I assumed Dick made up the name Zagreus, but it turns out Zagreus is a character in Greek mythology, although his lineage is convoluted. Dick is going with the idea that Zagreus is the son of Zeus. Zeus tried to hide Zagreus from Hera and the Titans, but eventually the Titans found Zagreus, tore him apart and ate him. Dick draws a parallel between this and Jesus who Dick imagines was hidden on Earth by God until we (the titans) killed him and later ate him in our communion ceremony. 

Dick goes on to talk about the “Hymn of the Soul” in the “Acts of Thomas.” In that parable a man retrieves a pearl from the mouth of a dragon before returning home. Dick relates that story to his experience with the girl with the Jesus fish necklace, although the comparison is kind of slippery to me. He says he tried to track down the delivery girl a month after she visited him, but the pharmacy had no idea who she was.

Before Dick shows Claudia notes for a new novel he is working on about time dysfunction he tells her the true name of Jesus was revealed to him in a dream: Zeus Zagreus. 

The novel’s working title is To Scare the Dead. The sketch for the plot involves an LA man in the record business who is disinhibited by a girl with a Jesus fish necklace and suddenly has the spirit of a 2nd century A.D. Essene in his head. The man reads about Christ’s return in Revelation and later has his house ransacked and his file cabinet blown open by the government. I wonder where Dick is getting these ideas from.

Dick goes on to talk more about cubic time and the possibly retrograde horizontal time axis. Dick speculates he may have had false memories about his life in California implanted after being hypnotized (by who?), and wonders if whatever happened to him in March could have been due to Soviet experiments led by the astrophysicist Nikolai Kozyrev.