Ong's Hat: The Beginning

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Summary: Ong's Hat, New Jersey: Revisiting the Mystery
Review: Since before the continents assumed their present shape, countless ages before intelligent proto-hominids walked erect and began using sticks to scratch signs in the mud, immeasurable aeons before alphabets and settled agriculture were new-fangled, Ong's Hat - a now deserted (?) village in southernmost New Jersey - was fated to become the most important locale in humankind's history, a critical juncture in time and space, and the nexus of a vast, uncountable quanta of probability matrices joining at the confluence of those temporal streams called past, present and future.

Since the event referred to as the "Opening of the Gate" occurred at Ong's Hat some thirty-three years ago on a spring equinox, much of the paltry amount of writing on that cosmic shifting of gears has been of an intendedly "disinformational" character for reasons apparent to all serious students of alternative history in general and OH in particular. The time has arrived when the truth can be told, neat and naked, complete and uncensored. And that story is, to put it mildly, a circuitous one.

In brief, a black Sufi cult founded in Newark, New Jersey in the 1920s by a circus magician has (with the help of a small group of Columbia University students, jazz musicians, beatniks, homosexuals and LSD experimenters) evolved by the late 1960's into a techno-tantric Moorish Orthodox commune and physics research institute centered in Ong's Hat, New Jersey, whose members managed to escape from this addled dirt-ball into a parallel universe through the intermediary of the "Egg" - a mechanism that enabled trans-dimensional travel into other worlds in other dimensions.

Add to the story a benevolent race of red-necked humanoids descended from Javanese lemurs on a parallel Earth, chaos magick, alternative sexualities, applied quantum physics, conspiracies galore, and heretical Eastern Orthodox bishops and you have an epistemological smorgasbord fit for a king.

This is a delightful piece of writing that leaves its reader hungry for more (and we are assured there will be more), that deserves to be read and read again, believed or disbelieved, shared with someone you love, and maybe even memorized!

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Summary: It's nice to have a dead-tree edition, but it's nothing new.
Review: Some of the editorial text of this book is new, but most of the content you'll be able to find all across the Net (in the form of the original Incunabula papers) for free. The text of those documents makes up most of this particular book. There's nothing that says that you can't print those out if you've a mind to, if only to save some money. Unless you're a hardcore researcher of the Ong's Hat mystery or a collector of unusual books, you're probably better off printing them out to make your own edition. You won't be missing too much.

Rating:
Summary: It's nice to have a dead-tree edition, but it's nothing new.
Review: Some of the editorial text of this book is new, but most of the content you'll be able to find all across the Net (in the form of the original Incunabula papers) for free. The text of those documents makes up most of this particular book. There's nothing that says that you can't print those out if you've a mind to, if only to save some money. Unless you're a hardcore researcher of the Ong's Hat mystery or a collector of unusual books, you're probably better off printing them out to make your own edition. You won't be missing too much.

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Summary: And off we go on a rollercoaster ride.
Review: The delightful legend of the Ong's Hat travel cult has been posted in the form of the Incunabula Papers since the earliest days of BBS and Internet communications. The mythos is an historical and cultural curiosity for that reason alone.

Has the great world-mind of the telecommunication infrastructure begun to breed its own myths? The elusiveness of the Incunabula's original proponents, Emory Cranston (a pseudonym) and Joseph Matheny (his real name), has spawned wild speculation that the Ong's Hat legend is nothing but a media hoax. However there is a dark side to this story that has never been fully told, which may help explain their circumspection.

What began as an heretical Islamic sect founded in the early 1900s by Black circus magician, Noble Drew Ali, evolved over the century into a techno-tantric commune whose members managed to escape this befouled world into a pristine, Edenic parallel universe, a New Jersey Pine Barrens devoid of inhabitants. This latter rag-tag group built the "Egg" - a glistening Faberge-like device that enabled trans-dimensional travel into unpopulated mirror worlds (per the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model). A special quantum-tantric feature allowed passage for two occupants while they made love, irrespective of their race, age or gender.

But wait, there's more! Add to this mix a benevolent race of humanoids descended from Javanese lemurs on a parallel Earth, capable of dimensional shift without machinery, who have been world tripping for thousands of years. You've got your chaos; sex magick; applied quantum physics; shadow conspiracy; crypto-palaeontology and enlightenment hopes all wrapped up in one neat package. What the [heck] more do you want