Friday, June 02, 2006
THE BLASPHEMY OF ROBERT ANTON WILSON
"The Horrow on Howth Hill" by Pope Robert Anton Wilson
contribution to the SubGenius anthology Three-Fisted Tales of "Bob"
The story is presented as a conversation between two inebriated friends.
The subject of the first part of this story is the size of a certain portion of anatomy of King Kong. He then moves into comparing his speculation to the size of a certain portion of the anatomy of various gods. The longer the part, the greater the god. In Wilson's estimation Osiris ranks pretty near the top:
Osiris is portrayed in Egyptian art as having about three times as much [anatomical feature] as one would expect in a man, or god, of his size. In Greece, Hermes was usually depicted with a [anatomical feature] almost the size of his body--why, statues of him look almost like a bureau with the middle drawer pulled all the way out. ...
Yahweh, the Jewish God who became the Christian God, always claimed to be bigger and better than any of the other Near Eastern gods who competed with him. He would have to be endowed with [anatomical feature] that would make Osiris or Dionysus, say, look almost impotent by comparison. ...
"Yahweh himself isn't much bigger than Kong. He walks around Eden at twilight without smashing down the trees or causing any notable wreckage of the sort Godzilla would leave in his wake. He shows his backside to Moses and nobody in Greece or even Babylon sees that cosmic spectacle. I would say he couldn't be more than forty or fifty feet tall. In bio-logic, he should have about four to five feet. In mytho-logic, if he were any ordinary fertility god like Hermes or Finn, he would have six times that or around twenty-four to thirty feet. As the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, etc., he would double our expectations at least. He should have around fifty feet. In passion, he would be symmetrical, fifty feet high and fifty wide in the middle, sort of like a giant F with the top stroke missing."...
Catholicism remains the last survivor of the ithyphallic cults of the ancient Mediterranean. Not only must one have a [anatomical feature] to be a priest, he was saying, but the Pope continues to insist on that because the inner order within the church--I think he meant the Knights of Malta--still holds the antediluvian credo about the biggest [anatomical feature] containing the greatest Animal Magnetism, or magic, or indwelling divinity, or something like that. He proposed a totally new, and shocking, theory as to how Popes are selected by the College of Cardinals and why these proceedings are always hidden from the public behind locked doors and no details are ever revealed. Evidently, he was seriously suggesting that, just as it requires a [anatomical feature] to turn a piece of bread into the body of a dead Jew, it requires the biggest [anatomical feature] on the planet to anoint others and pass on the power to perform this astounding alchemical transformation.
References to Lovecraft's Cthulhu are sprinkled throughout the story.
Such a story is not entirely unexpected from a former editor of "Playboy" Magazine. The fact that it may be funny to some doesn't make it any less offensive. Wilson is such a towering figure on the occult landscape that anyone who explores Cthulhu on the web is bound to run into him, and potentially to run into this story which is one of the entries in the Robert Anton Wilson Online Library.
I doubt if even Wilson would be foolish enough to write such a story about Mohammed, but the Christian God is blasphemed casually with no consequences. Tells me a lot about the character of the people who promote Cthulhu.
