Valis is a science fiction novel written by Philip K. Dick and published in 1981. The protagonist, Horselover Fat, is Dick’s alter-ego, and the book draws heavily on Dick’s own mental breakdown. Fat experiences messages from God, which is actually an ancient extraterrestrial being. These messages enable him to cure his dying son, to speak ancient Greek, and to realise that he must go on a quest to find a messiah, who is a reincarnation of Jesus Christ and Buddha and every other major prophet from all religions. This correspondence with God allows his consciousness to travel in time, to the ancient Roman empire, where he sees through the eyes of someone who is himself in a past life. When he travels in time, Fat experiences flashes of light, as do the characters in Lost.
In the Lost episode Eggtown, Locke has Ben imprisoned in his own house, and gives him Valis to read. Ben says that he’s already read the book, and Locke replies that he might want to read it again to see if he missed anything. The book contains a number of extreme similarities to Lost, both in terms of the narrative and underlying themes.
I believe that the figure of Jacob in Lost is an ancient alien deity, as is the God that is referred to in Valis. The alien god in Valis has a select group of other alien beings, who appear as humans but are immortal, who do his bidding and have always been searching for the next incarnation of the messiah over time. This is very similar to the eternally-young Richard Alpert, and the fact that only a select few enlightened individuals are permitted to speak with Jacob. The aliens in Valis disguise their third eye, whereas those in Lost I believe have only four toes, hence the four-toed statue. The search for a chosen one in Lost has lead the Others to focus on Walt, Ben, Aaron, perhaps Widmore, and most significantly Locke as potential candidates. Similarly to The Others, the aliens who do God’s bidding in Valis recruit human mortals who wish to follow their God.
In Valis, God impregnates the mother of the chosen one, for an immaculate conception to take place. When we see a flashback to Locke’s mother as a teenager, her mother berates her, saying that her boyfriend is “old enough to be her father”, which doesn’t fit in with Anthony Cooper, who when Locke is an adult appears to be barely older than him. Either Anthony Cooper does not age, like Alpert, or he is not Locke’s biological father, and Locke was in fact fathered by some version of Jacob. This idea is supported by the fact that Locke’s mother Emily claims that he was immaculately conceived.
In Valis, God can inflict or cure disease. He helps Fat to cure his son’s stomach condition, and he gives cancer to Fat’s girlfriend as a punishment for her selfishness. Likewise, Jacob cures Locke’s paralysis, gives Ben cancer and Jack appendicitis for not carrying his wishes out, and cures Juliette’s sister and Rose of their respective cancers. In Valis, God intervenes to ensure that Fat survives all of his suicide attempts, while in Lost, Locke survives being pushed out of an eighth story window, and Michael is unable to commit suicide or be murdered because of Jacob’s intervention.
Very significantly, the immortal aliens working for God in Valis speak of the “Fibonacci constant”, which is connected to The Numbers in Lost. They say that these numbers are a code that enables contact with a higher realm, and that they put out secret messages containing the Fibonacci sequence in order to contact people who have had messages from God containing the numbers. The word “constant” is used in Lost in relation to time travel, and there is a reference in Valis to a “Trans-temporal constant”, which is a psychological prison which links human beings from all times, and the ancient people who had knowledge of this constant held the secret of time travel. Similarly, in Lost, everyone is connected by a higher power which they have no knowledge of, though it seems in Lost that it is a system of multinational corporations and foundations (Hanso, Widmore, Paik, Dharma, Oceanic) that bind the characters together, rather than something metaphysical.
The deity in Valis exists everywhere, as does Jacob, who has powers on and off the island, at any point in time. Valis’s God is able to take over someone and make them do his bidding, as Jacob is able to utilise those who have died on the island. Valis refers to God as having freed the dead from time and space. This links to the scene in the Lost episode The Beginning of the End, in which Charlie appears to Hurley, and explains to him “I am dead, but I’m also here”.
The idea of being sent on a god-given quest that is one’s destiny is central to both Valis and Lost. Speaking through a child, God tells Fat, “Go wherever I send you and you will know what to do. There is no place where I am not. When you leave here you will not see me, but later you will see me again.” This is similar to Locke’s encounters with Christian Sheppherd, who speaks on behalf of Jacob, and instructs him on his mission. God also tells Fat, “Your future must differ from your past”, which is another central theme of Lost, particularly in relation to the character of Locke. During his treatment for mental illness, Fat discusses existentialism with one of his psychiatrists, Maurice, who tells him “The universe is what you make of it. It’s what you do with it that counts. It’s your responsibility to do something life-promoting with it, not life-destructive.” This concept could apply to many of the crash survivors in Lost, who seem initially! to be caught in self-destructive cycles – Jack with his drinking, Kate with her running away, Hurley with his weight and his obsession with the cursed numbers, Charlie with his heroin and so on. Their arrival on the island frees them from their pasts, an enables them to do something more worthwhile. Fat’s quest to find the next messiah enables him to put behind him the deaths of two of the women he has loved, and his wife leaving him, and pursue enlightenment.
The characters of Locke in Lost and Fat in Valis are attempting to persuade their companions of the power of their deity, and that they have communicated with this higher power and have a mission that they must complete. In Lost, Jack is the sceptic and Locke the man of faith, and in Valis Fat’s friend Kevin plays a similar “Doubting Thomas” role. In both cases, the doubting characters are eventually convinced that their friend is not mad and has in fact experienced something other-worldly.
Insanity is a major theme in both Lost and Valis. Both Fat in Valis and Hurley in Lost are declared insane and sent to state mental institutions in California (Hurley’s in Santa Rosa, Fat’s in Orange County). In both cases, the extent of their insanity is questionable, as Hurley is actually seeing dead people who are (presumably) sent by Jacob, and Fat is also actually receiving messages from an alien God.
Much of the action in Valis takes place in Los Angeles, which is also a very significant location in Lost. The two share a number of other locations. Fat travels to Portland in search of the saviour, while in Lost it is Ben’s birthplace, as well as the place where Richard Alpert misinforms Juliette she will be working. In season five of Lost, the Oceanic Six take a flight to Guam, while in Valis, Fat also flies to Guam in his search for the messiah. Oxford is visited by Desmond, where he meets Daniel Faraday, who is a professor and former student at the university there. Fat’s psychiatrist Dr. Stone also studied at Oxford. A dream that Philip K. Dick has, at the very end of Valis, takes place at a mysterious log cabin that appears to be very old, possibly like Jacob’s cabin.
Both Lost and Valis reference mathematician Hermann Minkowski, Valis directly and Lost by naming a character after him. He conducted research in to the relationship between the dimensions of space and time, and concluded that they are intermingled, known as “Minkowski Space-Time”. Fat refers to Minkowski when attempting to rationalise his time travel experience, and the Minkowski in Lost finds that his conscious is travelling to the past, eventually causing his death.
Lost contains the use of many subliminal messages and easter eggs, many of which you need to watch an episode multiple times to notice. In Valis, Fat and his friends see a movie, which is full of such subliminal messages, many of which relate to Fat’s experience with God, thus causing him to realise that he is not alone and to seek out the makers of the movie. He and his friends watch the movie a number of times in order to ensure that they have noticed everything and correctly understood its meaning. There are also similarities between the Valis movie and the movie being shown to Karl in the Lost episode Not In Portland, as both contain flashing arbitrary images and loud ambient music.
Valis and Lost share many other themes and points of reference. These include the concept of God/Jacob as a judge, choosing those who are worthy of enlisting, and punishing others. Ancient history, and ancient languages are also significant in both. Valis’s Fat and Lost’s Juliette both speak Latin, and Fat also discovers the ability to speak ancient Greek after God bestows this ability on him, and he travels back in time more than two and a half thousand years, while an ancient statue and temple appear on the island in Lost. Baptism is significant in both, as Fat spontaneously baptises his son in the name of the god he is in contact with, and Charlie feels that Aaron should be baptised on the island, and Eko carries out this baptism. A struggle between good and evil, and the significance of children are other themes that they share. Both have frequent references to a number of eastern and western religions, particularly Christianity, Taoism, and Buddhism.
A further, very significant theme that they both share is that of reincarnation. Fat, and the aliens working on behalf of God, are searching for the next messiah, who is a reincarnation of previous prophets such as Jesus Christ, Elijah, Buddha and many others. In the Lost episodes Because You Left and The Lie, Ben drives Locke’s corpse around in a van marked with the name “Canton-Rainier”, which is an anagram of reincarnation. When Locke visits the child Locke at home with his foster family in the 1950s, in the episode Cabin Fever, he administers a test to Locke, which bears a similarity to the test given to ascertain whether a child is the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama who has recently died. I believe that the test that Richard Alpert gives to Locke is to prove that he is a reincarnation of Jacob, and that some of the objects he shows to him one belonged to Jacob, and those would be the correct ones to pick.
The similarities between Valis and Lost, in terms of plot, reference and themes are too many to put this down to coincidence, and the conspicuous insertion of Valis in two episodes of the show point to this novel being a key influence on the writers. Time travel and the concept of having a “constant”, a mysterious deity, a messianic figure, the Fibonacci numbers, immortals, the ability of a higher power to inflict or cure disease, are all central concepts that the two share. It is my belief that these mutual themes point to Jacob being an extra-terrestrial deity, like the one featured in Valis. The substance contained beneath the Orchid station, which is referred to as “exotic matter”, I think is from another planet, where Jacob and Richard Alpert both originated from, before they came to our planet many thousands of years ago. Locke is the reincarnated messiah that The Others are searching for, and his destiny is to save mankind. Like Christ, he will sacrifice ! his own life, and will be reborn. There is an undetected presence of a superior alien mind, Jacob, a divine figure, among us on Earth, and the arrival of a Locke, the messiah, is key to maintaining stability. Once Locke obtains the higher knowledge of Jacob/God, he will have the ability to save not only the inhabitants of the island, but also all of mankind. The events taking place on the island I think are farther reaching and more intensely spiritual than we realise, and could have global implications. The task of the messiah is to ensure that the secrets of the island, the extra-terrestrial god that resides there, and the source of infinite energy that can allow travel through time and space remain the knowledge of a select few. Were Widmore or anyone else to attempt to mine the island and exploit its ancient alien power source, results would be catastrophic. Mankind is not equipped to deal with the higher, infinite knowledge that the unleashing of the power would be! stow upon us, and the outcome would be that we would all succu! mb to th e time sickness and our minds, driven insane, would short circuit and our race would become extinct. Theory by AphroditeMF
In the Lost episode Eggtown, Locke has Ben imprisoned in his own house, and gives him Valis to read. Ben says that he’s already read the book, and Locke replies that he might want to read it again to see if he missed anything. The book contains a number of extreme similarities to Lost, both in terms of the narrative and underlying themes.
I believe that the figure of Jacob in Lost is an ancient alien deity, as is the God that is referred to in Valis. The alien god in Valis has a select group of other alien beings, who appear as humans but are immortal, who do his bidding and have always been searching for the next incarnation of the messiah over time. This is very similar to the eternally-young Richard Alpert, and the fact that only a select few enlightened individuals are permitted to speak with Jacob. The aliens in Valis disguise their third eye, whereas those in Lost I believe have only four toes, hence the four-toed statue. The search for a chosen one in Lost has lead the Others to focus on Walt, Ben, Aaron, perhaps Widmore, and most significantly Locke as potential candidates. Similarly to The Others, the aliens who do God’s bidding in Valis recruit human mortals who wish to follow their God.
In Valis, God impregnates the mother of the chosen one, for an immaculate conception to take place. When we see a flashback to Locke’s mother as a teenager, her mother berates her, saying that her boyfriend is “old enough to be her father”, which doesn’t fit in with Anthony Cooper, who when Locke is an adult appears to be barely older than him. Either Anthony Cooper does not age, like Alpert, or he is not Locke’s biological father, and Locke was in fact fathered by some version of Jacob. This idea is supported by the fact that Locke’s mother Emily claims that he was immaculately conceived.
In Valis, God can inflict or cure disease. He helps Fat to cure his son’s stomach condition, and he gives cancer to Fat’s girlfriend as a punishment for her selfishness. Likewise, Jacob cures Locke’s paralysis, gives Ben cancer and Jack appendicitis for not carrying his wishes out, and cures Juliette’s sister and Rose of their respective cancers. In Valis, God intervenes to ensure that Fat survives all of his suicide attempts, while in Lost, Locke survives being pushed out of an eighth story window, and Michael is unable to commit suicide or be murdered because of Jacob’s intervention.
Very significantly, the immortal aliens working for God in Valis speak of the “Fibonacci constant”, which is connected to The Numbers in Lost. They say that these numbers are a code that enables contact with a higher realm, and that they put out secret messages containing the Fibonacci sequence in order to contact people who have had messages from God containing the numbers. The word “constant” is used in Lost in relation to time travel, and there is a reference in Valis to a “Trans-temporal constant”, which is a psychological prison which links human beings from all times, and the ancient people who had knowledge of this constant held the secret of time travel. Similarly, in Lost, everyone is connected by a higher power which they have no knowledge of, though it seems in Lost that it is a system of multinational corporations and foundations (Hanso, Widmore, Paik, Dharma, Oceanic) that bind the characters together, rather than something metaphysical.
The deity in Valis exists everywhere, as does Jacob, who has powers on and off the island, at any point in time. Valis’s God is able to take over someone and make them do his bidding, as Jacob is able to utilise those who have died on the island. Valis refers to God as having freed the dead from time and space. This links to the scene in the Lost episode The Beginning of the End, in which Charlie appears to Hurley, and explains to him “I am dead, but I’m also here”.
The idea of being sent on a god-given quest that is one’s destiny is central to both Valis and Lost. Speaking through a child, God tells Fat, “Go wherever I send you and you will know what to do. There is no place where I am not. When you leave here you will not see me, but later you will see me again.” This is similar to Locke’s encounters with Christian Sheppherd, who speaks on behalf of Jacob, and instructs him on his mission. God also tells Fat, “Your future must differ from your past”, which is another central theme of Lost, particularly in relation to the character of Locke. During his treatment for mental illness, Fat discusses existentialism with one of his psychiatrists, Maurice, who tells him “The universe is what you make of it. It’s what you do with it that counts. It’s your responsibility to do something life-promoting with it, not life-destructive.” This concept could apply to many of the crash survivors in Lost, who seem initially! to be caught in self-destructive cycles – Jack with his drinking, Kate with her running away, Hurley with his weight and his obsession with the cursed numbers, Charlie with his heroin and so on. Their arrival on the island frees them from their pasts, an enables them to do something more worthwhile. Fat’s quest to find the next messiah enables him to put behind him the deaths of two of the women he has loved, and his wife leaving him, and pursue enlightenment.
The characters of Locke in Lost and Fat in Valis are attempting to persuade their companions of the power of their deity, and that they have communicated with this higher power and have a mission that they must complete. In Lost, Jack is the sceptic and Locke the man of faith, and in Valis Fat’s friend Kevin plays a similar “Doubting Thomas” role. In both cases, the doubting characters are eventually convinced that their friend is not mad and has in fact experienced something other-worldly.
Insanity is a major theme in both Lost and Valis. Both Fat in Valis and Hurley in Lost are declared insane and sent to state mental institutions in California (Hurley’s in Santa Rosa, Fat’s in Orange County). In both cases, the extent of their insanity is questionable, as Hurley is actually seeing dead people who are (presumably) sent by Jacob, and Fat is also actually receiving messages from an alien God.
Much of the action in Valis takes place in Los Angeles, which is also a very significant location in Lost. The two share a number of other locations. Fat travels to Portland in search of the saviour, while in Lost it is Ben’s birthplace, as well as the place where Richard Alpert misinforms Juliette she will be working. In season five of Lost, the Oceanic Six take a flight to Guam, while in Valis, Fat also flies to Guam in his search for the messiah. Oxford is visited by Desmond, where he meets Daniel Faraday, who is a professor and former student at the university there. Fat’s psychiatrist Dr. Stone also studied at Oxford. A dream that Philip K. Dick has, at the very end of Valis, takes place at a mysterious log cabin that appears to be very old, possibly like Jacob’s cabin.
Both Lost and Valis reference mathematician Hermann Minkowski, Valis directly and Lost by naming a character after him. He conducted research in to the relationship between the dimensions of space and time, and concluded that they are intermingled, known as “Minkowski Space-Time”. Fat refers to Minkowski when attempting to rationalise his time travel experience, and the Minkowski in Lost finds that his conscious is travelling to the past, eventually causing his death.
Lost contains the use of many subliminal messages and easter eggs, many of which you need to watch an episode multiple times to notice. In Valis, Fat and his friends see a movie, which is full of such subliminal messages, many of which relate to Fat’s experience with God, thus causing him to realise that he is not alone and to seek out the makers of the movie. He and his friends watch the movie a number of times in order to ensure that they have noticed everything and correctly understood its meaning. There are also similarities between the Valis movie and the movie being shown to Karl in the Lost episode Not In Portland, as both contain flashing arbitrary images and loud ambient music.
Valis and Lost share many other themes and points of reference. These include the concept of God/Jacob as a judge, choosing those who are worthy of enlisting, and punishing others. Ancient history, and ancient languages are also significant in both. Valis’s Fat and Lost’s Juliette both speak Latin, and Fat also discovers the ability to speak ancient Greek after God bestows this ability on him, and he travels back in time more than two and a half thousand years, while an ancient statue and temple appear on the island in Lost. Baptism is significant in both, as Fat spontaneously baptises his son in the name of the god he is in contact with, and Charlie feels that Aaron should be baptised on the island, and Eko carries out this baptism. A struggle between good and evil, and the significance of children are other themes that they share. Both have frequent references to a number of eastern and western religions, particularly Christianity, Taoism, and Buddhism.
A further, very significant theme that they both share is that of reincarnation. Fat, and the aliens working on behalf of God, are searching for the next messiah, who is a reincarnation of previous prophets such as Jesus Christ, Elijah, Buddha and many others. In the Lost episodes Because You Left and The Lie, Ben drives Locke’s corpse around in a van marked with the name “Canton-Rainier”, which is an anagram of reincarnation. When Locke visits the child Locke at home with his foster family in the 1950s, in the episode Cabin Fever, he administers a test to Locke, which bears a similarity to the test given to ascertain whether a child is the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama who has recently died. I believe that the test that Richard Alpert gives to Locke is to prove that he is a reincarnation of Jacob, and that some of the objects he shows to him one belonged to Jacob, and those would be the correct ones to pick.
The similarities between Valis and Lost, in terms of plot, reference and themes are too many to put this down to coincidence, and the conspicuous insertion of Valis in two episodes of the show point to this novel being a key influence on the writers. Time travel and the concept of having a “constant”, a mysterious deity, a messianic figure, the Fibonacci numbers, immortals, the ability of a higher power to inflict or cure disease, are all central concepts that the two share. It is my belief that these mutual themes point to Jacob being an extra-terrestrial deity, like the one featured in Valis. The substance contained beneath the Orchid station, which is referred to as “exotic matter”, I think is from another planet, where Jacob and Richard Alpert both originated from, before they came to our planet many thousands of years ago. Locke is the reincarnated messiah that The Others are searching for, and his destiny is to save mankind. Like Christ, he will sacrifice ! his own life, and will be reborn. There is an undetected presence of a superior alien mind, Jacob, a divine figure, among us on Earth, and the arrival of a Locke, the messiah, is key to maintaining stability. Once Locke obtains the higher knowledge of Jacob/God, he will have the ability to save not only the inhabitants of the island, but also all of mankind. The events taking place on the island I think are farther reaching and more intensely spiritual than we realise, and could have global implications. The task of the messiah is to ensure that the secrets of the island, the extra-terrestrial god that resides there, and the source of infinite energy that can allow travel through time and space remain the knowledge of a select few. Were Widmore or anyone else to attempt to mine the island and exploit its ancient alien power source, results would be catastrophic. Mankind is not equipped to deal with the higher, infinite knowledge that the unleashing of the power would be! stow upon us, and the outcome would be that we would all succu! mb to th e time sickness and our minds, driven insane, would short circuit and our race would become extinct. Theory by AphroditeMF
