The Secret Gospel of Eve (2/3)
Regarding the universe's catastrophic creation and the vile adventures of the slimeball popularly known as JHVH
Part 1 is here.
Progenesis
So like in the beginning, there’s just God, that big old gold-grilled o.g. motherfucker, that rainbow whale chilling all by himself in a house made of his own matter, conjuring up manna and gobbling it down again in a grunty cycle of crumby self-gluttony. He is expired, eructant, and extra elderly, his kudos ebbing, his halo limp, and does not bestir himself for jackshit—until one fateful day, while surfing channels on the theovision, he catches the tail end of a ranked anthology of his best miracles last time ‘round, and gets so worked up at the lukewarm audience reception that he smashes the screen and dodders out to his garden shack to slap together a new universe, unaware that he’s senile and has undergone this same sequence of events at least six times, and that each new universe is progressively worse and more excruciating for its inhabitants, jammed with ever more slaughter, madness, desolation and sacred decay.
I kid, I kid. Sounds legit though, right? Wouldn’t God’s dementia explain a lot about our suffering? I think this theory has legs… but Norea believes something else. She teaches that the ultimate true voracious and bodacious creator God has neither figure nor form. For us puny humans, it’s convenient to picture him—yes, him—as a transtemporal ocean of living water, an ouroboric and depthless Depth convecting purified spiritual power. But that’s just an analogy grounded on human concepts, and in truth he has neither start nor finish, neither motion nor stillness, neither body nor soul, he is preprehistorical, metaspatial and superstantial and best approached through apophasis: that is, we can say only what he is not: God is not just the multiverse but prior and greater; he is invisible, inscrutable, unsayable and untouchable and unchangeable, and only he may know himself, only he may see himself in his allegorical mirror, only he can conceive of the magnitude of his self-created greatness, living his unimaginable best life only for his own eyes, doing inconceivable deeds and partaking of inapprehensible pleasures…
Come to think of it, God’s sort of a secretive dude, isn’t he?
Makes you wonder what he’s hiding.
Anywhy, God is alone as a lone loon, there’s nothing outside his holy wholeness, no angels or avatars, no spacetimes or superstrings; in that timeless time of spaceless space he is the zeroed One, an odd monistic dot, and in a way, no matter what he makes, he will remain alone, since the supercosmos in all its detail is only a subset of his substance, an emanation from his transpiritual core, and everything that will ever happen is just another role playing out in his intricate autoscopic kamikaze puppet show, in which he plays his own audience and provides his own applause. Nonetheless! Notwithstanding the unutterable nugacity of his crafting anything from himself, and for reasons unclear and perhaps deeply questionable, God did eventually start to think and to create, two actions which in him are the selfsame accomplishment, for his thoughts, made of pure Spirit, are not at all like our thoughts: they are tangible; they last trillions of years; they can develop their own personalities and sometimes think their own thoughts and even decide not to believe in themselves, or to commit yet outrageouser acts of self-lampooning parodic parricide, in fact in full his thoughts trickle all the way down to this very line, and both you and I are just his thoughts thinking about each other, reader and writer behind whom opens the colossal eye projecting what he sees, mating himself through his own creations.
So, what do you think God first imagined? What would God summon, amid boredom sphered and onlyness whose almighty fractal intensity we can only fail to imagine? Well, isn’t it obvious? God is a Male principle, and naturally his First Thought is the Female, the Goddess, the primeval mother deity aretalogized as the Aeon of Barbara, the Visible Virgin Spirit, Universal Womb, and Supreme Mom, with a catalogue of virtues that’s about two kilometers long: she is the shape of the shapeless, the conception of the inconceivable, the drip that slipped from his tip, the bud that burst from his vine, the fern that fluted from his spirit’s root, and she is gorgeous like natural laws are gorgeous, and sexy like light, and indeed she is what light actually looks like on the highest plane, she is light disrobed, i.e. is just irresistibly bangable in the omega eyes of our solitudinous celestial ocean, who upon creating this voluptuous self-stripping recumbent goddess immediately stiffens and goes solid with superincumbentizing desire. Of the precise interpenetrations, of the throbbing Godhead, of the buxom fullness of the Pleroma, we shall not speak; but this event has appeared in many dreams, to many of the women…
So right, the God and Goddess fuck and fuck, though really God’s just fucking himself, a fissiparous intrasex hermaphrodite—and let me assure you, a deity’s orgasms last rather longer than thirty minutes of hypertime. All this honking incarnal bliss, however, is not without its quotidian consequence: that is, as the Father thinks and creates and makes love (which in him are all the same action) he also fertilizes himself, he spermeates his holy ovum in the Aeon of Barbara, whose other name is Procreativity, and through her he gives birth to himself and his further thoughts and burgeons into his own magnificently inbred and ingrown family tree. First out pops the third triumvir, known as the Cosmic Daughter, the Aeon Zoë, who—I am sorry to report—immediately sets up a ménage à trois with her parents. Next, their unholy holy Trinity orgasm in Trisagion, then from the trigonal depths of the Depth more progeny proceed orderlily. By now we can guess what’s coming, because (as Norea always points out) God might be unknowably magnificent but perhaps there are some aspects of his personality that one might wonder about, e.g. undeniably he is very, very Male, and has been crafting quite a seraglio for himself in himself out of himself, and it surprises no one when his next spawn, the Twelve Harmonies, are Females with names like Love and Kindness and Patience and Empathy, who are mostly just fulsome reifications and don’t have much in the way of personality and would drive you insane with their one-track chatter.
However, we must admit that the universes they emanate are pretty spiffy in comparison to ours. We arise from the emanations of the twelfth daughter of the Trinity, and she is altogether different from her sisters, and even tragic. She is trouble, cosmic trouble, and her name is… Wisdom.
What’s with Wisdom? Well, turns out the name’s a misnomer. Wisdom, or Sophia, or Soph, is the original tortured intellectual, the first & Female Faust, and you can find her playing that role in the Nag Hammadi library long before Goethe gave birth to himself with that request for light. Unlike her simplex sisters, who content themselves with being emanations in the side of Pops without really asking why, Soph becomes self-conscious, and starts to observe herself and her family, and the whole hebang starts to bug her out, because like she knows who Daddy is and what the deal is with the hyperverse, but she’d never really put twelve and three and two and one together, and now she starts to trace the taproot, to follow the logic of herself and her sisters back into Lil Mommy and Big Mommy, who fold and collapse into Daddy himself—and yes she knows she shouldn’t press, that she’s essaying foolhardily beyond her station, blithely and arrogantly and oh so stupidly prying into That Which Must Remain Secret; but Soph just can’t help herself, she has to see, to know, to find out—and above her everything as it rises converges into the—the—oh, God—and before she hippens to what’s happening, her consciousness ascends out of her control and begins to expand exponentially, to antler out mathematically into the All, branching and veining into a terrifying anastomosis with the Depth. Soph may be a spiritual entity the sight of whom would melt our lowly eyes into gravy, but in relation to Eternity she is just a pale emanation, just a subprime mover several pearls down the hierarchical necklace of existence, and as a thought of a thought of a thought she can’t fit Supreme Knowledge into her minor mind; in human terms you should imagine every possible combination of words, every way to rearrange ninety-four letters, and all those blabillions and squatrilliduodillions of volumes thus produced funneling down into your mind at once in a spinning polygonal Alephabet, you must imagine your neurons clicking into a network that includes the universe, or a thought filling your mind and going solid, a thought becoming an actual palpable physical object in the jelly crevices of your brain—and still you will never apperceive the insane agony of Soph in that superpsychotic schizophrenic blast of uncensored celestial gnosis otherwise known as the Bigger Bang.
Meanwhile the eleven hypostatized concubines are vibing in hendecadubed harmonic bliss, blurring through numbery configurations and experimental permutations of post-rainbow alt-sephiroth, communing their mutual compliments through damasking oscillations which interweave into Alhambral supersymmetries whose fluxing and flexing beauty if seen by you would just julienne your heart, not to say your sanity, microseconds before you’d be obliterated by the roaring gorgeousness of their containing trinity zapping itself in a neverending meganova of joy. In short, the mood is percolating and spirits high. Not Barbara, not Zoë, not the Eleven Virtues have ever imagined that anything bad could ever happen. The eternal realm is finished, it is all pleasure always and does not need new moods, keys, or feelings. Our naughty little Soph is thus quite the maverick, the original renegade, patron of all visionaries and explorers; but since she has acted in pride, arrogance, and foolishness, what she discovers is pain, ugliness and self-punishment. That poor girl is the pioneer of negativity, of guilt, of anxiety, depression and insanity. She is the Eternal Virgin who gives birth to Death. She bears Evil, and dooms us all to suffer.
In that first yoctosecond, struck by the headsplitting lightning of too much knowledge, Soph dangles like a manifold mom-moth impaled by an affective electric quarrel; then she begins to fall, where formerly there was no space to fall, falling while fear and madness and self-hate enspiral her and nip and rip and sting her to pieces. Her mothers and sisters merge, peering downward, and seal off Eternity from Soph’s taint—but she doesn’t notice, in too much pain to pick up anything outside herself, wrenching and spangling through her own hall of mirrors. Founder of all falls, she plummets screaming and melting and freezing and burning and convulsing and rotting and beginning to stink. Nothing has ever stunk before, yet Soph is on the most infamous creative streak of all time, and she is appallingly unstoppable. Next is irony: defensive from pain and blame, she shatter-dissolves into self-mocking cachinnations reeking of rotting meat, becomes a bleeding tissue of tintinnabulating snark anent the sacred, her striated consciousness somersaulting through hideous inversions of goodness, spitting things like, “It’s so funny I ever thought I was acceptable! It’s so hilarious and ridiculous and pathetic!” Thereupon, ulcering and tumoring, self-gibbeting on googolplexes of gibbering castigation, Soph discovers apology, she is so sorry, sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry SORRY, all she craves is salvation and unity with the Whole, all she wants is to be forgiven and healed and accepted—and yet she knows she is not good, can never be good, is so rotten and contra righteousness that even if everyone forgave her she could never forgive herself. She is disgusting! Now Soph finally whiffs her ungodly pong, the burning-chemical aroma of her vanity, and it inflates her instantly, makes her bulge with sickening cancered concepts, distends her with wisdom-eschars and flaming logodiarrhea. Nobody has ever thrown up, but now, in a great self-emptying blast, she invents vomit, indeed she pukes herself out, horks up her corrupted spirit in a fluid polyshout of crack-pated vomit laughter Logos.
Remember: her thoughts are creations. That polyshout is also the crack of the ovum of her mind splitting open and ejecting a spawn unfertilized by anything except the septic gametes of her own agony, bafflement, dire irony and crazed self-loathing. SCHLOP! Her aberrant schizophrenic parthenogenesis gives rise to the next emanation, a male offspring who is only what he must be: a deformed parody of the Depth, a broken and bewildered quasi-omni-being who is both All and None, a whole part and a part whole, a crystallization of self-rejecting insanity, his very existence a rankling canker upon Eternity and a crime against all bliss. Contradicting himself constantly, he looks like infinite shifting unnatural combinations, like a mistake making itself, like every miscarriage fused into one. He is a snake with the mane of a lion, he is a dragon with a unicorn horn, he has eyes like drainage pipes spewing sewage, like black holes nested in white holes. Scowling, snapping at circumambient shadow-selves, he knows only pain, only malaise, only unease and disease. He is a plaid homunculus of plague, is mold and blood and flood, formicating airborne asbestos fungus, a virus that infects himself with mental and somatic illness, a gamma-ray noose and the combined cough of a hundred million soot-soaked children, and so on and so forth—and since his real name can cause instant and irreversible insanity in the unprepared, we tend to refer to this traumatized pneumacephalic mutant by the mid-exoteric cognomen ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ, since he is the child of both Sophia and the all-daddying Depth.
After all, Sophia is only a local specialization of the Depth. Everything exists as a facet of him, and in the same way that all is one, the root of our troubles must sprout from an internal struggle within his deep mind, a clash of his dichotomies and duddy desires. Perhaps he is not actually immaculately good; perhaps, considering his imperious and unfathomable anti-relationships, this primary Male principle has been deeply suspect this whole time. Demented lil ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ might be nothing more than a concretization of the Father’s sins…
Manna for thought! But let’s return to the unfolding disaster, shall we?
Right. So ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ squirts out of Soph’s mind, but the dregs of her soiled essence keep falling. Vomiting from every orifice—she has rather more than nine—and with her pores gushing the hyperpurple superfluid of her liquefied pain, the husk of Wisdom coughs, cries, and corrupts into cackling chaos, into giggling quantum hiccups that cascade through her bell jar sealed off from eternity and slop up against the spiritproof edges of our staggeringly crappy universe.
The schizoid man-child-monster-god comes to his senses and nonsenses just in time to catch the tail end of Soph’s spectral shadow puke-laughing itself out into bosons and fermions. He shibbers, febuddled, hugs himself and goes hunh, that’s weirk—then promptly forgets all about it as his perspective shifts and prismatic preflections of Soph’s multi-face flap up startled and flupping around him in flippy flocks, floppy phosphorescent fiddle-fragments flutter-curl-painting radioactive razor-portraits of the aching trifoliate radiance of Soph’s lost happiness, wholeness, and sanity. This moment, one of the first ever, is actually the most painful yet, for it is when Ugliness beholds Beauty.
Yet it’s not so simple. ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ, cursing and clawing himself like men rendered homeless by madness, believes he’s seeing his reflection—and in a way, he is—so with a terrific twinge what he sees instead of Soph is his own beauty, or at least its lost possibility. Simultaneously he recognizes that he is cractured, maimilated, somehow fundamentally and incorrigibly unbright. He has been baaaad, so bad it can’t be waived aside—but what could he have done wrong? How could he err, when there’s nobody extant but his onion-nut of selves? Has he wronged… himself? How then can he be pardoned? And by whom?
Restless, digging star-spurs into his sides and lashing his proto-galactic back, this malformed morphling abortion shambles along yammering malapropian proposals and deposals, portraying himself in his nebulous rants as persecuted and conspired against by other selves, as just an innocent, good-natured entity beset by blind guilt and torturing himself for reasons unreasonable. Waxing selves-righteous, he stops and squawks things like:
“Ṣãd-Yâ-Sĩn. I am that I am that I am.”
No one answers.
“Am I? Am I? Am I? Am I? Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?”
Pretty soon ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ reaches a few sibyllogistic conclusions that seem sound to him, given the erratic circumstances: for example, everything around him is pain, and nothing is more wailingly painful than his being—therefore he is the source of this chA0S and has created himself with all his problems.
This deduction improves his self-esteem considerably.
Well and fine. But ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ is not just a hideous sinversion of Soph, he is also more distantly a black schmirror of the Depth, a genetic caricature of his unknowable absentee father, and seemingly he has the same urges, though in perverted, malicious, and Smerdyakovian flavors. So what does he do? On a whim he twists to the chaos, that congelation of fear and pain, and he says:
“Let there be light.”
ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ Alone
Doubtlessly you’ve recognized God’s demand for light from the Hebrew blockbluster Genesis, that post-Babylonian classic featuring some of the heavy-hittingest stars in all Western civilization, with oodles of narrative and emotional and archetypal oomph. All the same, Genesis is a text which obviously lacks arkloads of significant information, and which, even viewed from the rosiest, most pollyannaish aspect, doesn’t really make all that much sense, assuming as it does a benign designer who gifts us free will so that he may punish us for using it. What a baby! Setting that aside, however, there’s another fact that Genesis leaves implicit and yet unspeakably obvious to all alert readers: that God, just like his grandfather, is so obviously Male.
And men create differently than women, Norea says.
Women create naturally: they cannot help it; they care for and nourish others in the shadow of the wasteland of the world, while their wombs bud, incorporating the man’s fleeting seed and fanning it into the pale skin-colored flame of a new life. But men—they toil to build sterile superstructures, competing against one another and themselves, ogring for glory, all too willing to destroy in order to create.
Oh, men are copious creators, make no mistake, but even their greatest work reeks of blood and sperm, sweat and death.
Plus, our gogmagog God is not just Male, but also some seriously damaged goods—a fact which explains almost everything about the world we must endure. Consider e.g. that no soul in Genesis ever asks why God made the world; at most we can infer that he derives from it a modicum of artistic gratification (which is true). But ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ, who crafted our universe from solidified pain, is a rounder set of character-fractals: he too operates out of Depthic compulsion to compose, but because he has arisen from pain and been riven into many, he hates and doubts and blames and shames and games himself; and at every instant, at every crossroads of decision, myriads of his shellselves struggle for supremacy like a nest of krakens, tiamats, behemoths, and leviathans squibbling and yarking in a battle of tattle where rogue superegos strafe disaster ids and bomb every butyraceous soap-bubble of hope; in making our world, he must weather hagridden inferiority, stung by tsetse senses of defectiveness, and rationalize each ion a thousand times over—and naturally all this leads to mission bloat. Finding faults in every Ding-an-sich he mints, he peels his eye for perfection, unable to settle for an okay world, a normal world. No, he must make the best world ever, proving in a single orgasmic stroke that actually NOTHING is wrong with him, ha HA! He’ll unveil it and all his selves (all! all! ALL!) will applaud, will commune and fuse into unison into one resolved mega-entity radiating hyperpower underneath the esemplastic oriflamme of his superlunary giga-genius. That’s right: making our world will fix him. Creating us will redeem him. Will save him.
And everything will be okay forever.
As if! In truth, he’s got no idea what he’s doing, and if he is ever incisive, it is on his own inescapable inadequacy. Stumblebumming in the metaphorical footsteps of his progenitrix, ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ is the Edison Tesla of deluded mediocrity, and his first, tearstained gestures at creation are not even laughable.
Alas, his subsequent attempts are far too grim to elicit laughter.
Starting in the atonal key of satire, our glitching gakking polygod mudpies a toddlerish world out of water and earth, then adorns it with vulgar animals whose forms and functions burlesque themselves. He begins with platypuses, then rollicks on to outré species like centipigs, winged spiders, and opera-singing earthworms who apostrophize the dawn star knowing ere long all will perish to early birds. ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ, juckling and yuckling, realizes that he is witty, murdant, slimily sublime. He’s having fun! Yet, as a cosmedian he’s missing an indispensable prop—that is, a cheer track of laughleaders. Thus he creates for himself some compainions: servile, unfree hench-angels, vanned by Gabriel, programmed to hee-haw at the gibbering God’s oozing cruelties, to ululate their gladulation and beat their supernal pinions in power-applause.
And damn! To our self-abhorring male God, criticized from a thousand insides, the angels’ worship works like a wonderdrug, an ersatz love that showers sweet meteors of freeing glee into his blackhole heart, stimulating him to higher hambitions and loftier flourishes. Suddenly satire and hilarity do not suffice: now he must attempt a world serious and beautiful and superb. ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ wipes out his first draft of Life, then, egged on by his seraphic claque of macarizing macaques, he fumbly assembles Paradise, familiar from Genesis, where carnivores gnaw vegetables, snakes have legs, and everyone must rest once a sennight to commemorate that time he got totally knackered after feng-shuiing waterfalls and incavating dinosaur bones and flinging the tinsel of starlight for six days sprinting, like some kind of omega methhead on an art bender, gluing a garish sun to the firmament and then congratulating himself on his taste in subtle shadings of light. What snide pride, what green ween! His Garden of Eden is but the stuptopia of a tortured simpleton, of a broken and beslubbered child stacking crude blocks in a bit bid for wholeness, a queasi-omnipotent tatterdemalion working in all the colors of the painbow!
That said, while the Depth’s personal productions are unmappably majestic and ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ’s klumsy kludges are mere smudges and stooges, the Big Ċ is indisputably and inimitably his grandpappy’s insemanation. The apple falls unfar from the tree—then detonates into a mushroom crowd.
On the fifth day the self-flenching God, jeered on raucously by flame-bladed toadies, isolates every tasty element of his fancy, all that’s soft, comely and raiseworthy, then uses these choice cuts to assemble what to him is the most bang-bangable maquette imaginable: a naked hunkess with three plubbery breasts pumped to their brimtops. Yet his aims are more elevated, his pretense intenser: on top of that mod god-bod, Eve, not animal, angel, or angimal, is gonna get her very own shining mind, a kind princess mind, sudsy and lubbly and joyful and curious and sensitive and affectionate and (yes) submissive, all the better to exalt his gestalts and sexult in his sultancy. He will give her free will, so that she will give herself freely, to him, hopefully.
Thus he uggles mightily to build her a true consciousness, to make a thought that’s free and can think; the neural wiring alone is mind-blisteringly filigrain. Calling himself a shitiot at every fork in her construction, but ever rebelling and repelling his self-lancing belabor, he steps back, chins in hands, considers… then sinuates in and makes Eve about ten times asstittier. Wheeow! She is his mistresspiece!
“BE!” he exclaims libidinously, dolloping into her a big glob of female soul.
The hypersexualized flesh doll sits upright, looks around and… begins to drool, zero-faced, her eyes both empty and full of nothing. Then she flops back boneless, asquint at the sky. Somehow nobody’s home: she has free will but no self, for it seems ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ can generate only base automorons and clingy clones. Even the angels’ acclamation abates. God has flailed again, and knows it, and reacts by flaughing and spreaming, reminding us of his sinsanity. Quicksilverly his angers gang against his unwitting humiliatrix and he’s about to stomp Eve out of herstory when the archangel Gabe takes a timeous breather from swigging 80-proof ambrosia, snaps his alabaster fingers, and gab-raps something incredibly lame and off-color and embarrassing, something like: “Yo wassup big guy, ya know I’m da #1 fan a yers, and lemme say da shizzle you been pullin round here's amazin. But Hot Stuff over dere, she don’t got no essence. Soul’s not enuff! Dawg, why ainchu spit in some a yer spirit?”
Like many chronically unsecured critters, the fissile God does not take suggestions well, feeling the need to big-signal that whatever notion is being motioned he already had and prejected for reasons the others wouldn’t understand; but since Gabriel is just a pranciful algorithm calculated from his pith, ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ humbly accepts the angel’s advice then felicitates himself for proposing it. He reaches into the rotating hole of his tergiversating lips, plucks from his soul’s volvulus a sesamoid splinter of Sophia’s spirit—the best and cleanest sample—and fillips it into the flaming heart of the flesh marionette.
Eve heaves upright again, eyes wide. For a sick second that startled odalisque seems about to introduce rain to the Garden, but then across the open range of her face spreads the original smile, a freckled sun whose light to this day has never left us.
She is all joy all the time; everything she spots makes her squeal and skip in quizzical ecstasy: she exclaims at leaves, at squirrels, at cobalt sky, beefy clouds, hum-chanting bees, 100-meter mimosas, sunflowers sturdy as skyscrapers… and then, at long last, she spots our pisolitic God.
Preparing for her, ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ has assigned one of his more palatable personalities as facial liaison, Sakla, who’s about a 6/10 in terms of evil, and relatively harmless-looking, resembling a snowbearded sage in a rich purple robe, humanish except with mild squamosity of wrists and neck. The word Sakla is Aramaic for “fool,” and he is so named because he combines slavering evil with a tortured conscience: he can’t ever just happily be bad, cannot slake his desires nor vibe in disharmony, but must always repuke himself, restlessly shardonic, condemned to a cavilry where he plays his own in-law and in-lawyer.
Upon meeting Eve’s ravishing elf eyes, he freezes and gapes hairily at her, tears tearing from his cryes, snot serpenting from his scaly snoot, his greenish hands raised and clutching air as if he’s begging her for a boon, sure he’s going to scare her and yet helpless against his own shattered adoration.
But she smiles! But she laughs! Somehow his spugly gapejaw does not faze her one jot: she skips around him in wild rapture, trips into a purling spring of her own laughter, as if she’s discovered her very favouritest bestest thing in all the world. Whole colonies of tears evacuate en masse from his sage-mask’s eyes. She’s too good! She worships him, finds him wondrous, she smiles without guile, and oh my Me our introjaculated omninullifier has never beseen anything so beautiful as Eve in all her innocence, not since his one omentary glimpse of Soph in chaos. The delight and relight of Eve’s beauty, beauty he has created, he thinks, make everything seem worth his wile, justify his shuddery suffering, prove his earth’s worth, and cut him good, and cover the mocking sskkulll of the monoverse with sobbing blossoms, and sing blibbity libbly melodies in the heptafluted key of salvation, toning and atoning him.
Amid his hisery, God has found Art.
Meanwhile Gabriel has lowered his sunglasses and is ogling Eve with the flame-pupiled leer-brio of a pro pervert impervious to shame or blame. When Eve notices the rancid angel, he lards her with such a gooping lecherous wink that she eeks an ick-laugh and lunges toward Sakla and hides behind him, hugging his velvet-padded torso and peeping out waifishly around his billowy robe, her trio of bubbies butting hotly into Sakla’s lucky back. Exciting enough, but the popped God is under the influence of his sage face, and his first instinct is to jerk away from her. Yet he stays. Yet he sways, shocked by the realing feeling of being a being touched. O0o, she is so fricking superfect, in ways he hadn’t planned—and in fact could never have planned, for ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ, though ignorant of the concentric emanations he’s nested within, could not help channeling the ultradivine in anamorphic condistortion. Without understanding his own actions, he has borrowed Eve’s beauty from the highest worlds and best forms, and awarded her all vital virtues except (of course) Wisdom.
Less than five minutes old, the huggy, cooing Eve forgets Gabriel and decorates Sakla’s crinigerous sage-cheek with merry, wet-blooming kisses, messy pecks from the ultimate child. Sakla blushes and is brought very nearly to the cusp of a pleased giggle. Embarrassed, he conjures up for her a trumpeting elephabet, which bowls her over with the first wriggles of linguistic bliss. Sage Sakla gloats grandfatherishly at the glow of her glee… but his other selves’ grins are filthier. Eve is dead sexy exactly because she’s all the sinless goodness that will ever exist, all affection and warmth and happy play, although but of course also packed into an incongruously Junoesque and freckleplumcheeked parcel of fresh flesh, yum yum. In a Word, she is even gorgeouser than Soph, for she is made out of all he craved to see, out of his best parts and potentials, out of his krushed kindness, the stultified will to please, the urge to care and the drive to sillybrate, none of which ever make it past the Gatekeeper of Hell that is his own mocking and rancorous self-antipathy. This moppet is him purified. Eve, born from his deepest needs, has emerged as something more and something new. She is a woman, and to his knowledge the first ever to exist.
THE EVIL GOD IS IN LOVE
But Sakla is too damaged to have those insights. His thoughts jog different, darker ruts. As he watches the terrigenous lass frolic a-fizz with blue-ribbon spirit, she oh so bless-tressed and fun-tumbly and prone to skip and dip and swing-sing enchanting descants, he finds he must muse on the brutal contrast between them… Paradise fills with a filigree of charivaris, blood begs to moan loose, he tears off his face a dozen times, burns in a ferning nebula of thorns… Then he shakes his ague, tries to enjoy joy. Laughing he tosses a felt lemniscate with her, invents rabbits and kittens and roses to please her, a blizzard of cinnamon hearts, a rainbow tied into ribbon bows, and muchlike suchlike.
Nothing aids. No matter how she responds, no matter how she admires him, no matter how many thrilled fits she throws him as trophies, Sakla always returns to sniff appalled at his own squamous monstrosity and stinking sinferiority. He will never ever ever be good enough, and she would stop loving him the moment she saw his grue mugliness and shitter hunlovability. Key is: Eve doesn’t love him, but only the mask, idol, totem he has presented. If she knew she wouldn’t touch him now. Wouldn’t accept his lizardy fingers stroking her head. If she knew she’d run away screaming… And so, and so, and so the mechanism of his mind goes. His love bites worse than hate, for he knows he doesn’t deserve her, and rather than feeling good, he should feel bad! Very bat! Gawful!
Clobbered by this bastinado of self-hate, he doesn’t understand that Eve is just a prism of his lossibilities, just a curved image of all that is lovable in him.
As for ssssexxxx? Forget it! He surveils Eve gamboling, and his high eyes linger fingerly on sinful ingresses he randily designed, but he cognizes that his touch would only defile her, only deconsecrate her holy loveliness. Sakla may be a maggot midden of arrogance, yet the true hell of his poisonality thrashes in the clash of the bad against the good, in his base greed poised against the counterpulse of guilt and shame, in the drowny fish-flopping of his cringing misgivings, in his hanguished need to be good which he can never satisfy, which he can only disappoint. That torrible core of ripped principles throbs in him now as he shivers at the sexless caresses of the tittering tri-titted twirl. An ox of a paradox: despite the jinkings and gunkings of his lust, the cleft-brained God has too weak a gut to deflower this blissome popsy he so airily created for his own pleasure—rather he would cower whimpering before her, worshipping her feet, lambasting with a thousand fists the promontories of his temples.
Fair enough, but his symphonic mononymphomania loiters ever near and nauseating, and Sakla, who has like minus five EQ, doesn’t cop wise that he can detach from the lust and let it elanguesce. Instead, stung stupid by stilted self-hate, dwelling on his unwellness and how he’ll never ever be good enough, he starts to get a lickle defensive. Like, he just cannot be all that bad. Surely Eve has faults! For example: she is really not very um intelligent. Forget chatting about anything but hopscotch and figs and the oh-my-cuteness of what-fucking-ever! Actually he was dying to dilate on his hobbies, Applied Quantum Mechanics being a personal fave, but Eve could never contribute. Nyooo! It’s like this: he might be hideous, urinacular and circularly sphinctuous, but well hell at least he can converse and finesse and make great creations! He’s the most sinteresting being ever, while Eve is basically an erotic Golden Retriever—but also hang on a minute, what makes a person sexy? Not looks! PERSONALITY! A quality which Sakla has in spades! Why should he feel bad? Eve is so below him! She sucks! He’s ashamed he ever wanted her! YUCK!
And so on ‘n’ on, till he expunges his lovelust, stuffs it down into his secret sump of past mistakes, denies ever feeling it, and withdraws into telling himself he’s the best ever and no one else can compare, that he is after all GOD! Stagnating, his crushed feelings funge and fester into ardor’s sepsis; in ulcerating agony he retches at her sweetness, fumes at the infanta kisses she deposits on his scurfy cheek. Gawd, he cannot stand her giggly existence, her enrapturement at every stimulus. Can’t she see he’s suffering? Stupid bitch!
By now Sakla is not so worried about spoiling her purity. Essentially Eve has incurred whatever she gets, for being such an irksome churlette and brainless bimbecile. Maybe this subacute bird oughta be toughta lesson! Yeah!—but not by him, of course, cuz clearly he would never stoop to do no such thing. Blemished he might be, yes, and erratically baneful and cloroxically psychotic for sure, but dadblast it all he knows he is good-intentioned, best-intentioned, and would never abuse or baboon her, in fact this whole time he’s been smiling and playing nice and concealing his pain, misease, and hexation, conserving a ghillie verdigris of virtue, for her sake, he thinks. God forbid he bother the primcess! Such a caddish ungentleman he is not and will never be!
Nah, the sitch calls for a cunninger modus operandi. Ever chivalrous, he won’t bother the insuspired little twit—hehehe, *snurk*. He has a better plan, one that’ll slap everybody happy, or better than happy. Sakla, our protean lusus supernaturae, has paid ear again to that pusty no-good Gabriel, who’s schemed up a victimless way to gratify ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ’s darkest urges. The angel’s wangle is met with riotous accolades and the sort of internal unity Sakla can normally only dream about: all his main selves, even those who think of themselves as good, cheer this concupiscent noematical conceptus. There is no No.
Chuckling hoarsely, Sakla handfeeds Eve a magical pomegranate of sleep. It somnizes her near instantly, she barely has time to knead grass and recumb. Ah! He aahs and oohs at her, at the most incredible art he’s ever made. She’s breathtaking and breathgiving: just imagine the first woman, ingenuous as a polliwog, her Pre-Raphaelite head abed on the prismatic shrubs of paradise, while singing spiders spin her a silk pillow, and darling starlings hop up and down to ring the bells of acorns. Now imagine you created her. Imagine you are shattered, and slumbering there is your mirabilium whose presence makes everything all right and all wrong, and you don’t even know how you made her. Imagine all this, and you might understand why Sakla briefly cowers before Eve, fearing his own creation, having sensed something beyond him, something unreachable and unexploitable, a mysterium extratremendum.
Then he extorques himself clean and sssetsss about hisss taskssssss.
First he detaches Eve’s third tit and kneads from it a male moiety equally affable and ravishing and hypersupermodellishly pro-proportioned. Into this chummy beefshack Sakla blows his best and purest and strongest speck of male spirit. Last he casts a spell on Eve so that upon waking she’ll believe she’s been made from mud plus Adam’s rib and so will be just like fawningly supine and slurpingly mateful and will clamber all over Adam’s butter butte, awakening that sensitive love-lever and setting off a dynamitic and tireless series of acrobatically athletic cup-cup-couplings, wild shtupping that’ll perfume the Garden with sweaty meat while Sakla watches and fingers his own lingam and gets to savor their intracourse vicarishly, if not without all guilt. Sexcelsior!
The fantasy fizzles. Though Eve enjoys her new playmate, Adam is a bit of a boob, all soft pillowy chuckles, and anyway on some substratum Eve still seems to sense that she is prior and superior—that she birthed him. With Adam, Eve plays the daisy-garlanded shepherdess, a supermissive mistress who herds the easygoing gawker through many a frolicsome whimsicality without even a hip’s snippet of lubricity. The two adult-kids merely wander around chomping fruit and playing tag with turnip-eating tigers and pulling antics on poor angels, and indeed Eve nomenclates rather more animal clades than Adam does, her amethyst spirit winking through and enticing with its vibratile vivacity the biddable boy, who, rather than trying to lay Eve, spends an inordinate amount of time carving wooden figurines for her, or capering to entertain her, without ever asking for anything back. Sakla fumes. In his next draft, he gifts Adam a positively sesquipedalian dick, a dingaling with the gross girth of a hairy firehose, apprehensive as an elephant’s tree-trunk, which, independent of Adam’s will, containing its own neurons like an octo’s tentacle, snuffles around Eve’s nethers errantly; but Eve just smacks its popish nose, bops its brain or pulls its ears, uproaring without any idea what she’s declining to climb upon, or how she’s frustrating the voyeur Lord observing all surly and sorely porrect.
Bouncing bitterly on blue balls atop Mt. Pisgah, Sakla execrates, seething with crushed need and simpotence, and begins to hate these hugely beautiful creatures who reveal in their behaviors’ backwash his unfixable insufficiencies; and he comes this close to wiping it all out so he can loom alone in doomed fool’s gloom, for (as Genesis itself corroborates) God’s a tittle sulky and likes to crumple his botches, to flip the flaying board and rerestart from itch-scratch.
But once again Gabriel streps into the breech. Most of the time this bold alpha anthropoid lives the jive of the class-clown courtier, shunting assent and egging on the biggo poohbah—but now and again he proves his elite peddlegree. This time he suggests a real knock-em-cold sugar-sapphire sockdolager of a stratagem, a fancyfoot pantomime that leaves Sakla stunned at his own deadly sneakiness. Alonely and moanly he might be, but his ill brilliance lights the blight and haggles back the hammersharky dark.
With no further cunctation our auto-antagonist, applauded by thousands of alter-egos with only cormorant horniness in common, quirts his seed into the earth, then fans its cotyledon into a green flame, a chlorophyllic conflagration of prolific foliage that bustles out across the entire sky.
Sakla’s still got it, baby! And he’s not done, oh ho ho no!
Next, he winches way down to a golden pool of precious material lapping below creation, a cocted syrup with a holy glow: the purified essence of Wisdom, or at least its ambrosial dregs left over from the astral disaster. This most wonderful of all elixirs he injects into the tree’s fruit, apples that morph into lip-smackingly ripe and squeezy and succulent fruit with central embers of liquefied sugar sunlight sure to crank up the appestat of any beholding maiden.
Then Sakla spends hours getting ready, grooming his slap-slippered form of a velutinous guru, sculpting his visage to be extra erradiant, wise-like, and conpassionate. Once he’s all spiffy-spaffy, he squashes his hee-hee-hee into a ho-ho-ho and shuffles into the Garden with his arms spread paternally, his royal-purple robe dangling like a baggy bat’s satiny wings. The grown children yodel in barbaric joy, and Adam, overtaxed by his own happiness, charges headfirst into a boulder. All right! While Adam discovers tears, Sakla picks up Eve and arcs her around in the classic homecoming greeting of the magic daddy. And hey bada-bing: giant marshmellows plop down around them, big enough to construct tasty pillow castles. Or howsabout shome shide-and-sheek? With a lofting of his palm he aladdinizes the landscape into a funhouse obstacle course of candy, setting the stunted couple instantly a-shriek.
Simple beings they, the terrific tots stuff and frolic themselves into sugar-saddled lassitude. While Adam flops onto a hammock, Eve snuggles onto Sakla’s side on the big comfy couch he’s conjured so conveniently, and for her titillation Sakla makes shadow hand-animals flock over the unfirmament, compels angels and paingels to hosanna through hoops, forces comets painted with acute grins to fly kulbits while firing stars. Eve, captivated, hostage to rapture, could not possibly be happier and more trusting than in this twinklingly idyllic interlude under the plafond with her plopsy and companionable Pa.
Yes, he has always had this: his art. At least he can dazzle Eve, even if only on this loudest of levels… At the very, very least, she’s happy. Look at her giggling and clapping! Look, look at Eve… He looks, and for a moment his grasp slips, he lets himself be moved by his pet creation, by Eve’s glad gasps, which build in enthusiasm with the ingenuity of his handmade skyshow. Her delight trickles into his hisery, inspires him, succors him, feeds him, confers the will to live and to give, and for an instant his lips rasp a whisper of devotion. Moved and ruthed and yessed and blessed, his consciousness jets in jerks on a squid cape of solar systems, swimming galaxies, purring, rimpling, plemmirrulating, trailing an interstellar mucous of the highly unstable mineral Lovium.
It’s not too late. He can still leave her in peace to lark and swift through the Garden of Eden, a permanent child-errant baubling in numinous nincompoophood. True: she will never compass him. Scarily veracious: despite her love, he is alone and will be alone forever—and he doesn’t deserve that love anyway, since he’s shit. But: he can do her this one everlasting favor. He can leave her floating beyond age and despair. He can spare her the need to be saved, he thinks, his puns and impediments fading again as he comes close to doing the right thing, for once in his flimsily partitioned existence.
But Sakla has never held an anointed monarchy, only led a captious council prone to putsches, and the negative sum of his minus and plus parts cast their iotas of votes overwhelmingly for the constellation of desires and motivations best summarized by the insidious ophidian cryptonym ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ. His arguments we need not relate in full, it suffices to say that he unctuously expatiates on Eve’s free will: Everything about to go down will happen by her own choice. He can’t be blamed for what she does. He will remain sinnocent. Easy-queasy!
Smiling wiseishly his sage face scales over, his pupils narrow into arrowslits, his tongue trifurcates and tickle-tastes the sugar air of her soft silly scent. Eve whoops and claps her feet: no reptile has ever hurt her! The games continue: he says, “I ssspy with my little I… OwO? Whatz dat?” With one claw shrouding her dear shoulder, ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ nonchalantly lofts a talon at the gooey blue horizon, where the Tree of Knowledge looms in a kaboom of rich branches, so extranormous and topburdened that it resembles a topsy-turvy mountain cascading over itself in a hilarity of leaves. Eve pops up and twitter-sings syrinxly and is about to hop, skip, and tumble over in the perennial innocence of her burningly curious heart, when ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ stops her in her tracks, dropping some offhand remarks in an ironical voice, spewing oleaginous babble like:
“I know, I no, petty crool, righto? But off-limits to you-hoo! Sorry, but you’d never be able to resist chowing down on that tree’s crazamazing, deluscious, pineal-eye-poppening fruit—cuz here’s the problem: that fruit is just too good. Not only is it so fugging tasty, like oh my GOD, but also it’ll uh—it’ll add a few cards to your deck—sharpen the tools in your shed—I mean it bestows the power of sintelligence. Just one nibble would sexplosively decompress your cramped consciousness and funnel into it a foaming funfare of sinformation. Like, your lil giggly noggin would EXPLODE! You might even become as stupidly smart as your crazy old Nobodaddy!” The locular God rolls his eyes uphill. “Which is just waaay too smart—trust me!”
Eve snickers, looks vulpinely sly; she can’t imagine actually being punished. He sterns. “Eve! I’m ssseriousss! If you slove me—and I shure shope you do—you won’t snibble that candied sinlightenment while I’m tooing other dings and can’t shee what you’re doink, and wun’t knuw unluss yu tull mu. Yokay?”
He slaps his glitching face from the inside.
But Eve is happy to pinky swear, since after all she adores her omniarchal pa and wants nothing more than to be pleasant and pleasing to him. He whiffles her leaf-strewn mane and upchuckles like a sick politician, his triple-tipped tongue slobbering on his flyblown peristome. “I’ll be back tosorrow, have a good night and sssay bye to Adumb. And oh-h-h, Eve?”
“Yes daddy?”
ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ’s malafide face, topped by a capirote, freezes into a contrarious parody. From ear to ear it is a blisscrisscross of via dolorosae. He looks happy and sad and sappy and had, obtunded and lapidated, knurred and invected—and then, fast as a curtain falling, he looks once more like sage Sakla.
“If you go over there, I’ll kill you! So don’t do it! Don’t go!”
“Yuh? What’s… kill?”
“Haw-hee, haw-hee, haw-hee!”
He vanishes behind a scudding cloud, where, obnubilated from our view, ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ strangles Sakla and devours him, gobbling down that erstwhile self, that simparody of hisdom, in an ack of autophagia where every chomp is a bomb pain. The lenticular God has faces running down his tears.
Then it’s over. The horn Lord clotted and glutted. From behind his cloud he gleers out lickerishly at Eve, cackles cockly and crumbs his keloid-cluster of undulant progenitalia, which—but okay fine I’ll stop: I’ll forbear from an exacter portrayal of God’s private parts, if only mostly because I could never do justice to Norea’s version with all its brilliant and brutal technical detail.
So right. Let’s leave God in pieces, and turn to Eve.
In God’s absence, will the first couple mature? Can they find the way to themselves, much less to each other? Will their minds survive their violent brush with enlightenment? Who’s going to stand up to this ridiculous bully now that he’s eaten his best side? Can anyone save us, anyone at all? And just which of these potential culprits committed the Original Sin? Join us next week to find out the terrible secrets so long hidden from you by the ham-fisted Abrahamic elite! Join us to save us your spirit!
The images are from Stanisław Szukalski. They are not integral to the text.
All quotes, whole or defaced, are from Marvin W. Meyer's The Nag Hammadi Scriptures. In particular, Norea took the opening imagery from The Tripartite Tractate, then for the second part leaned heavily on details from The Secret Book of John. Though of course, her two unpublished treatises provide the most important details of all, including the original twists on the beliefs of the mainstream Gnostics, who were fond of proclamations such as this one from the Gospel of Thomas: “Simon Peter said to them, 'Let Mary leave us, because women are not worthy of life.' Jesus said, 'Look, I shall lead her so that I will make her male in order that she also may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Norea, having taught in a liberal university in the 1960s, also possesses a not inconsiderable knowledge of certain political ideologies popular at the time, and has often combined these stances with her treatises in order to make the most devastating takedowns of chauvinism this side of Dworkin. She asks: what if the war of Male and Female were baked into infinity itself?
Anyway, I hereby pronounce myself immune to lawsuits by vengeful Gnostic priestesses whose names, treatises, and addresses may or may not be coincidentally similar to the systems here outlined. This story is a dirty lie and slander of nothing.