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A Vision of Murder and Hypnaughty Boy

A Vision of Murder

Pat Shannon sat on his living room settee staring at the Psychic Vibrations column in which Madame Zena had fingered Roger Nichols for the Flash Gordon hit. "She knows all about Flash and Lucy in the steam room," he told his brother in law. "So she knows something you and I and a hundred other guys know," Abe Fink conceded. He absently fingered his Star of David, wondering how best to convince Pat that he had no reason to commit an in-Canada murder in which Abe himself could conceivably be deemed an accessory. "Don't you think she has snitches, just like cops and real reporters?" Abe pursued. "You surely don't think she knows anything about you that could put you away?" "If she can have a vision of the preacher ordering the hit, what's to stop her having a vision of who actually did it?" Pat reasoned. "Vision, schmission," Abe scoffed. "The broad's in the same racket we all are, getting fat off the suckers." "And what if you're wrong?" Pat protested. "What if her powers are real, and next rime she aims her crystal ball at the Flash Gordon hit, she sees who did it?" "Crap!" Abe spat "Maybe Bugs Kennedy blabbed to his sister about the steam room bit, and she told the psychotwat. They do work together. And notice that she doesn't really know who killed Flash. She's just pointing out that the preacher had a motive. And the preacher killed himself before he could be questioned, so in the hypothetical case that he hired a hit man rather than icing Flash himself, he obviously can't finger him now. I'm telling you, the broad knows bupkis." Pat was unconvinced. "Maybe." "Look, we'll ask Bugs about it," Abe suggested. "If he tells you he told his sister Kate about Flash and the nautch broad, will that satisfy you?" "I guess so," Pat agreed. "No point jumping overboard if the boat's not really on fire."

HYPNAUGHTY BOY

"As you sleep soundly," Van intoned after the woman had gone through the motion of falling asleep, "you are going back in your mind, back to a time before you were born, back to another life in another body, back to the time of the event that led to your terrible fear of cats" Even if the concept of reincarnation had been foreign to the woman, Van's instructions were so explicit that she could not fail to understand what was expected of her. So when she obediently began to fantasize, her conviction that she was hypnotized caused her to believe that the pictures forming in her mind were recovered memories from a previous life. "Tell me where you are?" Van asked. "I'm in the Colosseum," the woman answered. "The Romans are feeding us to the lions." "The man trying to comfort you," Van prompted, "what's his name? "Androcles." "Is he your lover?" "I love him," she replied, "and he loves me. But of course we've never ... done anything. I mean, we've been prisoners of the Romans since we met, and there's no priest around to many us." "Would you like to make love with him?" The patient blushed. "Of course." "Take a good look at Androcles," Van Smuts ordered. "Doesn't he look familiar? He looks just like Van Smuts. Now that you remember the great love of your past life, you realize that he was Van Smuts in a previous incarnation. Now I'm going to awaken you, and when I do you will remember that the reason you are afraid of cats is that you were eaten by lions in a past life. And remembering that, you will have no reason to fear little bitty housecats ever again. And you will also remember that Mr Smuts is the reincarnation of your lost love, Androcles, and you will have an overwhelming urge to experience the loving Androcles was unable to give you in your previous life. Now you are back in the present, in the twentieth century, and when I count three you will be awake." Van removed a condom from his pocket before concluding, "One, two, three, awake!" He would not need to re-pocket it.

THE BELOVED DISCIPLE and THE FALL AND RISE OF THE HOUSE OF HIPPO

THE BELOVED DISCIPLE

Far more important than the ritual, at least to the invited guests, was the celebration that followed. It took place in the Qananite lodge, to which I belonged, a short distance from the temple. Quananite is an Anglicized form of an Aramaic word that meant "Zealot." I know now that the Zealots were fanatics whose triumph would have been every bit as disastrous for Israel as the triumph of fanatic ayatollahs would prove to be for Iran. But I had joined in the innocent assumption that to be zealous for the Torah must be a good thing. Two of my fellow Qananites attended Miriam's nuptials: Simon the Zealot, so called because he was the eldest son of the man who had founded the Qananite sect, and was therefore the hereditary Head Zealot; and Simon the Zealot's son, Judas the Iskariot, an iskariot, from Latin sicarius, being a dagger-wielder from the Qananites' ultra-militant wing, what you would today call a terrorist. In mid-afternoon the wine ran out. "There's no more wine," the newly proclaimed "virgin," Miriam, informed her son the Messiah. "Are the water troughs still full, and are there empty wine casks available?" Jesus asked. "Yes, of course." "Then where is the problem? Have the nuns carry the casks to the temple. You worry about trifles, woman." I dislike comparing Jesus to your television evangelists, since they tend to be liars, hypocrites, thieves and unbelievers. But they do share one of Jesus' most valuable qualities: a flair for showmanship. Of course he could have told his mother at once that there was more wine. But would that have promoted belief in his Christhood? He saw the opportunity to generate an increase in faith, and he took it. "Nathanael, the nuns are bringing some empty wine casks to the temple. Fill them from the sacramental wine stock in the cellar." "Sire, there's only pomegranate wine, undiluted," I pointed out. "It can't be drunk like party wine. Worshippers take a single swallow." "So we dilute it, Buwniy-but only a little. Let it remain stronger than the wine they've finished." And thus it was. Simon the Zealot took a sip of the new wine and told his Lordship, "Other hosts bring out the best wine first, and save the poorer quality until the guests' taste buds have been dulled. But you have reserved the best till last. Shrewd, Rabbi, very shrewd." "You are John the Immerser's disciple," Jesus answered. "Tell him what you have seen here today. A woman bore nine children, and now she is a virgin. A nun was impregnated with seven demons, and now she is my chaste companion. John wonders if he is Christ. Tell him a greater than he has come. A Spokesman John is. He'll know what Allah would have him do."

THE FALL AND RISE OF THE HOUSE OF HIPPO

One cousin in this three-generation saga of a dysfunctional family kills his stepfather before he is out of middle school. Within weeks of being ordained one of North America's last priests, he travels across country to assassinate two blackmailers trying to extort money from a cardinal. He rises through the ranks of the church by winning a reputation as the Vatican's most effective problem-solver/hit man, eventually becoming pope-after poisoning his predecessor. Another cousin, by promoting a philosophy of mediocrity touted as equality, is nominated for vice president as the presidential candidate's insurance against impeachment, and-unforeseen events do happen. Set in a North America in which religion has been reduced to cult level, mores approach Brave New World, and technology has advanced slightly past Mission Impossible: Manny Kennedy's earliest surviving memory dated from a time when he had just learned to walk upright. His mother Joyce could have told him that, in the outside world, Hitler was Chancellor of Germany; Ratti was Pope of the Roman Catholics, Napoleon V was Pope of the Avignon Catholics, Torquemada was Napoleon V's Grand Inquisitor of Spain, Portugal and Basquia (but had no authority in France, where theo-sedition, attempting to overthrow the separation of Church and State, was the only crime for which a perpetrator could still be guillotined), Lenin II was Caesar of all the Russias, and just a few months earlier had executed an old Bolshevik, Josef Stalin, for plotting to overthrow the Lenin monarchy, and William Lyon Mackenzie King was President of the United Secular States and Provinces of North America. But Manny had no awareness that there even was an outside world, for he was not yet one year old. Obviously, this story is set in an alternate reality. The reader should therefore not be surprised to find that network television is well established by 1900, events that have a real-world parallel do not necessarily happen at the same time and place or in the same sequence in the Hippo reality, and wars and elections do not always have the same outcome as those in a more familiar universe. This is a work of fiction, and should not be mistaken for anything else.

UNCLE YESHU, MESSIAH

Just as Saints believe that celibacy is admirable to the armies of the sky, so do they believe it is hateful to the demons of the underworld. Angered by Yeshu's continued refusal to resume normal marital relations with his magdalene, a demon, taking on a female form as a nightmare even though all immortals are male, mounted him while he slept, rode him like a stallion, and caused him to emit his sperm. At least that is the way Miriam and Nathanael told the story when I met them in Rome after Yeshu's death. Jewdah the Iskariot's version was that Yeshu had a wet dream. Whatever the truth, Yeshu took the incident as a warning that he was neglecting his khristly duty of fathering an heir to succeed him as king of the Jewdeans. For the remainder of his life he recreated diligently, not only with Miriam, but also with the show's other magdalenes, even though their congress with paying customers made it impossible for them to bear a royal heir. Soon after that, Miriam threw a "possessed" fit while Yeshu was tupping her. He handled it very well. He drew the alleged demon into his phallus and squirted it into the campfire. Rumor has it that Miriam experienced twenty-seven orgasms in a little over a twentieth of an hour, the last handful after Yeshu had withdrawn, but I have been unable to trace the tale to a reliable source. As for Rock's claim that he saw Yeshu's phallus vibrate exactly as his hand vibrated in more orthodox exorcisms, I suggest that Rock's state of drunkenness at the time precludes him as a compelling witness. In the week following the Roman New Year [January, 30 CE], Yeshu again played Caesarea. Such was his fame that a minimal amount of advance publicity was needed, and could be handled by Netser alone. Rock was promoted to chief of public relations, by which was meant officer in charge of finding Yeshu free meals and accommodation wherever possible. Most nights the whole company slept under the stars. But often enough Rock was able to intimidate a tax collector or an innkeeper into extending his hospitality to his god's Khristyah. Yakob and Yohanan, Zebedyah's fishermen sons, were assigned to crowd control. Their job was to make sure the collection boxes were returned to treasurer Jewdah unpilfered. Since a tentative itinerary for the next three months had been worked out, and the show had reached the point where it almost ran itself, Simon assigned himself and the other Zealots, currently totaling eight, low profile positions, although he did leave Jewdah in charge of the cashbox. Simon himself, recognizing that uncle Yeshu's Zealot connections should be played down if the revolution was to ignite, accepted the role that, for want of a better term, might be called cheerleader. Rock was surprisingly effective at his new job. He walked into the house of Levi bar Matathyah, Caesarea's third-richest Pharisee, and informed Levi, "The rabbi asks: What time should I come to your house with my students to eat supper?" "Rabbi?" Levi asked softly. "What rabbi?" "Rabbi Yahuwshua the Nazirite, the Descendant of Adam." "Yahuwshua the Nazirite wishes to sup with me?" Levi was amazed. From the tales he had heard of Yeshu's miracles, he had assumed that Yeshu would dine with no one less than tetrarch Herod Antipas, high priest Yosef Kaiafa, or Sanhedrin president Gamaliel, son of Shimeown, son of Hillel. He was delighted to be so honored. "Tell the rabbi to come at the tenth hour." "And how many students will your table accommodate?" Now Levi was less excited. Feeding the rabbi was one thing. Feeding camp followers was something else. "Just for one meal'?" he asked Rock. "For one meal," Rock agreed. Levi agreed to provide food and wine for twenty. It was not explicitly agreed that, in return, he would be serviced by his choice of magdalene. But it was, as the Roman lawyer Cicero might have said, expressly implied. Levi seated Yeshu at the head of the table. He had his slavegirls wash Yeshu's hands and feet. He could not but notice the line of demarcation where the washing ended. Yeshu's upper arms and legs had last seen water at his immersion. Nor could he fail to observe that, like other spokesmen before him, Yeshu smelled like the only tree stump in a field of ten thousand hounds. But he said nothing. Spokesmen are a strange breed. Yeshu could have taken a vow never to bathe, as a sign of his holiness. Rock grabbed a whole quail. Levi saw that he had not washed his hands. That was too much. "Rabbi," Levi asked Yeshu, "why do your students ignore the traditions of the seniors, and eat with unwashed hands?" "Where in the Torah are we told to wash the hands before eating?" Yeshu countered. "The Saints, the lawteachers, even the Pharisees obey man-made laws as if they had equal value with Eloh's laws. My Ebionites obey Eloh's laws, and that is enough." "But Rabbi," Levi protested, "surely the hands are defiled when we piss. If we then touch food, the food also is defiled." "Nothing that enters a man from outside can defile him," Yeshu answered. "Only things that come out of him can defile him. It is not the man who eats muck who is defiled, but the capitalist whose lack of compassion caused him to do it." I suppose Yeshu was not altogether wrong. An unclean man is less contemptible than an unkind one. But I fail to see that the analogy was valid. Would one defend a thief by comparing him to a murderer? Yeshu was justly criticized for repudiating basic cleanliness, and he sidestepped the issue by raising another that was extraneous. Levi was too polite to pursue such a petty issue. Instead he asked, "Rabbi, what should I do to win eternal life?" "You know the commandments," Yeshu stalled. "Worship none of the gods except Eloh. Worship your ancestors. Do not rob or kill a fellow Jewdean. Do not give false testimony against a fellow Jewdean. Do not emit your sperm into the wife of a fellow Jewdean. Do not take a false oath in Eloh's name. Do not lust after a fellow Jewdean's property, whether wife or house or livestock." "Rabbi, I have obeyed all of that since childhood," Levi declared. "Is there no more I can do?" The fish was clearly biting. Yeshu decided to yank the hook. "Sell everything you own, give the proceeds to the Paupers, and follow wherever I lead." "By the Paupers, Ebionim, you mean your own treasury, do you not?" Levi queried. "We are the Paupers," Yeshu agreed. "My apprentices own nothing but the rags on their backs." "Individually you are poor," Levi conceded. "But in your commune's coffers is enough gold and silver to dress all of you in purple. You give bagels to beggars, but so do I. And I do not hide my treasure, dress poorly, and call myself an Ebionite. Rabbi, I commend you for your holiness, and I'm sure I could buy my way into Adonai's theocracy by doing what you say. But frankly, I think I can also make it my way. Now if you'll excuse me, I have business to attend. My slaves will look after your needs." "How impossible it is," Yeshu pouted after Levi had gone, "for a capitalist to enter Eloh's theocracy. It's a fact, it's a fact, I'm telling you. It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a capitalist [Greek: ploutokrates] to enter the theocracy." Yeshu's rhetoric was not hyperbole. He meant, quite literally, that no property owner could enter the Ebionite theocracy-but a former property owner could do so, by giving the communal treasury the proceeds of selling everything he owned. Even so, I find myself suspecting that he was at least partially motivated by sour grapes at failing to land such a prize catch.

THE MYCENAEAN CHRONICLE

I stared dumbly at Odysseus, my sword lowered and my arms now around my frightened child, offering her what little comfort I was able. I was dimly aware of the shouts echoing through the crowd: "Kill the witch;" "Death to all who oppose the gods;" "Sacrifice Agamemnon;" "We will have Palamedes for general;" "The king must die;" "Kill the witch." For twenty-one days the winds had not ceased. Now, unless they were stilled within one day, Iphigeneia would die. Nor could I refuse to agree. To disallow the gods' arbitration in the face of such hysteria would be to invite a hundred spears into my back. Odysseus had won me a single day. I did not thank him. Had it been his own child whose life was threatened, he would have found a way to save her. I could only pray that Zeus would honor my worship and rescue my little girl. Zeus rejected my prayer. Or perhaps, the Fates having decreed that Iphigeneia's death day had come, he was powerless to intervene. The winds continued to blow. Even within the strait of Euboia, the waters were angry and unnavigable. Akhilleus declared that, the time for the gods' repudiation of Kalkhas having run out, the sacrifice he had ordered must now take place. Odysseus, who could yet have used his unparalleled skill as a demagogue to turn the multitude to any opinion he wished, firmly backed the murderer. I should hate him for that, but I do not. I acknowledge a distinction between swine such as Kalkhas and Tieresias who use religion as a means to power, and honest heretics such as Odysseus who are the scoundrels' dupes. I recognize that it is ultimately the Odysseuses of the world that are the more dangerous, for without them the Kalkhases could not function. But I reserve my unqualified hatred for those whose crimes are committed in full and perfect knowledge of what they do. Iphigeneia clung to my chest. "Daddy, please don't cry," she whispered. "You'll get another little girl." Oh, Zeus! Why? Why? Why? Are not the Fates subject to the king of all gods? You who cast down the Titans, you who stretched Hera across the sky and bound Prometheus for challenging your supreme power, must you now allow that which is not your will? Can you not muzzle the cruel Fates that would cut down a child on the mere brink of womanhood? Is she never to know the strength of a husband's arms? the joy of his bed? the warmth of his phallus? Holy Zeus, that was it! My little girl was a virgin, and virgins are under Artemis's special protection! "Will you mock the goddess," I addressed the assembly, "by sacrificing a virgin to the protectress of virgins? Will you bring her divine anger upon yourselves with such sacrilege? Is that what your false priest would have you do?" I shall not soon forget the expression on Kalkhas's face at that moment. Shall I call it obscene? The man's very existence was obscene. Kronos must have looked thus when he first contemplated the severed balls of his father Ouranos and saw that total victory was now his. "The witch must not die a virgin," the slimy voice of Kalkhas purred. "Her hymen shall be dedicated to Aphrodite, then her life to Artemis." As if to himself, but loud enough for all to hear, Thersites wondered, "Is that how all grease-ball barbarians get laid, by killing Hellenes?" Kalkhas's smirk became, if that were possible, more obscene than before. "She shall be wedded to the noble lord Akhilleus," he pronounced. I confronted Akhilleus. "Will you be party to such sacrilege? Will you know her love only to see her die? Are you such a man?" Akhilleus's answer could have come from Kalkhas. "I shall do my duty to the goddess," he replied smoothly. "I have a hardy phallus that will not disdain a king's daughter. I daresay I shall find her sow not uncomfortable." Only Akhilleus could make a fuck sound dirty. That, I think, says more about the man than could be put into one thousand pages. The wind was bound to drop soon. Twenty-two days of spring gales was unequalled in living memory. I stalled as much as I could. I sent Klytaimnestra a message that Iphigeneia was to wed Akhilleus, and asked her to weave a bridal veil. My argument, that we could well spare the three days it would take for the veil to arrive, fell on deaf ears. Odysseus produced a wedding veil from an Aulis woman, and demanded that the ceremony proceed. I could delay no longer. Iphigeneia lay on the sacrificial altar, clad only in the veil that Akhilleus would remove after consummating the marriage. Her face was calm and resolute. Akhilleus knelt over her, briefly displayed his upright phallus to the assembled princes, and plunged it into her tiny opening. I saw the scream in her eyes, but she made no sound. Twenty seconds later Akhilleus again displayed his phallus, now stained white and red. Iphigeneia was no longer a virgin, and could now be murdered without incurring the animosity of the sacred, holy, divine, stinking heretic goddess. Iphigeneia closed her eyes at the approach of the knife. A single slash ended her life. At least the fiend spared her the agony of a slow death. But then, he had no quarrel with the victim. It was her father whom the murder was intended to intimidate. One hour later the wind ceased, and the heretics of Ithaka and Thessaleie sailed off to do battle with the heretics of Troie. Strange indeed are the ways of Zeus.

THE JUDAEO-CHRISTIAN BIBLE FULLY TRANSLATED
Volume One, the Hexateuch
Volume Seven, the Christian books
Edited and translated by William Harwood
www.Imprintbooks.com

There has long been a need for a translation of the Judaeo-Christian bible that did not deliberately mistranslate certain words and sentences for the purpose of concealing that the biblical authors' beliefs were quite different from those of modern Jews, Christians and Muslims. To scholars with the competence and rationality to recognize the bible as a fantasy novel comparable with Lord of the Rings, the necessity of quoting from mistranslations that endorsed a "LORD God" not found in the original language has been frustrating and annoying, since it in effect forced them to perpetuate the mistranslations' fraudulent propaganda. The most blatant fraud in all church-sponsored translations has been the universal rendering of the Hebrew word allahiym or ha-allahiym as the proper name, "God." Allahiym is neither a proper name nor singular nor unisexual. Al, sometimes transcribed as El, (as allahiym is usually transcribed as elohim), means "a god." The suffix -ah is a feminine singular inflection, so that allah means "goddess." The suffix -iym is a masculine plural inflection, while the prefix ha- is the definite article, making ha-allahiym a dual-sex generic plural, "the gods and goddesses" or, in the common gender, "the gods." The practice of bible-makers mistranslating a word that means "the gods" as "God" stems from the doublethink that, because the translators considered themselves monotheists, the bible authors must have done likewise. They did not. Every Hexateuch author wrote at least one passage (to which I draw attention with a note) indicating his unequivocal belief in the reality of the other gods. Rather, it meant that the other gods had no more jurisdiction over Jews or Israelites than the monarch of England has over Americans or Russians. The Jews did not become pseudo-monotheists, giving all gods but Yahweh such lesser designations as "angel" and "devil," until long after the completion of the Hexateuch. In order to make this translation as useful as possible to scholars, I freely moved self-contained scenes to a position where they could be more conveniently compared with another author's writing on the same subject. For example, where the eighth-century Elohist and the fifth-century Priestly author both told the story of Moses producing water out of a rock, and the Redactor placed E's story in Exodus and P's version in Numbers, I brought the two together so that the reader can see at a glance that the two versions have sufficient similarities and differences to reveal that they were composed by two authors with extremely different viewpoints. And where otherwise identical stories involved the adult Isaac in the tenth-century Yahwist's narrative, but were associated with Abraham in E (whose Isaac was sacrificed as a child), I likewise placed the two versions in adjacent columns. I did the same where two authors directly contradicted each other, to demonstrate the impossibility of both statements being "revealed truth." Where a Redactor had riffled two earlier authors' versions of the same story into a single narrative, for example the selling of Joseph into slavery, I separated the versions into adjacent columns so that the reader could see that each was complete and self-contained. I also relocated law codes so that, for example, the J, E and P versions of the misnamed "Ten Commandments" could be compared with one another. And where a biblical author made a statement that contradicted present-day religion, such as expressing belief in the existence of gods other than Yahweh, I inserted a note to draw attention to the inconsistency. Where I could do so without falsifying the literal meaning of the Hebrew, I deliberately chose connotative translations that would force the reader to evaluate the behavior of a biblical hero or god more critically than he may have done in the past. Whereas a reader might easily blind himself to the implications of Yahweh's order concerning gentiles, that the Jews were to "rout them with a great rout until they are annihilated" (Deuteronomy 7:23, New World Translation), I am hoping he will find it much harder to shut out the true meaning of an order to "exterminate them in a massive genocide until they are eliminated." Only such a translation can drive home the full implications of continuing to regard the Judaeo-Christian bible as nonfiction. This volume contains all of the text of the books traditionally known as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and Joshua. But rather than retain those divisions, I have broken the Hexateuch down into six more logical segments, with three segments devoted to historical narrative and three to rituals and law codes. And rather than risk having editorial clarifications overlooked, I have taken the unusual step of placing such notes into the regular columns, adjacent to the passages they explain. No doubt this will annoy some. But the very existence of a fully translated bible will annoy the professional religionists who recognize that a correctly translated bible could end the equation of religion with reality unassisted.

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