Mumbo Jumbo (23 page)

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Authors: Ishmael Reed

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BOOK: Mumbo Jumbo
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And so possessed, Osiris did his basic dances for many days until Thoth had them all down. A Book of Litanies to which people in places like Abydos in Upper Egypt could add their own variations.

Guides were initiated into the Book of Thoth, the 1st anthology written by the 1st choreographer.

Soon after, peace once again restored, Osiris became bored. Sailors had come to him with tales of much suffering and cannibalism in many parts of the world. Osiris announced that he was going to leave his wife Isis in charge of the affairs of Egypt which was a little thing because at that time as 1 historian wrote “The Egyptians had little difficulty in being good.” Set saw this as his chance. He yearned for the old days when he went out to tell the people to “Move that chariot to the side of the road, O.K. where’s your license,” you know, stuff like that. On the day Osiris left there was a big celebration down at the port with guides from all over Egypt doing the dances of the gods. With tons and tons of cereal, Osiris Thoth and a crew and a fleet of 34 papyri boats set sail. It was midsummer, the 10th day of July, that he left.

Osiris toured the world with his International Nile Root Orchestra, dancing agronomy and going from country to country with his band; and a choir directed by a young comer named Dionysus whom you don’t hear very much about in his Egyptian setting because the Egyptian writing is “royalty centered.” With Thoth he taught people to permit nature to speak and dance through them, for so many 1000s of eyes looked through Osiris that he became known as “the many-eyed.”

Just as fast as Osiris would teach these dances the people would mimic him and add their variations to fit their country and their clime. People began to welcome Osiris the Bull, the Seedman, and he became a familiar sight walking down the ramp or rather trucking down the ramp, his pet eagle “Jackie” perched on his shoulder, his faithful Birdman Thoth at his side, taking it all down. And people of all the many ports of the world where he traveled would say “Hey Seedman, what’s going down?”

It was on his 2nd trip to South America that the rumors reached him. Because Osiris was teaching people how to make wine and if they didn’t grow grapes, beer, Set was going about Egypt telling everybody that Osiris was a fraud and that he was traveling the world “drunk” and “fornicating,” disgracing the name of the Fatherland. Set issued a challenge which travelers brought to Osiris. He was saying that if Osiris was so smart and a Human Seed and all, a Germ, would he perform the feat of the Germ. Could he be planted in the Nile and then spring from the waters. Surely if he had learned the arts of the sagacious bearded Black men in Arabia Felix at the University of Nysa he could perform this act. He said if he would do this that he, Set, would go somewhere and sit down and never complain again if people danced and sang. He didn’t want to go down in history as a “party pooper.” The devil was even hitting on Isis because he had eyes for her but she would just look upon her brother with disgust, this man who was going around putting the bad breath on Osiris. Osiris at this time was in Teotihuacán in South America where people of all races and from all over the world had arrived to watch the space ships their astronomers predicted would land. They landed after Osiris made a side trip to Olmeca where he remained long enough to pose for a portrait which was done in terracotta. He attended a 2-week festival as guest of an Inca king. It was here that he practiced Set’s challenge for days at a time. It was easy. Osiris had developed such a fondness and attachment for Nature that people couldn’t tell them apart.

He had never performed this trick but he knew that Nature wouldn’t let him down for long. When Osiris and his band returned to Egypt the people turned out to greet him, dancing and being possessed as the guides led them through. They laughed as Isis blushed because they knew that that night he would give her his “rod of authority.”

Set and his followers watched from the windows. That isn’t a bad piece of tail, Set said commenting upon the attributes of his sister in the presence of Nephthys whom he treated like a dog, and called her a bitch a tomato a heifer a cow and all other words related to the farming he hated so.

That night Osiris and Isis made love and the result of this Union was the child Horus.

The next day was the day of the test. The people gathered at the mouth of the Nile as the legislators placed Osiris in the coffer and drove nails through it. Molten lead was used to keep it airtight. Osiris winked at the people before the lid was closed. The coffer was sunk into the water on October 24th.

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.

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.

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