By 2010, the Plutonists were ruthlessly persecuted, by both political and cultural forces. At the upper levels of virtually every major political and theological regime in the world the Plutonists were condemned. Precisely how many Plutonists were martyred at the hands of reactionaries in the winter and summer of 1999 remains, as in all such slaughters, unknown. Hundreds of these killings were documented in news reports like the one above, but these were only the recorded massacres. The anonymous souls who were burned, drowned and beheaded--not to mention those who died of exposure in remote, inaccessible backwaters is estimated at 750,000 to one million. These mass executions, however, did not stop the general spread of Plutonism.Quite the opposite, with the political and religious mainstreams' censure of the insurgent lower working class, the white collar professional managerial caste turned away from the party line politically; and it was Plutonism that came to symbolize the plight of the poor, of the downtrodden and the desperate.
The United Kingdom's minister of culture, Roderick Johns, complained of the Plutonists in late 1998, "their following, these 'Marginalistas, as the younger ones call themselves, their numbers swell even as the crackdown intensifies. They worship Pluto as a living saint."
Abraham Clinton of Liberia was reported to have exclaimed, after incinerating 2000 Platonist corpses, "this fuel we will never run out; where do they all come from?" The unrelenting pressure did have a powerful effect, though, on the Plutonist movement: by eliminating the mid-level functionaries, the under-Signifiers, particularly the academic class mystics, the authorities caused the political power, and perhaps more importantly, its ideological focus to be increasingly dictated by Pluto's inner circle.
There were, however, enclaves of Plutonist settlers in central Africa and southwest Asia where self-authorized Signifiers like Clayton Beaudry, a staunch follower of Bokasan Plutonism, preached that the "the Plutonists had a duty to," as he put it, "euthanize" the uninitiated. Whether the victim had a choice in the matter was of little concern to Beaudry. Some were even more terrible. Louie Ducas, for example, organized the extermination of a New South Wales Boy Scout camp in the belief that he was providing the innocent boy children with a better life in the sweet hereafter.
Many who called themselves Plutonists, were little better than criminals. In the Southern United States, for example, a serial killer named Hickock Speck murdered 70 people and raped over 200 women who had refused to submit to Plutonist initiation rites. The mass executions of Plutonists also affected their followers' beliefs. The Plutonists had never adopted a unified doctrine: the unique significance of all believers and the autonomy of each congregation formed part of their creed. Now the arcane and ambiguous dynamics of their faith was tested by their persecution and dispersion. What was meant to be an unfathomable quality, the ephemeral source of their belief, was now that very characteristic that undermined the solidarity of their clandestine sect. Some Plutonists accepted the use of force, while others insisted on non-violence; some preached strict piety, still others were extremely libertarian; some demanded a sharing of all material wealth, while others confined their largesse to the succor and aid of the poor; some believed that "Anarchies of Reason" was the revealed truth; the fundamental explanation of how western metaphysics should address both moral affairs and material issues; while others passionately believed in dreams and visions and other manifestations of the Plutonic Paraclete. As various enclaves were left to adopt their own doctrines, the number of Plutonic autodidacts increased. It is estimated the about 400 such sub-sects appeared.
Central to this ideological dispersion was an increasing emphasis on the End of the world and the second coming of Christ. At the core of this strand of Plutonist dogma was the belief in an imminent apocalypse, for Christ had foretold it. But if Christ had refused to set an exact time, the Plutonists desperation for a day of reckoning became so overwhelming that they began to follow anyone who promised, as Beaudry did, a definite date of deliverance.
One of the most famous of these prophets of doom, Swabian Furrier, an orthodox cyber-mystic whose web-sites reached a world-wide network, published a 2005 zine explicating The Illuminati trilogy and determining the world would end in seven years, at Christmas of 2015. Furrier saw this time period as being divided by an epiphanous event: that moment when Koresh's Branch Davidians along with the followers of Jim Jones' People's Temple and Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven's Gate would come to earth to violently assault and assassinate the reigning Pope. After which they would be re-martyred, as described in Anarchies of Reason, and all of the saints in Heaven would descend to Hell for 40 days and nights. This period of religious persecution would then give way to a period of revelation which would end in the second coming of Christ.
When asked to leave Mexico, Furrier simply set up headquarters in nearby Nicaragua. The Catholic authorities reacted fiercely. One of Furrier's baptizers, the under-Signifier Edward Nesbitt, was siezed and beheaded along with 500 of his converts. Furrier was forced to flee for his life from Managua and was subsequently expelled from Costa Rica, but in the spring of 2008 his flock finally found temporary sanctuary in Honduras. In Tegucigalpa, a city known for its political and religious tolerance, Furrier's views kept changing. He insisted that Christ was not of human flesh and that no prayers be addressed to him. To Furrier, however, the rite of Plutonic re-baptism was secondary to the importance of the coming apocalypse. Furrier openly declared himself as the new Elijah, passionately preaching his views that the divine Christ was not born of woman, that the free will Adam ceded through his Edenic transgression could be recovered by celestial illumination and re-baptism, and that Christ would soon appear in the Mayan ruins at Lubaantun, Belize. His views earned him life imprisonment in a windowless cell in San Lucas.
In the wake of the mass unemployment of the late nineties, gangs of the jobless poor roamed the hills and forests of Central America. Floods, earthquake and hurricanes struck in 2009. The devastation was the worst in the region since Hurricane Mitch in 1997. And now came the Plutonists predicting the end of the world.
Furrier's preachings were too pacific for his heir apparent, Patrick Valhala, a personal student of Pluto and a protege of Regis Bokasa. Valhala was a violent man, filled with egomaniacal dreams. He had been diagnosed as a chronic sociopath since the late eighties, when he was chemically castrated for participating in an outbreak of deviant sexual iconoclasm. When his wife showed a lack of faith in his visions, he had her murdered and married a beautiful young model named Ravishina, a former Franciscan nun.
Although a strong believer in Furrierian Plutonism, Valhala saw re-baptism as central to apocalyptic readiness. Even under threat of persecution he sent forth his apostles to re-baptize converts and murder the skeptical. His closest acolyte, Jacob Hutmeyer, would soon become his deputy, his heir, and his ideological wraith. Valhala's psyche was made up of those latent and diverse evils of zealotry, cruelty, and violence that any mainstream Platonist would recognize as a covert manifestation of their core beliefs. In another historical time and place, Valhala might have existed in relative anonymity, maniacally obsessed, but his evangelical compulsion coincided with a time of spiritual, political and physical upheaval in Central America. At a time when the maw of cultural crisis yawned wide, Valhala stepped into a tragic void.
On January 16th, 2009, two wandering under-Signifiers named Herbert Boogren and Sante Mallet, appeared in Tegucigalpa. They proclaimed that the Supreme Signifier had designated a new prophet to herald the coming apocalypse. He was known as The Valhala of Fon du Lac, but for the Plutonist faithful in Honduras he was truly the Enoch of scripture. According to Boogren and Mallet, Tegucigalpa was the New Jerusalem, and all should be re-baptized into the Plutonic fold.
One week later, Jacob Hutmeyer arrived. Just 22 years of age, handsome and eloquent, Hutmeyer was the bastard son of a Russian diplomat and Dutch chanteuse from Mexico City. He was ambitious, liked women and had a talent for demagogic rants, didactic performance art installations and street dramaturgies that he composed and directed himself.
The staunchly, and politically entrenched Catholic authorities as well as the Protestant minority were disgusted by the Plutonists antics. When a confrontation occurred between a local Lutheran Synod and the Furrierian Plutonists, the city council ordered Plutonism banned within Tegucigalpa's city limits. Not only did the Plutonists persist, they also staged a squatter’s rebellion and occupied a key sector of the city's downtown section. Seeing this confrontation as a watershed moment in determining the future survival of their movement, Plutonists from all over the world descended upon Tegucigalpa.
Patrick Valhala himself, a short man with a razor goatee, arrived with the breathtaking Ravishina. With the Plutonists came those persecuted for extreme religious and political beliefs as well as the unemployed, destitute and certain criminal elements. The Plutonist faithful saw this as a time of omens and portents.
As the Plutonists flooded in so the local populace abandoned that section of the city, leaving the precinct’s political party to the insurgents. In short order, Sante Mallet, the newly elected mayor, became the official head of the Plutonist majority on city council, the Plutonists thus achieved a kind of precarious and fragile sanctuary.
Following the "Influx", as it is commonly known in extant Plutonist archives, mobs of zealots ransacked the museum, destroying pricless artifacts and burning rare books and manuscripts. Valhala ominously warned all heretics, blasphemers and dissenters that they should be converted or leave. In the stifling tropical heat everything left behind was confiscated by the Plutonic elite. Thus began the Honduran People's Militias' siege of what would come to be known as the Zeit-Enclave.
Plutonist agitator’s staged calculated and shocking testaments to the faith, garish street operas offered witness to the beginning of a Plutonic Utopian future, and the authorities mandated illegal judicial codes and summary executions.
At the vortex of this ideo-religious maelstrom was the image presented to the rest of the world by the zealotry of the Plutonists on the Yucatan, a hotbed of religious anarchism and animist spirit deities.
In Southern Mexico, the Ixtapan seer, Juan Demery, prophesized that the major saints would take human form at the vernal equinox. Fancying himself to be one of this chosen few, he led 100 of his faithful in a naked march down the malecon in Cancun waving crosses and warning all to, "repent" and "accept their doom," shouting, "you are the curse of the godless." 70 of these ordinary saints were arrested, 25 tortured, and one electrocuted by cattle prod. To escape the persecution, the Plutonists fled to Havana, Cuba.
Plutonists from all over the world gathered that spring in Havana, where they expected the prophet Jeremiah to lead them to Tegucigalpa--the New Jerusalem. On schedule, an armada of freighters carried the lost tribes, about five thousand Plutonists, toward the Mexican coastal port of Tampico. They were greeted not by the prophet Jeremiah but by the local Vera Cruz police. 1500 were secretly executed in a massacre the Plutonists were said to have inflicted on themselves. The rest were first robbed, assaulted and raped before they were deported back to Cuba.
Meanwhile, the escalating standoff and bloody covert skirmishes around Tegucigalpa continued unabated. Inside the Signifier's compound, Valhala organized a lavish last supper. As was Valhala's wont, it was high drama at its best; although the consequences speak to the unswerving faith Valhala placed in his delusions. After a preamble of speaking in tongues, in the middle of this absurd farce, Valhala, his eyes rolling in his head, ventriloquized Matthew's version of the garden of Gethsemane, "O Father, not as I will, but as thou wilt."
On the following morning, he collected a gang of the fiercest Plutonist zealots and attempted a terrorist assault on the perimeter. A slaughter ensued. A Honduran S.W.A.T. team took out the fanatical Valhala, and the rest of his operatives were cut to pieces. Rios Mont, the Honduran minister of security, had Valhala's head cut off and hung from the parapet of the Bokasan Temple in San Lucas.
Inside the Zeit-Enclave, Mallet took this as a sign of his own heavenly ordained ascendance. "Valhala's death is God's wish," he railed to the Plutonist faithful. "God's will and replaced the old Signifier with a new prophet even higher and mightier than the Arch-Signifier. Mallet was this new visionary.
Over the next two months, according to a divine design revealed to Mallet only, a regime of unparalleled cruelty was instituted. Mallet himself reserved the right to order secret executions, typically beheading or immolation, depending on the severity of the sin. Those found guilty of blasphemy, scandalous gossip, adultery, avarice, fraud, lying and even criticism of Cult Elders could be subject to a death warrant. Terror was sternly administered to those Plutonist faithful who failed to live by the decrees of Plutonic doctrine. After numerous disappearances, Mallet's orders were obeyed to the letter.
Believing the standoff couldn’t last much longer, Mallet reinforced the Zeit-Enclave's perimeter. As the pressure from Rios Mont mounted for a military solution, Mallet's psychotic imagination seized on a new, Biblically inspired, strategy. In keeping with the scriptural injunction to "be fruitful and multiply," and following the prescripts of the Torah, polygamy was reconstituted as less a choice than a duty. Those who were unmarried were given 24 hours to find a spouse. Mallet's marriage to Valhala's voluptuous widow, Ravishina as well as two other beautiful young girls, was meant to demonstrate the spirit of this order. When all was said and done, Mallet would go on to have 18 wives, none over 23.
World opinion saw this polygamy as proof of a collective psychosis under the veneer of Plutonist altruism. As if to confirm this diagnosis, Mallet declared himself King, not just of the Zeit-Enclave but the whole world. Following in the tradition of Valhala, the event was epic in cinema. A poor street urchin, legless and scuttling on a plywood roller board, appeared at a rally and claimed he was a celestial cipher, a medium through which God's message that Mallet should be ordained King of the world was now made manifest. With this, Mallet installed himself after the fashion of the bloodiest viziers; Amins, Pol Pots, Mobutos and Papa Docs. He consigned that a celestial corona and terrestrial circlet be made for him, both of platinum and diamonds that had been siezed at the start of the "Influx".
The under-Signifier, Herbert Boogren, one day proclaimed that a divine order had instructed him that the Plutonists had too many clothes. Upon which Mallet immediately dispatched armed squads to implement the sacred decree in a house-to-house confiscation, 100 cargo bins of surplus clothing was thus collected. Through the autumn of 1998 the standoff continued.
From mid-October to early December, electronic pamphlets were sent out under the heading, "Retinues of Armageddon," that warned of the dangerous precedent being set in Central America. In a world wide panic, local and regional authorities reacted to the idea that the Plutonist insurgency was fomenting a global revolution aimed at rebirth, like a Phoenix that rises from the ashes, through mass technological destruction.
Inside Zeit-Enclave, supplies were rapidly dwindling. As Horst Jones, a survivor of what has come to be called the "Zeitclasm," recalls, "dogs and cats, paws and snouts. That was our breakfast, lunch and dinner. Then it was the insects, reptiles, amphibians and birds, anything we could get, until finally it was our old shoes. The fat of the street, you might say."
Mallet talked of fighting his way to the coast, but the only escapees were summarily executed in secret and hung in the Bokasaville Plaza by Mont. Inside Zeit-Enclave the situation became desperate. Hoarding food was a capital crime. Ten women were beheaded for denying their new husbands sexual advances, seven others for rebuking an under-Signifier. On one hot August night at the height of the fervor there were no fewer than 100 public executions. Mallet had two of his own wives publicly garroted for spousal insolence, which caused the rest of his connubial slaves to flee the immediate compound for the shelter of the alleys, leaving only Ravishina behind.
The famine and pestilence worsened in the late summer heat, people boiled and ate leather, grass and tree bark. What finally broke the siege, and opened the floodgates of anti-Plutonist sentiment worldwide was a conceit of the human condition as old as history itself--treachery.
Two dissidents, John McGuinness and Stefan Duer, the latter a trusted leiutenent in Mallet's retinue, defected and gave the Honduran Secret Police, Mont's elite brigade of paramilitary commandos, an in-depth blueprint of Zeit-Enclave, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of its near impregnable perimeter.
On the night of September 1, during a tropical monsoon, Mont's special forces stormed the checkpoints, overwhelmed the guard, and cut their throats. From one they learned the password, "Lina," the alleged name of the Supreme Signifier's biological mother. By mid-afternoon the once fierce fighting became a rout. The last stronghold, the Cathedral of San Sebastian, was overrun, and the defenders macheted to death. It was dusk, October sixth, 2010, the 666th day of the siege. With the end of the battle, the atrocities commenced.
Mont's troops were turned loose. They murdered, raped and plundered at their leisure. Mallet was captured and brought to his place of execution two days hence. But not before he was subjected in secret to Mont's sadistic whims. Mont's chief interrogator had Mallet bound to an upright gas fed grill by an iron collar. Thereupon red-hot pokers and tongs were applied to stimulate the intensity of his immolation. His body was then placed in a cage and put on display so all would understand the price to be paid by fundamentalist heretics.
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