Wrath of the Sky Deity: From Ritual to Narrative

PKD #5: A review of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

An observation about plot conventions (which gained currency only since Philip K. Dick died¹), generalizes that “There are only two plots in all of literature: A man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town.”

Philip K. Dick’s 1964 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch travels both paths. The first chapter introduces Barney Mayerson as a doll-accessory company’s acquisitions manager who has received his draft notice. Mayerson’s journey is the long road to Mars. The stranger who comes to town is the interstellar merchant Palmer Eldritch, who returns to our solar system after a decade spent trading with the intelligent life dwelling among the worlds orbiting the star Proxima Centauri.

To understand the action of the novel’s plot is to recognize the characters as full-grown adults who get stoned and play Barbie dolls on Mars. In 1961 or 1962, Philip K. Dick’s first natural daughter Laura Archer Dick (the little girl had three older stepsisters through her mother Anne) got a Barbie doll from her dad for Christmas. In December 1963, Amazing Stories magazine published Dick’s ninety-seven hundred word short story “The Days of Perky Pat” about the Perky Pat doll and the post-apocalyptic society that plays with her.

Dick wrote in an appendix to one of his book-length short story compilations that “‘The Days of Perky Pat’ came to me in one lightning-swift flash when I saw my children playing with Barbie dolls.” That short story depicted adults playing with “Perky Pat” dolls in a post-nuclear-war California bay area. Its opening sentence is reused word-for-word in Chapter 3 of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The novelization of this story, its accretion into The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, introduced the element of an addictive hallucinogenic drug “Can-D” for use facilitating vivid doll playtimes. The novel also relocated the setting of dollhouse play to a Martian off-world colony. Several characters keep their names unchanged from the short story to the novel, and both plots share the motivating element of the Barbie “Perky Pat” toys, which can symbolize the indulgence of escapist memories from a bygone world.

While Dick ruminated on the themes he would use to flesh out this short story to novel-length, he and his wife Anne took confirmation classes together at Saint Columba’s Episcopal Church in Inverness, California. “In an effort to help myself I became a convert to the Anglo-Catholic church,” he told SF Commentary magazine in 1970. “I even took the rite of unction², but it didn’t help.”

1. Who is Palmer Eldritch?

If the word Eldritch evokes the literary cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft, then it’s an apt surname for the book’s titular character, whose apparent invincibility and comfortable familiarity with ambitious alien beings elevate him to a locus for awe by most of this novel’s other characters. “Is it possible Lovecraft saw the truth?” Dick asked in 1966. While Dick never cited Lovecraft as a strong influence on his work with the same deference he showed (for example) A. E. van Vogt, he did comment that Lovecraft’s technique of lifting imagery out from dreams was a storytelling tool they both shared³.

The first chapter in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch refers to a crash-landed space pilot as “the well-known interplan[etary] industrialist Palmer Eldritch, who had gone to the Prox system a decade ago at the invitation of the Prox Council of humanoid types”.⁴

Dick’s private notes from this period indicated he viewed the character Palmer Eldritch as more than an ordinary antagonist. In fact Eldritch represented to his author a personality not wholly fictional.

“Let us say, I would like Perky Pat to show up at my door, but I dread the possibility that, when I hear the knock, it will be Palmer Eldritch waiting outside and not Perky Pat. Actually to be honest, neither has shown up in the seventeen years or so since I wrote that novel. I guess that is the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction.”⁵

That phenomenon of seeing a much-yearned-for woman transform into the hideous person of Palmer Eldritch exactly occurs in the novel to the protagonist Barney Mayerson as he resurfaces from a drug trip; his love interest/fellow Mars-colonist Anne Hawthorne changes before his eyes into the man who sold him his dose of the hallucinogenic competitor drug “Chew-Z,” that is, Palmer Eldritch, complete with Eldritch’s mechanical eyes, artificial arm, and metal jaw. And by the way, those distinctive body parts belonging to Eldritch are the three stigmata alluded to in the book’s title.

The primal fear Dick felt in his real life of a menacing Palmer-Eldritch-esque persona rattled his sense of well-being so deeply in 1963 that he consulted with his priest on how to think about those fears. “I looked up at the sky and saw a face. I didn't really see it, but the face was there, and it was not a human face… anyhow the visage could not be denied. It was immense; it filled a quarter of the sky. It had empty slots for eyes -- it was metal and cruel.”⁶ His priest’s explanation was that Dick had seen Satan.

But who was this really?

In the novel, Palmer Eldritch’s power over the Mars colonists congeals as they start to use his bargain of a product. He’s a pharmaceutical salesman, whose drug takes those who partake of it to an imaginary world that Eldritch controls.

But in his own life circumstances, Dick wrote this character during a period when he was grieving deeply over the death of his own father. “In the novel my father appears as both Palmer Eldritch (the evil father, the diabolic mask-father) and as Leo Bulero, the tender, gruff, warm, human, loving man. The novel which emerged came out of the most intense anguish possible; in 1963 I was reliving the original isolation I had experienced upon the loss of my father, and the horror and fear expressed in the novel are not fictional sentiments ground out to interest the reader; they come from the deepest part of me: yearning for the good father and fear of the evil father.”⁷

Dick continuously recalled Palmer Eldritch in the notebook he kept towards the end of his life to analyze his old novels for themes he had overlooked in them at the time he wrote them. Portions of this notebook have been published posthumously as The Exegesis. More than a decade after Doubleday published his sixteenth novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Dick privately referred to Palmer Eldritch’s character in his Exegesis notes as follows:

• A powerful magician-like evil deity⁸

• The master magician in Stigmata administering a drug to people which puts them forever in this irreal world where no time passes⁹

• The Yaltabaoth Magician evil deity, spinner of spurious worlds, creator of illusion¹⁰

• The master magician who has us lost in his irreal world where no actual time elapses (called Palmer Eldritch in Stigmata)¹¹

• Simon Magus¹²

• God, backward¹³

While Dick compared writing the character of Palmer Eldritch to a personal exorcism (“I decided to exorcise it by writing about it, and I did write about it, and it did go away.”¹⁴), he later expressed regret at having written him: “God per se, as a character, ruins a good SF story; and this is true of my own stuff as anyone else’s. Therefore I deplore my Palmer Eldritch book in that regard. But people who are a bit mystically inclined like it. I don’t. I wish I had never written it.”¹⁵

In another character analysis Dick wrote in his Exegesis, “It’s even stated in the novel, that Eldritch is the Christian God.”¹⁶ (To clarify, this isn’t quite stated in the novel, although there is a character who denies it’s so.) And elsewhere, Dick ruminates “The Three Stigmata, if read properly (i.e., reversed) contains many clues as to the nature of God and to our relationship with him.”¹⁷

A fascinating device in the novel’s plot is that at no point in the story does any character see Palmer Eldritch, physically. He is written about in the newspapers (homeopapes), but when the character Leo Bulero tries to visit Eldritch in his hospital room, to see him in person, he is refused admittance. Later, Palmer Eldritch takes Leo Bulero prisoner and forcefully administers his alien hallucinogenic drug Chew-Z. In doing so, Palmer Eldritch speaks to Bulero only as an unseen voice through a radio-like transmitter. After Leo’s hallucination begins, he meets Palmer Eldritch within the hallucination, but the two never stand face-to-face on the physical plane. Congruently, Leo’s employee Barney Mayerson never sees Palmer Eldritch physically either. When Mayerson buys those new drugs from Eldritch, Mayerson discovers that the person before him who had claimed to be Eldritch is only an immaterial hologram. From that encounter onward, Mayerson sees Eldritch only in his hallucinations— and even then, Eldritch sometimes communicates to him as a disembodied voice. If Dick intended Eldritch to be a fictional stand-in for God (or for a severe aspect of him), then he carefully wrote this prominent character consistent with the Christian doctrine of the invisibility of God; as the eighteenth verse of The Gospel of John’s first chapter asserts, “No one has ever seen God”.

2. The ritual

Dick’s investigations into the history of religion provided him the material to transform his “vision of the face of Palmer Eldritch which became the basis of the novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,”¹⁸ into substance carrying heavier implications than its predecessor image of toys in spaceland. The impact of seeing a “true vision of God, but grown (to my blind sight) terrible”, the 1963 inspiration for his character Palmer Eldritch, synthesized the anthropological material Dick was studying at the time into this plot. Dick was sufficiently impressed by a comparative religion analysis by psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, titled “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass” that it compelled him to explore the topic of transubstantiation through fiction.

Jung’s essay “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass,” published initially in 1940 but significantly lengthened in a 1954 version, examines the history of the Christian observance of the Eucharist, contextualizing the stages of the rite as a category of ritual magic, whose manifold practice has arisen independently in worldwide cultures from pagan Europe to indigenous America. Jung cites the shocked accounts of the Catholic missionaries who documented Aztec “Teoqualo” worship to argue “the god’s death followed by ritual dismemberment, and the eating (communio) of a small piece of his body [as poppy seed dough cakes], are all parallels which cannot be overlooked and which caused much consternation among the worthy Spanish Fathers at the time.”¹⁹

Jung details examples of “human sacrifice and ritual anthropophagy” from the cult of Hippolyta, from platonic Gnosticism, and from Egyptian mythology to support his thesis that “the symbols of the Mass penetrate into the deepest layers of the psyche and its history.”²⁰

3. From the apotropaic to the literary

If the independent invention across historically isolated religions of the edible, potable deity suggests “an autonomous event… taking place on a ‘divine’ and ‘timeless’ plane transcending consciousness,”²¹ then Dick responded to Jung’s suggestion by mirroring Eucharistic wafers as the food of eternity with a science fiction food in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch that makes its hallucinating consumers feel trapped in eternity.

Dick explored the aspect of timelessness within food in his later Exegesis writings. On this novel’s Chew-Z hallucinations (which, although perceived by the partaker as nearly unending, end only a second of real-elapsed time after they begin) Dick wrote, “No time passes, in Stigmata. Eternity can pass: infinite time. And Eldritch pollutes all the spurious worlds — due to a person taking a drug… But Palmer Eldritch can spin out his hallucinatory world for what seems — just seems — forever, for centuries.”²²

While Dick appears to discover the resonances between the plots of his own novels and the themes of Christianity as happy accidents, the “Lord’s Supper” dynamic in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch appears to have been fully intended at the time of its writing.

“By a study of Stigmata one can understand transubstantiation, which was my source and theme (my intent).”²³

Even so, a separate note from Dick’s post hoc analyses of this novel makes it less clear how intentional this theme was for Dick at writing time. Possibly, a later rereading of his own novel brought its forgotten parable aspects back to his conscious awareness:

“When I recently reread Stigmata I saw it for what it was: a penetrating, acute, and exhaustive study of the miracle of transubstantiation, simply reversing the polarities of good and evil. What the novel contemplated was—that is, the conclusion it reached —was the startling notion that imbibing of the sacred host culminated, for the imbiber, in eventually becoming the deity of which the host was the supernatural manifestation. Since all of them were consuming hosts of the same deity, they all became the same deity, and their separate or human identities were abolished. They literally became the deity, all of them, one after another. What this constituted in the novel was an eerie kind of invasion. They were invaded on an individual basis and they were, regarded another way, invaded as a planet or species, etc., which is to say collectively. ... Invasion (penetration) of our world by a deity who can become everyone via the host, a mass theolepsy.”²⁴

It’s also clear the rite of the Eucharist continued to mystify Dick outside the context of this one novel, as when he wrote in his 1980 Exegesis notes, “God can transubstantiate the epiphenomenon into the real by virtue of his immanent presence in it, as in the eucharist. Thus reality is viewed as a perpetual sacrament.”²⁵

4. Conclusion

This narrative element of a subversive invasion-via-food strategy, employed by the Proxer aliens whom Palmer Eldritch apparently serves, led the Philip K. Dick scholar and author Dave Hyde to remark about this novel, “[it’s] a novel of alien invasion but an alien invasion unlike any other ever written. Usually, no matter how weird or horrifying a writer may try to make his aliens, their motives and actions can be directly related to human motivations: conquest, lebensraum, hatred and fear; but in Palmer Eldritch Philip K. Dick describes an alien presence with an unknown purpose… Palmer Eldritch is not human and his — its — motives are completely alien and incomprehensible.”²⁶

The development of a plot combining personal grief with mythological interest in Christian liturgical practices led to the synthesis of one of Dick’s most masterfully crafted novels. Recalling how to see the world as an unexplained, strange thing— that’s the value one gets from reading Philip K. Dick, and in particular this book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. It’s a novel that can make readers want to examine every new thought from the perspective of a stranger, and to then discard initial phenomenal explanations until at least two alternate theories can be built in their place.

1. The popular attribution of this quote to Leo Tolstoy appears spurious. More likely it originated in a writing exercise given by the novelist and professor of literature John Gardner to his students (Raymond Carver was among them).

2. The ritual involves wiping oil on a Christian’s head while the priest repeats a blessing. Its intended purpose is to heal one whose illness could potentially bring death. Dick would later clarify, “not supreme unction; just healing unction.”

3. Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, ed. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), page 13.

4. Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, (Boston: Mariner Books, 2011), page 11.

5. Philip K. Dick, The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Four: The Minority Report (1954–1963) (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2013), page 470.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, ed. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), page 407.

9. Ibid, page 412.

10. Ibid, page 405.

11. Philip K. Dick, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, ed. Lawrence Sutin (Lancaster, PA: Underwood-Miller, 1991), page 87.

12. Ibid.

13. Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, ed. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), page 148.

14. Philip K. Dick, The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Four: The Minority Report (1954–1963) (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2013), page 469.

15. Philip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), page 58.

16. Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, ed. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), page 420.

17. Ibid, page 148.

18. Philip K. Dick, The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Four: The Minority Report (1954–1963) (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2013), page 469.

19. C. G. Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 11, ed. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, executive ed. William McGuire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), page 223.

20. Ibid, page 222.

21. Ibid, page 246.

22. Philip K. Dick, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, ed. Lawrence Sutin (Lancaster, PA: Underwood-Miller, 1991, pages 183-184.

23. Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, ed. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), page 420.

24. Ibid, page 274.

25. In a preceding paragraph, Dick defines what he means by “epiphenomenon” as follows: “It really does not make sense to say that the universe is irreal unless you have something real to compare it with. So the correct formulation is not ‘irreal,’ which begs the question, but epiphenomenal, whereupon you look behind or beyond the epiphenomenon to see what its urgrund is.” Philip K. Dick, In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, ed. Lawrence Sutin (Lancaster, PA: Underwood-Miller, 1991), page 44.

26. Lord RC. Pink Beam: A Philip K. Dick Companion. (Ward, CO: Ganymedean Slime Mold Pubs, 2006), page 143-144.