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Hello readers,
The Divine Invasion is a Philip K. Dick book that I have wanted to write a review on for a long time now, and it will discuss spoilers including the identities of characters like Emmanuel and Zina.
The story takes place on Earth and beyond the Solar system, following Emmanuel, an impaired boy who can talk to animals, who meets a girl named Zina, who can possess animals and cease the flow of time.
I really enjoyed how the philosophy of the book was presented; The Divine Invasion is part of the VALIS series which is already heavy with deep theological philosophy, but this book managed to approach the topics closer than ever. Key characters include Elias, the present manifestation of biblical Elijah, who is taking care of Emmanuel, who was spontaneously conceived by his mother Rybys, while the boy’s assumed step-father Herb sleeps after surviving their immigration to Earth.
Also, The Divine Invasion is just brimming with the usual psychedelic themes and reality warping tropes that Philip K Dick’s diverse casts of characters tend to encounter. Conflicts revolved around Emmanuel’s wager over a game that decided the fate of the universe with an interesting spin on the idea of good versus evil, where the literary conflict of man versus nature or god was skewed into being against one’s very concept of self.
The science fiction began to bend into philosophical literature with Emmanuel’s angst over having needed to reach out to Herb in the past to assist in Emmanuel’s own birth, establishing in a satisfying way that Herb was experiencing the events leading to his cryogenesis while Emmanuel’s plot continued to move forward in the present. The political scenes of the book were kept to a minimum plot wise, at least in relation to the author’s other work, and were mixed with the book’s core spiritual themes where both the political church’s Big Noodle AI Bible hologram and the protagonist’s group believe the other’s side was the material manifestation of the Devil.
Yahweh/God as an actual un-metaphorical character in the story intervened in Herb’s life to introduce freedom via the Holy Spirit’s ability to go with one when seized, but not without Emmanuel’s child-like rage over his new believer's previous worshipped form of matter, rather than their spacetime medium or cosmic Source. Invigorated by their theophany, Herb, Rybys and Elias plot against the political church in order to smuggle the unborn saviour to Earth in Philip K. Dick’s take on the messiah’s interplanetary second coming; again, this is one of Phil’s most blatantly thick gnostic and neoplatonic tales based on his real-life exegesis. Characters’ faiths get questioned with problems such as God causing them to become sick, to suffer and to die for the greater good. Deities were displayed as personifications of the different accretional layers which Emmanuel meets as he climbed the hermetic ladder of the cosmos, from lower realm into the upper realm of Intellect with its outline of all the Forms under the ‘Lower Realm’, to undergo “the Hermetic transform” and unify with the gnostic, neoplatonic One or Hermetic Source; quoting the book,
“That which was below, his own brain, the microcosm, had become the macrocosm... I now occupy the entire universe, Emmanuel realized.”
The Divine Invasion presented “the one who brings benefit” as anyone who could overcome and transcend Forms, “when you hear the distant bells...”
Zina helping Emmanuel realize his part in the Trinity revealed far more than was stated by the narrative; Zina was Sophia, the Holy Ghost, the living Torah, Plotinus’s Intellect or Plato’s Idea or Form, which was symbolized as that which guides One back to itself, appearing as a hindrance but in practice was what transcended (or was transcended and thus transcended the One back to itself). Zina was thus the Buddhist’s Mara, who was different than Satan, as Mara was transcended during Satan’s descent; was Emmanuel the Son? Or, better said, was the Son really the messiah? Emmanuel said he was Yahweh, or the Father, but perhaps Emmanuel was the godhead reformed, unknowable and mute? More a neoplatonic sequence, rather than a trinitarian godhead, of Emmanuel, Zina, Belial; which would leave Belial or Satan as the Son. Emmanuel had created Zina who desired to be peaceful with the world rather than wrathful, to bring it flowers instead of destroying Belial and the material world (where all individuals resided, between the Intellectual and the Material) which acted as an example of the godhead working through them all.
The idea was that both real and unreal things were intoxicating, but that the real and sufferable were more important due to their necessity; Emmanuel admitted that the real was objectively worse, as in more evil than the idealistic-and-unreal, but that solidified how the idealistic-and-real was even better. When Emmanuel and Zina agreed to free all from suffering, it all led to releasing Belial, meaning that the material world had to be transcended anyway, meaning the living had to experience death in order to be free at last, stating that even Belial could be transcended. Herb’s entire plot hinged on that point, from him hearing interference from a local mountain deity named Yahweh while in cryogen sleep all the way to Emmanuel and Belial’s reality-altering wager over Herb meeting Linda Fox, his Beside-Helper. Herb agreed that Emmanuel’s vision of the Fox was the superior one, that necessity was the underpinning of reality, that suffering was because it had to be in order for there to be salvation at all.
The Divine Invasion employs good use of references to James Joyce and Finnegans Wake, C.S. Lewis’s religious sci-fi, Zoroastrianism on the guilty being saved by their Beside-helper if they admit that they are guilty, and Hayyim Nahman Bialik on the Torah translated as Law being inadequate compared to the totality of God’s reality or his “highest idea”, “the living soul of the world”, which reformed itself over the ages in the form of dharma and Hermetic philosophers’ stones. The reunion of Emmanuel and Zina, him remembering that they are the same entity, himself as the transcended En Sof and Zina as the female half of the godhead that stayed on Earth was a very intriguing and gripping method of symbolizing the sephiroth of the Tree of Life, with Zina as one half of Emmanuel’s whole, as the lowest of the ten where Emmanuel was the first and highest.
In the end, Herb’s story was about having to choose between one’s Beside-Helper (the Fox, Zina, beauty, salvation) and one’s “yetzer ha-ru” (Belial, darkness, suffering), between a real gift from God versus the illusive material world. Though, Emmanuel was a blind or impaired god, where the conflict arose solely from forgetting who was the original source, and it was dubious if Emmanuel was even the original source as he himself admitted there was a godhead that he fell from. All life, by this admission, was capable and worthy of transcendent godhood.
Thank you for reading.
Allen W. McLean
PS. Hope everyone had a Happy Halloween! I updated my recent Frankenstein review with some related links, which can be found here; https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/2022/10/20221020-frankenstein-book-review.html
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