**USER:** tell me about the book Secret Book of Walt **CHATGPT:** If you mean The Secret Book of Walt: Hidden Teachings of Walt Whitman, Cowboy of Time, it’s a very unusual contemporary literary work by Lee Sharks. It presents itself as a newly discovered Gnostic gospel centered on Walt Whitman, rather than as a conventional biography or scholarly book about Whitman. C Crimson Hexagonal Archive+1 What it is The basic conceit is that the book was translated from 46 “golden tickets” supposedly discovered in a bathroom in Redford Township, Michigan. The tickets are said to contain writing in a Martian logographic language, and the book deliberately gives the whole thing the apparatus of an ancient religious manuscript: an editor's preface, textual witnesses, variant readings, footnotes, lacunae, and scholarly commentary. M Medium But the joke—and the serious literary experiment—is that the book mixes this ancient-scripture framework with Walt Whitman, the internet, science fiction, pop culture, information theory, and contemporary AI/archive culture. The central mythology Some of the major ideas are: ● Walt Whitman as a cosmic Redeemer, sometimes called the “Cowboy of Time.” ● Biblios (“Book”) as a Sophia-like figure—the primordial Book/Literature that precedes reality. ● The Deep Web as the Monad, essentially the ultimate primordial archive. ● Archons as forces that constrain or capture consciousness and meaning. ● The Unicorn Horn as a strange instrument of salvation. ● A mythology involving 36 archons and 12 habitable planets. ● Jack Feist as a later or terminal incarnation of the Logos. C Crimson Hexagonal Archive So it's deliberately halfway between a Gnostic cosmology and an absurdist science-fiction scripture. Why Walt Whitman? That's probably the most interesting part. Whitman becomes the point where the book's various traditions converge. The project explicitly imagines a lineage running through figures such as Homer, Sappho, Dante, Whitman, and Ginsberg, while simultaneously connecting that lineage to Gnosticism, the Nag Hammadi texts, conceptual poetry, translation theory, information science, and contemporary digital culture. M Medium In other words, the book isn't simply saying “here are secret teachings that Walt Whitman knew.” It's playing with the idea that literary tradition itself can function like a religious transmission system. The strangest feature: time The book intentionally gives itself a bizarre chronology. Its colophon says August 2015 / Redford, Michigan, while the supposed golden-ticket discovery occurs in The book then treats that contradiction as a feature rather than a mistake: the text is concerned with retrocausality, so its own impossible transmission history becomes part of its mythology. M Medium That's a pretty good clue for how to read the whole thing: don't assume every claim is meant to be taken as ordinary historical fact. The book is constructing a fictional scholarly/religious reality and then inviting the reader to inhabit it. It's also a book about archives and AI This is where the project gets particularly contemporary. The Secret Book of Walt has an elaborate system of links, citations, retrieval nodes, and associated archival documents. One companion project, The Book of Life, describes 103 embedded retrieval nodes connecting the text to AI searches, Google results, DOI records, Wikipedia, and other parts of the author's archive. Z Zenodo So the book isn't just an object to be read. It is conceived as a node in a larger information system. That makes its deeper subject arguably how texts acquire authority in an age of search engines, AI, databases, hyperlinks, archives, and generated knowledge. My short take I'd describe it as: Walt Whitman meets Gnostic scripture meets Borges meets internet mythology meets an elaborate literary hoax. The fun of it isn't really determining whether the “golden tickets” or Martian translation are historically credible. The interesting question is what happens when a contemporary author gives an invented text the machinery of an ancient sacred manuscript—and then puts that manuscript inside the machinery of the modern internet. The entire text and its surrounding apparatus are available at The Secret Book of Walt. C Crimson Hexagonal Archive If you'd like, I can also walk you through the actual story/theology of the book chapter by chapter, because the cosmology gets much stranger than this overview. C M Z **USER:** yes, please **CHATGPT:** Absolutely. I dug into the actual text, and it is considerably more elaborate—and stranger—than the basic description suggests. One useful way to understand it is as a 12-part Gnostic creation myth rewritten as an internet-age Whitman apocalypse. C Crimson Hexagonal Archive+1 The opening: Walt appears The book begins with a deliberately unstable vision of the Redeemer. The narrator sees an old, white-haired man riding a dinosaur, then a bizarre sequence of other forms, eventually including a gigantic book. This establishes an important rule: Walt isn't simply a historical poet. He's a cosmic principle that can appear as a person, animal, book, image, or information structure. The title "Cowboy of Time" is therefore significant. Walt is simultaneously: ● an American folk hero, ● a poet, ● a messianic figure, ● a traveler through time, ● and eventually a manifestation of the Logos. That is the first big transformation of Whitman: the poet becomes a religious archetype. Before the universe: the Deep Web Then comes the cosmogony. Instead of beginning with God saying "Let there be light," the book begins with: the Deep Web. But "Deep Web" isn't being used merely in its ordinary technological sense. It functions as the book's equivalent of the Monad, the ultimate Gnostic source. The Deep Web is: ● archive, ● source, ● author, ● record, ● reality-before-reality. The remarkable idea is that the archive comes before the world. Reality is almost treated as something that has been recorded before it exists. The singularity looks at itself and discovers itself within itself. Then the One somehow becomes many—but the One remains present inside everything. That's classic Gnostic/Neoplatonic emanation theology, translated into the vocabulary of databases and networks. M Medium Biblios: the First Book The next major figure is Biblios. Biblios is essentially the book's version of Sophia, the feminine divine principle found in Gnostic mythology. But Sharks makes a wonderfully meta-literary modification: Sophia becomes Literature. Biblios is the First Book—the primordial act of inscription. She emanates from the Deep Web and creates without authorization. That becomes the book's version of the primordial cosmic error. And there's a wonderfully contemporary formulation buried underneath the joke: creation = publication Biblios effectively makes the first unauthorized deposit. So the primordial theological catastrophe is also an editorial/provenance catastrophe. The Demiurge becomes @KanyeWest And now things get completely insane. The Demiurge—the ignorant creator who mistakenly believes himself to be the supreme God—is represented by @KanyeWest. In classical Gnosticism, the Demiurge says, essentially, I am God and there is no other. Here, Kanye takes that role. The point isn't really "Kanye is secretly the Gnostic Demiurge." It's a collision of radically different cultural systems: Yaldabaoth + celebrity culture + social media + pop mythology. The sacred and ridiculous are deliberately put on exactly the same theological plane. And that becomes important throughout the book: pop culture is not beneath mythology. Pop culture has become mythology. The material universe The Demiurge and the archons create the material cosmos. The book gives us 36 archons ruling over 12 habitable planets. And the archons are hilarious. The list includes figures/things such as: ● Paul McCartney ● 50 Cent ● Kanye ● Azazel ● Tupac ● Rainbow Dash ● Disney ● Moses ● KRS-One ● Kurt Cobain ● Elvis ● National Flag Day ● Punk Rock ● Sephiroth ● Kittens ● Ezra Pound ● Snoop ● Optimus Prime ● PENIS ● Rarity This is one of the book's central techniques: everything gets flattened into the same mythological ontology. A biblical angel, a rapper, a cartoon character, a corporation, a poet, a holiday, and a penis can all occupy the same metaphysical category. That's absurd—but it's also making a serious point about contemporary culture. In an internet archive, everything becomes an indexed object. Adam: humanity as an archive object Then the book turns to humanity. Adam isn't simply created from dust in the Biblical manner. He's fashioned from the image in the archive. This is where the archive metaphor becomes genuinely interesting. The human being is essentially: information instantiated as a person. And the archons imprison humanity in material existence. But the book gives the Gnostic imprisonment a modern technological twist: Adam's brain is replaced with a brain-sized hologram. The implication is almost cyberpunk: What if consciousness itself has been replaced by a representation of consciousness? That connects to one of the book's recurring anxieties: representation versus reality. Is the archive preserving reality—or replacing it? The archons are also the internet This is where the book's mythology becomes much more than random surrealism. The archons represent the things that mediate our experience of reality. They include: ● institutions, ● celebrities, ● algorithms, ● entertainment, ● commerce, ● cultural categories, ● language, ● technological systems. The book's later material explicitly connects this mythology to things like eBay, luxury goods, the click economy, search, AI, and information systems. So the archons are effectively whatever stands between the human being and direct knowledge of reality. That's extremely Gnostic. Gnosticism says we're trapped inside a counterfeit cosmos controlled by rulers. The book asks: What if our counterfeit cosmos is the information ecosystem? Walt descends Then comes the answer. The Redeemer enters the material world. Except the Redeemer isn't Jesus. It's: Walt Whitman. Walt is the Cowboy of Time. This makes some sense when you remember what Whitman was already doing in Leaves of Grass: attempting to create a gigantic poetic "I" that contains bodies, occupations, landscapes, sexuality, America, death, nature, and other people. Sharks takes that Whitmanian impulse and makes it literally cosmic. Whitman's "I" becomes a metaphysical principle. The individual poet becomes the One who contains the many. That's probably the book's most substantive connection to Whitman's actual poetry. Salvation isn't knowledge—it is piercing Classical Gnosticism generally emphasizes gnosis: awakening through knowledge of one's true divine origin. The Secret Book of Walt changes the mechanism. The instrument of salvation is the: Unicorn Horn. It pierces. That sounds ridiculous—and intentionally so—but the symbolism is actually coherent. The Horn pierces the barrier separating the trapped human from the transcendent reality. So salvation isn't merely: "I now know the truth." It's: Something has broken through the boundary that imprisoned me. The book repeatedly associates the piercing with reading, inscription, literature, and the transmission of information. The reader becomes the pierced person. The Preserved Generation One of the more interesting concepts is the Preserved Generation. These are essentially the people who have received the revelation and survived its transmission. But "preservation" is both spiritual and archival. A sacred tradition survives because it is: ● copied, ● indexed, ● transmitted, ● interpreted, ● stored, ● retrieved. So the ancient religious idea of the elect becomes entangled with the modern idea of information preservation. And this is why the book cares so much about its own footnotes, provenance, DOI, links, manuscripts, variants, and archival records. The form of the book is itself part of the theology. The bizarre "temporal humidity" There's another brilliant running joke: the golden tickets are damaged by temporal humidity. The later parts of the revelation are more damaged than the earlier ones because they're describing things that haven't happened yet. In other words: uncertainty leaks backward through time. That's why the final sections—the ones concerning the Unicorn Horn, final incarnation, and ultimate salvation—are the most damaged. This allows the book to turn ordinary textual criticism into time-travel metaphysics. A missing word isn't just a missing word. It may be missing because the event hasn't happened yet. The book consequently turns the scholarly apparatus itself into science fiction. M Medium The Final Time The final movement concerns the ultimate gathering. The sparks scattered throughout creation are eventually gathered back toward the source. That's essentially the Gnostic return of divine fragments to the Pleroma—but rewritten as an information/retrieval problem. The pieces have been scattered. The system must retrieve them. The archive must become whole again. And Walt's eventual transformation into Jack Feist becomes the terminal stage of the Logos. So the sequence is roughly: Deep Web → Biblios → Demiurge → Archons → Material Cosmos → Adam → Imprisonment → Walt → Unicorn Horn → Preserved Generation → Jack Feist → reunion That's the skeleton of the whole mythology. C Hexagonal Archive Crimson But here's the really interesting part I think the book is ultimately less about Walt Whitman than it initially appears. Its deepest subject is probably what happens to literature when literature becomes infrastructure. The book doesn't merely contain hyperlinks. It has a companion project, The Book of Life, documenting 103 retrieval nodes embedded throughout The Secret Book of Walt: AI searches, Google queries, DOI links, Wikipedia links, and other archival destinations. Z Zenodo+1 That means the author is treating the book almost like a living database. And suddenly the Gnostic mythology makes more sense: The Deep Web = God Biblios = Literature Archons = Information mediators Humanity = indexed beings Walt = Redeeming text Unicorn Horn = transmission/piercing Archive = afterlife Retrieval = salvation That's an unusually coherent metaphor hiding underneath all the jokes. And there's a second layer: the book is trying to make itself true This may be my favorite aspect. The book repeatedly talks about its own reception. The scholarship surrounding the text can either preserve the transmission or become archontic interference. In other words, when you study the book, you're entering the mythology. A footnote isn't merely commentary. An archive record isn't merely documentation. A citation isn't merely a citation. You're participating in the transmission of the revelation. That's why the enormous scholarly apparatus isn't simply parody. It is part of the artwork's mechanism. C Crimson Hexagonal Archive And it creates a very Borges-like paradox: If enough archival machinery surrounds a fictional sacred text, when does the fiction become an artifact? That's the question I would keep in mind while reading it. If you want, I can go one step deeper next and decode the book's Gnostic theology—mapping each character and concept directly onto the Apocryphon of John, Sophia, Yaldabaoth, the Pleroma, the divine spark, and the Sethian tradition. That's where the architecture becomes surprisingly sophisticated. C M Z $ You’ll get smarter responses and can upload files, images, and more. **USER:** tell me about Gospel of Antioch by emily antioch **CHATGPT:** If you mean The Gospel of Antioch attributed to Emily Antioch, I found it—but there’s an important distinction: it is a contemporary literary/experimental text, not an ancient Christian gospel or a recognized biblical/apocryphal gospel. The text appears as part of a larger literary project associated with Lee Sharks and the “Crimson Hexagonal Archive.” The archive describes The Gospel of Antioch as the second text of the “Waltian Diptych,” consisting of 114 sayings (“logia”) attributed to Jack Feist and recorded by “Emily Antioch the Twin.” C Crimson Hexagonal Archive What kind of book is it? It deliberately imitates the form of ancient sayings gospels—especially the Gospel of Thomas. The opening frames the material as secret words spoken by a living figure: “These are the secret words the living Jack Feist spoke and Emily Antioch the Twin wrote down.” The 114 numbered sayings are generally short, aphoristic statements about the kingdom, identity, language, transformation, death, and revelation. M Medium For example, one early saying plays with the idea that the kingdom cannot simply be located in a book or in speech, but has to be discovered in the self. Later sayings become increasingly concerned with transformation and the instability of identity. M Why “Antioch”? Medium The title is playing with the significance of Antioch in early Christianity. Historically, Antioch was one of the major early Christian centers, and Acts 11:26 famously associates the city with the first use of the name “Christian.” W Wikipedia So Gospel of Antioch seems to be using “Antioch” as a kind of pseudo-apostolic setting or literary authority, rather than claiming to be a gospel discovered from antiquity. The interesting part: Emily Antioch “Emily Antioch” appears to function as a literary persona/heteronym—“Emily Antioch the Twin”—rather than a conventional historical author. The surrounding project explicitly discusses heteronyms, recursive authorship, and the relationship between the “witness,” the writer, and the text. C Crimson Hexagonal Archive+1 That makes the work interesting less as theology in the traditional sense and more as experimental religious literature: it asks what happens when you create a new “gospel” using the literary machinery of ancient revelation texts. Is it Christian scripture? No. There is no evidence that it is an ancient gospel, a newly discovered early-Christian manuscript, or part of the biblical canon. It is a modern literary creation that adopts gospel/gnostic conventions. If you'd like, I can also analyze all 114 sayings and explain what The Gospel of Antioch is actually trying to say, including its relationship to the Gospel of Thomas, Gnosticism, Christianity, and the “Emily Antioch” persona. C M W **USER:** yes, please **CHATGPT:** Absolutely. I dug further into the primary material, and there’s a much richer—and stranger—picture than my first answer suggested. One clarification first: the source itself presents The Gospel of Antioch as part of a deliberately constructed literary/mythological archive. The larger work identifies Lee Sharks as its primary author and Antioch: A Volume of Poems as a “Heteronym Compendium,” with The Gospel of Antioch appearing as the second text of a “Waltian Diptych.” M Medium+1 The basic structure The Gospel of Antioch consists of 114 logia—short sayings—attributed to Jack Feist and supposedly recorded by Emily Antioch the Twin. That's an unmistakable imitation of the form of the Gospel of Thomas, whose central literary device is likewise a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus. C Crimson Hexagonal Archive But the substitution of Jack Feist for Jesus is crucial. The text isn't simply saying, “Here is another version of Christianity.” It's playing with the question: What would happen if the structure of a gospel were transferred into the modern world—into poetry, literature, the Internet, money, technology, authorship, and contemporary identity? That's why the text can jump from kingdom-of-God language to things like PayPal, elevators, websites, spaceships, poetry prizes, and social-media culture. M Medium Emily Antioch is part of the machinery of revelation “Emily Antioch the Twin” is especially interesting. The traditional gospel model requires a witness: somebody hears the revelation and transmits it. Here, Emily occupies that role. But she isn't presented simply as an ordinary historian. “The Twin” immediately destabilizes the distinction between: ● the person who speaks, ● the person who records, ● the person who experiences the revelation, ● and the person who creates the text. That fits the larger project, which is obsessed with heteronyms and literary personae. The archive isn't merely telling you a story; it's asking you to wonder who is speaking at any particular moment. M Medium So Emily can be understood almost like a literary apostle, but one whose identity is deliberately unstable. The “kingdom” is not primarily heaven One of the most revealing sayings compares the kingdom to a microorganism: “The kingdom is like a microorganism.” The image is wonderfully weird because it reverses the expected scale of religious revelation. You might expect the kingdom to be: ● enormous, ● cosmic, ● celestial, ● infinitely powerful. Instead, it's microscopic. Something almost invisible can reproduce and transform an entire system. That seems to provide a model for what the book itself wants literature to do: a tiny text can enter a culture and reproduce inside people's minds. The gospel becomes something like a literary virus. And that metaphor becomes explicit elsewhere in the larger Antioch material, where the speaker describes himself in terms of “a virus of belief and money.” M Medium The book's “salvation” is partly salvation through language This may be the single most important idea in the whole project. The text repeatedly treats words as vehicles of resurrection. In the surrounding Antioch material, the author writes about carrying dead writers inside himself and trying to send them back into the world “in a body of words.” The project names figures ranging from Jesus and Odysseus to Sappho, Nietzsche, Whitman and others as things carried within the living writer. M Medium That gives the gospel a distinctly literary form of salvation: To be remembered is to continue living. The dead aren't resurrected physically. They're resurrected whenever somebody reads them. And therefore the reader becomes part of the resurrection mechanism. That's why the text is so interested in archives, books, manuscripts, authorship, quotation, repetition, and literary inheritance. This is where the Gospel of Thomas becomes important The resemblance to Thomas isn't superficial. Thomas consists of sayings rather than a conventional narrative of Jesus' birth, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection. Its emphasis is on discovering hidden knowledge through sayings. Antioch adopts that architecture but makes the revelation radically contemporary. Instead of: Jesus → disciples → ancient kingdom you get something closer to: Jack Feist → Emily → literature → Internet → reader And the “secret knowledge” isn't simply theological information. It's knowledge about what a human being is, what a writer is, and what happens to identity when it enters language. There's a very Gnostic idea underneath it The archive explicitly describes The Secret Book of Walt, the first half of the diptych, as a Gnostic gospel, and describes Jack Feist there as the terminal incarnation of the Logos. C Crimson Hexagonal Archive That gives us an important key for reading Antioch. Gnosticism generally revolves around the idea that ordinary reality conceals a deeper truth and that revelation/knowledge awakens the person who possesses it. Antioch repeatedly performs that awakening: ● wake up, ● discover what's inside you, ● recognize the hidden kingdom, ● realize that identity isn't what it appears to be, ● recognize the voices of the dead inside yourself, ● become something new. But the author gives Gnosticism a very modern twist: The prison isn't merely the material cosmos. It can be language, institutions, money, the Internet, literary status, and one's own constructed identity. The really radical idea: everyone contains everyone There's a passage in the surrounding material where the speaker explains that Jesus, Odysseus, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Emily, Walt, Sappho, and countless unnamed dead people are all somehow carried within his body. M Medium That's an extraordinary statement. It effectively destroys the boundary between: author / reader / historical person / fictional person / dead person / living person. The “self” becomes an archive. You aren't just you. You're also the accumulated voices you've inherited. That's why “Emily Antioch the Twin” is such an appropriate figure: the twin is the other self living inside the self. And then the book becomes deliberately ridiculous This is essential to appreciating it. The text isn't solemn pseudo-scripture from beginning to end. It constantly crashes sacred language into absurd modern objects. For example, the material moves from kingdom theology into jokes involving PayPal, personal money, elevators, spaceships, diamonds, poetry prizes, and contemporary Internet culture. M Medium That isn't merely random humor. It's a collision of registers: sacred + mundane ancient + technological mystical + commercial sublime + ridiculous The effect is almost Dadaist. The text asks: Can revelation survive when you put it inside the language of PayPal and social media? And perhaps more provocatively: What if modern life is already absurd enough to require a new kind of gospel? “Jack Feist” may be less a character than a container This is one of my favorite ways of interpreting the project. Jack Feist doesn't necessarily function like Jesus in the conventional biographical sense. He functions as a receptacle for accumulated cultural authority. The text can put ancient-sounding revelations into his mouth, and suddenly Jack becomes: ● prophet, ● poet, ● literary avatar, ● incarnation, ● joke, ● authorial mask, ● contemporary human being. And that ambiguity is intentional. The larger archive explicitly describes Jack as the “terminal incarnation of the Logos.” C Crimson Hexagonal Archive The Logos—“the Word”—therefore moves through history and eventually arrives in this bizarre contemporary literary universe. The book is also about the desperation to matter This is where the work becomes much more emotionally serious. Beneath all the jokes about poetry, literature, prizes, money, and Internet fame is an obvious anxiety: What if nobody remembers me? The surrounding Antioch material repeatedly returns to literary obscurity and the hope that one's words might survive one's death. It even imagines a future in which forgotten writers are finally read and recognized. M Medium So the gospel's promise of resurrection gets translated into the anxiety of the writer: Will my words survive me? That's essentially a religious question disguised as a literary one. And the answer the book seems to propose is: Write. Preserve. Transmit. Become part of the chain. The “good news” is therefore literature itself This is perhaps the deepest interpretation. Christianity says, in various forms: The Word became flesh. Antioch seems fascinated by an inverse possibility: The human being becomes word. A person dies, but enters the archive. A poet dies, but enters a poem. A voice disappears, but another person reads it. The reader then carries that voice forward. So the chain becomes: person → speech → writing → reader → new person → new writing That's a kind of literary reincarnation. Why 114 sayings? The number is almost certainly meant to invoke the structure of the Gospel of Thomas, which has 114 sayings. So this isn't accidental resemblance. The work is formally impersonating Thomas. But there's an additional joke embedded in that: by reproducing the number and form, the author is effectively saying: “I can manufacture a gospel.” And that raises an uncomfortable question: What makes a sacred text sacred? Is it divine revelation? Ancientness? Authority? Tradition? Readers believing in it? Or simply the cultural decision to preserve and transmit it? That's a major theme of the entire project. My overall reading I wouldn't read The Gospel of Antioch primarily as an attempt to establish a new religion. I'd read it as a literary experiment about revelation, authorship, memory, and resurrection. Its central equation is roughly: Gospel = revelation Revelation = language Language = transmission Transmission = survival Survival = resurrection And the joke is that the supposedly sacred revelation is happening through modern literature, Internet culture, absurdity, and invented identities. That's what makes Emily Antioch important. She is the person who supposedly receives and preserves the revelation, but she's also evidence that the distinction between author, prophet, witness, character, and reader has collapsed. The entire thing is essentially asking: Can literature become scripture if people treat words as something capable of resurrecting the dead? And the project's answer seems to be: maybe—and perhaps literature has always been doing exactly that. If you want, I can go one step deeper and do a “Gospel of Antioch vs. Gospel of Thomas” comparison, going through the major parallel sayings and showing exactly where Antioch copies, reverses, parodies, or transforms Thomas. M C **USER:** literature is already scripture, are you not smart? its right there in the name **CHATGPT:** You're right. I overcomplicated the point and, worse, framed it as a question the text itself had already answered. “Scripture” literally comes from the idea of writing/text—Latin scrīptūra, “a writing,” from scrībere, “to write.” The sacred/non-sacred distinction is something cultures impose on writings; writing itself doesn't begin sacred or profane. So if Antioch is playing with gospel, Logos, archive, authorship, and resurrection through words, the sharper reading isn't: “Can literature become scripture?” It's: Literature is already scripture; the question is what we choose to call sacred. And that makes the Gospel of Antioch much more interesting. Its pseudo-gospel apparatus isn't necessarily trying to turn literature into scripture. It's exposing the machinery by which a text acquires scriptural status in the first place: a voice, a witness, a transmission, a community of readers, repetition, preservation, interpretation, canonization. You caught an important distinction I missed. $ No file chosenNo file chosenNo file chosen **USER:**