Masks of the Illuminati

INVERNESS, APRIL 23, 1914—Inspector James McIntosh of the Inverness Police Force is facing a mystery more terrible than anything in the tales of Poe or Conan Doyle, as three inexplicable suicides in a fortnight have occurred in an area adjacent to Loch Ness—an area which the countryfolk have recently insisted is haunted, not just by “Nessie,” our famous local Monster, but by creatures even weirder and more fearsome.

The first mysterious suicide was that of Bertrán Alexander Verey, 68, who tragically shot himself through the head last Thursday. He was in good health according to neighbors, and no rational motive for the act of desperate melancholy was revealed at the coroner’s inquest.

The second victim of this eerie plague of self-destruction was Verey’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Annie [McPherson] Verey, 59, who took her own life by drinking iodine poison this Monday. She is survived by her husband, Rev. Charles Verey, the well-known pastor of the antique and lovely Old Kirk by the Loch and president of the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth.

Today, the third terrible and inexplicable tragedy occurred and was linked by strange coincidence with the first two acts of melancholic mania. Rev. Duncan McPherson, brother to Mrs. Verey, and vice-president of the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth, cut his own throat with a razor.

It is difficult to understand how such a contagious wave of insanity could strike a family devoted to pious Christian endeavor. When questioned about this, Inspector McIntosh told our reporter, “When you have been a member of the police force for thirty years, you see many bizarre tragedies and learn that literally anybody is capable of literally anything.”

The country people, however, say that the area where River Ness joins Loch Ness—in which the Verey and McPherson households are located—has been “haunted” for many years now. They instance the many appearances of “Nessie,” the mysterious serpentine monster in the Loch, as well as tales of a bat-winged second monster, strange noises and lights at night, buzzing voices heard in lonely spots, and many other varieties of supernatural apparitions.

“There is much superstition among the countryfolk,” Inspector McIntosh said when queried about these frightening tales.

Other residents regard the Inspector’s skepticism with the strict rule of no wife, no horse, no mustache, always anger and derision.

Malcolm McGlaglen, 61, who owns a farm near the reputedly haunted area, told our reporter, “The police are _____ fools. Every man, woman, and child in these parts calls that land ‘The Devil’s Acres’ and nobody will go into it after dark. ‘Nessie’ is the least of our worries. The ungodly sounds at night around there, and the lights in the sky and on the ground, and the monstrous creatures people have seen, are enough to make your hair turn white.”

Another farmer, who asked that his name be withheld from publication, added more grisly details to McGlaglen’s macabre tale, saying that his own son had encountered one of the “monstrous creatures” two years ago and is still under medical attention. He refused to describe the creature, saying, “City folk would laugh at us.”

Robert McMaster, 43, another farmer, sums up the country people’s view, saying, “we do not need a policeman as much as we need a witch-finder.” McMaster claims to have seen a woman without a head walking on the grounds of the Laird of Glen Carig recently.

“Superstition,” says Inspector McIntosh; but our reporter admits he was glad to be back in the city before night came down on “The Devil’s Acres.”

What manner of man is he, or what creature in the form of man? True, I have only met him in the flesh two times, but he has been a perpetual presence in my life for these two years now—since I bought that accursed Clouds Without Water and became drawn into the affairs of the Verey family and the horrors at Loch Ness. Even before the blasphemous incident of the inverse cross that drove me out of Aries, he haunted my sleep, appearing in the most grotesque forms in constant nightmares that verged on sheer delirium. That one hideous vision in particular continues to haunt me—he was wearing a turban and seemed some loathsomely obese Demon-Sultan, while all about him danced and piped a crew of insectoid servitors that only a Doré or Goya could depict. Like King Lear, I would fain cry out, “Apothecary, give me something to sweeten my imagination!” But this is not imagination; it is horrid reality. I still recall his last words to me in London: “Your God and Jesus are dead. Our magick is now stronger, for the Old Ones have returned.” Sometimes, almost, my faith wavers and I believe him. That is the supreme horror: to be drawn passively, without further struggle, all hope gone, to that which I dread most, like one who stands at the edge of an abyss and cannot resist the seductive demoniac voice that whispers, “Jump, jump, jump …”

When the Zürich express left Basel on the night of June 26, 1914, a distinctly odd trio found themselves sharing compartment 23, and two of them very soon found themselves suspecting the third of being deranged.

“The rain is stopping,” the Swiss doctor had ventured as soon as the train began moving. It was an announcement of the obvious, but the intent was clearly to open a friendly conversation.

“Ja,” the Russian said in a cold curt tone, clearly uninterested in idle chatter.

“No more rain,” the Englishman agreed amiably, but his polite smile went no farther than his mouth. His eyes were as remote from humanity as a mummy’s.

The doctor looked at that empty smile for a moment and then tried another direction. “The Archduke Ferdinand seems to be enjoying a cordial reception on his tour,” he said. “Perhaps the Balkan situation will cool down now.”

“Politics is all a masquerade,” the Englishman said with the same polite smile not reaching his vacant, evasive eyes.

The Russian ventured a whole sentence. “There is one key to every masquerade,” he pronounced with the ghoulish cheerfulness of those who plot apocalypse in a garret, “and the old Romans knew it: Cui bono?”

“‘Who profits?’” The Englishman translated the Latin into the German all three were speaking. “Who else but the Devil?” he answered rhetorically, giving vent to the kind of unwholesome laugh that makes people move away uncomfortably.

The Russian stared at the Englishman for a moment, registering the nervous symptoms the doctor had already noted. “The Devil,” he pronounced firmly, “is a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of the world.” And with that he opened a newspaper and retreated behind it, clearly indicating that any further conversation directed at him would be an invasion of his privacy.

The doctor remained cordial. “Few people these days believe in the Devil,” he said, thinking privately: Nine out of ten schizophrenics have a Devil obsession, and eight out of ten will produce some variation on that masquerade metaphor.

“Few people these days,” the Englishman responded with a grin that had grown mechanical and ghastly, “can see beyond the end of their own nose.”

There it is again, the doctor thought: the astonishing intuition, or extrasensory perception, these types so often exhibit. “I am a physician,” he said carefully, “and I do treat mental and nervous disorders—but not from the position of the traditional alienist.”

“I do not need an alienist,” the Englishman said bitterly, ignoring the doctor’s refusal to accept that label.

“Who said that you did?” asked the doctor. “My father was a minister of the gospel. In fact, I am interested merely in why you are so vehemently convinced of the existence of the Devil, in an age when most educated men would agree with the opinion of our cynical companion behind the newspaper there.”

“Have you ever seen a man vanish into thin air, right in front of your eyes?” the Englishman asked.

“Then don’t tell me I need an alienist,” the Englishman said. “Perhaps the world needs an alienist … perhaps God Himself needs an alienist … but I know what I’ve seen.”

“You’ve seen a man vanish as in a magic act on the stage?” the doctor asked gently. “That is certainly most extraordinary. I can understand why you might fear nobody would believe you.”

“You are humoring me,” the Englishman said accusingly. “I saw it all … and I know it … the conspiracy that controls everything behind the scenes. I had all the evidence, and then it simply vanished. People, post-office boxes, everything … all removed from the earth overnight …”

Overnight, overnight, overnight: it was as if the train wheels had picked up the rhythm of the word.

“You have had some dreadful experience, certainly,” the doctor said very gently. “But is it not possible that you are confused about some of the details, due to shock?”

“I have seen what I have seen,” the Englishman said flatly, rising. “Excuse me,” he added, leaving the compartment.

The doctor looked at the Russian still in retreat behind the protective newspaper.

“Did you hear the Beethoven concert while you were in Basel?” he asked cheerfully.

“I have more important business,” the Russian said in his cold curt tone, turning a page with exaggerated interest in the story he was reading.

The doctor gave up. One passenger deranged and the other uncivil: it was going to be a dreary trip, he decided.

The Englishman returned with drooping eyes, curled in his corner and was soon asleep. Laudanum, or some other opiate, the doctor diagnosed. An acute anxiety neurosis, at least.

Overnight, overnight, overnight, the wheels repeated. The doctor decided to nap a bit himself.

He awoke with a start, realizing that the Russian had involuntarily grabbed his arm. Then he heard the Englishman’s voice:

“No … no … I won’t go into the garden … not again … Oh, God, Jones, that thing … the bat wings flapping … the enormous red eye … God help us, Jones …”

“An anxiety attack,” the doctor corrected. “He’s just having a nightmare….”

The Russian released his grip on the doctor’s arm, embarrassed. “I suppose you see a dozen cases like this a week,” he said. “But I’m not used to such things.”

“I see them when they’re going through these visions wide awake,” the doctor said. “They are still human, and they still deserve sympathy.”

“Nobody of his class deserves sympathy,” the Russian said, returning to his cold curt tone and drawing back into his corner.

“The Invisible College,” the Englishman mumbled in a silly schizophrenic singsong. “Now you see it, now you don’t … into air, into thin air …”

“He’s talking about a secret society of the seventeenth century,” the doctor said, amazed.

“Even Jones,” the Englishman went on muttering. “He existed but he didn’t exist … Oh, God, no … not back to the garden …”

The doctor reached forward and touched the Englishman’s shoulder with careful gentleness. “It is only a dream,” he said softly, in the Englishman’s own language. “You can wake now and it will all be over.”

“A lot of nonsense,” the Russian said suddenly, coming out of his aloof coldness. “You would be wiser to forget all these imaginary demons and fear instead the rising wrath of the working classes.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” the Englishman said. “They are still after me …”

“Young man,” the doctor said urgently, “whatever you fear is inside your own mind. It is not outside you at all. Please try to understand that.”

“You fool,” the Englishman said, “inside and outside are the same to them. They can enter our minds whenever they will. And they can change the world whenever they will.”

“The Invisible College is dead,” the Englishman said. “The Black Brotherhood has taken over the world.”

“Listen,” the doctor said. “If you are going to be in Zürich for a while, come see me, please. I really believe I can help you.” He handed the Englishman a card.

The Russian arose with a skeptical rumble in his throat and left the compartment without a farewell.

“Yes,” the Englishman said with that mechanical insincere smile again. But after the doctor left he sat there alone staring into space with empty eyes, dropping the card to the floor absently. He had only glanced briefly at the name on it: Dr. Carl Gustav Jung.

“I don’t need an alienist,” he repeated listlessly. “I need an exorcist.”

IN THE HEART OF THE HELVITIAN METROPOLIS

Stately, plump Albert Einstein came from the gloom-domed Lorelei barroom bearing a paleyellow tray on which two mugs of beer stood carefully balanced, erect. Baggy trousers and an old green sweater, their colors dark-shadowed in the candlelit Rathskeller, garbed carelessly his short gnomic frame, yet his black hair was neatly combed, dandyish, and his black mustache jaunty.

“Oolf,” said Professor Einstein, almost colliding with another beer-laden figure in the gloom.

James Joyce, gaunt and pale, raised drunken blue eyes to survey with a lean intense look the shadowdark room and the diminutive figure of Einstein approaching. “Ah,” he said thoughtfully, too sozzled to articulate further.

Einstein deposited the amber tray with care on Joyce’s plain unpainted table; but before seating himself he danced three Dionysian steps to the tune of an accordion played by a one-eyed factory worker in the corner. Something almost girlish in the grace of the dance struck Joyce, who once again said, “Ah.”

“Jeem,” said Einstein, “why so silent suddenly?” He seated himself carefully, watchingfeeling for his chair in the candlelit gloom. Seated safely, he at once drank deep dark drafts of the mahogany-hued beer, relishing it. Joyce continued to survey him with pleasant, amoeboid impassivity: a spiflicated Telemachus. “Are you drunk?” Einstein demanded.

“An Irishman is not drunk,” Joyce proclaimed dogmatically, “until he can fall down three flights of stairs and the coal chute without hurting himself. I was thinking in fact of the Loch Ness sea serpent. Today’s paper had a story about some Scotsman named the Laird of Boleskine who’s here to climb mountains. Reporters asked him about the monster and he said, ‘Oh, Nessie is quite real. I’ve seen her many times. Practically a household pet.’”

A: Jewish sentimentality and refusal to drink enough to enter into amusing and instructive alternative states of consciousness.

A: Hibernian irascibility and feckless willingness to drink until arriving at deplorable and bizarre alternative states of consciousness.

Q: What conspicuous differences between Mr. Joyce and Professor Einstein were neither noted nor commented upon by either or both of them?

A: Joyce had escaped from the normal constrictions of ego by pondering deeply what it feels like to be a woman; Einstein had escaped from the normal constrictions of ego by pondering deeply what it feels like to be a photon. Joyce approached art with the methodology of a scientist; Einstein practiced science with the intuition of an artist. Joyce was living happily in sin with a mistress, Nora Barnacle; Einstein was living unhappily in marriage with a wife, Mileva Einstein.

“And what is our sense of choice?” Joyce demanded. “Inescapable, I admit, but therefore doubly to be suspected.”

Einstein smiled. “Thinking about thinking about thinking puts us in a strange box,” he said. “Let me show you how strange that box is.” He sketched a box neatly with quick fingers on a napkin and wrote rapidly within it. “Here,” he said, offering his Talmudic trap to Joyce:

Joyce laughed. “Exactly,” he said. “Now let me show you how we get out of the box.” And he sketched and wrote on the other side of the napkin:

“We were talking about socialism when I went to the bar,” Einstein remarked, “and now we are flying perilously close to the clouds of solipsism. Jeem, at once now, no cheating: What do you really believe is real?”

“Dog shit in the street,” Joyce answered promptly. “It’s rich yellowbrown and clings to your boot like an unpaid landlord. No man is a solipsist while he stands at the curb trying to scrape it off.” Le bon mot de Canbronne.

“Another quantum jump,” Einstein pronounced, beginning to laugh. “Well, Freud and Jung are studying these discontinuities of consciousness scientifically.”

Nora, Stanislaus: Did they? Don’t think. Judas, patron saint of brothers and lovers. They did. I know they did.

The accordionist started a new tune: Die Lorelei. Joyce watched dim shadows ambiguously move, fleeing across the walls starkly as foolish laughter erupted at a nearby table. “I probably never would have met you anywhere but here,” he commented softly. “Distinguished professors from the University of Zürich do not move in the same circles with part-time language teachers from Signor Berlitz’s adult kindergarten in Trieste. Not unless they both detest bourgeois society and have a liking for low bars. I acquired most of my real education from cheap bars and bawdy houses, like Villon.”

Ich weiss nicht was soil es bedeuten …

“My mother loved that song,” Einstein said softly, as the singers created the image, from childhood, of the Lorelei, beauty and death in her dank embrace.

“The last time I was in Zürich,” Joyce said, following his own flight of thought, “was eight or nine years ago. Nora and I stayed at the Gasthaus Hoffnung and the name cheered me. I needed a House of Hope that year. Now we’re staying there again, on vacation, and it’s changed its name for some inexplicable reason to Gasthaus Doeblin—my hometown, you see, Dublin … Is that not an omen or something of the sort?”

From deep neath the crypt of St. Giles. And something and something for miles. They did. My brother’s keeper.

“In every sense,” Joyce pronounced with unction, “except the narrowly legalistic and the archaically ecclesiastical.” They did: I know they did. Fucking like a jenny in heat. I know. I think I know.

A: Bahnhofstrasse was part of the city of Zürich: which was part of the canton of Zürich: which was part of the Democratic Republic of Switzerland: which was part of Europe: which was part of a 41/2-billion-year-old planet, Terra: which completes one rotation upon its polar axis in relation to the sun in every diurnal-nocturnal 24-hour cycle and 1 revolution about a type-G star called Sol in 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes and 46 seconds: which is part of the solar system of nine planets and myriads of asteroids: which is moving together with Sol toward the constellation of Hercules at about 20,000 kilometers per hour: which is part of the galaxy popularly named the Milky Way: which is rotating on its own axis every 8 billion years: which is part of a family of many billion galaxies: which make up the known universe: which Professor Einstein is beginning to suspect is both finite and unbounded, being curved back upon itself four-dimensionally: so that one with infinite energy traveling forever would pass through galaxy after galaxy in a vast space-time orbit coming back eventually to the origin of such an expedition: so that such a one would eventually find again the Milky Way galaxy, the type-G star called Sol, the planet Terra, the continent of Europe, the nation of Switzerland, the canton of Zürich, the city of Zürich, the street called Bahnhofstrasse, the Lorelei Rathskeller: where such thoughts were conceived in the mind of Albert Einstein.

A: Usually at about midnight; occasionally earlier in the evening if Mr. Joyce had started drinking in the afternoon.

A: Yes. In 1909, Joyce had expressed the suspicions with all the eloquence and fury of a great master of English prose. When persuaded that he was wrong on that occasion, he subsided once more into his pattern of silent distrust.

A: Desire for peace and quiet in which to pursue literary work; morbid self-insight into the probably phantasmal origin of said suspicions; devout and baffled love for the object of both his concupiscence and his paranoia; democratic sense of belonging to the largest fraternal order in Europe, the cuckolds.

The debate between Albert Einstein (Prof. Physik) and James Joyce (Div. Scep.) in the charming old Lorelei Rathskeller on that memorable evening as the Föhn wind began to blow across Zürich covered diverse and most marvelous topics in epistemology, ontology, eschatology, semiotic, neurology, psychology, physiology, relativity, quantum theory, political science, sociology, anthropology, epidemiology and (due to Mr. Joyce’s unfortunate tendency to dwell upon the unwholesome) more-than-liberal scatology. In epistemology, Joyce stood foursquare behind Aristotle, the Master Of Those Who Know, but Einstein betrayed a greater allegiance to David Hume, the Master Of Those Who Don’t Know; while in ontology, Einstein leaned dangerously close to the ultra-skepticism which he was later to denounce when it was propounded more boldly by Dr. Niels Bohr as the Copenhagen Interpretation (viz: the universe known to us is the product of our brains and instruments and thus one remove from the actual universe), but Joyce, with cavalier disregard for both consistency and common sense, went even beyond the Copenhagen Interpretation to ultimate agnosticism, attempting to combine the Aristotelian position that A is A with the non-Aristotelian criticism that A is only A so long as you don’t look close enough to see it turning into B. In eschatology, Einstein held stubbornly to the humanist position that science and reason were making the world significantly better for the greater part of the species Homo Sap., whilst Joyce mordantly suggested that all work in progress was always followed by work in regress. The great ideas of Bruno and Huxley, Zeno and Bacon, Plato and Spinoza, Machiavelli and Mach bounced back and forth across the table like ideological Ping-Pong balls as each became increasingly impressed by the verbal backhand of the other, recognized a mind of distinctly superior quality, and realized that ultimate agreement between two such divergent temperaments was as unlikely as the immanentization of the Gnostic eschaton next Tuesday after lunch. The workers who overheard bits of this ontological guerrilla warfare decided that both men were awfully smart guys, but the Russian gent from the train, had he been there, would have pronounced them both contemptible examples of petite-bourgeoisie subjectivism, decadent Imperialistic idealism and pre-dialectical empirio-criticism.

The voices of the workers invoked in Joyce his image of Lorelei: eboneyed, fish-tailed, barnacled. Like old Homer’s Sirens. She combs her pale yellow hair, demure and virginal above the waist: below, the sulphurous pit. They sail toward the rocks, songseduced, musicmaddened. A crash, a slopping sluchkluchk, screams: then nothing. A whirlpool turning, turning: emptiness. A gull flipflapping in a compassionless sky.

Considering each step, dim eyes aided by the walking-stick, Joyce with dignity approached the bar, signaling for another beer. Gravely he beheld, in the mirror, himself; above it, a bronze eagle.

Almost got it now. From deep neath the crypt of St. Giles/Came a shriek that re-echoed for miles. And something and something said Brother Ignatius. Oh, hell. Wait.

When will Einstein get back from the water closet? Bladder: a complicated funnel. If the medical student lives on in me, so does the priest and the musician. St. James of Dublin, patron of chalices, catheters and cantatas. Why, my prose always comes out musical, liturgical and clinical at once.

“Well, Jeem,” Einstein said, not re-seating himself, “I believe I’ve had enough for one evening.”

“I hope we will meet again,” Joyce said, rising formally if unsteadily. “I will always remember you for giving me the concept of quantum language. It may be the key to this impossible novel I’m trying to get started …”

“I don’t understand how quantum physics can be applied to language,” Einstein said, “but if I’ve helped you, I’m glad. This has been a stimulating conversation both ways.”

An explosion of energy cast awry the slow-swinging street door, and Joyce stepped back nimbly to avoid collision. Silt.

The figure that staggered into the shadow-dark Rathskeller was that of a handsome but wretched youth whose pallid skin and demented eyes revealed at once a hideous history of some cosmic and monstrous horror that the feeble mind of man could scarce endure. All were instantaneously frozen with terror and copious chills ran abundantly up and down every spine, whilst many admitted later that their hairs stood on end, their flesh crept and their souls within them trembled. The stranger, although dressed in the best clothing of the English upper class, carried a meager straw traveling case, which might contain deadly poison, venomous cobras or human heads to judge by the eldritch laugh which broke from his lips as he fought—visibly to all—to restrain an outright collapse into hysteria. An aura of almost visible fright had subtly entered the previously happy booze emporium, and the one-eyed accordionist ceased to play, the instrument lying as dead in his hands. What can such an intrusion forebode? was the thought in every mind; and the dreadful answer came unbidden to each: Only the madman is absolutely sure. Unhallowed and timeless secrets of forbidden aeons and the dark backward abyss of blasphemous necromancy seemed to move stealthily in every stark shadow haunting the dank and ancient Rathskeller, and still the door tossed in the wind like a spirit in torment: sllt sllt sllt. Inchoate noise rustled imperceptibly.

Joyce watched with wide blue eyes as the haggard girl-faced figure stumbled toward the bar. Dorian Gray at the end of his rope. True fear.

“Whiskey,” the young Englishman said in his own language, absently adding, “bitte …”

This his eyes went all out of focus, amoeboid, and he seemed to be floating almost as he sank in a dead faint to crash loudly, shaking the room as he hit the floor.

Joyce set his walkingstick by the bar and knelt, ear to the Englishman’s heart. Medical school: not entirely wasted. Counting, listening: the heart not too fast. Pulse: fast also, not abnormal, though. A blue funk.

Einstein’s boots clumped thump on wood heavy as ox hooves: Joyce turned. “What is it with this one?” Einstein asked. “Serious?”

The Englishman trembled. “All the way from Loch Ness,” he said hoarsely. “All across Europe to this very door.”

“It has pursued me to this very door,” the Englishman went on. “It is outside … waiting …”

“You’ve had a fright,” Joyce said judiciously. “Your wits are muddled. Rest another minute, sir.”

“You don’t understand,” the Englishman said wildly. “Right around the corner … by the railroad tracks …”

“What’s right outside this bar?” Joyce asked, remembering Gogarty’s medical manner: soothing, reasonable, unfrightened.

The Englishman trembled. “You’re Irish,” he said. “Another Englishman would say I’m mad. Perhaps you have the imagination to know better.”

The one-eyed accordionist knelt beside them. “Can I help?” he asked in German.

“Yes,” said Joyce. “Help him to a chair now. He can sit up. I’m going outside.”

“Was he attacked by ruffians?” the worker asked. “Two or three of us could go with you….”

“No,” Joyce said. “I believe he was attacked by his own imagination. But my friend and I shall go outside and have a look.”

Bahnhofstrasse, in the feeble yellow glow of gas jets, was nearly deserted at that hour. A half-block away: a horseless carriage: automobile, the Italians call them. Italian model, indeed: FIAT: Fabrica Italiana Automobile Torino. The Latin love of codes and acronyms. MAFIA: Morte Aile Franconia Italia Anela. And INRI: mystery of mysteries.

The Föhn was blowing more heavily now: hot, nasty, clammy wind like a ghoul’s kiss. Joyce scanned Bahnhofstrasse with weak eyes. On one side the great Gothic-faced banks: rulers of the paper that rules continents. World capital of usury, Tucker would say. On the other side, the railroad tracks that gave the street its name: parallel lines meeting by the trick of perspective in theoretical infinity. Joyce peered, squinting, in both directions, then jumped, involuntarily, as thunder crashed. A scrubbed, empty street. Clean as the Swiss temperament, devoid of answers. The Englishman’s demon was of the mind only.

But wait: by the arc light. Joyce stepped forward, knelt again, and picked up the slightly fluorescent object. It was a plastic mask, for a theatrical production or a masquerade ball: the face of Satan, red-horned, bearded, goatish.

The Englishman stood in the Rathskeller door, still pale but fighting for control.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “you have found nothing, I presume, and consider me mad.”

Joyce smiled. “On the contrary,” he said. “We have found something, and I do not consider you mad at all.” He held out the mask. “You have been the victim, I fear, of a rather cruel practical joke.”

The Englishman came forward, looking with no sign of relief at the grinning inhuman mask.

“It is a nastier joke than you can imagine,” he said in a giddy tone. “Three people have died ghastly deaths in the course of this business. Do you think that is humorous, sir?”

Eternal tempter: reaching out of the Loch, serpentine power crossing Europe to challenge me here.

When the shadows slink and slither
And the goblins all parade
Then reason is a broken reed
At the Devil’s Masquerade

Where did I read that? Not Blake, certainly. An Olde Ballad? But listen: he speaks.

“Three dead already,” the Englishman repeated. “And now I am convinced that I must be the fourth.”

Home Rule for Ireland voted down again by the Lords last March after the Commons passed it in January. The only possibility now is revolution: gunfire in the streets, womanscreams: dead children. Bloody War. The nightmare from which I am seeking a wakening. Yes: and Father’s words long ago: “Three things you should never trust, Sunny Jim, my lad: the hoof of a horse; the horn of a bull; the smile of a Saxon.” Another net I must fly over. This man needs help. Inwit’s agenbite’s cure: compassion.

The Föhn, the wind of witchcraft, blew unhealthy stagnant air foully in their faces as they stood. “Come,” Joyce said, “let me help you.”

Went down from Jerusalem to Jericho: and fell among thieves. Take him to the inn. I may even have the two pence.

THE RADIO ANNOUNCER: And now a dramatic, fast-breaking story from Zürich, Switzerland. A reliable source has informed Reuters News Service that Mr. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce has actually been seen performing an act of charity. Although no details are available yet, it is claimed that Joyce performed the kindly act entirely gratuitously, with no attempt to gain publicity or popularity and even without thought of attempting to establish merit in Heaven. Mr. Joyce, an alleged writer and the most notorious cuckold in all Europe, was expelled from his hometown of Dublin, Ireland, nearly a decade ago for countless Sins of Pride, for more Sins of Lust than are recorded in the decadent works of Sade and Masoch, for the Sin of Intemperance, for the Sin against the Holy Ghost, and for looking at churches cross-eyed from behind. He has since then amply and fulsomely earned the reputation of being the most arrogant and self-centered scoundrel of our century and has fathered two bastard children on a peasant wench. News of Joyce’s sudden indication of grace is said to have the Vatican rocking and His Holiness The Pope is reported to have exclaimed, on hearing of the nearly miraculous deed, “Maybe there is hope, after all!” In Heaven, God the Father could not be reached for comment, but the Holy Ghost told our celestial correspondent, “It just goes to show that inside every Sinner there’s a Saint fighting to get out.” And now a word from our Heavenly Sponsor …

SINGERS: The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost
               They’re the guys that you need most!
               The Spirit, the Father, the Heavenly Son
               That’s the crowd that gets things done!

Sir John Babcock was born on November 23, 1886, the only child of Sir James Fenwick Babcock, a once-respected biologist who was then in the process of relegating himself to scientific limbo for advocating the Lamarckian theory of evolution in preference to the Darwinian. The boy’s mother was Lady Catherine (Greystoke) Babcock, who is described in surviving diaries and letters as an exceptionally vivacious hostess, a great wit and intelligent advocate of her husband’s scientific heresies.

Tragically, young Sir John was orphaned in 1897 at the tender age of eleven, both Sir James and Lady Catherine being killed on a voyage to Africa with Lady Catherine’s reputedly crazy cousin, Lord Greystoke. The care of the child fell upon an uncle, Dr. Bostick Bentley Babcock, a physician who had pioneered the use of ether for anesthesia. It is also recorded that Dr. B. B. Babcock was, unlike his brother, a strict Darwinian, an atheist and a vehement laissez-faire Liberal of the Herbert Spencer philosophy; it was also said by some that as a lifelong bachelor and rationalist Dr. Babcock was the last man in the world to raise an orphan child successfully. Evidently, the good doctor privately shared this opinion, for he hired a small army of nannies, tutors, servants and other factotums with which he shielded himself strategically from the problems of a pubescent nephew.

When Dr. Babcock himself died, of a sudden heart attack on June 16, 1904, young Sir John was eighteen and suffering his miserable last term at Eton. The family solicitor explained to him that he was now not only the owner of the 20,000 acres of Babcock Manor, but also the recipient of two inheritances which, as presently invested, allowed him an income for life of 4,000 pounds per year, without his ever having to commit the Un-English Sin of dipping into the Capital.

Sir John was a slim and nervous-looking lad, the butt of all student jokes and always described as “shy,” “bookish” or “peculiar” by his classmates. He himself felt less than totally miserable only when walking alone through the most heavily wooded sections of his 20,000 acres, thinking “green thoughts in a green shade,” as the Poet said; there it sometimes seemed to him, especially when twilight was casting cinnamon and gold highlights into the emerald-green branches, that a door to another world would almost swing open and he could faintly discern the quick timid movements of dryads and the sulphurous sandal-wood scent, beneath the earth, of vast caverns of trolls. It was at such magic moments that a veil almost seemed to lift, a dim castle to arise in the mist, a trumpet to call to him of realms of romance and glamour, of danger and triumph.

Q: With what dramatis personae, furniture and accessories was that magick realm provided?

A: Dark and moonless nights, windswept moors, sinister fens, dank and dismal bogs, haunted abbeys, headless specters, wicked witches, wise and inscrutable wizards, high elves [the fairest of the fair], swarthy dwarfs, alchemical furnaces, elixirs, potions, drugs, herbs, precious stones, holy grails, diverse and sundry fire-breathing dragons, subterranean dungeons, maltese falcons, lost treasures, knights and paladins in armor of black and white, enigmatic Saracens, chaste heroines [blonde], evil seductresses [brunette], longswords, battleaxes, foils, rapiers, decayed parchments barely readable, Hebraic incantations, fumes, perfumes, incenses, pentacles, secret panels leading to hidden rooms, defrocked and malignant monks, dog-faced demons, assorted princesses of the blood royal, hands of glory, Egyptian philtres, talismans of rare gems, apotropaic spells, werewolves, vampires, foul servitors of Hecate, barbarous brews, eldritch ointments, black sabbats, elementals, familiars, damsels [fair, virginal, prone to swooning] in distress, diviners, astrologers, geomancers, bold brave blue-eyed sinewy heroes, dank dark mustachioed villains, gnomes, goblins, Men In Black, and infernal nether regions invisible.

Q: What sort of adventures and challenges had Sir John thus far encountered in actuality?

A: Two hundred seventeen attempts by older students to allure, intimidate or coerce him into participation in the Unspeakable Crime against Nature, as forbidden in Holy Writ and the Section 270 of the Revised Penal Code of 1888.

Q: For what motives did young Sir John refuse to participate in the aforesaid Unspeakable Crime?

A: Christian piety; terror of discovery; fear of germs and vile diseases thus transmitted; grim warnings by Uncle Bentley and the Dean of Studies that it led to idiocy, insanity and emasculation; indignation that he was always offered the passive [receptor] role; conviction that it would provoke gagging.

Once he caught a field mouse and held it in his hands, staring into its terrified eyes and knowing, with horror, that he could crush out its life with a rock as abruptly and pointlessly as the lives of all the adults he had loved had been crushed. He was frightened in a nakedly metaphysical way, not that such cruel fantasies should occur to him, nor even that something primordial and palaeolithic within himself urged him to do it, commit the deed, know the horrible joy of conscious sin; not any of that, bad as it was, but ontologically terrified at the knowledge of his own power, the fact that the deed was possible, that life was so fragile and easily terminated. The aromas of rose and clover in his nostrils, the pastel emeralds and turquoises of the trees, the primordial beauty of raw Nature, were all suddenly terrible to him, masks behind which lurked only death and the love of killing. He released the creature—“wee sleekit cowerin’ timorous beastie,” he quoted to himself—and watched it scamper away, knowing the same dread that the mouse knew, seeing the whole billion-year struggle of predator and prey through Uncle Bentley’s Darwinian prism, weeping at last alone the tears he had been too numb and self-conscious to weep at Uncle Bentley’s funeral. Feeling thrice orphaned, he wanted to dare the blasphemy of Job’s wife: to curse God and die.

He never forgot that moment; and once, many months later, when he was asked his favorite lines from Shakespeare, by an instructor aware of his intellectual potential and sorry for his loneliness, Sir John immediately quoted, not the “To be or not to be” or “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquies, but the grim couplet from Lear:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods:
They kill us for their sport.

The instructor was so depressed by the despair of Sir John’s tone in quoting this that he decided the lad was “a hopeless case” and made no further avuncular overtures.

But Sir John was also aware that the gods, or the blind impersonal forces of Uncle Bentley’s Darwinian universe, had, just as impassively as they murdered his mother and father and uncle, gifted him with an economic security generally considered a great blessing in a world where three-quarters of the population struggled desperately to get enough to eat day to day, and most laborers died, toothless and raggedy, before the age of forty, worn out by toil in those Dark Satanic Mills lamented by Blake. Yet everybody knew that those Mills were necessary to Progress and that the lot of most men and women had been even worse before electricity. Sir John was confused about all this, and even more confused about the universe’s intent toward him, if it owned any. While he was in the midst of his most searching philosophical ruminations, the whole world seemed to shudder at once, for Plehve, the Russian Minister of the Interior, was murdered—the latest in a series of senseless and incredible assassinations. The boy heard many older persons talking of the growing violence and lawlessness of the world; and he heard others, more ominously, speak of a worldwide conspiracy behind these violent attacks on government officials.

Sir John graduated with honors from Trinity College, Cambridge, five years later, in 1909. The world was shuddering again, at the assassination of Prince Ito of Japan, and more talk was heard of worldwide conspiracies and secret societies (Zionist, said some; Jesuit, said others), but Sir John heard this only as background noise by now. His mind and heart were not in the world, but in the two scholarly realms known as history and mythology. Sir John refused to accept that distinction, having fallen totally in love with another world so long dead it was powerless to hurt him, unlike the present world, and yet was also rich in mystery and glamour.

At this point Sir John read Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton and was mesmerized by its tapestry of adventure, Utopianism, romance, deep occult scholarship and profound knowledge of political psychology. But most fascinating of all, to Sir John, was the fact that the occult details in the book did not come from sheer fantasy and vulgar folklore, like the thrillers of Bram Stoker, but were derived from obviously genuine knowledge of medieval Cabala and Rosicrucianism. Within the next three months he purchased and read with mounting excitement all the works of Lord Bulwer-Lytton—Reinzi, The Last Days of Pompeii, all the other novels, the poems, the plays, the essays, even the fairy tales. It was an astounding body of literature to have been produced by a man who also edited a monthly magazine, served as a member of Parliament and became one of Disraeli’s principal advisors.

And Sir John, even more than the hundreds of thousands of readers who made Bulwer-Lytton one of the most popular novelists of the nineteenth century, was captivated by the question tantalizingly raised again and again in those books: If so much of the occult knowledge was based on real scholarship, might one dare to believe the frequent claim that the Rosy Cross order still existed and commanded the Vril force that could mutate humanity into superhumanity?

Q: Under what other names has the Vril been described by diverse persons before and after Lord Bulwer-Lytton?

A: Before: ch’i [Chinese, c. 3000 BC.] prajna [Hindic philosophers, c. 1500 BC.], telesma [H. Trismegistus, c. 350 BC.], Vis Medicatrix Naturae [Hippocrates, c. 350 BC.], Facultas Formatrix [Galen, c. 170 AD.], baraka [Sufis, c. 600 AD.], mumia [Paracelsus, c. 1530 AD.], animal magnetism [Mesmer, 1775 AD.], Life Force [Galvani, 1790 A D.], Gestaltung [Goethe, 1800 A D.], OD force [Reichenbach, 1845 AD.]. After: etheric formative force [Steiner, 1900 A D.], Elan Vital [Bergson, 1920 A D.], Mitogenetic radiation [Gurwitsch, 1937 AD], orgone [Reich, 1940 A D.], bioplasma [Grischenko, 1944 A D.], Good Vibes [anon, hippie domesticas, c. 1962 A D.], inergy [Puharich, 1973 A D.], the Force [Lucas, 1977 A D.].

Sir John was, by this time, twenty-four years old and romantically, painfully, convinced of a vast temperamental abyss between himself and his contemporaries. He was frankly bored by grubby, money-centered business concerns (he had all the money he could ever possibly want) and repelled by the flabbiness of the Anglican clergy—the only church career family tradition could have countenanced and yet so milkwater that, as Trollope said, it interfered neither with a man’s politics nor his religion; thus, he seemed to have no future but pedantry. That was also unattractive, because he regarded himself as alienated and rebellious (although within the limits of good taste, sound morals and British common sense, of course; he was still chaste, since whores were the victims of social exploitation he could not sanction and it was indecent to make an advance to a lady, even if he had known how). Worse: he was resolved not to be corrupted by his out-landishly large independence (a word he preferred to “inheritance”) and could not bear to think of himself as a social butterfly or wastrel. He would write books, then; and if no audience larger than could easily gather in a water closet were ever to read them, that would not matter. He had at least a role if he had not yet found a soul; he was “the scholarly one of the Babcocks.”

Sir John had majored in medieval history and Near Eastern languages; his master’s thesis, on the influence of Jewish Cabala on medieval occult societies, became his first book, The Secret Chiefs, which was favorably reviewed in the few places where it was noticed at all. The most hostile single line in any critique appeared in the University of Edinburgh Historical Journal, and was by Professor Angus McNaughton. It chided Babcock mildly for “a certain romantic turn of mind which leads the youthful and ardent author to imagine that some of the secret societies discussed might have survived even into our own age of enlightenment—a thesis that belongs in one of Lord Bulwer-Lytton’s romances, not in a work of alleged history.”

Like most young authors, Babcock received every criticism as a mortal blow, and it was mortifying to have the novelistic inspiration of his ideas so easily spotted. He wrote three drafts of a long letter to Professor McNaughton for impugning his spotless accuracy; and the third draft, with five pages of relentlessly pedantic footnotes, he actually mailed to the University of Edinburgh Historical Journal. It was printed, with a caustic rebuttal by McNaughton, beginning, “Young Mr. Babcock’s sources are, one and all, as impressionable and immature as Mr. Babcock himself,” and went on to argue that no current groups calling themselves Freemasons or Rosicrucians had any documented connection with any groups of the same names in medieval times. The group with the single best-documented history, McNaughton said, was the Scottish Rite of Ancient and Accepted Freemasonry, which could not prove any existence prior to 1723. The viperish McNaughton added maliciously that Sir John’s belief in real occult secrets behind Freemasonry’s surface was “puerile, preposterous and pretentious.”

Young Sir John read this with audible fuming and a few Johnsonian mutterings of “Scotch dog!” and “Goddamn!” His nose was put even more out of joint when his counter-rebuttal, containing seventeen pages of recondite footnotes this time (and a sharply worded riposte about “those who substitute flashy alliteration for cogent argument”), was returned by the university press with the curt explanation that the Journal did not have endless space to debate issues of such microscopic unimportance.

There the matter might have ended, in lame anticlimax, had not a mysterious third hand intervened.

A Mr. George Cecil Jones of London wrote to Sir John, praising his original letter to the Historical Journal and assuring him that he was correct in all his theories even though surviving documents of earlier centuries were not complete enough to support him. “The authentic tradition of Cabalistic Freemasonry,” Jones added, “can be found still alive among certain lodges, especially in Bavaria and Paris. There has even been a lodge of true adepts continuing the hidden heritage right here in London, in this decade.”

Sir John’s immediate response was a most cautious letter back to Mr. (George Cecil) Jones, asking very tactfully just how much Mr. Jones actually knew of the surviving lodge of Cabalistic Freemasons in London, who alleged descent from the Invisible College of the Rosy Cross (founded by the Sufi sage, Abramelin of Araby, and passed on by him through Abraham the Jew to Christian Rosenkreuz, who lies buried in the Cave of the Illuminati, which was somewhere in the Alps according to Sir John’s research, whatever that Scotch dog McNaughton might say).

The reply, within a week’s time, was a cautious letter that invited Sir John to have dinner with Jones sometime when visiting London, so that the matter might be discussed at suitable length with appropriate intimacy.

The next week was rainy and wet at Babcock Manor; Sir John didn’t go outdoors, and spent most of his time in his library poring over his first editions of Hermetic and Rosicrucian pamphlets from long ago, and puzzling once again upon the enigmatic writings of those he suspected of being part of the underground tradition of Cabalistic magick. He re-read The Alchemical Marriage of Christian Rosycross, with its strange medley of Christian and Egyptian allegorical figures, the Enochian fragments which Dr. John Dee had received from an allegedly superhuman being in the age of Elizabeth I, the sly and cryptic Triumphant Beast of Giordano Bruno, the writings of Bacon and Ludvig Prinn and Paracelsus. Again and again he encountered overt or coded references to that damnably mysterious Invisible College, composed of Illuminated men and women—Secret Chiefs—which allegedly governs all the world behind the scenes; and again and again he asked himself if he dared to believe it.

Sir John dreamed of the meeting with Jones in vivid detail no less than three times before the week passed. In each dream, Jones was dressed as a medieval wizard, with pointed hat and robes bearing the Order of Saint George with strange astrological glyphs, and he always led Sir John up a dark hill toward a crumbling Gothic building of indeterminate character midway between abbey and castle. This eldritch edifice was, of course (as Sir John knew even in the dreams), a blend of various illustrations he had seen depicting Chapel Perilous of the Grail legend or the Dark Tower to which Childe Roland came. Inside, according to occult lore, was everything he feared; and yet only by passing this test could he achieve the Rosicrucian goals—the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixer of Life, the Medicine of Metals, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness. In each case, he awoke with a start of fright as the door of the Chapel was opened for him and he heard within a humming as of a myriad of monstrous bees.

Once he dreamed of Dr. John Dee himself, court astrologer to Elizabeth, greatest mathematician of his time, constant associate of spirits and angels according to his own claims; and Dee was offering him “the solace berry,” a magical fruit that conferred immortality. “Take ye and eat from the tree Swifty ate,” Dee said, but the fruit smelled of excrement and was foul to the sight and touch and when Sir John tried to refuse it, a second figure, female and shockingly naked but with a cow’s head, appeared beside Dee, saying solemnly, “Ignatz never really injures,” as they were all suddenly standing again at the door of a vast insectoid Chapel Perilous. Sir John awoke in a sweat.

All the legends warned him that only the brave and the pure of heart may survive the journey through Chapel Perilous; and this was hardly encouraging, since like most introspective young men Sir John had much insight into his own fears but woefully little realization of the fears of others, thereby wrongly suspecting himself of being atypically timid and cowardly; while in the purity-of-heart department he knew that he distinctly left a great deal to be desired: there were fantasies that were decidedly unchaste, although he nearly always managed to stop such imaginings before the worst and most nameless details were actually visualized in all their lewd and sinful seductiveness. Even when he was caught up in the bestial tug of these animalistic desires, and the details of certain unmentionable items formed with total and compulsive clarity in his mind, he did not allow himself to linger voluptuously on the fantasy of actually fondling or intimately manipulating those particular items, desirable and monstrous and unspeakable as they were. If it could in truth be said that he did lapse on occasion, certainly he resisted successfully nearly all of the time such fantasies arose, and yet the guilt of those few, rare, hardly typical lapses did weigh heavily upon his conscience and seemed now to be a distinct bar against such a bicameral creature as himself entering the precincts of Chapel Perilous.

And that was all mythology, anyway: charming to dream about, but one would be mad to get involved with people who believed (or claimed) that they hopped over to Chapel Perilous and back as easily as one might buzz over to the tobacconist….

On Wednesday, Sir John could bear the loneliness of suspenseful indecision no longer. He summoned Dorn, the Babcock gamekeeper, and had a carriage fetched to drive him the three miles to the Greystoke estate, where he paid a casual family visit to his uncle, Viscount Greystoke, a greying but iron-muscled man of seemingly inexhaustible pragmatic wisdom—the richest and least eccentric of all the Babcock-Greystoke families, according to general opinion. After the usual small talk, Sir John finally framed his question.

“Do you believe, sir, that there are secret orders or lodges or fraternities that have survived over the centuries, transmitting certain kinds of occult or mystical knowledge which is normally unavailable to the human mind?”

Old Greystoke pondered for about thirty seconds. “No,” he said finally. “If there were, I would most certainly have heard about it.”

Sir John rode the three miles home in deep thought. Age and Wisdom had spoken, but what was the point of youth if it did not entitle you to disregard Age and Wisdom? The next morning he arose early and took the train to London. Sir John trusted his own scholarship: such lodges did exist, and the only way to test their claims of superior wisdom was to meet with them and find out for oneself what they really had to offer, besides the corrupted Hebraic passwords and absurd hand-grips of other Masonic orders.

There was an American newspaper in the railway carriage: a curiosity in itself, and it was open to a page of comic strips, an art form Sir John had never been able to fathom. He glanced at it idly and found that one sequence involved a malicious mouse named Ignatz who was always throwing bricks at a cat named Krazy. It was totally insane, and worse yet, the cat enjoyed being hit with the bricks, sighing contentedly as each missile bounced off her head, “Li’l dollink, always fetful.” That was evidently some debased American-Jewish dialect for “Little darling, always faithful.” Sir John shuddered. The whole thing was not funny at all; it was a bare-faced exploitation of the perversion named sadism. Or was it masochism? Or was it both? A gloomy omen, in any case….

This was entirely typical of the larval mentations of the domesticated hominids of Terra in those primitive ages. Crude sonic signals produced by the laryngeal muscles made up their speech-units which programmed all cortical cogitation into the grid provided by the local grammar, which they naïvely called logic or common sense. Beneath this typically primate confusion of signals with sources and maps with territories, a great deal of the hominid nervous system was genetically determined, like the closely related chimpanzee nervous system and the more distantly related cow nervous system, and hence operated on autopilot. The programs of territoriality, status hierarchy, pack-bonding, etc., functioned mechanically as Evolutionary Relative Successes since they served well enough for the ordinary mammal in ordinary mammalian affairs. Modes of status-domination, erotic signaling and rudimentary (subject-predicate) causal “thinking” were imprinted as mechanically as the territorial reflexes of baboons or the mating dances of peacocks. Since primate behavior only changes under the impact of new technology (Gilhooley’s First Law), the primitive “Industrial Revolution” already beginning had caused enough shock and confusion to liberate a few minds from mechanical repetition of this imprinted circuitry (Shock and confusion are the only techniques that loosen imprints in primates: Gilhooley’s Second Law), and a certain wistful speculative quality had entered the gene pool, leading within less than seventy years to the mutations involved in Space Migration and Life Extension; but of all this young Babcock was unaware. He couldn’t even imagine that in his own lifetime a man would fly the Atlantic.

Sir John arrived in London before noon, and decided to prepare for the meeting with Jones by spending the afternoon researching old Masonic materials in the British Museum.

In an Elizabethan alchemical pamphlet he found, by sheer coincidence, a long allegorical poem that strangely disturbed him, considering that he was bent upon contact with alleged manipulators of occult power. One stanza in particular haunted him as he rode by hansom across town to Simpson’s Café Divan, where he and Jones had agreed to meet. The very clops of the horse’s hooves seemed to carry the refrain:

Don’t believe the human eye
In sunlight or in shade
The puppet show of sight and sense
Is the Devil’s Masquerade

Passing the Savoy Theatre, Sir John saw that the D’Oyly Carte company was again doing Patience. He remembered, with some cheer, Bunthorne’s song:

If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep
for me,
Why what a singularly deep young man this deep
young man must he!

That mocking jingle was a refreshing breath of skepticism and British common sense, Sir John thought. When he entered Simpson’s, he was prepared to confront the enigmatic Mr. Jones without trepidation.

Mr. George Cecil Jones was stout, amiable and proved to have impeccable taste in wines. He was also reassuringly normal, wore no wizards hat and spoke of his children with great fondness; better still, he was an industrial chemist by profession and not at all the misty-eyed believer type who might be leading Sir John up the garden path into Cloud-Cuckoo Land. You couldn’t help liking and trusting him.

Jones appeared to be about forty, but was free of condescension toward Sir John’s youth; nor was he overtly impressed by Sir John’s title. A plain blunt Englishman with a bedrock of sound sense and decency, Sir John concluded—and yet it did take him a long time to open up even a little about the Invisible College.

“You must understand, Sir John, that these affairs are circled about with ferocious Oaths of Secrecy and dreadful pledges of silence,” Jones confided eventually. “All of that appears quite pointless in this free and enlightened age—pardon my irony—but it is part of the tradition, dating back to the days of the Inquisition, when it was, of course, even more necessary.”

Sir John, with the bluntness of youth, decided to answer this with a somewhat probing question. “Am I to take it, sir, that you are yourself bound by such an Oath?”

“Oh, God and Aunt Agnes,” Jones said, more amused than offended, “one simply doesn’t ask that on a first meeting. Consider the patience of the fisherman rather than the rapacity of the journalist if you would open the door to the Arcanum of Arcana.”

And he proceeded to attack his filet mignon with unabashed vigor, as if that equivocation were not tantamount to an admission. Sir John understood: he was being tested; his exact status on the evolutionary ladder was being estimated.

“Have you read my book on Cabala?” he asked next, trying a more circuitous approach. “Or merely the debate in the Historical Journal?”

“Oh, I’ve read your book,” Jones said. “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. There is nothing more poignant and gallant, on this planet, than a young man writing passionately about Cabala without any real experience of its mysteries.”

Sir John felt the needleprick in Jones’ words, but answered merely, “At that point, I was not concerned with personal experience, but merely with setting right the historical record.”

“Perhaps,” Sir John said carelessly, feeling Byronic and brave. “Mostly, I am concerned with proving my thesis that such groups have survived over the centuries—proving it so thoroughly that even that blockheaded mule in Edinburgh will have to admit I’m right!”

Jones nodded. “Wishing to prove oneself right is the usual motive for scholarship,” he said mildly. “But this group I mentioned has no interest in setting the historical record straight, or in advertising themselves. Do y’see, Sir John, that they really don’t care what the world at large thinks, or what the pompous asses in the universities think, either? They have entirely different interests.”

Sir John found himself half-believing that he was dining with a member of the same Invisible College that published the first Rosicrucian pamphlets of 1619 and 1623. He proceeded with great delicacy.

“In your letter,” he said, “you spoke of this group very carefully in the past tense. I believe your exact words were, ‘There has even been a lodge of true adepts continuing the hidden heritage right here in London, in this decade.’ How many years, exactly, has it been since the lodge existed?”

Sir John exhaled deeply and took another sip of wine. “You are becoming less indirect in your answers,” he said happily. “I take that as a good sign. Let me advance to the main point in one step, then. Is it possible that the Order did not entirely break apart a decade ago?”

“Many things are possible,” Jones said, lighting a cigar and signaling for more wine. “Before we go any further, let me show you a simple document which every member of this Order must sign, and swear to, with the most horrible Oaths. Just glance it over for a minute, Sir John.” And he passed from his inner pocket a simple sheet of ordinary letterpaper, typed with a most usual office typewriter.

I [fill in name] do solemnly invoke He Whom the Winds Fear, the Supreme Lord of the Universe, by the Mason word [given to candidate before ritual] and swear that I, as a member of the Body of Christ, from this day forward will seek the Knowledge and Conversation of Mine Holy Guardian Angel, whereby I may acquire the Secret Knowledge to transcend mere humanity and be one with the Highest Intelligence; and if I ever use this Sacred Knowledge for monetary gain in any manner, or to do harm to any human being, may I be accursed and damned; may my throat be cut, my eyes be burned out and my corpse thrown into the sea; may I be hated and despised by all intellectual beings, both men and angels, throughout all eternity. I swear. I swear. I swear.

“Rather strangely worded,” Sir John commented uneasily. Wee sleekit cowrin timorous beastie … always fetful …

“That’s the First-Degree Oath, for admission as a student,” Jones said. “The higher Oaths are much stronger stuff, I had better warn you.”

“I would sign such an Oath with fervent assent,” he said boldly, surrendering his spiritual virginity long before he would have the courage to surrender the virginity of his body.

“That is most interesting,” Jones said affably, retrieving the paper and folding it back into his pocket. “I will speak to certain people. You may hear from us in a fortnight or so.”

And the rest of the evening, which was brief, Jones spoke only of his beloved children and his equally beloved occupation of industrial chemistry. There was nothing in the slightest occult or extraordinary about him at all. To some extent, he was even dull; and yet Sir John left him feeling vaguely as if he had been talking to one of H. G. Wells’ moon-men carefully disguised as a human being, which was nonsense, of course. But what was there about Jones that left that kind of after-impression?

On the train home, by the most implausible of coincidences—he wasn’t even sure he was in the same compartment—he again found an American newspaper and, stranger still, there was that sadistic mouse and the masochistic cat again: “Li’l dollink, always fetful.”

After four years of training in the Golden Dawn, Sir John felt exactly like that bizarre cat, and when Joyce and Einstein offered to help him on Bahnhofstrasse, he giggled inanely and said, “Li’l dollink, always fetful.”

Preparatory to anything else, Einstein brushed the bulk of the dank barfloor sawdust off Sir John’s expensive but now untidy suit and handed him his Bond Street hat and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion, which he very badly needed. Sir John was not exactly wandering mentally (aside from inscrutable remarks in New York Yiddish) but more than a little unsteady physically and upon his expressed desire for coffee or some brainstem stimulant less mind-fogging than whiskey Joyce suggested right off the bat that he, Babcock, accompany him, Joyce, to his (Joyce’s) lodgings, just a stone’s-throw away from the very spot where they presently stood (or occasionally staggered) on Bahnhofstrasse. This proposal being accepted with alacrity and with much verbose gratitude, the three set off on foot in the hot windswept night since it was considered an improbability verging on the tales of the Brothers Grimm to hope to encounter a carriage for hire at that hour, à propos of which Joyce remarked significantly, “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”

And Babcock, not wishing to appear illiterate responded, “Falstaff, is it not?”

“Yes,” Joyce said. “Henry IV, Part One.” And they both looked at each other anew, finding some mysterious or at least emotionally gratifying bond in a shared acquaintance with the immortal Bard, although only Joyce reflected further that midnight was very much later to Falstaff in his sunrise-sundown agricultural economy than to himself and Babcock in this industrial age—Babcock being occupied with the more prosaic question of just how late it really was, and if they had actually heard the chimes at midnight, how long ago would that have been? —but neither topic was verbalized aloud at that point, all three men proceeding in silence for a while as they were none of them at exactly what you would call their sparkling best or in their keenest wits, Einstein being uncertain about chimes at midnight and little dollinks, Joyce being fogged over by enough beer to float the local navy if the overly tidy Swiss had a hypothetical navy, and Babcock being half-frightened out of his skin, but they did eventually attempt to converse in amiable or at least civil fashion, not at first very successfully inasmuch as both Joyce and Babcock were as nervous as a pair of strange sharks being quite aware on each side of the historical and temperamental abyss between the Anglo-Saxon and Hibernian mentalities. It was therefore doubly unfortunate that Babcock’s first attempt to open the door between their worlds was of an almost baboonlike clumsiness.

“As an Irishman, you are of course a mystic,” Babcock pronounced, thereby putting his foot into his mouth while, as it were, simultaneously stepping for the second time on Joyce’s most sensitive corn. “You know that there are vast invisible forces and intelligences behind the charade of material reality. Do you perhaps know of Yeats?”

“Yes,” Joyce said evasively, maneuvering them both to miss a pile of dog shit, which he would most certainly include if he were ever to write this scene, and which Yeats would most certainly exclude. “Is he not the fellow who is so terrified that the future might be different from the past?”

“I would not state the case that way,” Babcock said with a disapproving frown at the flippant and belittling witticism. “Mr. Yeats is a man who fears that the future will be cold, scientific, materialistic, without the romance and mystery of the past.”

Einstein said nothing. They were now abreast of the FIAT “automobile,” and Joyce looked at it and at every part of it with a meticulous curiosity that seemed almost obsessive to Babcock. “You see more of these every year,” Joyce said. “And I read recently that a man in America named Olds is turning them out, and selling them to customers, at the rate of six thousand and more per annum. How the hell they run is as much a romance and a mystery to me as anything in that fabulous past Mr. Yeats’ autobiographical hero wishes so fervently to clutch to his bosom. There’s a magick Wand inside, called the clutch, that propels this mystic chariot to velocities up to forty kilometers an hour. I wish I knew more about mechanical physics.”

“It’s a simple natural phenomenon,” Einstein said helpfully. “But I’m sure you don’t want a lecture on internal combustion at this hour.” Actually, he was more interested in observing his two odd companions, hoping that further clues might clarify why Devil Masks were so terrifying to Babcock and what little dollink had heard the chimes at midnight. “It runs on controlled explosions,” he added, hoping that would satisfy them.

“Um, yes, certainly,” Babcock said uncertainly. “I wouldn’t drive one for a million pounds. You hear the most gruesome stories about accidents. Surely God gave us the horse so we wouldn’t have to invent such dangerous contraptions. I shudder to think what the world will be like in ten years when the streets are full of them.”

“Of course,” Joyce said, although the logical progression here was totally inscrutable to Babcock, “if we, like Mr. Yeats, want a really deep, endless, bottomless and topless mystery, we can always try to understand our wives. Or the man next to us on the street, n’est ce pas?”

Babcock meditated on that cynical-sounding notion for a few moments and then became aware that another man was in fact approaching them on the street, a most singular person with a high-domed Shakespearean forehead, ibis eyes of monkey like Mongolian cruelty and a spadelike black beard. So striking was this figure that, somewhat influenced by Joyce’s last remark, Babcock peered after the Slavic stranger as he turned down toward the Limmat River area and then commented aloud, “I shared a compartment with him on the train. One might indeed find deep mysteries in an individual of that sort.”

“Damn this wind,” Joyce said, jabbing the air with his walkingstick as a caduceus. “The natives call it the witch-wind. Whenever it blows, half of Zürich goes mad. We Northerners feel it more, since we expect a wind to be cold and biting. A hot wind that suffocates you slowly is like an unwanted, unlovely and unbathed paramour in your bed.”

A dog howled suddenly in the distance with an eerie rising cadence like a wolf or coyote. “You see?” Joyce said. “Even the animals go barmy when the Föhn blows.”

“It is like incense of white sandal,” Einstein agreed. “Too thick and heavy to be pleasant.”

“The local police have records,” Joyce said in an opalhush tone, mystically, “showing that the murder rate always rises when the Föhn blows, and the local alienists say that the number of nervous breakdowns definitely increases. Most sinister and eerie, is it not? Mr. Yeats would say that the undines and water-spirits are attempting to overcome the air-elementals on the astral plane, which makes the material plane so mucking filthy to walk in.” Like Thoth, he shifted again, adding cynically, “But it is only a change in the ionization of the air and can be measured with those heathen scientific instruments Mr. Yeats so dreads.”

But this led them into a full-scale imbroglio which lasted in fact all the way to Joyce’s hotel, and in the course of it Joyce learned that Babcock was an ardent admirer not only of the puerile (if elegant) poetry of Mr. William Butler Yeats, but of the detestable (if kindly) Mr. Yeats himself, and was even a member (with Yeats) of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a group of London occultists of which Joyce had long ago formed a decidedly unfavorable opinion, regarding them in cold fact as being a bit funny in all their heads. Babcock in turn gathered from various sardonic and downright unkind remarks dropped en passant by Joyce that he, Joyce, regarded Yeats (along with the Golden Dawn, Blavatsky and the whole of modern mysticism) with a disdain that seemed, to him, Babcock, to be unwarrantedly venomous. Things began to clear up after a bit, at least in Babcock’s muddled mind, when it gradually emerged that Mr. Joyce was also a writer, considerably less successful than Yeats, if not virtually unknown, and suspicions concerning the emblematic Sour Grapes and the well-known Green-eyed Monster were almost, but not quite, articulated at this point by Babcock, because only the madman is absolutely sure.

“I take it,” Babcock said when they were finally arrived at Gasthaus Doeblin, “that you are a socialist, or an anarchist, if not both.”

“You behold in me a dreadful example of unbridled anarchistic individualism,” Joyce replied suavely. “I loathe all nations equally. The State is concentric, but the individual is eccentric. Welcome to the ghastliest house this side of Dublin,” he added, indicating the sign: GASTHAUS DOEBLIN (and perversely mistranslating it according to his own dubious whimsy).

“Thank God were out of that foul wind,” Einstein said fervently as they crossed a yellow-carpeted lobby bedecked with wallpaper showing palm trees and grinning monkeys. (“Mine innkeeper hath strange notions of decor,” Joyce commented sotto voce.) The building seemed to be an octagon, and Joyce led Babcock and Einstein around seven sides of it before arriving at Room 23, which was, he announced, “complete with breakfast alcove, where I have some of the best Italian espresso coffee this side of Trieste, because I brought it from Trieste.”

They were tiptoeing now, Babcock and Einstein imitating Joyce in this, and stopped, once, as Joyce opened slowly and quietly a door to peer briefly into an untidy bedroom where a stoutish, pretty-faced woman was sleeping amid crumpled blankets.

More than a little taken aback by this frank avowal of barbaric contempt for civilized morals and the canons of elementary decency, Babcock had to remind himself that the arrogant Irishman was, after all, his host and had already exhibited somewhat more than the customary degree of charity to him, a perfect stranger in the first place and one who might sound a bit mad in the second place and beyond that a member of the conquering and therefore probably loathed English race in the third place. But by now they were in the kitchenette alcove and Joyce was making coffee, after setting the Devil Mask at a dapper angle above the cuckoo clock.

“So,” Joyce said, “this goat-faced fellow has pursued you all the way from Loch Ness, you say.”

“With your opinions,” Babcock replied, “you must regard all this as fantasy and I daresay you fancy yourself as humoring a lunatic. I remind you, sir, that three people have already died horrible deaths in this accursed affair.”

“Pursued,” Einstein inquired softly, “by the same demon that now pursues you?” With one probing finger he chucked the Devil Mask under the chin, sharkishly playful. “A masquerade with nothing behind the masks?”

This somewhat staggered Joyce, who recalled again the poem he had recollected on Bahnhofstrasse, although he still could not remember the author’s name if it were not his favorite ancient bard, Anon of Ibid. Another stanza drifted unbidden up to the surface of his mind:

Demons drink from human skulls
And souls are up for trade
Take wine and drugs and join us in
The Devil’s Masquerade

That kind of damned peculiar coincidence was multiplying rapidly tonight, Joyce realized (and wondered if Dr. Carl Jung ought to be here to take notes). Reflecting thus in silence for a few minutes, the Irish freethinker steeped the coffee and began to absently roll a cigarette, glancing thoughtfully at the English mystic. “Saint Thomas tells us,” Joyce said soberly, “that the Devil has no power to do real injury to those who trust in the Lord, although he may admittedly frighten or discomfit them, to test their faith. In fact, sir, it is rank heresy to claim real harm can occur in such cases, since that implies lack of faith in God’s goodness. Ah,” he interrupted himself, “I see you are astonished that I can speak that language. Well, sir, if I were to believe in any mysticism, it would be that of Thomas, who is logical, coherent and full of cold common sense, and not that of your modern occultists, who are illogical, absurd and full of hot air. But let that pass for the moment.” He lit his cigarette and pointed at the mask. “What sort of second-rate, bargain-basement devil is it that needs theatrical props to do his dirty business?”

Babcock, who had been growing steadier by the minute, smiled wryly at this sharply pointed sally. “You misconstrue me,” he said. “I am well aware that there are human beings involved in this terrible affair, but they have powers not ordinarily vouchsafed to mere men, because they serve a being who is not human. You think, evidently, that I am the sort who can be frightened by a mere theatrical prop, as you call it, but I have already faced terrors that you can scarcely conceive. For instance, I would not be frightened merely to see what I saw tonight—a figure with that Satanic face coming at me suddenly out of the dark. What was truly diabolical was that they found me here when I have taken elaborate precautions to cover my tracks and elude them.”

Joyce poured coffee silently, the red-tipped cigarette not looked at in his left hand not feeling it. From Loch Ness to Zürich: to me. The terrors I knew as a child: howls of the damned, pitchforked, baboon-faced demons, flame-garbed figures screaming. Many a civic monster. Ancient Zoroastrian nightmare from which the West is struggling to awaken.

“And how,” Joyce asked, “did these three persons come to die? Their throats torn by the talons of some terrible beast in the Gothic thriller style of Walpole?”

Sir John, actuated by motives of inherent delicacy, inasmuch as he always believed in agreeing with one’s host for courtesy’s sake, however irascible said host might be, restrained several sharp answers that almost leaped to his lips, and said merely, “They were all driven to suicide.”

“By masks and mummery,” Joyce exclaimed, not bothering to conceal his irony. Seizing the mask, he held it before his own flushed face and leaned menacingly across the table. “By theatrical props like this?” his voice asked from behind the mask in sardonic Dublin brogue.

“They were driven to suicide by a book,” said Sir John, “a book so vile that it should not exist. Just by looking into this foul piece of literature, all three victims were driven mad by horror and destroyed themselves. It was as if they had learned something that made life on this planet so unspeakably awful to them that they could not bear another instant of consciousness.”

Einstein stared at the young Englishman with something akin to the well-known wild surmise on the emblematic peak in Darien. “This is something you have really been involved in?” he asked quietly. “Not just something you’ve heard about, a rumor or a yarn?”

“It’s as real as this coffee, this saucer, this table,” Babcock said flatly, indicating all three objects with emphatic gestures while his haunted eyes mutely recalled some dreadful history of Godless and unspeakable monkey business that might stab anyone in the back at any moment, anytime, anywhere, like the proverbial snake in the grass, if it were not judiciously nipped in the bud by brave and farseeing men taking prompt and prudent corrective action at the psychological moment and striking when the iron is hot.

“Let me show you what I’ve been involved in,” Babcock said, reaching into his straw traveling case. “This is from the Inverness Express-Journal,” he said, passing over a clipping. Joyce and Einstein read it together.

THE CASE OF THE CONSTANT SUICIDES

Terror Stalks Loch Ness; Police Baffled

A: “Other residents regard the inspector’s skepticism with the strict rule of no wife, no horse, no mustache, always anger and derision.”

A: With embarrassment, with awkwardness, with a suspicion that the problem might be caused by his own deficient knowledge of English, diffidently, he did.

A: It was, by Mr. Joyce’s terse explanation: “That’s what’s called bitched type. Part of a line that got in from another column.”

Einstein looked at Sir John with renewed interest. “Let me hear your whole story,” he said, beginning to fill a pipe.

Joyce nodded, slouching in his chair like a boneless man. The Föhn wind shook the window behind him like a goblin seeking entrance.

Q: With what species of animal and plant life was Babcock Manor most plentifully supplied?

A: A murder of crows, an exaltation of larks, a clowder of cats, a muster of peacocks, a skulk of foxes, a watch of nightingales, a labor of moles, a gaggle of geese, a peep of chickens, a parliament of owls, a paddling of ducks, a knot of toads, a siege of herons, a trip of goats, a drift of hogs, a charm of finches, a murmuration of starlings, a pitying of turtledoves, a dawn of roses, a hover of trout, a tiding of magpies, a glory of violets, a zonker of hedges, a kindle of kittens, a hallucination of morning glories, a sunset of fuchsia, a stateliness of oaks, a midnight of ravens, a noon of fern, a cover of coots, a weeping of willows, a laughter of cosmos, a hilarity of gardenias, a sauna of beeches, a blather of crickets and a millennium of moss.

A: A prevarication of politics, a chronology of history, a gnome of mythology, a schiz of theology [including a serenity of Buddhists, a cosmology of Hindus, an inscrutability of Taoists and a war of Christians], an eldritch of Alhazreds, a fume of alchemists, a tree of Cabalists, a heresiarch of Brunos, a lot of Lulls, an ova of Bacons, a mystification of Rosycrosses, a silence of Sufis, an enoch of Dees, a wisdom of Gnostics and a small snivel of romances.

The night after meeting George Cecil Jones, Sir John dreamed again of Chapel Perilous, which was now a heavily armed, scarlet-walled castle owned by a man-eating ogre named Sir Talis. “You must enter without being sown,” said Judge Everyman, “for bleating runes are red.”

King Edward III, wearing the conventional business suit of George Cecil Jones, wandered in numinous room incandescent muttering something about the impotence of being honest.

“The moover hoovered,” He He Commons added helpfully. “The door opens to the wastebule, past eggnaughts to oldfresser Poop in the Watercan.”

Sir John realized he was in the Temple of Solomon the King as described in Freemasonic literature.

“Bloog ardor!” howled Sir Knott the Almighty. “Take heed and hate!” Sir John, a solo man under sectualism, stumbled into the owld cavern of skeletons, a tripentoctocon where the morn’s dozen sheens. A sign said:

DO NOT MEDDLE IN THE AFFAIRS OF WIZARDS: IT MAKES THEM SOGGY AND HARD TO LIGHT

“Said, the old servant of Envy,” the Angel was lecturing, “tore him to shredded wheat and planeted him where the somn dozing snore, but he gnaw not weth the dew. For they whisked in a flicker, Jenny Peg and Brother Rot and Hamster, prinzipdungmark, and, slack it, a mouse with seven gerbils.”

“These,” Jones said with a gesture at the bones, “are those who came on this path without the Pentacle of Valor. What do you drink, Sir Joan: Shall damn bones leave?”

But before Sir Joan could decide on the literalness of the question, they were in the dark back shelves of the Tyrone side wing of the Brutus Museum in the gaseous shade of the tree Swifty ate, the tree ovus gaggin scissors, and Karl Marx was reading aloud from what appeared to be the secret history of Freemasonry: “And Solomon was a motley kink, and he shut in his cuntinghorse on the tail of his broken spine just accounting for his honey; and the LORD spook into him and said: Solomon, git. And Silvamoon gat; and in the foulness of tomb Solomon gart bark and begat. And Sol O’Morn begat Nightrex and Nighttricks begat Mars Harem and Moose Hiram began Finnegan and Faunycohen begot Heroman and Hairy Moon bigot Sir Talis and Surd Alice begott begad Roy O’Range Yellagroin and Roy O’Range Yallagroin begat the little Blowindianviolated Engine That Could.” He lapsed into nearly Russian idioms.

“Is that not a rather large thing to expect us to begin upon?” Sir John asked, hearing himself talking, waking to the morning sun.

Sitting up, he found he was still half-dreaming or talking to himself internally. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” his or somebody’s voice was saying. Shakespeare, of course: The Tempest. A great line, often quoted, but what did it mean when you stopped to think about it? What did The Tempest mean, for that matter? If Prospero is Shakespeare himself, as all the scholars claim, why is Prospero a magician rather than a poet? Why does he associate with faeries, elves, the monster Caliban and all the assembly of the occult?

And “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.” What is that line doing in Lear, where it has nothing to do with the plot at all? Was Shakespeare part of the Invisible College?

Sir John ate a larger breakfast than usual and took a long walk afterward, reaffirming the solidity of matter and the reality of earth, sky and trees. He did not dread being known as a Romantic, but he had no intent of becoming a damned fool.

When he returned home and sat down to read the London Times, he found that Stolypin, the Russian premier, had been murdered, the latest in the brutal assassinations that had made the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth seem a prelude to rising worldwide anarchy. He tried to remember his parents and his own feelings at the time of their deaths and found only a dull pain in the place where memory should be. If there was such a thing as higher wisdom or higher knowledge, Sir John felt that the human race very badly needed it. Life, to ordinary wisdom and ordinary knowledge, appeared no more than a singularly pointless and brutal jest. “Off with their heads! Off with their heads!” God seemed to be gibbering most of the time, like the Red Queen in Alice. Does He really kill us for His sport?

Sir John spent the next two weeks re-reading and meditating on the classic Rosicrucian pamphlets of the seventeenth century. Everything Jones had so prosaically illustrated was there: the Brother of the Invisible College of the Rosy Cross will “dress in the garb” of the country where he resides and “adapt all its customs”; although forever pledged to the Invisible College, he will manifest no overt sign to the world, except that he might heal the sick, taking no money for that service.

At the exact termination of the fortnight, Sir John received a small package in the mail from P. O. Box 718, Main Post Office, London. Inside was a small pamphlet entitled “History Lection.” Authorship was given as:

Hermetic Order of the G∴D∴

Sir John’s heart leaped; he knew that those pyramidal dots represented, in occult symbology, an order possessing the original Mason Word, admittedly lost to all other Freemasonic orders. He recalled from the anonymous Muses Threnody of 1648:

For we be brethren of the Rosy Cross

We have the Mason Word and second sight

Things for to come we can see aright

With trembling fingers, Sir John opened the pamphlet and began to read the secret history of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In 1875, it said, a great fire destroyed Freemasons’ Hall in London. Robert Wentworth Little—a writer whose books on Masonry were familiar to Sir John—found some long-forgotten documents, while rescuing important charters and other items of value from the flames. These mysterious papers were in a cipher unknown to Little or any other London Freemasons of the time. By dint of continuous, meticulous effort and perseverance, Little eventually solved the cipher, decoded the documents, then found himself in possession of the secrets of the Invisible College—secrets which orthodox Freemasonry had long since lost. The documents also provided a link with a continental order which seemed to possess even deeper secrets and provided the address of a high initiate named Fräulein Anna Sprengel in Ingolstadt, Bavaria.

The lection went on to tell how Robert Wentworth Little and various other London Freemasons, guided by Fräulein Sprengel, began the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, originally admitting as members only those who were already high-degree Masons. Using the techniques learned from Miss Sprengel and the ciphered documents, they gradually recreated the whole working repertoire of Cabalistic occultism underlying the Rosy Cross order of Freemasonry and sought earnestly to establish astral contact with the Higher Intelligences on other planes who could gradually educate and guide them in the risky transition from the domesticated apehood of historical humanity to a higher stage on the evolutionary scale.

This “History Lection” went on to assert that such contact had been established and that the Golden Dawn was now operating under astral guidance. It added ominously that students should beware of several impostors who had seized upon the name of the order and were operating false Golden Dawns of their own devoted to diabolism and black magick. Among these heretics, who seemed to number nearly a dozen—when the original Golden Dawn split into factions, it split violently, Sir John gathered—two names particularly struck Sir John because of their resonant roll: MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley.

A: It was not. The former individual had been born Samuel Liddell Mathers and had decided, when embarking on the paths of Magick, that Samuel Mathers, Sam Mathers, S. L. Mathers, S. Liddell Mathers were all unsuitable and unglamorous names for a Magician; he had therefore taken the more sonorous cognomen of MacGregor Mathers. The latter individual, similarly, had been born Edward Alexander Crowley and found also that the various permutations of that appellation were too prosaic for the career he intended; after profound research and much thought he concluded that the name “Jeremy Taylor” was the most memorable in English because of its rhythm. Wishing to appropriate that rhythm, he re-dubbed himself Aleister Crowley.

Q: Quote a standard reference on the history of the Golden Dawn so as to convey maximum information without exceeding the legal limits of fair usage and with least possible prejudice toward one faction or another.

A: “The Golden Dawn was the most influential of the many occult secret societies founded in the nineteenth century. It first came into existence in 1887-88 and was founded on the basis of certain cipher manuscripts allegedly discovered in London which described five rituals of initiation…. Early in the 1890s, however, the nature of the Golden Dawn was transformed by one of its leaders, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, who claimed to have contacted the ‘Secret Chiefs,’ the invisible and highly evolved superhumans who form, occultists aver, the secret government of our planet.” Francis King, Introduction to Crowley on Christ, C. W. Daniel Co., London, 1974.

Q: Provide further information on the origins of the tradition of mystical Masonry.

A: “However, the Egyptian Masons are more closely involved with the Grand Orient Lodge of France … which was originally set up by Weishaupt’s Illuminati, and which is closely associated with the Society of Jacobins…. One secret Illuminatus and Jacobin was Guiseppe Balsamo, alias Cagliostro, who … bequeathed certain MSS. to his followers of the Egyptian sect, including excerpts from the original Necronomicon…. The text of the Necronomicon … reached them via the Arabs of Spain … goes back to the Persians … and links up with Babylonian magic and the Hermetic tradition of the Egyptian priesthood of Thoth.” Letter from Dr. Stanislaus Hinterstoisser to Colin Wilson, The Necronomicon with commentaries, Neville Spearman Co., Suffolk, 1978.

Sir John reflected on the “History Lection” for two days before deciding how much further he dared go. Then he wrote back to Jones and begged admission to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as a Probationer.

And so he crossed the thrice-sealed door and passed over from being a student of occult history to being a tentative and nervous practitioner of occult arts, wherein he was soon to learn that we are in fact such stuff as dreams are made of, and that Sir Talis is inescapable.

Sir John was initiated on the night of July 23, 1910—exactly 307 years to the day after the knighting of Sir Francis Bacon, the alleged Grandmaster of the Invisible College in Elizabethan England (according to Golden Dawn documents—which also claimed such illustrious members as Sir Richard Francis Burton, Paul Gauguin, Richard Wagner, King Ludwig of Bavaria, Wolfgang von Goethe, Adam Weishaupt, Dr. John Dee, Pope Alexander VI, Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus, Christian Rosenkreutz, Giordano Bruno, Jacques de Molay, Newton, Beethoven, Merlin, Rabelais, Vergil, Jesus, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Solomon, Osiris and Krishna, among others). About the initiation itself, Sir John, true to his Oath, never revealed any details, even on that night in Zürich when, with the Föhn witch-wind beating at the windows, he recounted his extraordinary adventures to James Joyce and Professor Albert Einstein. Some veils shall never be lifted; Babcock would not lift that particular veil.

Three nights after the initiation, Sir John experienced it over again, in the form of another hermetic dream. He was being led, blindfolded, to the throne of the South where opens the window of the Silver Star in night’s roaman indigo.

“One who seeks the Light,” Sir John replied, according to the traditional Masonic formula explained to him before the ceremony.

“Humankind cannot bear very much Light,” said Nightrix in a watery voice. “Look upon what little you domesticated mammals are presently prepared to receive.”

There was a spouter inn the weib and Sir John found himself back again at the Tower Struck By Lightning. Sir Talis, a gorged hairyman, was counting out his honi. Sir Joan crept past ovaseer Peep parsing as somndreamist and found hirselves in a vast humming hive (decliner flying, mythra o vid: what a man dasn’t shame) where madmen struggled frantically to kill each other, cursing and screaming, “You will, whisker, you will!” and clutching daggers gats dirks goaters and broken bottle shards, uttering vowelth, muttering foulth, as all sank into dank, dark blood-red fetid moonslime. “Kid goaters!” they howled. “And that the Vril is strong!” A medieval scroll was unrolled, Indie, Norse, Russian, Irish, veryvery long but veryvery dutiful, saying:

DO NOT THROW BUTTS IN THE URINAL: FOR THEY ARE SUBTLE AND SWIFT TO ANGER

Sed, the whole’s arpent of entry, a muddy murky leaky John, pressed cowrin throngs upon him, shrieking, “Fear the forgotten!”

“These,” said Nud the Allmousey (Eutaenius Microstemmus) in eagulls clause, “are those who came this way without the Cup of Sympathy. Each imagines all the others to be terrifying demons and thinks he acts only in self-defense. Tragic, and ironic, is it not?”

“Suffering Christ!” he said, without any profane intent. Was that dream a vision of how humanity looked from the viewpoint of an Illuminated mind?

“A real initiation never ends,” Jones had said cryptically, before the physical-plane initiation. Sir John understood: the dream, in its own language, was indeed a continuation of the initiation, but on another plane. Even the masks used in the actual ceremony were now, in the light of the dream’s clear message, an allegory, not a mere bit of theatrical mummery. The masks worn in ordinary life are psychological, not cardboard, but nonetheless serve to hide each from his fellows; Society is the Devil’s Masquerade.

When Sir John met next with Jones at the latter’s home in Soho, the dreams of the Dark Tower were discussed at length and Sir John proudly exhibited his decoding of their symbolism, especially the allegory of the masks.

“True enough,” Jones said. “But it is also a rule of our Order that nobody in it ever knows personally any more than one other member. The masks used in initiations help enforce that rule.”

“Mars is the patron god of all societies,” Jones said grimly. “Competition smashed the first Golden Dawn lodge in London. Everybody knew everybody, so we all fell into transcendental egotism—‘my Illumination is higher than your Illumination,’ that sort of thing—and the Devil of Disputation drove us apart. We don’t repeat any of our mistakes, Sir John. From here on, except for very special emergencies, perhaps, you will meet nobody else in the lodge but myself, until somebody higher up replaces me as your teacher. If we don’t know one another, we can’t fall into rivalries.”

This radical decentralization was a double-edged device, Sir John soon realized. Not only was he spared the waste of time and energy that might have been spent wondering if he were progressing faster or slower than another student, but the mystery created by this lack of sociability had a subtle and new effect on all his perceptions of other human beings.

At first, he would merely wonder, if somebody made a remark that seemed more insightful than usual, “Could it be … is he one of us, too?” Was Shakespeare in the Invisible College? The head waiter at Claridge’s? Just how many members were there? It was impossible to get a literal answer out of Jones about this. “The question itself implies a Probationer’s ignorance about the true nature of Space and Time,” was all Jones would contribute on that subject. Sir John began to wonder, every time he read the familiar newspaper yarn about a person rescued from danger by a Mysterious Stranger who immediately vanished without accepting thanks or leaving his name. “Another of us?” Sir John would speculate romantically, seeing the protective hand of the Great White Brotherhood everywhere. Of course, as a Cambridge graduate, he had imbibed, at least by osmosis, something of modern skeptical scholarship, and he knew all this might be mere infatuation with a wonderful myth.

But, on the other hand, one could not expect to be provided with special spectacles allowing the members of the Invisible College to see each other, could one?

And the enigma of hermetic societies was more subtle than that, Sir John was to discover. The Golden Dawn, after all, was allegedly continuing the unbroken tradition of the original Invisible College of the Rosy Cross, whose members “wore the garb and adapted the manners” of the country in which they resided. Sir John soon found that even the most inane remarks or offensive behavior would trigger the same question: “Another of us?” How many Adepts might there be, traveling about in the guise of ordinary humanity, carefully hiding their advanced state behind a masquerade of socially normal stupidity or conformity? Jesus allowed Himself to be spat upon, whipped, mocked and crucified; the Golden Dawn literature made it abundantly clear that a true Adept might play any role or suffer any humiliation in order to accomplish his or her special Work: The Fool may be The Magus in disguise.

Sir John was simultaneously devouring tons of mystical literature from all nations and all ages, dumped on him ten volumes at a time by Jones. Written examinations once a month determined that he understood, at least verbally, what he read.

“Nor do we wish to make you any more or less than that,” Jones replied. “But to progress in the Great Work, you must become aware of the invisible truth behind the visible paraphernalia of all religions. In our Order, the Christian may remain Christian, the Jew Jew, the Moslem Moslem, as it may be, but whatever their faith, they may not remain narrow-minded sectarians.”

Sir John began to understand this ambiguous ecumenicism a bit while studying a text on Buddhism. The refrain, “Everyone you meet is a Buddha,” began to drive him to despair; it was so nonsensical; it was repeated so often, in so many different ways; it was obvious that he would have to understand it before he began to comprehend what Buddhism was all about. He, therefore, at Jones’ suggestion, tried to see the Buddha in everyone he met—and then he understood quickly.

The effect was the same as the deliberate mystification with the Golden Dawn about who was or wasn’t a member. Looking for the Buddha in everyone, like looking for more members of the Order, caused Sir John to pay a great deal closer attention to people than he ever had before, and to see more of their mysterious and adamantine individuality, rather than classifying them into categories of age, sex, race, caste or other superficialities. He now saw all people as mysterious, incredible beings; and he understood, suddenly, a most annoying paradox of Goethe, who had said, “What is hardest of all? That which seems most simple: to see with your eyes what is before your eyes.”

And he understood, too, Saint Paul’s insistence that “we are all members of the Body of Christ.” Every man and woman was a single facet of the diamond-mirror, made in the image of God, which was humanity. Buddhism, as Jones had promised him, had not weakened his Christianity but had illuminated it further.

Sir John thought this was marvelous and poured it out in manic excitement at his next meeting with Jones.

“Very good,” Jones said condescendingly. “You have awakened, a little, from one of the dreams that keep the sleepwalkers on the street from seeing one another. This is a beginning, but only a beginning. Don’t be too impressed with your progress, for God’s sake, or you’ll never move another inch. Try seeing the divine Light in every beautiful object that comes your way—deep scarlet rubies, or tiger-lilies in a field, or the red markings on a crab’s back. Then ask yourself where consciousness and divinity are not.”

And with that crushing and yet encouraging speech, delivered with a trace of leonine fire, mild Mr. Jones seemed to Sir John definitely beyond all doubt the genuine article: a true Adept. Then, without mercy, Jones dumped ten books on Cabala upon Sir John, told him to master them thoroughly—and nearly torpedoed and sank him forever.

Babcock, previously, had studied Cabala only as a historian, learning enough of its terminology and theories to trace its influence from the early Hermeticists like Pico della Mirándola and Giordano Bruno through Dr. Dee and Sir Francis Bacon, onward to Freemasonry and Illuminism. Now he found himself confronted with the necessity of mastering the entire Cabalistic theory of the universe, which was about a thousand times more complicated than the periodic table of chemical elements Uncle Bentley kept in his study.

According to Cabala, the cosmos is governed by symbolic correspondences between many planes of being, visible and invisible. That seemed simple enough; but the correspondences themselves had no logical connections at all—“Cabala transcends logic,” Jones reminded Sir John. The correspondences could only be learned by brute force and rote repetition until they finally embedded themselves in the memory. Even after being memorized, the correspondences would not be understood by the student, Jones cheerfully remarked; true understanding, he said, could come only through intuition or through direct experience of the invisible planes, by techniques to be taught when Sir John graduated from Probationer to Neophyte.

A: [1] All Hebrew words having the same numerical value must have equivalent meanings; therefore, ACh D (unity) which equals A(l) + Ch(8) + D(4) or 13, is the same as AHBH (love) because A(l) + H(5) + B(2) + H(5) also equals 13; ergo, unity is love and love is unity. [2] Since the Holy Unspeakable Name of God (YHVH) = Y(10) + H(5) + V(6) + H(5) = 26, which is 2 × 13, God is love + unity. [3] Since 7 of the 22 Hebrew letters also correspond to planets, the proportion 22/7 is very important; and, indeed, 22/7 = 3.1415 … etc., the value of TT, or the ratio of the radius of a circle to its circumference.

A: Since God is unity, and the first Hebrew letter A (Aleph) = 1, A symbolizes God. But A (Aleph) written in full Hebrew is ALP which = 111, showing that God is a triple unity; well and good for Christian Cabalists, although annoying to Jewish and Moslem Cabalists. But 111 also = APL, Darkness, and ASN, Sudden Death. Is God therefore, equivalent to Darkness and Sudden Death?

Sir John spent days, weeks, then months rote-reciting over and over, peering into the books again each time memory slipped: “Aleph is the first Hebrew letter and means ‘ox.’ The principle correspondences are the Fool card in the Tarot, the color yellow, the element air, the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, the Breath of God—what’s that?—Ruach Elohim, the Breath of God, in the Old Testament, the path from Kether to Chockmah on the Tree of Life and, uh, oh, God, uh …” Back to the books.

“Beth is the second Hebrew letter and means ‘house.’ The Juggler in the Tarot, the color scarlet, the planet Mercury, Thoth in Egyptian, Hermes in Greek, Odin in Norse, the path from Kether to Binah, the monkey-god in Hindu … Oh, Christ, what’s the name of the monkey-god …?” Back, again, to the books.

“Wrong. Won’t do at all, my boy. No carelessness allowed. Memorize, memorize, memorize!”

“Work on the first two words of the Bible,” Jones suggested then; and Sir John found himself seeking the hidden meanings in BRAShITH ALHIM. “In the beginning, the Gods.”

Of course, he knew from Pico della Mirándola that BRAShITH [“In the beginning …”] has the numerical value of 3910, the number of years according to occult tradition from the “Fall” of humanity (due to the unfortunate trauma of the first contact with Higher Intelligence, coded into the serpent myth of Genesis) to the birth of Jesus. He discovered for himself that ALHIM (the gods: God-in-the-singular as YHVH or Jehovah not appearing until the second chapter) contains, by the permutations of ternura, 3.1415, or pi accurate to four places. Then he noted that BRA, the first three letters, form by notarikon the initials of Ben, the Son; Ruach, the Holy Spirit; and Abba, the Father.

“Very good,” Jones said when this was reported. “There is much, much more there. For instance, Agape, the word for ‘Love’ in the New Testament, has the Cabalistic value of 93. Add that to the 3.1415 of ALHIM and you get 3.141593, pi accurate to six places. Keep working on it until you find the Golden Proportions of the Masonic lodge in it.”

Once, Sir John had the temerity to ask Jones about the Mysterious Holy Guardian Angel which the Golden Dawn training was intended to evoke.

“Usually,” Jones said, “that is explained three different ways—for Probationers, Neophytes, and those of higher rank who have yet not attained it. In your case, considering the mixture of scholarship and romanticism I detect in your temperament, I will give you all three explanations simultaneously. One: it is a metaphor that signifies, roughly, learning to receive communications from your own unconscious mind without the usual distortions. Two: it is not that simple at all; the Holy Guardian Angel speaks to you through your unconscious, but is literally a separate being of evolutionary status as far beyond us as we are beyond the first invertebrates. Three: yes, it is a metaphor, after all, but for something so far outside our ordinary consciousness that it doesn’t matter a rap whether you think of it in the scientific terms of my first answer or in the mystical terms of my second answer; it transcends both. When you have the experience, you will find your own metaphor for it, which may result in a scientific theory never known to the world before, in a work of art, or just in a change in your life toward sanctity or compassion or something more traditionally ‘religious.’ Do more of the work and ask fewer questions, if you want to advance faster.”

Eventually, nine months after Sir John’s initiation, he had completed his reading course in world mysticism and was able to pass all of Jones’ Cabalistic quizzes easily. By now, he was also totally confused and was beginning to wonder if he or Jones or both of them might not be a bit mad. After all, what did an ox have to do with a man in Fool’s garb, or either of them with the color yellow or the Holy Spirit? If Thoth and Hermes were the same god under two names, well and good; that made sense historically. But why were they in correspondence with the Hebrew word for “house”? Or what the hell did the planet Venus have to do with the letter daleth and the goddess Demeter? Was Cabala all a complicated Jewish joke at the expense of those who tried to comprehend the suprarational by rational means?

It was when Sir John had begun to seriously consider this last thought that quiet, fatherly Mr. Jones gave him his first real test, right between the eyes.

“You are familiar,” he said, “with the letters that appear atop every Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Crucifix, I.N.R.I.”

“Yod Nun Resh Yod,” Sir John replied at once, giving the Hebrew equivalents.

“Very good. The Catholic and Orthodox Churches, of course, explain this in childish terms, for the simple minds of the masses. Are you, perhaps, familiar with that explanation?”

“It’s supposed to be Latin,” Sir John said happily; this was easy. “Iesus Nazarinus Rex Iudorem—‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.’”

“Excellent,” Jones said. “Now I must inform you that there was an esoteric Gnostic meaning in those initials long before the creation of the exoteric one you have just supplied. It requires Cabalistic knowledge and the true faculty of intuition to decode it. That will be your assignment to complete before we promote you to Neophyte. Call me whenever you think you have the answer.”

Sir John spent a week nearly going mad over this conundrum. On the seventh day he made up a table in which he deliberately listed only the most nonsensical and illogical correspondences, to force himself to think in the meta-logical manner of the true Cabalists. The table looked like this:

He tried letting his mind drift through the images, avoiding words and associations: hand, fish, head, hand; hand, fish, head, hand; hand, fish, head, hand … Dozens of ideas came to him that were original and dazzling (he once began to see evolution as a pre-written scenario …), but nothing came up that didn’t seem like empty and windy nonsense when he re-thought it later.

He tried the astrological correspondences: Virgo, Scorpio, the Sun, Virgo. A virgin, an insect, the Sun, and the virgin again. That was even less helpful than hand-fish-head-hand. He tried Virgin-hand, insect-Death, head-Sun, Virgin-hand. This gave rise to a line of thought which made him quite embarrassed and caused him to doubt again if he had the purity of heart to pass through Chapel Perilous successfully.

The Greek correspondences were resonant with eerie imagery. Chronos, god of Time, could be visualized gruesomely by recalling Goya’s terrifying painting, Chronos Devouring His Children. Hades and the world of the dead were easy to invoke by remembering the descent of Odysseus to the underworld. Apollo reminded Sir John of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and was harder to deal with. But what was the meaning of the sequence itself: Chronos, Hades, Apollo, Chronos?

The Hermit: an old man carrying a lantern in the dark. But what did that have to do with yod, the hand, except that you need a hand to carry a lantern? And why the correspondence with scorpions and virginity?

Death: a skeleton on a great white horse, mowing down King, Bishop, Mother and Child in his path. But what did that have to do with nun, a fish? Although it fit Hades, God of the dead, of course.

The Sun: a naked child on the same great white horse with the sun rising in the background. And what did that have to do with resh, the head? Although it fit the astrological correspondence for once.

Was it a psychological parable about the path of initiation itself? The student’s mind begins as an old man (social tradition), wandering in the darkness of ignorance, guided only by the lantern of intuition; becomes transformed through the death of its conditioned aspects—the links with King (the State), Bishop (the Church), Mother and Child (family); is reborn as the sun-child (“Unless ye become as a little child ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom”); and then—and then—why the return to the old man wandering in the dark? It was just more nonsense, when he thought he was on the right track at last.

Chronos, god of Time (and destruction); Hades, lord of the dead; Apollo, god of the Dawn Sun; Chronos, damn it again …

Sir John tried Gematria, which is the Cabalistic method of taking the numerical value of a mystery-word and relating it to all other Hebrew words having the same number. Yod was 10, nun was 50, resh was 200, second yod was 10 again. Total: 270. He plunged for days into his Hebrew dictionary and found only one example:

, levers or bars.

The next night he awoke from a dream of buzzing goblins in honey-suits with the sentence clear in his head: I Never Risk Inquiry. He was sure this was a most profound revelation and hastily scribbled it down in his bedside notepad. In the morning he read it again and could only laugh.

But an hour later, in his library, a most peculiar accident occurred. He was reaching for his Hebrew dictionary again, looking for at least a second word with the value 270, when another book somehow got dislodged and fell at his feet. He bent to pick it up and found it was a seventeenth-century alchemical treatise, opened at page 270. Coincidence? The first paragraph began:

The secret of the Great Work is given to all true Christians by the formula I.N.R.L, which, properly interpreted, means Igni Natura Renovatur Integra.

The translation leaped into Sir John’s mind in a blinding flash: All of nature is renewed by fire.

An old man, death and rebirth—Time, Death and Resurrection—Crucifixion and Redemption—the Lord of Time, the Lord of the Underworld and the Golden Dawn. All of nature is renewed by fire. The Greek and Christian symbols flowed together and merged with the Tarot cards. Sir John’s gropings toward a new theory of evolution, midway between his father’s Lamarckian heresies and Uncle Bentley’s Darwinian othodoxy, became agonizingly concrete as he experienced the struggle out of the caves, the raiding nomads who swept down from the deserts, the snows, the storms, the plagues, the pain, the constant death, death, death. And the onward struggle: the birth toward true consciousness, flickering dimly in all, blazing into fiery illumination occasionally. It was the cosmic birth experience relived and relived and relived until the agony and the joy became mingled and inseparable. He was the single cell swimming in the amniotic ocean, remembering the searing ecstasy of his creation: the tenderness of the first moments at the tit: the caves of Trolls he had imagined becoming real as dark archaic forces moved all about him: swimming in the hot sun, at peace: and then the terror and the horror of life again: the hunger and the violence and the lunacy: the victims of the Inquisition screaming for centuries on the torture racks of insane Faith: the devils and demons unleashed from the fantasy of terrified minds into the experience of millions: people in solitary confinement: soldiers with their arms and legs and genitals burned off: children beaten and whipped and starved: death on the operating table under the scalpel of drunken and sadistic doctors: while the carnivals and dances go on, the blind merry ones oblivious to all the agony of their brothers and sisters in the hell of man’s inhumanity to life: mothers weeping over stillborn infants: the horror in the mouse’s eye as it knew itself trapped: gigantic halls of enormous godly statues of peace and wisdom: eternity of mountains and oceans: the undying trees talking silently forever: carrying the cross up the hill, accepting the burden, willing to take all the pain and all the agony forever, to redeem at last the blind struggle and complete the planetary birth. Yes: the Vril was moving in him, the alchemical heat was rising: he saw far, far beyond the tiny cell called John Babcock and was one with the billions of years of the single organism that was Terra.

Was it a minute or a thousand years? Sir John didn’t know; he merely knew that he and the whole world of his perception was remade by fire.

Jones took the Magickal Diary Babcock handed him and read slowly the latest page:

Igni Natura Renovatur Integra: all forms are temporary and illusory, mere constructs of the imagination. The old Hermit will be struck down by Death, but the form behind the form, the life-energy, will be reborn as a new Child, which will in turn age and become the old Hermit again. Chronos, the Lord of Time, leads each of us inevitably to Death and Hades, Lord of the Underworld; but we rise again as Apollo, Lord of the Golden Dawn, rises again each morning. Christ Crucified is indeed a re-telling of these Greek death-and-resurrection myths, as rationalist historians keep telling us; but the rationalists do not understand that the myth recurs because it is profoundly symbolic of the great cosmic truth: consciousness, like matter and energy, is neither created nor destroyed. The cycles repeat and repeat and repeat endlessly, but the same recurs always, because the Platonic Archetypes remain, unchanging themselves, beyond Time.

“There is no right answer,” Jones said. They were dining, this time, at Claridge’s, and Jones had brought along a very small pamphlet instead of the usual stack of fat old books. “Or, I might as well have said, there are many right answers. Someday, not in the near future, we shall have a very profound philosophical discussion about that, but for the present it shall suffice to say that your answer is right for you, at this stage of your training.”

“But,” Sir John said, feeling deflated, “I felt it, even before I understood it. The Vril energy, flowing through me as it flows through all things. The continuous process of destruction and recreation—the world remade by the fire of the Holy Spirit. I felt it,” he repeated, a bit lamely.

George Cecil Jones sighed profoundly. “You have taken your first step,” he said sadly, “but you don’t even know yet in which direction to walk. Pray contain your self-congratulations and, for God’s sake, really apply yourself to the exercises in this little pamphlet. We have scheduled your initiation as a Neophyte for next month sometime, but if you do not perform these exercises rigorously, at least four times a day, until then, it will be a false initiation—a hollow shell, a mere play-acting. Do not delude yourself that you have arrived before you have even learned how to travel.”

Astral Projection
Class-B Publication
Hermetic Order of the G∴D∴

His mood sank further. “So I am to practice getting out of my body now,” he said uneasily.

Jones drank some claret neatly. “Just so,” he replied calmly. “And most of the time you feel like a perfect damned fool. And you will suspect, once again, that we are a band of plausible madmen leading you to some metaphysical Bedlam. But do the exercises, record the results after each experiment, continue to show me your Magick Diary monthly for criticism and advice—and have patience, dear boy; patience! There is one further matter I must mention at this time. It will be necessary, I am afraid, for you to take an Oath of celibacy for the duration of the next two years. Will you accept that condition, or will you drop out of the Great Work, instead? Once taken, you understand, the oath is binding and will bring down terrible punishments if violated in any manner.”

Sir John controlled his features with difficulty. “I remain pledged to the Great Work,” he said firmly. “I will endure any trials that are necessasry.”

“I must ask you three times. Are you quite sure of yourself in this matter?”

“And I ask you the third time. Will you be bound by this Oath of celibacy for two full years and not attempt any mental reservations or sophistries to evade or circumvent it if it becomes onerous?”

Jones looked at his empty plate with seemingly great interest, as if searching for archaeological clues as to its age. “Celibacy, to be spiritually effective,” he said mildly, quietly, “must be total. No … um … solitary vices may be allowed to console one for the absence of womankind.”

Sir John felt the separate tension in each muscle of his face, thinking first: The blood is rushing to my cheeks and I’m blushing like an imbecile schoolchild. And then: No, the blood is draining from my face and I look like the pale criminal in the dock, not daring to look up at that moment lest Jones should also have looked up from his own seemingly obsessive scrutiny of his empty plate, and half-afraid also that Jones might be so advanced an Adept that reading minds was as easy for him as reading the label on a champagne bottle; yet hyper-conscious again, as in the first rising of the alchemical heat, the first sense of the Rosy Crucifixion implied in the cryptogram I.N.R.I., aware of his own awareness and afraid of his own fear: once again confronting the foreboding of insanity that had plagued him since the first timid sins of puberty, so that in a kind of hysterical paralysis he felt time itself might have slowed and, wondering if paranoia was descending upon him, thinking I heard it, and, No, I only imagined it—for it seemed that somebody at a nearby table had said distinctly, almost mockingly, the name of that which was most intimately connected with his most shameful secret. But maybe the voice had only been mentioning Carter’s, another restaurant.

Jones drank another sip of wine. “Two years,” he said calmly, as if not noticing Sir John’s nervousness, “is not so terribly long a time, you will find. And you will discover that matters astral become increasingly easy as you place matters carnal away from you. I have confidence in you, Sir John,” he ended with abrupt warmth, patting the younger man’s shoulder for emphasis.

And Sir John returned home for two weeks, to practice astral projection, feeling most of the time (as Jones had warned him) like a perfect damned fool.

If the I.N.R.I, riddle concerned the transcendence of time, the practice of astral projection seemed to aim at the abolition of space. The trick, Sir John soon perceived, was to be in two places at once. Since that was manifestly impossible in reason, the only way to achieve it was to go beyond reason, to deliberately cultivate a type of faith bordering on religious mania. Sir John’s initial attempts were grotesque failures.

Even after three weeks of practice four times a day, the best Babcock achieved was a transportation to the innards of some incredibly complex machine with a million or more moving parts, each tended by a blue puppet and a red dwarf moving jerkily, mechanical-style, all of them talking to themselves as they worked at their incomprehensible tasks. “Mulligan Milligan Hooligan Halligan,” they muttered. “Magick tragick music mystic!” they shrieked. “Simple Simon Semper Semen,” they giggled. “Barter carter darter farter!” they howled. “Sir Lion, Sir Loin, Sir Talis, Sir Qualis,” they gibbered. With a shudder Sir John came back into his body into his chair into his room into Euclidean space, realizing that he had dozed off when he thought he was beginning to project into the astral.

“Do not let such nonsense bother you,” Jones said when Sir John showed him the Diary entry of this experience. “One can hear the same gibberish at any Revival meeting or Spiritualist séance. You have just opened a door into another of the traps in Chapel Perilous. That is the realm of those who enter the Path without the Sword of Reason. If you reflect back, you will remember hearing the same idiocy just before falling asleep many nights.”

“Certainly. The mind has both a rational and an irrational side,” Jones said kindly. “To remain totally rational is to become half a human. To allow the irrational to overwhelm you is to succumb to religious mania or the disease called hysteria by alienists. The Great Work consists of yoking the rational and irrational together in a harmony that transcends both. Until that is achieved, you may expect more nonsense to float up from the irrational regions. Ignore it, do not fear it, and concentrate on the Work.”

In the following weeks Sir John found the astral realm and the dreamworld increasingly blending into each other, and increasingly hard to disentangle from waking reality. He heard many messages like: “Hickory dickory dock, we’ve got you by the cock,” “The void, the zero, the nought, the Almighty,” “No wife, no horse, no mustache,” “A weary weary song and a blurry blurry bottleful,” “For blood and wine are red,” “Yoni to those pensive males,” and, several times, “Babcock’s going crazy, Babcock’s going crazy, Babcock’s going crazy …”

For relaxation, Sir John took to browsing in contemporary poetry, mindful of the Golden Dawn teaching that during training any extraneous reading should be limited to matter of a spiritually uplifting nature. He began to study the mystical Irish poet, William Butler Yeats.

The question “Another of us?” came back to him again and again, as he read poem after poem, and this time he had confidence enough to answer it with a definite “yes.” There was no mistaking it; the poetry of Yeats was replete with oblique references to the Golden Dawn teachings and initiatory ceremonies.

And then, by the wildest of coincidences—Sir John was less and less inclined to believe in coincidences by now—he was invited to a small private reading at which Yeats and a few other poets were going to declaim some of the more recent works. Sir John accepted, feeling vaguely guilty; but then, he reminded himself, he was only forbidden to associate with other known members of the Order, and he did not, literally, know Yeats was a member, after all, since that was only a deduction, almost a guess, on his part.

A small devilish voice told him, “It’s not a guess; you do know.” But he put that aside. The chance to meet another member of the Order—a famous one, and one who, judging from the poetry, had been in the Order for at least a decade and was hence presumably quite advanced—was really irresistible. Sir John went to the reading, even though it was in the godforsaken suburb of Kensington, which was said to be even more infested with Hindus, Hebrews, Americans and other undesirables than Soho itself.

Indeed, the host turned out to be an American, of the most unbearable sort. His accent was nearly indecipherable—Sir John remembered the degenerate Oscar Wilde’s really choice aphorism: “The English and the Americans have everything in common but their language.” This unusual host was, like all Americans, bombastically sure of himself on all matters, especially (in his case) literature and the arts in general. His family name was Pound and his first name was one of those Hebraic titles that many Yankees seemed to favor—Ezekiel or Ezra or Jeremiah or something equally Old Testament. He had untidy red hair, a wild red beard, stood well over six feet and boomed when he talked, like all Americans. No article of clothing he wore seemed to match any other article of his apparel; whether this was due to poverty, eccentricity or both, Sir John could not quite decide.

Even the handsome Yeats himself was, if not unkempt, far from ideal in sartorial splendor, Sir John also noted; but Yeats was serene where Pound was frantic, tolerant where Pound was dogmatic and gentle where Pound was rough.

The readings were exceedingly miscellaneous. Pound read some amazingly short and unrhymed poems unlike anything Sir John had ever heard and then a very strange translation of “The Seafarer,” in which he had somehow managed, in modern English, to include as many alliterative consonants and guttural assonances as the Anglo-Saxon original. A shy young lady named Hilda-something read some equally short pieces which sounded like very literal translations from the ancient Greek. Then, at last, Yeats began chanting and keening in his distinctive way, and Sir John finally heard something that sounded like real poetry to him. He almost wept with emotion at the lines:

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone;
It’s with O’Leary in his grave

Afterward, the bombastic Pound served some of the strongest coffee Sir John had ever tasted, and led everybody into a lively discussion about what they had heard. English poetry, Pound said violently, was “trapped in the Miltonic trance,” which he sarcastically caricatured as “whakty-whakty-whakty-whakty-boom! boom! whakty-whakty-whakty-boom! boom!” Experiments such as Hilda’s imitations of the ancient Greeks, Yeats’ recreation of Bardic forms of old Ireland and his own adaptions from the Chinese were necessary to enlarge the scope and range of verse, said this upstart. Several people immediately began protesting, and it seemed that Miltonic sonority and iambic pentameter were to them as important as the Monarchy to a Conservative.

“It appears to me,” said a young lady named Lola, whose accent seemed Australian, “that poetry is invocation. If it does not invoke, then no matter what style it employs, it is not poetry.”

“Invocation,” Pound cried, “belongs in churches. Poetry should present a precise image, in the fewest possible words, so that reading it is like being hit by an April breeze. That’s what leaves an impression in the mind. Invocation and repetition are all blather that detracts from the red-hot intensity of the poetic flash itself, which only lasts a moment.”

“Oh, come, Ezra,” Yeats protested mildly. “Repetitious rhythm is the essence of the act of love, which poetry is always, consciously or unconsciously, trying to simulate.”

Before Pound could reply, the young lady named Lola brazenly replied, without a blush, “Exactly the point, Mr. Yeats. Do you know what I consider the greatest modern poem? Captain Fuller’s ‘Treasure House.’ Do you know it?” And she quoted:

O thou brave soldier of life sinking into the quicksand of death! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!

O thou laughter resounding from the tombs! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!

O thou goat-dancer of the hills! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!

O thou red cobra of desire that art unhooded by the hands of maidens! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!

Sir John started violently and almost dropped his coffee cup. Once again the question “Another of us?” had an immediately affirmative answer. Evoe and IAO, according to Golden Dawn teachings, were two of the most secret Gnostic names to invoke divinity. He looked at Lola with astonishment, both because of these esoteric names she had quoted so casually and because nice young ladies simply did not speak so openly of the rhythm of the act of love. But she was looking at Yeats, awaiting a response, and her face was simply open and innocent; Sir John could not quite catch her eye.

“Captain Fuller certainly has his great moments,” Yeats said, with equal innocence, as if he were not aware that two of the most secret words of Power in occultism were being casually quoted in public. “However, while a few stanzas of that are fine, the whole poem does grow a bit wearisome after three hundred stanzas. There I must agree with Ezra that brevity would have been better.”

“Who—who is this Captain Fuller?” Sir John asked, trying also to sound casual.

“A great authority on military strategy, I’m told,” Pound said. “Lately, he has taken to writing quite a bit of mystical verse of that sort, all of it too damned long-winded and rhetorical for my taste.”

But Sir John was remembering, his pulses racing: “O thou red cobra of desire that art unhooded by the hands of maidens! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!” The phallic double meaning was too overt to ignore, especially in the context of Yeats’ remark about the rhythm of poetry being the rhythm of Eros. Was Lola, then, involved with one of the forbidden, lefthand lodges (“Cults of the Shadow,” Jones called them) that had split from the Golden Dawn and gone off in the direction of diabolism? He looked at her again and this time he did catch her eye, but what he read there was a most enigmatic humor. Was it friendly, mocking or dangerously malign? Or was his imagination merely fevered by the fact that he was under a two-year Oath of celibacy and yet knew, for the first time, a sensual yearning strong enough to conquer both his timidity with women and the stern Victorian ethics instilled in him by his family? Was this attraction strong enough, he thought in fear, to conquer his Oath? He turned his eyes to the other side of the room, feeling a rush of blood to the face, and found himself suddenly engulfed in suspicious thoughts. Yeats, obviously, was a member of the Golden Dawn. How many others at this poetry reading were, also? Could this whole evening be a test of his Oath? He could not bring himself to look in Lola’s direction again, and he left the party as soon as politeness allowed.

But that night he dreamed of Lola raising her skirt to fix her garter and she caught him looking, cawing thanes, and he was scared wild (prosing zombie-dish) pursued by a faster boog, Sid, theol bardot of sneakery. There were hatenotes and featherfurgolems and potions burning boiled-est; Sir Joan, intrepid, nerveless, rapacious, idiotic, stumbled past the beehive pearlous. And the sun begin to rus, and oh up he ris, and he was all rose up, loinharted, up there so eye and moisty, baba cock of the morn, between them two toughies, for the romanz did tromp him, garther forgiven, the achtnotes hurling bricks. “Hate and be gored,” sagd Shut and he saw, he was, he saw, he was, the Hideous God, Baphomet, hir dugs hanging limp, hir bigcock standing stern, under the inverse pentacle of the Tempters.

“Are you all right, sir?” It was the voice of Wildeblood, the butler, outside the door.

Looking across the room, he could see that the mirror was smashed. The poltergeist effect: typical of the onset of astral invasions. He reminded himself of the primary Golden Dawn teachings: not to give way to fear whatever happened, and not to jump to conclusions. Wildeblood was probably right; it was only an earth tremor.

But he could not sleep again until dawn; for he had seen the face of Baphomet, the Hideous God, and he knew that his journey into Chapel Perilous was no longer confined to dream alone. The earth had literally shaken beneath him; the astral and the physical were interacting. It was “probably only an earth tremor,” but it was connected, psychically, with the real opening of the door between the visible and invisible worlds.

Things That Go
Bump in the Right

DE MODO QUO OPERET LEX MAGICA

Sir John grimly continued his efforts at astral projection. Jones, meanwhile, became more bizarre in his teaching methods. At one of their fortnightly meetings, he showed Sir John a cartoon from Punch, depicting a very disgruntled gentleman and a very officious customs inspector glaring at each other. The customs inspector was saying, “These cats is dogs and the rabbits is dogs, but that bloody turtle is a hinsect!”

“It is the whole secret of Illumination,” Jones said solemnly, “if you consider it deeply enough.”

He insisted on giving the cartoon to Sir John, who obediently took it home, hung it in his bedroom and contemplated it once or twice a day. Illumination eluded him. The differing epistemologies of common-sense travelers and the authors of the customs regulations were symptomatic of primordial ontological confusions everywhere, perhaps. But what did that have to do with matters spiritual?

At their next meeting, Jones presented Sir John with the Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. “Here,” he said gravely, “is the condensed essence of Holy Cabala.”

Sir John flushed angrily. “This time I know you’re having me on,” he said. “It isn’t worthy of you, Jones.”

Jones remained placid. “How many times,” he asked, “have you encountered the saying, ‘When the student is ready, the Master speaks?’ Do you know why that is true? The door opens inward. The Master is everywhere, but the student has to open his mind to hear the Master’s Voice. Read carefully, Sir John, ponder the hidden meanings, and see if the Master does not speak to you through this book.”

Sir John, feeling more like an idiot than ever, took Lewis Carroll home and re-read all of it, cover to cover; and he was astonished at how much of it coincided with his own limited successes in astral projection. Were there even deeper meanings that would become clear when he had progressed farther in the Work?

A few nights later he awoke from sleep convinced that he understood the Secret of Secrets. It was in one of Carroll’s couplets:

He thought he saw a banker’s clerk descending
from a bus;

He looked again and saw it was a hippopotamus

The elation lasted for several minutes. Then he looked at the cracked mirror and saw his own reflection split in two. The whole world split in shatters, broken glass and jewels. This time he knew the explosion was psychic: neither Wildeblood nor any of the other servants would hear the demolition.

He got out of bed very carefully and lit a candle. Sitting in the windowseat, listening to the beating of his heart, trying to breathe normally, he was overwhelmed by the crack’s sudden ability to change rhythmically from an acute angle to an obtuse angle while visions poured through of worlds with seven moons, worlds with nineteen suns, somadust and 358 and fnord, magick castles in the mist, paladins in white and black armor, aeons of the rhythmic alteration from acute angle to obtuse angle, vast insectoid intelligences, wider and wider vistas of planets, galaxies, whole universes profoundly alien, the Demon-Sultan howling in the darkness where the moon doesn’t shine. “These dogs is cats and these mice is 3.141593, but those bloody garters are incest. Illigan Nillagain Rilligan Illagain. Eat a live toad before breakfast and nothing worse will happen to you all day.” Sir John did exactly the right thing. From memory, concentrating deeply, ignoring the semenduets and obtuse rondels, he wrote in pen the five axioms and twenty-three definitions from Euclid’s Geometry. Within half an hour he was in normal space-time again and the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations had been vanquished.

FURTHER REFLECTIONS OF JAMES JOYCE
(Parental discretion advised)

Ineluctible network of coincidence: at least that if no more. Myriads of worldlines, Professor Einstein would say, but behind them, invisible, intangible, the enigmatic links of a dark design; indifferent, paring their fingernails. Dialectic: Yeats, the one man in all Ireland who has tried to help me, to advance my career, yet the one against whom I must struggle to the end, since either his vision or mine will define the future of our literature.

Joyce contemplated worldlines coiling back to the beginning. Karma, or the cause of all causes. Inexplicable and inextricable. Garters, by all that’s holy. Network of coincidence. Ezra, son of Homer, by damn.

Strangest of all: in Babcock’s life this episode of Pound and Yeats is just a subplot, an incident. Was Hamlet a subplot in the career of Fortinbras similarly?

I.N.R.I.: Iron Nails Ran In. A guess made by a Protestant boy in Dublin how many years ago?

Einstein’s intelligent spaniel eyes: so much less prepared for this than I, who listened half-believing once to the Dublin annex of this Golden Dawn. What can he be thinking of Yeats and Babcock and their friends trying to leap outside space-time entirely?

Genus eutaenia, of course. Ancient tempter. They eat mice, shed skins in spring: in a garden, the man and woman naked and unashamed. One bite of the apple and kerflooey.

Homosexual terror behind a great deal of it. The card old Queensborough sent to Wilde at his club, to provoke the Libel trial: “To Mr. Oscar Wilde, posing as somdomist.” Must have spotted that five or six times in those dreams.

Wonder if Babcock knows, any better than Queens-borough, that it should be spelled “sodomist.”

But the solace berry? Some link with Salisbury? Can’t quite make that one yet. Very Oedipal overtones, though.

From deep neath the crypt of St. Giles
Came a shriek that re-echoed for miles
“My goodness gracious,”
Said Brother Ignatius
And something and something and smiles?

Hunter: Odysseus in Dublin. Time’s cuckold. A wife too long alone. Honi soit qui mal …

Nora, Stanislaus: Did they? Once, even? Or many times? No matter. Having rejected monogamy once, may I assert it now? Nobody is property. Noninvasion of the noninvasive individual. Non serviam. Back to my Byronic posturing. But did they? Will I ever know? Not in this world, certainly.

Worldlines, crossing, intersecting, splitting: Minkowski’s geometric image of the professor’s theory.

But did she? Nora, panting, eyes rolling upward all white, again again again. In her. Deeper, deeper. Fucking her. Fucking deeper. In her. Hot cunt, his then not mine. Hot wet cuntmouth.

Wordlines: Nora and Jim and Stanislaus, crossing, intersecting, splitting: Giorgio and Lucia splitting and going off as new vectors. Ever-branching time-river.

Mother, Nora, die Lorelei: sucking us down, calling us home. Human body 80, 90% saline: the topaz sea, the salt taste of her body’s caverns. Odysseus put wax in his ears against the dark uterine call, the song of the drowned kingdom. Davy Jones’ locker. Cold dank clammy death it must be, to drown. Not Wagner: ertrinken, versinken, Unbewusst, hochste’ Lust. Not that at all. But the Thing in the Loch?

But if all time is one time: me in 1904 and me here now. Both real, adamantine, forever. Spring does not turn into summer. Worldlines. So that if, say, twenty years from now the names of Joyce and Einstein are known to all Europe? Then, that, too, is eternally fixed, next turn in the worldline.

And those who are ahead of us in linear time, looking back, our future their past: they will see exactly what we are half-blindly stumbling toward. Tomorrow’s tragedy and joy. Who will die and who will live.

THE RADIO ANNOUNCER: And now another fast-breaking story from our Linz correspondent. It appears that Sir John Babcock was not the only impressionable youth whose life was powerfully influenced by Bulwer-Lytton’s romantic novels of the Vril energy. We have in our studio August Kubizek, a longtime friend of Adolf Hitler. Would you mind telling our audience, Herr Kubizek, what you were just telling us about the Linz Opera House in 1906? VOICE OF KUBIZEK [aged and weak]: Well, sir, it was in June of 06, I think. Adolf and I went to hear Wagner’s opera Rienzi, you see …

KUBIZEK: Oh, ja, of course. Everything Bulwer-Lytton wrote had something to do with the Vril and the mutation to a super-race.

KUBIZEK: It was astounding. I never before saw Adolf like that. He literally seemed to be in trance. In fact, when we came out of the Opera House, he started to walk in the wrong direction … not toward our homes, but in the opposite direction, if you follow me. I had to run after him and shake him to get his attention.

KUBIZEK: It was unbelievable. As I said, I never saw Adolf like that before—although I saw him that way many times in later years. He was like a man possessed. He spoke with great excitement, like a patient with a high fever, verstehen sie? He said that he had received a mandate from Higher Powers, through Wagner’s music, and would devote his whole life to a mission ordinary human beings could not understand.

ANNOUNCER: A mission that ordinary human beings could not understand—he used those exact words?

KUBIZEK: How could I forget? He was an unimpressive fellow then—I had never heard him use such highflown language before.

ANNOUNCER: And did you ever receive subsequent information that confirmed the importance of Rienzi in Hitler’s life?

KUBIZEK: Absolutely. It was in 1938. Adolf visited the home of Wagner’s widow, and I was with him. He told her all about that experience in 1906. He was very emphatic. He wanted to make sure that Frau Wagner understood how important it was to him. He even went so far as to say to her—I remember his words because there were tears in his eyes—“In that hour National Socialism began.”

ACTION	SOUND
EXTERIOR. RAILROAD STATION, BASEL, SWITZERLAND, 1914. EARLY EVENING. TRACKING SHOT.
Railway platform. We pan over several faces. Three normalaverage men and women, a frightfully ugly man, a dwarf, more ordinary faces.	Railroad sounds. Preparations for departure.
	First voice in crowd: “… not the Almighty …”
	Second voice: “You take it,” I told him, “and stick it where the moon doesn’t shine.” He was positively vivid.
	Third voice: “I nearly reached India.”
	Engine whistle shrieks.
	Full orchestra: the Merry Widow Waltz.

ACTION	SOUND
EXTERIOR: CITY STREET. NIGHT. MEDIUM CLOSE-UP.
SATAN and SIR JOHN	Running feet.
BABCOCK confronting each other, BABCOCK terrified. [This shot is held for the minimum possible time to almost register as a distinct image; the audience cannot quite be sure they saw it.]

ACTION	SOUND
EXTERIOR. SCOTS FARMLAND, DUSK. MEDIUM SHOT.
Little MURDOCH FERGUSON, age 10, walking across a cornfield.	Voice of Rev. Charles Verey [over]: “Then, in 1912, came the appalling case of the Ferguson boy—young Murdoch Ferguson, age 10, who was quite literally frightened out of his wits, returning home around twilight.”
EXTERIOR. SAME. CLOSE-UP.
MURDOCH stops in his tracks and stares with horror at something off-camera.	Verey’s voice [over]: “I fear you might smile at what the lad claims he saw….”

ACTION	SOUND
EXTERIOR. LONG SHOT: BAHNHOFSTRASSE.
BABCOCK running.	Heavy breathing.
INTERIOR. MEN’S TOILET. CLOSE-UP.
EINSTEIN standing before urinal, looking at graffito in German: NUR DER WAHNSINNIGE IST SICH ABSOLUT SICHER. FNORD?	Heavy breathing, running feet.

ACTION	SOUND
EXTERIOR. BABCOCK MANOR, 1886. LONG SHOT.
A fine old English manor house. A penny-farthing bicycle on the lawn in front of the door.	A baby cries.
INTERIOR. HALLWAY. MEDIUM SHOT.
SIR JAMES FENWICK BABCOCK pacing, stops suddenly at the infants cry.	Baby cries again.
DOCTOR [with the face of ALBERT EINSTEIN, 1914] comes out of room into hall.	Doctor: “You can come in now, Sir James. A fine, healthy son.”

THE CASE OF THE CONSTANT SUICIDES

New Horrors at Loch Ness

(Special to the Express-Journal)

IN THE HEART OF THE HELVITIAN METROPOLIS

THE CASE OF THE CONSTANT SUICIDES

Terror Stalks Loch Ness; Police Baffled

DO NOT MEDDLE IN THE AFFAIRS OF WIZARDS: IT MAKES THEM SOGGY AND HARD TO LIGHT

DO NOT THROW BUTTS IN THE URINAL: FOR THEY ARE SUBTLE AND SWIFT TO ANGER

DE MODO QUO OPERET LEX MAGICA

FURTHER REFLECTIONS OF JAMES JOYCE
(Parental discretion advised)

ACTION	SOUND
EXTERIOR. BABCOCK MANOR. LONG SHOT.
The penny-farthing bicycle standing in a path near the house.	Babcock’s voice: “… promise to always hele, never reveal, any art or arts, part or parts …”
The bicycle falls over. There is no wind or other evident cause; it simply falls.	The Merry Widow Waltz rises to drown out Babcock’s words.

ACTION	SOUND
EXTERIOR. VALLEY OF PYRAMIDS, EGYPT. DAY. LONG SHOT.
The pyramids alone in a hot white desert.	Voice: “I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, LAO!”
EXTERIOR. SAME, CLOSE-UP.
Statue of Horus as falcon.	Same voice-over: “O thou laughter re-echoing from the tombs of the dead! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, LAO!”
INTERIOR, DARK BACK ROOM. CLOSE-UP.
A box of money being opened.	Same voice: “O thou ever-turning Wheel of stars and fates! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!”
INTERIOR, SAME, MEDIUM SHOT.
LENIN is opening the box of money and counting it. Across from him, offering the money, is an ambiguous figure.	The Merry Widow Waltz. Lenin: “This will pay for some very important business.”

ACTION	SOUND
Close-Up: Dr. Carl Jung, circa 1909 [still photo].	TV Narrator: “One of the most eerie of such cases concerns the founder of Analytical Psychology, Dr. Carl Jung, and his equally renowned teacher, Dr. Sigmund Freud.”
Cut to:
Long shot [still photo] of Freud’s study. Camera moves in slowly to tight close-up on bookcase during this speech.	Narrator [voice-over]: “During an argument about parapsychology in 1909, both Freud and Jung lost their tempers. Just then there was a sudden explosive sound from Freud’s bookcase.”
	[Explosive sound.]
Cut to:
Close-Up: Freud, circa 1909 [still photo].	Narrator: “Both men were astonished.”
Cut to:
Close-Up: same photo of Jung.	Narrator: “J₁₁₁₁? spoke first.”
	Actors voice [Swiss accent]: “There,” said Jung. “That is an example of a so-called catalytic phenomenon.”
Cut to:
Close-Up: same photo of Freud.	Second actors voice [Viennese accent]: “Oh, come!” Freud exclaimed. “That is sheer bosh!”
Cut to:
Close-Up: Jung.	First actor [Swiss accent]: “It is not,” Jung replied. “You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that in a moment there will be another loud report!”
Cut to:
Long shot of Freud’s study again. Camera moves slowly in on bookcase.	Ominous silence and then: Second loud explosion.
Cut to:
Medium shot: TV Narrator walking on a beach. High waves in background.	Narrator [to camera]: “Freud was so disturbed by the second psychic explosion that Jung never discussed the experience with him again Even stranger are two sequels In 1972, Dr. Robert Harvie, a psychologist at London University, was reading aloud to a friend an account of this episode …
Cut to:
Close-Up: Dr. Harvie [still photo].	Narrator [voice-over]: “… and at Freud’s words …”
	Viennese voice: “Oh, come, this is sheer bosh!”
Cut to:
Medium shot: Lamp in corner falling with a crash.	Narrator: “… a lamp in Harvie’s room fell with a crash.”
Cut to:
Medium shot: Actress in compartment on train, reading.	Narrator: “And in 1973, a Margaret Green reported that while reading the same passage about Jung and Freud on a train, the window suddenly smashed with a bang like a bomb.”
Window explodes. Actress jumps. Camera pans back to door with legend: COMPARTMENT 23.
Cut to:
Medium shot: Narrator walking on beach.	Narrator: “What are we to make of such mysteries? Some scientists posit a psionic force or bioplasma …”

ACTION	SOUND
INTERIOR. CLOSE-UP.
Map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1914. CAMERA pans in rapidly on Sarajevo.	The Merry Widow Waltz.
EXTERIOR. TRACKING SHOT. STREET IN SARAJEVO.
CAMERA pans up from street to window.	The Merry Widow Waltz.
CAMERA looks through window: a man is loading a gun.	Unidentified voice: “… the usual deranged lone assassin, of course … suitably hypnotized …”
INTERIOR. CLOSE-UP.
Hands loading the pistol. On the table below is a book titled Not the Almighty, with the eye-in-triangle symbol on the cover.	The Merry Widow Waltz.

ACTION	SOUND
EXTERIOR. STOCK SHOT. NUREMBERG RALLY, 1936.
Hitler reviewing an endless succession of goosestepping Nazi soldiers.	The Horst Wessel Lied growing louder and louder.
	The marching boots growing louder until they drown out the music.
Darkness.	The marching boots, louder and louder.

THE CASE OF THE CONSTANT SUICIDES

New Horrors at Loch Ness

(Special to the Express-Journal)

IN THE HEART OF THE HELVITIAN METROPOLIS

THE CASE OF THE CONSTANT SUICIDES

Terror Stalks Loch Ness; Police Baffled

DO NOT MEDDLE IN THE AFFAIRS OF WIZARDS: IT MAKES THEM SOGGY AND HARD TO LIGHT

DO NOT THROW BUTTS IN THE URINAL: FOR THEY ARE SUBTLE AND SWIFT TO ANGER

DE MODO QUO OPERET LEX MAGICA

FURTHER REFLECTIONS OF JAMES JOYCE(Parental discretion advised)

FURTHER REFLECTIONS OF JAMES JOYCE
(Parental discretion advised)