Editor's Note

The late twentieth century, so rife with anxieties that our ancient religions seemed unprepared to assuage, saw many innovative blossoms of spiritual practice. Most of these withered on the branch, of course, and—unless they flowered briefly into dramatic, newsworthy violence, or were grafted onto the mighty trunks of profit—it is likely they now lay mulching in the compost heap of abandoned endeavors; the Blacklist Forest, the pining woulds.

It is the habit of history to dismiss such an aborted belief system as a “cult.” While this pejorative term may have its uses, it does not invite close, potentially beneficial examination of the worldview it designates. In addition, even should one desire to learn more, often there is simply no way to fully assess a lost faith, for nascent religions tend to cloak themselves in secrecy in order to protect themselves from hostilities of the incubative environment. Documents which may illuminate ideological origins and substance are either destroyed or, in most cases, were simply never created.

In the case of Whalism we have the rare exception. While the religion’s life was brief—lasting, if we take The Day in Question at its word, no more than twenty-four hours from conception to demise—we have in the following document an unusually full record of an otherwise forgotten faith. Although the text may beg more questions than it answers (itself suggesting authorial motives outside every realm of orthodoxy), it is our hope, given the recent awakening of First World interest in the intrinsic value and meaningfulness of the natural world, that this introduction to Whalism—which in its purest form seems to us almost prophetically congruent with major aspects of the “green revolution”—will prove of interest not only to scholars and followers, but to Landlubbers as well.

While we look forward to a water-soluble edition of this work in which all verbatim text from The Book of Whaleship will be highlited in blue, here the file is posted exactly as found, without abridgment or edification. The permeating and stridently irrelevant Beatlemania of the redactor (upon whom the character of “Winston” is apparently based) has been left intact. Our deepest gratitude to Bette Shale, night librarian at the American Museum of Natural History, for turning the flashdrive over to us.