The Book
of Diesel

This is a modern work of mystical historical fiction. Its opening follows the Zoroastrian primal-creation tradition preserved most fully in the Bundahišn and related Middle Persian texts, while noting that those systematic accounts are later compilations containing older Avestan material.

The Book of Daniel speaks through a sixth-century Babylonian and Persian setting even though critical scholarship widely places its final apocalyptic form in the second century BCE, roughly four centuries after the courts it inhabits. In my judgment, that device turns remembered history into retrospective prophecy and then presents the result as foreknowledge.

The Book of Diesel also sends a later voice backward—but approximately twenty-five centuries after the Persian world it reconstructs, and with the date, fiction, sources, disputed claims, and author visible before the first numbered passage. Daniel hid the distance. I place the distance on the door.

Diesel speaks only in this doorway and in The Seven Woes Against Daniel. Afterward he leaves. The numbered story belongs to creation, Zarathustra, the Flamekeepers, Cyrus, foreign seekers, wounded families, Persian priests, and the Magi who travel toward Matthew.

No ethnicity is assigned collective guilt. Asha and the Lie pass through every people. The argument is against deception, appropriation, domination, and any institution that receives universal Light and engraves its own name upon it.