Summary
Chapter 52
A young prince Egyptian priest, Osiris, studied at a university in Yemen and commuted to Ethiopia and Sudan, bringing his knowledge of agriculture and conferring with others on the topic. They compared agricultural celebrations, known as the Black Mud Sound. At the time those who influenced the growth of crops were seen as sorcerers. Theater accompanied these fertilization rites. People sang and played instruments and let nature pour out.
Osiris was adept at the mysteries and people began to say his mother was the sky Nut and his father was the earth Geb. Osiris’s dances were popular and caught on.
Osiris finished university and returned to Egypt, where a dark cloud covered the land. His brother, Set, thought he was a dilettante. Set was a crook and a failure. He hated agriculture and nature, and was a raging, jealous, and egotistical man. He wanted to marry their sister Isis, but Osiris was going to. The people hated Set, who went down in history as the “1st man to shut nature out of himself” (162).
The Black Mud Sound spread throughout the land and people danced during the day and celebrated with instruments and singing and shaking at night. The Egyptians loved Osiris and called him the Bull. He toured the lands with his musicians and brought prosperity and peace.
Set hated this and tried to shut down the music, for which he was booed and lampooned. Osiris married Isis and Set married their other sister Nephthys. The latter marriage was unhappy, and Set spent time with lackluster poets who wandered around criticizing people.
Soon, though, Osiris’s dance began to come upon people and interrupt their tilling of the soil. Osiris did not know the alchemical arts and did not know how to stop this trouble. An artist came to visit him and told him this was because the music had no text, so if Osiris could just dance for Thoth he would illustrate them and then the priests could figure out which god or spirit possessed them and how to make them depart if need be.
Osiris did this dance for Thoth for days and Thoth took this all down in his Book of Litanies.
*
Peace was restored to Egypt but Osiris was bored. He heard of suffering and cannibalism elsewhere in the world so he left Isis in charge of Egypt and set out to help. With a young friend Dionysus, he brought music and dancing and taught thousands of people.
Set saw this as his chance, and started telling the people that Osiris was bringing drunkenness and fornication throughout the world. He said his brother was a fraud and if he was really a Seed then he should also be a Germ and be planted and then spring from the waters of the Nile.
Osiris heard of the challenge and began practicing. While a guest of an Inca king he did this days at a time and never failed. He returned to Egypt to the people’s acclaim and reunited with his wife. That night she conceived their son, Horus.
The next day was Osiris’s test, and he was placed into a coffer, nailed shut, and put into the Nile. But he was secretly risen by the legislators that night. They saw he was in a death-like slumber, a trick he’d learned, and the legislators mutilated him to look like fish did it. Set gloated that the people’s hero was a fraud.
Thoth knew Set was lying, having seen Osiris do the trick in South America. In fact, throughout that region and in other places in North America and Africa word had spread of this feat. Thoth thus called for an autopsy and investigation. Thoth was arrested but managed to escape. He left the sacred Book with Isis and went into exile.
Isis wandered Egypt, lamenting her husband. Osiris seemed to live on through bulls (which Set had killed) and in the celebrations of the people. Furious, Set began to target the Osirian guides. Most of them fled, but they had learned the Work. Dionysus took it to Greece, where he taught the people the Osirian Art until the Atonists of the late 4th century had Constantine “co-sign for the Cross” (168).
The Greeks established temples to the Egyptian-derived Mysteries, letting people be filled with the gods. The Atonist priests began calling these gods “daimons” in the 10th century so they would have evil connotations. The Greeks and Romans were crazy about the Mysteries and celebrated them in temples to Osiris and Isis. The Atonists had their temples sacked in A.D. 378; their priests were tortured and all behavior that was seen as deviant or un-Christian was crushed. As time passed the Atonists seemed like they were stronger, but the rites associated with Osiris continued underground. The Church persecuted them through torture and killing, using claims of heresy and witchcraft.
Set had many problems even though he’d outlawed the Osirians, Dionysus, and Thoth. He banned dancing, sex, and Life itself; a death cult formed around him. He was worried, though, about the rumors of Horus growing up in Koptos where Isis had fled. He decided to move to Heliopolis City of the Sun and rule Egypt from there.
Set’s mind continued to deteriorate and became obsessed with the Sun. His religion was based on Aton, the Sun’s flaming disc, and he thought this would overcome the nature religion of Osiris. Yet at the time of his death he had not stamped it out, and it would continue to spring up around the world. Atonism never took real hold in Egypt, seen as “nothing but a club of old grumblers” (174), until Amenhotep. The Osirian leaders offed this one when they realized he was just going to be another Set.
Tutankhamen came to power and let the people do their stuff, but there was trouble brewing. Another pharaoh’s daughter, Thermuthis, adopted a baby found in a basket in the bushes. She was a conservative woman who was aghast at the permissiveness she saw all around her. She did not know her son, Moses, would sneak off to the Domain of Osiris every chance he got. One historian claimed he even became an Initiate.
The people called Moses Pharaoh when he went among them. Once he asked them what the heaviest sound they’d ever heard was. Someone told him of Jethro the Midianite who could play the “sounds of the spirit and had a legendary instrument that sounded like an orchestra and knew all the ‘old songs’” (176). Moses was intrigued and traveled to see Jethro. He had his men set up a ruse where he could appear to save Jethro’s cattle. Jethro was grateful and invited Moses to stay. Moses heard him play the instrument and was struck; if he could learn then he could be the Hierophant of the surviving Osirian Order.
Over the next months, Moses learned the music from Jethro, writing everything down. Yet when he prepared to leave Jethro told him unless he knew the words to the music, the music would not be right. He would only pass them on to a family member, he said, so Moses decided to marry his daughter Zipporah.
When Moses and Zipporah married they planned to return to Egypt. As they were about to leave, Jethro told Moses that one day he should go down to Koptos where Thoth’s Sacred Book was. It had to be gotten during the right moon or it would be in its evil phase, he explained. Moses was shocked, wondering why he was just hearing about this. He lied and said Zipporah needed more time to rest before they left and went into the mountains to think about everything.
In the mountains, he had a vision, with a Specter of Set telling him he must figure out how to circumvent the deathless snake that guards the temple at Koptos at Isis and Osiris's temple, and that Isis would succumb to a certain line since it was her time of the month. He would tell Moses what to do but Moses must promise to restore the cult of Aton to Egypt. Moses laughed and refused at first, knowing how popular the Mysteries were and how “arid” (178) Atonism was, but he reconsidered and said he would. Set told him what he needed to know.
Moses returned and told Jethro he as leaving. Jethro knew what he was doing and criticized him. Moses sarcastically threw money on the ground in front of him as a “copyright fee for the junk you taught me” (179) and left. Jethro sighed to his friends that Moses would just be a two-bit sorcerer.
Chapter 53
Moses arrived in Koptos and got directions to the temples. He wandered in and looked at the obscene drawings of genitalia on the wall and saw scattered instruments. He smelled incense and drank wine, eventually falling asleep. When he woke, Isis in her Petro aspect was caressing him. He was immensely aroused by her but knew he had to be careful. She made love to him but interrupted herself and jumped up and asked what he brought for her.
Moses pulled out scarves, jewelry, liquor, and chickens. She took them all but said it was not enough and he needed to talk to her. He spoke to her in the Osirian way and fought the deathless snake down in her depths and went into her Book and got it all down. He left her there and set out for Egypt.
When he arrived he told the people he had a better sound than the Black Mud Sound; it would be a dignified concert and would not just be music that backgrounded dancing. The people were annoyed, knowing this to be an Atonist trick.
That evening Moses began playing Jethro’s music but something was wrong. People thrashed and imitated snaked and fought. Moses told his Atonist brethren he would fix it by doing songs and dances from the Work, the Sacred Book, and then people would love him and desire him. When he did this, though, people’s ears bled and some charged the stage. Moses did not know why the rites and words and dances did not come together.
The Osirians came out and made their own music and the people relaxed and began to play their instruments and sing. Men came close to Moses and he ordered their arrest. His Atonist thugs surrounded one man and beat him, so the audience charged. People stoned the royal chariots and looting and killing went on all night.
When they pushed into the palace itself, Moses had an idea. He took a leaf from the Book, uttered the Word, and set off a huge nuclear explosion that dwarfed anything Set ever did. This was the Petro Asson instead of the Rada; Moses must have approached Isis on the malevolent side of the Moon. Moses and his Atonists left the land for many years, and when they returned Moses saw Osirian behavior was still there. He wanted to burn the Book but was too afraid, so he hid it in a tabernacle.
*
Centuries passed and the Knights Templar, filthy ruffians, built their headquarters on the ruins of Solomon’s Temple. They bullied and persecuted in the name of Atonism. Their librarian, Hinckle Von Vampton, came across the Book of Thoth buried deep in an ancient room. He showed it to Hugues de Payens, their leader, and they began to translate the hieroglyphs.
The Book did not let them do this for very long, and gave them the worst of itself. It was saving all its love and Rada for when it reunited with dance and music. The Templars began to practice their Petro rites in secret. Their fortunes reversed, though, and they had to flee the Holy Land.
Philip IV despised the Templars and tried to destroy them, but Hinckle escaped. The Templars went underground. Hinckle was hidden by sympathizers for centuries. He came to America in 1890 and this was when all the symptoms of Jes Grew arose. The Wallflower Order was looking for Hinckle because the Book of Thoth was lying fallow but J.G. was raring its head wherever he went.
Hinckle got a job with the Sun and sent out his feeler to the Order through exposing their war in Haiti. He separated the Book into 14 pieces and sent them out. Someone gave it to Abdul, who began to translate it, and it became stationary. Jes Grew moved toward Manhattan, where, when it united with its Text, it would become Rada instead of Petro of Moses and the Templars.
Hinckle tried to get the Book from Abdul but had to murder him. The epigram Abdul left behind indicated that the Book was buried under the Cotton Club. A copy of the translation was with a publisher who had rejected it. When they unearthed the box they saw the Templars’ seal, the same that Hinckle wore right now. They knew of his plan to create a Talking Android and that is what brought them to this party.
Chapter 54
There is a hush in the room. Rollings speaks up and bellicosely says he does not believe any of it—why would someone give it to Abdul if it was supposed to keep moving, and how could Hinckle and Gould be thousands of years old? Black Herman asserts that they are because they learned to cheat death.
Hinckle tries to assuage the crowd, saying he is the easiest person to get along with—and who would have even given the Book to Abdul in the first place?
A voice speaks up and proclaims he did. It is Buddy Jackson, who saunters forward and gives the ancient Black handshake to Black Herman and PaPa. He speaks of how the Caucasian lodges wanted nothing to do with Black members and said they were illegitimate. They broke away from the National Compact and changed their name and ran the Caucasian lodge members out of Harlem. The vicious campaign against them continued, though, so they had some of their light-skinned brothers infiltrate the Caucasian lodges and they found out about the Knights Templar and learned that the Masonic mysteries were of Black origin and this man Hinckle had a sacred Book. The Caucasians seemed to know what was going on, though, and tried to kill Buddy by the Sarge of Yorktown, but that failed. The Book came to Jackson, who went by another name, and he decided to give it to Abdul because he knew Abdul knew the Egyptian writing.
Some of the partygoers wander away. Others listen intently. Rollings asks to see the Book, but before that can happen, T Malice rushes into the room.
Chapter 55
T Malice cries out that Jes Grew is dissolved; it is all over the radio. Buddy offers to take out Rollings, Hinckle, and Gould, but Black Herman says that they still have to show that the Book is real or no one will take them seriously.
T Malice goes out to the car and brings in a gorgeous, lavishly decorated box with snakes and scorpions encrusted with gems all over it. The Templar seal is on top. T Malice opens the box to reveal an iron box, then a shiny bronze box, then a sycamore one, then an ebony one, then ivory then silver then gold then empty.
Hinckle and Gould delight in this, but they are not left with this feeling for long when a group of “proletariat Black women and their little children” (196) burst into the room and accost Gould as the one who was creeping around the children. Herman cautions the sisters to wait a moment, that they will take care of the molester. The women demand justice but agree.
*
Black Herman and PaPa LaBas take their captives away from the party. Hinckle is proclaiming Biff will return and release them, but the men say nothing. The car heads away from where Hinckle thinks they are going, the Tombs prison, and he is confused. LaBas says they are just detectives with no authority here but they have jurisdiction in Haiti so they’re going to deliver the men to other authorities.
Black Herman and LaBas push their captives up to Benoit Battraville’s ship. They exchange greetings and shake hands with Battraville. Before they leave, PaPa asks Battraville why he thinks Jew Grew is waning. Battraville knows but cannot say, for he does not think the Haitians should intervene in the Americans affairs. He knows they will figure it out themselves, though.
Black Herman and LaBas walk out together, the former saying he is off to India to help recover a jewel missing from the great Buddha’s forehead. They say their warm goodbyes.
T Malice and PaPa return to the Kathedral, where Earline greets them happily. They are pleased to be together again. There is also a letter newly arrived from Abdul. PaPa opens it and reads the deceased man’s words. Abdul writes of how his book was rejected and how the publishers only want the seamy side of Black life, and how he wanted PaPa and Black Herman to read the Book of Thoth but he actually burned it up. It was too lewd, too depraved, and too decadent. He will sell the box and from the proceeds build a beautiful mosque.
PaPa sighs at this censorship from a man who decided for himself what Black people could view and understand. Jes Grew must have sensed the “ashes of its writings, its litany” (203) and shriveled up and died.
Earline asks if this is the end of Jes Grew, and PaPa replies that there is no end or beginning, as there is no end to life and Jes Grew is life.
*
A report says that grateful telegrams pour into the White House. Jes Grew the menace is over. Yet there will be difficult days ahead, the news proclaims, and they must go through a period of anxiety.
Biff Musclewhite will be heading home on the Titanic.
Haitian withdrawals are soon.
Thor Wintergreen has committed suicide, but a list of the Mu’tafikah was found and they were all arrested.
*
At lunch, PaPa and Earline talk about what happened to her. She admits she forgot to replenish the loa’s tray. She believes in Jes Grew now, she says, and wants to learn more. She says that young people today need to be told more about the rites so they can respect them. PaPa understands.
She invites him to a show playing at the theatre. It is “Mumbo Jumbo Holiday,” which Black Herman liked and the Atonists did not. He is pleased to see how many people are going.
Epilogue
Freud traveled to America and is disconcerted with the “Black Tide of Mud” (209), as he called it. When Dr. Jung as asked about Freud’s visit, he said his friend thought it a mistake. Jung also traveled there and saw that Europeans living in America had “gone Black.”
In the 1910s James Weldon Johnson started calling this thing “Jes Grew.” Scott Joplin put it out there and ended up having shock therapy. It filled Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Otis Redding down the line of years.
It is a lost liturgy seeking its litany, and it must find its Text or it will be mistaken as entertainment.
PaPa LaBas is giving this as a speech to students. Someone marvels that he is a hundred years old.
He continues on, speaking of how the knowledge came to America when the slaves were forced here. The rites are neither good nor evil but it depends on how they’re used. The houngan “practices the Rada rites with the Right Hand. Cheap, evil bokors practice the rites with the Left Hand” (213). And wherever the untampered word exists the Atonists move in using both religious and secular troops.
The moderator says it is time to end now, and thanks the eccentric old man for coming for his annual talk about Jes Grew.
PaPa leaves, but someone calls out to him on the street. It is “the old man who in his devotion to empirical method had washed out any prophecy for which his ancestors were famous” (215). He had not known what to make of Jes Grew and denounced it through the years. But now the imitators are on the decline and the members are taking over and Jes Grew is attaching to its blood. He had spent so much time talking like the Atonists before. He resembles “the embarrassed gargoyle dismayed and condemned to watch his former worshipers pass him by as thy went into the centers of Jes Grew” (216).
The man follows LaBas out into the parking lot and querulously asks him why he mystifies his past; youngsters need something palpable. He says they must have the Classics, serious works. PaPa ignores him and gets into his car and starts the engine, and tells the man to please move. The car jolts forward accidentally and hits the man, but he jumps up unharmed.
As PaPa drives away, he pities the man, who’d be back up on his soapbox talking of Marx and Freud and Youth and all that. He was frumpy and frowzy and would not last long, PaPa thinks.
In the '60s, people said they could not follow PaPa. In the '50s, they were unnerved. In the '40s, he wandered around like a haunt. In the '30s, he tried to recover his losses. In the '20s, they knew, and now the '20s were back. Time is a pendulum, not a river, and what goes around comes around.
Analysis
The last section of Mumbo Jumbo ends with a whopper of an exposition of the history of Jes Grew, stretching all the way back to the ancient Egyptians, moving through the empires of Greece and Rome, subverting our traditional understanding of the rise of Judaism and Christianity, and arriving squarely in the present moment of the 1920s. It also offers a reckoning for the villains Hinckle Von Vampton and Hubert “Safecracker” Gould, but it does not show the reader what they’ve been expecting this whole time—the Text, safe and sound in the ornate box whose hiding place PaPa LaBas cleverly deduced. By conscientiously withholding the Text from the reader, Reed makes his point about the nature of detective stories, about the essence of Jes Grew itself, and about the arc of history.
Reed commented in 1978 that he thought the “linear novel is finished,” and Mumbo Jumbo exemplifies that assertion with its placement of the most ancient of history at the very end of the novel, followed by a swift jump ahead several decades to the 1970s. His view of time is a “pendulum. Not a river” (218), so this move back and forth is crucial in establishing his view of history as dialectical, not teleological. He uses, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. notes, “the story of the past to reflect upon, analyze, and philosophize about the story of the present.”
Many critics have focused on the subversion of the detective novel tropes, looking to how Reed deconstructs the genre’s “emphasis on realism, linearity, and ratiocination” (Joe Weixlmann). The detective novel typically has a protagonist who relies on rational, deductive reasoning and shies away from anything that smacks of the spiritual or subjective. Reed’s choice to parody this genre, Lizabeth Paravisini explains, allows him to critique the same “social, religious and philosophical principles he finds objectionable in Western culture.” There are numerous examples of this in the novel: learning where the actual Text is (buried under the Cotton Club) comes from an inadvertent comment by T Malice and a dream of Black Herman’s, showing a reliance on “chance and intuition…accompanied by a rejection of empirical evidence as the way to reach knowledge”; the classic summation of how the detective came to his conclusion is not tidy and clear but instead laborious, very lengthy, and, as Richard Swope suggests, “full of anachronisms, and at times it appears that another voice supplants that of LaBas, which might be attributed to Reed himself but can also be thought of as the mediating voice of the loa”; and the pyrrhic victory of the protagonists, who, while they put away the antagonists, ultimately fail to procure the Text and save Jes Grew for the moment. Ultimately, as W. Lawrence Hogue notes, “The detective fails to solve the crime or find the truth. The missing text destroys any expectation of a closed conventional ending and reaffirms the text's sense of indeterminacy. What Reed in Mumbo Jumbo does is improvise upon the conventions of the traditional detective story (much in the same way that jazz musicians are expected to improvise on the standard composition)…Reed in Mumbo Jumbo writes a detective story that shows it is a linguistic invention.” Swope agrees, adding that “while the classic detective's goal is to repair the social order, a white middle-class order, which has been disrupted by a crime, LaBas is actually out to undermine that order, to infiltrate the Atonist, or single-minded, tendencies of white America with an alien cultural form. According to LaBas, the real plague is Atonism itself…”
Why, then, does Jes Grew disappear? Its written text is indeed gone, destroyed by Abdul Hamid. But this is important, as it literally refuses to be kept in a box, and is thus ultimately more of a state of mind and a state of being. It can live on in fragments, seeds, memories—and it can revive in the 1970s, as the final section of Mumbo Jumbo reveals. Helen Lock explains that “Jes Grew cannot be told by words, since it cannot be confined by forms. It takes its very existence from improvisation, change, and adaptation. It is not a form in itself; it is a response to a form. Thus the Book which had been used to limit these endless permutations is never revealed, because it must consist of words, and Reed wishes to avoid the conventional reader response of ‘atonement’ of sign and signified which had previously emasculated the spirit of Jes Grew. Once petrified on the page, ‘the written word comes forward as the completion of a process, not as the process itself. It quietly omits the context of composition, of discovery.’ And Jes Grew is essentially a process of discovery, an expression of individuality. So Reed shifts the emphasis from the fossilized forms of the Euro-American tradition, to the spirit which is conjured by the power of the word.”
