Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo

That night the legislators came to the Nile and raised Osiris. They lifted the lid and saw Osiris lying there smiling in a deep death-like slumber, a trick he had learned “down home” among the heavies in the Sudan and Ethiopia.

They mutilated him and made believe that he was torn into 14 parts by fish, and from that day forward fish have been considered evil in Egypt. On October 31st the people came and saw the mutilated corpse, parts of which had been washed up on the shore, and the open coffer lying not far away.

Set stood there in triumph. There goes your Seedman eaten by fish, let’s cut out all this farming jazz and go back to eating each other. Come here you, Set said in his John Wayne voice, swaggering toward a luscious woman, a succulent dish standing in the crowd.

Thoth knew this to be a lie. He had seen Osiris perform this act during their sojourn in South America. Among the Navaho Indians in North America, at Aztec festivals, around West African peoples who were known to repel an invader by “playing whistles and beating on drums,” the news had circulated through many tribes that Osiris could perform this trick.

Thoth spoke up, demanding an autopsy, an investigation of Osiris’ death. Set had Thoth arrested for his proposal. Thoth was taken into custody but escaped through the help of some of the guards who were still loyal to the memory of Osiris. Before going into exile, he ran to Isis and left his sacred Book in her hands; and then he went away. Some say he went into exile in the hills where he wrote magical books under a pseudonym which survived until the “civilized” Romans burned the library at Alexandria.

Isis began to walk about Egypt, screaming lamentations for her husband. At the moment of his triumph, Set began to hear unsettling stories. Osiris had been seen in the land. He had been seen wherever Isis had left a backbone, or a toe or an arm belonging to her dead husband. The people were beginning to call Osiris the Bull the Human-Seed as well, and wherever they found a Bull with a scarab under his tongue, an eagle on his back and a square on his forehead they began to celebrate Osiris’ “living Spirit.” When he heard of this, old Set ordered the murder of the Bulls and being a particularly mean cuss, ordered that they be tortured 1st. (This led to the sport that the American writer Ernest Hemingway took such delight in.) But wherever the Black Bull God Apis appeared and was murdered another Bull would take his place. Well this was driving Set up the walls. This was October 31st, the night that people went about wearing masks, being whatever they felt like in honor of the man whom Nature spoke through. Set sent out warrants for the Osirian guides who had learned The Work and they fled. Some of them fled to Down Home where they matched their knowledge with the necromancers in Ifé, Nigeria. Dionysus traveled to Greece where the Dance “spread like wildfire” although Homer doesn’t mention it. He nevertheless helped himself to the stories Dionysus brought concerning Osiris, the man who traveled through the world and returned home to a wife under siege by conspirators. Dionysus kept the faith of his school chum and home boy. (Dionysus can be read as “God from Nysa.”) When the King of Thebes forbade the feeding of Dionysus, the angry loa influenced the young people to revolt. When Proteus, King of Tiryns, closed a temple dedicated to Dionysus known as “the man of the black goatskin” a contemporary writer described the ensuing choreomania:

They rushed out of doors and in frenzied dance raged over the countryside, singing weird songs, tearing their garments, unable to stop dancing.

Dionysus taught the Greeks the Osirian Art which lasted until the Atonists in the late 4th century B.C. convinced the Emperor Constantine to co-sign for the Cross. Dionysus taught the Greek guides to identify the Nature that spoke through mankind. The Work. Listen to Hippocrates:

If they imitate a goat, or grind their teeth, or if their right side be convulsed, they say that the mother of the gods is the cause, but if they speak in a sharper and more intense tone they resemble this state to a horse and say Poseidon [Neptune] is the cause.

NOTICE

RICHARD, CHUCK AND JOHNNY WISH TO REMIND CALIFORNIA’S ROCK FANS THAT THE STAGE IS VIRTUALLY INDESTRUCTIBLE. ONE MAY ATTEND WITH NO FEAR OF MORTAL INJURY, SHOULD HE OR SHE FEEL THE CALL TO COME FORTH AND DECLARE HIS OR HER SOUL TO THE GLORY OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL.

The Greeks established temples to these Egyptian-derived mysteries where people would go out of their heads so that the gods could take them over. (About the 10th century the Atonist priests will call this diabolical possession or corrupt the Greek word daimon so as to have evil connotations. Freud, the later Atonist [according to 1 biographer, a big fan of Moses, Cromwell and other militarists], is to term this “hysteria.”)

The Greek and Roman masses were crazy about the Egyptian mysteries and celebrated them in the Temples of Osiris and Isis, much to the chagrin of the satirist Lucian, who in Dialogues of the Gods derided the animal figures associated with the royal couple; but the religions were too popular for criticism to affect anything and the people danced and sang and were touched by the Spirits under the careful watching of trained priests of Dionysus the choir master. They, the Greeks, would never have thought about calling these Hosts schizophrenics or catatonics, which were after all their own words. Paranoia and the like were clinical Atonist words invented by people who having lost the knowledge of what they were doing just kinda threw these terms out there. These rites lasted on up to A.D. 378 when the Atonists made havoc upon the temples of their opponents’ “pagan” systems. Prior to their sacking, jealous politicians had burned the temples in 58, 50 and 48 B.C. Formerly the people could go to the temple and get away from it all through the guidance of a priest; now they were tortured and any Osirian behavior was seen as an escape from reality and such. All of the gods who were rivals of the 1 they called Jehovah (the cover-up for the Flaming Disc God) were driven underground and the many were reduced to 1; even Muhammad, 1 of Jehovah’s allies in the priesthood, is depicted in a church carving as the devil.

The 4th century A.D. was a crucial period for both Atonism and the mystery Dionysus had brought from Egypt. Atonist scholars up to their old yellow journalism of the Daily Heliopolitan decided to depict Osiris as Pluto, a castrated god of the underworld (remember Taurus?) but they kept on Isis as Virgin Mary. In fact in many African locales the passion for Isis was transferred to the Atonists’ Mary. This occurred in Africa and southern Europe. Mary was the mother of the Atonist compromise Jesus Christ. They made him do everything that Osiris does, sow like a farmer, be a fisherman among men but he is still a bokor, a sorcerer, an early Faust. Lazarus was a zombie! He was a sorcerer, a Maharishi yoga type who went around the countryside performing tricks. The quality of which the great man Julian the Apostate Emperor (called Apostate because he wanted in the 4th century, to revive the religions Dionysus brought to Greece) was to comment

…Yet Jesus, who won over the least worthy of you, has been known by name for but little more than three hundred years: and during his lifetime he accomplished nothing worth hearing of, unless anyone thinks that to heal crooked and blind men and to exorcise those who were possessed by evil demons in the villages of Bethsaida and Bethany can be classed as a mighty achievement.*

Julian knew the difference between a houngan and bokor, having surrounded himself with the solidest post-Osirian priests of his day. And Julian fed the loas publicly, to the ridicule and scorn of his countrymen who had been converted to Christianity. On February 4, A.D. 362, he proclaimed religious freedom in the empire and ordered the pagan temples restored. But the Atonists were too powerful for Julian. He was assassinated on a Persian battlefield 12:00 midnight June 26, 363. He failed in his gallant attempt to reverse the Atonist challenge. He foresaw the Bad News it was going to bring to the world. John Milton, Atonist apologist extraordinary himself, saw the coming of the minor geek and sorcerer Jesus Christ as a way of ending the cult of Osiris and Isis forever.