Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo

He showed the Book to Hugues de Payens, their leader, who was feeling heady because it was shortly after his trip to the Church Council of Troyes where he had won for the Templars immunity from excommunication. They began to translate the hieroglyphics but the Book was not going to be their whore any more and gave them the worst of itself. It was saving all of its love and Rada for when it united with its dance and music. What they derived from the Book were strange ceremonies which were called the “Rule of the Temple”… a rule scholars claim has been lost. They practiced these Petro rites in secret and this is when their fortunes reversed. The great Black Sultan of Egypt and Syria named Saladin also known as Salāh-al-Dīn-Yūsuf ibn-Ayyūb with an army of 70,000 men drove them from the “Holy Land” in 1187. Hinckle Von Vampton fled with the sacred Book.

This was only the beginning of their downfall. In alliance with kings of Europe they attempted to regain Jerusalem in 1244 but this time they were massacred by Mongols by 1248; and in 1250 the Arabs once more defeated them. In 1303 they lost their function completely because by this time there was no “Holy Land” to protect, all of it having again come under control of the Muslims.

Philip 4 of France, a king the Templars had saved from a Paris mob, despised the Templars. Some say he was inept and jealous because they wouldn’t admit him to the Order: he wasn’t strong enough to pass the qualifications. They were also moneylenders and when he hit on them for a loan they refused. Finally he approached their then leader Jacques de Molay with a plan. They would launch another Crusade in alliance with their rivals the Hospitalers and this time it would be directed by the Prince of France. Philip thought this a clever way of disposing of their wealth. When Jacques de Molay refused the offer, Philip got his pope, Clement, a “sick man,” to bring them to trial. In 1307 Pope Clement ordered the kings of Europe to arrest all Templars within their territories. Philip arrested de Molay on the charge of practicing strange rites of a blasphemous nature which involved worship of the Black god Baphomet. The Templars were merely exercising their rites according to the way the Book had deceived them. 37 Knights Templar were immediately burned at the stake in Paris and 50,000 were rounded up throughout Europe and slain. The 2 leaders were executed and died with curses on their lips concerning the king and pope. Hinckle got away. The Templars went underground. A corrupt form of their rites continued as Masonry, which you will notice also traces its origin to the Temple of Solomon.* Wherever Hinckle traveled in Europe he was hidden by sympathizers from generation to generation. This went on for 100s of years until he came to America in the 1890s and all of the symptoms of Jes Grew were here so they began to rise as they sensed a potential coming together with the Text. Years passed. The Wallflower Order, a secret society of enforcers established when the Atonists triumphed in the West, was hot on his trail; scouts were thinning out all over America looking for the Templar librarian. The Wallflower Order was closing in on Hinckle because, since the Book of Thoth was lying fallow, wherever Hinckle traveled J. G. would rear its head. That was when Hinckle Von Vampton got the bright idea. He selected 14 J.G.C.s and paid them a monthly salary just to send the Text around to each other in a chain, each time changing the covering so that the authorities wouldn’t get suspicious. The conditions were that they not cultivate friendship with 1 another.

So it went around in circles, this private express. Hinckle Von Vampton got a job with the New York Sun and it was then that he sent out the feeler to the Wallflower Order in the shape of that headline exposing their Holy War in Haiti after their mouthpieces in America had been informed that the story would not be played up. Of course the Wallflower Order investigated to find out who had the goods on them and it turned out to be Hinckle. 1st they ransacked his apartment because they wanted the Book more than they wanted his corpse. They felt that by burning the Book they would sterilize the Jes Grew forever. He made a deal with them to the effect that his Order would have to be in charge of the Crusade against Jes Grew in order for him to return the Book, if indeed this is what Jes Grew craved. Well 1 of the 14 people on the list, we don’t know who, gave the book to Abdul. The Text became stationary as Abdul began to translate The Work and this is when Jes Grew brought it on up and started to move toward Manhattan.

With its Text Jes Grew would become Rada instead of the Petro of Moses and the Templars. Well, when Hinckle wrote letters to the 14 asking them to return the Text (they accepted the money thinking that he was just another eccentric millionaire, the kind who leaves all his money to his cat) he learned through his columnist W. W. Jefferson that Abdul was in possession of a Book whose description matched the one he had sent out. He approached Abdul for the Book and when Abdul resisted he murdered him. Abdul left behind an epigram on American-Egyptian Cotton

Stringy lumpy; Bales dancing

underneath this center lies

the Bird.

We deciphered this to mean that the Book was buried beneath the center of the Cotton Club, the nightclub where Abdul had been arrested for loitering and for attacking the flappers. The night he was arrested he apparently had just finished hiding the sacred Book there. He translated the Book before he died and a copy of his translation was in the hands of a publisher who rejected the Book but the original treasure was safe underneath the Cotton Club. When we dug up the box containing the Book we found the Templars’ seal on the top and we traced it to Hinckle Von Vampton as the scout the Wallflower Order of the Atonist Path had assigned to create a Talking Android; the 2nd phase of the Wallflower plan, that of creating a “spokesman” who would furtively work to prepare the New Negro to resist Jes Grew and not catch it. It was the seal on the box of the Book that connected us with Hinckle Von Vampton and if you will just look he is wearing it right now.

The guests turn to Hinckle, who manages a weak smile, his face red, clutching the pendant he wears about his neck: 2 knights riding a horse, a symbol of the Templars’ poverty vow. When we heard that tonight he was scheduled to introduce “the only Negro poet with any sense,” it all became clear and we rushed right over.

Studies of the magic and ritual of Africa have…established with some certainty that all systems for the disturbance of consciousness practised by the African Negro are derived from ancient Egypt.

Witchcraft (1965) — Pennethorne Hughes

Is such an etymology to be trusted? One of the fragments of myth still to be found in Haiti makes Guede the first dead man to be saved by Legba, who called his soul up from beneath the waters. If the baton wielded today by the Guedes is the counterpart of Osiris’ severed penis, which fathered Horus upon Isis, the matter may have something in it…

The Invisibles: Voodoo Gods in Haiti— Francis Huxley

* Introduction to African Civilizations— John G. Jackson, with introduction by John Henrik Clarke.

* Book of Moses: 8, 9, and 10th — Henri Gamache.

* Concise History of Freemasonry — Calvin I. Kephart

A HUSH FALLS OVER the gathering. The Hostess, having been given smelling salts, comes around but when she sees LaBas, Herman and T Malice and the 6 Python men standing next to them she faints again and has to be taken by 7 men into the Louis 14th “Sun King” bedroom upstairs.

Hinckle Von Vampton and Hubert “Safecracker” Gould are sweating profusely. The Guianese art critic Hank Rollings finally speaks up.