Donning the Habit, Defrocking the Pope
The wisest man I ever met would probably by most people in this world be considered a good-for- nothing fool. His name was Ray and we all called him “Fisherman Ray” because that was what he did with himself – he spent his days and nights fishing off local piers in the Huntington & Newport Beach area in California. And when he wasn’t fishing, he was drinking his coffee in a local coffee shop. That’s where I got to know Ray during my high school years.
Ray was a retiree out of JPL. In fact, most of the regular Sunday morning patrons of the coffee shop on Orange and Main street in Huntington Beach where employees or ex-employees of JPL or Hughes Aircraft. I was just the young punk-poet who hung around them and listened in awe at some of their stories. Ray, on the other hand, acted like an outsider even from these groups – always standing alone. His role in this environment was more along the lines of being the butt of gentle humor. He was the “old lunatic” everyone liked to joke mildly about, with good humor of course, once he finished his weekly spiel and left.
Ray’s “bag,” as we used to call his spiel, was a numbers racket. To Ray, everything seemed to have a mathematical equivalent and some sort of psycho-spiritual connotation. He was a big conspiracy theorist (this was even before I knew of such people). He’d go on and on about numbers this, numbers that, all the codes of the big “Them” who were in control of the rest of “Us” by their manipulation of numbers and secret messages.
Granted, at face value Ray’s theories boiled down to an old man who had seen too much that he possibly didn’t fathom, and now he had too much time and money to do anything but ponder some of life’s mysteries. Granted, his notions seemed very farfetched and we might even agree insane, but he wanted very much to teach me what he believed was true.
Years later as I examine my time with Ray, it wasn’t his numbers rackets that were so informative about how the world works, it wasn’t his grand mass of information about dollar bills, the civil war, the Kennedy years, and the American Space Program that I learned the most from, it was the simplicity of his own life that he demanded of himself as a means to assuage his fears of political deceit. He lived his life the way he wanted to, simply and routinely.
I look back at Ray fondly also as being one of many people I’ve met or learned about who share the same birthday I have. Like Bobby Darin, the Nation of Israel, and myself, Ray’s birthday is May 14th. We all have landed under the zodiacal sign of The Bull, Taurus, which is also the ruling authority of the tarot card known as The Hierophant (or Le Pope in Italian and French deck designs).
The Hierophant sometimes sends us messages of divine inspiration and wisdom. This card represents institutional religion, organized law, and regular routines. This is all about the nature of our quest for knowledge. Here we learn, by studying Crowley’s version of the card, that the seemingly chaotic appearance of things is really an illusion caused by a narrow view of a grand geometric pattern. Life really does seem to run by the numbers. Sometimes it’s good to go by the numbers, and sometimes good to turn those numbers on their heads.