The Religion of Kerista
and Its 69 Positions
By Robert Anton Wilson
Beatniks, swingers, and hippies all over the world are banding together
to create a society where anything - but anything - goes
Eight years ago, an ex-Air Force
officer named John Presmont was sitting in his
room on
"Why does it have to be me?" he cried.
"BECAUSE YOU'RE SO GULLIBLE," the Voice answered solemnly.
"But what should I do?" Presmont continued to object. "I don't know anything about founding a religion."
"PEOPLE WILL COME TO GIVE YOU STRENGTH," said the Voice unperturbed.
"THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO PREVENT THIS
THING FROM HAPPENING. HAVE A BALL, ENJOY
YOURSELF TO THE UTMOST. FIND THE MOUNTAIN BESIDE THE SEA.
THE PIED PIPER WILL PULL OUT THE SWINGING PEOPLE."
Today, a chubby and cherubic 44, John Presmont has become Jud the Prophet to a few thousand followers scattered in such odd places as London, Berlin, Tangier, New York City, San Francisco, and Passaic, New Jersey. For the first 5 years, his religion was called "our thing" by its adherents because the Voice had said that "THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO PREVENT THIS THING FROM HAPPENING." Three years ago, however, the word got out that the Mafia is called "our thing" (cosa nostra) by its members, and Jud soon had another vision, seeing a colony of Buddhas (Enlightened ones) living on an island with a huge mountain by the sea, and it was revealed to him that the island would be called Kerista (derivation unknown). His followers now call themselves Keristans, and the religion is called Kerista.
The rule of the religion of Kerista is the
rule of Rabelais's abbey of Theleme: Do What You
Will. Kerista is a religion of joy and freedom, a
religion without dogma or restriction, and a religion of
ecstasy, for the Voice had told Jud the Prophet, "HAVE A
BALL, ENJOY YOURSELF TO THE UTMOST."
The Keristans uninhibitedly follow this injunction,
and Kerista is, therefore, utterly unlike the dominant forms of religion .in
Judaeo-Christian cultures. The
A few weeks ago, I journeyed down to the eastern part of
My appointment was with a 24-year-old C.C.N.Y. graduate who called himself Dau. When I found his apartment, a good-looking brunette who said her name was Tre let me in and said Dau would be back shortly. (Most of the Keristans eventually take these new names, which, like the Black Muslim "X" or the Catholic confirmation-name, symbolize a new identity.) The apartment consisted of just two rooms. A monument-sized American flag acted as a room divider-, another American flag hung over the window in lieu of curtains. There were no lights.
Dau suddenly charged in behind me, a hyperactive boy with a short, neat beard, and announced that the "vibrations" were better in the "nursery," so we would conduct the interview there. We tramped down the stairs into the building next door and went to another apartment where seven other members of Kerista were waiting.
"I'm E.Z.," said a giant of a man who re-minded me vaguely of the illustrations to Paul Bunyan stories. He was wearing trousers, but nothing above the waist and no shoes or socks. His thick black hair hadn't been inside a barbershop for at least a year and his curly black beard was as wild as Rex Barney's pitching the season the Dodgers retired him. Three naked babies, all less than a year old, were playing on the floor. (The Keristans share everything, including the care of babies.) A blonde young lady wearing nothing but a pair of black panties came out of the kitchen, nodded at me, and went into another room, from which she soon emerged in a bathrobe and joined the discussion.
"You see?" Dau said. "Aren't the 'Vibrations better here?" Everybody agreed that the vibrations were better.
I asked if Jud was present, and it turned out that he wasn't. "But
I wanted to speak to the leader," I complained. A 22-year-old boy named
Good quickly explained, "No, no, man, you don't get it. Kerista has no leader.
Jud is the prophet. Kerista doesn't need leaders, or teachings, or theories, or
stipulations, or restrictions. Kerista is freedom."
"Kerista is freedom and love," E.Z. corrected.
What I had heard around town was that Keristans were all bisexual, promiscuous, and 99% of the time zonked out of their skulls on marijuana, peyote, LSD-25, or some other psychedelic drug. As delicately as I could, I inquired about this aspect of their freedom.
"Well, first of all," Good said, "we're not trying to enforce anything on anybody. That goes against freedom, and freedom is our first law. People can keep any hang-up they've got, as long as they want to keep it. Of course, if they want to get over their hang-ups, we'll help them. But we don't pressure anybody to try anything that they're still square about. We have one member who's still a virgin."
It developed that this apartment – which belonged to E.Z. and Marquel, the blonde girl who greeted me in her panties –
was the "nursery" only today. The three babies belong to all of this Kerista cell, and
whichever apartment they are in for a day is the "nursery" for that
day. All in all, there are 10 such apartments in the
The interview proceeded:
Q: Well, what happened after Jud heard the Voice?
A: [By Good] Nothing. He had to wait for the people to come, like the Voice said. One by one, over the years, we've found him.
Q: Do you take these odd names when you join Kerista?
A: [By Dau] Well, first you got to get in contact with your pure self, through Buddho, the art of no-defense. That means not defending the social self with all the usual hang-ups and bullshit. When you find the pure self, you take a new name.
Q: How do you get the new names?
A: [By Dau]
From a Ouija board.
Q: I see. What is Buddho, the art of no-defense?
A: [By Dau] You get rid of bullshit. You stop defending yourself. Dig? You don't put up a front. You admit who you are. You don't play-act, you don't put people on.
Q: But how do you Learn Buddho?
A: [By Good] We teach it. You name the price, half-price for the first lesson. You start with conversation and learn how to stop de-fending yourself on that level. Then you move in and get rid of the more subtle defenses.
Q: Did Jud invent Buddho?
A: [By Tre, 23, female] Dau invented Buddho. It's a contraction of Buddha and judo. We've all added something to Kerista. There's no one truth.
Q: Now, about this voice that spoke to had. Do you believe it was the Voice of God?
A: [By E. Z.] If you want to call it that. You could call it Jung's "collective unconscious" or the Zen "not-self" if you wanted. We're not particular. The important thing is not theories. The important thing is living according to the pure self, not full of a lot of bullshit.
When you ask the Keristans about the
"vibrations," they are rather vague. "You know, man, the
vibrations." When you ask if they mean the hypothetical "orgone energy ocean"
suggested by Freudian heretic Wilhelm Reich, they
disagree. Some think Reich's orgone energy is
the vibrations, some doubt it. Reich and Freud, chiefly, they blame for the
conservatism of modern psychiatry, and recently they sent out advertisements to
all the psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists in
The Keristans I interviewed come from a
variety of backgrounds and it was hard to find a common denominator among them.
E.Z. is 28 and grew up in the slums of the lower
Onn, a divorced 22-year-old with one child, was
born in
Fly, an intense, highly-charged girl, is also 22 and has a B.A. in
philosophy from
Dom, 21, a bearded giant, comes from a Ukrainian farm family in
Good, 22, comes from a lower-class Hungarian-American family and summed up Kerista for me by quoting a line of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's: "Everybody has his own hole to climb out of." He has attended C.C.N.Y. and joined Kerista as soon as he heard of it. "Like as soon as it came along it was the thing to do," he says.
Marquel is an attractive 29-year-old blonde who was born of a middle-class Irish-American
family and attended
Tre comes from a middle-class German family
in
All of these Keristans were either born into the
middle-class, or, like E.Z., achieved middle-class status through their own
talents, and all have rejected it. They have turned their backs on the Affluent
Society and now squat in the slums of the
All that is central to Kerista, as it was explained
to me, is Buddho, the art of no-defense; there are no regulations or stipulations. Buddho, it seems, is a technique, invented by Dau, for escape from other-directedness. It begins with
watching yourself in ordinary conversation and observing how often you are
"defending" against implicit (or projected) criticism from the other
party. More advanced Buddho includes the conquest of
greed, sexual jealousy, and other "hang-ups." "We're trying to
live ac-cording to the pure self, not full of bullshit," E.Z. says. When asked how Kerista
differs from the many other swinging, free-living people in the
The economics of the Keristans, I learned,
are as strange as their religion and their sexual practices. At present, in the
It was getting late, and Dom was eager to brew up some peyote tea, so I left, after making an appointment to meet Jud the Prophet.
Two days later, I went up to the
"Look," Jud said, "my work is over, in a way. I had the vision and communicated it, and now I'm finished. It's up to Des here to take the next step. You should really interview him. Des is the most important man right now, because the most important part of -Kerista right now is building an island colony, and that's his territory."
Desmond Slattery, a man of 50 with a short, gray beard that made him look like Walter Huston playing Satan in The Devil and Daniel Webster, took the ball immediately. "Get this clear," he said. "I'm not religious. I abominate all religions, without exception. To me, Kerista is a social movement, and Jud knows how I feel."
"I don't care whether people call it a religion or a social movement," Jud said. "The important thing is that they act naturally and decently."
Desmond Slattery began to explain the island colony to me. He had voluminous papers, maps, booklets,
charts, and other paraphernalia to illustrate everything he said. A graduate in
sociology from the University of Wichita, Slattery went into the jungles of
British Honduras 5 years ago and created a new industry-the breeding of bees in
a new environment and the extraction from them of a special honey obtain-able
only from bees fed on jungle vegetation – and
his success was written up enthusiastically in an article in Bee World, the beekeeper's
journal. Slattery sold the business as soon as he had proved it could be done,
for profit-making is the least of his interests. He has been a merchant seaman,
a pilot for Pan Am, an Air Force officer, a hobo, a movie actor, and a TV
producer, but most of the time he has preferred
agricultural work in such odd corners as
But a doubt remains. "How do you get the money to start?" I asked.
Slattery hauls out a piece of paper. "Here's four plans," he says. "I'm cooking up a few others if these all fall through." He has set his goal at $50,000 and each plan seems like a fairly possible approach. One plan starts with 200 members, and another with 100 members. "If we can't get all the bread we really need," he says, "I go in with only 14 people, hire a few Indians, and start clearing the jungle with machetes." He means it. He has done it before. "Of course," he adds, and his eyes twinkle, "I'1I pick those 14 damned carefully."
After the island is founded, Slattery plans to make it a tourist
attraction for hipsters. "Kerista will become
the hip
A friend of mine asked Jud, 4 years ago, why he founded Kerista, and Jud had answered, "I don't want to work for a living." I asked him about that, and he answered, "That's right. When we get the colony going, nobody will work. When you're doing what you want to do, it isn't work; it's play. One cat is raising rabbits, another is raising chickens, somebody's growing vegetables, they're all having a ball, is that work? Work is when you're taking orders from somebody you hate."
"How would you sum up Kerista?" I asked,
"Total sharing," he said. "Getting rid of masochism and sadism, inferiority and superiority. Being yourself.
"Kerista is the essence of hip," Jud went on. "There are millions of hipsters all over the world who have part of it. They're looking for Kerista without knowing it. Norman Mailer said that hip was going to give birth to the next religion. He was right and we're it."
When I had entered Slattery's office, I had been introduced to a young
Negro girl, Joy, who then proceeded to sleep through most of the interview.
Just before I left, I. asked Jud if Keristans
objected to monogamy-I was thinking of the
Joy, who is 19 and came up from
About a week afterwards, at my invitation, Jud and Joy came out to spend
a weekend with my family in our home high in the mountains of
In the relaxed atmosphere of my own living room, I probed Jud for some more information about the unconventional sexual practices of the Keristans. I soon learned, for one thing, that it is not at all unusual for two or three Keristans to be engaged in sexual hi-finks on a couch while several others carry on a conversation in the next room. I then inquired about the problem of contraception.
"Most of the Keristan men detest condoms," Jud said, "so it's up to the girls to protect themselves. They use the usual things, diaphragms and coils and pills."
This is protection against unwanted births, but it seemed to leave the venereal-disease problem unchecked. I asked about the rumor that Kerista had suffered a gonorrhea epidemic a few months ago.
"Yeah," he said morosely. "That was Dau's fault. He went balling with outside chicks and brought back a beautiful case of the clap. It spread to nine of the downtown Keristans in a week. But then we caught it and everybody went down to the Public Health Service and had shots. It's all cleared up now. On the island, we'll take precautions and make visitors submit to a medical before mixing with the community."
None of the unmarried Keristan girls has yet
become pregnant through Keristan group-sex, Jud said.
"At least," he added, "not in the
Legalize group marriage. Legalize
indecent exposure. Legalize trial marriage. Legalize abortion. Legalize
miscegenation. Legalize religious intermarriage. Legalize marijuana. Legalize
narcotics. Legalize cunnilingus. Legalize transvestitism. Legalize pornography.
Legalize obscene language. Legalize sexual intercourse. Legalize group sex.
Legalize sodomy. Legalize fellatio. Legalize prostitution. Legalize incest.
Legalize birth control. Legalize Lesbianism. Legalize polygamy. Legalize
polyandry. Legalize polygyny. Legalize homosexuality.
Legalize voluntary flagellation.
"You see," he said, "it's all common sense. Almost all intelligent people are Keristans al-ready, without knowing it." He has a half-formed plan to amalgamate Kerista with LEMAR (the League for Legalized Marijuana) and form a new political party with the 69 Positions as its platform. "We've still got a secret ballot," he said, "and people who are afraid to stick their necks out in public could go into the voting booth and, for once, stand up for what they really believed. I bet we'd get a lot of votes and scare the pants off the squares."
Later, Jud was reminiscing about the
loft in which 22 Keristans had lived together for a while last year. "It was groovy," he said.
"The rent came to $10 a month for each person." It had its drawbacks,
though: Dau brought in some really weird types.
"There was one guy who showed
up, balled 20 girls in a week, and never came back or paid for anything. And
there was a girl who was pretty far out, all she ever said was the word
‘fuck.’" Jud is trying to persuade the other Keristans
to screen out "the wrong types."
Joy is pregnant and Jud is shortly
coming up for trial on a marijuana charge, but his spirits remain high. "Kerista can't fail," he says, "because people need
it. We're all isolated in modern
society. Isolation makes men paranoiac: They've proved that in the laboratory.
Cut a man off from all human contact and he starts going mad in about 6 hours.
We're all too isolated and cut-off since the old religions died and
commercialism began. We need a new religion-Bernard Shaw said it, Koestler said
it, every intelligent man has said it. Kerista is the
new religion. Nothing can stop Kerista. Nothing."
The
Voice that spoke to Jud 8 years ago had more humor than the Voices that have
spoken to other visionaries
in the past, and Kerista may even seem, to the skeptical, a satire on religion. But there could be no doubt of the
fervor, and the sincerity, of Jud when he said, "Nothing can stop Kerista." Kerista might very
well become, like Zen in