The Judas Tapes

Of Bankowsky's previous novels, the critics said:

A GLASS ROSE

A brilliantly constructed first novel . . . thoroughly convincing . . . great, raw impact. TIME.

Bankowsky is with one novel among our finest writers. L.A. MIRROR

AFTER PENTECOST

A grit of reality and an ecstasy of vision . . . as remarkable and intense a novel as the season is likely to produce. N. Y. TIMES

ON A DARK NIGHT

An ability to endow the most naturalistic of characters with mythical and heroic lineaments. N. Y. TIMES

THE PALE CRIMINALS

A high and strongly-marked talent right on the verge of full maturity. CHICAGO TRIBUNE

THE BARBARIANS AT THE GATES

Devastating . . . The novel is a work of revelation. KANSAS CITY STAR

A lesson for all mankind. NATIONAL REVIEW

Table of Contents

Foreword

BOOK I

Notes to Book I

BOOK II

Notes to Book II

BOOK III

Notes to Book III

Afterword

Books by Richard Bankowsky

A GLASS ROSE

AFTER PENTECOST

ON A DARK NIGHT

THE PALE CRIMINALS

THE BARBARIANS AT THE GATES

REX NEMORENSIS

THE JUDAS TAPES

HELLO CENTRAL GIVE ME HEAVEN

GENIUS IN LOVE

THE JUDAS TAPES

A novel by

Richard Bankowsky

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2010 Richard Bankowsky

For Prince Emmanuel

Foreword

In the winter of l973 the subject was brought to the Lublin Parapsychology Institute in Polish Galicia by the Archimandrite of a local religious Order seeking an opinion regarding the apparent mental breakdown of a hermit recluse who, having allegedly fallen into a trance at an outlying monastery, had begun inexplicably speaking in a voice and language not his own. Up to that point the subject had been thought to be an illiterate mute who had secluded himself away in the monastery's bone crypt his entire adult life avoiding all human contact whatsoever and never so much as speaking a single word to anyone for as long as any of his brother monks could remember.

The so-called Judas Tapes are recordings of this voice representing itself to be that of Judas Iscariot speaking out of the darkness of Sheol, the Hebrew land of the dead. However, whether it actually is the voice of the so-called fallen apostle channeled through the medium of an inspired fellow monk, or merely the hallucination of a psychotic recluse, is a question which needs addressing. For though the phenomenon of the possession of humans by so-called damned or demonic spirits is still given credence in many parts of the world, it has generally been rejected in the scientific west.

On the other hand, the emergence upon the scientific scene of the phenomenon of depth psychology and the hypothesis of a collective or primordial unconscious layer of the human psyche which is thought to contain within its allegedly illimitable boundaries all the vast cumulative experience of the race into which some gifted prophets, mystics, psychics, artists and psychotics are presumably sometimes privileged to gaze may or may not offer a solution to this problem. Is it possible that a simple, unschooled, virtually illiterate Ruthenian monk, having fallen into a kind of catatonic trance, might during the several hours of his seizure become a gifted psychic who, peering into the deepest layers of his unconscious wherein presumably the entire inherited history of the race lies stored, has channeled what he found there?

To put it another way, it was of course not the Iscariot himself that our goatherd channeled but the primordial imprint of the maligned apostle’s revisionist version of the Synoptics’ good news on the collective unconscious. For the apostle himself is psychically as well as physically dead as a door nail―out of cosmic dust, back to cosmic dust. It wasn't the man himself that was contacted, only the collective memory's conception of him.

Since the human brain, like everything else, including consciousness, is made up of energy quanta that vibrate (the Chinese chi, if you will); parapsychologists generally agree that the brain radiates a special hitherto unknown energy field responsible for telepathy. And should the frequency of one field be stepped up sufficiently enough to invade another, channeling results. Apparently among the dead as well as the living; in this case the very long dead. Therefore, it is not so much an example of mind over mater as it is mind over force field; the unconscious psyche of the channeler connecting with the collective unconscious of the human race in which all possible ways of looking at human experience exist whether or not they reach consciousness at any particular time or place. In other words, since upon waking out of his trance the subject was unaware of anything that had transpired during his loss of consciousness, might he presumably have been used by these collective unconscious forces, supposedly latent in every human psyche, as a vehicle to communicate these matters to the modern world? Why these particular matters should be communicated to us at this particular hour, or what use the world might make of this intelligence are questions whose answers we can only speculate upon at this juncture.

But even assuming the authenticity of these tapes recorded at the institute, one might justifiably argue that Judas is after all, at least according to scripture, a condemned spirit speaking out of the underworld and therefore is not to be believed, that his entire tale is nothing more than a tissue of rationalizations and outright untruths fabricated to exonerate himself of the accused betrayal of his Master by accusing Simon Peter, of that betrayal―that is, of abandoning their promised Messiah to the cross and posthumously transforming him into the Gentile Christ and scourge of the chosen Jews.

Why the Church has chosen to remain silent on the entire matter of these tapes is patently obvious to anyone who has read the extant transcripts, calling into question as they do the validity of the scriptures and the faithfulness of Simon Peter. Their existence at this writing has been acknowledged as nothing more than a local phenomenon equivalent perhaps to claims of various orders and parishes throughout Christendom of possessing fragments of the True Cross or the bones of apostles―one more esoteric fragment of apocrypha more interesting to scriptural scholars than to pastoral shepherds and their flocks.

On the other hand, parapsychologists at the Lublin Institute as well as at the Soviet Union’s Siberian Science City and the One World Enterprises Parapsychology Institute in Rome have found the subject one of the most extraordinarily powerful psychics ever studied at these prestigious institutions. Up to now, however, all transliterations into several Slavic and Western European languages of the original Greek and Aramaic on the tapes have remained so scholarly and so formidably footnoted as to attract virtually no attention outside of certain severely restricted, highly specialized psychological and hagiographic circles.

It is hoped that this dramatic rendering of the transcript into English may reverse this trend. For whatever may be said for or against the authenticity of the tapes, the message they bring to the modern world, whether out of the darkness of hell or out of the deepest depths of the so-called primordial unconscious (which may after all amount to the same thing) would seem to be more, or at least should be more, than the exclusive concern of a handful of parapsychologists and scriptural students and scholars.

Nevertheless, granting the need of a literal translation of the tapes into English, such a translation would not likely reach any more of a share of the general mass of English-speaking lay populations than extant translations have reached the lay populations of the Eastern and Western European countries in which they have appeared. Bringing to the general reader a dramatic, rather than a literal, scholarly translation while adhering scrupulously to the historical data presented in the tapes, will it is hoped suggest some of the heroic character of the speaker’s voice which so forcefully impresses a listener to the tapes but is lost to the readers of literal transcriptions.

What liberties have been taken with the original narrative is minimal, consisting chiefly in the dramatization of much on the tapes that is rendered narratively. Direct discourse has been rendered into dramatic dialogue, incorporating scriptural narrative and dialogue where paucity in the tapes suggested such meddling might be forgiven as warranted. Furthermore, a narrative style deliberately suggestive of scriptural models has been adopted to suggest the eschatological tone of the original tapes themselves, which though made available to psychologists, scriptural scholars, and churchmen of all denominations, are jealously protected against all audio reproduction. And, finally, the tapes have been divided into chapters and much of the formidable footnoting of previous transcripts has been omitted, and those questions which might arise in the reader’s mind regarding the single year chronology of the ministry and the general harmony of the text with scripture are anticipated in several endnotes at the close of each Book.

Dr. Professor Yacob Frankovich Vassilyev

One World Enterprises Parapsychology Institute

Rome, Italy, 1978

BOOK I

The Moonstones of the Magadan

How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born again?

John 3:4

1

Now it came to pass in Nisan of that year, some six days after the Passover, that I stood up before the Elders in the Synagogue at Corozain and opening my mouth said to them, I must down to Magadan, Masters. To the city on the sea. To buy ointment for my burial day.

And they looked upon me. And their mouths fell open. And they pulled upon their beards but did not speak. Then all at once, as one, they cried out, Rabbi! Hazzan! Shepherd of the flock!

What talk is this of burial oils?

Of Magadan, Harlot of the Galilee, Babylon by the Sea?

The length of our days is three score ten, Rabbi. And you are not yet fifty.

Yeah! Who will blow the trumpet from the roof?

And who will read the sacred lesson from the ark?

And teach the children in the house of books?

And counsel us in sacred law?

And scourge us when we sin?

And therefore I held up my hands before them. And raising my palms to heaven, I looked up crying out, Behold! Before you stands the paragon who has lost his soul. Who must down into the valley of the dead. To Magadan, the harlot of Galilee, Babylon by the sea. For while I walk among you in the light of day—a pious son of the Father, teacher of children, guardian and interpreter of the Law, husband, householder, and father of sons—my unlived life, like a bastard brother, disinherited and despised, wanders in the underworld. In the abode of the Queen of Sheol. Sleeping in dust. Prostrate in that house of darkness. Where dust lies on door and bolt. And from whence they who enter escape not.

But they did not understand my words, and shook their white heads and pulled upon their beards, asking if I were ill. Whether perchance some disease, like a wolf crouched in a thicket, was about to pounce upon their beloved shepherd and devour him, leaving his sheep upon the mountainside trembling and afraid?

And therefore I looked into those ancient faces leaning hard upon my words, and said to them, I am a tamarisk in a garden that drinks no water. Whose crown in the field brings forth no bloom. A willow that rejoices not by the shallow water course. A withered fig whose unripe fruit bestrews the barren ground like fallen stars. True son of deep water, I can no longer drink the shallow waters of our Father’s Law, and wither under the scorching sun.

Then a moan rose up from among them. And they shifted their feet and began to whisper one to the other behind their hands. But I cried out, I must into the earth again, Masters. Back into our Mother, into the seed pod, her womb. Where under the waxing moon she may wash me with clean water and anoint me with fine oil. And with dazzling garments clothe me. And teach me once again to play the flute of lapis lazuli. And amid the heartbeat of kettledrums send harlots to appease my soul.

Now when I said these things, they were silent. And the Synagogue was unto me like a great basalt womb. Huge as the belly of Leviathan. And the two high windows were the eyes of the beast, looking out onto the evening where the setting sun shone upon the city like the eye of a dying god. And it fell upon the lectern, dimly illuminating the brittle parchment of the scriptures.

But my words were not from the book of the Father, but out of the book of Astarte and the Mother goddess, Isis. And the Elders knew this. And therefore when I turned from them, putting the ark of the Law behind me and, descending the stair, walked between their stools toward the mouth of the beast, almost as one they raised their voices against me, crying out, Raca! Fool! Idolater! Defiler of the Synagogue! Whelp of Satan! Footstool of harlots!

And they tore their garments and spat upon me even in the sanctuary of the house of prayer. For their wrath knew no bounds. And they rose up to put me forth forcefully from the Synagogue. But I looked upon them, and knowing they feared my madness, passed between them out of that place and into the courtyard where the mother of my children followed after me beating her breast and tearing her hair. And my children also ran after me wetting my garments with their tears. And they hugged my knees and pulled upon my sleeves.

But they were strangers to me. And with one word I put them behind me. And with another I subdued their mother. And with silver wound within my girdle, and in my turban gold —all told together with my pouch as much as three hundred dinar— I set out with my mule from that place. And following behind me a short distance beyond the borders of the city, my children wailed one last, Stay oh father! Stay!

But their mother who had shared my bed and heard my dreams and had watched with me as I walked the room all night holding my head and weeping into my hands, knew that my spirit wrestled an