The Sirens of Titan

Gnostic-ish Themes in Kurt Vonnegut's Greatest Novel

Gnostic-ish Themes in Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan

Have you ever had an unsettling dream that lingered long after you awoke? The kind of dream where something deep in your psyche whispered Ponder this! to your conscious mind? The kind of dream whose meaning became clear only much later, after you’d grown up and learned a bit more about yourself and about Life?

The best stories are also like that. Using the language of dreams, they convey unutterable insights — or rather, they inspire you to cultivate those insights within your soul and thereby grow wiser and better as a person.

I recently had an experience like that when I reread (after many years) Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan. In this post, I will discuss the importance of reading books that give you the kind of experience described above, provide a brief synopsis of this particular story (in case you haven’t read it recently, or ever), and examine some of the more important issues raised in this book. These issues are directly relevant to the biggest conflicts in our world today, and they also cut to the heart of the most fundamental questions about our existence.

Consuming More “Nutritionally-Dense” Content

Sometimes, to save what’s left of my sanity, I have to turn my eyes away from the slow-motion civilizational train wreck happening before our eyes. Honestly, I should probably do this more often. There’s not much I can do about it, and ineffectual worrying does nothing but make me depressed or anxious (or both).

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve managed to detach somewhat from the daily news cycle. As a result, I’ve felt less crazy, and I probably haven’t driven others quite as crazy as I usually do, either.

Most people ignore the political and cultural madness by zoning out on mindless trivia, like celebrity gossip and professional sports (and OMG, you can get two for the price of one now with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce!!!). I don’t really think this is an improvement. It’s a little like quitting smoking, but constantly binge eating junk food instead and gaining a ton of weight. Maybe “normal” people think you’re more pleasant to be around when you’re a giant-bag-of-Doritos-a-day binge-eater, rather than a pack-a-day smoker (at least you don’t smell like cigarette smoke, and at least you don’t make the fatties around you feel as bad about their own obesity), but you’re just as unhealthy (probably even more so) and all you’ve succeeded in doing is exchanging a vice that can sometimes be fun (tobacco) with one that is always boring (junk food). So it goes with those who avoid the perils of culture-war debates by feasting their minds on factory-food for the soul instead.

It’s much better to ignore the daily drama of politics by elevating your perspective to the more eternal and transcendent themes. Instead of doom-scrolling Twitter, read a good novel. Rather than listening to some angry podcaster ranting about the latest political outrage (I certainly don’t know anyone who fits that description now, do you? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ — by the way, have you checked out the podcast episodes of this excellent substack?) while you’re driving to work, listen to an inspiring audiobook instead.

Of course, I usually don’t follow my own advice here (and given the content of some of the posts I’ve written, I don’t often encourage others to follow my own advice either), but when I do follow some variation of Tim Ferriss’s “low-information diet,” I never get to the end of the week and wish I had spent more time debating idiotic Conformmunists online (although it can be a great public service when someone does deftly demolish prominent Conformmunists online, for all the world to see, as Steve Sailer expertly did to Will Stancil recently, as this helps shift the Overton Window towards Reality, and away from psychosis, on important issues).

A Gnostic-ish Novel

On a recent break from following the daily news cycle, I reread one of my all-time favorite novels, and one which I consider to be Kurt Vonnegut’s absolute best: The Sirens of Titan. There is much to commend it. The story is truly cosmic in scope, not merely because of the “space-travel” element, but also because it manages to capture the essence of so many of Life’s biggest mysteries.

Man Looking up at the Stars and Pondering Life’s Biggest Mysteries

By now, many of you long-time readers are no doubt well aware of my Gnostic-ish tendencies — I say “Gnostic-ish” because I am drawn to the Gnostics primarily for the questions they raised, and for the perspectives from which they raised those questions, rather than for the specific conclusions they reached. I know this would seem to be a contradiction in terms, since gnosis means “knowledge,” but the type of “knowledge” of theirs I most fully embrace is their practical know-how of finding paradoxes and anomalies in conventional narratives and focusing their attention there by asking great questions and exploring intriguing possibilities.

A Brief Caveat about Cynicism

A caveat is in order: I do not admire cynicism (neither the literal philosophical school of Cynicism nor the mindset of the postmodern cynic who speaks only in clever ironies, who is always commenting on ideas without ever expressing a genuine idea himself). I wholeheartedly agree with G.K. Chesterton when he said that modern philosophers just want you to hate your own life as much as they hate theirs.

I believe that we should always be attempting to reach better, truer, and more complete explanations of how best to live, even if such an ideal is forever unattainable for us (at least in this realm), and that we should sincerely endeavor to put such ideas into practice, as best we can, in our own lives. (This is, of course, in stark contrast to the Marxcissist, who tries to put her own “luxury beliefs” into practice in everyone else’s lives, imperiously, while shielding her own life, as best she can, from all the consequences of her own beliefs.)

The problem with the cynic is not that he denies that we can know “The Good” and “The True,” but rather that he denies that there is anything Good or True to be known.

No, what I endorse is not cynicism, but rather an earnest desire to know The Good and The True, coupled with the intellectual and spiritual humility to admit that our knowledge is, at best, imperfect and incomplete.

Now, back to what I was going to say about The Sirens of Titan . . .

Using stories, symbols, and metaphors to explore metaphysical issues

The best explorations of Life’s thorniest issues take place in the format of storytelling. Straightforward discourses on philosophy, theology, psychology, etc., lack the same depth of insight or impact, no matter how rigorously they are argued, and no matter how charismatically they are communicated. The best philosophers, theologians, psychologists, etc. all know this, so they make copious use of stories from literature and history to make their points.

To the everlasting frustration of the Logical Positivists, human language will never be sufficiently precise to communicate, exactly and concretely, even the material phenomena of our world, let alone abstractions like Truth or Goodness or the Self. In their efforts to make their project succeed, the Logical Positivists sought to cram all of Life into the narrow confines of human language. To make it fit, they had to strip out all of the mystery and magic that makes Life worth living. (And that is a recurring thing with ideologues who insist that Life always adheres to their theories about Life; they always end up declaring war on Life itself, in order to make their theories work.)

To quote G.K. Chesterton again (from Orthodoxy), “The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

Stargazing at Night and Writing Poetry

To attempt to understand Life, then, we need myths and metaphors, and that brings me back to The Sirens of Titan.

Like Reconnecting with an Old Friend

Prior to last week, I had not read The Sirens of Titan since high school. I remember that I enjoyed it as a teenager, but looking back, I can only conclude that this novel was wasted on me, as most of it must have gone right over my head. I was smarter than the average bear, as far as high schoolers go (though this is not saying much, as most high schoolers are supremely stupid); but I had precious little in the way of life experience or emotional maturity then, so I missed many of the deeper issues explored in this story.

It is the mark of a great book that it stays with you, and that at some point it starts nagging you to read it again, and that when you do read it again, you are amazed to find that the book is much different than you remembered, but in a very good way, because it is so much more than you remembered; it’s almost as if the book grew older and wiser in tandem with you.

Rereading a great book is like meeting a dear old friend after many years apart and, within minutes of your initial greetings, being fully engrossed in a conversation that has almost nothing whatsoever to do with “the old days.” Obviously, the book had all that to offer (and no doubt much more) the first time you read it, but you were incapable of receiving its riches. That’s how I felt rereading The Sirens of Titan.

I’ll provide a brief overview of the plot and main characters, in case you have never read it, or in case you haven’t read it recently. I would offer a “spoiler alert,” but honestly, this novel doesn’t rely much on suspense to maintain your interest. In fact, the novel makes frequent and brutally effective use of dramatic irony: the reader often knows what will happen, and even what has happened (I will explain this later), to the characters well before they know.

The genre of The Sirens of Titan is something like “science-fiction fairy tale.” It takes place in a surreal realm that is recognizably our world, while also being unmistakably distinct from it. It’s set in a timeless future, relevant to every era yet somehow belonging to none of them. The story contains some pretty fantastic elements, but events unfold in such an orderly way, that in the context of the story, nothing about it seems implausible. Remember, though, that my synopsis will present these fantastic elements out of context, and that they do not seem nearly as fantastic when you read about them in the book.

Also, if the initial setup of this synopsis seems clunky, kindly stay with it for a while. Like a great joke with an elaborate premise, I believe the “payoff” is big enough to make the setup worthwhile — once you get there. (So grab a strong cup of coffee if you need to.😊☕👍) If it gets to be too much, you can skip to the section below the synopsis labeled “Gnostic-ish Themes in The Sirens of Titan.” Or you can read The Sirens of Titan and then revisit this essay! (Links to purchase the book at various retailers are provided at the end of this post.)

A Synopsis of The Sirens of Titan

The story begins with a “materialization” at the estate of Winston Niles Rumford. Winston and his dog, Kazak, materialize there regularly every 59 days. Apparently, Rumford was an interplanetary adventurer who flew his spaceship into a phenomenon known as a “chrono-synclastic-infundibulum” that caused him and his dog to exist thereafter “as wave phenomena — apparently pulsing in a distorted spiral with its origin in the sun and it's terminal in Betelgeuse,” and each time the Earth intersects some part of this spiral, man and dog “materialize” — or at least become visible — there for a few minutes.

Basically, Winston Niles Rumford has become something like a “hyper-dimensional being.” He can perceive things about others that they cannot perceive about him, and he can act in ways that appear to be magic to regular people.

Big crowds gather outside the large walls of Rumford’s estate in the hopes of being able to catch a glimpse of Rumford or his dog Kazak when they materialize, but very few people are allowed inside to watch. Malachi Constant, a Hollywood billionaire and reprobate playboy, who is quite possibly the luckiest man in the world, has been invited to attend.

After materializing, Winston Niles Rumford makes some farfetched-sounding predictions to Malachi Constant. (As a result of his condition, Rumford is able to see past, present, and future simultaneously.) Rumford says that Constant will soon go to Mars, where Constant and Rumford’s wife, Beatrice, will be “bred like farm animals.” Rumford then tells Constant that, after he leaves Mars, he will go to Mercury, then return to Earth, and finally go to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, where he will live out the rest of his days.

Malachi Constant doesn’t like the sound of any of this, so he takes various steps to stop it from happening. However, like the tragic King Oedipus, his efforts to alter his fate serve only to bring his prophesied destiny to pass. After both Constant and Beatrice Rumford suffer cataclysmic reversals of fortune, they each end up making separate deals with Martian secret agents to participate in a highly classified government project. (No participants ever ask their recruiter which government it is that is backing this project — it turns out to be the government of Mars.)

Martian military base at night

The next part of the story takes place on Mars, where we meet a soldier in the Martian army named “Unk.” Unk has just been discharged from the hospital, after an intense brain surgery to treat his “mental illness.” Almost all of the Martian soldiers have undergone surgeries of this kind, which involve a combination of (1) erasing most of the soldier’s memories and (2) installing a radio receiver and mind-control hardware under the soldier’s skull. Immediately after being released from the hospital, Unk is ordered to execute a fellow soldier. As Unk approaches, the condemned man, in a hushed whisper, tells Unk the location of a letter that he wants Unk to read. Unk then strangles him to death.

Later, Unk finds the letter and reads it. The letter consists of things the writer has been able to figure out about the inexplicable why’s and wherefore’s of life on Mars, about the horrific reality underlying deceptive appearances. (For example, Unk begins to suspect that most of the soldiers are not really human, because they behave so robotically, but he notices something different about certain individuals which leads him to suspect that they are something more than they profess to be.) The letter tells Unk about his best friend, Stony Stevenson, and about his own family, consisting of his mate, Bee, and their son, Chrono, who are both on Mars. When Unk reaches the end of the letter and sees his own signature, he realizes that this letter has served him and his friend as a repository of their “forbidden” knowledge.

He begins to understand that he and his friend, Stony Stevenson, have suffered terribly for years, but that each time they have begun to piece things together and figure out the bigger picture, they have been seized by the authorities and sent to the hospital for another round of memory wipes. Apparently, this process has happened multiple times already. They have been like Sisyphus and his stone, struggling heroically to attain self awareness and understanding, only to have their progress undone, and thereafter have to start all the way over at the beginning, in complete ignorance.

Fortunately, they have been able to preserve some of their knowledge by writing it down in letters like the one Unk is presently reading. They have managed to hide these letters and use them to re-learn forgotten truths after each memory wipe.

Having read the letter and realized, once again, that his entire existence on Mars is a lie and that the Martian army is going to be sent on a suicide mission to advance the secret agenda of a shadowy figure (whom the reader immediately recognizes as Winston Niles Rumford, the hyper-dimensional being who “materializes” at the beginning of the book), Unk vows to escape and to take his mate, Bee, his son Chrono, and his best friend, Stony Stevenson, with him. He is unable to find his friend. He does find Bee and Chrono, but he is caught by military police before he can escape.

Martian military base

When Unk regains consciousness, he is about to be placed on a spaceship with one of his squad mates, Boaz. (Boaz is one of the “real commanders” of the Martian army; he has a control box that he can use to manipulate the hardware installed within other soldiers’ skulls.) Martian troops have already begun departing for their suicide mission of attacking the earth with absurdly inadequate weapons. Unk resigns himself to this fate. Before he boards the ship, he meets Winston Niles Rumford, who provide Unk with some clues about who is is and how he came to be as he is.

Long before this point in the story, the reader is well aware that Unk is actually Malachi Constant (former billionaire playboy), suffering from acute amnesia after a series of memory wipes. His mate Bea is, of course, Beatrice Rumford, also suffering from acute amnesia after several memory wipes of her own. As it turns out, most of the Martian soldiers require only one memory wipe, but in the case of Constant and Beatrice Rumford, they have been forced to have their memories erased repeatedly because they both habitually ask questions and try to figure out who they really are. Before Constant’s spaceship departs, Winston Niles Rumford shares an interesting detail with him: owing to the existential angst that both Constant and Bea suffered while on Mars, Constant attempted to produce a written philosophy, and Beatrice began writing poetry. Both of these activities were discovered and resulted in them both having their memories wiped yet again. Winston Niles Rumford explains to Constant that no other Martian attempted to do either of these things.

Following his conversation with Winston Niles Rumford, Malachi Constant, who still knows himself only as “Unk,” boards a ship with Boaz (again, one of the “real” commanders of the Martian army). They believe that they are going with the rest of the fleet to attack Earth; however, their ship has instead been programmed to take them to Mercury. Along the way, Constant destroys the control box that Boaz has used to manipulate the hardware under Constant’s skull. Boaz decides not to fight Constant or try to control him anymore, after Boaz realizes that he probably will need a buddy to have his back and for camaraderie, that having a friend is more important than being able to control someone like a lab rat — especially since it dawns on Boaz that he has essentially also been a lab rat in the same experiment as Unk. Their ship eventually takes them deep inside a maze-like cave system under Mercury’s surface, where they are marooned for three years.

During this time, the Martian army conducts its absurdly suicidal attack on the planet Earth. This has the intended effect of uniting all humanity, and the various nations deploy their entire stock of nuclear weapons to repel the invasion. Eventually, the last wave of Martian troops lands on Earth and are mostly butchered within minutes of their arrival. However, the Earthling’s collective feeling of triumph soon turns to one of collective shame and pity when they discover that this final round of invaders whom they have massacred are all unarmed women and children.

A Psychopathic Televangelist Preaching about His Messianic Vision for a Brave New World …

Winston Niles Rumford takes advantage of this moment of worldwide confusion and remorse to foist a contrived religion on the world: “The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent,” which is meant to unite all of Mankind under Rumford’s utopian — or rather, dystopian — vision. Rumford convinces the majority of the world’s people that he is God’s one true lawgiver by making a series of prophecies that are thereafter fulfilled. Rumford teaches that God does not care about human affairs, so humans have to create the heavenly kingdom themselves. Under the tenets of Rumford’s creed, the only moral evil is failing to rectify disparities in outcome between individuals or groups, because all such disparities are caused solely by Luck.

To remedy Life’s unfairness, the new religious order employs something like a “Handicapper General” (who is not thusly named in the Sirens of Titan, but whose handiwork is easily recognizable to anyone who has read Vonnegut’s famous short story Harrison Bergeron): people are expected to compensate for the blessings of Fortune by incurring artificial handicaps. These handicaps are the only things that people are permitted to take pride in. The net effect of this ideology is that everyone has been cut down to the same level of mediocrity, and everyone is proud of how handicapped they are.

This religion’s equivalent of Satan is the dreadful person remembered as Malachi Constant (the billionaire playboy who became the unfortunate Unk) — who is burned by believers in effigy during religious rituals (kind of like a postmodern Guy Fawkes) — Constant’s terrible sin was that he took selfish advantage of all his good luck, without voluntarily handicapping himself. According to this creed, Malachi Constant was punished for his pride by being cast out of the Earth and sent to a realm of suffering.

Meanwhile, on Mercury, Malachi Constant — who still knows himself only as “Unk” — and Boaz grapple with the problems of isolation and exile, each in his own way. Their ship is well-provisioned, so they do not really “need” anything. However, they each experience some form of existential anxiety, which they are forced to confront head-on because they quickly run out of distractions to anesthetize this angst.

Boaz settles into a life of Zen-like simplicity. He spends his days cultivating and communing with the primitive life forms in Mercury’s caves, with no selfish motive other than the happiness he feels when he sees these creatures’ flourishing.

Constant explores restlessly, and his mind spins wild theories about the nature of their surroundings and the forces that appear to be sending them messages. Some of the primitive life forms that Boaz is raising begin to arrange themselves into words and phrases, such as “It’s an intelligence test,” and these messages provide a series of hints as to how Constant can escape the planet. Eventually, these messages culminate in specific instructions for Constant to follow.

Constant excitedly tells Boaz the news, that he now knows how to fix their spaceship and leave for Earth; however, Boaz is now blissfully content and has no desire to go back to Earth, so he elects to stay behind. They divide their provisions, and Constant sets off in the spaceship for Earth.

In his “revelations” that have been recorded as scripture for his new religion, Winston Niles Rumford has prophesied the time, place, and manner of Constant’s (who still knows himself only as “Unk”) arrival on Earth. Consequently, when Constant lands in Massachusetts, he is instantly greeted as a celebrity and carried in a grand procession to the Rumford estate, in time for one of Winston Niles Rumford’s materializations. The hysterical mob does not yet know that “Unk” is really their religion’s chief devil, Malachi Constant.

As it turns out, Constant’s mate Bee and their son Chrono are selling concessions outside the materialization. Since the Martian war, Rumford’s materializations have turned into huge media spectacles, and Rumford has become something of a televangelist for his new religion.

On this occasion, Rumford cross-examines the “space wanderer” known as “Unk” adversarially and reveals that he is actually that horrible sinner-above-all-other-sinners known as Malachi Constant. Rumford then fills in the remaining blanks in Constant’s knowledge about who he is and how he came to be what he now is. Because of his amnesia from all the memory wipes he endured, Constant remembers almost none of this, though he has experienced just enough déjà vu that he feels intuitively that these dreadful revelations are true.

By this point, Constant is so spiritually broken that he meekly accepts the condemnation Rumford pronounces upon him: Constant is ordered to board a waiting rocket ship (apparently one that was built by a company Constant owned in his previous life as a playboy billionaire) and to thereafter be sent into exile on Titan, along with Bea and Chrono. Rumford asks Constant if he thinks there is anything good he has ever done in his life that should mitigate this sentence. The only thought that comes to Constant’s mind is that he had a best friend on Mars named Stony Stevenson. Rumford then informs Constant that Stevenson is the very man he strangled to death — though Rumford leaves out the fact that Constant didn’t recognize Stevenson because he had just had his memory wiped, that Constant had been naively following a direct order from his commander, and that the mind-control hardware installed in Constant’s skull had made it impossible for him to disobey that order — nor did Rumford acknowledge that all of these circumstances had been precisely orchestrated by Rumford himself, in order to get Constant to be the one to kill his own friend.

As a result of these revelations, the fickle crowd has turned against Constant. As he looks out from the door of the spaceship and surveys the surrounding landscape prior to departure, he is suddenly overcome by a sense that even though the Earth is a friendless place, it nonetheless has an undeniable beauty to it.

Marionettes Having Their Strings Pulled by a Psychopathic Puppetmaster

Next, Rumford tells the audience about Bea’s true identity — i.e., that she is Rumford’s own wife, Beatrice — and he catalogues her various “sins” for them and for her to hear. He then orders her and her son, Chrono, to board the spaceship with Constant. She makes a brief, defiant, unrepentant speech in response to Rumford, and then she and Chrono join Constant on the rocket ship, which takes off for Titan.

The family eventually lands on Titan, where Winston Niles Rumford has been living with Kazak, in a palatial mansion built by forced Martian labor (prior to the Martian army’s suicidal attack on Earth). Titan has some indigenous wildlife, but prior to the arrival of Constant and his family, the only intelligent creatures there were Winston Niles Rumford and an alien from the planet Tralfamadore (an alien race that makes appearances in other Vonnegut novels, most notably Slaughterhouse Five).

The Tralfamadorian, named Salo, is a robot who had been carrying a secret message (Salo was programmed not to open the sealed message until he arrives at his destination, so he has no idea what it is). Unfortunately, his spaceship broke down and left him stranded on Titan. Using their advanced technological wizardry, the Tralfamadorians have been manipulating life on Earth in order to produce a civilization capable of creating and delivering a replacement part to Salo, so he can continue his journey.

As it also turns out, Winston Niles Rumford has himself been heavily manipulated by the Tralfamadorians in order to get the replacement part to Salo by way of Malachi Constant’s son, Chrono, who carries a “good luck piece” he found in a factory on Mars; this good luck piece, is the replacement part.

Winston Niles Rumford is deeply perturbed by the knowledge that he has been manipulated and used by distant aliens to achieve their own selfish aims. This is obviously ironic, given how selfishly Rumford manipulated and used his fellow humans, especially Malachi Constant and his wife Beatrice, in order to advance his own messianic agenda.

Shortly after the arrival of Malachi Constant and his family, Winston Niles Rumford and his dog Kazak have their wave spiral blasted out of the solar system by a massive explosion on the Sun, which means that they will no longer be appearing on either Earth or Titan. Before this happens (and knowing that it is about to take place), Rumford reveals to Salo that he knows all about how the Tralfamadorians were using him for their own ends. Salo desperately tries to assure Rumford that their friendship is genuine and that he has never manipulated Rumford himself, but that he has instead sought only to help Rumford achieve his own agenda. (The cause-and-effect relationship here is murky, since Rumford’s agenda produces the incidental effect of delivering Salo’s replacement part to him.) Rumford demands Salo prove that they are really friends by opening the sealed message and showing it to Rumford before he is blasted out of the solar system. Being a machine and having been programmed with strict orders not to open the message prior to reaching his final destination, Salo finds this incredibly difficult, but he ultimately decides to override his own programming and do it. He opens the sealed message and finds that it consists of a single symbol, which translated into English simply means “Greetings.” Crushed by the discovery that the sole purpose of his impossibly long odyssey is to deliver such a pointless message, Salo eventually commits suicide by disassembling himself.

Spaceship Flying over One of Saturn’s Moons

Meanwhile, Winston Niles Rumford and Kazak are blasted out into space by the solar storm, leaving Malachi Constant and his family as the only intelligent life on Titan (since Salo the robot has been disassembled). They eventually adapt to their lonely existence there. Many years pass. Bea eventually dies of old age, and Chrono goes feral, living amongst a flock of indigenous birds. All alone, Constant begins tinkering with Salo’s mechanical body parts and eventually manages to put the robot back together in working order. Upon being turned back on, Salo learns of the replacement part for his spaceship that Constant’s family brought with them. Salo decides that since he has come this far, he might as well complete the mission and deliver the message to the distant star system. He offers to give Constant a ride back to Earth. Constant knows that he will die soon and that Chrono doesn’t care to have anything more to do with him. Realizing that he has nothing left on Titan, Constant accepts Salo’s offer.

Salo deposits Constant at a bus stop in Indiana in the wee hours of the morning in the middle of a snow storm, per Constant’s own wishes. Even though he is all alone, he is happy and feels like he is back home. As Constant freezes to death, he has a hallucination in which his old best friend, Stony Stevenson, comes to meet him. In Constant’s vision, after he and his old friend exchange excited greetings, Stony announces that he’s come to take Constant to a blessed place, where Bea is already waiting for him, and the two of them board a dazzling spaceship together. Then Constant dies.

Because this was only a synopsis of the story, it is necessarily incomplete. Vonnegut demonstrated a masterful attention to detail in creating the book and its characters, and although these details are important and relevant to the story’s grand themes, I was unable to include them all. I can only say, you should read this book and discover its hidden insights for yourself. No analysis of this novel can take the place of reading it.

Now, let us discuss some of the Gnostic-ish themes in The Sirens of Titan . . .

Gnostic-ish Themes in The Sirens of Titan

From the foregoing synopsis (especially if you have previously read The Sirens of Titan and this summary served merely to refresh your memory of it), you can probably already see some of the Gnostic-ish elements to the story.

The themes I discuss below will by no means be exhaustive. In the space of a single blog post, I am able only to touch on the most obvious points. Again, I cannot urge you strongly enough to read the book for yourself. Here are a few of the more salient themes, in no particular order:

The Memory Wipe

Malachi Constant has his memory surgically erased on Mars and is thereafter given a new identity as “Unk,” but he adapts poorly to this new identity. Troubling and inconvenient questions arise irrepressibly in his mind. He knows he is not supposed to think too deeply or too often about certain forbidden topics, but he cannot help himself, even though he knows it will get him into trouble, even though he knows pursuing those questions will cause him terrible pain. Deep down, he knows that something isn’t right. Where does that knowledge come from? And why can’t he ignore it like everyone else seems to?

Isn’t that just the way you often feel? Like there’s some knowledge that keeps bubbling up from somewhere deep inside your being, some part of you that knows that our world is not what it seems. Even if you have no idea how you know, you nevertheless know that there’s another dimension to your own existence, and you feel like maybe you can bring that knowledge into your conscious awareness, if only you can focus your attention hard enough and in the right place.

There’s a reason most of the world’s indigenous religions have some sort of belief in reincarnation. The Abrahamic religions notably do not, despite passages in the Bible that suggest a belief in reincarnation, such as when Jesus says that the Old Testament prophet Elijah had returned in the person of John the Baptist (Matthew 17:12-13). Some modern researchers, like Dr. Jim Tucker (author of Life Before Life), have compiled some uncanny evidence that some children actually have remembered verifiable details from other lives. When you think about it, it is rather odd that reincarnation should arise and become such a widespread belief, if (as our postmodern materialist scientists and “new atheists” tell us) there was absolutely nothing to it.

Leaving aside the issue of reincarnation, here’s a more prosaic example of “memory wipes:” waking up from a dream. Isn’t it odd that our brains, especially our visual cortex, should be so active while we sleep? We all have sometimes experienced the feeling of being dragged towards sleep against our will (especially as children), i.e., earnestly desiring to stay awake but finding it increasingly impossible to keep our eyes open. Now, that would make sense if our brain had become exhausted and needed to rest, like a tired muscle. But we spend much of our sleep dreaming, and while we’re dreaming, our brains are not resting. Quite the opposite! Doesn’t that strike you as odd? What do our minds do while we’re asleep, and why is it so difficult to remember any of it after we wake up?

Then there are the medical cases of amnesia, where patients lose memories of who they are and what they’ve done, or in the case of anterograde amnesia (a condition explored in the Christpher Nolan movie Memento), patients lose the ability to form new memories. These bizarre cases raise unsettling questions about the link between memory and identity, especially when you ponder what it would be like to be the amnesia patient, to have entire sections of your life about which you remember nothing. (Of course, all of us do have an entire section of our lives about which we remember nothing: early childhood! Even though our earliest years contain some of our most formative experiences, we remember almost none of it.)

Below is a video where Howdie Mickoski discusses the use of “memory wipes” in the television series Westworld, which has a similar dynamic to the use of memory wipes in The Sirens of Titan. (Mickoski develops these ideas further in his excellent book Exit the Cave: Ending the Reincarnation Trap.)

“Memory wipes” also come up in movies like The Matrix, Dark City, and Angelheart. In each of these films, the main character is driven nearly insane as he recovers true memories that completely change his sense of self, or as he learns that memories that he thought were true never actually happened. It is deeply unsettling to learn that your entire identity is build upon lies, and that sinking feeling is made worse by the further realization that you actually used to know the truth, but your memory of that truth was erased.

Alone among Automata

While he is on Mars, trying to piece together the puzzle of his true identity, Malachi Constant (believing himself to be “Unk”) sometimes wonders if he and his squad mate Boaz are the only real people. The other soldiers’ eyes seem lifeless, and they move mechanically, like robots or marionettes. He wonders why it is that he is the only one who seems to be bothered by the absurdity and artificiality of their lifestyle.

If you’ve been online at all these past few years, you are well acquainted with the “NPC” (non-playable character) meme, which likens a large number of our fellow citizens to the computer-generated background characters in video games.

Of course, as the writer of Ecclesiastes observed, “there is nothing new under the Sun.” The ancient Gnostics knew all about NPCs: they called them hylics.

Laura Knight-Jadczyk, author of The Secret History of the World (and How to Get Out Alive), calls them “organic portals.”

Whatever name you use for them, you’ve probably wondered this: why do so many people act like automata? Apparently, around 50% to 70% of people do not experience an inner monologue. Some small percentage of people lack even the ability to visualize something without actually seeing it. If you’ve ever looked up in awe at the starlit sky, you probably cannot imagine a life devoid of wonder and curiosity, yet many people never show the slightest appreciation for any of the magic or mystery in our world. Even a cat or an orangutan becomes anxious or depressed if it is unable to explore freely, yet millions (if not billions) of humans can live like machines without complaint. Something doesn’t add up.

Concentric Circles of Archons Manipulating Each Other and Mankind

The question of “Free Will” is a recurring theme in The Sirens of Titan. Winston Niles Rumford, the counterfeit messiah, predicts the future, so there’s the question of whether the characters are free to contravene those predictions. (Similar objections are raised to the existence of an omniscient God; however, if God is “outside” or “beyond” Time — if God is, to borrow an analogy from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, like the piece of paper on which a timeline is drawn — then there’s no reason to restrict God’s knowledge or action to the sequential points on our own timeline.)

But leaving aside Rumford’s seemingly inerrant predictions about future events, Rumford directly manipulates his Martian personnel, even going so far as to control them using radio frequencies and hardware installed inside their skulls. He devises and manages a system under which participants have their memories surgically altered, and then are told lies (or at least partial truths) to get them to do what Rumford wants.

His treatment of Malachi Constant and Beatrice can only be described, at best, as needlessly cruel; he ruins their lives and causes them immense suffering, merely to promote himself as the fraudulent messiah of Earth’s new religion. Talk about a “God complex!”

But for all Rumford’s cunning and foresight, he is himself being used, possibly against his will, by a race of aliens from a distant planet, in furtherance of their agenda, within which he and his schemes are but a small and insignificant part.

Something about this arrangement resonates deeply with me. Most major religions warn us about dangerous spiritual deceptions. Where did these deceptions originate? And why are people so susceptible to being deceived? Whether the world was originally good and got corrupted by the evil power (Christianity), or whether the world is a simulacra (of God’s reality) created by the evil power (Gnosticism), or whether this universe is a battleground over which the forces of Good and Evil fight for dominance (dualism), Evil seems to have an inordinate amount of influence, and to command the loyalties of many of the world’s most powerful people. This is strange, because Evil is so obviously a parasite, rather than an original thing, and a parasite that ultimately destroys its own host and itself. Why should this Evil have originated in our world in the first place? Do the conventional explanations make sense?

“Conspiracy theories” so often turn out to be true, but then these conspiracies ultimately appear to be components of a much larger conspiracy. The scamdemic. The bankster schemes. The WMD hoax with Iraq. Epstein Island. All of these seem to bear the same fingerprints. Zoom out, and the outlines of multigenerational, worldwide conspiracies going back centuries, if not millennia, become visible. Somehow psychopaths have been able to sacrifice their own immediate self-interests in order to coordinate their efforts across vast distances to pursue a common aim which may not even materialize in their own lifetimes (think, for example, about the communists’ “long march through the institutions”). Who is ultimately pulling the strings?

Religion as a Social Control Mechanism

This is really a continuation from the previous section about large-scale conspiracies. Dig deeply enough, and it begins to look like these conspiracies encompass entire religious institutions, if not the religions themselves.

In The Sirens of Titan, Winston Niles Rumford takes advantage of the “hyperdimensional” nature of his existence in order to manipulate millions (if not billions) of people into adopting an artificial religion. Like a good Utilitarian, Rumford ostensibly believes that the ends justify the means. What are his ends? Unifying the world’s population under what could be described as a “rules-based international order.” Establishing peace and liberal values. Safeguarding democracy, no doubt. All very noble sounding, just like the purported motives of our oligarch-owned politicians today. But is that really what motivates Rumford to do all those terrible things to other people? Is he just cracking a few eggs in order to create a heavenly omelet? Or is all his platitudinous rhetoric just a smokescreen for more debased desires? At the end of the day, isn’t he trying to be god, in order to feed his massive ego? Isn’t it all, ultimately, just about power over others?

Marxism functions just like a religion. And like Rumford’s “Church of God the Utterly Indifferent,” Marxism seeks to make people religious, not spiritual, because religiously-motivated, spiritually-dead people are easy for demagogues to control. However, it is in Man’s nature to be spiritually-minded, so this makes Human Nature an enemy of the new religion. Artificial handicaps are introduced. True greatness is punished. Mediocrity is rewarded. Men are flattened into one homogenous, demoralized, easily controlled mass.

The counter to that religion of death is its opposite: a spiritual life, characterized by the pursuit of Truth, Excellence, health, vitality, kinship, friendship, and real joy.

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. (Philippians 4:8 KJV.)

Summing Up

I’ve really only scratched the surface of this excellent book. As previously mentioned in this post, I think The Sirens of Titan is Kurt Vonnegut’s best novel, even better than his more famous masterpiece, Slaughterhouse Five. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Here are links if you would like to buy a copy of The Sirens of Titan:

• On Amazon (affiliate link that will kick a few cents back my way — whether you buy this book or something else that you were planning to buy anyway),

• At Books-A-Million, and

• At Barnes & Noble.

This post took a lot of time and effort. I thought about putting it behind a paywall, but decided against it because I believe these “Gnostic-ish” questions are important in light of the dark forces furtively manipulating our world today. That said, if you find my writing valuable and are able to do so, please consider supporting it with a paid subscription. (And of course, those of you who are already paid subscribers have my sincerest gratitude for your kindness and encouragement!)

We are nearing the end of the present age and the dawn of a new one, and God only knows what comes next. We are truly in uncharted territory. With predatory powers and principalities lurking on the periphery of our awareness, naïveté is luxury that none of us can afford. By asking good, but difficult, questions, and by resolutely and unflinchingly seeking true answers, we can and will get through this. God — the real God, and those spirits aligned with the real God, will help us to see what we need to see, and to do what we need to do. The real God be with you.