Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo

The brutish gods of Nile as fast,

Isis and Horus, and the dog Anubis hast.

Nor is Osiris seen

In Memphian grove, or Green

Trampling th’ unshowr’d Grass with lowings loud:

Nor can he be at rest

Within his sacred chest,

Naught but profoundest Hell can be his shroud;

In vain with Timbrel’d Anthems dark

The sable-stoled Sorcerers bear his worshipt ark.

This from his Hymn in “On the Morning of Christs Nativity,” which is nothing but a simple necktie party out to get Osiris’ goat. And those “Timbrel’d Anthems dark” is the music that old Jethro played, the music of the worshipers of those festivals where they had a ball. Boogieing. Expressing they selves. John Milton couldn’t stand that. Another Atonist; that’s why English professors like him, he’s like their amulet, keeping niggers out of their departments and stamping out Jes Grew before it invades their careers. It is interesting that he worked for Cromwell, a man who banned theater from England and was also a hero of Sigmund Freud. Well the mud-slingers kept up the attack on Osiris, a writer Bilious Styronicus even rewriting Osirian history in a book called the Confessions of the Black Bull God Osiris in which he justified Set’s murder of Osiris on the grounds that Osiris made “illicit” love to Isis who, he wrote, was Set’s wife. He was awarded the Atonists’ contemporary equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for this whopper. Others went about calling Osiris, Moloch, which translated means “nigger cow.”

Well the Atonist Church becomes stronger as the years pass but a strange thing happens. The rites associated with Osiris and other pagan gods continue underground. The only remedies the Church knew was to “beat the living shit out of them.” Throwing those possessed by demons into dungeons, burning it out of them. They killed millions of people this way but it didn’t put an end to the dance epidemics, heresies, witchcraft, infidels, and remnants of “pagan” religions. Well, if the Church had continued dealing with the foe in this manner, beating people up, raiding their apartments at 2:00 A.M., burning them at the stake, it would have wiped out a good portion of Europe’s population. The rest of the population was being depleted by physical plagues. Much later came another Atonist compromise, Sigmund Freud, who refined the rhetoric of the Church and eased the methods of dealing with the problem. Freud saved many lives which would have ordinarily been dealt with by the Church in an inhumane manner. But when Freud came to America and saw what was going down over here it was too much for even this man. Freud fainted.

After the exile of the Osirians, Dionysus, Thoth and other members of that fabled entourage, Set had problems. Every time he’d go out on tour his convoy was stoned. He had outlawed Dancing. Everything that Osiris stood for he attempted to banish so that he would cut this figure out of his life forever. Next he banished Music. And then as his mind deteriorated he banned Fucking.

And later even Life itself. He began to groove behind a real death cult that grew up about him. His legislators and their wives resembled a Billy Graham audience at Oakland Coliseum. The people began to grumble. There was talk of revolution. Talk that Horus had grown up in Koptos where Isis had gone into exile and was prepared to march on the old man. When the child was younger Set had dispatched an arch poisoner, but he failed because Isis was in possession of the Sacred Book and had developed some pretty strong garde.

Set decided that he would fasten his hold on the populace by performing a miracle the way Osiris used to. He had 1 of his bokors who practiced the art of the Petro Rites with the Left Hand to “come on up and give the folks a show.” Well, being insufficiently trained the boker didn’t know what he was doing; he only knew Dirty Work and raised the temperature of Egypt to over 50,000 degrees* resulting in something resembling an A-bomb explosion. Set and his followers fled to Heliopolis City of the Sun and decided to rule Egypt from there.

Set grew worse. The people began to return to their old ways, dancing and performing the rites as they remembered them, but without the Text and someone to tell them what to do — Osiris’ assistants now dispersed in West Africa, southern Europe, and elsewhere — it resulted in degeneration. Set began to develop a weird relationship with the Sun. If you can understand Los Angeles you can almost get the picture; imagine 2 or 3 Los Angeleses and you got Heliopolis. The legislators lay around in the Sun all day and developed a strange Body Building scene on the beach. Set decided that he would introduce a religion based upon his relationship to the Sun, and since he was a god then the Sun too would be a god. Of course this was nothing new because the Egyptians had worshiped the “heat, light, orbs, and rays,” had worshiped the Sun in a pantheistic manner. With Set, the Sun’s flaming disc eclipsed the rest of its parts.

He made the legislators serve as his writers, as Thoth had for Osiris. Maybe this would do it, he thought. And so the legislators went through the old texts and started rewriting things and doctoring them to make Set look good and Osiris look bad. By establishing his own religion based upon Aton (the Sun’s flaming disc) he felt he would overcome the nature religion of Osiris. He would be the reverse of Osiris who was associated with fertilization and spring; he would become Aton the “burner of growing things,” the Egyptian Jehovah who causes famine pestilence and earthquakes. Before he died he was in such a state that he believed that the Sun was dependent on him and thus he would walk around in circles all day thinking that when he walked the Sun made its course about the planet.

He really flipped. And he was to die watching the Bull God Apis rise all over the land. The Temples of Osiris and Isis were constructed in southern Europe, Nubia and the Sudan. It was becoming a world-wide religion. It was successful everywhere the remnant of the Osirian priesthood was; they knew what it was capable of and knew how to draw it out or make it depart. But in places where The Work wasn’t known it would spring up unexpectedly and cause disastrous results or be mistaken for entertainment or be practiced with the Left Hand. Try as they may to popularize Atonism, the Egyptians weren’t going for it. It became nothing but a club of old grumblers located in Heliopolis.

That was until Amenhotep 4 (about 1500 B.C.). He was a frail tall and weakling interior-decorator type who became an Atonist and changed his name to Akhnaton (devoted to Aton) while he spent sometime in Heliopolis hanging out on the beach the Atonists made popular, now a decadent, Joe Atlas scene.

When the fool moved the capital to Tel el Amarna they knew they had another Set on their hands and the Amon sect, the ones in charge of maintaining the Osirian mysteries, had the sucker offed. To make an uneasy pun they quit this 2nd Set.

Fortunately Tutankhamen came to power and the people were allowed to do their stuff, working out this way on the wall in the hall every which-a-way. That was until Thermuthis, the stubborn, self-indulgent daughter of a weak Pharaoh. 1 day while bathing she discovered a child in a basket and against the advice of Baria, an old HooDoo woman, brought the child into the palace. № 1 could tell her anything. Thermuthis had had her “been to”: her expatriate fling in Europe. Hadn’t she hung out in the cafés and listened to Greek, the language of “civilization”? Hadn’t she learned how to be vague? To flim flam? She looked down on her own people whom she joined her friends in mocking as they went about “practicing that superstitious mess.” The Osirian cult had lost its prestige and now did its stuff “way out on the outskirts of town.” There were rumors of dancing and “getting happy” and singing out here in the roadside temples. At Thermuthis’ request the Pharaoh would have them raided once in a while. But since the Osirians were giving the guard some “ice”—emeralds, diamonds, lapis lazuli — as soon as a priest, houngan and houngonikon or mambo or an elder and his sisters were arrested he was soon back on the street in circulation. Thermuthis and some of her Greek friends went down to these places one night and were appalled at the frankness of these rituals; the Pussies and Dicks on the walls as decoration, the low-down gut-bucket music. They were snobs. (The opening night crowd of charlatans at a racist N.Y. museum.) All day they sat around discussing such things as “If I stand in the water today am I the same person who stood there yesterday etc. etc.” you know. Jiving the citizens of Egypt.