Black-Market Manna 4
an occult metafiction in 5 parts
This novella was originally published in Angry Old Man Magazine, Volume 2, in 2018. It has undergone a few updates and visuals. No further angel meat was consumed in the process. Enjoy!And now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.
1 Kings, 12:11
I Dreamed of Chains Singing
“The fundamental error of dualism is that it ignores everything between high and low—the excluded middle, where everything is gray and confusing. Most of us dwell there. Demons, after all, are nothing but angels consigned to trench digging. .”
Part One/ Part Two/Part Three/Part Four
Medieval scholars put the number of angels at three hundred million, a little less than half of those being fallen. If these celestial beings were meant to be sustenance for Ialdabaoth and company, then Hyrcanus was just an insignificant poacher.
Later that evening, I forced myself to finish Hoch Himmel. I had Vasmatzidis translate the Enochian text and make sense of the Watchtowers and other diagrams.
Flowerbomb and Bonestorm did not get as far as my astute friend and I would—either because Bonestorm had read to the point of no recovery or because their grasp of Enochian left something to be desired. There had been developments in the language since their time, Vasmatzidis informed me.
John Hyrcanus had got hold of Shemyaza, the leader of the first two hundred fallen angels, or Watchers, who had gone in unto the daughters of men and begot a race of giants called the Nephilim. Genesis 6 says YHWH was furious with the besmirching effects the Watchers had on humanity, such as teaching the inhabitants of earth the art of warfare and cosmetics. So he decided to start from scratch by bringing about a flood. Conversely, the Nag Hammadi texts have the demiurge, Ialdabaoth, consulting with his archons, telling them that the humans must be destroyed, for they have gained knowledge that would make them their equals.
Hyrcanus says that Shemyaza, already fallen, would be glad to show him how to snag angels down from heaven, for both sustenance and inspiration. Those that offered up stories worthy of being published and promulgated would be spared. Those unable to do so would be taken to the darkest recesses of the basement, where they would be flogged; just like they were up in heaven, as the various choirs of seraphim, cherubim, and thrones sang “Holy Holy Holy,” while God, having been made to stand up from his throne, went to work on them with his celestial scourge.
It was this celestial turmoil that made them do things like grow dreadlocks and shoot up heroin, and lose themselves in godforsaken places like the murky subconscious of an insecure forty-five-year-old theology professor. In turn, the chains of Hyrcanus sought out these stray angels, wooed them with song, and hauled them down in a velocity as quick as that of the Holy Spirit ascending back up from having paid a speaker of tongues a visit.
In the Book of Job, Satan is the tempting agent of God, sent to test Job’s faith in the Lord. This concept concurs with the last chapter of Hoch Himmel. If the Book of Psalms is attributed to a God-inspired King David, then Hyrcanus will pen a dark counterpart thereof: the Maccabean will author a collection of evil psalms, a sort of shadow book of song concocted with the aid of Satan, or at least his minions, who have fallen out of favor with God simply for having been themselves, for having been what God made them.
The fundamental error of dualism is that it ignores everything between high and low—the excluded middle, where everything is gray and confusing. Most of us dwell there. Demons, after all, are nothing but angels consigned to trench digging.
The book of bad psalms, then, would be that Iad Bab Zna. It was referred to as the ‘cannibal book.’ I had no idea what that should mean. Vespasian had yet to call us, meaning he had not found it. I hoped it would be the end of the literary rat race we had engaged in. Whatever else published by John Hyrcanus that remained to be found would be his actual literary efforts.
Hyrcanus had not been malevolent; he had been merely human. Kudos to him if he was able to pull the wool over the eyes of the demiurge. Knowledge was never intrinsically bad, despite what any clergyman maintained. The reckless wielding of it may be another matter entirely. The serpent that wandered through the Garden of Eden was an agent of change. Change, because it is not welcome, and because it hurts while it happens, gets labeled as evil—until, of course, its consequences lead to rebirth. Lucifer means bearer of light; he illuminates and reveals the mysteries of the mystical experience, which the dull and exoteric choose to call evil.
The Old Testament god, jealous by his own admission, did not wish to grant Adam gnosis. And Lucifer, who passed knowledge on to man, would not genuflect unto his inferior, Adam. For that he was cast down.
If every word ever uttered in praise of the Lord became a celestial adjunct to the Book of Psalms, the same held true for John Hyrcanus’s Iad Bab Zna, to which the iniquities of the world become offshoots. Vespasian, our antiquarian bookseller, who remained in Boston, was to prove this.
[Vespasian]
God’s Power in Motion
It appeared that someone had broken into my shop and stolen three of my books. For a millisecond, I suspected a group of goth kids that shuffled by all the time, though they may have been too busy being morose to willingly take items that would have added virtually nothing to their personae: an old biography on George Washington; a Latin copy of Volume I of Plutarch’s Lives, of which I have another copy; a frontier novel called Trails of Destiny, by one Milton Thornbluff. I kept crunching the numbers on the loss and they came up the same: my insurance premium was greater than the value of those three books.
Due to a gentrification and counter-gentrification over the last twenty-five years, my book shop shared a strip mall face with a tattoo parlor, a comic-book shop, a poke takeout joint, a tarot reading salon, and an acupuncture clinic. I feared for the world that the type of person who would visit all six establishments already existed.
Last night, while I was locking up, the goth kids came walking by. Just two weeks ago, they had visited my shop and funneled together their savings to buy a mint copy of a second edition of one of Crowley's Equinox variety issues.
“Mr. Vespasian,” one shouted out to me. I walked toward them. The whiteness of their corpse paint defied the night. “Thanks for the book,” one of the girls said, having it tucked under her arm.
“You bought it. Thank you. Was it what you expected?”
The boy who had called out my name lifted up a black lace sleeve, and there on his pallid arm were five or so angelic seals from the Greater Key of Solomon. I chuckled. They smiled in unison. I actually appreciated their commitment to the scene; they burned calories by digging deeper than typical pop culture.
For the antiquarian bookseller, there are trails of print that cut strange and sometimes dangerous paths. To not tread them with one’s own safety in mind is bad business.
I had books that taught you how to cultivate a homunculus, or a ‘little man.’ I also had autographed first editions by Colette and André Breton. I had a hefty tome that teaches a man, provided he is one-armed and is the owner of a switchblade, how to perforate the astral planes in such a manner that they pancake onto each other, making celestial ascension all the easier. I had a seminal work on anti-math, a negation of calculus first published in Amsterdam in 1833, author unknown. I had wrapped in a polythene bag a certain Dispomaniac’s Diary, a pop-up book that supposedly came complete with a projectile of puke to be flung at the would-be reader upon opening.
I had up on my second floor, on the top shelf not far from the ceiling, a 5,000-page work of fiction titled Crunch, though I must confess that Volume XIII is missing, hence the drastic markdown in price. I had pornographic bamboo scrolls from the Han dynasty. I had in my possession, locked under glass case, a catalogue written by a Byzantine courtier, titled The Boy Servants of Empress Theodora, and What They Were Made to Do to One Another. I have under my other glass case a brittle almanac compiled by demons experienced in the possession of human beings, with a cover made of dried rose petals. I have never opened it, lest it fall apart, but a companion book also in my possession claimed that it consisted of chapter headings like “Supplications Unto the Father for Permission to Go Forth,” “Making Alliances With the Razor Wind,” and “Best Times of Day to Enter a Host, According to the Five Seasons.”
I had a slim volume in vellum that serves as the preface to seventeen different novels, all of which delta back into the same afterword, which serve as a disclaimer to the existence of the preface, thereby refuting its own existence. I had the obligatory collection of Illuminati updates crawling up through the centuries, though I couldn’t help but boast that I also have a lost work by Christian Rosenkreutz, called Purple Eagles, though it was in less than passable condition.
I also had four novels published by a John Hyrcanus II (1958-present). The first two were medieval romances dabbling in Arthurian legend. The third was about a Byronic count who corrupted his nubile niece by proposing for her a syllabus of reading material consisting exclusively of pornography. Each book was not to be read until he had succeeded in plucking a feather from a real angel, which would serve as her bookmark. The higher he made his way up the various orders, toward the Thrones, the baser she became from her reading. The fourth book by John Hyrcanus II was a pseudo-semi-autobiographical account of his meditations on his ancestor and namesake, John Hyrcanus I, author of Our Effervescent Menace, Iad Bab Zna, The Secrets of Carchemish, and other hermetic works.
There was not much in Hyrcanus II’s fourth book that would serve as anything new to my friends. They might have been interested to know that Hyrcanus I was evicted from his apartment because the owner of the building had been bought out by a bank that was going to take over the brownstone with a new branch. Hyrcanus had sealed his basement. For the good part of a decade preceding that eviction, he had dug and fortified a tunnel that stretched a good kilometer to the east. One day, after having stayed at a nearby hotel for months, Hyrcanus entered the park frequented by Flowerbomb and Bonestorm, winding down the concrete paths with not a thing in his hands.
He made his way to the north side of the park, scaled a slope, and popped open a trap door that stood hidden among five trees. He descended a wooden ladder and collapsed the entire tunnel with dynamite rigged up weeks in advance. A story in the following Thursday’s newspaper claimed the workers and clients of the new bank had felt a slight tremble for about three seconds, just after two in the afternoon.
Whatever happened to the angels held captive is anyone’s guess. They may have been eaten by the hierophant, or had proved mortal once plucked from their heavenly abode. A fellow antiquarian bookseller in the Midwest told me when I went searching for that Iad Bab Zna, the so-called ‘cannibal book,’ that he had in his possession another item once belonging to Hyrcanus. I asked what, and he pointed to a rusted, oversized birdcage hanging from the rafters of his high ceiling. He told me that the cage once held the crowning achievement of Hyrcanus the hunter: Rafael, mentioned in the apocryphal Book of Tobit, third archangel only to Gabriel and Michael. The bookseller asked me if I wanted to climb the stairs and go touch it; I told him that I was grateful for the book and would be on my way.
Whether any of these expensive tomes that I had in my possession were telling the truth was sometimes beside the point. Though I did like to fancy that, out of so many, at least a few of them did expose the misbehaviors of the universe we thought we knew so well. Those paper trails reminded me of that park in Berlin. I never saw it myself, but Marie and Vatmazidis provided enough details from their own visits. What with the incident of the meat-eating butterflies, the reading rituals of Flowerbomb and Bonestorm, and the hidden crypt of John Hyrcanus, that park in Germany was a veritable tour of oddity to be read by the feet that trod its concrete pathways.
Whether reading nature or print, the objective was to enjoy the journey—whether the destination be a towering structure inside of which await further mysteries, or an impregnable brick wall.
I had two things that I wished to keep from my curious friends, though I was afraid that, in the end, I would clue them in. I didn’t think I’d last long in refusing to allow them to read this that I here write, for example—or to read a handwritten Hyrcanus II vitriol found by the goth kids among the pages of their Crowley book, which gave a good idea of the author’s mental state.
The first thing was a suspicion that the complex structure of Hyrcanus I and the Berlin twins was an elaborate fabrication started by John Hyrcanus II, unto whom a dark mystification of an ancestral past would not be detrimental. Notoriety could mean more sales. He could have penned every single book involved himself, which in itself would be impressive, in that he managed to run prints in long-lost typefaces and place the texts in old-style bindings, complete with century-old copyrights and names of no-longer-extant publishing houses that do check out. Who knew? Maybe he had a printing press in his basement. He could have co-opted the past by devising his own works around texts that already existed—though by whom those texts were written, if not by their purported authors, would raise further questions.
The second thing I wish to keep from the curious eyes of my friends is the Iad Bab Zna. I had the only copy in the world. I could therefore control its effects and destiny. I had it up on the second floor, on the bottom shelf of the bookcase furthest from the window. Who knew what secret doors of conspiracy they would feel around for if they were to open the book and see that text appeared only on the right-side pages? They would say that the weakling nightmare mystic, called Bonestorm in some places, though he may have been Hyrcanus himself, posthumously penned his magnum opus while in Hell.
The Iad Bab Zna was published by The House of Myrrh, a short-lived publishing venture that folded in the early twentieth century. Vasmatzidis would kick open one of those doors to Overthere, duck his tall, gaunt frame into the doorway, offering a hand to help Marie over the threshold, and into Hell, where they would eavesdrop on demons plying their trade among the brimstone and charred flesh.
Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK. If you like what you just read, why not check out my brand-new novel? It’s an LA noir mystery with an alcoholic private detective, vegan crime bosses, guys who cut cocaine with borax, and AI Charles Manson.
Suicide by Jiu-Jitsu? Hmm. Tequila? Of course. Crushed Trachea Blues is live and livid. You in?
My mind is whirling with book fragments and apocryphal apocalypses.
This is a fabulous text that really could be expanded into an esoteric extravaganza like no other.