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Mikhail got another email after he’d been working with Mir for a few months. It said that the Old Ones would like him to learn a little more about their organization. They said that Ian would come by to pick him up and go on a little trip one day. They said it was not a big deal, just a little ceremonial introduction that would give him more understanding about the historical background of their organization and a better appreciation of its operations.
This piqued his interest and he was primed for a new, interesting experience when Ian showed up in his car.
“So where exactly are we going and what are we going to do?”
Ian---as was his nature---took a few moments to think about what he was going to say before speaking. “The name of where we are going is a ‘Holy House’. To really understand what it is, you have to understand one of the Old Ones’ key survival techniques. That is, they have build their organization around a specific form of camouflage called “hiding in plain sight”. The idea is that if you try to make what you do invisible people get freaked out and very curious when they inevitably find out about it. But if you can get them to put the wrong label on something, you don’t really need to hide it. Let me explain what I’m talking about with a little story.”
“For years and years a border guard manned an isolated crossing between two countries. Every once in a while a fellow would cross from one direction on a bicycle. He always carried a back pack, which the guard searched, but he never found anything. This went on for years until the guard was one day from retirement. He asked the following question. ‘For years I’ve thought that you were smuggling something. I’m retiring tomorrow and won’t turn you in if I find out what it was. But I’m curious. What is it that you are smuggling?’ The traveller replied ‘bicycles’.”
“The secret of this story is the ‘default’ label that the boarder guard unconsciously assigned to the fellow’s bicycle. As long as he just saw it as a transportation device, it never occurred to him that it is also a valuable commodity worth smuggling across a boarder. It also never occurred to him that he’d never seen the guy coming back---because he worked a specific shift. He didn’t think that the guy might be walking or riding a bus the other way. In the same way, the Old Ones have a series of special centres where we educate and build community. They hide them first by putting them someplace where no one would expect them---in this case, a middle-class subdivision. Secondly, they’ve hidden them by making them look just like every other building in the area. In this particular example, we use a single, detached house. This hides it from the vast majority of people, who don’t really pay much attention to their surroundings. If you doubt that, ask yourself how many people know that there are also transformer stations similarly camouflaged in some neighbourhoods?”
“Finally, for that small number of people who might notice them, we hide them in plain sight by creating a second misdirecting label that allows people to dismiss them without thought. In this particular case, we pretend that we belong to a obscure Asian religion which has special ‘Holy Houses’ in suburban neighbourhoods to perform services. That’s an artifact of there being a fair number of Asian immigrants in this local area. Other communities with different ethnic make-up masquerade as Sufi groups, Daoist Temples, Buddhist sects, etc. There are exceptions, but generally we try to look like harmless minority religious groups.”
Mihail sat bolt upright in the car. “What????”
Ian chuckled. “Yeah. I know. What is a secret group of hyper-rationalist types doing with altars filled with statues of gods, chanting, wearing funny robes, etc?”
“But think about it. Religion fills an interesting role in our society. First off, you can’t really touch it with a ten foot pole or the ring-wing types will rain legal fire and destruction down on you. Secondly, people have become pretty much used to weird cults doing silly stuff. Third, most folks are absolutely sick of people trying to convert them to their weird religions. This means any curiosity that people might have once had has been burnt out of them because they tried to be polite with a Jehovah’s Witness once only to end up being hounded by them for months afterwards.”
“Meaning, unless your group gets labelled ‘extremist’ like those ones that abuse children, hoard guns, or, put up gaudy temples that lowers local property values---people will go to great lengths to just leave you alone. The elders have analyzed all these different elements and have come up with the perfect religious camouflage to protect our meeting houses. In this town they project the image that this is just a traditional religion from Asia, so it isn’t a “New Age” group with goofy ideas about space aliens. It doesn’t try to get new members, so it doesn’t harass people into joining. It has no obvious interest in any social issues like abortion. Finally, the ‘Holy Houses’ try to totally blend into the community so they don’t lower property values.”
“But on the other hand, if someone snoops around and wonders what the heck is going on, all they see are strange gold-plated gods on altars and people wearing ornate brocade robes going through rituals with incense and chanting. If anyone asks, there’s a whole song-and-dance about a minority religion from Asian that was persecuted by the government so it learned to keep it’s head down and not bother anyone. It spread to the West through immigrants. That’s usually enough to deal with any interest.”
Mikhi asked the obvious question. “But what about non-Asians? How do you explain them being involved?”
“It generally doesn’t come up. Most people are afraid of being labelled “racist” nowadays---especially the sorts of people who would feel comfortable enough to ask. For those rare folks who do, we say vague things like ‘I took a vegetarian cooking/martial arts/fine art class and got to know some people there and one thing led to another.’ That’s generally enough to explain individuals, and people just extrapolate to everyone else they see.”
“If you have any more questions, you can ask the people you’ll meet here. That’s really why you were asked to come to the service.” At this point Ian was well into a subdivision. He turned into a cul-de-sac, stopping in front of a house that looked just like all the others.
They got out, walked to the door and were greeted by a middle-aged, somewhat plump woman of obvious Chinese descent. She suggested they remove their boots and showed them where to hang up their coats. She said they could call her “Anne”.
She led them out of the entrance hall into the rest of the house. Mikhi was surprised to see that even though from the outside the building looked like a regular suburban, two-story bungalow, on the inside it was “open concept”. In decoration it looked like an Asian temple---complete with a large altar resplendent with large, gold-plated statues, and, short benches for kneeling. Anne led them to the back where she showed them simple black gowns that she asked them to put on. There were also soft cloth pillbox hats and black cotton slippers to wear too.
“People have heard of Buddhist temples where people have to go barefoot, and the monks shave their heads. Other Asian religions are the opposite. People are supposed to always cover their heads and feet as a gesture of respect to the Gods. We make sure that we always try to act the same way that real followers of this path would act. Think of it as something like ‘method acting’---we try to stay ‘in role’ as much as possible to avoid a slip-up that might reveal who we really are.”
“The service will be starting soon. I’d suggest that you just play along with everyone else. Afterwards we are going to have a small meeting where some of our specialists will explain in more detail what is going on here and where you fit into it. If you have questions, they will hopefully be able to answer them.”
Anne led Ian and Mikhi to a couple kneeling benches at the rear. Other folks were filing in, so they just sat down and waited for the “fun” to start. After a while, someone handed out sheets of paper with a bunch of seeming nonsense syllables written with Latin letters. Once in a while, the word “Kow Tow” was inserted inside parentheses.
After a while, a couple elderly men went to the front of the room. One of them sat down off to the side facing everyone else. He placed a large, shiny red object in front of him. He sat quietly with a similarly painted red drumstick in his right hand. The other elder sat front and centre facing the majority. He waited a bit, then quietly, yet forcefully, announced “Start!”. People immediately quieted down and silence filled the hall. At that point he announced “Lui joe gork sai jueen ging!” There was a brief rustling of papers as people found the sheet with that title, followed by more silence. Then the other elderly man tapped on the large wooden block with his drumstick and loudly announced “Hoy Ging Jao!” and started to chant the syllables on the page while setting the time on his instrument. When he came to place on the sheet where “Kow Tow” was written, he loudly announced “Kow Tow”, then stopped beating. At that point everyone in the main body got up off their benches and kneeled on the floor in front of them and quickly pressed their forehead into the carpet. They quickly sat down, the cantor started beating his wood block, and they went through the next set of meaningless symbols (at least they were to Mikhail---but also, he suspected, everyone else).
Once the entire set of sounds had been gone through, the cantor sped up his rhythm and the process started all over again. He did this two more times until at the end the pace was manic and it took every ounce of concentration Mikhial could muster to keep up. He was also sweating very hard under his regular clothes plus the cotton gown.
A similar process went through several of the the other pieces of paper. Then the person leading the service announced “End!” The two old men got up off their benches, and walked out of the room. At that point everyone else got up, walked into the closet, and took off their robes, hats, and, slippers. Normal conversation ensued, but at a subdued volume as everyone seemed to be dealing with a slight “buzz” from the experience.
Anne sought out Mikhail leading him to a door behind the altar, down a set of stairs into the basement---which had a meeting room plus a kitchen. She got him a cup of coffee and led him to a table where a few other people were sitting. One stood, indicated a chair and asked him to sit and make himself comfortable. He introduced the group.
He was a tall, dark-skinned Asian man with smooth facial features. “We’re not going to tell you our names. You probably wouldn’t remember anyway, and we tend to avoid using them. It’s been a long time since one of our groups was identified and persecuted---but you never know. It just makes sense to be careful for security reasons.”
A lightly built, pasty-white, elderly woman joined in. “What did you think about our little ritual?”
“I don’t really know. It was kinda strenuous. I feel like the same way I do when my taijiquan teacher is trying to build up a muscle group with one of her specialized exercises.”
“Not surprising.” A middle-aged black man with an Afro streaked with white hair was speaking. “You are using the same core muscles. The point of the chanting is to help with your breathing, your ability to project your voice, and, to get a little bit of cardio.”
“It’s also a team-building exercise. Human beings are eusocial animals---much like termites, bees and ants---we need to spend at least part of our time doing collective activities. This helps us ‘get out of our heads’ and remember that our group goals can be larger than our petty individual concerns.”
The very white old woman added to these comments. “All human activity includes ritual as part of their process---religion, the law, universities, the military, etc. It is essential to how we function. Ants work collectively because they use a combination of simple instincts activated by specific chemicals that they secrete and which are smelled by other ants. In human beings we use language and culture to manage collective behaviour. That’s why soldiers use rituals to mould recruits into a collective unit. Religions do exactly the same thing to create congregations of believers.”
An elderly man who looked to be of Chinese extraction joined in. “There are species of ants known as ‘slavers’. They have a strategy of manipulating other species of ants by imprinting stolen young with new scent markers that mimic those of the species that is enslaved. The Elders use a similar process to hide their subculture. We absorb and mimic aspects of another specific subculture---like the particular minority religion that we are emulating here. It not only allows us to camouflage our organization, it also allows us to take advantage of the cultural heritage of the group we’re copying from. There are obviously aspects of this religion that have allowed it hold group cohesion in the midst of a larger, more dominant, and, somewhat hostile culture. The Elders are just like any other subculture---we need to find a way of holding the individual members together and keep them focused on the ‘big picture’. That’s a significant fraction of why we emulate the rituals of the groups we mimic. They obviously work for the group being copied, so we are happy to let them work for us too.”
The black man with the afro finished off the discussion. “The major difference is that the Elders always make sure that we remember that no one gets ‘captured’ by the ideology of whatever grouping we copy. We always tell everyone that this is just an outer shell of something else---. Hence this introductory talk.”
Anne had been sitting behind Mikhi all through this and at this point brought things to a close. “That’s enough to process for one visit. Ian will take you home. Think about what you’ve experienced here and what you’ve been told. When you come back there will be an opportunity to answer whatever questions have ‘stuck with you’ right up until you come back.”
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