VALIS, pages 122-123

Horselover Fat is dead. Dragged down into the grave by two malignant women. Dragged down because he is a fool. That’s another nonsense part of Parsifal, the idea that being stupid is salvific. Why? In Parsifal suffering gave the timid fool “purest knowledge’s might.” How? Why? Please explain.

Please show me how Gloria’s suffering and Sherri’s suffering contributed anything good to Fat, to anyone, to anything. It’s a lie. It’s an evil lie. Suffering is to be abolished. Well, admittedly, Parsifal did that by healing the wound; Amfortas’s agony ceased.

What we really need is a doctor, not a spear. Let me give you entry #45 from Fat’s tractate.

#46 In seeing Christ in a vison I correctly said to him, “We need medical attention.” In the vision there was an insane creator who destroyed what he created, without purpose; which is to say, irrationally. This is the deranged streak in the Mind; Christ is our only hope, since we cannot now call on Asklepios. Asklepios came before Christ and raised a man from the dead; for this act, Zeus had a Kyklops slay him with a thunderbolt. Christ also was killed for what he had done: raising a man from the dead. Elijah brought a boy back to life and disappeared soon thereafter in a whirlwind. “The Empire never ended”.

Entry #46 The physician has come to us a number of times under a number of names. But we are not yet healed. The Empire identified him and ejected him. This time he will kill the Empire by phagocytosis.

In many ways Fat’s exegesis makes more sense than Parsifal. Fat conceives of the universe as a living organism into which a toxic particle has come. The toxic particle, made of heavy metal, has embedded itself in the universe-organism and is poisoning it. The universe-organism dispatches a phagocyte. The phagocyte is Christ. It surrounds the toxic metal particle – the Black Iron Prison – and begins to destroy it.