were directly proportionate to the differing weights of the hammers.

Qumran Scrolls: Also known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. A library of Jewish documents dating from the third century B.C.E. to C.E. 68, discovered in a series of caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea. The inhabitants of the Qumran community may have been Essenes.

ruah (Hebrew): Breath, spirit.

Runciter, Glen: Character in Dick’s Ubik (1968). The cigar-smoking Runciter heads an anti-pre-cog company with the help of his dead wife Ella, who dwells in cryonic suspension. Significantly for the Exegesis, Runciter communicates with characters stuck in an alternate world through advertisements, matchbook covers, and bathroom graffiti.

Salvador Salvandus, or Salvator Salvandus: The “saved savior,” a trope of Gnostic soteriology. The hero in the “Hymn of the Soul” in the Acts of Thomas is an example of such a savior who himself is saved.

Sankara (c. 788–820 C.E.): One of the most important expositors of Advaita Vedanta or idealist “nondualism” in medieval India; see Atman.

satori (Japanese): Enlightenment; in Zen Buddhism, a deep intuitive insight into the nature of reality.

Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860): Pessimistic German philosopher whose account of the blind striving of life, or “will,” casts doubts on the power of reason to organize human society. Schopenhauer called for humans to look beyond appearances or representations, which have a similar relation to reality as a dream. A pioneer in the Western philosophical encounter with Eastern thought, Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by the Upanishads, whose translation had “been the solace of my life, and will be the solace of my death.”

shekhina (Hebrew): To settle, dwell, or inhabit. In the Bible, the term refers to the presence of God in the Tabernacle and later the Temple (see, for example, Exodus 40:35); in Kabbala, this divine presence is considered female and is associated with the material world.

sibyl: Female oracles or prophetesses of the ancient Greeks. Particularly important to Dick was the famous sibyl at Cumaea, a community near Rome. Though pagan, some sibyls were considered to have prophesied the coming of Christ.

Siddhartha: The birth name for the prince who became the Buddha.

soma (Greek): Body.

Sophia, sometimes Hagia Sophia (Greek): Wisdom, considered alternately as an abstract philosophical concept or a sacred being. The aeon Sophia plays a vital role in many Gnostic systems, where her actions bring about both the fall into creation and the salvation of the light; she also makes an appearance in the biblical book of Proverbs.

Spinoza, Baruch (1632–1677): A lens maker, Jewish heretic, and philo sophical monist of vast influence on the history of philosophy. Spinoza’s vision of an “immanent” God identified with nature suggested that the divine permeates material reality. This theory of creative immanence was grist for Dick’s meditation upon 2-3-74. Spinoza remains an influential thinker for contemporary philosophy, especially in the works of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

Stigmata: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) tells the story of wealthy industrialist Palmer Eldritch, who returns from the Proxima system with the drug Chew-Z; when ingested, it transports the user into another reality where Eldritch, whose “three stigmata” include a slot-eyed metal mask, is God. The novel can be read as an inverted fantasy of the Mass, in which the sacrament is taken to ensure salvation and ever-lasting life, not for the parishioner, but for the deity.

surd: From the Latin root “speechless”; in mathematics, a surd refers to an unresolvable or “radical” square root (such as the Ô2) that cannot be expressed with rational numbers. Within the religious discourse of theodicy, a surd refers to a natural evil, like tsunamis or cancer, rather than a moral evil. Dick defines it here as “something irrational that can’t be explained after everything that is rational has been.”

Synoptic Gospels, or Synoptics: Name for the three canonical gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—that contain roughly the same narrative of Jesus’s life and share a good deal of material and language. Apocryphal gospels and the canonical Gospel of John have little to no such overlap.

syzygy: The name given in some Gnostic systems, particularly those associated with Valentinus, for the male-female pairs of entities, or aeons, who emanate from the One or the supreme being. The term is also used by Carl Jung to describe the pairing of the male animus and female anima in the unconscious.

Tagomi, Nobusuke: The hero of The Man in the High Castle (1962). Tagomi is a midlevel Japanese bureaucrat who, at the end of the novel, “sees through” to something resembling our reality while examining a piece of jewelry in a San Francisco park. See TMITHC.

Tagore: On the night of September 17, 1981, Dick experienced a hypnagogic vision of Tagore, a world savior living in Ceylon. On September 23, Dick sent a letter to the science fiction fanzine Niekas (and to some eighty-five other friends and distant contacts) describing Tagore as dark-skinned, Hindu or Buddhist, and working in the countryside with a veterinary group. Rabindrath Tagore was a major Indian writer in the twentieth century; the name also distantly echoes Tagomi.

Tat Tvam Asi (Sanskrit): Traditionally translated “That thou art.” An im portant phrase in Vedantic thought, it is a means of emphasizing the identity of Atman and Brahman.

Tears: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) features Jason Taverner, one of the most famous entertainers in the world, who wakes up in a dystopian world where no one has ever heard of him. The book offers meditations on the various types of human love that, Dick argues, ultimately bind us to our reality.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1881–1955): Jesuit theologian, philosopher, and scientist notable for his fusion of theology and evolutionary theory. He proposed that humankind is evolving toward Point Omega, a single, unified being that is also Christ. Teilhard wrote extensively about the noösphere xs, the collective effect of human consciousness on the biosphere and the medium for the planet’s evolution toward Point Omega.

tetragrammaton: See YHWH.

theolepsy: Possession by deity.

theophany: The visual revelation of deity.

Thomas: A separate personality who, according to one of Dick’s lines of speculation, had cross-bonded with the author during the events of 2-3-74 (see homoplasmate). The topic of much speculation in the Exegesis, Thomas is most often identified as an early Christian; other possibilities include James Pike, Paracelsus, a Soviet agent, and an alternate or future version of Dick himself.

Tillich, Paul (1886–1965): German-American Protestant theologian and philosopher. Tillich’s The Courage to Be (1952) was a major and widely read work of postwar existentialist thought. In his concept of the “god beyond god,” Tillich argues that a reinvigorated encounter with the divine requires that the faithful move beyond what Dick calls “prior thought formations” and encounter a God beyond their concepts of God.

Timaeus: One of the Platonic dialogues, the Timaeus describes the cosmos as the work of a divine craftsman, the personification of Intellect or noös, who creates order out of primordial chaos. Dick borrows heavily from the cosmogony of Timaeus, in particular its description of the cosmos as a living animal with a soul and its teleological account of history as the activity of noös shaping ananke, or necessity.

Ti to on (Greek): “What is it?” This primordial question of Being is famously asked by Aristotle at the beginning of his Physics.

TMITHC: The Man in the High Castle (1962), a Hugo Award–winning novel set in an alternate United States where the Axis powers won World War II. The novel’s portrayal of the interactive wisdom of the I Ching looks forward to some of Dick’s later theorizing about VALIS, while the protagonist Tagomi’s epiphany late in the novel anticipates, for Dick, his own experience with the fish sign.

To Scare the Dead: Dick’s first proposed novel about the events of 2-3-74. Dick made notes for the novel in 1974–75. The title was intended to refer to the reawakening of seemingly dead personages (such as the early Christian Thomas) as a result of the same forces that were at work in Dick’s 2-3-74 experiences.

Torah: Strictly speaking, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Pentateuch. In Kabbala and in Dick’s Exegesis, Torah takes on a transcendent role as the plan of creation, roughly analogous to the Logos in Christian theology; some traditional Jewish mystics held that the Torah was a living being.

Tractate: “Tractates Cryptica Scriptura,” a metaphysical treatise, heavily influenced by the Exegesis, that Dick appended to the novel VALIS (1981).

Ubik: Dick’s 1969 novel concerns a team of telepathic corporate spies injured in an explosion, who find themselves in a world that is rapidly decaying and devolving. As the characters succumb, their condition is mitigated by a magical product known as Ubik: an aerosol spray that combats the forces of entropy.

Umwelt (German): The universal environment that surrounds us. One of the three types of world described by the existentialist psychologist Ludwig Binswanger; see Mitwelt and Eigenwelt.

Urgrund (German): Primitive basis or source. Used by both Eckhart and Boehme to describe ultimate reality.

Urwelt (German): Primeval world.

UTI: Ultra Terrestrial Intelligence; a term for higher beings who originate on this planet.

VALIS: Acronym coined by Dick, based on the phrase “Vast Active Living Intelligence System.”

Valisystem A: Dick made notes for a novel with this title between 1974 and 1976, sometimes in conjunction with notes on To Scare the Dead. The book was written in 1976 and posthumously published in 1985 as Radio Free Albemuth.

Virgil (70–19 B.C.E.): Roman author. The sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, as well as his fourth Eclogue, features the Cumaean Sibyl.

VR: VALIS Regained, working title for The Divine Invasion (1981).

Warrick, Patricia, or Pat: Patricia Warrick, a science fiction critic who corresponded with Dick and wrote about him extensively, both before his death, in The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980), and after, in Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick (1987).

Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947): English mathematician and philosopher. In their Principia Mathematica, Whitehead and Bertrand Russell attempted to provide a robust formal structure for mathematics, a project whose unresolvable contradictions ultimately helped spawn the computer. Later Whitehead developed process philosophy, a school of thought that characterizes reality as a continuum of overlapping events rather than a collection of objects. Charles Hartshorne developed Whitehead’s thoughts on the theological implications of this philosophy into process theology.

Xenophanes (c. 570–475 B.C.E.): Greek philosopher and poet, and a critic of the religious anthropomorphism of his contemporaries. In fragments referenced frequently in the Exegesis, Xenophanes describes a God who is unitary, changeless, and eternal and “shakes all things by the thought of his mind.”

Xerox letter, or Xerox missive: A mysterious letter received by Dick in March 1974. The envelope contained a photocopied book review from a left-wing newspaper with certain words underlined in red and blue; it had a return address, but no name. Dick insisted that his wife Tessa read it in his stead, claiming vague foreknowledge about it and believing that if he saw its contents he would die. In the Exegesis he suggests that this foreknowledge saved his life.

YHWH: In the Hebrew Bible, the true name of God; also referred to as the tetragrammaton.

Zagreus (Greek): An alternate name of the Greek god Dionysus that means “torn to pieces.” The name reflects the Orphic myth that Dionysus was torn apart by the Titans as a child, only to return to life through the agency of his father Zeus, who restored his son to life by eating the heart of his sundered corpse.