Philip K. Dick and the Illuminati

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by Jim Keith

The most fascinating account I have encountered of a possible contact with an alien intelligence is the book VALIS by Philip K. Dick. Aspects of the book which seem to be little understood are symbols which point to an encounter with what we can accurately term the Illuminati. The messages in VALIS are coded, and the meanings encoded are Freemasonic, comprising in fact a relatively exhaustive recapitulation of Freemasonic lore and agenda.

VALIS is a semi-fictionalized account of “Horselover Fat,” Dick’s alter ego (the name formulated from word derivations of his name), and Dick’s meeting with what he takes to be God or at least a God, via the medium of a pink beam of light. Dick dubs this god VALIS (a Vast Active Living Intelligence System).

Dick’s vision came about when, in March of 1974 and suffering from two impacted wisdom teeth, he waited in his apartment in Anaheim, California for a pain killer prescription from a local pharmacy. When the delivery person from the pharmacy arrived at the door it was a young woman wearing a golden fish-emblem necklace. Dick reflects that: ‘‘For some reason I was hypnotized by the gleaming golden fish; I forgot my pain, forgot the medication, forgot why the girl was there. I just kept staring at the fish sign.

‘‘‘What does that mean?，I asked her.

“The girl touched the glimmering golden fish with her hand and said, ‘This is a sign worn by the early Christians.’ She then gave me the package of medication.

“In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis – a Greek word meaning, literally, ‘loss of forgetfiilness.’ I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate in cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.”

The sudden influx of knowledge had been caused by a pink beam of light which shot out of the necklace, apparently penetrating directly into Dick’s head and imparting a vast array of information, including knowledge of several languages which he hadn’t previously understood. Aside from feeling a sort of hyper-rationality, Dick sensed that he had been taken over by a superior mind which had memories dating back in excess of two thousand years. Later Dick was to hear troubling, grotesque messages coming out of his radio telling him to die, and to have an all-night display of graphic inner visions similar to thousands of abstract paintings seen in succession projected upon his mind’s eye. He also experienced a superimposition of the features of ancient Rome onto those of Califor¬nia in the 1970s, and formed the conviction that the present world was locked in a Black Iron Prison, a state of spiritual (and probably physical) entrapment.

From these experiences and others Dick evolved a complex body of speculation, from which he drew a trio of books including VALIS and a lengthy Exegesis of several thousand pages of handwritten notes about the nature of his contact with what he determined to be God.

Dick’s experiences with VALIS were not alto-gether benign. After his encounter (and a breakup with his wife) Dick attempted to kill himself, ending up in a mental ward instead.
What Dick believed to be the source of his contact is particularly interesting:

“‘Where did the plasmate [VALIS] originally come from?’
“After a pause Fat said, ‘From another star sys-tem.’
‘‘‘You wish to identify that star system?，
‘“Sirius,，Fat said.

In VALIS Dick relates the fairly well-known infor-mation on the Dogon tribe and their startling and un- explainably exact astronomical knowledge about the Sirius system (as described in The Sirius Mystery by Robert G.K. Temple 一possibly a pseudonym?). The Dogon, Dick says, ‘‘got their cosmogony and cosmol¬ogy directly from the three-eyed invaders who visited long ago. The three-eyed invaders are mute and deaf and telepathic, could not breathe our atmosphere, had the elongated misshapen skull of Ikhnaton and ema¬nated from a planet in the star-system Sirius. Although they had no hands, but had instead, pincer claws such as a crab has, they were great builders.”

Dick has Horselover Fat dreaming of these three- eyed creatures:

“They manifested themselves as cyborg entities: wrapped up in glass bubbles staggering under masses of technological gear…Soviet technicians could be seen, hurrying to repair malfunctions of the sophisticated technological communications apparatus enclosing the three-eyed people.”

He also believed that:
“Our world is still secretly ruled by the hidden race descended from Ikhnaton, and his knowledge is the information of the Macro-Mind itself…From Ikhnaton this knowledge passed to Moses, and from Moses to Elijah, the Immortal Man, who became Christ. But underneath all the names there is only one Immortal Man, and we are that man.”

“Real time ceased in 70 C.E. with the fall of the Temple at Jerusalem [i.e. the Temple of Solomon]. It began again in 1974. The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind. ‘The Empire never ended,’ but in 1974 a cypher was sent out as a signal that the Age of Iron was over; the cypher consisted of two words: KING FELIX, which refers to the Happy (or Rightful) King.

‘‘The two-word cypher signal KING FELIX was not intended for human beings but for the descendants of Ikhnaton, the three-eyed race which, in secret, ex¬ists with us.” Dick believed that “The person referred to by the two-word cypher KING FELIX is the fifth Savior who…VALIS had said, was either already born or would soon be.”

Out of the VALIS communications, “…Fat deduced that he had a mission, that the plasmate’s invasion of him represented its intention to employ him for its benign purposes.”
Of Ikhnaton’s three-eyed kin, Dick alter-ego Fat observes, “My God… These are the original builders…”, to which statement another character replies, “We have never stopped… We still build. We built this world, this space-time matrix.” These are approximately the same terms with which the Freemasons refer to themselves in such tomes as Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma. There is no mistaking the connection for anyone with the slightest familiarity with Masonic lore. And VALIS, we learn, employs the same mystical communication system as the Ma-sons: ‘‘…all its verbal information is stored as Cabala”.”

The Cabala (alternate spelling, Kabbalah) is an ancient form of Jewish mysticism which pervades Free¬masonry, top of pyramid to base.
Dick describes the method by which VALIS initiates secretly communicate with each other: “During a handshake, a motion with one finger of two intersecting arcs: swift expression of the fish symbol, which no one beyond the two persons involved could discern.” Unless, of course, you accidentally tried the handshake on a Freemason.

In his Exegesis Dick amplified on his beliefs:

“For the first time I have inferential evidence that a genuine secret fraternity of authentic Xtians exists,& has affected history… & possess supernatural powers & Immortality, due to direct links back to Christ so they are the true hidden church. The two historic interventions which I am sure of collate: the secret fraternity fights the Empire (Rome in all its manifestations) & promotes the evolution of man to higher levels by inner & outer regeneration. The 16th, 17th century illuminati are connected with this secret brotherhood …”

Whether the godlike VALIS was involved at all,what was communicated to Dick seems to be approximately what the Freemasons and their brethren want us to believe about their mission: that theirs is an ancient tradition resting on an immortal bloodline from the star Sirius, and that the fulfillment of their plans (including the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon, and the enthronement of a World King 一 their secret agenda hidden within their inner circle cant) is the only salvation for this soon-to-be One World.

Dick seems to have come to believe that VALIS took the form of a satellite, firing electronic beams of information down upon the Earth. Or perhaps crop circles? He has one of his characters say, “The satellite had control of them from the get-go. It could make them see what it wanted them to see…The satellite has occluded them, all of them. The whole fucking United States.”

There are other indications that the actual VALIS which Dick contacted may have come from another source than Sirius.

“In Fat’s [i.e. Dick’s] opinion his apartment had been saturated with high levels of radiation of some kind.” He theorized that “…the Rosicrucians [philosophic precursors of the Masons, with little if any connection to current groups of the same name] were telepathically beaming pictures at him, probably boosted by microrelay systems of an advanced order; but then, when Kandinsky paintings began to harass him, he recalled that the main art museum at Lenin specialized in just such nonobjective moderns,he decided that the Soviets were attempting telepathically to contact him.’，

Later Dick theoretically pinpoints the transmissions as originating from the schemes of a crippled rock musician named Mini:

“He [Mini] visited the Soviet Union one time; he said he wanted to see certain experiments they were conducting with microwave information transfer over long distances.” Fat himself comes to believe within the pages of VALIS that “All that was involved from the start… was advanced laser technology. Mini found a way to transmit information by laser beam, using human brains as transducers without the need for an electronic interface. The Russians can do the same thing. Microwaves can be used as well. In March 1974 I must have intercepted one of Mini’s transmis-sions by accident; it irradiated me.”

Actually, I really doubt that Dick felt the source, of his infernal “enlightenment” was a rock musician. It happens that information beam experiments of ex-actly Âe type that Dick speculated on were at about that time being conducted by both the CIA and the KGB.

CIA Director Richard Helms has described re-search taking place in the 1960s into “sophisticated approaches to Âe ‘coding, of information for transmit¬tal to population targets in the ‘battle for the minds of men’…” as well as “an approach integrating biologi¬cal, social and physical-mathematical research in at¬tempts… to control behavior•” He has described ‘*use of modern information theory, automata theory, and feedback concepts… for a technology for controlling behavior.” using information inputs as causative agents.’’

Anna Keel, in Full Disclosure magazine, writes that, “Due to [the CIA’s] Project Pandora, it is now known that applied biological (and other) frequencies can also be used as direct ‘information inputs’ (e.g., of feeling or emotion) and to reinforce brain rhythms associated with conditioning and information process¬ing. One way to get such a signal into a human may be through use of a high frequency carrier frequency. Results of research into information processing, un¬conscious processes, decision making, memory proc¬esses and evoked brain potentials would likely be ex¬ploited or integrated in an interdisciplinary system.

“For difficult subscribers…there are substances that have psychological or psychobiological effects ranging from subtle through devastating, and that cause increased susceptibility to conditioning. Some of these substances are similar to ones which are recog¬nized by neurotoxicologists or behavioral toxicologists as occupational hazards; some are variations of sub¬stances used experimentally in laboratories to produce selective damage in certain neuronal tracts. Many sub¬stances needn’t be injected or orally ingested, as they may be inhaled or applied with ‘skin transferral agents,’ i.e. chemicals like the popular industrial sol¬vent, dimethylsulphoxide (DMSO), which can, in fact, enhance the applied substance’s effect. For instance, some compounds cause damage that produces in¬creased sensitivity to stimulus, distraction (or flooding of thought associations), and enhance susceptibility to influence, i.e., a state where automatic parallel infor¬mation processing, which usually takes place outside of awareness, interferes with conscious or more inten-tional limited channel processing. While causing acute mental symptoms wouldn’t be the goal in groups, pro¬ducing mild distraction, an ego weakened blurring be¬tween the sense of ‘I’ and ‘you’，would enhance some kinds of conditioning and promote suggestibility; then, perhaps transmitted ‘thought associations, ‘the voice of God’，‘lucky advice, or whatever, can more easily get through and have an effect… [emphasis added] Con¬venient to the agencies involved in covert influence is that among primary syptoms of schizophrenia or men¬tal illness are ideas that one is being influenced by ‘transmissions’ (e.g. radio frequencies), ‘voices’ or even telepathy; unless complaints about covert psycho¬logical weapons are well organized, they would tend to be discounted as indicative of mental imbalance.”

Another approach which may have been used is the transmittal of “key concepts” to matters of which the subject is already conversant, creating a “realign- ment’’ of the subject’s entire sense of reality by the injection of just a few bits of information, images, or sentences. In Dick’s case this might have involved ac-cessing his study into religious symbolism and history. A fast acting hallucinogen and a beamed transmission of religious concepts might have made him very sus¬ceptible to the idea that, due to an unexplainable event of “gnosis”，he had tapped into the secrets of reality.

Dick describes a message broadcast “Out over the airwaves by one of the largest TV stations in the world, NBC’s Los Angeles outlet, reaching many thousands of children with this split-second informa-tion which would be processed by the right hemi-spheres of their brains; received and stored and per-haps decoded, below the threshold of consciousness where many things lay slumbering and stored•” He terms the message the ‘KING FELIX cypher’, and re-ports that, “The United States Army cryptographers studied it but couldn’t discern who it was intended for or what it meant•” Later he talks about a TV ad for a supermarket chain, “…on the screen the words FOOD KING appeared – and then they cut instantly, rushing their film along as fast as possible so as to squeeze in as many commercial messages as possible; what came next was a Felix the Cat cartoon…One moment FOOD KING appeared on the screen and then almost instantly the words – also in huge letters – FELIX THE CAT. There it had been, the juxtaposed cypher, and in the proper order: KING FELIX.””

I don’t know whether the KING FELIX cypher or the Food King/Felix the Cat messages were actually broadcast (other than in VALIS, that is), but discount-ing the possibility out-of-hand would be unwise. Cer-tainly similar messages have been sent over the air-waves, such as the Eye in the Triangle station break presented by CBS during 1992, or the subliminal im-age of the Statue of Liberty projected between the film frames of an ALF cartoon, as reported in TV Guide.

While the first example — the Eye in the Triangle —seems sinister enough, what of the second: the Statue of Liberty image? Surely that must have been slipped into the programming by some zealous right wing patriot skulking in the CBS editing room. So one would tend to believe, but check out what conspiracy researcher Norma Cox has to say in her Secrets news-letter on the subject of Lady Liberty:

“[This] is the statue of the Moon Goddess, Diana… This Queen of Heaven is also the Queen of Democracy… Diana’s right arm holds a great torch (symbolizing the Sun) high in the air. The left arm (right and left symbolic of male and female), grasps a tablet which bears the date of the Declaration of Inde-pendence. A crown with huge spikes, like sun rays, rests on her head (the crown covertly represents our satellite, the Moon)… Note the similarity between Juno, holding aloft a sword and Diana, whose statue, symbolizing Freedom, Equality and Worldwide Broth¬erhood, stands in New York harbor. Worshipped as Juno Lucina, the Bringer of Light, Illuminism’s [or Freemasonry ’s] adoration of this Moon goddess ranks only slightly below that of the god of the Sun who, in the case of Juno, is Jupiter (Zeus), her husband.”

Ultimately the VALIS Odyssey is difficult to inter¬pret with any absolute sense of certainty about what took place that day in March of 1974. It shines with points of illumination whose meaning remains elusive against the explanations of prosaic reality.

What we do know is that, for whatever reason, in whatever fashion, Philip Dick had almost the entire Illuminist-Freemasonic mythos thrust into his fore- brain, and that he struggled with it, trying to make sense of its symbolism, for the short period of time which remained of his life.

Either he was force-fed a massive injection of Freemasonic mythology via electronic beam, or in a moment of dreadful illumination — or perhaps hallu-cinogenic receptivity — Philip K. Dick saw the truth of the world.

This article is excerpted from the book Saucers of the Illuminati by Jim Keith, forthcoming from IllumiNet Press, P.O. Box 2808, Lilburn, GA 30226.

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