"'The stork makes her home in their tops,'" Eric said; after a time.

To me, Fat said, "These are Ikhnaton's race. That's Psalm 104, based on Ikhnaton's hymn; it entered our Bible -- it's older than our Bible."

Linda Lampton said, "We are the ugly builders with clawlike hands. Who hide ourselves in shame. Along with Hephaistos we built great walls and the homes of the gods themselves."

"Yes," Kevin said. "Hephaistos was ugly, too. The builder God. You killed Asklepios."

"These are Kyklopes," Fat said faintly.

"The name means 'Round-eye,'" Kevin said.

"But we have three eyes," Eric said. "So an error in the historic record was made."

"Deliberately?" Kevin said.

Linda said, "Yes."

"You are very old," Fat said.

"Yes, we are," Eric said, and Linda nodded. "Very old. But time is not real. Not to us, anyhow."

"My God," Fat said, as if stricken. "These are the original builders."

"We have never stopped," Eric said. "We still build. We built this world, this space-time matrix."

"You are our creators," Fat said.

The Lamptons nodded.

"You really are the friends of God," Kevin said. "You are literally."

"Don't be afraid," Eric said. "You know how Shiva holds up one hand to show that there is nothing to fear."

"But there is," Fat said. "Shiva is the destroyer; his third eye destroys."

"He is also the restorer," Linda said.

Leaning against me, David whispered in my ear, "Are they crazy?"

They are gods, I said to myself; they are Shiva who both destroys and protects. They judge.

Perhaps I should have felt fear. But I did not. They had already destroyed -- brought down Ferris F. Fremount, as he had been depicted in the film Valis.

The period of Shiva the Restorer had begun. The restoration, I thought, of all we have lost. Of two dead girls.

As in the film Valis, Linda Lampton could turn time back, if necessary; and restore everything to life.

I had begun to understand the film.

The Rhipidon Society, I realized, fish though it be, is out of its depth.

An irruption from the collective unconscious, Jung taught, can wipe out the fragile individual ego. In the depths of the collective the archetypes slumber; if aroused, they can heal or they can destroy. This is the danger of the archetypes; the opposite qualities are not yet separated. Bipolarization into paired opposites does not occur until consciousness occurs.

So, with the gods, life and death -- protection and destruction -- are one. This secret partnership exists outside of time and space.

It can make you very much afraid, and for good reason. After all, your existence is at stake.

The real danger, the ultimate horror, happens when the creating and protecting, the sheltering, comes first -- and then the destruction. Because if this is the sequence, everything built up ends in death.

Death hides within every religion.

And at any time it can flash forth -- not with healing in its wings but with poison, with that which wounds.

But we had started out wounded. And VALIS had fired healing information at us, medical information. VALIS approached us in the form of the physician, and the age of the injury, the Age of Iron, the toxic iron splinter, had been abolished.

And yet ... the risk is, potentially, always there.

It is a kind of terrible game. Which can go either way.

Libera me, Domine, I said to myself. In die illa. Save me, protect me, God, in this day of wrath. There is a streak of the irrational in the universe, and we, the little hopeful trusting Rhipidon Society, may have been drawn into it, to perish.

As many have perished before.

I remembered something which the great physician of the Renaissance had discovered. Poisons, in measured doses, are remedies; Paracelsus was the first to use metals such as mercury as medication. For this discovery -- the measured use of poisonous metals as medications -- Paracelsus has entered our history books. There is, however, an unfortunate ending to the great physician's life.

He died of metal poisoning.

So put another way, medications can be poisonous, can kill. And it can happen at any time.

"Time is a child at play, playing draughts; a child's is the kingdom." As Heraclitus wrote twenty-five hundred years ago. In many ways this is a terrible thought. The most terrible of all. A child playing a game... with all life, everywhere.

I would have preferred an alternative. I saw now the binding importance of our motto, the motto of our little Society, binding upon all occasions as the essence of Christianity, from which we could never depart:

FISH CANNOT CARRY GUNS!

If we abandoned that, we entered the paradoxes, and, finally, death. Stupid as our motto sounded, we had fabricated in it the insight we needed. There was nothing more to know.

In Fat's quaint little dream about dropping the M-16 rifle, the Divine had spoken to us. Nihil Obstat. We had entered love, and found ourselves a land.

But the divine and the terrible are so close to each other. Nommo and Yurugu are partners; both are necessary. Osiris and Seth, too. In the Book of Job, Yahweh and Satan form a partnership. For us to live, however, these partners must be split. The behind-the-scenes partnership must end as soon as time and space and all the creatures come into being.

It is not God nor the gods which must prevail; it is wisdom, Holy Wisdom. I hoped that the fifth Savior would be that: splitting the bipolarities and emerging as a unitary thing. Not of three persons or two but one. Not Brahma the creator, Vishnu the sustainer and Shiva the destroyer, but what Zoroaster called the Wise Mind.

God can be good and terrible -- not in succession -- but at the same time. This is why we seek a mediator between us and him; we approach him through the mediating priest and attenuate and enclose him through the sacraments. It is for our own safety: to trap him with confines which render him safe. But now, as Fat had seen, God had escaped the confines and was transubstantiating the world; God had become free.

The gentle sounds of the choir singing "Amen, amen" are not to calm the congregation but to pacify the god.

When you know this you have penetrated to the innermost core of religion. And the worst part is that the god can thrust himself outward and into the congregation until he becomes them. You worship a god and then he pays you back by taking you over. This is called "enthousiasmos" in Greek, literally "to be possessed by the god." Of all the Greek gods the one most likely to do this was Dionysos. And, unfortunately, Dionysos was insane.

Put another way -- stated backward -- if your god takes you over, it is likely that no matter what name he goes by he is actually a form of the mad god Dionysos. He was also the god of intoxication, which may mean, literally, to take in toxins; that is to say, to take a poison. The danger is there.

If you sense this, you try to run. But if you run he has you anyhow, for the demigod Pan was the basis of panic which is the uncontrollable urge to flee, and Pan is a subform of Dionysos. So in trying to flee from Dionysos you are taken over anyhow.

I write this literally with a heavy hand; I am so weary I am dropping as I sit here. What happened at Jonestown was the mass running of panic, inspired by the mad god-panic leading into death, the logical outcome of the mad god's thrust.

For them no way out existed. You must be taken over by the mad god to understand this, that once it happens there is no way out, because the mad god is everywhere.