“This is a book for those who lie defeated by history and by the present. It isn’t a manual to turn the current defeat into a future triumph, but a rumour about a passage hidden within the battlefield leading to a forest beyond it.”
-Federico Campagna
Like many of Dick’s novels, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is inundated with a haunting ambiguity. Reader and character alike are never sure of the solidity of the presented reality, and one starts to get the sense that neither is the writer. Published in 1964, the novel was inspired largely by a vision of a face in the sky Philip K. Dick reports seeing the previous year:
“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; it was a vast visage of perfect evil. I realize now (and I think I dimly realized at the time) what caused me to see it:. . .months of isolation, of deprivation of human contact. . .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 and, worst of all, it was God.”
In the midst of his rocky third marriage, Dick self-exiled to a “little single-walled shack that [was] so cold in winter that. . .the ink would freeze in [his] typewriter ribbon.” It was in this hovel, under a God-haunted sky, that Dick typed out the manuscript for Three Stigmata, transferring the face from the clouds into the character of Palmer Eldritch, an oligarch whose spaceship crashes on Pluto upon return to the solar system from deep space.
It is rumored Eldritch has returned with some type of hallucinogenic, extraterrestrial lichen which he plans on distributing to colonists on Mars and various moons throughout the solar system, all with the UN’s blessing. Corporate rival, Leo Bulero, is not at all pleased to hear such a rumor. You see, he is already distributing a hallucinogen amongst the colonists, and is having to do so covertly, the UN having deemed his illegal.
Contradictory stories ensue: Eldritch died in the wreck, Eldritch survived the wreck, but is in recovery in an undisclosed location, and, strangest of all, what has returned from the distant Prox System in Eldritch’s ship is not Eldritch at all.
Bulero enlists one of his corporate precogs to get to the bottom of this mess. She is able to pinpoint him to a UN1 hospital on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. This she accomplishes by concentrating on future newspaper headlines:
“The headlines say that Palmer Eldritch is dead. . .And you’re accused of having done it, Mr. Bulero” (27-28).
She admits that the murder is not a certainty, that the future is not set, and her clairvoyance reveals a multitude of timelines, but that it could happen. Bulero is not dissuaded. He hatches a plan to visit the moon disguised as a reporter working for his company’s paper, but Eldritch has anticipated this move, and is prepared for his rival’s visit.
Upon the occasion of the two industrialists’ meeting, the novel’s trap is triggered.
Koinos Kosmos
“The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own,” or so goes the Heraclitus fragment. Koinos kosmos is the Greek name for the shared world and idios kosmos that of the sleeper’s private world. While Heraclitus’ koinos kosmos is often understood more along the lines of consensus reality, and idios kosmos as the private mental life of the individual, the way Dick uses the terms in his essay, Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes, and elsewhere, is only loosely related. In fact, Dick’s idios kosmos might be more in line with consensus reality, something like one of Robert Anton Wilson’s reality tunnels, or what anthropologists might call a lifeworld. To oversimplify, we could call it culture. It is the superstructure that sets limits to the possible and shapes the boundaries of experience for those born into it. It’s not necessarily something an adherent is consciously aware of. If asked to define their lifeworld, most people would be at a total loss, for it is the very element through which we move.
Koinos kosmos, on the other hand, would be more aligned with pure immanence, Reality with a capital-R, or unmediated reality. It is the whiteness of the whale.
“If a person’s idios kosmos begins to break down, he is exposed to the archetypal or transcendent forces of the koinos kosmos, and, if the time comes that he lives only in the koinos kosmos, he is exposed to powers too great for him to handle. . .In other words, we must have our idios kosmos to stay sane. Reality has to filter through, carefully controlled by the mechanisms by which our brains operate. We can’t handle it directly, and I think that this was what was occurring when I saw Palmer Eldritch lingering, day after day, over the horizon.”
A healthy lifeworld might allow for exploration, both down into the depths of the idios kosmos as well as up into the outer reaches of the koinos kosmos, and even provide structured ways of doing so via ritual and religion. This provides structure, while simultaneously allowing for a certain vulnerability to the sacred, a willingness to be malleable, and adapt to changing conditions.
As we discussed way back in Slapstick Horror, one of Trickster’s traditional roles was to usher in the new, and where else can the new be found but the farthest depths and remotest reaches?
An unhealthy lifeworld shackles Trickster and closes the exits, vehemently denies the validity of alternative kosmos, and exerts a rigid refusal to adapt. Exploration outside a certain boundary becomes a strict taboo. In that way, it is like a prison. And what do you know, the lifeworld we occupy here, as in all of Dick’s fiction, is none other than the Black Iron Prison.
Yes, things are looking rather bleak in the pages of Palmer Eldritch. The world has heated up. One cannot even go outside during the day without thermal shields. Power failures cook entire apartment blocks. Meanwhile, beach resorts are opening at the poles for the ultra rich, who are also able to elect to undergo “evolutionary therapy” in order to expand their frontal lobes, thereby peel off, once and for all, from the preterite masses2. Oh, and a draft system is enlisting people to colonize Mars and various moons across the solar system. These are not sought after stations, but a sacrificial mission. Even in Mars’ relatively lush Fineburg Crescent, life is exceedingly difficult:
“The colonists there had gardens: it was not, like some areas, a waste of frozen methane crystals and gas descending in violent, ceaseless storms year in, year out. Believe it or not he could go up to the surface from time to time, step out of his hovel” (120).
Barney Mayerson, one of Bulero’s precogs, is sent here after failing to rescue his boss from his ill-fated meeting with Eldritch. He finds the Crescent’s reputation to be somewhat overstated. The aqueducts meant to keep the gardens watered are clogged with miles of Martian dust and the equipment with which to clear them is in bad repair, telepathic jackals stalk the night, and almost everyone seems to be an addict of something called Can-D.
Can-D is the drug distributed by Mayerson’s old boss, Leo Bulero. It is the illegal compliment to his highly successful business: Perky Pat Layouts. These layouts are dollhouses, basically. P.P.L. manufactures them as well as miniatures of every imaginable sort with which these dollhouses can be accessorized. The dollhouses harken back to an imagined midcentury golden age, and the official story is that colonists play with their sets in order to combat their homesickness, but really they are incomplete without Can-D, the ultimate Perky Pat accessory, which Bulero also distributes, although this he does covertly.
The drug translates its user into the Barbie-like world of Perky Pat.
Upon ingesting the Can-D, users’ consciousnesses are transferred into the dolls’ bodies. In this way, it is very much an analog drug. Women animate Perky Pat herself, while men animate her partner, Walter. If multiple sets of men or women use the same layout, they will share the single doll body, their consciences having to work in tandem in order to maneuver their avatar. Meanwhile, their actual bodies will be sitting inert around the layout.
“Their two bodies would be seated at proper distance one from the other; no wrong-doing could be observed, however prurient the observers were. Legally, this had been ruled on; no cohabitation could be proved, and legal experts among the ruling UN authorities on Mars and the other colonies had tried—and failed. While translated one could commit incest, murder, anything, and it remained from a juridicial standpoint a mere fantasy, an impotent wish only” (42).
The colonists seem to use this power, mostly, for swinging. The hovel Mayerson joins is occupied by three couples, who, having mixed and matched who knows how many times, are growing tired of the drug experience, and will be taking a vote whether to switch to the newly available Chew-Z.
Eldritch’s Chew-Z is just hitting the market at the time Mayerson arrives. It is like Can-D’s digital counterpart. Unlike its predecessor, it does not require a layout. Instead, the user goes entirely into their own imagination where they have full control of reality, like a totally lucid dream, or so goes the advertisement.
All Can-D offers is access to an alternative idios kosmos, a place where the usual rules don’t apply. Instead of living in a miserable hovel on a desert planet, you can drive a convertible, go to the beach, and sleep with your roommates' partners. Still, Can-D reality remains constrained by materiality, ie the miniatures. Chew-Z, on the other hand, offers the user control over their own koinos kosmos which amounts, basically, to the ability to play God in a universe of their own creation.
The user goes into their own head, into a totally plastic world, a sandbox universe, where they have complete control. It is populated only by manifestations of oneself who can take any form desired.
“Isolated. The communal world is over” (179).
Reading Stigmata in 2025, one cannot help but think of the internet, and especially of the current bombardment of AI, for it, too, promises a sort of disappearance into a false world of one’s own creation, occupied by a single mind. There is even a scene describing a device that can turn books into movies in any style the viewer desires, for example Moby-Dick but make it funny3. There are those who’d like programs like this to be at the center of our own world’s artistic production. A terrifying idea, for there could be no encounter with the new in such a work, not even with an Other, but only remixes put through your own mind’s filter.
As with the sweet promises of our own modern tech overlords, what Eldritch is offering is something far more sinister than he lets on.
Palmer Eldritch
“‘God,’ Eldritch said, ‘promises eternal life. I can do better; I can deliver it. . .When we return to our former bodies—you’ll notice that no time has passed. We could stay here fifty years and it’d be the same; we’d emerge back at the demesne on Luna and find everything unchanged, and anyone watching us would see no lapse of consciousness, as you have with Can-D, no trance, no stupor” (86-87).
Demesne is a word that has fallen out of popular use over the last two hundred years. It derives from the latin dominus and refers to the land attached to a manor and retained for the owner's personal use. An interesting choice of vocabulary to evoke here. It was the lord of the manor who dictated the idios kosmos for all those who lived upon the land. Despite their overwhelming majority and the fact that they were the ones working the land, the serfs had little ability to shape their own world. The landlord set the boundaries of their realities, typically in ways that directly benefited himself at the cost of everyone else.
Palmer Eldritch, or rather the entity possessing Palmer Eldritch’s body, is behaving in the same way. Far from granting users their own domains, as advertised, they are shepherded into that of this alien creature who was cast out from his home star-system and “took up residence where that wild, get-rich-quick operator from your system encountered [him]” (223).
The creature admits to Barney that it is attempting to introduce Chew-Z to humanity in order to perpetuate itself within humanity’s conscience. Any who take it would become denizens of this creature’s reality where it has full control over everything.
This is basically how Dick defines the Black Iron Prison at one point in Exegesis:
“The BIP is a vast complex life form (organism) which protects itself by inducing a negative hallucination. . .It has come here. And because of its defensive devices we are not aware of it. . .This is a sinister life form indeed. First it takes power over us, reducing us to slaves, and then it causes us to forget our former state, and to be unable to see or to think straight, and not to know we can’t see or think straight, and finally it becomes invisible to us by reason of what it has done to us. We cannot even monitor our own deformity, our own impairment. Even the edifice of the church has been subverted by the BIP and made into an instrument of its occlusion of us. . .Yes, the human brain has been invaded, and once invaded, is occluded to the invasion and the damage resulting from the invasion; it has now become an instrument for the pathenogen: it winds up serving it as its slave” (404-405).
It is exceedingly difficult not to read this as an eldritch definition of capitalism, that hegemonic idios kosmos in which we are all entombed, and which is at this very moment cooking our planet into the same inhospitable hellscape as seen in Stigmata. No doubt the masters of our reality would scatter us poor morlocks across the galaxy to live in hovels and terraform alien deserts as they luxuriate in the warm bath houses of the north pole—God, I’m so tired of railing against capitalism at large. It feels like such a futile exercise, but if that doesn’t map onto our situation perfectly, I don’t know what does.
Something has gotten inside of us and flipped this switch within our conscience and made us slaves to an organism that is destroying us, and we are, largely, blind to it. Maybe that is why there is this new openness to mysticism and the Weird on the left, broadly construed. With communal life in the state it is in, labor totally scattered, and capitalist propaganda running at full blast, becoming aware of our situation has become like this moment of amanesis, an unforgetting, an almost religious awakening.
Dick had his own religious awakening around the time he wrote this book. As Erik Davis tells it in High Weirdness, his “embrace of Christianity is murky. In some accounts [the face in the sky] was the cause, while in others, he explained the turn to the church as Anne’s last-ditch attempt to save the marriage” (276). While he would not attend services for long, Dick would consider himself a Christian and an Episcopalian for the rest of his life. He formed an early fascination with the Eucharist, which brought him to Jung’s “Transformation Symbols in the Mass” which may well be where he first “encountered the explicitly Gnostic notions of the fallen and ignorant demiurge” (276).
Despite his status as a born-again believer, the ingestion of both drugs in the book are a rather nihilistic parody of Christian communion. Indeed, even before the introduction of Chew-Z, Can-D is acquiring its own religious adherents:
“He himself was a believer; he affirmed the miracle of translation—the near-sacred moment in which the miniature artifacts of the layout no longer merely represented Earth but became Earth. And he and the others, joined together in the fusion of doll-inhabitation by means of the Can-D, were transported outside of time and local space. Many of the colonists were as yet unbelievers; to them the layouts were merely symbols of a world which none of them could any longer experience. But, one by one, the unbelievers came around” (37).
Anne Hawthorne
Anne Hawthorne is a devout of the Neo-American Christian Church—she also has the same first name as Dick’s estranged wife, but we aren’t going to unpack that here. For some insight into Dick the Romantic, check out
’s “Philip K. Dick is Sci-Fi Saul Bellow” in which she identifies both men as sensitive souls with tragic flaws—As for our purposes here, Barney Mayerson meets Anne on the trip to Mars where they learn they will be living in the same area. She tries to convert him to her religion. In fact, she confesses that she is going to Mars as a sort of missionary, planning to convert as many as she can, away from Can-D, and to the Church.“I think the use of Can-D indicates a genuine hunger on the part of these people to find a return” (127).
A return to what exactly, she does not get a chance to say because Mayerson cuts her off, but we can fill in the blank. She argues that the Can-D experience is not real, that the Earth it takes you to is false. That the layouts are idols. Barney says he doesn’t care. It feels real, and it’s communal, so that’s good enough for him. He is puzzled by Anne’s convictions, having none of his own, saying he could understand them if she was from the colonies, and desperate for something to believe in, but she is from Earth, same as him.
Barney will continue to connect Anne with the Earth. When he runs into her again on Mars, she seems to have been totally broken by her experience. She no longer cares about converting anyone and just wants to get back to her home planet.
“No wonder she hated it on Mars; historically her people undoubtedly had loved the authentic ground of Terra, the smell and actual texture, and above all the memory it contained, the remnants in transmuted form, of the host of critters who had walked about and then at last dropped dead, in the end perished and turned back—not to dust—but to rich humus” (143).
She is in a state of despair. She is miserable on Mars and cannot go home. In reading this section, one might remember that Dick himself has lost access to his marital home, that his life has fallen apart, and he is alone in a shack, freezing his ass off and spending all his time writing while the sky contains the face of an evil God, that the macrocosm might be playing itself out in this microcosm. Anne/Dick longs to return home, but has to admit the “Earth is ceasing to become our natural world. . .We’ve got no world left! . . .'No home at all!’” (141).
There is not much of a happy resolution beyond this point, either. Reality remains unsure through the end. Eldritch seems to be replacing everything and everyone with himself. The demiurge remains firmly in control. His telltale signs, the metal jaw, the artificial hand and eyes, shine through as he replaces more and more characters as the novel nears its conclusion.
It becomes impossible to know what level of reality we are in: whether we are in Eldritch’s world, or the real world but with Eldritch’s bleeding in, or vice versa, or somewhere else entirely is never again clear after Bulero first sits down with him.
Just how cruel of a game the demiurge might be playing is never revealed. Bulero seems to have a plan that will kill Eldritch and end the madness, but he may well be carrying it out in an imaginary realm. Who can say? Eldritch is not only all around, but he has also gotten completely inside:
“It looks into our eyes; and it looks out of our eyes” (219).
Reverse
On its own, Stigmata reads as one of Dick’s most nihilistic works, written during an exceedingly dark period of his difficult life, but, in hindsight, Dick revisits the work. The first piece of advice he gives in Exegesis on understanding the novel is to read it in reverse, but what it might mean to do so is never made explicit. Is one to go the opposite way as the characters and slowly become less and less aware of any demiurgic intrusion, and just live one’s life as if it were real? A Voltaire-type tend your own garden bit of advice?
If so, Dick seems to contradict this idea later on, which is about par for the course when it comes to Exegesis. By the midpoint, Dick is seeing Stigmata as a single piece in the center of a larger cycle. Its purpose is to reveal the incursion of the demiurge. It follows after A Scanner Darkly and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which show our occlusion and the world as it really is respectively.
Stigmata’s job, then, is to illustrate
“Who/what deliberately occludes us: the Yaltabaoth Magician evil deity, spinner of spurious worlds, creator of illusion and inhabiting, contaminating (unclean) presence in these degraded pseudo worlds" (405).
This is followed up by A Maze of Death, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, each of which show a salvific entity from the koinos kosmos trying to enter our idios kosmos, the Black Iron Prison. This will be most fully fleshed out in the VALIS trilogy, but until then we are left with the demiurge in YHWH drag while the real YHWH is pushed to the periphery of the trash stratum, trying to break through.
There are some sparse hints about surviving even such a fallen reality sprinkled throughout. Even Eldritch, Barney points out, was created by God and therefore must contain His mark to some degree.
There is also an emphasis on groundedness. The Earth purveys even here. There is a yearning for the natural world. Barney sees it most clearly in Anne, but it is an underlying motif throughout the work.
The very currency of the world has earthly connotations. Often referred to as skins, it is specifically truffle skin, a type of mushroom that grows underground, totally connected to the Earth. The truffle is used, we learn, because their special genetic makeup makes forgery impossible. Likewise, a perfect human forgery seems to be beyond the ability of Eldritch. It is always his three stigmata breaking through, notifying characters that they are interacting not with a fellow human being, but merely a manifestation of the demiurge.
That these mushrooms cannot be replicated might be related to how they are grounded in the Earth. Mycelial networks suture them not only to one another, but to a base reality, as if the Earth herself maintains some connection to the koinos kosmos. Even if everything built atop the surface is irreal, there is something stable and capital-R Real about the planet.
In many traditional cultures, snakes are respected as messengers from the underworld. Their holes in the ground are seen as portals. What is the underworld if not base reality, the koinos kosmos? If the Christian God is actually the demiurge in disguise, then it would only make sense for the snake to be vilified in His religion, for The Black Iron Prison can allow no messages to be retrieved from outside its walls, so the serpent’s truth must be spun into the most dastardly lie imaginable.
Beyond the truffle, lichen, too, are evoked throughout the book. Not only are both drugs derived from the substance, but it stands as a solid metaphor for the Martian colonists who are sent to sacrifice themselves in the long act of making Mars a livable place while their lords and masters soak up the last available pleasures on Earth.
These colonists might learn a thing or two from the humble lichen which is considered a pioneer species. It is among the first living things to colonize bare rock or areas defoliated by a disaster. It can survive in extremely harsh conditions, ranging from deserts, frozen tundra soil, and high altitudes. When pressed beyond its limits, lichen can even enter into a state of suspension known as cryptobiosis, during which biochemical activities are halted until more hospitable conditions return.
This does not mean it is just about going into hibernation and awaiting a messiah to save us. If Stigmata is acting as a prequel to Ubik, then we know the in-breaking force cannot do the job on its own. Something must be in place for the that force to activate. The battle has to be fought on our side of the glass. Here is where the lessons of lichen and mushrooms come in, lessons of survival in brutal conditions, building and upholding mycelial-like networks, and the sheer perseverance of a dogged belief that one day the conditions will change, the walls of the Black Iron Prison will crumble, and the lichen shall inherit the Earth.
[Exit Music]
Speaking of the UN, Bulero’s complaining about the organization being run by foreigners has got to be one of Dick’s funniest throwaway lines.
Shades of H.G. Wells’ Morlocks and Eloi.
That’s the example from the text. Moby-Dick is already very funny, if you ask me.
This was fantastic.
Thanks, what a great piece on Dick’s book, I think my favorite due to the Perky Pat Layouts. I dipped into his last novel, „The Transmigration of Timothy Archer“, recently in one of my vignettes of 100 novels of 1982: https://open.substack.com/pub/detlevfischer/p/philip-k-dick-the-transmigration?r=2xe802&utm_medium=ios