My name is Horace B. Williams. I do computer assisted linguistic analysis of various sorts, mostly on “questioned documents”—suspected forgeries. I have been asked to make this statement by Mr. John Beers Phertipton, counsel to Mrs. Lorraine Havasin, wife of the presumed late Prof. Bergen Havasin of Deseret University. Mrs. Havasin, as I understand it, is filing suit to claim her husband’s insurance immediately. The insurance company is claiming that he is not dead, only missing; therefore she must wait for the statute of limitations to run out before she can press her claim.
It is true that no body has been found. It is also true that I know where the body is, but I fear that Mrs. Havasin may have a long wait on her hands because there is no way on this Earth that I can lead anyone to it.
Given my current condition of “enforced rest” at the English Fork Mental Institute the insurance company lawyers will undoubtedly question my competence to testify in this matter. But in any case, here is my story.
Two years ago I had reached a point in my life where I took a serious interest in religion. I have spent most of my life as an inquisitive agnostic and I was generally willing to discuss religion any place, any time. Ned, a friend of my wife’s, felt it was his duty to end my state of indecision by winning me over to his faith.
As a result of my previous inquiries I had formulated many questions and made several observations that I presented to Ned. He had few answers. But he did have a father-in-law, Bergen Havasin, who he thought might be able to supply more. After a few inquiries he invited me to attend a discussion at the house of the Havasins. Ned said that Prof. Havasin was a physics professor who also had begun delving deeper into the nature of religion recently. He was trying to unify recent scientific discoveries with Biblical revelation.
In addition to Ned, Prof. Havasin, and myself, there were our respective wives, Kitty, Lorraine, and Melene. After some pleasantries we began a round-robin discussion with everyone there participating. I was arguing from an aggressive agnostic position, Ned was responding as the conventional true believer. During most of the discussion the Professor Havasin watched quietly.
But at one point in our discussion I queried, “How can you believe these religious scriptures when they bear so little relevance to the reality we experience?” It was part of another line of reasoning I was trying to make with Ned but the professor interrupted. Like all the other quotes I’m giving you, I don’t claim that it’s word for word, but it’s the best I can do. And anyone will tell you that I have a good memory for dialogue.
“It’s difficult,” he replied in a quiet earnest voice, “unless you accept two things: First, that these people are describing experiences that are totally beyond their ken and, second, that these are translations of translations and they’ve lost some of their essential meaning. If you accept these tenets then whole worlds of revelation open up.”
That was all he had to say for the moment. My discussion with Ned went on, but at the end of the party I asked the professor for further clarification.
He informed me that he had begun some studies concerning these points, and, that if I was interested, he would be glad to discuss them further at the next meeting. I said I would be delighted. These sounded like they would be interesting new concepts that I hadn’t encountered in my previous religious inquiries.
Our next meeting was the following week. My wife and I walked up to the Havasins’. We admired the bounteous gardens and smelled the fragrant springtime lilacs that grew in the Avenues neighborhood of Salt Lake where we and the Havasins lived. The Havasins greeted us warmly and we began the discussion with Bergen telling us of his findings.
“Concerning the question of the validity of the translations in this or any bible, you merely have to look at the preface. This one here, a King James, states, ‘this is one of several exact translations’. And here, another one, The Good News Bible published in 1976, states ‘At times the original meaning cannot be precisely known, not only because the meaning of some words and phrases cannot be determined with a great deal of assurance but also because the underlying cultural and historical context is sometimes beyond recovery.’”
“Beyond that there are the ‘twice told tales’ such as the two descriptions in Genesis 6 and 7 of how to pick the animals that go in the Noah’s Ark. Genesis 6 says take one pair of each, and Genesis 7 says take seven pairs of the ritually clean animals and one pair each of the rest. Each describes the same event, each tells a slightly different story.”
“Sure,” said Ned, “that’s the Yahwist and the Priestly source. The Yahwist figured that Noah lived so long ago that the dietary laws didn’t even exist yet, and the Priestly guy figured the distinction was timeless.”
“So,” the professor continued, “we can take as a given that there’s some inaccuracy in the Bible, and at least ignorance about the subject of the writings on the part of the authors.
“Amazing, so simple to find. Right there in the front.”
“That part isn’t inspired, of course,” Kitty remarked, “but it’s true as far as it goes.”
“The rest of my findings are neither as straightforward nor as decisive. They are, in fact, preliminary, but I think you’ll find them interesting and informative.
“First, are you familiar with the concept of a hypercube?
“A cube with more than three dimensions?” Melene said.
“That’s correct.”
“I’ve seen pictures of them in Scientific American.”
“You’ve seen two dimensional representations of the three dimensional ‘shadow’ of a four dimensional cube.”
“ … Right … if you say so … Actually, now I see what you mean. I can’t really see a 3-D cube in a two dimensional picture either, can I!”
“Exactly. Now it turns out that a 4-D hypercube penetrating into 3-D space has some interesting properties beyond those of a normal cube. One of those is that when you look at it, you can see more than one side at a time. You see four sides at a time, in fact.”
“Four sides?” I questioned
“Four sides. And it turns out there are some four-sided creatures mentioned in the Bible. Ezekiel 1 and 10 both give wonderful, almost identical, descriptions of looking at four sides of a being and there’s some description in Revelations 4 of a similar phenomenon, although in John’s description in Revelation, the text actually describes four beings.”
“A single being with four heads?”
“No, one head, just four different visible sides.”
“Four faces in Ezekiel,” Ned remembered. “Four ‘living beings’ in Revelation. But even so the scholars say that John is referring to Ezekiel.”
I say, “So, what do you make of this—beyond it being the jabbering of crazy old men recorded two or three thousand years ago and translated five times before it reaches us? Have I ever told you my White Noise Theory about—”
Bergen says, “No, though I’m sure you will soon enough, but let me finish my theory first.”
“Right, excuse me.”
“Ezekiel calls those four-sided beings cherubim.”
“You mean angels?” says Melene.
“That’s right, angels. Angels may be 4-D creatures penetrating our 3-D world.”
“God and his angels are extra-dimensional creatures?” I query.
“At least some of them. This would explain a lot of their recorded capabilities. Since these beings exist in more dimensions than we, they can penetrate or leave our universe at will, and they can see all things and all people in our universe at the same time, much as we can see all things drawn on a piece of paper at the same time. They can even see the insides of all things. They could watch our hearts beat, for instance.”
“Interesting, but what’s the point of all this. So what if these beings can come and go. Of what import is that to us today?”
When I say that, he looks carefully at the floor between his feet. Sitting directly across from him as I was, I was the only one who could see the wild glow light up his eyes as he said quietly but quite distinctly, “I think I can summon an angel.”
The room went dead quiet for a moment. Then Bergen laughed and looked up. The glow was gone. “In my imagination, of course.”
The rest of the group laughed it off.
When our discussion ended, I told Melene I wanted to talk to the professor a little more. She had no problem with that since she wanted to do something or other with Lorraine, I forget exactly what, in another part of the house, When I was alone with Bergen I confronted him.
“What did you really mean you can summon an angel?” I asked.
“I believe an angel to be one of these higher dimensional beings. I believe that an earthly being can call it to come visit our plane of existence. I haven’t tried yet but I’ve thought out the plan that will let me.”
“How?” I said incredulously. After just our two meetings I had come to respect Bergen but this sounded like pure madness. Either he was mad because angels did not exist or he was mad to be tampering with things mankind should best leave untouched.
“My son Jeremy has been helping some local amateur archeologists explore the ruins of Babylon—strengthening community relations as well as pursuing the hobby he’s had forever. They found what they think is the tomb of Ezekiel, the 6th-century prophet. That night Jeremy went back and the moonlight revealed an inscription on the floor. It's nothing you would notice by torchlight or flashlight or sunlight. And it seems to have mattered that it was the night of the full moon, and the Sabbath.
“He’s sent his old dad a rubbing of that inscription. He knows about my hobby.
“The inscription is in a simple code, not hard to break. It indicates that left back in Israel were certain talismans that permit the user to summon the angels Ezekiel wrote about. Cached, apparently, just before the Israelites were marched off captive to Babylon.
“I believe those talismans will give us the powers of Jesus himself. We’ll become like gods. And one of our powers will be to summon angels.”
“Tell me you’re pulling my leg.”
“I won’t.”
“In Old Testament times, what did people do to reach the Lord? They performed sacrifices and they prayed with the proper incantations. But in this case, nothing has survived in the Bible as we know it. So it looks like at least some information has been deliberately obscured.”
I was aghast. I sat down. This man was on the thin edge between genius and insanity. He could be on the verge of the discovery of the century. In that instant I decided. I wanted to be part of anything that momentous.
I stood up. “I’m with you!” I declared.
“Hmm.” He pondered for a moment. “Perhaps God’s more on my side than I thought. If he sent you to me, then perhaps I shouldn’t be so concerned about tampering with his deepest secrets.”
We both chuckled at that and called it an evening.