Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo

Well, during the intermission Moses went back stage and his Atonist supporters, ass kissers who traveled with him everywhere he went since his return to Egypt, were drinking beer and told Moses how good he was and began to pat him on the back. Moses knew something was wrong. He was told by 1 of the ushers that fights were breaking out in the stadium and that they would have to call for the Army if the violence got out of control.

Don’t worry, Moses said, I will next do the songs and dances I learned from The Work, the sacred Book, and that way the people will rejoice and love me and young girls will follow me everywhere.

Well, Moses went on stage and began gyrating his hips and singing the words of the Book of Thoth, and a strange thing happened. The ears of the people began to bleed. Some of them charged the stage and tried to get at Moses but the Atonist thugs beat them back. 1 Osirian priest could no longer take it. He and several others knew what Moses had learned and knew how it was using him.

Moses couldn’t understand. Why hadn’t the rites and the words and the dances congealed? Why hadn’t the contagion broken out? Why weren’t people talking in strange tongues and having happy convulsions?

Moses examined his guitar. Something was wrong. But then the Osirians rose from the rows they occupied and began blowing their whistles and the beautiful sounds filled the air. They didn’t know The Work that Moses knew, but in his hands it wasn’t doing him any good anyway. The people began to relax. Removed instruments of their own they had smuggled into the park and began playing them along with the Osirians who were marching toward the bandstand playing the instruments. The people began to dance. Moses couldn’t stand it.

Arrest those men, he said as the men came closer to where he stood and began to mount the steps. 1 Osirian — a Black Osirian, a crocodile wrestler known by his friends as “The Hunter”—lunged for Moses but the Atonist thugs surrounded him, stabbing him and making him bleed and then stomping him while he was down until he lay on the floor dead. Seeing this, the whole audience charged the bandstand and Moses was whisked away by some Atonists. People began stoning the royal chariots as they raced for refuge in the Palace. Looting and the killing of Atonists went on all night.

The people surrounded the Palace. Some of them leaped over the barricades set up by the Pharaoh’s militia. They hurled missiles at the residence; inside, Moses’ mother Thermuthis sobbed softly. She cried the way they did in Greece, civilized, dignified, not the piercing wailing from the viscera associated with the mourning Isis who walked all over Egypt sharing her pathos with her people after her husband’s murder. (Thermuthis cried the way 1 of my relatives from Alabama described as “crying proper.”—I.R.) The Greek friends were trying to reach the boats as quickly as they could—2 of these loafers, brothers, thought of supporting themselves by selling an idea of a frieze dealing with the murder of “The Hunter” at the hands of the Atonist thugs.

Moses thought that he could calm the multitude by going out to the balcony and “reasoning” with the people (his mother’s sophist friends had gotten to his head too), warning them that he would not truck any rowdiness and that horrible punishments were in store for those who persisted in this unruliness.

Ladies and gentlemen of Egypt. I will unleash the Holocaust upon you this time if you persist in this action. We must have sanity and logic during these times of change and upheaval.

A rock busted the cat’s lip.

In anger Moses flung his rod to the ground where it immediately transformed into a snake.

The people laughed. They called him mountebank and sorcerer, fakir in a pejorative sense of the Petro Asson, and other names associated with cheap charlatans who would raise the dead for 15 dollars and change.

The crowd began pushing into the Palace. Moses then ran back into the apartment where his mother was sobbing softly, touching her soft smooth flabby face with a handkerchief.

He berated her: For heaven’s sake will you cut that out. I’m trying to concentrate.

Then the idea hit him. Moses ran into his apartment and removed a leaf from the Book Isis had given him. He returned to the balcony where below the crowds had taken trees and were now using them to pound on the Palace gate. Moses uttered The Work aloud. 1st there was silence. Then the people turned toward the Nile and they saw a huge mushroom cloud arise.

A few minutes later, screaming of the most terrible kind came from that direction. The crowd dispersed, trampling 1 another as they rushed for the shelter of their homes. This was a turning point in the Book’s history.

The practice of the Left Hand had now arisen to the level of that of the Right Hand. As the distinguished musicologist Fats Waller was to comment later: “Formerly the right hand was given all the work and the left hand shifted for itself, thumping out a plain octave or common chord foundation; now it’s more evenly divided and the left hand has to know its stuff.”

Moses’ explosion made even Set’s magicians look small. The next day fish and other river creatures dead and dying washed up on the shores of the Nile.

The VooDoo tradition instructs that Moses learned the secrets of VooDoo from Jethro and taught them to his followers. H. P. Blavatsky concurs: “The fraternity of Free Masons was founded in Egypt and Moses communicated the secret teaching to Israelites, Jesus to the Apostles and thence it found its way to the Knights Templar.” But this doesn’t explain why he received the Petro Asson instead of the Rada. My theory is that it was due to the fact that he had approached Isis at Koptos during the wrong time of the Moon and stirred her malevolent aspects thus learning this side of the Book. Others say that shortly afterward Moses and his Atonist followers went into exile.*

When Jethro heard of the incidents occurring in the North, the nuclear attack and the outraged mob, he told Zipporah. She took it well. She was glad that Jethro hadn’t, in a fit of rage, sent the white leprosy to Thermuthis, Moses’ mother. Jethro was a good man and once you begin the Petro work it’s hard to quit.

Many years later when Moses returned home 1 day from “communicating with his God” he found his children dancing before the despised Bull God Apis, the animal which carries the living spirit of Osiris. Moses heard the “heathen sounds”* (timbrel’d anthems dark, boogie, jazz, down-home music, funk, gutbucket) he hadn’t heard since the old days in Egypt. Moses grabbed the awful Book from his sons and daughters who were enjoying themselves, dancing their tails off. Moses wanted to get rid of the Book, having sworn off it, but was afraid to burn it. He feared The Work’s power. So instead he hid it in a tabernacle where it was lost and became known as 1 of the “lost Books of Moses.”

Centuries went by until 1118 when the Knights Templar built their headquarters on the site of Solomon’s Temple. The organization was an imitation of Hasan-ibn-al-Sabbah’s Assassins which had similar offices: Grand Masters, Grand Priors, Priors, Knights, Esquires, Lay Brothers, and the Templars even adopted the Muslim colors so as to distinguish themselves from their rivals the Teutonics and the Hospitalers. They were a bunch of filthy ruffians, thugs and excommunicated “holy sinners” who wore their clothes until they rotted off their backs; maybe not so bad when you consider that this was a time when the King of France only changed his clothes 3 times a year. They were bully boys who justified their existence by harassing “sacriligers adulterers and others in the name of the Cross.” (As usual they left themselves to be the judges of who was guilty of these vaguely defined crimes.) Their stock rose and when they saved the 2nd Crusade from annihilation they were in a position to write their own ticket. Hinckle Von Vampton was the Templar librarian. One night while stacking books in the basement of the library he came upon a secret passageway which led down some concrete steps into an ancient room. It was here he came upon the Book of Thoth, the sacred Work Isis had given to Moses. The Work of the Black Birdman, an assistant to Osiris. (If anyone thinks this is “mystifying the past” kindly check out your local bird book and you will find the sacred Ibis’ Ornithological name to be Threskiornis aethiopicus.)