Let's Blog VALIS! Part 6 of 14.

The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes

And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,

And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,

And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom

In which Horselover Fat is given some good Jewish advice

Maurice isn’t a name that means very much: just ‘dark, swarthy’ and doesn’t seem to be very Jewish, but it is apparently a very common morphing of ‘Moshe’ into a less Jewish-sounding name adopted in the days when that was important. And in this chapter Maurice is loudly, simply, and with authority - not like the scribes and Pharisees, but like Moses on Sinai – directing Fat back to Torah.

His first commandment: “Go smoke dope and ball some broad that’s got big tits, not one who’s dying” echoes the first commandment of the 613 commandments of Torah, as listed by Moses Maimonides: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.”

And he calls out Fat’s gnostic bullshit.  Incredulous that Fat believes all this gnostic crap, he tells him what to do. “I want you to go home and study the Bible. I want you to read Genesis over twice; you hear me? Two times. Carefully. And I want you to write an outline of the main ideas and events in it, in descending order of importance[1]. And when you show up here next week I want to see that list.”

We are not told if Fat actually does this or not.

Those guys who carry the oil-smeared one have been reading ‘The First Book of Enoch’. It is not very good, they think. It is a fairly repetitive mish-mash that does not expand on Genesis 6:1-4 as interestingly as they had hoped. It may also have been the inspiration for “The Phantom Menace”, since another word for Nephilim, the monstrous beings begotten by the fallen Angels upon human women, is Anakim. Mind you, Darth Vader was not 3000 ells high, but that would have been difficult to harmonise with the original trilogy.

In the second half of the chapter Sherri complains about all the people she works with and all the other people she knows.

[1]: According to Moses Maimonides’ list of the 613 commandments by order of importance, the most important one in Genesis is ‘circumcise your boy children on the eighth day’.