1. Did you know that the hula hoop was actually invented by aliens?
2. Did you know that Uncle Sam & Dr. Seuss are aliases of an evil entity known as Samael?
3. Did you know that everyone on Earth has seven exact duplicate versions of themself (clones) walking around?
4. Did you know that disco was crafted by the devil to ensnare black people?
5. Did you know that Yoda is actually a cloaked symbol of Freemasonry?

If any of this is news to you, then you need to brush up on your facts - that is, your Factology. Factology is the esoteric doctrine of a group called the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, or more commonly, the Nuwaubians.

In a 1999 article, CNN describes the Nuwaubians: “The Nuwaubian philosophy includes elements of Christianity, ancient Egyptian polytheism, and a belief in unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” Adam Heimlich of the New York Press recognizes their influences as being a bit more complex than that:

A partial list, from my notes, of places I’d encountered Nuwaubian notions before includes Chariots of the Gods and the Rael’s embellishments on that book, conspiracy lit, UFO lit, the human potential movement, Buddhism and new-age, astrology, theosophy and Blavatsky, Leonard Jeffries and other Afrocentrics, Cayce, LaRouche, alternative medicine, self-help lit, Satanism, the Atkins diet, numerology and yoga. Many of these York mentions by name. There are also extensive discourses on the Torah, Gospels and Koran, as well as on Rastafarianism, the Nation of Islam and the Five Percent Nation.

What originally drew me personally to studying the Nuwaubian teachings is precisely this highly idiosyncratic and sometimes downright weird mix of traditional religion, and contemporary Afro-centric sci-fi conspiracy theory. If you’d like a good primer of some of the more far-out aspects of Nuwaubian teachings, I recommend Wikipedia’s very detailed entry. Intrepid explorers in the Nuwaubian realms would also do well to arm themselves with the facts about Tama-re, the now defunct Egypt-themed Nuwaubian compound in rural Georgia, complete with pyramids and everything. And then of course there is the controversy surrounding the movement’s founder, Dr. Malachi Z. York-El who is now serving something like 135 years in prison for over a hundred counts of child molestation.

With the extremely high-level of weirdness surrounding this group, it’s more than tempting to simply label them a New Age UFO cult and move on with your life. I love a good mystery though, so I’ve taken it upon myself to at least make an effort into understanding what these folks are all about.

Actually, I think they would probably prefer that we try to overstand them, rather than understand them. See, a major part of Nuwaubianism is what seems to me to be a kind of linguistic kung fu. Commentator Ryan Cook begins to crack the code in this piece on UFO’s and New Religious Movements (NRM is the more politically correct term for “cult” nowadays):

The three pillars of Nuwaubian teaching are Right Knowledge, Right Wisdom, and Right “Overstanding.” I take the last term to denote a way of knowing not subjugated by temporal authorities, as conventional “under-standing” is. Knowledge is properly ordered and sequenced facts. Wisdom is knowing how to correctly use truth and power, mutually implicating forces.

And within that system of values, Factology is part of the method to achieving these ends.

Nuwaubian teachings focus on “facts” (i.e. the opposite of the “myths” of most systems of thought) and research–a combination referred to in several sources as “Factology.” York is often quoted approvingly by members as saying “Don’t believe me; check it out for yourself,” encouraging Nuwaubians to question received wisdom and the status quo. Belief, the basis of all other religious systems, is bad since it is based on (subjective, changeable) trust rather than truth.

And that all sounds totally great until you look at the items which they are calling “facts.” Here’s another typical item from the Factology website:

Altered Time & E.T.’s

The time and space relationship is linked to the human and Earth’s bio-rythms, and that determines how many dimensions for a world, which in your case is a third-dimension reality, are up for grabs. This is dealing with the extra space we have in our time.

Let me explain. The clocks on Earth used to have a “tick” and a “tock.” Now there is only the “tick.” So time has been changed, and that missing “tock” is up for grabs that can be utilized by extraterrestrial beings who overstand this “altered time,” and they can come in and out of this dimension at will.

(Incidentally, at the bottom of every page on the Factology site it proclaims paradoxically: “Factology! Belief is ignorance.”)

What’s more, is that York claims to have received a great many of his facts by way of channelling extraterrestrial (extra-terra-astral) entities. And York himself claims to be from another planet. Now, even using the most liberal definitions, I find it really difficult to call such ramblings “facts,” though I do find them extremely interesting and strangely thought-provoking.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one who’s a bit puzzled by this whole thing. Adam Heimlich’s NYP article poses these same questions to people who are more intimately involved with the movement:

Then I confessed that I, for one, was not sure how to deal with Nuwaubian facts that conflicted with things I’d learned previously. I asked Jack if he was having the same problem, and he replied, speaking slowing and carefully, “I went to school in the 50s and 60s. Education, back then, was on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. That raised questions…about information that was withheld. It makes you question, ‘Why was it withheld?’ and ‘Who benefits from that?’”

As you can see, these queries seem to just lead you further down the rabbit hole. And perhaps that is precisely the beauty as well as intention of Factology. One item leads to another, which leads to another, and they all hook iinto or piggyback on concepts or thoughts which you already have, exploiting the cracks and in-between places in your mind. And before you know it, you start to feel a kind of a funny tingle reading through their tracts. It’s almost as though some of it starts to make sense. Okay, well maybe not “sense” in the normal usage of the word, but perhaps a kind of mythological sense, a “logic” of myth and symbol. Here’s a good illustration of that:

He [God] created the Devil as the subtle and most shrewd beast of the field (Genesis 3:1). Thus, the Devil was smarter than Adam and Eve. If God created humans in the image and after the likeness of God. And we think, feel, smell, and talk like God. Then, he created the Devil and made him the shrewdest, subtlest beast of the field? He was (even) able to beguile Adam and Eve. That only leaves us under the impression that the Devil is a shrewder creature than God. The Devil was able to beguile Adam and Eve who thinks like God. So he must be able to beguile God also.

There’s something about this that strikes me as very intelligent. Namely, his ability to take commonly known stories and change one or two things about them so that they are seen in a whole new light. If I had to venture a guess based on what I’ve read and my own interpretations of it, that’s precisely what the point of his teachings seem to be. On the surface, it just looks like this crazy patchwork of sci-fi religious snippets of information, story and theory. But perhaps the hidden (occult) purpose of all of it is to train you in a certain style of semantic and symbolic dissection. And the process of dissecting “facts” (or “dropping science” as the 5% Nation would say) is what unleashes the inner powers of the mind and the divinity of the spirit.

This hypothesis seems to hold up when viewed in the light of other supporting documentation. There’s a short article in Philadelphia’s City Paper about a hip hop group called the Lost Children of Babylon, which is heavily influenced by Nuwaubianism.

“You can dance to our music,” Rasul explains of the group’s aim, “but it’s strictly to stimulate certain latent forces inside your chromosomes.”

Chromosomes here, aside from the literal biological meaning, could be taken to mean the underlying codes of structures which make us who we are. By breaking down and re-organizing these “facts”, a new world of meaning is opened up to us. Later, in that article Rasul claims that listening to their album “is like taking shrooms.” On their website, they claim that their rhymes are “super-conscious.” And maybe that’s what all this Nuwaubian stuff is at the end of the day. At least, that’s my overstanding of it anyway. What’s yours?