A Philadelphia Story

As I’ve explained in previous chapters, I believe we are supposed to be helping the punks emerge into our reality. I have labored to understand what it is I can do to hasten the day of this event.

My conclusion is that there are two things I can do. The first is an outgrowth of my reading of The Boomer Bible, which I have had more time to study than anyone but the punks who wrote it. If my reading of it seems off the wall, at least give me the benefit of the doubt on the basis of the greater time I have had with it than any of my readers.

One fact that has inevitably leaked from the Cream King Trove research effort is that the punks of South Street set great store by the Tarot deck. They went so far as to develop their own versions of it, and there is additional evidence to suggest that this interest was acquired at the very beginning of the punk writing movement. If this is a correct assumption, we should be able to perceive a connection between The Boomer Bible and the Tarot—possibly a very deep connection.

Based on my own textual research, I have concluded that this connection does exist and that it is manifested in a variety of ways.

The most obvious and least compelling evidence is verbal: the Tarot is mentioned in text, in Chapter 37 of Wharts in the thirteenth of fourteen bullet points. The reference is to "The Harrier Tarot,” and although we might normally expect an item of importance to be linked to the Intercolumn Reference (ICR), there is no such reference here, possibly because the book of Wharts is almost devoid of ICR notes .

The bulk of the evidence of Tarot connection in The Boomer Bible (BB) is numerical, but no less interesting and persuasive for that fact, because the numerical perspective on the BB makes it appear almost a different book from the one we have grown used to reading.

The number hunt begins with the reference to the Harrier Tarot, but before we can make any headway, we must consider what numerical evidence might consist of.

The Tarot is a deck of 78 cards, 22 of them belonging to what is called the Upper Arcana, and 56 belonging to the Lower Arcana. Collectively, these 78 cards do amount to a representation of the whole world, designed to be used for guidance in the path of an individual person through the world as he encounters its major elements and forces.

The 22 cards of the Upper Arcana are numbered from Zero to Twenty-One and are believed to represent in symbolic imagery the allegorical journey of The Fool (No. 0) to full attainment of wisdom and power in The World (No. 21). Why 22 cards? Because there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet—the Tarot’s symbol of spiritual completion, which is analogous to the “alpha and omega” of Christian symbolism.

The 56 cards of the Lower Arcana are divided into four suits of 14 cards each. The playing deck we are all accustomed to is derived from the Lower Arcana, and there is a correspondence between the suit designations of the two decks. The lowest ranking suit of Clubs corresponds to the Tarot suit of Wands; the suit of Diamonds corresponds to the Tarot suit of Pentacles; the suit of Hearts to the Tarot suit of Cups, and the highest ranking suit of Spades corresponds to the Tarot’s suit of Swords.

Additionally, it is helpful to know that these four suits symbolically represent the four elements of antiquity: water, earth, fire, and air. Interestingly, it is believed that the number four was a symbolic number of completion in antiquity for this very reason, and that such symbolism may account for the inclusion of four gospels in the New Testament of the Bible.

Each suit of the Tarot has one more card than the suits of the playing deck. The newer deck’s Jack is a replacement for two Tarot cards, The Page and The Knight, bringing the number of face cards to a meaningful total of four.

Overall, then, we are looking for meaningful relationships or repetitions associated with the numbers 78, 22, 56, 14, 4, and 5 (four suits plus Upper Arcana).

 But if the hunt begins with a reference to the Harrier Tarot, where do we look? The place where the most numbers are to be found in association with Harry and his Harriers is in the Book of Harrier Brayer, where The Table of Harrier Days enumerates the seasons of the Harrier Year. Here, we find that the longest season, Trinity, consists of Trinity Friday and the twenty-one Fridays following. Does this matter?

When I discovered this numerical coincidence(?) I drew up a chart comparing the cards of the Upper Arcana to the “Topics” of the Harrier season Trinity, in order. I believe even skeptics will be impressed by the correlations:

No.    U.Arcana                        Topic

 0    The Fool                            The Zero

 1    The Magus                        The Ace

 2    The High Priestess            The Crusader

 3    The Empress                    The Hedonist

 4    The Emperor                    The Plutocrat

 5    The Pope                        The Establishment

 6    The Lovers                        The Relationship

 7    The Chariot                        Power

 8    Justice                                Blame

 9    The Hermit                        The Self

10    The Wheel of Fortune        The Game

11    Strength                            Certainty

12    The Hanged Man              The Loser

13    Death                                The Big One

14    Temperance                        Desire

15    The Devil                            The Winner

16    The Tower                          Responsibility

17    The Star                              Accountability

18    The Moon                          The Setback

19    The Sun                              Success

20    The Day of Judgment          The Future

21     The World                        El Dorado

It would seem that the punks had something definitely in mind in their  mention of the Harrier Tarot. Now, with the spotlight on the number 22, can we find other associations between Harry and the Tarot?

The answer is yes. There are 22 Articles of the Harrier Parish, which is the section that lays out the entire “theology” of the Parish .  Hymn No. 22 is the Harrier equivalent of the doxology, that is, the hymn most closely associated with the messiah. And if we look at the Present Testament, we find that it contains 22 books (five fewer than the New Testament of the Bible, whereas the BB’s Past Testament contains exactly the same number of books, 39, as the Old Testament of the Bible).

So, at a minimum, there is very strong circumstantial evidence that the BB has definite links to the Tarot. But do such links mean anything, or do they represent a kind of game? The answer to that, I believe, is that it depends on the nature of the links we find. In the case of the “Harrier Tarot,” it would appear that the punks are using the Upper Arcana to establish a contextual criticism of what Harry is saying. In another words, the Tarot references are being used as an augmentation of the text, for the purpose of clarifying the point of view of the authors.

Rewarding as this contextual support might be, it will not help us locate or contact the punks of South Street—unless there are Tarot correspondences that relate directly to the meaning and intentions of the punks themselves.

With this in mind, I continued my search and came, ultimately, to the conclusion that the entire BB was conceived to be a Tarot deck by the punks of South Street. If true, this would have to be relevant information about the meaning and intentions of the punk authors.

But is it true? Clues abound. Three books in the BB have 78 chapters: the Book of Psomethings, the Book of Ed, and the Book of Willie (the first book in the Present Testament.) But why three books and not four, since four is a number of completion? Nothing in the Punk Testament is long enough to have 78 chapters, and yet this testament is clearly of high importance to the punks, despite the fact that it is of much smaller scale than the other two.

But perhaps scale is the key. A careful analysis of the Punk Testament reveals that one of its books has exactly 78 verses. Coincidence? The book in question is Bands, the first book of the Punk Testament.

Thus, the punks have told us four times that the number 78, the definition of wholeness in the Tarot deck, is important to the BB.

But why did they wait till the book of Psomethings to give us 78 chapters in the Past Testament?

Mulling this question was what led me to the discovery that the BB is subdivided primarily according to a scheme of fours and fives.

The first five books (Kinesis, Apes, Names, Gods, and Lies) are a natural grouping, of course, consistent with the Bible’s Pentateuch (five books of Moses). The next four books (Gypsies, Mesopotamians, Greeks, and Romans) also constitute a natural grouping of the greatest (or most famous) civilizations of antiquity. These are followed by five books concerned with the middle ages (Barbarians, Christians, Bubonites, Giants, and Explorers).

There then occurs what seems like an exception, the nine Books of the Chosen Nations. But closer analysis reveals that these consist of five western nations (Spics, Frogs, Brits, Krauts, and Yanks) followed by four books of eastern nations (Beaks, Russkies, Chinks, and Nips), to which the book of Others could be added as a fifth, or left to itself as a symbolic stand-in for the whole.

The Chosen Nations are succeeded by a set of five “P” books, which correspond to the Bible’s books of wisdom (of which incidentally, there are only four). It is in this group that Psomethings is included with its 78 chapters. Is there something notable about the “P” books that makes them the best location for a global hint about the Tarot?

Individual readers will have to decide this issue for themselves, but I am persuaded that there is. Analysis of the five books in numerical terms is indeed interesting. The Book of Psongs consists of 66 chapters (the number of books in the Bible) and, coincidentally(?), ends on the sixth verse of Chapter 66. Is it just my imagination, or are we being shown the shadow of the beast?

The next in the sequence, the Book of Psayings, proves to be something of a conundrum in terms of chapter count. While it ends with Chapter 6 (on a sixth verse, incidentally), it also contains the twenty six letters of the alphabet, which have been squeezed somewhat ambiguously into Chapter 5. It would appear that the purpose of this ambiguity is to enable the punks to end with a number designation that has meaning to them—66, while still permitting the alphabetic chapters to be counted as chapters in some other organizational scheme. But more about that later...

It is only after the first two “P” books, with their Biblical numeric references to 666 and 66 that the Book of Psomethings appears with its 78 chapters. The book after that is Pnotes, which has 56 chapters, which we recall as the number of Lower Arcana cards. The fifth and final “P” book is Pspeciastes, which has four chapters, and it bears mentioning that four is a number with symbolic meaning in both the Tarot and the Bible.

As an aside we might ask, Does the “P” stand for Punk? For it would seem that this is the location where the punks are telling us, with numbers only, that their work is to be understood as both a Bible and a Tarot deck.

Does the term superposition ring a bell? If my analysis is accurate, we are being told here that there are (at least) two mutually exclusive schemes of organization for The Boomer Bible. Can we verify the claim, if that’s what it is?

I believe so. What we are looking for are the numbers which represent the BB as definitions of its wholeness, however that is constituted. The derivation of numbers from the testaments is self-evident: 39 books of the Past Testament, 22 books of the Present Testament, and 12 books of the Punk Testament. But how do we assign a number to the Book of Harrier Brayer? I suggest that the punks were very clear about how they wanted readers to arrive at this number.

The Book of Harrier Brayer has a Table of Contents page which illustrates the hierarchy of its organization in terms of indentions. The principal sections of the book are those whose titles stand against the lefthand margin. There are five of these: 1) Signs & Symbols of the Pontifical Harrier Parish; 2) Table of Harrier Days and Appointed Texts; 3) Harrier Orders of Service; 4) Articles of the Pontifical Harrier Parish ; and 5) The Hymnal.  

What happens when we use “5” as the number of totality for the Book of Harrier Brayer? Very interesting things.

Adding the Book of Brayer (5) to the Present Testament (22) gives us 27, the number of books in the New Testament (and, intriguingly, the number of hymns in the Hymnal). And since we’ve already seen that the Past Testament has the same number of books as the Old Testament (39), the number of the Past Testament plus the present Testament plus the Book of Brayer equals 66, the number of books in the Bible.

But if we now add to 66 the number of books in the Punk Testament (12) , we arrive at a total of 78, the number of cards in the Tarot deck.

It would seem that the numerical clues provided in the “P” books do amount to a claim, and the claim is accurate. The punks have written a complete Bible of 66 books—Harry’s Bible—and they have also given us 78 units which they ask us to see as cards.

Moreover, this seems to provide us with literary information as well; that is, assistance in interpreting the BB as a whole. The Punk Testament in this numerical context is no longer an addendum or a postscript commentary; it is  possibly the critical component of the whole. In structural terms, the punks appear to be saying that the world now belongs to Harry. He is the definition of wholeness and completion. And this is a definition of wholeness which leads inevitably to annihilation.

The alternative indicated by the existence of the Punk Testament, however, is not simply a turning point or change of direction; it must amount to transformation. This is a key point which is made perfectly clear by the numerical context. The Tarot deck which corresponds to the punk perspective must also take in the entire work, expressly including all 66 units of the “Harry Bible.” The old organization therefore disappears into the greater whole envisioned by the punks.

They are not carping about an imminent end of the world: they are issuing a call to arms for metamorphosis, a recreation of the universe we choose to live in.

I am well aware that the mere existence of 78 units does not prove that the punks have a synthesis which verifies their right to invoke a transformation. But the fact, is we have already seen the underlying structural logic by which the books of the BB do coalesce into a Tarot deck. That’s the point of all the fours and fives in the second level of structure. Every time we encounter four books, we can divide them into suits. Every time we encounter five books, we can divide four of them into suits and assign the fifth to the Upper Arcana.

It is also clear that much of the later content of the Punk Testament is designed to show us how the text of “Harry’s Bible” can be rehabilitated in terms of a different perspective. The Book of Ways methodically steps us through the books of the Chosen Nations and rewrites not the facts, but the underlying storyline of each one.

I suggest that the Punk Testament also contains the information we need in order to divine the meanings of the individual suits in the Punk’s BB Tarot deck. The key is to be found in the set of chapters in Ways that enumerates “the way of the punks.” For here we are expressly given references to the four elements, along with symbolic language that may be read as the proposed punk symbolism for a new definition of completion.

Without doing a line-by-line analysis, I will summarize my own subjective interpretation of Ways thus:

Chapter    Element        Punk Suit

35            Earth             Numbers

36            Air                Words

37            Fire                Images

38            Water            Voices

And, I believe, the Upper Arcana in the Punk Tarot is represented by the word “dreams.”

In summary, my view is that the Punk Tarot envisioned in the BB represents a whole associated not with the physical world, but with consciousness. The four suits represent the grammar of human thought and expression, while the Upper Arcana represent the sphere—the mind space, if you will—in which we envision and create what has not yet been brought into being. The punks are asking us to abandon the metaphoric sleep of Harry’s world and awaken into a new kind of consciousness in order to transform the nature of our own existence.

Yet we began this discussion with the awareness that the punks are not at present fully emergent in our world. Can we also look to the BB for a clue as to when they may return?

Again, I believe we can. I am hesitant to mention this fact because it is so incredible to me, but I have counted again and again, and I must report that the number of chapters in the BB’s three testaments totals 2001. I must also point out that the text of the BB assigns a special identity to this number; it is the number the punks associate with the beginning of Mankind—humorously rendered in the Past Testament as 2001 million BC. If I am reading the numbers right, therefore, the punks foresee a new beginning for Mankind in the year 2001, a beginning at which I expect they would like to be present.

For my part I am convinced there is much to be done if we are to help them achieve the target date of a year 2001 return to our ‘reality.’

The first step I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter is one we can all participate in: learning how to use the BB as a Tarot deck organized around the theme of consciousness. Differences in individual interpretations will, of course, result in innumerable variations of such a deck, but perhaps that is the point. The practice of reading and studying books in the context of other books with which they are structurally affiliated may precipitate the kind of thinking the punks are asking us to do. And it may be that the reading of  “card” layouts designed to address specific questions will help us learn more about what we can do as individuals and how we should go about doing it.

The other area in which I believe it possible to take action has to do with authenticating the original existence of the punks. If the objective is a quantum moment in which the punks must “declare” themselves real, then we take a quantitative step toward that moment with each new item of physical evidence we can produce in confirmation of their history.

To this end, I am planning to embark on a search for the fabled Apunkrypha of South Street. I am convinced that although there may be pieces of this work in the Cream King Trove, the researchers at Eberhard do not possess anything like a complete copy of the one work which may complement and complete The Boomer Bible. I have distinct ideas about how and where to begin looking for it, but these I will keep to myself for the present. As soon as this book has been proofed for the printer, I will be setting out on that mission. If I succeed, my next book will be a stunner. If I fail, the next book on the punks may be written by someone else.