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INTRODUCTION
By Lon Milo DuQuette
It has been seventeen years since the release of The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford,1 and twenty-one years since the unexplained disappearance of the controversial "rabbi" whose unorthodox teachings formed the substance of the text. I was initially flattered when asked by my publisher and colleagues to collect and curate the material for what would become that landmark publication. I never dreamed, however, the assignment would become so challenging or so exasperating.
Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford (his real name is still unknown) was a highly eccentric character. His followers, although few in number, enthusiastically embraced his nonsectarian doctrines and methods. Unfortunately for his biographers (and future students), he rarely committed any of his discourses to writing. He was hopelessly undisciplined and relied almost exclusively upon person-to-person tutoring and informal interactions within a small circle of disciples, a few of whom took excellent notes; most of whom did not.
After his (still-unsolved) disappearance in July of 1997, his colleagues were burdened with the ponderous task of sifting through the stacks of scrapbooks and manuscripts that towered floor to ceiling in every room of his otherwise charming Long Island beach house. Directing the labor of collating and cataloging was Ben Clifford's administrator (and "magical son") Dr. Gizmo Ben Lamed. I prevailed upon this saintly and good-humored gentleman to be project editor on The Chicken Qabalah.
I'm embarrassed to admit that the popularity of The Chicken Qabalah came as a complete shock to all of us. From the first week of its release, critics of esoteric literature reacted with extraordinary kindness. Sales figures for CQ (while modest compared to those of sadistic erotic novels or gluten-free cookbooks) continue to tolerably satisfy the publisher, who for the last ten years, has urged me to write a sequel. Year after year I declined, arguing one cannot get blood from a turnip. There were simply no more Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford texts to publish. I was secure in my belief that the material available to us when we researched The Chicken Qabalah represented nearly all of the writings, notes, and interviews known at the time to exist.
Happily, that is no longer the case.
RABBI LAMED BEN CLIFFORD — DEAD AT LAST
The story of how all this "new" material came to light is as curious as everything else surrounding the bizarre life of this enigmatic holy man.
Because his disappearance was unexplained and a body was never recovered, Ben Clifford's estate languished in limbo for many years. Legal disposition of his affairs was postponed a dozen times, triggered by "rabbi sightings" reported from around the world. Many of these were obvious hoaxes perpetrated by grief-maddened Chicken Qabalists. Others were disturbingly bizarre and seemed eerily genuine. To this day, many remain unexplained.
Perhaps the most dramatic sighting was bolstered by the testimony of Sister Gina Martini and eleven Carmelite nuns in Albany, New York, who, in 1999, reported being startled after vespers by a partially clad intruder matching the rabbi's description, friskily darting in and out of rows of drying laundry in the convent courtyard. Two years later, police in Orlando, Florida, responded to a disturbance inside the Noah's Ark attraction at the Holy Land Experience amusement park. A man who boldly identified himself as Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford was subdued and briefly detained for loudly berating a teenage actor portraying the High Priest Caiaphas and for making lewd comments to the morbidly obese actress portraying Noah's wife.
Naturally, each reported sighting had to be followed up by insurance company detectives whose investigations necessitated repeated postponements of legal proceedings. Finally, on April 1, 2015, Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford was at last pronounced "legally dead" by Judge Terrence Stool of the Superior Court of Suffolk County, New York. News of the final disposition stirred little interest in the esoteric community — most of whom, like me, were certain The Chicken Qabalah would remain the final published exposition of the teachings of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford.
Then, on the evening of April 30, 2015, I received a text message from Dr. Ben Lamed:
OMG! 3 bags full of LBC goodies found @ BNL. pls call asap. Apparently ZIPPY real!!! Gizmo.
I immediately phoned Dr. Ben Lamed, who was so excited I could hardly follow the particulars of his rambling narrative. I will attempt to summarize:
Shortly after Judge Stool pronounced Rabbi Ben Clifford legally dead, he discovered a bag of still-warm onion bagels on the sunroof of his car in the courthouse parking garage. Inside the bag, he found an envelope containing a tiny key, along with a handwritten note that read as follows:
Dear Judge ... or whoever declared me legally dead.
Hello from the other side!
Don't freak out ... nobody really dies. But you'll find that out. Just don't worry about it.
I hope you enjoy the bagels, but please don't eat the key. It unlocks storage locker #528 in the kitchen of the cafeteria at Brookhaven National Laboratories here on Long Island.
Take the bagels home, but please deliver the key along with this note to my old friend Dr. Gizmo Ben Lamed at 3520 Greenbrier Rd. in Montauk and direct him to immediately take possession of the contents of the locker. The contents are really, REALLY cool, interesting and important.
I would write more but ... I'm dead and I keep getting ectoplasm all over the typewriter.
Thanks, and have a nice eternity.
(signed)
"The Late" Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford
It wasn't easy for Dr. Ben Lamed to gain security clearance to the highly secretive Brookhaven National Laboratories (itself the subject of conspiracy theories concerning the Philadelphia experiment, time travel, and extraterrestrial intercourse). It seems the rabbi's only connection to Brookhaven had been with its one-time director, Dr. Zaia Youkhanna, an Aramaic scholar and amateur Qabalist, who had organized the rabbi's 1975 lecture tour in Baghdad. When Gizmo finally was allowed access to the kitchen area and opened locker #528, he discovered two large and curiously decorated carpets rolled up and propped in one corner. He also found three black plastic trash bags stuffed with documents, notebooks, ritual scripts, a Canadian Army first-aid kit, a pitch pipe, some colored pipe cleaners, and a 1967 Minimoog synthesizer.
Gizmo pleaded with me to join him in Montauk, and I immediately cleared my schedule and booked a flight to New York. What we discovered revealed an exciting and previously unknown facet of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford's life and teaching methods. The most stunning revelation confirmed the existence of an "Order" resembling the rabbi's alleged Qabalah school, the Zerubbabel Institute of Philosophical Youth (Z?I?P?Y?). Biographers, myself included, had long assumed Z?I?P?Y? was purely mythological — a whimsical fable he invented as a teaching device. It appears we were wrong. The documents revealed that, for a number of years, Ben Clifford was the hierophantic director of a strange and highly unorthodox Qabalistic initiatory society. He didn't refer to it specifically as Z?I?P?Y? but rather by the generic designation "Our Holy Order" (O?H?O?).
Passports and unsent postcards confirmed that, beginning in 1984 and continuing every other year, he would disappear for as long as six weeks at a time. Not even his closest Montauk colleagues knew where he went or what he was up to. His Long Island students fantasized he was moonlighting as a spy, or that perhaps he had mistresses. Most of them simply assumed he needed to periodically check himself in for drug or alcohol detox.
In actuality, he was traveling — all over the world — Wales, Norway, Macedonia, Poland, Germany, Australia, Japan, Croatia, Shanghai, Beijing, and Bethel, Connecticut. These were not lecture tours. He traveled to initiate student-candidates into a three-degree Qabalah Mystery School.
The documents discovered in the kitchen locker contained complete scripts for each of the three initiation ceremonies, along with portfolios of degree-specific study materials, toys, exercises, and meditations. For the Chicken Qabalist (or indeed anyone searching for practical applications of Qabalah as a self-transformational practice), these documents are pure gold. It is this material, including scripts and commentaries of the initiation ceremonies themselves, that make up the major portion of this book, which I've tried to order in an approachable format.
I have not been able to determine with any degree of certainty whether or not any of these O?H?O? "lodges" continue to operate. But, because I am certain that it was the rabbi's wish that his "secret" initiations and exercises be made public after his death, it is clear to me it was his intention that the work of initiating and instructing new members should continue. I have, therefore, organized this book in a format that I believe the good rabbi envisioned — a practical handbook or guide for both the solitary "Chicken Qabalist" and all other adventurous individuals who believe they can play well with others to experience the initiation ceremonies and degree exercises of the O?H?O? or Z?I?P?Y? or whatever you want to call it.
To paraphrase the immortal Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford: "Call it anything you want! Don't worry about it! You're a Chicken Qabalist!"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Son of Chicken Qabalah"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Lon Milo DuQuette.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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