INTERROGATORIES AND OBJECTIONS
to New Scripture and Hypnogogic Prose
Here are some answers to a working list of questions intended to clarify the claims, limits and possible objections to the literary project of New Scripture and its rhetorical engine Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose.
The questions were generated with prompts designed to produce the most pressing and relevant objections or questions that might be put to me in relation to these ideas.
The project was prompted by a fairly dismissive response I received to a YouTube comment: ‘You can’t just sit down and write scripture.’ The commenter also said that you have to have some kind of inspirational source to do it; otherwise it is just writing.
My response was: I agree with both of those points.
The real questions are: what more have I done than ‘just sit down and write" scripture’? And what kind of inspiration does my writing have? Those are very useful questions.
The questions below are fairly comprehensive and definitely challenging, but they are probably not exhaustive. I have included a short list of "unanswered" questions and there could be plenty more put. If there are other questions you would like to ask, or ways in which these questions could be phrased more meaningfully, please do not hesitate to ask them!
The full texts of my major works are available on my website in PDF format and also as full-text searchable versions with permission for AI access.
You can read my works of New Scripture yourself, or ask your AI to analyse the texts. The latter may be the easiest and most comprehensive way to generate worthwhile analysis of my writing and its admittedly ambitious claims.
Now to the interrogatories.
What is New Scripture?
1. When you call these works New Scripture, what precisely are you claiming for them?
Response
I am claiming that they employ the rhetorical techniques of scripture in order to produce the same — and perhaps enhanced — visceral and emotional response that scripture can produce. Those techniques involve a certain kind of rhythmic, repetitive, insistent, incantatory prose — which I call Hypnogogic Prose — matched with the deepest themes: love, death, and love as stronger than death.
I think the word ‘New’ mostly refers to the fact that my work does not engage in the same coercive control that traditional scripture tends to use - threats of eternal damnation in the fire and so on. There is also the fact that its themes and narratives are much more humane and more sane than old scripture.
2. Why call them scripture rather than novels, religious fiction, mythic fiction or prose poems?
Response
I think the better question is why traditional scripture gets to have this special name, ‘Scripture’. The word just means writing, and I tend not to distinguish between novels, mythic fiction and gospel stories in any deep or profound way.
I think writing comes to be called scripture when it causes people to become profoundly and enduringly moved by it, when it uses that particular type of hypnotic language associated with scripture matched with the deepest themes. The more you engage with this project the more pressing the question becomes, as to why scripture claims a special ontological category for itself?
3. Is New Scripture a genre, a literary movement, a personal project, or simply the name for a particular group of your books?
Response
The term began as an attempt to explain why my books look so strange. Initially I was trying to explain them to myself, and then the term became a useful way of explaining my work to other people.
I now see New Scripture as a genuinely urgent literary project, or some kind of pressing literary experiment. To examine whether scripture really is just a collection of rhetorical techniques, or whether there is something genuinely divinely inspired about it.
4. Does New Scripture have to draw upon inherited sacred narratives, or could a wholly original story qualify as New Scripture?
Response
I think we have to be careful with the idea of a wholly original story. When we are talking about genuine literature, I’m not sure there really is such a thing.
But in general, any story could qualify as New Scripture if it had the right qualities. The Lord of the Rings absolutely qualifies as such a work, even though Tolkien himself would almost certainly have resisted the idea.
That work contains elevated language, the deepest themes of love and death, and an ethic of service and heroism that places it front and centre as New Scripture. There is also the fact that many people respond to it as a profound source of inspiration and consolation.
5. Could another writer produce New Scripture while holding religious or philosophical views very different from your own?
Response
That is an excellent question. My initial answer would be: I don't know.
Looking to the past I might refer to Lovecraft or Tolkien or even the work of Nick Land and the CCRU. All of these produced strange and persuasive incantatory work while coming from very different philosophical and spiritual persuasions.
If we are looking purely at the rhetorical aspect of New Scripture, then marrying a certain kind of hypnotic language to these deep themes would seem to be available to anyone no matter what their spiritual outlook is. Just how impactful the resulting work would be might vary significantly.
The claims made for New Scripture
6. Do you claim to have written better books than the Bible?
Response
This might sound a little mealy-mouthed, but I do not find ‘better’ a very useful descriptor in this endeavour.
What I do say is that I have access to an astonishing array of literary technology that the authors of the Gospels (for example) did not have. A packet of cheap biros and a few reams of copy paper already put me well ahead of them, and I also have access to the astonishing power of the word processor.
Perhaps more importantly I have access to the broadest imaginable wealth of literary technology. I have every writer in the English tradition and translations of pretty much anybody else I want to read. I have Shakespeare. I have the King James Bible.
I sometimes say that if a reasonably talented modern author cannot write something at least the equal of the Gospels, they should give up writing immediately.
7. Do you claim that your books supersede the Bible or the Gospels?
Response
Not at all. The Bible and the Gospels (obviously) remain exactly as they were before my work was created.
What I do say is that people's regard for these foundational narratives have undergone a significant collapse in the West, and that our societies are worse off for it. My project is essentially restorative: to rebuild a repository of foundational stories to replace those original stories which have been lost as common cultural possessions. They are (mostly) gone and they are never coming back.
8. Could a devout Christian read New Scripture sympathetically without abandoning Christianity?
Response
I might sound like Jordan Peterson when I say: it depends what you mean by ‘devout’ and ‘sympathetically’.
If a person is a devout Christian in the sense that John Shelby Spong was a Christian, I do not think there is a single part of my books that would pose them serious difficulty.
On the other hand, even a strongly dogmatic or orthodox Christian could still have significant sympathy for parts of New Scripture. They might (for example) view Lightbringer as a kind of Christian allegory, or as a secular Imitation of Christ.
New Scripture and inherited religion
9. If New Scripture depends upon biblical stories, images and cadences, is it dependent upon the tradition it seeks to challenge?
Response
Absolutely. All writing occurs within the profound dynamics of literary tradition, even when writers do not understand these dynamics.
I owe an enormous debt to scripture, and also to various non-sacred writers whose thought and style have influenced me. The only thing I reject is the idea that scripture — works of profound revelatory writing — is somehow fixed in time and can never be improved upon, extended or answered. I am much more comfortable with ideas of progressive revelation as found in certain traditions such as the Bahai faith.
10. Would a work such as The Majesty of Judas retain its force for a reader who knew nothing of the Gospel story?
Response
What it lost in familiar reference it might gain in strangeness and beauty and terror. I can imagine a person encountering the story with a kind of naïve horror and revulsion at certain aspects of it — the crucifixion, for example — to which the Christian sensibility has become slightly dulled.
There is a problem though that I did not expect. As soon as some readers sense that there might be mythic depths to the story, they become terrified of not understanding them and therefore looking foolish. I had no idea this was such a powerful human motivator because I have never really cared about looking stupid, and I have often done it exceedingly well. For many people the prospect of looking stupid or ignorant seems to be a ghastly prospect.
11. Is rewriting inherited sacred narrative fundamentally different from the way religions and cultures have always remade older stories?
Response
It's not fundamentally different. I just think that the need to do it is more urgent than it has ever been because we have suddenly and catastrophically lost our foundational stories... and our society is suffering very badly from that loss.
12. Why retain religious language such as redemption, revelation, sacrifice and covenant if you reject many of the doctrines historically attached to those words?
Response
Because ideas of redemption, revelation, sacrifice and even covenant are profoundly human ideas that occur across a huge range of human cultures and writings. Religions such as Christianity have no special claim to these deep human experiences.
I myself have experienced profound redemption and revelation. I have been called upon to make many sacrifices, and I have entered into covenant numerous times over the course of my life. The idea that these concepts are monopolised by dogmatic religion cheapens the whole of human experience.
Is Hypnogogic Prose actually new?
13. Did you invent Hypnogogic Prose?
Response
Not even remotely. I did invent the term for it, which also provides an analytic lens for the style, but the thing itself is as old as time.
I describe Hyp Prose as the language of extreme and elevated spiritual states. You can see it in the Gospels, in the Psalms, in al-Ghazali and in the Qur’an. My version draws upon all of these styles but my only claim is that I have analysed it, recovered it, democratised it, and used it in the service of stories that are deeply humane and do not carry the baggage of sadism and cruelty that traditional scripture sometimes does.
14. Why is Hypnogogic Prose not simply prose poetry, lyric prose, incantatory prose or biblical pastiche?
Response
It does encompass all of these things, and many more besides. The novel thing about the term is that it provides an over-arching description and analysis of what all these things are: the profound and powerful rhetorical techniques that give scripture its force.
Identifying these connected techniques under the rubric of Hypnogogic Prose allows us to examine scripture as a set of rhetorical techniques rather than simply as the Word coming down from on high. It also sets out the boundaries of the experiment: is there more to scripture than literary technique?
The word hypnogogic and the psychology of the form
15. Do you claim that Hypnogogic Prose actually induces a hypnogogic or altered state in readers?
Response
I do make that claim, but I don't mean anything like hypnosis or some kind of automatism. I mean something much gentler: a gradual quieting of the critical mind and an opening of the receptive heart. The same thing that happens when you listen to a beautiful song or you read some lines of poetry that you love.
This technique is engaged in throughout ‘old’ scripture. The difference is that I am explicit about what I am seeking to do. It is also worth noting that old scripture reinforces these effects through enforcing outlandish truth claims via threats of eternal torture. I have completely abandoned those kinds of threats and coercive techniques.
16. If Hypnogogic Prose induces a hypnogogic or altered state, what evidence would support that claim?
Response
I will answer this by way of a question that I have put a number of times in my work. What is it about scripture that has sent ‘vast armies surging across the seas"? How has a mere book built monasteries and religious orders and instruments of torture on a massive scale?
The traditional answer is: because scripture has been ordained by God. My response is that I believe we are really dealing, at least in significant part, with the effects of a particular set of rhetorical techniques. The wondrous and appalling effects of such books are strong evidence that they induce some kind of hypnotic or altered state.
17. If the psychological claims cannot be demonstrated empirically, would the literary idea of Hypnogogic Prose still stand?
Response
If there were empirical tests that could genuinely determine whether a certain kind of writing has a particular persuasive or emotional power, I would abide by the result.
But I also think this has already been tested to some extent. Both the Qur’an and the Bible have had astonishingly powerful emotional and persuasive effects on billions of people, despite making mutually incompatible religious claims. At least one of these traditions must be wrong about its central spiritual claims. Yep both of these traditions exercise the same profound impact on their believers hearts and minds.
This is strongly indicative that divine revelation cannot be the source of the emotional power of scripture. I take it as potential proof that it is a set of rhetorical techniques rather than spiritual truth that is at play here.
Rhetoric, persuasion and manipulation
18. What is the difference between making a reader emotionally receptive and manipulating them?
Response
This is a good question, but it points straight back toward a more fundamental question: does old scripture manipulate people? As noted above it does so not only by rhetorical techniques but also by asserting completely implausible truth claims and then threatening horrible consequences for disbelief.
New Scripture is absolutely candid about the rhetorical techniques in play. If readers experience a slight softening of their cynicism or scepticism in favour of a strong emotional response, they know what is happening and why. And in the end these effects are no different from the effects that any kind of artwork can have upon people.
You also need to remember that this technology comes in the form of a book. If you dislike the impact or effect at any point of the narrative you can simply snap the book shut and there is no obligation to open it again. I have had some sensitive readers respond in exactly this way, and I expect to see it happen in frequently in the future.
19. Could the rhetorical techniques of Hypnogogic Prose be used just as effectively for propaganda, fanaticism or hatred?
Response
They already have been, over and over again throughout history. The incantatory rhythms of Hitler, the elevated and repetitive rhetoric of Osama bin Laden, and the wild-eyed Protestant preachers who helped drive the Reformation and drag Europe into wars of unimaginable duration and horror.
These techniques have historically been used surreptitiously and sometimes with a fanatical intensity that even the people using them have not fully understood. We now see similar rhetorical techniques used consciously to promote every kind of fanaticism and frenzy and this will continue to be used until the end of time.
The thing I am doing differently is that I am honest about these techniques, and that they are being employed within the confines of narrative fiction rather than to make truth claims about the state of the world or the necessity of certain political action.
Literary quality and the danger of excess
20. Can there be bad Hypnogogic Prose, and what would it look like?
Response
There can certainly be failed attempts at Hypnogogic Prose, and I feel reasonably certain that I have made a few of them across the course of my books.
Because there are reasonably clear criteria for the effect of genuinely well-written Hypnogogic Prose, if a piece of writing fails to achieve that effect then it is probably some lesser kind of writing. The most obvious failure would be a lapse into mere Purple Prose, where so-called elevated language descends into pomposity and melodrama, and repetition turns towards worthless redundancy.
Authority, inspiration and grandiosity
21. Do you claim any special spiritual or intellectual authority for yourself as the author of New Scripture?
Response
Not at all.
The whole project starts from the proposition that there is nothing especially spiritual or divinely inspired about scripture, and that the power of scripture arises mostly from rhetorical techniques applied to very intense emotional material.
This is one reason the experiment of New Scripture is so interesting. If I succeed, the project might expose some of the manipulative techniques used by the pedlars of this or that religious scheme. If I fail, it could lend some additional credence to the claim that scripture really is divinely inspired or comes out of God in some profound way.
This is why I say that religious people should get on board with the project. They know from the tenets of their faith that this project is bound to fail, and provide them with a real boost in these days where scepticism driven by comparative religion has captured many of their former followers.
22. Do you regard yourself as a prophet, religious teacher or recipient of revelation?
Response
No. I despise that sort of claim to authority. Terence McKenna once said that for one human being to teach enlightenment to another human being is like one grain of sand teaching enlightenment to another grain of sand.
The only claim I do make is that when I write I often experience my work as coming from somewhere other than my conscious mind. If people ask me what I mean by that, I tend to fall back upon the old tradition of inspiration by the Muse — something Tolkien described, along with many other writers. Really all I know is that the experience is similar to the ‘not inventing but reporting’ that Tolkien expressed so well.
23. Can a writer experience a work as given or inspired without making any supernatural claim about its source?
Response
Absolutely. As the question implies, the only thing a writer actually has in such a situation is the experience or feeling that some work is being given or inspired.
If you want to speculate or create some explanation about your experience? You could speak of deep mythic archetypes, broken-off parts of the psyche, some general relationship with the Muse, or even the claim that the Archangel Gabriel spoke in your ear and told you what to say. Psychiatrists might have an alternate view.
When these claims are analysed carefully they are always some gloss over the actual experience which remains quite numinous and difficult to explain. But amongst musicians and writers the experience is so common that it scarcely raises an eyebrow.
24. Isn't calling your own books New Scripture, or naming a new literary form, inherently grandiose?
Response
I certainly think it is ambitious, and taken too far it could be evidence of grandiosity.
But the claim I actually make for New Scripture is quite modest. I propose it as an intriguing and potentially revealing literary experiment. My claim is not some inflated claim for my own work, but rather that many of the claims made for traditional scripture are themselves inflated.
There is also my claim that the categories of New Scripture can never be closed. I hope other writers will discover the project and perhaps start to work towards making their own contribution. This open source format is profoundly democratic, and completely opposed to the way that traditional scripture is written and then asserted as the final Word.
25. What is the difference, in your view, between artistic ambition and self-importance?
Response
I think the difference lies substantially in your purpose for engaging in the artistic endeavour.
My purpose is to provide resources that help people get a better view of what scripture is; to provide emotional release and emotional reset for people who are suffering; and to challenge some of the coercive and cruel claims of conventional religion to obedience and submission upon pain of eternal torture. If you are working to help people and to liberate people - for absolutely no money - that's quite protective against self-importance.
Moral and theological questions
26. Why is love the central moral principle of the project, and what exactly do you mean by love?
Response
The single thing that unites the major human religious traditions is a focus upon love.
By love I mean any action of the body (including speech) that is directed towards the welfare of another person rather than your own welfare. It manifests in acts of kindness and support, hospitality, generosity, tolerance and restraint.
If every person on this planet could be convinced that this was correct general orientation for their lives the world would improve so rapidly that we would barely understand where we were.
27. Can love require refusal, punishment, separation or force?
Response
Absolutely. Love is held in the balance between mercy and severity.
Most parents love their children deeply but they often have to refuse them things, impose some kind of correction or punishment, and in certain cases physically override the child’s own volition where the child is otherwise going to injure themselves.
28. Does an ethic centred on sacrifice risk encouraging vulnerable people to remain in abusive or destructive relationships?
Response
I think there is some risk of that occurring.
However my treatment of sacrifice takes place within stories in which the opposite principle is also made apparent. Where it is morally permissible (and sometimes morally required) to fight against evil even when it is deadly and overwhelming. When people understand the ethic I am proposing they hopefully understand that there is no sense in which I am asking for submission or obsequiousness. The demand for submission is the province of traditional religion.
29. Is redemption always possible, and does an emphasis upon redemption risk centring the wrongdoer rather than the person who was harmed?
Response
It depends upon what you mean by redemption.
In my work there are always clear pathways towards redemption, but they pass through the strait gate of repentance and atonement. That can include making some kind of remittance or reparation to the person harmed, but there is no sense in which the victim is required to accept those things. And redemption is only ever meted out to the deserving.
30. Why are suffering, grief and loss so prominent in New Scripture, and is there a danger of aestheticising suffering?
Response
I think these things are prominent in New Scripture because they are prominent in human life. Consider the millions of people in this world who die deaths of despair. It is almost impossible to imagine the depth of suffering driving even one such death, let alone such appalling numbers.
Along with those tragic aspects my books contain many movements of joy, relief, love, sensual enjoyment and beauty. There is also the fact that every story eventually turns toward the triumph of love over the world. If I did not depict loss or suffering the works would have no narrative ballast.
Readers, accessibility and response
31. Who is New Scripture actually for, and who is it not for?
Response
New Scripture is for the lost and the brokenhearted.
It is probably not suitable for zealous religious apologists or people submitted to dogmatic religion.
32. Does the form risk exhausting the reader by keeping the prose at too high a level of intensity?
Response
That risk definitely exists, but it is ameliorated by the fact that not every section of the work displays elevated linguistic or emotional intensity. The stories cycle through intense moments and mundane moments without any particular boundary being drawn between them.
This question also reflects a common mistake about how a person reads scripture. You don’t simply open the Bible at Genesis and read all the way through to Revelation. My own exposure to scripture was in the traditional way: through a devout Catholic upbringing in which, every week at Mass, you heard selected fragments from the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Gospels, the Psalms, and elsewhere.
Once the basic story of the books is understood New Scripture is designed to be encountered in this occasional and repeated way, providing gentle consolation or (if needed) profound emotional reset.
33. Does the elevated or scriptural register create an unnecessary barrier to entry?
Response
I have adapted and democratised the language as far as I possibly can but there are limits.
People do not need any particular literary training to approach the books or understand them, but they are required to climb up just a little from ordinary prosaic speech. Pretty much everybody can do it, but I am sure many people will resent even the small effort they are being asked to give.
34. If a reader finds the books unmoving or overwrought, has the experiment failed for that reader?
Response
I do not think the reaction of one reader is enough to invalidate the experiment. Plenty of people have not been able to get into the work, and I expect there to be many more.
The real test is whether a reasonable proportion of readers have the reactions that I am seeking to provoke. I have already had quite a few of people respond in such ways, so I am reasonably confident that the work can achieve that fairly modest goal.
35. How do you avoid making the theory unfalsifiable by attributing negative responses to an unreceptive audience?
Response
Once we start talking about ‘unfalsifiability’ we are getting into territory that can sometimes feel more like a certain kind of apologetics than literary criticism..
There is however is a perfectly practical answer. If, after reasonable exposure, the work attracts nothing but scorn and derision — or perhaps even a complete absence of meaningful response — I think I would be forced to admit that the experiment has failed. Then I suppose I would go back to the drawing board... or perhaps knock on the door of the Jesuits and beg them to let me back in.
Canon, future writers and the test of success
36. Can anybody actually write scripture, or can a text only become scripture later through the response of a community?
Response
I think anybody can propose their work as scripture, partly because the term has a very loose penumbra of meaning around it.
If someone puts a work forward in that way, I would expect them to make various specific claims about it, guided by their own idea of what scripture should be and how it works. Then if the work completely fails to move anybody or produce any meaningful response within a community, that is a good indication that it does not rise to even a basic level required by the term.
37. If other writers adopt Hypnogogic Prose or write New Scripture, what authority, if any, would you have over how the terms are used?
Response
Absolutely none.
If the project developed in a completely novel direction, or if the terminology changed completely, I would just be stoked that the project was proceeding. It is almost inevitable that there would be aspects of this intellectual direction that I have not even anticipated. And working all alone for two decades in the literary wilderness almost guarantees that I am going to get various things wrong.
38. Would you regard it as a success if another writer eventually produced a work of New Scripture far better than your own?
Response
Absolutely.
I think I might be annoyed for about half an hour because my little feelings got hurt. I might kick the odd chair and grumble about all the work I did, blah blah blah.
But then I would just grab the book in order to be absolutely transported by it. I would be laughing and crying and saying, ‘Oh my God, this is what I envisaged.’
And then I might contact the person and say: Il miglior fabbro. Literate people will understand very well that there is no shame in uttering those words.
39. Can these rhetorical techniques make weak or commonplace ideas appear more profound than they really are?
Absolutely. This is exactly the accusation that Christians make against Muslims and their holy book; and of course Muslims also make that accusation against Christians in respect of theirs.
However a true synthesis of genuine Hyp Prose with the deepest human themes is almost inevitably going to make any work a work of genuine literary quality, and in the hands of a very talented writer can become the very best kind of writing that exists.
40. If Hypnogogic Prose proves not to be genuinely new, New Scripture never supersedes anything, and the books never acquire a large readership, what remains valuable about the project?
Response
If all else fails, I would still be left with the profound impact that writing these books has had upon me.
As the Psalms say: it has dragged me up out of miry clay. It has provided me with profound ethical instruction and ethical understanding. It has also put me in touch with the profound feminine entelechy that continually works to console me, instruct me and help me move forward.
And the books are beautiful too. One never has to apologise for creating something beautiful.
The other thing that such a failure would do is lend weight to the claims of traditional religion that their holy books are indeed holy or divinely inspired in some profound and inimitable way. My failure would be their victory, which is why I think certain kinds of religious people may see this as a project worth engaging with... in the certain knowledge that it must inevitably fail.
Questions not yet answered
There would be any number of questions that could be asked by a person who is interested to find out about the parameters of new scripture and hypnagogic pros and to test some of the claims and techniques that are proposed. Here is a list of possible questions that I would be happy to answer, please feel free to supply me with any other questions via the contact page of this website.
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When you say that a religion can be superseded by telling a better story, what exactly does better mean?
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Are you proposing New Scripture as a replacement for Christianity, an alternative to particular Christian narratives, or something else entirely?
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What do you most admire about traditional scripture, and what do you think it gets profoundly wrong?
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Rhythm, repetition, elevated diction and scriptural cadence are ancient techniques. What, if anything, is genuinely new about their use in Hypnogogic Prose?
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Are there earlier writers who might retrospectively be described as writing something very close to Hypnogogic Prose?
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How do you distinguish the effects of the prose itself from the effects of rereading, memorisation or prior emotional investment?
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Why would a writer want prose to soften or bypass a reader's critical resistance?
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If traditional scripture demonstrates both the beauty and the danger of powerful rhetoric, how does New Scripture avoid reproducing the same danger?
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Can writing that refuses dogmatic authority nevertheless become dogmatic through sheer rhetorical force?