The Televisionary Oracle (55 page)

In addition to a cascade of erotic feelings up and down my body, the touch of these six hands and the sound of the crowd’s happy vigor stirred a curious sensation in the center of my brain. It felt like something was hatching: a ticklish irritation mixed with blissful release. I had an urge to scratch myself there.

Gradually this prickly opening made me alert to some fresh layer of meaning or substance in the sights and sounds around me. It was as if a new perceptual apparatus were awakening. It didn’t duplicate any of my five senses but was a blend of them all—and more. As I tried to explain to myself what was happening, I flashed on Helen Keller’s reputed ability to “smell” an approaching storm hours before its arrival.

I could hear the honeysuckle fragrance of the light streaming from The Other Rapunzel’s eyes on the Televisionary Oracle. I tasted the grainy texture of the crowd’s buzz with the soles of my feet. Madame Blavatsky’s head massage precipitated a serpentine trill of trumpets on my tongue. The hatching place behind my eyes surged with chiming fountains of incandescence. Was I merely hallucinating? Or was I extracting the secret quintessence of this world, which I had previously been numb to?

In the course of my explorations with altered states of consciousness over the years, I’d developed a special fondness for dreams in which I was dreaming. Now, the memory of that paradoxical condition provided a small bit of reference for the supercharged state of my sensorium. It was as if there were a more essential Drivetime within the Drivetime, and I had slipped into it.

“I have one other thing I want to say to you,” The Other Rapunzel boomed above the tumult, and in response the crowd gradually shushed.

“Now that we have formulated a strategy to wriggle out of our predicament,” she murmured, as her tone became lower and more intimate, “let’s talk about your third eye. Or maybe you’d prefer to call it your second nose. Whatever you wish. Your pineal gland. The thousand-petaled lotus. The philosopher’s stone. The one part of your body that might someday give you direct perception of—not merely second-hand gossip about—all the places the scientists don’t believe in and therefore can’t see. The one part of your body that can abolish time and survive death and dream while awake and fuck everything alive. P.S. to astrophysicists: It can even locate the universe’s so-called dark matter.

“At the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail, we refer to this joy jewel as the Televisionary Oracle. Everyone who has ever lived has owned one. Only trouble is, it’s dormant in most people. They live and die without ever using their birthright even once. That tragic loss is due mainly to the fact that you can’t turn on the Televisionary Oracle all by yourself. No matter how smart you are, no matter how holy or rich or selfless or famous you are, you just can’t get the Televisionary Oracle up and running without the divine intervention of Our Lady of the Vultures: the Primordial Menstruator, Yo Mama Persephone Herself.

“There is a fairly reliable way to enlist the Goddess’ help, though—maybe even seduce Her into slipping you a massive dose of grace. Can you guess what it is?”

The Other Rapunzel stopped her rant, as if making room for a response.

Of the thousands of people in the stadium, Jumbler spoke first. “Become a tantric fucknut,” she shouted out at the top of her lungs, “and direct your fucknut energy up to your pineal gland.”

“Yes! Excellent!” The Other Rapunzel exclaimed, beaming, as if she had heard Jumbler.

She took a moment to shoot a stream of liquid from her squirt gun into her own mouth before resuming.

“When you circulate your sexual energy away from your genitals and up towards your heart and head—ideally using not just your heroic willpower but also your naked compassion as a pump—you show the
Goddess you’re ready to collaborate with Her in switching on your Televisionary Oracle. As a reward, She may take custody of the nerve currents you have sprung loose from their confinement down below, and shepherd them in just the right way into your sleeping power spot. In Her own good time, if you continue your work faithfully, She may shock awake the magic organ, allowing you to tune in to the data-rich splendor you’ve always been missing.

“Then you can join the Goddess at will in the wormhole between the Dreamtime and the Waketime.”

As the crowd burst into a new round of frenzied approval, I remembered—or rather recapitulated—a scene from my life as Mary Magdalen. This was not happening in some finished past, but
now.
I was in the company of Jesus on our sleeping mat in a room of my family’s home in Bethany. It was before dawn. Through the window I could see the Morning Star hanging low in the sky, and above it a crescent moon. We sat facing each other, blissfully conjoined in the hierosgamos. As he moved in me, I picked up the alabaster flask containing the spikenard and anointed his head. Then he ceased the undulation of his hips and allowed me to take the active role. Holding the flask, he crowned me with an equal measure of the sacred unguent.

As our mouths met to consecrate the blessing, other lives began to stir in my mind’s eye. I remembered or rather
was
Eumolpus, leading frightened neophytes into Persephone’s subterranean labyrinth at Eleusis on a September morning. I was Robin the Mouth, devouring a cake from the chest of a dead man as his relatives looked on. I was Antonin Artaud, alternately struggling and soaring from the effects of the peyote I’d ingested in a Mexican hotel room.

And then I was Rapunzel Blavatsky as I would be further on along the thread of time. A million memories from the future exploded simultaneously in the hatching place in my brain—events that from the standpoint of eternity, I realized, had already occurred or were occurring now and always. I saw myself returning to the sanctuary where I had grown up, scoured clean of my blotch and accompanied by Jumbler, to fight for my right to transform the Pomegranate Grail into the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail. I relived the arduous process of building the ever-expanding network of menstrual huts all over the world. I paraded down the streets of many cities with my “Funeral for
the Apocalypse” spectacles. I revisited the entire process by which I prepared myself to initiate selected men into the menstrual arts and bless them with the gift of the hierosgamos. I remembered every kiss—with Jumbler and everyone else—and every dream class, every Drivetime excursion, even every meal. Our kidnap of the airwaves, our murder of the bad apocalypse, the celebration of Twenty-Two Weeks of World Orgasm: I remembered the future in every detail, all the while communing with the Televisionary Oracle, the sixty-six-million-year-old, hyperdimensional, organic “machine.”

H
ere we are again, beauty and truth fans. Your personal diplomatic representatives to the Queen of Heaven. Lonely lovers of all sentient beings and all-around global village idiots.

As you can see, we’ve set our hair on fire—don’t worry, it’s treated with flame retardants—while juggling ancient goddess figurines unearthed in Çatal Hüyük as we balance atop leather medicine balls
in our glass slippers and snakeskin underwear. All for you. All in the quest to seduce you into knowing exactly what you want.

So what
do
you want, anyway, beauty and truth fans?

What?

You want to know what
we
want?

Well, to be truthful, our greatest desire is to become anonymous celebrities with enough access to your imagination that you will allow us to
daimonically
possess you. Not
demonically
possess you, like the entertainment criminals.

What’s the difference?

The English word
demon
refers to an evil spirit, while
daimon
is an ancient Greek term meaning a personal guardian angel or a supernatural being that serves as an intermediary between humans and gods.

When entertainment criminals
demonically possess
you, they extirpate your imagination and replace it with their own decadent simulation of an imagination.

When we eaters of cruelty
daimonically possess
you, on the other hand, we devour the fake imagination that the entertainment criminals have infected you with. We then serve as kick-ass guardians at the threshold of your awareness, preventing the entertainment criminals’ poison from slipping into you for as long as it takes you to establish a reliable link to your own best teacher—the ingenious angel in your own higher brain.

S
ince long before I was a soldier in the World Entertainment War, I have loved to dream. Every night I feel a thrill as my head impacts the pillow, knowing there’s a good chance I’ll live through at least one story that will be far more interesting to me than any Hollywood movie.

This has been true as far back as I remember. My love affair with adventures on the other side of the veil began early. I still have the three pages of three-holed, blue-lined, loose-leaf paper on which I wrote down my dream of a trip to the planet Venus when I was eight years old. (It was a successful journey; I was greeted by thirteen girls who covered me with kisses and fed me chocolate candy and gave me magic baseball cards.)

As I muse now upon this innocent passion, I can’t help but think I was born to be what other cultures have called a shaman. It’s immaterial whether I explain it as a genetic predisposition or the result of past-life karma: Without stimuli or encouragement from my family or teachers or anyone else in my early environment, I was drawn to explore a world beyond the one my senses perceived. My quest was naive and self-taught. Though I managed when I was in fourth grade to find a few scientific books on dreams in the local library (the New Age had not yet sprouted), all I had to go on was instinct.

At age seventeen I discovered psychedelic drugs. They offered me a different entry into the realm I’d previously accessed exclusively through dreams. Powered by this new tool, my attraction to the other side of the veil leaped to a higher octave, and I became even more
committed to recording my sleeptime excursions. Beginning then and continuing till the present, I have kept a notebook and pen next to me virtually every single night of my life, even while crashing on the floors of friends’ crowded apartments. At a conservative estimate, I’ve remembered and recorded thousands of dreams. Bookshelves full of old dream journals prove it.

Upon leaving my parents’ home and arriving in college, I confirmed my growing suspicion that the educational system had tried to conceal a secret of great magnitude. Readings of Eliade and La Barre and Joseph Campbell introduced me to the paper trail documenting the existence of other realities besides the narrow little niche most people regard as All There Is. Their work in turn led me to the literature of Western occultism, whose intriguing material was written not by academics but by experimenters who had actually traveled into the great beyond.