The image features Hagbard Celine giving a psychedelic speech during a climatically surreal moment towards the end of the book.
Hagbard is attempting to save attendees of a music fest in Ingolstadt, Germany from a horde of resurgent nazi zombies. Or at least that’s one interpretation of what’s going on!
The scene is a kaleidoscope of conflicting points of view, Joycean modernism pushed to the extreme, where uncertainty itself is elevated to the highest reality.
I like that this little fragment of Hagbard speaking in tongues now lives only a short train ride away from the location of the scene in the novel. Not to mention, for thematic reasons, in the capital of Bavaria!
Oh! And for contextual clarity, the original quote, my drawing, and the museum’s image selection all came well before covid. Hagbard is imploring us to remove our Oscar Wildean masks of truth :)))
Here’s the description of the museum from the initial license request e-mail:
The Deutsches Museum in Munich is a special place for communicating scientific and technical knowledge. Opened in 1903 it is not only one of the oldest museums of science and technology in the world, but also with its exhibition space of 66,000 square meter one of the biggest. Its unique collection of original exhibits makes Deutsches Museum an international leading institution for celebrating science and technology. As a major German research museum of national significance, it is supported by the state of Bavaria, the federal government and the German states and is a member of the Leibniz Association. Currently the Future Initiative is working on upholding the museums excellent status and modernizing the exhibitions, which are all going to be updated. Some topics are even going to be completely new.
The idea for this comic popped into my head fully formed, like an email attachment from the great beyond, and translated to the page almost effortlessly. I say almost because the last little detail I wanted to add, the hieroglyphic translation of the monologue on the first page, proved strangely elusive.
“I AM YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW.
I HAVE THE POWER TO BE BORN A SECOND TIME.
I AM THE SOURCE AND CREATOR OF ALL THE GODS!”
A passage I picked up from a PBS Pledge Week showing of the Joseph Campbell documentary Sukhavati – Place of Bliss, while I was laid up with a broken hip and fractured arm. (Same time as I was studying the Tale of the Tribe w/ RAW, et al.)
For the life of me I can’t find or remember where I picked this up from, (Campbell? Leary? Wilson? Narby?) but this enigmatic passage from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, has a modern answer, of sorts.
What is of the past, present, and future, with the power to be continuously reborn, and is the source of all our fantastical imaginings? DNA!
I think I got so stuck on the importance of having the hieroglyphic source of this quote in the comic, because of this anecdote from RAW’s Prometheus Rising:
“I am He that was, and is, and shall be,” a sentence from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in hieroglyph and in his own handwriting, was found on the desk where Beethoven composed the Ninth Symphony and all his later, aeon-spanning “evolutionary” music.
My assumption that these mythic hieroglyphs would be easy to find and pop into my otherwise finished comic slowly but surely faded away, as my hours long search stretched into a 3 AM delirium, and on into a week long expedition into the furthest corners of the internet. I eventually gave up on the web and shelled out some hard earned cash for a print copy of E. A. Wallis Budge‘s The Egyptian Book of the Dead, with its line by line translation of the ancient tome, but still no dice! I scoured the almost 400 pages of that thing, to no avail, and briefly considered trying to reverse engineer my own translation, but having come this far, it felt wrong to just fudge it.
At this point, the search for reference to a throwaway visual gag, that no one but me would care about, had now taken a week longer than the creation of the rest of the comic! Eventually, luckily, and thankfully, my persistence, and my Temple University Academic Journal subscriptions, paid off, and I found a satisfactory source for the translation.
This was in 2009, and now flashing forward to 2022, where I’ve just finished remastering the art for the comic, and am about to republish, when I think back to my struggles to translate the opening bit, and it occurs to me, I never documented my source! I don’t actually remember where this translation came from. My only assurance is that I trust my stubbornness enough that I probably wouldn’t have given up unless I found something pretty solid, but that same stubbornness being still very much intact, that trust doesn’t cut the mustard.
And so guess what? The whole thing repeats again!
Though this time with a bit more clarity.
I figure out that I’m looking for Chapter LXIV,
AKA Utterance 64, of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Whereby one cometh forth by day from the Netherworld.
And that there are 2 versions:
One from the Papyrus of Nu and another from the Papyrus of Nebseni.
The reason I couldn’t find it in the book I bought is because that particular version of The Egyptian Book of the Dead is based on the Papyrus of Ani, which is missing that chapter.
The good news is that this book has the hieroglyphs I’m looking for! But the bad news is that there’s no accompanying translation. So I can’t be sure what’s what.
And you guessed it, this is the exact reverse of the other book, and contains the English translation, but no hieroglyphs.
Between the 2 though, I have numbered lines that I can match up, and am now in the ballpark.
And really, it looks like my 2009 effort matches pretty well! It picks up about halfway through line 2 and ends about halfway through line 3. Some of the symbol stacking is different, but clearly whatever reference material I found back then is at least talking about the right turkey.
Having fallen down yet another multiple day internet rabbit hole, chasing this same damn funny bunny*, I’m hesitant to leave well enough alone without some sort of smoking gun, so I decide to once again plunk down some cold hard cash for a physical book, with still another elaborate title. This one looking like it was written by an SEO algorithm specifically for someone in my unique position:
READING HIEROGLYPHICS – A Very Ancient Text: CHAPTER 64 THE BOOK OF THE DEAD Extracts from the Papyrus of Nu and the Papyrus of Nebseny By Bernard Paul Badham
I mean, pretty on the nose, right?
So I just got my grubby mitts on a copy of READING HIEROGLYPHICS, and am very happy to say that it appears to very much agree with my original 2009 translation. Again, there are some minor formatting differences, and Badham’s English translation differs slightly from both Budge and Campbell, but his line by line translation agrees exactly with the starting point I have in the comic, which was my main remaining doubt. (I’d include his translation, but this book was only published in 2016, and I’m guessing this passage is the main draw for this very niche publication, and am loathe to steal his thunder)
Anyway, after all that, I feel comfortable allowing the original hieroglyphs to remain :)))
* “According to some damn book I lost (sorry!)
Osiris really means Divine Hare”
Robert Anton Wilson to me in an email, circa 2005.
And now the only other minor bone of contention, OSIRIS JONES.
The name Osiris Jones also comes from Joseph Campbell, in a lecture about Egyptian Mythology, Campbell explains that according to the Book of the Dead, upon their demise, every Average Joe becomes identified as one with Osiris, JC then appears to riff a name for this everyman/God hybrid, “Osiris Jones, let’s say.”
Here it is straight from the source:
A subsequent googling would suggest that I was incorrect in assuming that Osiris Jones was an arbitrary stock name that Campbell came up with off the top of his head, because it appears to be a direct reference to a 1931 book by Conrad Aiken called “The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones.”
I didn’t know this until just now, but apparently James Joyce was somewhat panicked when this book came to his attention, according to Richard Ellmann’s Joyce biography, “the title of Aiken’s book sounded so close in theme to Finnegans Wake that it seemed more urgent for him to read the book than for him to move” out of the path of a rapidly expanding WW II.
“Osiris Jones has not yet come forth by day or by night and I am waiting for a copy of that biography to be sent me by Gorman or his publisher.”
Letter from James Joyce to Maria Jolas dated 7 September 1940.
There appear to be several records of Joyce attempting to acquire a copy of Osiris Jones, but it seems doubtful that he was able to find a copy before he died just a few months later.
A looser connection, that I was indeed aware of at the time, involves the late, great Ol’ Dirty Bastard. The first, and so far only, member of the Wu Tang Clan to pass on. One of ODB’s numerous nicknames is Osiris, as he announces on “Triumph” the lead single from Wu Tang Clan’s 1997 album Wu Tang Forever:
“WHAT Y’ALL THOUGHT Y’ALL WASN’T GON’ SEE ME?
I’M THE OSIRIS OF THIS SHIT”
Amongst all his other names, suchlike Ason Unique, Dirt McGirt, Big Baby Jesus, and innumerable others, his government name was Russell Jones. It takes a little bit of cherry picking, but it ain’t too hard to find Osiris Jones in the mix.
My version of Osiris Jones debuted in the Spring 2006 issue of the Maybe Quarterly, albeit spelled as “Osirius”, perhaps as a portmanteau of the Egyptian God and the mythic Dog Star, but honestly, more likely, just a misspelling!
These first depictions of Osiris Jones were giant 3ft x 3ft paintings.
Funnily enough, given the backstory, the first image is based on the title page of the first edition of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.
The blue skin was about trying to create a more inclusive mythic iconography, that could work within a planetary society. In 2009, when James Cameron’s Avatar emerged, with its global box office dominating blue skinned cat people, it made pretty specific sense to me.
The problem with the name Osiris Jones didn’t occur to me until 2014, when I was prepping the first print edition of Weird Comix #1, in which the Osiris comic is the lead off hitter. It suddenly occurred to me that OSIRIS JONES sounds, and maybe even looks, like a rip off of OSMOSIS JONES, a 2001 live-action/animated movie, starring a blue skinned cartoon character, voiced by Chris Rock.
I don’t know why I thought it mattered, but I decided it was a good idea to change my character’s name to Osiris Smith, thinking that the main gist of the bit was Osiris + a common everyday surname, not realizing I was leaving behind almost 100 years worth of contextual resonance, and for what? To not step, ever so slightly, on the toes of a movie barely anyone remembers?
So forgetting all that noise, for this updated edition, the name Osiris Jones has been restored.
P.S. I have done what James Joyce could not! And acquired a copy of Conrad Aiken’s “The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones” Same 1931 edition Joyce was chasing too :)))
Originally made in 2008 for The Hic-Up, an excellent punk rock zine out of Wilmington, Delaware. This was an esp heady era, when I was sharing studio space with the great Todd Purse, and we were working in, what I called, The House of Ideas, surrounded by our wonderful friend group.
It got so I started using the assemblage of cool cats as a writers room of sorts, crowdsourcing ideas, workshopping art styles, etc. I remember we went around the room for an hour to come up with the phrase “ivory frock” to describe Marilyn Monroe’s iconic dress for the original punchline.
The comic was originally a metaphysical riff on the now old and mostly forgotten SNL skit Astronaut Jones, starring Tracy Morgan.
The joke being a sacred moment ruined by a profane outburst.
A coincidence of opposites w/ Albert Einstein & Marilyn Monroe, a pairing that seemed both natural & nonsensical, and which I assumed, at the time, that I had invented.
Years later, I ran into an optical illusion featured at the Franklin Institute, which when looked at closely appeared to be a picture of Albert Einstein, but would transform into a picture of Marilyn Monroe when viewed from far away.
The same trick could be accomplished with almost any subject matter, I’m sure, but I felt encouraged that someone else had connected the same 2 dots. Little did I know that, in our Rule 34 world, that was only the tip of the iceberg…
“You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don’t already believe it.”
– Robert Anton Wilson
These headlines stem from the same source, Shelley Winters, who was roommates with Marilyn Monroe when they were young struggling actors.
Winters recounts in her autobiography, and told David Letterman in 1989, the story of the 2 girls writing a list of the famous men they were interested in, on which Monroe included Einstein.
“Marilyn, there’s no way you can sleep with Albert Einstein. He’s the most famous scientist of the century. Besides, he’s an old man.”
“That has nothing to do with it. I hear he’s very healthy.”
Several years after MM’s death, SW was at the apartment of the Strasbergs, Marilyn’s foster parents, who inherited her belongings, and amongst the things she left behind was a silver framed photo of Einstein, which was signed with the inscription: “With love, respect and thanks. Albert Einstein”
But don’t take my word for it, here’s Shelley Winters telling the story to David Letterman:
Now I hate to say it, but I’m not sure it’s more plausible that Marilyn Monroe had an affair with Albert Einstein, rather than just that Shelley Winters wanted to have something interesting to say on TV, but who knows!
There also appears to be a copypasta fan fiction story about MM & AE that pops up in several places around the web, which incorporates the “with my looks and your brains” routine:
At a dinner party, Einstein and Marilyn sat next to each other. After a few flutes of champagne, she cooed in his attentive ear: “I want to have your child. With my looks and your brains, it will be a perfect child!”
Einstein replied: “But what if it has my looks and your brains?”
Though I’m not that crazy about that joke being performed by those 2 characters, because the whole reason MM is an enduring personality is because she isn’t just a dumb blonde, but rather a thoughtful person who seems tragically self aware about the complex dynamics of embodying an icon/symbol/object.
It’s a great song though!
A few years ago I had an experience at a comic con where a nice lady was flipping through my comix, got to the page with Einstein crassly coming onto Marilyn Monroe, appeared visibly bummed, put the comic down, and walked away.
I suddenly got how easily that joke could be misunderstood and that the context was too dependent on trusting that there were good intentions behind it.
When it came time to prep new print editions of my early WEIRD COMIX, I knew the joke wasn’t worth the misunderstanding, but still thought the archetypal team up of Albert Einstein & Marilyn Monroe was worth exploring, so I went in search of inspiration for a new ending, and did indeed find it :)))
“The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.” —The license for Jenny Everywhere
I also created a copyleft logo for JE that is available in PNG, EPS, PSD and AI file formats :))) CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD ZIP FILE
On March 4, 1971, Terence and Dennis McKenna conducted their experiment at La Chorrera, in which they experienced contact with an apparent extraterrestrial higher-dimensional logos, by ingesting a psychotropic concoction as part of an idiosyncratic ritual, a harbinger of ever escalating high weirdness.
Between July and August of 1973, Timothy Leary conducted a group telepathy experiment while incarcerated at Folsom Prison, resulting in supposed contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence from the future, delivering a message which Leary then transmitted under the name “StarSeed”.
On July 23, 1973, Robert Anton Wilson began experiencing contact with a higher intelligence from the Sirius star system which continued until around October 1974.
In 1974, John Lilly came to believe in a network of cosmic entities, and that he had achieved contact with the local representatives: E.C.C.O. (Earth Coincidence Control Office)
On February 20, 1974, Philip K. Dick experienced a transference of cosmic information from a Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS), which continued throughout February and March of ’74.
And that’s just off the top of my head! WTF was going on in the early 70’s??
To hazard a guess, these were all exceptionally bright people enveloped in a countercultural zeitgeist of sci-fi psychedelia, living in a world where Woodstock just landed on the moon, and Spaceship Earth was undeniably on the verge of something HUGE. So when their imaginations became exposed to extreme circumstances, by hook or crook, they envisioned new kinds of gods, networked cosmic intelligences. (Basically anticipating the internet?)
Worth noting that these experiences all went on to inspire very influential books and systems of thought. To whatever extent these were actually pathological breaks from reality, they have functioned in our culture as successful visionary revelations.
Though in this there is most certainly a survivor’s bias at play. For every Robert Anton Wilson, who carefully navigated the destabilizing consequences of psychotomimetic experiences, and extracted useful and entertaining life lessons along the way, how many less fortunate souls maybe got less admirable results?
COSMIC TRIGGER WARNING: Self Harm
On March 26, 1997, the bodies of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult were discovered in a house just outside of San Diego, having participated in a ritual mass suicide, orchestrated as part of an extraterrestrial/metaphysical belief system, in which they hoped to board a spaceship trailing the Comet Hale–Bopp.
Okay, so that may feel a bit out of left field, let’s step back a sec…
In March of 1972, Marshall Applewhite & Bonnie Nettles met and pursued a spiritual quest that eventually resulted in apparent contact with an extraterrestrial divine intelligence that bestowed upon them a mission to fulfill biblical prophesy by dying, being resurrected, and ascending bodily to a literal, physical heaven, on an actual spacecraft.
In 1974, the “cult of cults”, what would eventually become known as Heaven’s Gate, was formed.
This timeline places “The UFO Two” firmly in the High Weirdness cluster of the early 70’s.
So I guess pretty obviously I recently watched the Heaven’s Gate documentary on HBO, and before even catching on about the funky 70’s stuff, noticed a weirdly familiar vibe in the archival footage, which felt like a southern preacher’s imitation of Timothy Leary’s guru schtick.
Or even one of those especially weird, self-transforming-machine-elf workshop events Terence McKenna would put on, except at the end of the UFO cult show these cats took off with half of the audience to go live in the woods!
The Two apparently ran an alternative spiritual bookshop in the early 70’s, so maybe were familiar with some of the psychedelic literature of the time. Their visionary experience is hypothesized as resulting from an LSD trip, so there may be more than coincidence at play here.
They referred to “beliefs” as “programming” which seems like it could have been taken directly from John Lilly’s work. They also seemed to have a general sense of the concept of reality tunnels, or more specifically that people viewed the world according to their programming. Which I suppose shouldn’t be much of a surprise, since cults depend on deconstructing existing belief systems. So if they say your concept of self and reality is illusory, it has the ring of truth, but then can use that as a wedge to instill far grander delusions.
Sort of like if you watch a Charles Manson interview, and half the time he’s doing a folksy Alan Watts routine, which attempts to disarm you for the more direct sociopathic manipulation.
In “Everything is Under Control” RAW reports that Applewhite and Nettles, then going by the names “Bo” and “Peep” walked out of a lecture he was giving in Houston in 1978. At the time they were identified as “leaders of a typical UFO contact cult.”
Terence McKenna also reported early familiarity with The Two: “I couldn’t believe the way in which the media portrayed the Heaven’s Gate people as very careful thinkers, very reasonable people — I mean, I heard about this thing in 1975. Somebody said, ‘Hey, there are these two people who are running around who say that they’re off a spacecraft. You wanna go see?’ [extremely irked voice] ‘NO!'”
There’s home video footage of members in the 90’s driving home after holding a public meeting, wherein their message got pretty decisively rejected by those in attendance, and they are clowning on a particularly critical dude deemed too dumb to receive their truth, they mock him as a “bonehead,” much to their own delight.
Generally speaking, it is pretty difficult to see the irrationality of our own unexamined assumptions, by proxy, I glimpsed the bars of a Black Iron Prison.
I suspect the sheer magnitude of the infamy generated by the media circus that surrounded the discovery of the mass suicide presented itself as a fulfillment of prophesy to many of the ex-members who were left behind. Several of whom took their own lives in belated attempts to join in on the space rapture.
Perhaps the most haunting aspect of the documentary is the running commentary from a left behind lapsed member who remains convinced he fucked up and missed out on spiritual ascension.
On April 22, 1997, one month after the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, Timothy Leary’s ashes were launched into space on a Pegasus rocket.
“We are sending a comet to your solar system as a sign that the time has come to look to the stars.”
An excerpt from Timothy Leary’s StarSeed Transmission, which in hindsight, makes the 1997 appearance of Hale–Bopp Comet a very strange dot to connect amongst the stars, but the better view might be a bit more Earthbound.
As someone who spends quite a bit of time in mental and digital ideaspaces, I can sometimes accidentally fall into the error of treating my body like a vehicle that carries my mind around. Not as a conscious ideology, like the Heaven’s Gate cult, but just as a consequence of having an introverted personality w/ an interest in computers and art, esp during quarantine. (This was written in the Summer of 2021.)
What’s the opposite of alienation? Reconciliation?
So my take away from all this is a reminder to return to my body more often, and maybe not just pour coffee into myself in front of a screen until somehow productivity starts to happen!
RAW’s take away was basically that they would have remained harmless weirdos, except the fallout from the Waco massacre pushed them over the edge, which the doc also touches on.
The documentary takes a sympathetic view, depicting the members as basically regular people who were just kind of unlucky.
Terence McKenna, as noted earlier, was much more sick of this type of shit, having been around the paranormal block maybe a few too many times, and thought we shouldn’t be shy about calling out harmful nonsense, with the caveat being we should also notice how much of our culture is comprised of equally absurd notions.
(Also, I kind of like how TM refuses to break kayfabe and acknowledge that his whole thing is having the wildest nonsense around!) The balkanization of epistemology continues unabated, and ultimately these are just fragments of an unknowable big picture, so it goes!
The image features Hagbard Celine giving a psychedelic speech during a climatically surreal moment towards the end of the book.
Though I’m not that crazy about that joke being performed by those 2 characters, because the whole reason MM is an enduring personality is because she isn’t just a dumb blonde, but rather a thoughtful person who seems tragically self aware about the complex dynamics of embodying an icon/symbol/object.
