Hallucinatory Fever
On Hallucinatory Fever for many Days, profaned 'dumb-fuck' - 天兄 Hong Xiuquan洪秀全
Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全 was born into a family of Hakka farmers in Hua county in 1814. He was twice an outsider in his own country, for Hakka were "guest people" in Hua-they did not bind their women's feet; they did not hew to Cantonese tradition-and Hua itself was a desolate, unwelcoming backwater crawling with bandits and marauding gangs. As Hong grew into manhood, China teetered on the brink of catastrophe: the British pumped opium into the ports; the Q'ing issued punishing decrees to a drug-zonked population-conversing with a foreigner became reason enough to lose one's job, or one's head. When the emperor decided to expel the English and their "devil drug," London so feared the impact on its economy that it sent a fleet to raze China's harbors and destroy its forts. Studying the West or teaching Chinese to foreigners was out of the question. Selling a Chinese book to a Westerner became a capital offense punishable by execution; books from abroad were confiscated and burned; and round-eyed missionaries were held to be evil incarnate.
Into this roiling tableau steps Hong Xiu-quan. Aspiring to something greater than farming, he comes to Canton to take the Confucian state examinations-the gateway to becoming a mandarin. He fails the test, but as he lingers in the city square, two men approach and hand him a book. It is Quanshi liangyan ("Good Words for Exhorting the Age"). Hong does not know it, but one of the men is Liang Afa, a Christian convert and a maker of books. The taller one lurking behind is Rev. Edwin Stevens, a former professor of theology at Yale.
Hong thinks nothing of the incident, takes the book home, puts it on a shelf, takes a job at a local school, and continues to study for the next round of examinations the following year. These, too, he fails. But this time he leaves the hall exhausted; as he heads home, it is clear he is gravely ill.
In his sickbed and writhing with fever, Hong has a hallucination that will have far-reaching consequences for him and for all of China.
He dreams that he ascends to an afterworld where attendants greet him in dragon robes and horn-brimmed hats. They slit him open, remove his soiled entrails, and replace them with new. A woman welcomes him and leads him to a tall, erect man in an imposing black robe. "So you have come back up?" the godlike figure says, and identifies himself as Hong's father. There are tears of anger in his eyes. "Pay close attention to what I say," he tells Hong. "Many of those on earth have lost their original natures. [They] dissipate in offerings to the demon devils . . . They shall not escape my wrath."
Hong's hypnopompic ravings continue as his family watches aghast. "Now he leaps from his bed and runs around his room, shouting battle cries and moving his arms as if in combat; now he falls back again, silent and exhausted." They hear him address a man he calls his "elder brother," a figure who appears to have had his own experience with earthly demons. One day, Hong rises from his bed, writes out in red ink the title "Heavenly King, Lord of the Kingly Way, Quan," and posts it on his door. The people of the village begin to whisper that the young man has gone mad, but as time goes by Hong calms down. He returns to his Confucian studies, resumes his teaching job, and prepares a third time for the examinations.
He is 23.
Not for several years does any of this make any sense to Hong. In the interim, he sits for the examinations twice again, and fails both times. But one day he is drawn to the odd-looking book on his shelf. Opening it distractedly, he reads passages from the New Testament, descriptions of Christ's visit to earth, expressions of Christian faith.
The "tracts fit the lock of Hong's mind in many ways," for they focus on the source of evil, and the meaning of the good. In their strange complexity, they talk to the world within his head and to the world of war that has been swirling around Canton from 1839 to 1842." When he reads the quotes from Isaiah, it is as if they were written for him: "Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence." Hong puts everything else aside and throws himself into Christian scripture. Sharing his excitement with like-minded Hakka and sympathetic relatives, he gathers the pieces of his fevered dream.
They seem so obvious now: The father figure was surely God Himself; the female, the Celestial Mother; the elder brother Jesus; and Hong is none other than God's second son-the Heavenly King of Great Peace.
天弟弟:"dumb-fuck:*:, Dumb fucks:*:"