Phantasms can be almost anything nonordinary, and anything you see that is nonordinary is probably a phantasm. If, for example, you come across the body of a hippopotamus, dead and bristling with arrows, in the aisle of a hardware store, this is undoubtedly a phantasm. If you come across a galvanized steel bathtub at the side of the road or a boxful of broken Super Chief china outside your door, these are very probably phantasms. Phantasms are distinguished by being insubstantial (more insubstantial than the rest of the Afterlife), boring, and inutile in the extreme. Where do they come from? Folk wisdom says as much about their origin as anyone cares to know: “The road comes from below, phantasms from above.”6
They soon disappear.
Wooden dog phantasm at the Crystal Tongue Gate—a typical example of the phenomenon; note the telltale absence of shadow. Anomalous images like the face peering through the gate are welcome accidents that, to aficionados, mark the work of good or lucky photographers; they become manifest only in photographs and are never visible to the naked eye. (illustration credits 4.2)
1 See De Selby O’Brien, The Life and Afterlife of De Selby O’Brien. De Selby’s analysis of the road in his chapter, “The Road and How I Rode My Bicycle Up and Down It to Eternity and Returned to Tell the Tale but Forgot It Before I Could Write It Down,” is by far the most detailed of the various accounts of how one can spend one’s Afterlife on the road. Written as an old-fashioned picaresque, De Selby recounts his encounters with the Singing Ray, the Wings of Fiery Desires, the Astral Light and Its Minions, the Hole in the Road that Leads to the Other Side of the Other Side, and so on, all adventures that no one, of course, has verified. Of the many source books he cites, none of them will be found in our bibliography, because they simply do not exist. However, before one entirely discredits De Selby, one should remember that his book is far more richly and realistically documented, than, say, Hatchjaw’s The Road’s Wrinkles. Alas, we cannot question De Selby about his adventures because shortly after completing his book, a wind storm left his brain in a shambles and he now believes himself a bicycle.
2 Ms. Zend began her life as a child of parents unknown and later became Cincinnati’s most respected chiropractor. After coming to the aid of a Colombian diplomat (she foiled a mugging outside a so-called convenience store), she married him and moved south, where she wrote eighty-nine juvenile novels about a Colombian parrot called Parrot; the Parrot series was popular at the turn of the twentieth century, but (for reasons that can only be explained by the whimsicality of the gods of literature) was never translated from her native language, the Zend. After her husband’s death before a firing squad, she returned to her native country where she gained some local fame with her “1001” series of paintings of one thousand and one spiral galaxies. She died in a Chicago tenement at the age of one hundred, a virtual recluse completely forgotten by her once-adoring public.
3 It should be noted, however, that Francis Bacon and all other candidates proposed as authors of the Shakespearean corpus are similarly playless.
4 A notable exception was Vincent van Gogh, who carried his painting frenzy into the Afterlife with scarcely a pause to collect materials, and in the same isolation he practiced in life. One day in the early 1960s (it is said) a newcomer interrupted him at work to say that he, the newcomer, had recently acquired a van Gogh at auction for more than two million dollars. The artist (who sold only one painting in his entire lifetime) regarded the speaker with a piercing stare, laid down his tools, and walked away, never to return. It is a fact that the cache of van Goghs left behind amounted to more than seventeen thousand canvases.
5 Not always an easy chore. A library (which is to say, a collection of books, musical scores, or manuscripts) may be found in the corner of a lean-to, in a building that looks like a warehouse, or in an abandoned “diner” parked at the side of the road. They are usually unmarked and unattended.
6 In other words, the road is “solid,” while phantasms are as insubstantial as the air.
CHAPTER 5
RELIGIONS
OF THE AFTERLIFE
People who in life troubled themselves to lead upright and abstemious lives on account of their religious beliefs often feel disgruntled when they cross over and discover that the lot of the pious in the Afterlife differs not a whit from that of the most debased sinner. They feel cheated and are likely to renounce religion as a sham and a trick. Indeed, religions that in life promised “pie in the sky when you die” find few adherents in the Afterlife. Religions that were primarily racial or ethnic or social in nature have likewise not fared well.1
Nonetheless, religion is a powerful and enduring force among the dead.2 The concerns and focus of Afterlife religions are different, naturally, from those of their earthly counterparts; none are morally prescriptive; none claim to be based on divine revelation or to have been divinely founded; none go in for proselytizing in any systematic way. Here there is nothing comparable to, say, the five pillars of Islam, the five observances of Judaism, the four yogas of Hinduism, the three vows of Buddhism, or the faith of Christianity. No one banters on about Atman/Brahman, Yahweh, Buddha, Allah, the Holy Trinity.3 Salvation from the consequences of sin, original or otherwise, is no longer an issue. Charity, purity, and correctness of ritual observance are seldom pursued as ends in themselves. The Golden Rule, which in life could be pointed to as an underlying principle that all religions could affirm, has little practical meaning in the Afterlife.
It has never been an objective of The Little Book to provide a catalog of Afterlife religions. Even a cursory survey of them would occupy hundreds of pages. In any case, most newcomers have only one immediate question to ask about the subject: “What is expected of me?” and this is easily answered: Nothing whatever is expected of you. Probably half the inhabitants of the Afterlife have no religious connection or belief whatever. Another large portion, perhaps half of the remainder, regard religious activity as a form of ready entertainment, to be sampled at will, as books, films, or television programs were in life. Only the remaining quarter of the populace (to continue to speak in very rough terms) throw themselves into their religions with genuine belief and fervor.
In general, three kinds of religions are to be found in the Afterlife (again, as contemporarily experienced): Crossing religions, which, being based on faith in a life to come, more nearly resemble earthly religions than the others; guild religions, which draw together shades with similar interests and pursuits; and spontaneous religions, which are ignited unpredictably, burn brightly for a time, then (usually) disappear without a trace. In the Afterlife, it is not considered de rigueur to “belong” to one religion and shun all others. Shades who are inclined to religion tend to belong to all and to fill up their days attending one event or service after another.
CROSSING RELIGIONS
Newcomers are often surprised to encounter in the Afterlife a widespread and thoroughly respectable belief that some form of “crossing over” to “another life” still awaits us. The belief (which is not considered an inherently religious one) is certainly ancient, and may well be as ancient as humankind itself; no period has ever been visited in which it is absent.
The belief has two solid foundations in fact:
1. Crossing over to a different state of being has already occurred once, so why not twice? In life, it was easy to doubt the possibility of such a crossing; in the Afterlife, it is impossible to doubt it, for it has already happened. Additionally, believers argue with credible logic that a second crossing is clearly needed to fulfill our most ancient expectations: in the Afterlife, we are exactly halfway between beast and angel, halfway between the matter-heavy beings of earth and the matter-free beings of the spirit world. One more crossing, they assert, will surely bring us to the end of our journey. Nonbelievers reply: “What angels? What spirit world?”
2. People in the Afterlife disappear. There’s no doubt about the fact; what is in doubt is its meaning. Believers are convinced that people who disappear have crosse
d over to a higher state of being. Nonbelievers take Occam’s razor to this conviction, pointing out, quite correctly, that one need not do anything very unusual in order to disappear from one’s normal stamping grounds in the Afterlife. One may simply walk away and never return. There are no police here to trace one’s movements; there are no voter-registration rolls, no licensing bureaus, no data-tracking systems of any kind. And, they further point out, many persons long thought to have crossed over have returned, giving one or another perfectly ordinary explanation for their absence. Believers reply that some of the missing have never returned—which of course is equally true.
Ramagadri devotes a whole volume (XXXIII) to the subject and observes, “If in fact there is another land or phase of existence to which we are destined to cross over, chances are good that many residents of that land or phase of existence believe that there is yet another land or phase to which they are destined to cross over. Even in death, there is no surcease to yearning in the human heart.”
In life, the occasion for crossing over was not in question; if it occurred at all, it would occur at death. In the Afterlife, with death behind us, nothing is more in question than this: No future event presents itself as the obvious occasion for an additional crossing over. It is by their several answers to this question that crossing religions chiefly distinguish themselves one from another. Their theories of how, when, and why we are to find release from this stage of being are propounded in pamphlets that are handed out in the street, stacked in doorways, and scattered to the wind. There are hundreds of them. By ancient usage, all bear names suggestive of effulgence; if someone presents himself as an inhabitant of the Luminous Tower, as an associate of the Gleaming Eye Badger, as a scintilla of the Sheer Wing Luster, or as a rod of the Evanescent Bundle, you can be reasonably sure that the reference is to a crossing religion.
For nearly half a century, a group known simply as the Radiant has dominated the field, largely owing to their fortunate acquisition of “the Bodhisattva in Khaki.” Their principal tracts, “The Thirteen Stages of Crossing Over” and “The Chant of the Khaki Bodhisattva,” appear in Appendix I.
GUILD RELIGIONS
As the name suggests, guild religions are the religions of groups held together by common interests, pursuits, or conditions.
Karroum. The oldest guild religion is that of the skinless, who call themselves “the Karroum” and who call their religion by the same name (also spelled Karrym or Kharrm); the meaning of the word is unknown, though it may be an ancestor of the Sanskrit Karma, fate. The beliefs and practices of the Karroum are not discussed outside their ranks and are held secret from the newly skinless for many years, until it’s certain that “recovery” is beyond hope for them. The Karroum exert a powerful fascination over many minds, and their followers are virtually permanent attachments, so much so that they constitute a guild of their own (and practice their own secret religion).4 The literature devoted to the Karroum and their followers is enormous.
The Penitents. In the Christian era, many newcomers arrived in the Afterlife believing it to be Purgatory and therefore adopted a life of prayer and penance in hopes of hurrying release to Paradise. Since self-denial of the usual kind (fasting, for example) produces little or no discomfort among the dead, they took to inflicting chastisements on one another. When the desired release failed to occur, people tended to get bored with this after a period of time (varying from years to centuries), and many defected to the catacombs (see below). The Penitents have declined steadily since the Middle Ages, but pockets of them can still be found here and there.
Catacomb Dwellers seek a great many different things, among them the Final Sleep, the Dark Brother, and Walling-In (or Reunion). There are not many “musts” in the Afterlife, but a visit to the catacombs, which are accessible nearly everywhere, is surely one of them. For those who have a taste for the macabre and the romantic, the catacombs are practically an alternative to the Afterlife itself. Harsheult’s Guide to the Catacombs is comprehensive and always reliably up-to-date.
The Letheans. For most in the Afterlife, total and permanent memory loss is the Great Terror. For a Lethean,5 it is the desired objective. Their beliefs and rites are centered on The Six, who “many centuries ago” achieved a state of total nirvanic oblivion. Unfortunately The Six cannot (for obvious reasons) explain how or when they attained this state. A careful distinction is made by Letheans between “nirvanic” oblivion and the ordinary “street-corner” sort that can be encountered anywhere in the Afterlife. “Street-corner oblivion is indistinguishable from mere confusion and is a painful and distressing condition, altogether unlike the nirvanic.”6 It is said that The Six can be visited, though Letheans disagree about the rewards to be expected from such a visit; some claim that The Six are capable of transcendently illuminating discourse, while others insist that their amnesia is so sublime that they exist altogether without language. Needless to say, the pilgrim’s route is a closely guarded secret.
The Dark Brother (see Chapter Three). This comes closer to being a universal religion of the Afterlife than any other, appealing equally to common folk and to intelligentsia.
SPONTANEOUS RELIGIONS
“Street-corner religions in the Afterlife,” H. L. Mencken has written, “fall somewhere between rioting and television—less overwhelming than the first but far more entertaining than the second.” Not much more can or needs to be said about them. They pop up, spread like wildfire, burn fiercely for a few months or a few years, then vanish. No stigma is attached to participating in any of them, no matter how bizarre the rite or how absurd the premise. In fact, they clearly satisfy a deep-seated human need for communion with the bizarre and absurd. A few examples will give you the flavor.
The Densely Packed of the Central Realm. Whenever you see a hundred or more individuals swaying and moaning “Our Mistress, Our Mistress” over and over and holding one another close together, you know you have encountered the believers of the Densely Packed of the Central Realm. Their beliefs are founded on the following brief account:
Once a mosquito stung Our Mistress on the forehead, and the next morning she was dead. A woman in a flowing white robe took her hand and led Our Mistress along a wooden catwalk, then under a huge archway and up a staircase whose stairs were worn and sunken in the middle. At the top of the stairs was a balustrade where groups of the newly dead, still in their old physical forms, stared down at the sight beneath them. Our Mistress looked over the rail and saw the earth’s globe in all its astonishing panorama spread out below her. Between the earth and wherever it was she was, the disintegrating forms of animals and human beings floated about in space. When Our Mistress looked behind her, she saw only a gray plane where dazed, shadowy human figures bumped into one another. Farther away others rushed about, scattering far and wide into the desert or clouds. Forms without faces or arms swam dreamily above the scurrying swarms. Suddenly a strong wind swept everyone and thing into one densely packed area and Our Mistress asked the ear nearest her mouth where was she? Such tempests are not rare, the ear replied. Our Mistress felt the need to scratch furiously at her forehead, but when she attempted this, her forehead wasn’t there. Her shell had fallen completely away, and, with the legions of the dead, she was dragged by the wind’s appendages deeper into the hinterlands.
The Church of the Tachyonists. Not a church in any ordinary sense, but you’ll see them gathered in the fields, perhaps a dozen members (whatever the number, it must be even). First, they will discuss their basic tenets, or rather not discuss, but stand in pairs and, in litany fashion, state them to one another, nodding enthusiastically all the while.
“We move so fast we don’t move.”
“Yes, yes.”
“We move so fast we are not here.”
“Yes, yes.”
“We move so fast the light cannot know us.”
“Yes, yes.”
“We move so fast no one can detect us.”
“Yes, yes.”
&nbs
p; “Can you see my hands move?”
“No, no.”
“Can you see my eyes?”
“No, no.”
“Am I even here?”
“No, no, no.”
Then they will pull from the pockets of their tattered coats sheets of paper, which they roll into tubes. Into each tube a bead is placed, or if beads aren’t available, a pebble or a pea. Then, with a member at one end of the tube and a member at the other, they blow the bead (pebble, pea) back and forth for several minutes, from one Tachyonist’s mouth to another, until they seem to tire of their ritual. They unscroll the tubes, return the paper to their pockets, and the last ones to have beads swallow them. Then, almost as if they were embarrassed, they nod to one another, and wander out of the field and back onto the road.
Curiously, no Tachyonist claims to have seen the phenomenon of the “whales” (discussed in Chapter One) from which the physicists first derived their theory of tachyons constituting the base medium of the Afterlife.
The Church of the Afterlife As Will and Idea is among the oldest and most respected of the spontaneous religions (insofar as any of them can be said to be respected). Some believe it will ultimately achieve the status of a guild religion (in five or ten centuries). It’s found in two forms, the psycho-reactive and the Schopenhauer-influenced.
Adherents of the psycho-reactive persuasion hold that the Afterlife and its constituent parts are formed by the willing of it, that it is an environment that comes into being by reacting to our conscious and subconscious desires (Quine, Walmsey, et al.). To begin a meeting, they will knock some benches together, sit down, and decide what it is they want the Afterlife to be for the duration of their assembly (an Alpine meadow, a wintry southeast Texas beach, leaf season along Lake Biwa in Shiga province). They then proceed to “will” this form into being. What outsiders see, of course, is only a handful of thinkers sitting on wooden benches and holding their foreheads in intense concentration.