Sacred Books & Sky Hooks

By Paul Enns Wiebe

Sacred Books & Sky Hooks is a genre-bending literary thriller with occasional dollops of humor. Like Melville's Moby Dick,  it is punctuated by nonfictional discussions of a central subject. Instead of whales and whaling, this novel deals with the subject of founder myths: sacred stories told by and about founders of religious movements. And instead of being a tale of a quest on the high seas, it is a literary thriller featuring kidnapping, murder, and escape.

A former Washington lawyer and amateur comparative religionist puts three such myths—those created by Corky Ra, founder of a contemporary start-up religion; Joseph Smith; and the Apostle Paul—on a virtual stand and finds them all guilty of making questionable claims about their divine revelations. On publishing his findings, he becomes anathema to the religiously correct, engages his nemesis in a Western-style shootout, and finally finds solace in a faraway place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Komos Books
• Release date: Nov 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781952006227

Paul Enns Wiebe

Armed with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Paul Enns Wiebe taught comparative religion at Wichita State University until taking very early retirement from his tenured position to become an independent writer. He has published nine novels and counting, as well as a pair of nonfiction books and a passel of articles in his academic specialties.  

Book preview

FACT AND FANCY

Summum Bonum Amen Ra, also called Corky Ra, was as real as Joseph Smith and the Apostle Paul.

The assessment of this trio of mythmakers is based on historical research, though the discoveries of the hidden manuscripts are fictional through and through.

The plot is a creature of the author’s odd fancy, as are the characters—except for the historical ones.

PROLOGUE

On a bleak, frigid morning on the Fifteenth of March somewhat more than forty years ago, I entered the world, courtesy of Renée Swift, née Arouet. While she and I were in the delivery room at Massachusetts General, my father, J. Ethan Swift II, JD, was pacing the halls outside, hoping for a boy to continue his good name. The gods smiled on him, and I was christened J. Ethan Swift III, with a JD to follow.

Father liked to say that he was of the Dooblin Swifts, though he had left Ireland and run off to London when he was barely seventeen. He’d been born into a Catholic family, but when he turned twenty-one and moved to Boston, he became what he liked to call a staunch, born-again Unitarian. He had come to prefer the music of Liszt to that of Palestrina, he’d often say, and a rose supported by a vase on top of a piano to a statue of the Virgin standing in a dusty alcove.

Father’s face advertised his Irish genes. Even at the age of seventy his large, fit body supported a substantial head graced with gray, unkempt hair, a round, pink face and a broad mustache whose edges extended half an inch beyond his large pink ears, which had been tinged—or so Mother would say—by his routine of enjoying a late-afternoon apéritif, a dinner chardonnay, and a bedtime whiskey. His conversation was lively and his learning immense. He always dressed immaculately in the kind of suit one would expect from someone in his position, though where the Boston Brahmins were concerned, he was just an upstart who had made good at the bar.

Mother came from a long line of French atheists. But while she was pregnant with my younger brother, she took a stroll on a Chestnut Hill green, where she was caught in a thunderstorm; a bolt of lightning knocked her to the ground, causing her to have a religious experience. She was quickly carted off to Mass General, where, on waking, she became a Christian for life. However, she had trouble settling on a single denomination. Not long after finding a new denomination that better fit her shifting theological tastes, she would move on to another. This was largely because, as Father would say on the few occasions when I accompanied him to his weekly Liszt-and-rose affairs, the church she’d most recently abandoned wasn’t consistent with the social advances he had made and the views that went with them.

Mother had started with the Pentecostals, moved from them to the Baptists, then the Methodists, before settling on the Presbyterians—for two years, after which she considered becoming a Catholic, though because of Father’s disapproval of the religion he had abandoned, she settled on the Episcopalians. I don’t recall her other religious experiments, though I believe the Quakers once captured her interest. At any rate, during her inevitable quarrel with the Episcopalians I quit attending the services of the churches she sometimes had me grace with my company. This happened after my last Eucharist, where before receiving the Body and after the woman before me had had her portion, I whispered to the gentleman administering the sacrament, I’ll have what she had. For this petty sin I received a murderous glare, not the conspiratorial smile I’d hoped for.

Other items concerning Mother included her appearance (tiny, svelte, Gallic nose) the accent of her native tongue, and her dress (elegant, preferring business suits when in the world of charitable causes but long, sparkling gowns while entertaining Father’s crowd). She was lively in motion and ardent in conversation, though her mind, which had originally been bright and astute, was prematurely on the wane—because, Father often confided to others, of that damned lightning strike.

Then there was Jean-Pierre, co-victim of that lightning bolt. Despite being somewhat deficient in matters of the mind, he was Mother’s favorite. He was tiny and slim and had an awkward gait and a nose that advertised his Gallic genes. A difficult birth had led to a difficult life. He was constantly changing his dress, always according to the fleeting fashions favored by the mavericks of his marginal world, and continually in search of his true self, which, when he seemed to have found it, soon vanished and was followed by another futile quest.

All my family’s religious comings and goings had put me in a state of confusion. What was I to believe? What moral codes was I to adopt? Out of this confusion came a growing conviction, in my adolescent years, that I might do well as a poet. I was encouraged in this belief during my tenure at the Boston Latin School, where a classics tutor guided my attempts to write Shakespearean sonnets, none of which were ever published—no doubt for good reason.

At Harvard, where Father insisted that I go—it was, he reminded me, a key part of the family tradition—my primary concentration was in comparative religion, with a joint effort, at his bidding, in government. My idea was to prepare for a graduate program in my primary field. Father’s idea was that if I wanted to continue the life I’d grown accustomed to, I should follow his path and become a lawyer.

Don’t you want such a life? he then asked, looking deep into my eyes.

Yes I do, I replied, looking downward at his shoes.

Why are you looking at my shoes? he demanded.

Because . . . , I began, then faltered.

Yes?

Because . . . , I went on, looking up at his eyes, I want to be a scholar.

Well, he said with a grand smile, you should have both. And he rubbed his fingers against his thumb, then stood up and walked over to a bookshelf and plucked a tattered copy of Great Expectations and proceeded to stick his nose into what he regarded as Dickens’s greatest work.

I saw his point: my vocation would provide the means to pursue my primary interest.

And so after my baccalaureate I entered Harvard Law. And after the JD, Father pulled a few strings that got me a position in a D.C. prosecutor’s office. After a short but successful time in that position, I switched sides and joined a prominent law firm, where I represented some of America’s finest and wealthiest politicians in their desire to keep their reputations intact and to remain free men and, at several points, women. During those years I ate, drank, and slept well, with no spouse to lecture me about my peccadillos. And working with the detectives one finds necessary in my line of work led me to develop what they liked to call a gumshoe’s eye for bullshit.

My undergraduate days had taught me to think of religion in a comparative way. As I learned from this schooling, my later travels, and my hobby of reading in the religions of the world, there are patterns in the beliefs and practices of the entire set. A short list of these patterns would include pilgrimages, apocalypses, sky gods, initiation rituals, and sacred books, which commonly include both creation stories and founder myths. (As I will report, I came to take an ardent interest in myths of the founder sort.)

My aptitude for pursuing this interest was tested in a newly adopted role as a critic of a start-up religion based in Salt Lake City, to which I traveled at Mother’s behest. Her Jean-Pierre had become a member of a startup religion calling itself Summum. I was, she said firmly, to extract him from that cult’s tenacious claws.

Thinking that this would be a good time for me to resume my religious investigations, I retired from the legal profession at the obscene age of forty-four. I was honored by my colleagues and given a farewell party by some of my former clients. Then I visited my aging parents back in Chestnut Hill, got my marching orders from Mother, said my goodbyes, and flew off to Utah’s capital.

I

THE CURIOUS CASE

OF CLAUDE CORKY RA

1

Mother’s plan for Jean-Pierre’s life had not gone well. At an early stage in her spiritual odyssey, she had decided that her beloved son would do well as a Presbyterian pastor. He had balked at the idea, arguing that he was on a religious quest of his own. This, he said, had started while he was preparing for the rite of confirmation featured in her then-version of Christianity. He had shared with me the secret that he’d spent short stints as a Buddhist monk, a Daoist, a late-to-the-game Hare Krishna, an unwholesome mix of American cults, an adherent of several of the apocalyptic sects that periodically raise their heads, and a Muslim—though a peace-loving one, he insisted. And these were only the ones he’d told me about. In our last pre-Summum conversation, he’d told me that his current goal was to become a Hindu guru meditating in a mountaintop cave while, I imagined, muttering sacred words and enjoying the view.

But Mother was not to be deterred. Though neither she nor Father knew the extent of Jean-Pierre’s spiritual meanderings, they knew he was constantly numbered among the unemployed. This did not go down smoothly with Father, who, despite Mother’s pleadings, abruptly cut their younger son’s financial strings. Jean-Pierre’s conversion to a Utah cult, he raged as he paced the floor, was the tipping point.

When I arrived in Salt Lake City with Mother’s orders to extract Jean-Pierre from Summum’s greedy talons, he didn’t meet me at the airport. I had to seek him out. I finally found him wandering around town, telling people on the pavement about the joys of sex. He was advising his audience that these joys could be had by joining Summum and following the instructions set forth in a slender booklet he was selling called Sexual Ecstasy from Ancient Wisdom.

I said my hello; he answered by giving me a copy. I flipped through a few pages, then handed it to a passerby, who flipped through a few pages and handed it to another passerby, who dropped it and quickly vanished. When his small crowd had dispersed, I invited Jean-Pierre to a lunch he looked as if he’d welcome.

After sitting down and ordering, Jean Pierre a full meal and I a sandwich, I asked him, What the hell are you doing here?

I’m spreading the word about this really neat religion, he said between bites.

I can see that, I replied. But what happened to your goal of sitting on top of that Indian mountain?

I couldn’t dig up the scratch to fly there, he admitted. Anyway, that was just a passing fancy. I’ve matured since then.

Matured! Did you know that even Mother has begun to notice something askew in that skull of yours? I think she’s starting to be ashamed of you.

"Well, I’m ashamed of her. All she’s ever done is go from one church to another. She’s been missing all the other possibilities. Like Summum. By the way, have you ever tried it? It’d suit you fine."

I sighed and said, Tell me everything you know about it.

He thought about this for a while. Then, The major point seems to be that they have this really neat way of getting saved.

Don’t tell me, I said. It’s called ‘salvation through sex.’

Right! I gave you that book. I bet you read it, didn’t you?

I looked at a few pictures and skimmed a few paragraphs. It strikes me as bad porn smothered with a sauce of shoddy philosophy. So I gave it away.

Thanks, he said sarcastically. It probably got me a convert. And thanks for the lunch. Now, go tell Mother to buzz off!

I need your address and cell number.

He gave them to me and left, presumably in search of converts.

For the rest of that afternoon I looked around the city, rented a nice apartment, and prepared myself for the coming brotherly match.

Once settled in, I emailed the headquarters of Summum, asking a few innocuous questions about their organization. Who was in charge? What was their current membership? How often did they meet, and on which days? I told them I was working on an article about their founder, Corky Ra. (This was true at the time, though I later scuttled the project in favor of finding my own answers to these questions.) I received a reply from the outfit, wanting to know for which publisher I was doing the article. I immediately wrote back saying I was a freelance writer with an interest in comparative religion and that I’d send the finished piece to whoever was most likely to publish it. They again responded, saying Summum would gladly answer my questions, with the proviso that I sign a copy of their enclosed media agreement. After reading the agreement and noting that it stipulated that I agree not to provide the content of the article to anyone without the expressed written consent of Summum, I politely wrote back that I wouldn’t sign it because I couldn’t agree to this stipulation, while thinking that neither could I bear the shoddy, unlawyerly wording.

Then I sought out Jean-Pierre and asked him to a full dinner at a fine French café. When he was through devouring the main course, I showed him the emails.

After he’d read them I said, As a lawyer and amateur bloodhound, I’d advise you against staying with this outfit.

I know you’re a hotshot when it comes to the law, he said sarcastically, "and I’d advise you to go play in your own sandbox. Besides, what makes you an expert on religion? How many have you tried?"

Avoiding this question, I said, You’re dealing with a very nervous little cult that seems to be wary of answering the simplest questions. That tells me a lot, and it should tell you something, too.

The waiter came and asked, "Ees everathing all right, monsieurs?

Jean-Pierre said, I’m ready for dessert. Whatta ya got? And try using plain English.

The waiter seemed a bit miffed, but after a bout of throat-clearing he said, still in his French accent, Cake, pie, and ice cream.

Whatta ya recommend? Jean-Pierre asked, with no sense of irony that a man with his name and pedigree was demanding that a French waiter use plain English.

Why not try all three? I suggested.

Like the man says, said Jean-Pierre.

And you, monsieur?

Gâteau à la crème glacée, I said in my best Latin School accent.

The waiter smiled, nodded, and left, while Jean-Pierre said under his breath, Jee-zus Christ!

"Have you tried him?" I asked. Many have, with mixed results.

Listen, he scoffed. I’m not so hungry that I have to put up with this bullshit. I’m off. Then he added, If you come up with some real evidence that my religion’s not up to par, you know where to find me.

And he was gone.

When the waiter came back with the dessert orders, I asked him to have them sent, except the ice cream, to my prodigal brother’s address.

2

Despite Summum’s apparent desire for secrecy, the details of Mr. Ra’s life as a founder of a bright new religion are both ample and accessible. From a variety of sources—the substantial press he received, a few television interviews, and several of his own testimonies on the website he inspired—it’s possible not only to find answers to my simple questions, but to plot the main events in the life of Claude Rex Corky Nowell/King/Nowell a.k.a. Summum Bonum Amen Ra, or Corky Ra for short.

Born in Salt Lake City on November 2, 1944, he was christened Claude Rex Nowell. After his parents divorced in 1948, his mother remarried, took her son with her to Southern California, and had his name legally changed to Claude Rex King. Somewhere along the way he picked up the nickname Corky. While still in California, he graduated from some community college with a degree in construction technology.

Corky moved back to Salt Lake City in 1964 at the behest of his birth father, who gave him a job in his construction business, though insisting that he join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; though Mr. Nowell himself wasn’t active in the church, it seems he thought his son would benefit financially from a tie to the dominant regional power. About this time Corky changed his name (legally) back to Claude Rex Nowell. Maintaining that name for the time being, he became a Mormon missionary, rising to the position of assistant to the mission president, which, he once boasted to an audience, is about the highest rank you can get to as a missionary. After a full term on the Central States mission field, he went on to attend Brigham Young University and then the University of Utah, from which he graduated—or did not graduate—with majors in business and, perhaps, philosophy (the sources on these two points are at odds).

In 1970, Corky and a young woman named Annette Hall were married in a Mormon temple. They moved into a home his father had built for him in an affluent neighborhood of the Salt Lake Valley at the base of the majestic Mount Olympus. Not long afterward the couple had two children, he lost interest in the Church, began to meditate in the basement den—at the time he thought of these exercises as relaxation—and he and Annette started to see things from two totally unrelated perspectives. In 1974, the two were divorced and he was doing his meditations in an apartment.

A year later, Corky says, I was just having a regular old life like everybody else has. I would go to the clubs in town, and dance, and have a few drinks, and party and get involved with different people, one of whom was a woman named Chris Miller, whose religious preferences seem not to have been preserved for the ages.

On October 28, 1975, while sitting on a couch in Ms. Miller’s apartment, Corky was supposedly visited by extraterrestrial beings he came to call Summa Individuals. This visit led to his founding of the religion Summum, which he registered with the IRS as a nonprofit organization. On orders from the extraterrestrials, he claimed, he began to construct a small pyramid-shaped temple in Salt Lake City. In 1977 Summum initiated a student organization at the University of Utah, making it possible for Corky to conduct classes for night students; he later claimed that after two years of these classes, almost twenty thousand had become members of Summum. Using volunteer labor and donations, his pyramid was completed in 1979; it was to serve as a sanctuary, a classroom, a winery, and a repository for the mummies of Summum devotees and their pets. In 1980 he changed his name (again legally) to Summum Bonum Amen Ra, though he was commonly and informally known as Corky Ra.

In 1988, again claiming to be following orders from the extraterrestrials, Corky published a book on the wisdom those visitors from elsewhere had taught him. He called it SUMMUM: Sealed Except for the Open Mind. A year later he married a woman named Grace (surname not given), whom he had met in a parking lot after one of his lectures. This wedding took place in the Summum pyramid; it was officiated by his disciple Summum Bonum Neffer Menu, a.k.a. Su Menu, formerly Sue Parsons, a piano teacher—who was later to succeed him as president of the organization.

Six years later, he published an illustrated booklet, Sexual Ecstasy from Ancient Wisdom, with the subtitle The Joys of Permanent Sexual Ecstasy.

In 1997, Summum reported an American membership of a hundred and fifty thousand.

But what placed Corky Ra in the public eye was the litigation. In late 2008, the case of Pleasant Grove City v. Summum was heard by the US Supreme Court. It had been initiated by Corky’s wish to place a monument listing Summum’s Seven Aphorisms, alongside a monument of the Ten Commandments in the city park of a small town near Provo, Utah. On February 25, 2009, the Supreme Court ruled against this New Age religion. The vote was 9-0.

Summum Bonum Amen Corky Ra was unavailable for comment on this setback. He was in his beloved temple, undergoing the last stages of mummification. He had died on January 29, 2008 of what Su Menu described as complications from Vietnam-related Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and a bad back.

So much for what might pass as Corky’s obituary. But we know other things about him.

In 2007, Jared W. Blackley, a writer for the antiestablishment Salt Lake City Weekly, did a piece on Corky titled Ra’s Deal: If You Like Sex, Wine, Pyramids, and Egyptian Philosophy, Corky Ra Has Your Religion. Blackley gave a physical description of his subject: medium build, late fifties, stereotype of the aging hippie, bald in front, gray hair gathered in a ponytail descending halfway down his back, calm confidence, soft voice. (The Summum website features a headshot of Ra with a full head of black hair but without the ponytail.) Blackley also interviewed Ken Sanders, one of Corky’s former colleagues at a printing press and design shop, who recalled that Corky Nowell was a salesman who got the firm lots of job contracts but never quite got the hang of some crucial pragmatics—that is, he made contracts for jobs that were impossible to fulfill. Corky, he added, would also come to work carrying what he called an unbreakable ‘bonum rock’ of pink quartzite purportedly from another planet.

Then there are the miracles Corky is said to have performed. According to sworn affidavits, he has turned a blue sky into a rainstorm, lit a candle by staring at it, and impregnated several fully-clothed women just by using the energy from the penis of a fully-clothed man standing on the opposite side of the room. All the women, with one exception, escaped their unwelcome state by directing their energy toward releasing their embryos, though what this releasing was all about is never explained.

There is no account of the woman who retained her embryo.

3

What does Corky Ra allege happened on the day he was relaxing on his girlfriend’s couch? What is he asking us to believe?

Corky’s account of his first and defining revelation appears twice on the labyrinthine summum.us website, once in a written essay, the other in an informal question-and-answer session on the subject of his first encounter with the Summa Individuals.

References to encounters with Beings not of this planet can be found in all major philosophies and religions dating back to the beginning of recorded history, Corky’s essay begins, though he gives no examples or arguments for this claim. He then recounts his own encounter, taking care to say that before the event, he had always supposed that those who had reported having had personal revelations were either lying or mentally ill.

Several months into his meditative regimen, he says, I began to notice a ‘ringing’ in my ears. Then, on October 28, 1975, it happened. The noise in Corky’s ears became very intense. His body began to vibrate; he opened his eyes and found himself alongside an enormous pyramid, made of something like graphite, half a mile long at the base but without doors. Everything was quiet and perfect. Then he noticed another structure, with a round, convex shape, like a flattened ball and a hundred yards in diameter. He walked through its wall and found himself in a large room full of beautiful, elegant, divine humanoids of both genders. They established a high-level telepathic link with my mind, he said, and instantaneously I understood them. These Beings were what he came to call the Summa Individuals, meaning, he informs his Latin-deficient readers, the Highest Individuals.

Then there were the crystals. Once inside the structure, he was shown a glass-like shaft rising from the floor. Concepts started streaming through my mind, he reports. As he looked at the shaft, another one came down from the ceiling and headed toward the back of his head. Later he learned that this shaft was crystalline, reminding him that communication occurs by way of crystals, as mentioned in the Bible, the Torah, and the Hindu Bhagavad Gita. Maybe, Corky thought, these crystals were a contemporary Urim and Thummim. (He was referring to a pair of rocks used as divination devices; they are first mentioned in the biblical book of Exodus and were later said to be used by Joseph Smith, purportedly to help him translate the Golden Plates he claimed to have discovered in an upstate New York hill into the Book of Mormon.)

Corky said he continued to have these visitations. At first he resisted the Summa Individual’s demands, but he came to understand the nature of the work I was responsible to complete, even though I had no details of how to accomplish this task. Finally, he started to tell others of these encounters. His life was changed; he became a well-known person, achieved peace of mind, and came to understand Creation Itself.

At the end of this account, there is a Summum version of an altar call. To the open-minded who have evolved far enough to understand, etc., he promises: You too can have the wealth of the wealthy, the fame of the famous.

Corky’s informal talk in his temple tells much the same story. He expands on his experience with the Summa Individuals—for example, he reports that they led him to a piece of energy that looked like a very large crystal [which] came out of the floor and I looked into it and I saw all the things that were going to happen about building the pyramid and making the nectars [wines]. He anticipates skeptics who might suggest that he got all this