The Empire Never Ended (VALIS) (Patreon)

Commissioned by the God-favored.

I was 21 when God spoke to me. in a small forest in upstate New York. I chose the setting deliberately, opting to meet God where He lived. Leaving my phone in my best friend Daniella’s house, I sat down in a little clearing under the forest’s eaves, surrounded by tall grass which occluded me from the view of any passers-by. Isolation from people was the first step. When I was sufficiently alone, I closed my eyes, used my password for prayer, and waited for God to arrive.

When God arrived, They didn’t grandly announce Their presence with a vision of the Holy Spirit. They simply made Their presence felt, leaving more of a signature on my brain than a concrete image. They welcomed me, as if  I had RSVPed to a longstanding invitation. It was like a long lost family member was embracing me with an unspoken message of “welcome home.”

We didn’t have an in-depth conversation: meeting the Divine is less about discourse than having what we might call “vibes” beamed into your head. Great visionary writers like Julian of Norwich and the Book of Ezekiel’s author captured that with their proclivity for describing heavenly sensations rather than prescribing encounters with God.

I suppose I had the inverse religious experience of Horselover Fat, Philip K. Dick’s self-insert protagonist of his classic science fiction novel VALIS. Less a work of speculative fiction than a thinly veiled spiritual memoir, VALIS is Dick’s engine for expounding on his Gnostic philosophy of mind.

In VALIS, Dick’s alter ego Horselover Fat (whose name riffs on Philip Dick’s), stating “I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity.” Dick studiously avoids objectivity in VALIS, making preposterous statements like Zebra, his name for God, telling him “you are my favorite.”

It’s not that Philip K. Dick’s VALIS is a collection of drug-addled theological lectures by a narcissist who tried to push his wife off a cliff. I mean, it’s definitely that, but reducing VALIS to the vices of its premise does it a disservice. Dick’s lectures are intelligently and knowledgeably presented, and its stream-of-higher-consciousness style is impeccable. Weaving autobiography, science fiction, and religious exegesis should be impossible, and Dick weaves that thread stupendously.

VALIS both defines and undermines Dick’s narcissism by treating Fat like a scientific object, dissecting his mind and religious experiences. This is flatly a science fiction novel where God beams a pink ray into Dick’s brain. “We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us.” God exists as technology, a Theo-mechanical apparatus called VALIS.

This gets into the book’s profound Gnosticism. VALIS is a philosophical piece of Seventies speculative fiction in the same way David Bowie’s contemporary albums are. The Mother Goose character, whose VALIS film tips the novel into religious metafiction, disrupts the whole experience with a dose of Gnostic glam androgyny. As Fat observes, “The fifth Savior,” the latest avatar, is “a rock star.”

The fact is that Gnosticism is good science fiction. This is the real innovation of VALIS. Gnosticism’s apparatus where Yaldabaoth, a false god, creates the world as a botched job is a miserable (if justifiable) cosmogony, but a fantastic science fiction premise.  It’s like Gibson’s Sprawl as theism.

Yet VALIS falls short as Gnostic text because of its abject misogyny. Multiple female characters have their suicides and addictions reduced to catalysts for Fat’s religious odyssey. Fat holds the women in his life in contempt for their struggles, yet uses them to move his life forward.

Gnosticism, for all its faults (the Tripartite Tractate’s concept of elected souls always struck me as soteriological eugenics), has a prized role for femininity. Sophia, the Gnostic embodiment of wisdom, is pointedly feminine. The Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura acknowledges that “St. Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before,”

Sophia’s appearance in VALIS is contrapuntal to the book’s misogyny. She’s a toddler, an image of femininity, daughter of David Bowie. Sophia destroys Fat; the embodiment of wisdom kills off Dick’s scapegoat alter ego. 

The elision is odd. A few years ago, I had a Gnostic phase kicked off by Gnosticism’s presentation of feminine power. When I was rediscovering my spiritual life, Gnosticism was a gateway drug, adjacent to orthodox Christianity but decidedly an alternative to it. One day, my best friend Daniella handed me The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, a volume of Gnostic texts excavated in the 1940s in Upper Egypt, where VALIS stipulates “the plasmate [VALIS] had gone into hiding […] and was again loose in our world, and as angry as a motherfucker.”

In a café at our community college, Daniella, presumably under orders by VALIS, (although she could have just fucked with my mind), urged me to read a Gnostic poem called “The Thunder, Perfect Mind.” The poem, a series of paradoxical dichotomies, presents an image of an all-encompassing feminine figure:

For I am the first and the last.

I am the honored one and the scorned one.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin.

I am <the mother> and the daughter.

I am the members of my mother.

I am the barren one

    and many are her sons. 

When I read those words, I slumped in my chair, physically winded from the ordeal. I scrolled through the rest of the poem like Yaldabaoth had smacked me upside the head. 

It was no coincidence that I had transitioned only a few months before. Gnosticism is fundamentally a flattering faith. It teaches believers that their mind is a beautiful and elite thing. To hear that femininity is a paradoxical force for holiness changed my life.

Dick finds a similar appeal. When God tells him that he is his favorite, he is overjoyed. It is a source of validation when his friends shoot down his theological exegeses and his girlfriends distract him with, scoff, personal problems. Gnosticism is fun because it elevates knowledge as the greatest good. For a science fiction author, it’s a playground.

It’s also bound to the sort of masculine narcissism often found in hard science fiction. The art of knowledge and explaining things are generally perceived as a man’s job. Unlike The Thunder, Perfect Mind, VALIS locks into a hard gender binary, one where women are tools.

“That’s exactly what you stipulate reality is: a two-source hologram.”

“But intellectually thinking it is one thing,” Fat said, “and finding out it’s true is another!”

Fat discovers the gender binary underpinning all things. Masculine intellectual prowess; femininity is a disruptive force.

Dick lacks a vision of the divine feminine. When he encounters it, it is quickly snuffed out. Sophia dies right off the bat. Fat and his friends only try to dissect and analyze the divine. They cannot conquer her.

Death can make or break your faith. I lost mine that way not too long ago. But the pink beam and its message never left me alone. Horselover Fat and I both had our minds altered by the Gnostic divine. If any god can unite a misogynist and a trans woman, then Gnosticism’s true power is the abolition of the gender binary.