Ram Arising

By Joseph Rex Kerrick

With society in an accelerating state of collapse, a couple of star-crossed lovers named Kirk and Jennifer find themselves caught in the middle of a power-struggle between factions led by superhuman beings. A warlord named Ramar is building an international rogue state called Thule; its inhabitants claim descent from extraterrestrials who seeded the white race on Earth in the distant past. Opposing them is Kalianna, a black media star who leads her own cult and claims to be an incarnation of the Goddess Kali. The climax is a magical battle in which the antagonists wield spiritual and sorcerous energies powerful enough to trigger an apocalypse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Rex Kerrick
• Release date: Jan 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310788666

Joseph Rex Kerrick

I live right on the border between Earth and the numenal realm, so it's an easy commute for me ~ in fact it takes no time at all. This facilitates my metaphysical research, since I can scope things out from the heights of heaven, the depths of hell, and everything in between.In terms of the merely physical coordinates, I'm sixty-odd years old and live in Northern California with my son Jeffrey, who is thirty-and-also-odd. We like mostly opposite things but overlap by virtue of our *philia*, familial love. With this redeeming value we live together in peace, which is more than a lot of people can say these days.

Book preview

It didn't take long for America to break down after the economic foundation collapsed.

In 2033 a semblance of law and order still prevails in militarized urban Green Zones, where the citizenry lives in fear of the gangs and terrorists who rule the countryside. Kirk Donaldson is among the fortunate few with a decent job, but his life is riddled with insecurities. In an effort to rekindle an old romance, he accompanies Jennifer Ekstrom to a performance by a rising star named Kalianna, the leader of a New Age cult whose followers worship her as a Goddess. In the audience is Gavin Paneskos, who challenges Kalianna and covertly engages her in psychic combat. During an intermission, Gavin and his cousin Aurora talk with Kirk and Jennifer, revealing that they are members of what the media describes as a white supremacist terrorist group. The truth, they say, is that they are citizens of Thule, a legendary kingdom which has risen again and thrives in areas liberated from what they call the New World Empire. Their leader is Ramar, a man endowed with the highest enlightenment and powers bordering on the supernatural.

Romantic encounters take place, Gavin with Jennifer and Aurora with Kirk. Each couple shares a kiss charged with such psychic-tantric energy that it awakens the souls of Kirk and Jennifer to their true identity as Thuleans.

The story tears open the Matrix-illusion of material life, and offers a glimpse of the hidden powers that contend for control of the world, for good or ill. The climax is an epochal battle that evokes the mythos of the Endtime, drawing on Hindu as well as Christian prophecies, the scientific Singularity, and the coming of the Übermensch.

Ram Arising

Copyright 2014 by Joseph Rex Kerrick

Published by Joseph Rex Kerrick

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Table of Contents

Part I: The Bull, the Ram, and the Avatar

1. Eye in the Sky

2. Pluribus Ex Unum

3. Destiny or Dharma

4. Prophets and Warlords

5. Rising on the Vibe

6. Waking from the Dream

7. A Star-Crossed Eclipse

8. The Millennium Shift

9. The Impeccable Vessel

10. The Tropical Faultline

Part II: A Godseye View

1. Dharma Combat

2. Masters, Supermen, and Übers

3. Secret Wars

4. The Pellucid Viewer

5. The Macrobot

6. Thule

7. RamaSpirit

8. Metazons, Monsters, and Demigods

Part III: Dharmalove

1. Security Precautions

2. Behold the Man

3. The Art of Love

4. The Microcosmic Orbit

5. When a Rose Is a Rose and More

6. Touched by a God

7. Dharmalove Troth

8. The Aegis

9. Seelenheil

10. The Cure for Hardcore Karma

11. Circuit of Love

12. The Kin of Aries

13. Dharmalove Flux

14. The Talisman

15. Hearts, Two Pair

16. Psychic Surgery

Part IV: Rites of Darkness

1. The First Spell

2. Angels and Demons

3. The Rites of Baal

4. Demon Feast

5. Zapped!

6. The Black Sun

7. Distress Signal

8. Asmodeus

9. Magical Battle

10. Beginning of the Endtime

11. Apocalyptic Shift

12. Awakening

About Joseph Rex Kerrick

Also by Joseph Rex Kerrick

Part I: The Bull, the Ram, and the Avatar

1. Eye in the Sky

On a bright spring day in 2033 the view from directly above the Golden Gate Bridge was spectacular. It was being viewed through an instrument that had the capacity to pan in and out, taking in the entire Bay Area or focusing closely on the traffic streaming along below. The observers were above the common lot of humanity in more profound ways as well; theirs was the power to bind or to loose energies far beyond the equations of mundane science, and to occupy the many dimensions of which it dreams.

Such power could be used to rule the planet absolutely, or to exert benevolent influence to a degree that could bring a new Golden Age. Neither was an immediate option for the beings above the bridge, because their exalted legion was opposed by another, a cabal with powers on a par with their own. These secret leagues have been at odds for a thousand years and more, and the changing fortunes of human history are a mere reflection of the ebb and flow of the tide of their hidden conflict.

Today was a momentous occasion, for an encounter was planned between a pair of leading figures from the opposite camps. Security was essential, because only one of the two players was aware of the plan. The beings had at their disposal the means to chart the innumerable probabilities generated by the event. Their assigned task was to alter as many factors as may be necessary for a favorable outcome. All major elements had been accounted for, but there remained some vital strategic moves.

A minor imbalance in the peripheral forces jeopardized an important gain for the side leveraging the event. The beings had scanned an array of potential balancing factors in their multidimensional view of the timestream; they had selected the most promising one, and watched now for its imminent appearance. And there it was below them, a car that had just cleared the toll plaza and slipped into northbound traffic. It was driven by a man, upon whom the beings now focused their scrutiny. After a moment they were satisfied with the value of their choice; but before they could intervene in his life they must also satisfy the demands of Dharma to be sure that the true will of the man was not violated. An option was simply to ask permission, but like the great majority of humans, the man had little more than a remote inkling of his own true will and destiny. Therefore the beings scanned ahead through the patterns of what might be, and again they were pleased with their findings.

There beamed down from above the bridge a laser-like needle of light, bearing an instrument so subtle that it was invisible and undetectable by merely human means. The beam intersected the crown of the man's head, then sluiced its way down his spinal column until the payload was lodged in a particular node, or nadi. Their task was now complete, and the beings departed.

2. Pluribus Ex Unum

Kirk Donaldson let out a long breath after finally getting through the daily ordeal at the Golden Gate toll plaza. Even the state-of-the-art scanning devices didn't seem to make a dent in the ungodly traffic jam and intrusive stupidity of the security personnel. How easy it must've been back in the days when all you had to do was pay a toll!

The pile-up at the plaza at least made the drive across the bridge fairly swift, except when hassles arose from suspicious activity or outright violence. A couple of car-size drone choppers flew along nearby, and Kirk felt momentarily reassured. The Bay Area Green Zone was one of the best-policed enclaves in the country ~ though the term police was semantic, since it was all done by the military and private security agencies, some of which were armies in themselves, and even air forces.

Kirk was twenty-nine years old, and so his entire adult life had been lived in the era after the economic draw-down (as it was euphemistically called) had led to a massive deterioration of the social structure. A dispassionate observer might see a certain irony, or perhaps collective karma, in the fact that the situation in the United States now strongly resembled that of the countries it had invaded and occupied in earlier decades. The power of the federal government was merely nominal in broad swaths of territory, which were dominated by drug gangs, terrorists, and self-styled revolutionaries. One of the biggest disruptive forces here in the west was Aztlan, also known as the Alta California Liberation Front, dedicated to winning back the state for Mexico, or at least for the Mexican guerillas who comprised the movement. Mexico itself had fallen into nearly feudal conditions ~ the drug cartels had formally taken over the government of many municipalities, and several whole states.

Even the common cause of Aztlan could not bring peace in the long-running war between the two largest home-grown drug gangs, which had now expanded enormously. Kirk recalled how the security checkpoint was first installed at the toll plaza after the Sureños pulled off a commando operation on the bridge: they used a rocket launcher to sink a Norteño cargo ship passing underneath. The Bay was polluted with coke and meth for almost a month.

Suddenly Kirk felt a prickle on the top of his head. He thought it must be an insect and tried to brush it away. Then something spectacular happened: the sky above the bridge exploded in white light. He might've thought it was a terrorist attack except that it was completely silent and somehow made him feel absolutely beatific ~ it was as if heaven's door had opened and divine radiance flooded down. It quickly faded out along with the ecstasy, and Kirk was left gripping the steering wheel in wonderment that he hadn't had an accident. What the holy hell was that? he thought.

Then he felt another strange sensation, this time in the pit of his stomach, or perhaps his solar plexus ~ but after a split-second of nausea, this too passed away. The whole thing smacked of some experiences in his youth, induced by drugs which he had given up when he began his career. He decided it must have been a flashback. He felt worried that it might recur, but resolutely pushed it from his mind.

3. Destiny or Dharma

The drive up Highway 101 was uneventful ~ thank God, thought Kirk. Now the constant fear of external danger was heightened by the possible new demon within. He tried to distract himself with other thoughts, like his love life. This was a demon of a different sort, since he hadn't had a lover in the past two years, ever since Jennifer jilted him. He had a morbid dread that the big three-oh would dawn and find him still running solo; it might officially brand him as a bachelor or something, and make it that much harder to score. Maybe I'm erotically disabled, he thought, a near-obsessive fixation. He began to feel so desperate that he considered phoning Jennifer, but instantly dismissed it as wishful thinking.

Kirk lived in Novato, perilously close to the northern perimeter of the Green Zone. It was made worse by the presence of Latino gangs in the town itself, some of them affiliated with the bloody collective monsters beyond the border, which was really just the boundary between Marin and Sonoma Counties. His state of mind was such that he evaded, or postponed, the hazardous trip home by impulsively turning off at the exit for downtown San Rafael.

He parked in a lot where he only had to go through one metal detector, then strolled morosely through the shopping district. The streets were patrolled by the well-armed-and-armored troops of an agency employed by the Merchants' Association; as in most of the country, the local police force had been disbanded long ago from the bankruptcy of the city government.

Suddenly he realized that he was near the building where Jennifer lived, a condo complex in the town plaza. His spirits lifted at the thought of buzzing her bell. It was absurd, of course, but now he had a strong gut feeling that he should go for it. He got within five