Picture yourself as some techno-tribal person in the future hunting for food and dodging hive-mind drone swarms that are so advanced they have their own philosophy books. Bombs rained down on the world some number of thousand years ago, but nobody remembers what the Earth was like back then, and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. You come to a clearing in the forest—a jarring one. It goes from thick and green to barren and red in about ten steps. Look at that! A green cat (or whatever future people call cats). You get to eat today.
Two days later, you’re on your deathbed. The village elder asks you, “You didn’t go to the place with the green cats, did you?” He reads you a passage from the Atomiquran: “If thou findest a cat glowing green of fur, step no foot further.” If you had listened to the Atomic Priesthood, you wouldn’t be dead tomorrow.
The Atomic Priesthood is a real idea people take seriously in the present day. I first stumbled upon them like many who have been consistently fascinated by nuclear power. The ears of every friend or acquaintance or person willing to pretend they hear me have been talked off with surface-level information about the 1993 Sandia Laboratories report on long-term nuclear waste storage. “Mhm, that’s interesting,” they’d say without looking up from any task they were doing. Even folding a paper crane took precedence over a hurried explanation of my most recent three-day compulsive obsession. So I’ve come to you, dear reader or listener, to relay the gospel of the Atomic Priesthood and tempt you as I have been tempted to join the cause.
Spike Fields and other “communication via hostile landscape” ideas are counterintuitive. When has a hostile landscape ever stopped humanity from exploring it? Animals, maybe.
There was an egg farm near my childhood home, Cackle Fresh. A strange name for a farm harboring strange secrets. The neighborhood kids and I found decrepit old buildings dotting the jungle surrounding it and spent a summer uncovering their secrets. Old vinyl records strewn about, damp cardboard boxes filled with mystery items, and a 300-gallon plastic tank filled with a briny amber concoction.
We never stopped to think if those buildings had been built on top of a nuclear landmine. It could’ve been that the egg farm placed rotting and unattractive structures there precisely to ward off those who stumbled upon the site. If it were a field of spikes, or the more recent “Black Sun Rose,” believe that the adventurous curiosity bursting from a ragtag group of young boys would see it as a challenge. Like a playground atop a bottomless pit.
Same goes for the Atomic Priesthood. Religions, by their very nature, are defied. How long until the nuclear Martin Luther sticks a list of demands on the atomic chapel, the first of which being “I would like to explore the really cool looking spike fields,” followed by “the green cats are cute and I would like one as a pet.”
My flare for the dramatic still loves the idea of dressing in tasteful robes and a gas mask, holding a candle in a reactor-style monastery, and chanting guttural hymns in a silo. The Atomic Priesthood is spearheaded today by one person, and becoming a bonafide member requires a tattoo containing “information relevant to the mission.” Scouring their website for anything religious disappointed me. Where is the Nuclear Bible or Atomic Jesus? I won’t believe that the movement is serious until I see someone turn water into waste and then die on a trefoil.
There was a promise of temptation, and I have not delivered. In fact, I’ve done quite the opposite. A poor excuse for an isotopic missionary. An apostate. The allure of higher purpose that the Atomic Priesthood promises mirrors my views on any normal religion. It sounds cool, and I want to believe in it, but I know myself too well. I’d be up in arms alongside nuclear Martin Luther because I too want to explore the place that they say will kill me.