[UA] The terrible truth about Hutt River

[Patrick O'Duffy]

It's a complete fucking hole.

As for the gematria, I dug up the article. I figured rooting through a few
boxes of old magazines was a more attractiv task than finishing this WW
piece I'm supposed to be working on.

The story comes from the November 1998 issue of RALPH magazine. For those
non-Aussies, RALPH is a local MAXIM/FHM clone, but one with more of a sense
of humour and a tendency to take the piss out of itself. Some of the
articles were quite well done. Ummm... my girlfriend at the time liked it,
honest.

(That should be enough embarrased justification, I hope.)

Anyway, from the article (pages 56-60), talking to Prince Leonard:

--
Nowadays he uses mathematics to ponder "some very advanced physics at our
Advanced College of Research here."

Where? "Over there." Oh. In the chapel. Prince Leonard says that he and some
young, mathematically-inclined people from Geraldton have proven that "the
spiritual" does exist.

They use 'gematria', a cryptographic method of interpreting passages of the
Hebrew scriptures by substituting numerical values for the alphabetic
meaning of the letters (each Hebrew letter representing a number).
Therefore, gematria practioners give themselves licence to reinterpret any
and all writing.

That's why he's got the '666' painting. According to his interpretation of
the "666 is the Number of the Beast" passage from the Book of Revelations,
666 is not the Number of the Beast, but a complex formula that teaches
mankind how to "build a barrier against the beast."

"We've advanced to the stage," says the Prince, "where some of the spiritual
sine waves we've brought out do fit to a mathematical series blah blah
blah..." After years of spieling to tourists, the Prince talks at a
high-speed blur. The only way to decipher him is to record him at real time
and play him back at low speed where he sounds, appropriately, like Satan.

He's saying: "We're dealing with the sine waves of the energy that's reputed
to be spiritual. We've now connected it to an observable factor. We've taken
it away simply from faith into the pure sciences where you can sit down and
research it."

Prince Leonard was not content with faith in God alone. He needed to see Gos
with his own eyes. This, in my simple view, defies the basic tenets of
Christianity. Did not Jesus Christ say to his disciples that faith alone was
all they needed? "What happened to _faith_, Prince Leonard? Are you going to
reduce God to just a series of numbers, a mathematical formula? Hang this
man!"

But my men are off at the Gift Shop buying Hutt River stubby holders and
useless Hutt River currency (one Hutt River dollar = one Australian
dollar)...

--

Having reread this for the first time in ages, I can't help thinking that if
you gave the Hutt River inhabitants guns and ready access to stimulants,
they'd be a lot like the True Order of St. Germain...

--
Patrick O'Duffy, Brisbane, Australia

You really do moan at an Olympic level, don't you?

- Spider Jerusalem, TRANSMETROPOLITAN #37


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