The seventies started almost two years late but Bishop James A. Pike missed the bus. The accused heretic-turned-New-Age-spiritualist died in the Judean desert in September 1969 after losing his way, unprepared, in a quest to walk the footsteps of Christ. To Joan Didion, writing in The White Album, he was ‘a man who moved through life believing that he was entitled to forget it and start over, to shed women when they became tedious and simply move on’.[1] He was- until he longer was- ‘everywhere at the right time’[2] and represented to Didion the social amnesia of the sixties: the tendency to forget. Pike was also, however, Philip K. Dick’s friend. An unusual pairing at first glance: a neurotic sci-fi visionary with an appetite for amphetamines and the celebrity Bishop of California who conducted a televised séance to contact his late son. Yet, Pike’s influence on Dick was integral to shaping an alternative method of hermeneutics: of explaining the world around us. This was an influence not simply on Philip K. Dick but on the decade as a whole. If Pike was the amnesia of the sixties, Dick became the paranoia of the seventies.
Down an unassuming street of pristine picket-fenced lawns in San Rafael, California and up the stone path of a detached bungalow sat 707 Hacienda Way. Dick came home on the morning of November 17th, 1971, to find his safe blown open, potentially with ‘powerful explosives’,[3] several important papers missing and the house ransacked. He filed a police report but, when San Rafael Police Department came round, he claimed they eyed him with a suspicion implying he had done it himself.[4] That November morning in San Rafael was to change Philip K. Dick forever, catalysing his anxieties and neuroses into an eventual interconnected web of theories about his own persecution and an exegesis of his entire body of work. These theories had Stanisław Lem exposed as a body of Soviet writers, ‘a total party functionary’[5] known to Dick as Solarcon-6; a Vast Active Living Intelligence System informing him that Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration should be encoded into his work;[6] and the two-word cipher, King Felix, unknowingly embedded in his 1974 novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.[7] Dick’s mind, it seems, used this break-in as justification for the conspiracies he already feared, stemming back to his run-in with the FBI agents who wanted him to inform on the Socialist Workers’ Party back in the early fifties.[8] The break-in- although never solved- was a colossal moment.
Paul Williams is a useful man here. The Crawdaddy founder wrote the most famous feature on the incident for a 1975 Rolling Stone article. In the article, Williams sketches seven potential theories which Dick, and others, had laid out. Among these are ‘Terra Linda minutemen’; the Black Panthers; a strange character known only as ‘Peter’ who was a potential informant looking for a street drug called ‘Mello Jello’, allegedly an experimental drug leaked from a US Army base; Dick himself; and, perhaps most strikingly, religious fanatics looking for a manuscript that Bishop James Pike had given to Dick.[9], [10] The legitimacy of any of these theories may forever be debated but they each reveal something about the political moment: the rise in right-wing militias in the Nixon era; post-1964 racial tensions (Hacienda Way was in a primarily Black neighbourhood and Dick was friends with several members of the Black Panther Party who were tangled up in the ongoing Angela Davis trial at the time);[11] the MK-Ultra program’s experiments with psychoactive substances; and, in the case of James Pike, the counterculture’s transition towards esoteric spiritualism and New Age religion.
This transition influenced Dick’s own construction of V.A.L.I.S., his Vast Active Living Intelligence System. The famous 2-3-74 incident was the inspiration for Dick’s V.A.L.I.S. Trilogy, the last of which is The Transmigration of Timothy Archer– Archer being a very thinly veiled reconstruction of Pike. Dick recalled how, on February 3rd, 1974, a young woman came to the door with deliveries of sodium pentothal for the compacted wisdom tooth he was recovering from.[12] The woman was wearing an ichthys, a clandestine symbol of early Christianity, which flung pink light into the ether. Dick then witnessed visions, understood conspiracies and felt enlightened about his contemporary moment, explaining these visions in his eight thousand page exegesis. The role 2-3-74 had on Dick’s subsequent writing has all been discussed at quite great length and, more often than not, both VALIS and the November 17th incident have been disregarded as symptoms of schizophrenia, the effects of Dick’s drug abuse and subsequent paranoia.[13] Any or all of these could be true, yet value lies in, however, and what has been neglected is, the role Pike’s spiritual influence had on Dick’s thinking after these events.
Emmanuel Carrère, in his Dick biography I Am Alive and You Are Dead, traces the pair’s relationship back to a dinner in Autumn of 1965- Dick was dating Nancy Hackett whose mother, Maren, was the (not-so) secret lover of Bishop Pike (then still married; then still the Episcopal Bishop of California).[14] After the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, Pike had become infatuated with Gnosticism and pulled Dick into its orbit, selling it as a branch of theology for the ‘punks’, the ‘dissidents’ of Christianity.[15] Of course, this resonated with Dick’s world view- his suspicion that all was not what it seemed which, at that time, had stayed in the rather- for Dick- conservative territory of alternate realities and allusions to LSD. Yet still, as Carrère says, he ‘wanted to believe there was a remedy’-[16] that remedy being Jesus Christ. This put Dick in contrast with Pike’s growing Gnosticism.
In his research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Pike was going back and forth to London, meeting one of the scholars of the Scrolls John Marco Allegro, writer of the controversial and highly disputed The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Allegro’s theory was that amanita muscaria mushrooms- fungi with psychoactive properties- grew around Qumran, where the Scrolls were found, at the dawn of early Christianity and that the Gospels were a cryptogram for protecting the mushrooms from the Romans: Jesus himself being a mushroom.[17] This theory has recently been popularised by podcast host Joe Rogan yet Allegro’s philological methods have been highly criticised and he has all but become an alienated, yet recently cultlike, figure in the theological world.[18] However, in the late sixties, before Sacred Mushroom had even been published, Pike and Dick were fascinated with the idea that early Christianity was a fertility cult for mushrooms. This venture into esotericism may have been integral for Dick to see that his two worlds- the man hailed as the intellectual Mad Hatter of the counterculture and the man curious about using spirituality to explain this world he found himself in- could coexist: they could form the same person. He could explain the world in part through Gnostic Christianity and in part through the array of psychedelic and esoteric thought he found himself surrounded with.
It was not simply his thinking that changed hereafter; his writing became much more overtly esoteric and spiritual. In the late 1960s, Dick wrote Ubik, Galactic Pot-Healer, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Maze of Death, all of which feature allusions to Gnosticism, characters who parallel Christ or themes of reality vs. perception. It was not- to be clear- Pike who introduced Dick to religion. Nor was it Pike who made Dick intellectually interested in Jesus Christ. However, perhaps it was Pike who opened Dick up to Christian esotericism. Pike’s obsession with the Gnostics opened up a new way for Dick to see spirituality. It allowed him to consider that that pink beam of light which came from the delivery woman’s ichthys in February 1974 may not just have been the hallucinations of a man recently medicated for a compacted wisdom tooth, but it was perhaps guiding him towards a truth about those early Christians Pike was so troubled by. In other words, if not for the friendship with Bishop Pike, Dick may not have viewed his own spirituality in such an ambiguated way; he would not have been able to unite his seemingly disparate world views into one which shaped the direction of spirituality, science fiction and paranoia for the following decade. This, no doubt, bred more delusions than revelations. Dick’s mental state became more and more concerning and, at times, his life was punctuated by suicide attempts until his death from a stroke in 1982.[19] Yet, by using spirituality and esotericism to explain the increasingly overwhelming and multitudinous realities Dick found himself in, he established a model of using the norms of the late sixties to offer an alternate mode of reasoning for the seventies.
Joan Didion famously said,
many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive travelled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.[20]
Yet time must have waited before moving past that tumultuous decade, for the break-in at Hacienda Way in November 1971 marked the beginning of the seventies. Although some years off the more complex theory of 2-3-74 and more than a decade away from the publication of Dick’s final novel, it announced the pervasive paranoia of the decade like a siren. It anticipated Watergate by half a year, realising the possibility that- even if Dick ransacked his own house and stole his own papers- the powers the American people once trusted- the government, the military, one’s own friends, God- were maybe out to get them and that this world they found themselves in, much like the one Philip K. Dick found himself in, needed another method of explanation.
By J. Bristow
[1] Joan Didion, The White Album (New York, NY: Fourth Estate, 2017), p.57.
[2] Didion, The White Album, p.57.
[3] Paul Williams, ‘The True Stories of Philip K. Dick’, Rolling Stone, 6 November 1975, p.45.
[4] Williams, ‘The True Stories of Philip K. Dick’, p.50.
[5] Jeet Heer, ‘Marxist Literary Critics are Following Me! How Philip K. Dick Betrayed His Academic Admirers to the FBI’, Lingua Franca, 11 (2001), 26-31.
[6] John O’Neill, When Philip K. Dick Reports You to the FBI: Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration, Webpage, Black Gate (2018), https://www.blackgate.com/2018/09/18/vintage-treasures-camp-concentration-by-thomas-m-disch/ [accessed 28 March 2024].
[7] Philip K. Dick, Valis (London: SF Masterworks, 2001), p.151.
[8] Emmanuel Carrère, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick, trans. Timothy Bent (London: Picador, 2005), p.43.
[9] Williams, ‘The True Stories of Philip K. Dick’, pp.50-91.
[10] Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (New York, NY: Carroll and Graf), p.272.
[11] Williams, ‘The True Stories of Philip K. Dick’, p.50.
[12] Simon Critchley, Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher, Part 1, Webpage, The New York Times, https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/philip-k-dick-sci-fi-philosopher-part-1/ [accessed 28 March 2024].
[13] Sutin, p.263.
[14] Carrère, p.196.
[15] Carrère, p.198.
[16] Carrère, p.198.
[17] Carrère, p.199.
[18] James C. Vanderkam and Peter Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance For Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity (London: T&T Clark, 2005), pp.323-325.
[19] Carrère, p.360.
[20] Didion, The White Album, p.47.
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