Nemu’s End

In 2002, water began leaking from the holiest wall in Jerusalem, striking an apocalyptic chord in the hearts of many locals, including the rabbi of the wall himself.[1] Omens are a shekel a dozen in Israel these days. In 1997, the birth of a perfectly red heifer caused great excitement; according to Numbers, this unlikely animal is the symbol that the time is right to build the third temple.[2] Melody was thought to be the first such animal born in two millennia, but she developed a blemish before she was three years old and ready for sacrifice. Another was born soon after, however, in 2002, the year the wall sheds tears.[3]

We have always seen omens, whether rams caught in thickets or conjunctions in the sky. Signs crop up all through recorded history, so perhaps they are intrinsic to human existence, and the red heifer is just another red herring. Sensible sceptics might have it that we jump to conclusions without due scrutiny, because of the way our brains are wired, but our wires are Wi-Fied into a cosmic network. The human brain is indeed an excellent machine for making connections, but it also makes programs. It builds the architecture to interpret code. It downloads information from the mainframe, it doctors it, and loads it up again.

In 1898, Morgan Robertson published a novel about the wreck of the biggest ship afloat, a luxury liner called the Titan, which was said to be unsinkable. 14 years later, the Titanic sank, and the details of the tragedies are uncannily close. Both boats struck an iceberg on the starboard side around midnight in April. Both had three propellers and two masts. The Titan was 800 feet long, the Titanic was 880 feet. In the book it was travelling at 25 knots, in real life it was travelling at 23 knots. The Titan was carrying 3,000 passengers, and the Titanic carried 2,240, though its capacity was roughly 3,000.[4]

Robertson went into trance to write, and there have been other soothsaying artists. The relationship between the world within and the world without is complex. The universe is strange, riddled with paradox and interconnections, with mediums on the astra-net, wizards at the switchboard, and prophets and poets writing plots. If omens are lines in a cosmic script, are we are the slaves of fate, or of artifice?

Whether a leaky pipe, the tears of the Messiah, or both, the weeping Wailing Wall would have raised expectations and prayers, and intention pushes probability. Remarkable patterns arise from chance combinations of code in ordinary computers. Remarkable heifers arise from chance combinations of code in ordinary chromosomes. Mind arranges space, reality flows into the vacuum, and order is born from chaos. The red heifer incantation has been uttered repeatedly over the millennia, every time someone read Numbers, and now, like London buses, two arrive together and the wall weeps for joy. Both developed blemishes before they were mature, but Messianic cattle breeders are attempting to engineer a third. There is a good dose of dramatic tension in this story, as the Mosque of the Dome on the Rock, from where Mohammed ascended into heaven, would have to be destroyed for the temple to be rebuilt. A liberal Israeli newspaper described Melody’s appearance as more dangerous than a terrorist bomb, and suggested she be shot.[5] Mel Gibson would love the plot, but really, it is a little too laden to take seriously. Who writes this stuff? Who gave the monkey a typewriter?

Omens raise questions amidst nuclear tensions, and there is an apocalyptic tang in the air. The expectations of conscious beings carve our world. Harmonious thoughts create beauty, and mental discord manifests as physical suffering. Generally, we fear the worst, and so that is what we get. The mind moves first, cutting shapes in the void, whether with conscious intention or confuzed misapplication. The astral follows, and after it the mud, as fast as physics permits. Most of the time our magicks are limited by language. Words divide up our world and grammar dictates how it fits together, but beyond that we are governed by the stories we tell, the stories telling us. We are bound by plotlines. Like characters in someone else's drama, we play roles we never chose, speak lines we never wanted to say. The original scriptwriters and scribes have long since passed away, but the symbolic foundations of our culture they laid down survive. Bible stories provided a common God for an expanding Christian world, fixing the currency of communication, limiting law, and stabilising culture. The text also provided template narratives to refer to. Tales such as Job’s trials, and archetypes such as the nitpicking Pharisee were constantly applied to people’s lives, directing expectations and shaping outcomes. The plot thickens and the ending becomes ever more predictable, but our Lamentations have become letters to the council, we appeal to ombudsmen rather than deities, and where is the poetry in that?

The code goes back to Babylon and beyond, coming down to us as a program called ‘The Word of God’. It ran exclusively on Jewish hardware for centuries, but with extra applications added in the first century, The Bible became universally compatible. Seventeen centuries later, despite constant patches and upgrades, despite Muslims, Christians and Jews swapping ideas and viruses amongst their different versions, corrupted source files finally brought down the network. Scientism was installed on a new generation of brains, driving hardware in a new direction. This version has spread rapidly in the last century, but it too has its bugs and super-bugs, and the system is heading for an almighty crash.

Alternative architectures are emerging, tackling ailments from cancer to depression, problems which Scientism often fails to treat, and cannot even describe satisfactorily in its language. Research is throwing up evidence questioning the fundamentals of the scientific method, pointing to a world that is both non-rational and unpredictable. We are losing faith in Scientism as we lost faith in The Bible, and we are even losing faith in ourselves as objective judges of reality. Belief is degrading, and as gaps in our knowledge open up, magick seeps through. Finally, having descended completely into materialism, we are becoming free of the mud we are made of. Walls are weeping and curtains are calling. It is time to build New Jerusalem, but for Y#V#’s sake, build it in another dimension.

The apocalypse is where boundaries dissolve, where good fades into evil, where Meri melts into Mary, where pagan, monotheist, and materialist all dissolve into one. The Word splits everything it touches. A double helix curves from the root of the Tree of Knowledge, around the Tower of Babel, from Abram to Zion and back to Zion the long way round. The snake beguiles with a trail of magick words from Alpha to Omega, and now twin heads close in on the molecules coding for the Tree of Life, spitting venom and slashing with razor sharp teeth, whilst caressing electrons on a forked tongue, putting a different spin on things. The end is nigh, and revelation is upon us. We can bring about doomsday if we hate ourselves enough, but we can also dream up something better. Transformation? Or death? Homo sapient? Or homo subservient? Homo serpient? Or homo semi-permanent.

The punch line approaches, but this crazy Jewish joke is only a short book. The Maitreya is the next Buddha but he’s not the last. The chapter closes, but the story continues. On a cosmic scale, man is a great ape who very recently acquired a mind to meditate upon, and he is still struggling to get the words pinging around it under control. The Bible is his primer, introducing a limited thinker to infinite mysteries. It is necessarily controlled by a stern master made in our image: incomplete, ambitious, and with a terrible temper. Our history is His story, and hiss-story, a saga of restriction and transformation, where a perfect being suffers to overcome the limitations of the world. Beyond the purge and behind the divisions lies a blank page where our story begins.

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27

The Final Draft