Masks of the Illuminati

It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the weird and unscientific thinking typical in different ways of both Joyce and Babcock was entirely alien to Professor Einstein’s well-disciplined mentations. A black camel beneath a horned moon might be an omen of almost anything and everything to either Joyce or Babcock, but it was a domesticated mammal conjunct to the burned-out satellite of a type-G star to science.

As he listened intently to Sir John Babcock’s wondrous tale, Einstein occasionally allowed a quiet smile to break upon his lips—the reflex of an evolutionary past in which furry ancestors similarly bared their teeth at the sight of food; but it was the meat of pure thought that inspired the typical anthropoid grin in this case, the marvelous (albeit blind) processes of evolution have produced a brain, in advanced human beings such as Einstein, capable of hungering and thirsting after Truth itself.

Science, it cannot be too often repeated, deals with actual readings of actual instruments, while permitting only the most economical descriptions of the phenomenon recorded. It is permissible, of course, to posit certain gedankenexperiments (thought experiments), thereby deducing from known laws the necessary consequences of hypothetical situations. Within an interstellar elevator, for instance, the gravitational equations of Sir Isaac Newton will appear to be obeyed, as indicated by all instruments, thereby leading physicists within the elevator to posit the Newtonian explanation of their observations. To a physicist outside the elevator, however, the same data will be explained by the law of inertia. This line of thought had been amusing and perplexing Professor Einstein for some time now, but he determined to set it aside and concentrate his analytical powers upon the Gothic novel in which Sir John Babcock evidently lived and in which occult forces were more prevalent than scientific laws.

There is, he began to see, a principle of neurological relativism, as well as of physical relativism. Just as he became a new Albert Einstein by rejecting his citizenship and the God of his people, Sir John had changed his nervous system by these so-called occult exercises.

Yes: my two observers trying to measure a moving rod while they are themselves moving at differing velocities. That is the relativism of the instrument. But take, let us say, a man who is a Russian vegetarian pacifist and a woman who is an Italian Catholic conservative, each trying to understand Sir John’s story. None of it will mean the same to both of them. That is the relativism of consciousness, of the nervous system itself.

But the nervous system, mein Gott, is the instrument which reads all other instruments.

So, then: precisely as my physicists in the elevator can never tell, from within the elevator, whether the downward force is gravity or inertia, so, too, no two persons can tell, from within their nervous systems, what presumed external source provides the signals they receive. Which is why, of course, the atheist and the occultist can argue forever, without either ever convincing the other. We are trapped, trapped, trapped by our ideas, forever in the position of the five blind men and the elephant. The rules of our neurological chess game determine the form or context with which we frame each new signal. The player on the other side, as Huxley said, is hidden from us.

But all the guilt in those dreams: Can it be due to that mouse incident? Why does the mouse from the comic strip keep coming back? The whole problem belongs more to Freud than to physics, really.

Zwei seelen wohnen: Papa’s favorite lines. “So deep, Albert, every word from the heart of a great man.”

Poor Papa! Always worried that I was mentally defective because I wasn’t like the other boys. Because? Well, I wasn’t. Because I was wondering what it feels like to be a photon: How many years ago was that?

Fifteen, I was: that would be 1879 plus fifteen, same year I renounced my German nationality, ninety-four it would be then, 1894. Around the time I read about the Bell case in the American Supreme Court. Capitalist schweinerei: ever since 1872 (that would be … um … seven years before I was born) fighting over who owned the electrons. Seven plus fifteen is twenty-three; twenty-three years, then, Alexander Graham Bell and his competitors squabbling over the patent. Owning electrons, mein Gott. All my years in the patent office. Tedium of avarice. As if anyone could own a law of nature. Königen, kirchen, dummheit und schweinerei.

But the apes still seek money, bonds, patents. Mammalian predators. Maybe on the wrong planet I was born? Only hope for humanity: heap all the currencies, bonds and shares in one lovely garbage heap and ignite them. Walpurgisnacht. “So deep, Albert.” Yes: and let the masses dance around the flames to celebrate their liberation from age-old tyranny. The phoenix of freedom rising.

Or maybe it is genetically fixed. Predation and hierarchy date from the vertebrates. Perhaps I am on the wrong planet born. Biedermeier, they called me in school. Biedermeier: too stupid to lie.

In French that would be Pierrot le Fou. In English? Simple Simon. No: more like Honest John. Biedermeier Einstein.

Zwei Seelen wohnen ach! in meiner Brust. Must mean something. If it were Hegel, I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always.

Uncle Jacob ridiculing the kosher laws. Well, Mama never kept a kosher kitchen, really. A house of heretics, we were. But only Uncle Jacob was an outspoken atheist. That for me was good, like the years in the Catholic school. To be born a Jew with an atheist uncle and go to a Catholic school: it opens the brain-cells. Diversity of signals.

Yes: the more conflicting signals received, the bigger we must make our world picture to account for them. People have little minds because every nation, every church and almost every family restricts the signals. So that speed of travel increasing (with also speed of communication increasing) means that everybody will receive more conflicting signals. Force the primates to get smarter, maybe. Impossible to keep a small Italian Catholic mind after meeting many, many German Protestants. The Englishman back from India is no longer 100 percent bloody English. Yes. Travel and communication will accelerate more in this century, so people will have to become smarter.

Neat, that. But pacifism more basic than socialism, it must be. If we do not put an end to war, there will be little civilization left to socialize. But try to tell that to the socialists, God help you. If the chips are down they are German or French first and socialist later. When the shooting stops. And:

Very neat, too. Coming on to look more like curvature in the new equations. Non-Euclidean, converging. Geodesies. Not to be seen or experienced but known through the mathematics. Nicht aus dem Sinn.

Faster and faster communication, so every Ivan, Hans and Juan gets like me a mixture of Catholic, Jewish and atheist signals, or some equivalent jumble: force them to think and choose.

Zwei Seelen wohnen … Yes. The two types of consciousness, which Freud now calls conscious and unconscious, are the two souls Goethe was speaking of. Sir John’s Golden Dawn is a neurological game in which the unconscious soul, called the astral body by them, is made conscious.

But even Freud does not understand the relativity of the instrument, of the nervous system itself. We three here in this room—Joyce, Sir John and myself—are existing in three different neurological realities, just exactly as my space-voyagers at different velocities exist in different spacetime realities.

The shadow-show of sight and sense: relativity of the instrument. Nur der Wahnsinnige is sich absolut sicher.

It does not, of course, make a pfennig of difference if this Golden Dawn contraption can trace itself back to the Rosy Cross of the Middle Ages, to Adam, or even to the first amoeba. Nor does it matter if Mr. Robert Wentworth Little invented the whole “tradition” out of hot air and forged ciphers in the collaboration with the enigmatic Fräulein Sprengel. The significant objective fact on which scientific attention must focus is that by joining this organization our friend Babcock has involved himself with a secretive order engaged in projects of which he knows actually nothing, although he assumes much. Too much, in fact. As we all do, every day.

The obvious absurdity of Newton’s hypotheses non fingo: actually, it is impossible not to theorize. The velocity of nerve transmissions in the brain is such that we can never disentangle perception from conceptualization. It is even a concept that I am presently speaking to human beings. Joyce and Babcock might both be automatons passing themselves off as humans, or I might be hallucinating. And who but Poincaré and Mach understand that fully, in their bones? We live, as Joyce says, in a web of symbolic constructs made by our brains. The Herrdoktorprofessors cannot understand my paper on relativity of space-time, for instance, because they think “length” is a fact, not a concept of our brains.

And this, too: when I renounced my citizenship in Milan nearly seventeen years ago, it was what the depth psychologists now call a rebirth experience: I re-defined and re-discovered myself. As when I discarded the God of my fathers. Perhaps both were necessary before I could re-define and re-discover space and time. Renunciation of the old must precede discovery of the new.

So: behind all this mumbo jumbo, that is basically, structurally, what Sir John is describing: a process whereby an orphaned boy adrift in this world with too much money is discovering a new way of defining and perceiving himself. And also, of course, his world. As I re-defined the world after re-defining myself. A chess game of the mind.

But what are the rules of this game and how did it bring him to the state of terror in which he now exists? And who or what is the player on the other side? That is what I first must grasp: the rules of this strange mind-game called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

I must ask not, How does it feel to be a photon?, like Biedermeier Einstein two decades ago in 1894, but, in this case: How does it feel to be a sorcerer’s apprentice?

YE GENETIC ARCHIVES

Ye first Furbish Lousewart a retainer of great green Grey stoke Manor was. Of great green Grey stoke Manor was he a retainer, and yea a foundling they found him fearful nigh unto death but brief hours after bloody born from mother’s womb was he. A bastard born was that fair foundling, Furbish Lousewart.

Of his lineage, fair Furbish’s, ’tis said that planted in his mother’s belly was he by ye curate of Weems, a man most mountainous in girth that some did dub Round John or ye Holy Hog of St. Hubert’s, which is because that St. Hubert’s was ye church of Weems wherein as curate he did fare. Of fair Furbish’s mother, in troth, ’tis said she was a nun who did later for sin sensual atone by pious pilgrimage to Thomas’ tomb whereat she told a tale full fabulous to one Geoff. Chaucer who in verse the same tale did tell in his book of which all know. Some say also that model was she for ye pretty Prioress in the gypsy cards called Tarot, which card was later dubbed ye Female Pope and now ye High Priestess is yclept.

Lord Greystoke named the foundling bairn Furbish Lousewart because ye tyke so couth and dainty looked when they in mean manger found him. Furbish Lousewart was as dainty a name as leman could in Merrie England have in those days, it being the vernacular for herba pedicularis, a flower full fair in ye snapdragon family that no wight could name a bloom eke fairer ne bonnier.

Furbish Lousewart grew to mighty manhood, a fellow of cautels yet of mickle mirth, see ye here: for he three bold sons (legitimate) did father and seven bairns of assorted sexes (illegitimate) and then, alas, did die a death most dire in Holy Crusade against the swarthy Saracens that did hold the Holy Land by force of sword. All the world is saying yet that he (F. Lousewart) did impress posterity more through his besotted lechery than through fidelity to the holy bed of Christian marriage, for the Rt. Hon. Mr. Justice P. J. Farmer who does dabble much in genealogy and such antiquarian matters hath said on many occasions (in the hearing of many that do bear good reputation) that the only Greystoke to survive that Crusade was as it were but a pseudo-Greystoke, being seed of Lady Greystoke’s lewd liaison with the aforesaid rascal, Furbish. If this be true, then the noble Greystoke line (that were Papishes but are now, folk say, good Anglicans) are actually of bastardly and plebeian origin. ’Tis a merry tale if true, all agree.

This much at least science can pronounce with mathematical certainty: within the testicles of Viscount Greystoke that night of June 26, 1914, did reside exactly one-sixteenth (0.0625) of the genetic information that formed the neurogenetic template of Sir John Babcock, while within the testicles of Viscount Greystoke’s cousin, Giacomo Celine, was precisely one-fourth (0.25) of the gentetic information of Hagbard Celine, who more than sixty years later was going to inform the grandnephew of Sir John’s gamekeeper that there is no enemy anywhere.

DE SOMNIIS VESTIMENTA HORRORIS

From the greatest horrors irony is seldom entirely absent, as if to remind us that there is in truth no such thing as motiveless or mindless malignity. Thus, the crack in Sir John’s mirror inspired him, subtly and indirectly, to begin to accommodate himself somewhat to the twentieth century, but at the same time the hellish terrors of earlier centuries more insidiously gathered about him. The crack was only moderately disquieting at first—although he could not look into it without imagining he saw, in the distorted image of himself created by the jagged glass, some depressing and menacing symbol of the dark side of the Vril force which had attacked him through the weak spot opened up by his susceptibility to the voluptuous yearnings aroused, perhaps deliberately, by the enigmatic Lola and her brazenly casual allusions to the rhythm of the act of copulation and the red cobra of desire. He was haunted by an uncomfortable idea, although he tried to shake it off; it would be foolish certainly to accept it, on no better evidence than the coincidence of a bad dream and an earth tremor—yet the insidiously disturbing concept continued to grow in his mind: he had perhaps encountered a real witch, and the medieval world he had so long studied was seemingly coming to life around him.

The bedroom itself was now insidiously depressing to him, because of the cracked mirror and its eldritch bicameral images, yet he was also subtly uncomfortable elsewhere about the huge old house, also: something distasteful and disquieting, almost a sense of decay and morbidity, appeared to permeate the very air; something nameless and vague, a mere adumbration of new presences and possibilities, probably only his own overactive imagination, and yet something that seemed autochthonous, virtually antediluvian, furtively suggestive of hideous secrets of forgotten times and deeds that were against Nature and against Scripture. The invasion of even the furniture with this inchoate omnipresence was bewildering, if one was able to compare, in the light of the different atmosphere before the Dark Force (as he came to call it), the previous ubiquity throughout Babcock Manor of commonsense normalcy.

Sir John embarked upon a campaign to banish the whole perishing business by refurbishing, not merely the cursed mirror, but the whole of Babcock Manor, and soon had the place swarming with tradespeople and laborers in a huge project of modernization, including even the installation of electricity in every room. It required many months, but finally Babcock Manor had been fully adapted to the twentieth century. The malign humor of the hideous forces unleashed against Sir John meanwhile proceeded to produce, as this superficial adaptation to the present was feverishly afoot throughout the manor, a growing invasion of his inner life by the most hellish and dismal of ancient terrors.

Sir John continued to dream often of Chapel Perilous and once he found himself in a huge dungeon beneath the earth, where crowds of sullen and stupid persons argued and debated violently. “We shall have gno gods!” shouted some. But others shouted back, “We shall have gnu gods!” And weenie gothor thick haggard were poor. “There is no Chapel, there is no Grail, it is all a child’s fantasy,” muttered a liddel bho poop, yet veni verits, surd Alice war bear, flogging thor-talis behind them. “The tree o vus, the size of us, the weight of us,” sang an Erring Go BRA in groinblancorange, but a triune pentagonal octupus explained, posing as somadust. “These are those who started on the Path without the Wand of Intuition. They have arrived, but they do not know it. They have Is so they no can see. Honey to them, pansy meals. Does a BRA shith in the woods?”

For some reason I do not fully comprehend, I awoke with the conviction that Shakespeare was indeed an initiate of the Rose Croix. I feel closer and closer to grasping what he meant in saying that we are “such stuff as dreams are made of.”

A few nights later he allowed himself to be cajoled into a bridge game at Viscount Greystoke’s, although that was precisely the sort of idiot pastime he generally despised. He barely endured the early part of the evening—there was much brandy, many cigars, and altogether too much talk about fox-hunting, a sport he despised as inhumane and barbaric. It was with great effort that he refrained from quoting the infamous Wilde’s description of that bloody recreation as “the uneatable pursued by the unspeakable.” Then, around ten, a strange thing happened: he suddenly remembered that the ordinary playing-card deck was derived from the Tarot. The spades were the Wands of Intuition, the hearts the Cups of Sympathy, the clubs the Swords of Reason, the diamonds the Pentacles of Valor: and the structure of the deck corresponded astrologically to fire signs, water signs, air signs and earth signs: 52 weeks in 4 seasons, 52 cards in 4 suits. But if Cabalistic signs were everywhere, the divine essence was also everywhere, and he remembered again that there were no places or times where the visible and invisible worlds did not meet and mingle: he saw the Buddha in everyone, again. The rest of the evening he was so intensely conscious that he seemed to himself to have been half-asleep all his life by comparison; he won trump after trump. The euphoria was with him for nearly a day and a half after, and then gave way to a vague anxiety again when he remembered that many forms of lunacy begin with such excited states of mentation in which every incident and event seems charged with more than human meaning.

In London two days later Sir John met the bombastic American, Ezekiel (or Ezra) Pound—perhaps by accident—at the British Museum. Pound was carrying a Chinese-English dictionary and a batch of notebooks labeled “Fenol-losa MS.” and was effusively cordial. They amicably agreed to step out for a bite of lunch together.

“Yeats is progressing nicely, under my influence,” Pound pronounced grandly, over fish and chips. “He’s coming out of that Celtic fog and beginning to write modern poetry.” Sir John found this self-importance hilarious, but managed to keep a straight face. He tactfully changed the subject.

“Why are you so preoccupied by Chinese verse forms?” he asked in his most diffident manner.

“Chinese,” Pound pronounced, “will be as important to the twentieth century as Greek was to the Renaissance. And he went on for twenty minutes on that topic, before Sir John was able to interpolate a remark again.

“Who was that young lady reciting Captain Fuller?” he asked, knowing that an evil impulse was driving him.

Pound looked up sharply. “She says her name is Lola Levine and she comes from France,” he replied. “I doubt it. Her French is worse than mine.”

“Exactly,” Pound agreed. “A young lady one should not trust too much. Have you heard of Aleister Crowley?” he asked.

Sir John remembered the name—one of the leaders of a renegade Golden Dawn faction said to have turned in the direction of Diabolism. “Vaguely,” he said.

“Well, whatever you’ve heard is probably unfavorable and you’re just being English and tactful in not mentioning it,” Pound said with a piercing glance. “Don’t get too interested in Lola Levine, if you want any advice from me, Sir John. She is said to be, or to have been, one of Crowley’s countless mistresses. Terrible things happen to people who get involved with Crowley, or his friends or mistresses. Have you heard of Victor Neuberg?”

“Victor Neuberg got very involved with Crowley a few years ago,” Pound said. “He is now recovering, slowly and painfully, from a complete nervous and mental breakdown.”

“That’s what the doctors call it,” Pound said somberly. “Neuberg believes he is under siege by demons.”

“Yes,” Pound answered with a level stare. “That’s the sort of thing that happens to people who get too close to Crowley and Lola Levine and their circle. Neuberg even claims Crowley once turned him into a camel.”

“Well,” Pound said, “I suppose it would be more traditional to turn him into a toad, but Crowley by all accounts has a singularly eccentric sense of humor.”

“Do you believe Neuberg really did turn into a camel?” Sir John asked, wondering just what Pound’s attitude toward all this really was.

“Hellfire, no!” Pound laughed scornfully. “But I do believe that if you get mixed up with a gang like that, and really get into yoga and meditation and group sex and drugs and howling invocations at Sirius, you’ll damned soon end up believing whatever the other lunatics in the group believe.”

On that note, the lunch ended and they parted. Sir John found himself wondering if he was ready, yet, to believe in the metamorphosis of a human being into a camel. The idea seemed to belong not to the true tradition of mysticism as he had come to know it through the Golden Dawn, but to the realm of folklore, witchcraft and old-wives’ tales: and yet the disquieting thought remained, trailing him about like an unpaid usurer, Something happened to poor Neuberg, something that the alienists are perhaps not ready yet to understand or heal. If we are such stuff as dreams are made of, these eldritch forces which Macbeth so evocatively calls “night’s black agents” are as powerful as anything in the masquerade of social life with its timid decorums and deceptions; and thinking also, There is Cabalistic logic in it: the camel corresponds to the Hebrew letter gimmel, which corresponds to the Masked Priestess in the Tarot, the guide across the Abyss of Hallucinations to the undivided light of Pure Illumination.

It was only another accident, of course—only another coincidence—but Sir John actually encountered Lola Le-vine in Rupert Street later that afternoon. There was no mistaking that dark brown hair, those strange brown eyes, that enticingly voluptuous figure to unhood the cobra of desire. By the grace of God, she didn’t notice him and he passed by quickly, hardly thinking of her petticoats and garters and those things.

That evening, however, he encountered her again, in a much more outré manner. He was performing his fourth exercise in astral projection for the day, according to the instructions in the Golden Dawn manual, and, for the third time since he had begun the practice, he achieved a state of mind where it almost believed it was real.

[“It seemed real,” he had told Jones after the first such experience, “but I cannot be sure. I think I am perhaps just deceiving myself and it is imagination.”

[“Pray do not let that bother you,” Jones had replied. “It always begins as imagination….”]

This time, Sir John, eyes tightly closed, was imagining his astral mind rising out of his body, looking down at the whole room—his physical body included—from some eerie vantage point near the ceiling, and beginning, again, to almost believe his imagination. Following instructions, he projected higher, above the earth, looking down at his estate from a great height, and then, projecting higher, looking down at England and parts of Europe. With a colossal effort, he projected higher and saw the blinding white light of the sun (behind the Earth at this hour) and the planets Mercury, Venus and Mars. It was going so well that he projected out of the solar system entirely and approached the realms of Yesod, the first astral plane.

And there it was, just as described in the Cabalistic books of many centuries: the two pillars of Night and Day, the masked Priestess seated on the throne: Shekinah, the embodied Glory of Jehovah.

“Who dares to approach this realm?” She asked, Her voice strangely familiar. (Or was he imagining all this? Was this practice just a trick to contact the unconscious by “dreaming” while still partly conscious?)

“You have turned your back on the Light,” She answered sharply, Her brown eyes seeming to shine or glow in an odd manner. “You have rejected Me and banded together with the Black Brothers who hate and despise My creation. Infernal nochts; rocks intangible.”

“No, no,” Sir John said, frantically reminding himself of the First Teaching [“Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure”]. I have never rejected You.”

“You have rejected the female, My representatives on Earth, and the act of joy and love which is My Sacrament. You can never pass this Gate until you conquer your fear of Woman. Fear is failure and the forerunner of failure.

Sir John recognized Her voice at last: it was the voice of Lola Le vine. Desperately, he plunged backward toward Earth, remembering to try to calm himself: when one is blinded by panic, the teachings said, one might not be able to find one’s way back to the Earth-body. In total funk, he briefly found himself in one of the alchemical planes, where a White Eagle, a Red Lion, a Golden Unicorn and Sir Talischlange pursued him through a magickal wood and the trees chanted rhythmically, “Pangenitor, Panphage, Pangenitor, Panphage, Pangenitor, Panphage …” Lola’s voice sang in antichorus, “lo Pan! Io Pan Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!” Then, somehow, he was whirling down, down, through endless darkness, to the White Light of the sun again, the spinning Earth-globe, England, his own estate, and the bedroom in which he found himself seated, sweating, with his heart beating wildly.

He recited the great Mantra of protection: “Christ above me, Christ below me; Christ at my right side, Christ at my left side; Christ before me, Christ behind me; Christ within me.” His back was cold from the sweat, and the astral heat burned his forehead; he was trembling. He repeated the Mantra three more times before he was able to feel safe again.

“If anything particularly glorious or particularly frightening happens, write it down at once,” Jones had instructed him. “That gets the linear, rational mind operating again—and the record will be useful to you, later.”

Sir John performed a banishing ritual first, to be on the safe side, and then wrote the vision carefully in his Magick Diary. He added:

If this was just my own unconscious mind playing tricks, it is still most interesting. The chorus and antichorus invoking Pan seems to suggest that the unconscious can compose Greek poetry much more rapidly than my conscious mind could. And the ideational content of the chant—Pangenitor, all-creator; Panphage, all-destroyer—clearly indicates the identity of Pan and the Hindu god, Shiva, which is most curious, since I had never consciously understood that identity before this Vision.

I can only conclude that the above attempt at re-ductionism is very forced and not really convincing. Deep down I know that what happened was not merely unconscious tricks of my mind. Because my heart is not pure, because I harbor lust and carnal desire, I missed the true gate of Yesod. I did not encounter Shekinah, the female component of Jehovah, as would have happened if my heart were clean. I encountered Ashtoreth, the female Devil, and true to Her nature, She attempted to psychically seduce me. Many alchemists recorded similar meetings with the succubus, or female lust-demon.

Sir John repeated his banishing ritual, and gave up on astral projection for the night. He allowed himself a rather stiff brandy, to relax, and another, even stiffer, brandy before bedtime.

We do not escape our demons that easily. Sir John dreamed many things, all of them voluptuous and sensual. He wandered through jeweled and many-colored harems where Victorian newbuggers in honeysuits with camelly pants engaged in vile, nameless perversions, obscenities he had encountered before only in the evasive Latin euphemisms of Krafft-Ebing. He was wandering through the gardens of his uncle, Viscount Greystoke, and a dark serpentine Sicilian named Giacomo Celine (who claimed to be related, distantly, to the Greystokes, and, hence, to Sir John himself) was explaining earnestly something totally incomprehensible about Sex and Creation. “The male is space and the female is time,” Celine said “but of course, the universe itself is bisexual.”

The clowns and acrobats sang “I Never Risk Inquiry,” but Yeats and Sir John were back at Pound’s flat. Yeats whispered suggestively, “The culprits are bears. It’s always darkest just before the storm.” He was leading Sir John to another garden, past the hall of infinitely reflecting mirrors, and the Countess of Soulsburied was waiting there for him, with a face much like Lola’s. She was sprawled totally naked, except for a blue garter with a silver star, on her left thigh. Goldly nude on a crimson-jeweled Arabic purrpurplebed, her left hand lewdly moving in the grove of brown hair above that maddening garter, doing that horrid disgusting thing to herself, to gather per darker bane, a bolt like a brick sheet hose, her face flushed with the same unbearable and inhuman rapture as the famous statue of Saint Teresa in Rome. “To the puer, all things are puella,” Yeats mumbled, vanishing with myriad reflections into infinite mirrors.

Sir John threw himself upon Lola, kissing the garter rapturously, mad with hatred, love and desire, and she whispered, “All things are Buddha. Evil to him who thinks evil of it.” And her thighs were wrapping around him, sucking him down, down, down into ecstasy so intense he cared not if it were divine or diabolical.

“Little check on her? Liddel chick honor?” Sir Talis Saur chanted. “If god is dog spelled backward,” he hissed, lisping, “what does that mean? Not the Almighty?” But Sir John was fucking a fox-bitch in heat, groveling in the mire: mind and heart and soul lost in the Night of Pan.

His heart beating wildly, Sir John shot up from sleep, moaning, the evidence of orgasm dark and dank on his pajama crotch.

DE FORMULA LUNAE

“I have encountered a succubus,” Sir John said, guiltily, knowing it was all his own fault.

“Indeed,” Jones replied most mildly. They were dining at Simpson’s again, and Jones seemed strangely absent-minded and preoccupied. “Was this in a dream or on the astral plane?”

“Both,” Sir John said, beginning to know how a Catholic feels in the confessional booth.

“In other words, you did not succeed.” Jones looked irritated, as if he had other problems and did not need this. “We will have to postpone your initiation as Neophyte until this matter gets resolved,” he added thoughtfully. “Let me see, you have the astral projection booklet, and that contains the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. I advise you to try it several times, until you feel the invading presence has been entirely driven away from you.”

And he skipped his usual postprandial cordial, ending the meal with uncharacteristic abruptness, rushing off with the look of a man who has more problems than he can deal with at the same time.

Sir John returned home in a mood of dejection and apprehension. What do you do when your teacher clearly indicates that your problems are of minor importance compared with the other burdens he is carrying? Dark suspicions were beginning to gather about him, and Jones hadn’t given him a chance to discuss that at all. But Sir John remembered all too well the many references he had read to the Dark Rosicrucians, the Black Brotherhoods, the group who devote themselves to vexing, haunting and seducing all those who embark on the spiritual path of the Great Work. Was it possible that Lola Levine and her mysterious master, Crowley, were conspiring to destroy the true Golden Dawn by launching astral attacks on new and not very advanced students like himself?

Sir John tried the Banishing Ritual several times, but it was mere play-acting. He felt nothing; he perceived nothing new; he realized that his confidence in himself was weak. Finally, in a mood of mixed bravado and nervousness, he began to study a few of the books on Black Magick he owned—books he had only glanced into with repugnance and fear before. Now, he forced himself to read carefully and scrupulously, determined to understand the forces that might be attacking him.

After all, he had been performing the Banishing Ritual for several months now, accepting Jones’ bland explanation that the purpose was to banish all the impure parts of himself that might interfere with the Great Work. But now he wondered if the real purpose might not be to banish forces or entities of which it were better that the Neophyte did not know, lest he succumb to the fear which was failure.

He read of the nameless ritual of the Black Goat with a Thousand Young, of the fiery Serpent Power that could be raised from the aroused genitals to the brain itself by forbidden sexual excesses, of the foul Eucharist of Immortality drunk in unspeakable rites by those who would replace God by Man. With nausea and near-dizziness, he began to understand the Satanic logic behind this medley of filth, blasphemy and perverted transcendentalism—the secret Gnostic teaching that Neschek, the Serpent in Genesis, having the number 358, which is also the number of Messiah, the Serpent is the Messiah. (Since all words with the same Cabalistic value numerologically are names of the same metaphysical entity.) He learned the Manichean interpretation of I.N.R.I.—Ingenio Numen Resplendet Iacchi: the true God is Iacchus (Dionysus)—and the logic, although wicked, was clear to him: lewdness and prolonged sensuality, to this mad philosophy, were the essence of the ecstasy which could blot out ego and raise Man to Godhood. He was literally ill after a day of this research and trembled at the thought of the lunatics who believed such things and the deeds they would be willing to perform.

Sir John decided to try the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel, even though that was considered risky for those below the Grade of Master of the Temple.

Nothing happened—except that the invocation unleashed stronger fear and wilder hope than Sir John had ever before experienced. But perhaps the intensification of emotion was all the Invocation could be expected to produce in a Probationer.

But a few minutes after closing the ritual and breaking the circle, Sir John suddenly felt an impulse to write. What came from his pen was not an account of the invocation and its results, as he should have written if he had been following Jones’ teachings, but rather a neoplatonic dialogue with the obsessing spirit of Lola Levine, the Black Priestess:

CULPA URBIUM NOTA TERRAE

I: This filthy, swinish philosophy, this black perversion of civilization and ordinary decency—how can you possibly believe it is the path to higher wisdom, to the Over-M an?

SHE: Nay, think not that thou hast Wisdom when thou art still Trapped in the Accursed Deed. Know in thy Heart and Bowels, not just in the Verbalizing Mind, that the Great Tao must always be in Balance, for Excess of Disciplined YANG energy is most dangerously Explosive: and the worst Wars of all History are fast coming upon ye for That. Hear Me: for the Psychic Equilibrium of Humanity it is necessary to follow the Swing of the Pendulum to the Joyous, Dionysian, yea even Mindless, Recorso of YIN. The Male must cease to Tyrannize over the Female, the Rational over the Irrational, the Spirit over the Flesh. We must become One and Undivided again, in the White Light and Ecstasy of the Horned God, Iacchus, lest all fall into the Pit of Because and perish with the Dogs of Reason. The Spirit is upon Me even as I write through thine unwilling Hand. O I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!

I: That doctrine spawned the licentiousness that destroyed Greece and Rome; it is the plausible lie that justifies every depravity. The opposites are not intended to unite, but to fight until Light triumphs over Darkness. The human soul is the battleground of God and the Devil and they are not One. Good is not Evil; God is not the Devil.

SHE: The soul limited by Yea and Nay is a Prisonhouse and breeds Pestilence. Ask it of the Wise Rabbins who made the Holy Cabala and See what Mighty Clue they left for those with Eyes to See: for are not Neschek and Messiah both by Enumeration 358? What signifieth this? It is a Sign pointing the Way to the Truth that is beyond all Duality, beyond all Concept, beyond the accursed Dungeon of Yea and Nay. I am possessed again by the unspeakable nameless Night of Pan. Pan! Io Pan! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!

I: You’re a mental lunatic, you are. Take your damnable blasphemies and your vile pseudo-philosophy and your garters and get out of my head, damn you!

SHE: The Truth whereof I speak is even in your Tree of Life symbolism, O Rosicrucian. Just as the Tao is both white yang and black yin, so, too, on the Cabalistic Tree, does not Kether, the Supreme, manifest as both Chokmah, the Male principle of Light, and Binah, the Female principle of Darkness? In your Bible, does not Saint Paul say that the illuminated soul is “not under law, but under grace”? Does not Saint Augustine tell us to “Love, and do what you will”? Grace is given to Those Wise Ones who are beyond Good and Evil, beyond Mind and its empty Concepts, swept up in the Rapture of Mindless Unity. The spirit again moves in Me, and in your Hand, and we can only cry: I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!

I: Aye, the Devil can quote scripture to his own purpose. But these obscene rituals, this reveling in carnal desire, is the black downward path, to Earth, and the true path is upward, to the starry heavens.

SHE: If all Beings are in truth Buddha, how can Any of Them be Evil? If all energy proceeds from the Undivided Light, as you Cabalists say, how can any Yearning of the Human Heart be in opposition to the Light? You drive yourself Mad with false Dualisms and then forsooth wonder why you cannot achieve the inner Unity for the Great Work. I who speak am the Mother and Whore of all Men. I am the dark Womb and the dank Night from which Creation begins. I am Shekinah, the embodied glory of Jehovah. I adore thee, Ya-ha-weh! I adore thee, IAO!

I: Thou art Ashtoreth, the lust-demon, and I banish you now in the name of He Whom the Winds Fear, the Lord of the Universe, the True God Whose name is

SHE: Do not blasphemously write the Name you have not the wit to understand. I will Leave you now, for a While, but be not Deceived. You have only Banished one Half of Yourself. In your disunited Soul you will grow only foolish Fear and muddy Hatred. Go play with those garters you hid in the closet when you were eighteen.

Sir John threw his pen across the room, to break the spell. It had truly become as if another spirit were writing through him; it was indecent, worse than the time a groping pervert had fondled him on a train, when he was sixteen and too shy to cry out—he had pulled away furtively, ashy-faced; but this was a more vile, a more personal, invasion.

“I am the Lord: I create Good and I create Evil.” “When the Adept crosses the Abyss, all opposites become One to him.” “Brahman is the slayer and the slain.” “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is One!” “ARARITA: One in His origin, One in His individuality, One in His permutations.” The Alchemist “must descend to every depth, plunge into the fires of Hell, before he can accomplish the Great Work.” Original Sin was the first dualism, “the Accursed Dyad” denounced by all Cabalists. “All is One.” “All is Tao.” “All is Buddha.” The mystics of all ages seemed to be on Lola’s side. 358: the Messiah and the Serpent are One. That was the meaning (or one meaning) of those incoherent dreams about “the tree Swifty ate.” 358: one in His permutations, one in His origin.

With a prayer for grace, he attempted Bibliomancy, the art of receiving divine guidance by opening the Bible at random, sticking in a finger, and reading the verse so discovered. He found that he had entered near the end of the New Testament and was in the Epistle of Jude. He read with greet intensity:

Clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.

This was certainly ominous enough, and the context, when Sir John began skimming it, was even more foreboding:

Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities.

What more clear warning could there be against Lola Levine and the infamous Crowley and all those pseudo-mystics of this age who attempt to exalt sensuality as sacred and eroticism as holiness? But the Epistle continued, growing even more explicit and speaking directly to the temptations Sir John had experienced:

But, beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostle of our Lord Jesus Christ;

How that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts.

Every word was like a flame eating into Sir John’s conscience, revealing the horror of that which had almost seduced him. He wept with repentance and joy: he was saved. A direct communication had come, from the God of his Fathers, and Lola and her lying heresies were banished. He was free.

“Clouds without water,” he repeated to himself. “Sterile, dark, sinister—but empty. Lies, lies, all lies. I am free of them, free!”

In later years he was to remember that moment, wondering how he had been so blind. The real terrors were still ahead of him, and Jude “the Obscure” had, like many an oracle, prophesied more than could be understood until much time had passed and many strange events had transpired.

DE AURO RUBEO

It must be reiterated that, among the domesticated primates of Terra at this time, what they sonorously called the-Supreme-Virtue-of-not-poking-one’s-nose-into-the-affairs-of-the-authorities was still universally esteemed as the very pivot and fountainhead of what was, among them, known as living-in-accord-with-the-Divine-Plan-as-revealed-to-us-in-church-on-Sundays. Basic epistemological and ontological questions were never raised in “polite society,” that is, among those described by Galaetic Intelligence as so-objectively-hopeless-in-their-idiocy-as-to-be-subjectively-convinced-of-their-own-superiority-to-the-other-wild-and-domesticated-apes. This tragic and absurd condition, found on no other planet, however backward, in the Great Universe, was due entirely to the imprinting of their nervous systems by what are scientifically described in the Trans-Galactic Encyclopedia of Primate Psychology as chemically-bonded-reflex-arcs-causing-primate-perception-to-be-limited-to-“realities”-accidentally-present-at-moments-of-imprint-vulnerability, which is to say that in most cases, only that which caused adrenaline secretion was perceived as visible or tangible in their rudimentary brains. Science had already revealed to them, of course, that 99.99% of the physical universe was invisible to their senses, but they were not capable of deducing from that that an equal part of the mental and spiritual universes was also unperceived by them as they robotically proceeded about their mammalian business of survival, reproduction and nurturing of their cubs.

A MOST CURIOUS HISTORY TRUE STORY OF THE ROSY CROSS

From Abramelin of Araby came the Sacred Word unto Abraham the Jew, who was called to the sublime Task of the Illuminati, wherein he durst master every Detail of the Great Work, so that he might in due season accomplish it not only for himself, but for all Persons in those ages in which Darkness lay upon the West. As it is written: Suum Cuique. And Abraham did in good Time pass the Secret unto many who understood but In Part and, finally, unto our Master, Christian Rosenkreuz (or in the Tongue of the English, Christian Rosycross) who by the Grace of the Trinity did come at last to understand the Whole. Sis benedictus: in the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the All-Merciful.

Whom men call Giordano Bruno or The Nolan was a Magus of our Holy Order; and his Teaching was Heliocentricity, not merely in the material Sense for which the Black Brothers of Rome did seize him and cruelly Burn him at the Stake: but also in the spiritual sense, in that the Ego or Self known to Man is, like unto the Earth, not the center of consciousness but merely appeareth so by a species of Glamour or Delusion. And Bruno the Nolan taught all Men that hath the Wit to Read Between the Lines that the True Center of the Soul is like unto the Sun: a White Light from which cometh all Life on Earth: that is to say, all impressions upon the Ego.

Cagliostro hath names and forms innumerable, and we know not his true human Birth. But in many Lands and Times hath he appeared, under divers Names and Titles, and yet we may recognize him by his Teaching which was, is, and shall be, that conscious Thought is but Epiphenomena, the Noise of the Machine. Now Al-Chem-y meaneth the Egyptian Science, and the True Science of Egypt hath this for Fountainhead: we have in our House many substances which act directly upon the Blood, thereby befogging Vision, and we have in Nature many substances which act also directly upon the Blood, to correct Vision. He who hath Ears, let him Hear: de magno opere. In the Name of the Father and of the Mother and of the Son. Amen.

And in the Age of Science that came to Flower in the nineteenth century after the Magus of Nazareth, the true Order of the Rose Croix did go Underground, as a Seed that must be buried ere it Sprout: for it was nigh approaching Time to reveal the true Secret of the Cosmic Furnace and the Alchemical Heat unto all humanity. And great preparations were Made, in deep Secret, to prepare for the event. And many experiments were Performed, of which men know not yet, but one such Experiment was the creation in London City of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which the True Name was Comoedia Quae Pan Dictur.

EXPERIMENTS IN ASTRAL PROJECTION

The Alchemical Heat Increases

So, anyway, two years passed. Germany and France almost went to war over a gunboat in Morocco, but then an uneasy peace was negotiated at the last moment. The Chinese became a democratic republic. Amundsen reached the South Pole and excited the imagination of the world. Sir John, who more and more regarded himself as a Liberal, rejoiced when the House of Commons passed a bill granting Home Rule to the Irish, and then wrote an angry letter to the Times when the House of Lords voted it down. A Dane named Niels Bohr electrified the scientific community by suggesting that quantum discontinuities caused the interior of the atom to follow Rutherford’s model, similar to the solar system itself; and Sir John was amused that science was finally catching up with the traditional Hermetic teaching that “the things above are reflected in the things below.”

Sir John himself had become, in many respects, a new man under the slowly rising Alchemical heat of celibacy and magick. He advanced from Neophyte to Zelator, from Zelator to Practicus. He was trained in asana, A yogic contortion that twisted the body just as Cabala twisted the brain, and emerged with better health, better self-control and better humor than ever. He also learned pranayama, a special breathing technique which seemed to vanquish most negative emotions and kept him vaguely euphoric most of the time. His study of Cabala, under Jones’ merciless hounding, advanced to the point where it now seemed as natural to his mind as asana to his body; he could hardly remember how contorted and difficult both had seemed at first. And his journeys on the astral plane increasingly magnified his understanding of himself and others, even though he was still unsure much of the time whether these visions were real or imaginary.

He even saw Lola Levine at a concert one night and was neither frightened nor attracted, although he couldn’t help visualizing her thighs and garters.

Then, one day in Soho, he was browsing through the shelves of used bookstalls and found a volume entitled Clouds Without Water. At this point, he no longer believed in coincidences: he knew that what the ignorant call by that name are actually occult clues which can instruct the Adept in important spiritual matters, once he had deciphered their meaning. He picked up the book and began browsing.

One group of poems was entitled “The Alchemist,” and Sir John remembered, nostalgically, his premature sense of total enlightenment when he had deciphered I.N.R.I. as the alchemical Igni Natura Renovatur Integra—the whole world is re-made by fire. Turning the pages, he stopped at the fifth poem and read:

the eternal spring, the elixir rare

That mage and sage have sought and uncomplaining
Never attained. We found it early where
The Gods find children.

Sir John stared at the book in mute astonishment. That could not possibly refer to the perversion his mind had shamefully read into it. After all, this was not a Black Magick grimoire, but only a collection of poems. He looked back at the title page:

ACTION	SOUND
EXTERIOR. BABCOCK MANOR. LONG SHOT.
The house almost lost in a panorama of dark trees and twilight shadows.	Voodoo drums.
EXTERIOR. BABCOCK MANOR. MEDIUM SHOT.
The house, dark and looming. The pennyfarthing bicycle in front of the entrance.	Voodoo drums.

ACTION	SOUND
INTERIOR. RUCKINGHAM PALACE, THRONE ROOM. MEDIUM SHOT.
DISRAELI whispering to QUEEN VICTORIA.	Disraeli: “That infamous Babcock lad has gone and done it again.”
VICTORIA registers horror.
DISRAELI lowers his voice further.	Disraeli: “And this time it’s worse than ever. No hands!”
INTERIOR, THRONE ROOM. CLOSE SHOT.
VICTORIA furiously angry.	Victoria: “The absolute rotter! Call out the guard! I want him flogged at once!”