This is an anthology of my fiction published in 2006, before ebooks got popular, so it’s only available as a paperback: click on the pic for a description and ordering information. The longest piece in the volume is a two-part novella, The Visions of Victor and Beatrice, of which I’ll now give a detailed summary.

In Part I, The Wedding of Star and Shadow, Victor undergoes the ultimate near-death experience. Though fictional, many aspects of the tale are based on true NDEs; here they expand beyond the sum of their parts unto mythic proportions. The fantastic events have two bases in reality: first, the story is an extrapolation of an actual spiritual experience I had myself, told here:

Secondly, it’s a retelling of the sacred tradition of the ascent through the planetary spheres. This was at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece and their Roman offshoot, the initiatic religion of Mithras. I updated the legend in light of the revelations of modern astronomy: Victor ascends not just through the realms of the planets but of the galaxies and the entire space-time continuum.

Many mainstream readers have enjoyed the story without grasping its racial element, which is veiled but at the very core of the plot. In the metasphere of the solar system, Victor meets The Gods of Thule. They derive from Greek, Roman, and Hindu mythology, and include the planetary deities; they are glorified white racial archetypes, and partially overlap with the pantheon of the White Order of Thule (WOT). At this point in the story, however, the word “Thule” is not used. The Gods tell Victor the name of their heavenly realm, and he says that it’s an ineffable mantra which he can’t simply write down, but “I was overwhelmed by the memory that this was my true home.” Further, “this local solar world was an outpost of an ultimate homeworld which lay in a region that could only be reached by traveling into deep space.”

Victor journeys to the center of the galaxy and gets sucked into the black hole there. In desperation he chants the mantra-name, and is rescued by beings whose essence was the same as that of the spirits of the solar system, but were vastly larger, greater, and wiser ~ “there was a sense of immense power, tempered by an all-pervading love. They recognized me as a member of their mystical body, albeit a much less evolved one; but still I was of the same substance as them.”

The substance is that of Thule ~ the spiritual essence of what manifests on Earth as the white race. This is only revealed at the climactic end of the story, after Victor travels to the end of time and returns, and attains the ultimate enlightenment.

Part II is titled:

It’s the vision of Beatrice, who is Victor’s lover. She observes that he’s transformed after his NDE: his aura is charged with divine radiance, working positive and sometimes miraculous changes on the people around him. But true to the title, the spiritual star has a shadow: the material world has taken on a hellish cast in Victor’s eyes: he sees a strange numenal overlay in which people appear to be turning into robots, getting homogenized into a subhuman race. On a trip to the city with Beatrice, Victor sees a gargantuan mechanical monster straddling the landscape and consuming the vital energy of the oblivious citizens. He calls it the Macrobot.

They meet some old friends of Victor’s who have forsaken mainstream society to pursue natural alternatives off the grid. He tells them the whole story of what he calls his “afterdeath” experience, and the name “Thule” resonates strongly for them, including a little girl named Joy, though they don’t understand its meaning. They all go up a hill in a big park and meditate in a circle. Beatrice finds herself higher than she’s ever been, in telepathic contact with Victor and the others. A numenal being begins to coalesce in the circle, hailed by Joy as her angel. It fills everyone with bliss except for Beatrice: the light of the angel burns her and strikes fear in her heart. She bolts in panic, falls down the hill, and hits her head on a rock. Victor desperately tries to revive her, but her breathing and heartbeat stop.

Beatrice undergoes a life review, as happens to everyone at the point of death; she relives all the vital aspects of her entire life. She’s astounded to remember that she herself related to angels on a regular basis, until some traumatic events when she was seven years old. Her family moved from an idyllic college town in the mountains to a big city where her father entered graduate school. It was the late 1960s, and her parents got converted to the radical leftism that was sweeping academia. They insisted on transferring Bea to a public school in their mixed-race district, in order to overcome their “white privilege” and have “solidarity with the people”. For the first time in her life Beatrice encountered hatred and abuse at the hands of the black kids. Her angels were able to offer some limited help, and assured her that as long as she always remained true to them and to herself, they would never forsake her. Eventually, though, she succumbed to the browbeating and brainwashing, and joined a clique of “antiracist” white students. She never saw her angels again, and eventually repressed the memory of their existence.

Beatrice embraced the whole liberal worldview, and discovered new frontiers of it when the family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where her father became employed after getting his doctorate. She was with the trendsetters in the shift from antiwar and racial politics to feminism, and then explored the many facets of the New Age movement. She got her own degree from UC Berkeley, and later met Victor. The memory of the first time they made love was the climax of her life review, and then her awareness returned to the moment of her death.

Bea’s afterdeath experience is dramatically different from Victor’s. Whereas he ascended to the headiest regions of the metasphere and beyond, she plunges into the murky astral fog generated by the high-tech postmodern world, and falls into the clutches of its diabolic overlords. They use her liberal imprints to trick her into participating in their scheme for world unification, but she discovers that the entity which all the peoples are being melded into is not the glorious godlike being she imagined, but a global-sized robot ~ in fact, the Macrobot.

She tries to escape but is cast into the vast interior of the Macrobot, where another mind-control spell clouds her memory. She meets her culture-hero John Lennon, who takes her to the “strawberry fields” of a supposed heaven-world where the souls of people who were political and New Age liberals in life receive advanced training in “sex, race, and soul change” for a promised liberation: the ultimate one-way trip to Nirvana. Her mentor is an Amerindian shamaness named Savannah, under whose guidance Beatrice and the other souls morph their astral bodies back and forth between genders and races, to unlearn all their “prejudices and preferences”; thus when they reincarnate they will be androgynous and of a different or mixed race. The inference is that today’s gender-bent and mongrelized masses are the product of a deliberate scheme being orchestrated not only from the earthly enclaves of the ruling clique, but from the metasphere itself. As above, so below ~ for better or worse!

At length Beatrice graduates and prepares for the culminating ritual with a group of her fellows. They stand in a circle around a small temple which they will enter, then meld into Oneness. As Beatrice has witnessed in the past, a beam of light will then shoot straight upward from the domed roof of the temple, carrying their spiritual essence to Nirvana. Anticipation of the ecstasy triggers a memory of making love to Victor ~ the first time she has thought of him since coming here. This breaks the spell, and suddenly Beatrice realizes that something is rotten in Electric Heaven. Meanwhile, Victor has been keeping an eye on her from Thule, by means of a numenal spy apparatus, but he couldn’t intervene until she somehow signaled that she wished it. Now his face appears large in the heavens and he shouts: “Beatrice! Don’t go into the temple! It’s a trick, it’s a trap!” She holds back as all the others enter, but Savannah shoves her in from behind. Inside she sees that the beam of light is a fake, simply produced by a spotlight. She and the other “initiates” are each in a pod on mechanical tracks carrying them into an astral factory where automated machinery melts down the form of each one in turn, and pours the substance into molds from which they emerge as robots. Thus she realizes that Victor’s seemingly paranoid fantasy is literally true: people are being turned into robots! She watches with horror as they wire themselves into the infrastructure of the Macrobot, where they will serve forevermore as mindless cogs in the global mechanism.

Victor comes to the rescue, but to escape her imminent meltdown Beatrice must cross an abyss and make a fateful choice that can restore her to life on Earth or bring about the end of everything.

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