Credit: Dangerous Minds / Phillip K Dick / Publicity

There’s probably a sizeable portion of the fanbases of Philip K Dick that cries themselves to sleep over the fact that their hero believed in God.

It’s true. The godfather of science fiction, the incredible mind behind works like The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and A Scanner Darkly, a man who sounds like he should be revered in militant atheist circles, was a believer.

Perhaps that’s not such a surprise, after all, both militant atheists and Phillip K Dick fans are often called Dickheads, but probably not for quite the same reasons. However, the story behind his brush with The Divine is as fascinating as anything he himself put on the page.

Dick himself would have probably found most questions about mainstream religion a little beneath him. This was a man whose depth of thought is literally impenetrable to most people, even those who read his work. He probably would have found the question of whether he was a Christian who believed that God was a man in the sky with a big white beard a waste of time, and would be more interested in questioning the metaphysics of being a creation of God than whether he was going to church every Sunday.

These questions found their way into his work on a few occasions. In fact, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is essentially an extended look into what it means to be a creation of someone else’s design.

However, it wouldn’t be until 1974 when he had a set of experiences that changed him thoroughly, and made him start one of the projects that would captivate him all the way up to his death in 1982, The Exegesis of Philip K Dick.

What was ‘The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick’?

So, first things first. An exegesis refers to an extended period of study, explanation and interpretation of an individual text, most often a holy book of some kind. In true Philip K Dick style, his exegesis is something much deeper than that, to the point where it’s less about a holy text and more about his personal experiences with The Divine. This fixation on God and specifically Christianity stems from one particular experience he had recovering from surgery on his wisdom teeth.

One February morning, Dick received a delivery of Darvon from a beautiful young woman wearing a gold, fish-shaped necklace. Upon asking after the necklace, the young woman replied that it was “a sign used by the early Christians”, and as she said that, the strangest thing happened to Dick. Sunlight glinted off the pendant and became a “pink beam” that mesmerised him. Over the next few days, Dick started experiencing intense hallucinations, at first geometric shapes but then… something very different.

As detail in his exegesis, Dick claimed that he began living a double life; one as Philip K Dick and one as ‘Thomas’, a Christian persecuted by the Romans in the first century AD.

Now, obviously, having vivid hallucinations while taking a new medication is nothing unusual. However, the exegesis puts it forward that just because you know the source of these visions, why would that make them any less true? He began documenting his experiences in a journal, one that he worked on with a vigour not seen in years, sometimes writing 150 pages in one night.

It was never meant to see release. The journal was over 8,000 pages in length by Dick’s death in 1982, but eventually, segments of the journal were bound together as The Exegesis of Philip K Dick in 2011, a tome that its editor, Jonathan Lethem, said “just might contain the secret of the universe”.

Not bad for a mental breakdown, eh?