Edited from a private MS.
by the
REV. C. VEREY
Society for the Propagation
of Religious Truth
Privately Printed
For Circulation Among Ministers of Religion
1909
Sir John felt chagrined. How silly of him to imagine Diabolism in a book put out by some Scottish Presbyterian. But what did those lines mean, then?
Sir John skimmed a few more pages at random. The whole series of poems seemed to be a glorification—virtually a sanctification—of adultery. This couldn’t be. Then he saw a footnote by the Rev. Verey:
Only a Latin dictionary can unveil the loathsome horror of this filthy word.
Sir John looked back to the word thus indirectly defined, or rather not defined at all, and found it was fellatrix. He blushed; but then he remembered again: “We found it early where the Gods find children.” Could such nameless things be printed?
In Sonnet VIII of the Alchemical sequence, he found the lines:
Now I have told you all the ingredients
That go to make the elixir for our shame
Already make the fumes their spired ascents;
The bubbles burst in tiny jets of flame
The elixir of shame, he knew, was in Satanic theology the Eucharist of Immortality; it was found only within the pudendum of a sexually ecstatic woman. This book was almost his early half-hallucinatory visions of the corrupt Lola Levine come back to haunt him in print. He turned to the Preface:
“Receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.”
So wrote the great apostle nearly two thousand years ago; and surely in these latter days, when Satan seems visibly loosed upon earth, the words have a special and dreadful significance even for us who—thanks he to God for His unspeakable mercy—are washed in the blood of the Lamb and freed from the chains of death and of hell.
Surely this terrible history is a true Sign of the Times. We walk in the last days, and all the abominations spoken of by the apostle are freely practised in our midst. Nay! they are even the boast and the defense of that spectre of evil, Socialism.
The awful drama which the unhappy wretch who penned these horrible utterances has to unfold is alas! too common. Its study may be useful to us as showing the logical outcome of Atheism and Free Love.
Well, that at least explained why the Rev. Verey had edited and commented upon this libertine volume, although it was still unclear if he truly understood what It was he was condemning. Certainly, if he thought these poems related in any way to “Atheism,” he had missed the target by a mile.
Sir John turned back to the section called “The Alchemist” and searched carefully to see if his speculation about the “elixir of shame” was correct. He found in Sonnet X:
This wine is sovereign against all complaints,
This is the wine the great king-angels use
Sheer nausea overcame him. If the elixir or wine was what he suspected, the vile secretions of the organs of shame, the great “king-angels” were not those of heaven but of hell. He read further in the same sonnet:
One drop of this raised Attis from the dead;
One drop of this, and slain Osiris stirs;
One drop of this; before young Horus fled
Thine ghosts, Typhon—this wine is mine and hers
Ye Gods that gave it! not in trickling gouts
But from the very fountain where ’tis drawn
Gushing in crystal jets and ruby spouts
From the authentic throne and shrine of dawn.
It was not just perversion that was being described; it was the deliberate use of loathsome Parisian vices for initiation into diabolism. Sir John skimmed some of the Rev. Verey’s footnotes rapidly:
Lingam—the Hindu God [!]—the male organ of generation.
Yoni—Its feminine equivalent. That the Poor Hindus should worship these shameful things! And we? Oh, how poor and inadequate is all our missionary effort! Let us send out more, and yet more, to our perishing brothers!
Doomisday—An affected archaism for the Day of Judgment. How can the writer dare to speak of this great day, on which he shall be damned forever? “For he that believeth not is condemned already.”
Blood-bought bastards—Christians! O Saviour! What didst Thou come to save?
Poor Rev. Verey obviously had no notion at all of what these poems were about. He regarded them as the anti-Christian fulminations of an Atheist, even a Socialist. He was too naïve to recognize the diabolism, the counter-theology that was actually being expressed.
Sir John looked back again at the Preface, and found no clue to the identity of the author of these vile versifications, except that he had died of “a loathsome disease.” Verey added:
I may perhaps be blamed for publishing, even in this limited measure, such filthy and blasphemous orgies of human speech [save the mark] but I am firmly resolved [and I believe that I have the blessing of God on my work] to awake my fellow-workers in the great vineyard to the facts of modern existence.
Sir John turned to another of the poems and the world seemed to spin with vertigo as he read:
So Lola! Lola! Lola! peals,
And Lola! Lola! Lola! echoes back,
Till Lola! Lola! Lola! reels
The world in a dance of woven white and black
Shimmering with clear gold greys as hell resounds
With Lola! Lola! Lola! and heaven responds
With Lola! Lola! Lola!—swounds
All light to clustered dazzling diamonds,
And Lola! Lola! Lola! rings
Ever and ever again on these inchaunted ears,
And Lola! Lola! Lola! swings
My soul across to those inchaunted spheres
Where Lola is God and priest and wafer and wine—
O Lola! Lola! Lola! mystic maiden o’ mine!
Could it be? Was Lola Levine the paramour who had lured this mad poet into vice and, beyond that, into diabolism? Skimming rapidly, Sir John found “Lola” in poem after poem, but never any last name. But in the very first sonnet he found in the closing line a Latin phrase that froze his blood:
Evoe! Iacche! consummatum est.
There it was—Evoe, one of the two most hidden names of God (which Sir John had good reason to remember was known to Lola Levine); Iacche, the vocative form of Iacchus, secret name of Dionysus, god of orgies; and consummatum est, last words of the Mass. But this mad poet could only refer to a Black Mass, not a Catholic Mass, in this foul context of Dionysian revelry, perversion and anti-Christian blasphemy. How simpleminded was the Rev. Verey to imagine that these poems merely recorded the destruction of a man drawn away from his lawful wife into an adulterous love affair, when they actually described the step-by-step initiation into the worship of the Horned God of sexual ecstasy—Panurgia, the god worshipped by the pagans before Christianity arose to unmask him (the God of This World) as Satan, adversary of the invisible True God, beyond the Stars.
Sir John purchased Clouds Without Water and took it home for study. This might be a most serious matter. If it were truly what he suspected, he would have to consult Jones for advice.
Memory remembers before remembering has memorized: remembers the unspeakable and forever unthinkable fact of the apotheosis [virtually the cynosure: a moment vivid as the terror in the eyes of that fieldmouse so many years ago: knowing that such terror was the price of consciousness in Uncle Bentley’s universe, but with yet a sense of loathing and holding back from the ultimate revelation, the cataclysmic final horror of that detail so unthinkable as well as unspeakable that mind hesitates to advance toward recognition of it (remembering instead as in a continuous unrolling of time backwards, so that he saw himself picking Clouds Without Water from the bookstall, writing the angry letter to the Times about Home Rule for Ireland, opening the Bible to the Epistle of Jude and the stern warning against the mockers in the last time, the invasive spirit of Her writing through the pen in his hand, the revelation of Ingenio Numen Replendet Iacchi, the actual attack in which She appeared in succubus form to drain the Vril energy into Onan’s Sin Against Nature, the chanting of Pangenitor and Panphage, Pound’s story of poor Victor Neuberg turned into a camel, the thunderous crash that cracked the mirror as the material and astral universes intersected, the poetry reading at which She had first quoted “I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!”, the idiot gnomes chanting “No wife, no horse, no mustache,” the oath of celibacy taken three times under Jones’ relentless eyes, the first rising of the Vril at the comprehension of Igni Natura Renovatur Integra, the first meeting with Jones, the debate with McNaughton in the Historical Review, the horrid return of the ugly temptation to actually kill the mouse and have the experience of conscious Sin, Uncle Bentley’s death, the first sense of the caverns of trolls beneath Babcock Manor in boyhood fantasy, the penny-farthing bicycle) but holding back in this state still midway between dream and memory from that one detail, that epicentre of delirium and temptation actually longing to see and touch and kiss again that blue garter, those lascivious thighs, that unspeakable central mystery of creation through corruption.
“There is Good and there is Evil,” Sir John said awkwardly, having trouble finding words at all, feeling numb and drowsy. “We know it intuitively, directly.”
“There is Up and there is Down,” Lola said mockingly. “We knew that intuitively and directly—before Copernicus. It’s all relative, can’t you see?”
Was this a dream, an astral vision or reality? Sir John struggled to remember how he had gotten here, into this vile Parisian brothel. “It isn’t all relative,” he protested, feeling that he was perhaps only talking to himself. “There are Absolutes. Thou shalt not commit Adultery. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, or his maidservant, or their garters. Thou shalt not …” But he could not remember the other Commandments. Was he drugged with opium or hasheesh?
“Behold the hidden God,” Lola said as the Hermit, Death, and Sun cards danced into strange, intricate patterns, chanting “Yod Nun Resh Yod. I.N.R.I. Isis Naturae Regina Ineffabilis. Creatrix, Feliatrix: Venus Venerandum. Leo Sirtalis. Perditrix naviam, perditrix urbium, perditrix eorem, nupta bellum. Garterius, Pantius, Pussius, Cuntius. Yoni soit qui mal y pense. Eat it with catsup.” Dank things moved darkly. She had taken the Crucifix and inserted it between her thighs, moaning in nearly raving idiocy, masturbating wildly.
It was a dream, only a dream, after all: such things as we are made of. Turning on the newly installed electric lights, Sir John sat up and wrote it all out carefully, including the jumbled Latin and Norman-French. Isis Naturae Regina Ineffabilis: Isis, ineffable queen of nature. Some Egyptologists did claim that the Ankh cross, alleged origin of the Christian cross, showed the lingam of Osiris joining the yoni of Isis.
The meaning was clear: the Black Brotherhood, after two years, was activated against him again, perhaps because he had purchased Clouds Without Water and completed a magickal link. Well, he was no longer an ignorant Probationer; he was a Practicus, fully armed with the weaponry of practical magick, unafraid.
After breakfast, he would plunge directly into the heart of the new mystery. Meanwhile, he would not be deceived by a lying dream. The spirit haunting him was not Isis, although the “virgin mother” symbol was, of course, an allegory on ain soph, the limitless light of the white void behind matter itself according to Cabala. And Osiris-Jesus, the dead-and-resurrected son-lover of the virgin, Mother Void, was Man himself raised to superhumanity by the disciplines of magick and yoga. But that was all, in this instance, a lying masquerade. The obsessing spirit was carnal, unclean, and therefore an emanation of Ashtoreth, the lust-demon.
Still, the acronym haunted: Yod Nun Resh Yod: Isis Naturae Regina Ineffabilis. In numinous rooms incandescent. How many codes could four letters contain or be forced to contain? Is meaning itself the stuff that dreams are made of? Or was it better to return to the pragmatic semantics of Humpty Dumpty’s “When I use a word, it means what I want it to mean”? Could all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put common sense back together again?
The one hundred fourteen sonnets collected in Clouds Without Water told a blood-curdling story when Sir John had time to read them at leisure. The anonymous poet, a married man seemingly in his early twenties and with a university degree, meets the enigmatic Lola, who is then only seventeen. Stealthily and slowly, she seduces him, until he casts aside his wife, his reputation, his good name and all else to live in sin with her. The sonnets continue for quite a while to celebrate the joys of their lawless love, although only a student of Cabala could decode, behind the euphemistic erotic imagery, the actual Satanic practices into which the poet is being led. Lola’s body becomes both God and the priestess and altar of God; the Christian divinity is denounced and mocked in increasingly bitter lines. The clergy are described, viciously, as “blind worms” and “pious swine”—to which Rev. Verey added a footnote, saying, “The poor servants of God! Ah, well! We have our comfort in Him: like our blessed Lord, we can forgive.”
The climax is abrupt and shocking. The poet discovers that he has contracted syphilis—“the recompense of his error which was meet,” as Rev. Verey commented—and plunges into despair, killing himself with an overdose of laudanum. Rev. Verey concludes the volume with a warning to others that Free Love and Socialism lead to countless similar tragedies every day in London, a city which he seemed to regard as being damnable as Sodom itself.
Most shocking of all to Sir John was Sonnet VII of a sequence called “The Hermit,” dealing with a few weeks in which the poet was parted from Lola by relatives and friends who were attempting to end the illicit affair. The poet wrote:
I will visit you, forlorn who lie
Crying for lack of me; your very flesh
Shall tingle with the touch of me as I
Wrap you about with the ensorcelled mesh
Of my fine body of fire: oh! you shall feel
My kisses on your mouth like living coals
Even Rev. Verey was not so ignorant of occultism as to misunderstand this or attribute it to Atheism and Free Love. His footnote said explicitly, “This disgusting sonnet seems to refer to the wicked magickal practice of traveling by the astral double.” Sir John sighed, remembering his own travels in “the body of fire” (as the astral double is technically called) and his own terrifying encounter with Lola Le vine, in which she had dragged his unconscious body into unwilling sin.
For many days Sir John pondered and worried. Finally, he decided that he must act, and he carefully penned a letter to Rev. Verey at the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth in Inverness, Scotland. He chose his words most carefully:
Babcock Manor
Greystoke, Weems
July 23, 1913
Dear Rev. Verey,
I have recently acquired a copy of your sad and terrible book, Clouds Without Water, and was very moved by the tragedy recounted therein.
Before proceeding further, I must in honesty inform you that I am not, as you are, a Presbyterian; but I am a fellow Christian and I hope [and pray] a devout and pious one. What I have to tell you will be shocking and perhaps incredible to you but I beg you to think deeply and ponder long before rejecting my most somber warning.
I know not how you came into possession of those terrible poems, and can understand [although some bigots would not] why you considered it proper to print them, with a running commentary showing the dreadful results of the life and philosophy celebrated by the unfortunate poet. However, I do not think this book should ever have been published, and I fear that you have touched upon an evil far worse than you realized.
Briefly, I am a student of Christian Cabalism, and, although loathing with all my heart the perversions of Cabala employed by diabolists, I have of necessity learned a few things about their beliefs and practices. You may find this hard to credit, but the poet is not describing merely an adulterous love affair; he is, in fact, depicting—in a kind of code, but in a manner clear to students of these matters—the horrible practices of what is called Left-Hand Tantra or sex-magick; the devices, in short, of the Black Mass and of Satanism.
I am writing to you because it is obvious that the wicked woman who led the poet into these fiendish paths [called only Lola in the text] must be an initiate of a cult of black magicians. Such groups, I assure you, do not relish having their secrets published, even in code—especially when the code is, as in this case, quite transparent to any student of Cabalistic occultism. Without wishing to alarm you unnecessarily, I think it possible that this cult may wish to suppress the book, even though your Society circulated it only to ministers of religion, since it is now beginning to appear in the used bookstalls [which is where I found my copy]. It is even possible that they may seek revenge upon you.
If you do not dismiss this letter as the ravings of a superstitious fool, I wish to offer you my friendship and aid, in case such black magick action against you is being taken or plotted.
Until I hear from you, I can only conclude: May the blessings of our Lord be upon you, and surround you, and protect you.
Sincerely,
Sir John Babcock
After posting this missive, Sir John began to have serious doubts about whether a Scottish Presbyterian would, or would not, credit the continued existence of Satanic lodges in the modern world. He also wondered if he had acted prematurely; but Jones was on holiday in France and Sir John had no one else to advise him.
A few nights later, Sir John visited his cousins, the Greystokes, and met again the aged Sicilian, Giacomo Celine, who seemed to be related to a South European branch of the family. Somehow, the conversation turned to ghost stories after the brandy and cigars were circulating.
“Lewis’ The Monk is still the most blood-curdling book ever written,” Sir John ventured at one point.
“But that’s technically not a ghost story at all,” Viscount Greystoke remarked. “It’s a story of demons.”
“Of course,” old Celine said. “Ghost stories really are quite dull, actually. Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein is not a ghost story, either, and I think it at least as terrifying as The Monk. And that young Irishman from Sir Henry Irving’s theatrical corporation—what’s-his-name—Stoker—he has written the most frightening book ever: Dracula. And that doesn’t deal with ghosts, either. Ghosts are comparatively tame compared with the real horrors a lively imagination can conjure up.”
“That reminds me,” old Greystoke said, “there’s a novelette around that is more terrible than anything we’ve discussed, and it has no ghosts, either. Ghosts, after all, are only dead humans, and humans can be wicked enough as we all know, but it’s the non-human creature of evil that really makes the blood run cold, as the saying goes. The non-human is not limited by the traits which even ghosts share with us.”
“Quite so,” Sir John agreed. “And what is the name of this novelette?”
“Oh, here it is,” Greystoke replied, prowling among his bookcases. “If you want a bad night, try reading this before bed.” And he handed Sir John a slim volume of stories entitled The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen.
Sir John retired to bed with Machen’s The Great God Pan around eleven and indeed he had a bad night. He quickly became convinced that he had discovered another member of the Golden Dawn and one who knew a great deal about the dark Satanic lodges working in opposition to the Great Work. “There are sacraments of Evil, as well as of Good,” Machen wrote, and his title story was a most daring approach to almost describing the sacraments of Evil explicitly.
Even worse for Sir John’s peace of mind, Machen recounted, as fiction, a weird and terrible story of which Clouds Without Water might actually be a missing chapter or a sequel. The Great God Pan tells of two men, Clarke and Villiers, who share a common interest in the bizarre and mysterious side of London life. Although Clarke and Villiers do not join forces until the climax of the story, each of them finds, working independently of the other, parts of the history of a most strange and dangerous woman, called “Helen” in the text. In each chapter, either Clarke or Villiers encounters a victim of this woman, or hears a yarn of incredible events which seems to relate to her mysterious doings. When Villiers and Clarke finally intersect each other’s investigations and begin to compare notes, most of the truth begins to emerge, although not all of it, since Machen restricts himself to hints and euphemisms. What is clear, however, is that “Helen” is a worshipper of the Horned God, who has lured countless men and women into unspeakable erotic practices—sexual excesses leading at first to ecstasy and then to a chain of nervous breakdowns and suicides.
It could almost be the story of Lola Le vine; and Sir John wondered if it were, in fact, her story.
How much of Machen’s terrifying tale was fiction, and how much fact? Why had Machen published, even as fiction and even with the worst of it veiled in vague hints, so many dreadful secrets which the world was better not to know at all? Why had the Secret Chiefs of the Order allowed Machen to publish this dreadful tale, for that matter? Sir John found himself thinking, without humor, of the Rev. Verey’s dark warnings that the world was entering the last days and the final conflict between Good and Evil would soon be upon us all. The Grey stokes, who had family connections in every branch of the government, it often seemed, were worried more and more lately about the possibility of a greater war than the world had ever known….
Sir John uneasily climbed out of bed and looked again at the most disturbing passage in Clouds Without Water, in which the Rev. Verey said:
Unblushing, the old Serpent rears its crest to the sky; unashamed, the Beast and the Scarlet Woman chant the blasphemous litanies of their fornication.
Surely the cup of their abominations is nigh full!
Surely we who await the Advent of our blessed Lord are emboldened to trust that this frenzy of wickedness is a sure sign of the last days; that He will shortly come …
Could it be that the true purpose of the Golden Dawn was not merely to raise the human mind to communication with the divine, but to train warriors of God to do battle against the forces of diabolical magick threatening the planet? Why did the first teaching say so harshly, “Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure,” if the members were not expected, eventually, to confront the most fearful evils and do battle against them?
Sir John performed a most earnest banishing ritual, drank a double shot of cognac, and crept back to bed, severely troubled in his mind. His dreams were not pleasant.
The Hermit carrying a rotlantern was leading him down a Naranhope alley in some low, disreputable neighborhood of London. Orofaces out of Hogarth’s etchings and Doré’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno glared gorm on all sides; Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas rose up from a violet cellar muttering incoherently, “the love of Jesus and John … the love of David and Jonathan … the love that dare not speak its name.” The Hermit began to fondle Sir John on the rougeway carriage again and a terrific explosion shook the vertetrain. “They are dropping bombs from monoplanes!” somebody shouted. “The Anti-Christ is coming: Night, the Almighty. London is aflame!” Voices sang the Internationale and looters ran through the streets carrying indigo garters and boxes with moving pictures on them. “It’s probably a magnetic phenomenon,” old Celine said reassuringly. “I Never Risk Inquiry.”
And this is the horror, said Eutaenia Infernalis, and this is the Mystery of the great prophets that have come unto mankind, Moses, and Buddha, and Lao-Tse, and Krishna, and Jesus, and Osiris, and Christian Rosycross; for all these attained unto Truth, and therefore were they bound with the curse of Thoth, so that, being guardians of Truth, they caused the proliferations of countless lies: for the Truth may not be uttered in the languages of men.
Lola sang in clear, lark-like soprano:
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old England’s winding sheet
Sir John, seven years old, hid in the closet. They were playing hide-and-seek. The Cuntease of Salisbury entered the room. He backed farther into the rear of the closet, behind his mother’s skirts. The Cuntess opened the door and groped him by the throat. He tried to tell her to stop, but he was choking and could not speak. Then he knew it was Lola again.
“You’ve been a bad boy,” she said, “playing with blue garters and your mother’s skirts.” She flung him to the floor, where Count Draculatalis leaned over him to whisper in his ear, “The true Eucharist is the Eucharist of blood, the lunar force unleashed upon earth once a month. Take ye and drink.”
Hooded, red-eyed figures crouched around the garden chanting, “Io Io Io Sabao Kurie Abrasax Kurie Meithras Kurie Phalle. Io Pan Io Pan Pan Io Ischuron Io Athanaton lo Abroton lo IAO. Chaire Phalle Chaire Panphage Chaire Pangenitor. Hagios Hagios Hagios IAO!”
Oscar Wilde, wearing Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker cap, bent to examine Sir John’s penis through a magnifying glass. “It is very, very long,” he pronounced solemnly, “but very, very beautiful.”
A form was crystallizing in the dank air: a dark blue ribbon edged with gold, a mantle of blue velvet, a collar of gold consisting of twenty-six pieces, Saint George fighting the dragon …
And Pan, ithyphallic and terrible, arose in the midst of them, Lola bending to present his vile gigantic organ with an obscene kiss.
“Charing Cross, Jeering Cross!” the conductor shouted. “All mystics off at Charing Cross!”
But on the platform, everybody was staring and Sir John realized he was wearing his mother’s skirt.
“Sonly a beach of a pair to plumb this hour’s gripes,” muttered the fox, but John Peel lit a great flashing light with a goat sow gorm in the morning and Sir John blinked, shuddering into wakefulness as warm sunlight flooded his bedroom. It was dawn and the night and night’s black agents had vanished into air, into thin air.
Sir John ate a very subdued breakfast. “A war between the great powers,” Viscount Greystoke had said, extremely worried, only a few weeks ago, “might destroy European civilization, or throw us back into the Dark Ages.” Was it possible that the dark, chthonic forces of the ancient pagan cults, the beings that Lola and her friends were trying to unleash again upon the world, intended such a frightful transformation of what had been an age of enlightenment and progress? Or was he taking the chaotic symbolism of the dream, a feverish blend of the worst in Gothic fiction and black magick, too literally?
He decided to take a long walk around his estate, meditating on one of his favorite lines from the Golden Dawn Probationer ritual: “We worship thee also in the forms of bird and beast and flower through which thy beauty is manifest even in the material world.” His eyes opened as he repeated the phrase over and over: every bird call seemed to remind him that God was truly good, that even on the plane of accursed material existence the divine radiance showed itself to those with spiritual vision. The deer were the gaiety of God, the trees His mercy, the stream His ever-flowing love.
A strutting robin came pecking the ground near him and he watched it with affection. It was a creature, he suddenly realized, more alien to himself than the Martians imagined in the fantastic fiction of H. G. Wells, and yet sentient as he and with its own intelligence. How can we live among so many wonders and be so blind to them? Sir John remembered the great Psalm: “The heavens declare the glory of God and the earth sheweth His handiwork.”
Then he saw two foxes copulating and blushed, turning his eyes away from the temptation to lewd thoughts. We must love the beauty of this world, which is Gods gift, he reminded himself, but we must never forget its fallen nature nor let it seduce us from seeking the beauty of the spiritual world of which this is the grossest shadow. For to worship nature as it is was to fall into the error of the sensualists and Satanists, of “Helen” in The Great God Pan.
Sir John returned to the volume when he was back in his library and had read two more of Machen’s macabre tales, “The Black Seal” and “The White People.” Both dealt with the ancient Celtic lore of the faery-people, but not in the sentimentalized manner which Shakespeare had established in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest and which has been naïvely copied by writers ever since. Rather, Machen followed the actual lore of the peasantry of Ireland and Wales, to whom the “little people” were not benign beings at all but a terrifying inhuman race of malign tricksters who lured men with vistas of beauty and sublime wonder only to lead them into a realm of unreality, changing chimerical shapes, formless forms, time distortions and nightmare, from which few returned totally sane. Sir John, who had studied this lore in his investigations of medieval myth, realized that Machen’s picture of faery-folk was far truer to peasant belief than the charming fantasies of other writers on the subject. The Irish, Sir John remembered, called the faery “the good people,” not out of real love or respect, but out of terror, because these godlings were known to punish most terribly those who slighted them. The faery, Machen obviously understood, were denizens of Chapel Perilous unleashed somehow from the astral realm into temporary appearance in our material world. In fact, “Helen” in The Great God Pan was first reported to Clarke as a small child in Wales allegedly seen playing with one of these terrible creatures.
Sir John pondered much on all this; but when the days mail arrived, he saw that it contained a letter from Rev. Verey, Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth, Inverness, Scotland. He opened the envelope with a quick, nervous rip and read:
Sir John Babcock
Babcock Manor
Greystoke, Weems
My Dear Sir John,
I must thank you sincerely, as a Brother in Christ, for the concern and compassion expressed in your letter of recent date. Needless to add, our theological differences do not matter—I am no old-fashioned fanatic, I hope—and I recognize all true Christians [which does not include, of course, the accursed Papists] as fellow toilers in the vineyard for our Blessed Saviour.
To come to the point at once, I am neither astonished nor incredulous about your claims concerning the vile sonnets in Clouds Without Water. Indeed, I am only astonished at my own blindness in refusing to see, at first, the full extent of the horrors there uttered. You will, I am sure, understand my original inability to accept the obvious when I confess that the poet who wrote those lascivious verses was [alas!] my own younger brother, Arthur Angus Verey, whose total depravity I was long loath to admit, even while confronted with the terrible evidence of his apostasy and heresy.
It is all too true—Arthur mocked our holy religion continually after attending the damnable university of Cambridge [which is staffed almost entirely, as you must be aware, by men whose Socialism and Atheism are concealed barely enough to avoid public scandal]—but I, God forgive me, I was too fond, too forgiving a brother to admit even to myself that Arthur’s youthful rebellion had carried him far beyond the superficial Free Thought of most “intellectuals” of our time, into the very pits of Diabolism. Even after his suicide, when the poems came into my hands through our family solicitor, I refused to see that the mockery of Jesus [and of the clergy of our holy religion] was not merely that of a skeptic but of a Satanist. If you have a younger brother of keen intellect and wayward nature, you may perhaps understand my folly, my sentimental blindness.
Well, sir, that is old business, and now I am paying the price of my delusion, and paying at usury. There is no doubt that diabolical forces have mounted an attack against my church, my family and myself. Things have happened around these parts lately that would cause all “advanced thinkers” to laugh me to scorn, and alienists to commit me to an asylum, if I were so foolish as to speak of them in this materialistic age. The huge, bat-winged Creature in particular—but no, I wish not to alarm you but to reassure you.
While I am admittedly under siege, I am not afraid. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.” [Psalm 23] There are nameless things loose in our world once again, not just in the sinks of London but even here in the pure air of Scotland itself, but I am confident that all protection lies in the rock of my Faith and in the eternal presence of our Lord. I am too attached, sentimentally, to this old church and this lovely highland landscape [in which I have spent all sixty-two years of my life] to turn and run from these forces which rise up against the Almighty; and is not their doom clearly predicted, as is the final triumph of Christ, in Revelations itself? I pray; I remain steadfast in faith; and I will not give way to panic, however they may vex and haunt me.
I do, however, thank you for your offer of help, and I hope that you will remember me in your prayers.
Most sincerely yours,
Rev. C. Verey
P.S. I do not think it altogether wise for Christians to meddle in the Jewish [and therefore un-Christian] arts of Cabala. Perhaps you may need more help than I.
“The perfect damned fool!” Sir John cried aloud. But he re-read the letter more slowly and found himself strangely touched by the old man’s simple faith and unpretentious bravery. Vexings, hauntings and that “bat-winged” Creature could not make very comfortable living in a lonely old church on Loch Ness.
Sir John sat down, calmed himself, and then wrote a most unrestrained and tactful second letter to the Rev. Verey. He pointed out that his offer of help was somewhat presumptuous; he acknowledged the power of faith to hold at bay the agents of darkness and Old Chaos; he praised the courage of Verey, not too unctuously, so as to evade any suspicion of flattery; and then he got down to business. He explained his interest in Verey’s problems as part of a larger research project, in which he was attempting to learn the scope and powers of the cults of black magick in the contemporary world; he waxed rhetorical, declaring that a book on this subject, which he hoped to write, might “awaken Christendom to the ever-present activities of the Old Enemy it is currently inclined to forget”; he begged for specific details on the problems besetting the Verey household and environs.
When Sir John took this out to the box to post it, he felt a sudden cold bite in the air and his mood abruptly turned against him. It was not really wise, perhaps, to plunge into matters of this sort without Jones being around to advise him. Why, if anything too serious resulted, he had no way of contacting the higher officials of the Order, except through that post office box in London, which might not be picked up more than once in a fortnight. It would certainly be humiliating to have to consult with Yeats, for instance. That would reveal him as a bumbling beginner who had become involved in matters so murky that he was forced to violate the rule against socializing between known members of the Order to obtain help. Standing at the box, mulling in this morose manner, Sir John suddenly began to think he himself was under psychic attack at the moment, and the voice inside telling him to abandon this matter was a presence from outside seeking to frighten him away from his plain duty. “Fear is failure,” he reminded himself, one more time, and dropped the letter into the postal box.
Thunder crashed immediately overhead.
Coincidence, he told himself; coincidence …
But he already knew that “coincidence” was a word used by fools to shield themselves from recognition of the invisible world that so often intersected and altered our visible universe.
| ACTION | SOUND |
| INTERIOR, JOYCE’S KITCHEN. MEDIUM SHOT. | |
| BABCOCK telling his story. JOYCE and EINSTEIN listening, fascinated. | Crash of thunder. |
| EXTERIOR, PRE-DAWN SKY. | |
| Dark clouds. | Thunder roars again. |
| INTERIOR, JOYCE’S KITCHEN. CLOSE-UP. | |
| JOYCE terrified. | Faint voodoo drums. |
The fear of thunder as the origin of religion: Vico’s theory two hundred years ago. The first men, huddled in caves, trembling before the angry roaroaroar of a force they cannot understand. Fear of the Lord: the hangman God of Rome and this Rev. Verey. And, from childhood, Mrs. Riordan’s voice: “The thunder is God’s anger at sinners, Jimmy.”
Signore Popper in Trieste asking why I still tremble at thunder: “How can a man with so much moral courage as you be frightened by a simple natural phenomenon?” Put that in the book. Have Einstein or Hunter, whatever I’ll call him, say it to Stephen: natural phenomenon. F.I.A.T.
What did I answer Popper? “You were not raised an Irish Catholic.” Agenbite of inwit.
Thor’s hamer: the Norse feared it, also. Roaring growlruinboomdoom. “God’s anger at sinners, Jimmy.” Merde. Le mot juste de Canbronne. Conbronboomruinboom doom.
A nightmare from which humanity must wake. Beginning when the first ape-like Finnegans or Goldbergs hid in awe from He Which Thundereth From On High. “Fear is the father of the gods”: Lucretius. Panphage, indeed. I have said: I will not serve. Brightstar, son of the morning, hawk-like man ascending from the labyrinth:
Where they have crouched and crawled and prayed
I stand, the self-doomed, unafraid
No: they will not terrify me into submission. To the devil with pangenitor, panurgia and panphage: may the great panchreston, Natural Phenomenon, stand me now and forever in good stead.
I tried to love God once, in adolescence, and failed. I tried to love a woman, when I put away childish things, and I succeeded. Read me that riddle, ye seekers after mystery.
But: out of the Loch, across Europe, ancient Tempter, to seek me here. Worldlines, crossing, intersecting: Horned monsters: Shakespeare, me, the greengrocer down the street. Out of the Loch. “The vicar said ‘Gracious’”?
Have Einstein or Hunter or whatever I’ll call him meet the Sirens in a workingman’s bar. “It’s Brother Ignatius”?
Two. Three. Four. Fräumünster chimes telling us in linear time the morning is passing. Hans leaving the bed of his wife’s lover’s lover: many a civic monster.
Perhaps I see more because my eyes are weak. Blindness the highest form of vision: another paradox. Inexhaustible modality of double-viewed things. Paradox, pun, oxymoron: and all Irish bulls are pregnant. Ed eran duo in uno ed uno in duo, who stirred up wars eight centuries ago: caught forever in Dante’s words. Two in one, one in two. Bloog ardors: blue garters.
The Gospel According to Joe Miller. Thou art Petrified: Rock of Ages. A riddling sentence from one who did not speak Latin, yet on this pun stands the old whore, rouged with metathesis. There are wordlines as well as worldlines.
| ACTION | SOUND |
| EXTERIOR. SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. TRACKING SHOT. | |
| CAMERA pans through heavily wooded mountain area. Film is edited to give jerky, nervous effect, by removing every tenth frame. | Lola’s voice [singing]: “Up the airy mountain Down the ferny glen We dare not go a-hunting |
| EXTERIOR. TIGHT CLOSE-UP. | |
| Grinning face of the statue of Pan. | Lola’s voice-over: “For fear of little men.” |
Semple Solman, mid nuked gorals and nu derections, mud blocked boxes and blewg orders, temptler orion, met apehighman going through his fur. Sssaid ssnakey Soulman, primate of owl laughs that dour not spook the gnome, his trees sank acht in minor’s bush, “Let my teste you war.” But Urvater, who’s arts uneven, war wild and sad, for only a maggus or a nightruebane or a furgeon honey-frayed can wake One-Armed amid the fright of the double’s minsky-raid.
And the fool were laughted (booboo treesleep) and Sir Joan peeled apauled at the pith of garmel, the musked priestess, through the faundevoided lickt of Garther, the clown, the everlusting One, with that night holy behind him. The caps were in the cups and the cubs were in the cabs and the cubherds were bear. And Sir John awoke to Sol, to sunshine in the window, to the wake world again.
He reached for his Magick Diary, the daily routine of recording each dream a habit by now, and then found that he could not verbalize any of the fragments still in memory. He wrote:
A very strange dream, which seems to be blaming myself for my fathers death and yet also suggests that such patricide is, symbolically at least, part of initiation. All mixed up with Mother Goose and the Order of Saint George.
When he went down to breakfast he found the morning post had already arrived and contained a letter, in shaky handwriting, from the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth. He opened it immediately and read:
My Dear Sir John,
“Pride goeth before a fall.”
How much more profound do the words of Holy Writ appear to me each year, and how dim and undependable my own weak human reasonings!
I admit that I am truly afraid at last.
To confess such fear is more of a humiliation than you can imagine; at least, it is so for a stubborn old Scotsman like myself.
To provide the chronological narrative you requested: I suppose, in some sense, the whole evil cloud began to gather about me as soon as I printed that accursed volume of my young brother’s blasphemous verses. For instance, our local monster—“Nessie,” as the farmers call her—has never been so active as in the four years since that book appeared. Where, in earlier times, this gigantic serpentine form was only reported rarely, and usually by persons whose sobriety was at least questionable, in these recent years the monster in the Loch has been seen increasingly often, and by many persons, and groups of persons, who must be regarded as of the highest probity and sincerity of character. As you are perhaps aware, the matter of Nessie is no longer an obscure rumor among us Highlanders but is increasingly discussed in the newspapers throughout the U.K. and, I hear, even on the Continent. Since my church faces directly toward the Loch—being situated where River Ness empties into Loch Ness—it is not wholesome, I assure you, to lie awake nights and wonder what is out there and why it has become so active lately.
Then, in 1912, came the appalling case of the Ferguson boy—young Murdoch Ferguson, age ten, who was quite literally frightened out of his wits, returning home around twilight. I am saddened to say that the lad has never been the same since this experience, although his parents have taken him the round of many doctors; he still has frequent nightmares, seems abstracted or lost in thought most of the time, and refuses absolutely to go out of the house after dark. I tell you all this because otherwise I fear you might smile at what the lad claims he saw. It was one of those creatures which we Celts call the wee people or the faery. Young Murdoch insists that it had green skin, pointy ears, was no more than three feet high, and that its eyes glowed with an eerie phosphorescence of malignancy. So terrific was that malign stare that the evening of the experience the lad was unable to stop trembling until the family doctor gave him a very strong sedative [opium, I believe].
| ACTION | SOUND |
| EXTERIOR. SCOTS FARMLAND, LONG SHOT. | |
| MURDOCH running. | Voodoo drums. |
| EXTERIOR, SAME. MEDIUM SHOT. | |
| Tiny figure, back to camera, watching MURDOCH run. | Voodoo drums. |
| EXTERIOR, SAME. CLOSE-UP. | |
| Tiny figure turns suddenly toward camera; we see only glowing eyes in a dark face. | The Merry Widow Waltz. |
This incident occurred in the glen just behind my church. Of course, every village in Scotland [and in Ireland, also] has such eldritch encounters reported occasionally, and I am quite sure that most of them are, as the atheistic psychologists say, self-induced delusion brought on by listening to old-wives’ tales. But young Murdoch was known to me as a boy of higher than normal intelligence, adventurous spirits and emotional stability. He is now a neurasthenic case, and I can only believe that something most terrible did accost him in the gloaming that evening.
Next came the sinister Oriental gentleman in black clothing. Now this is most inconclusive, but for that very reason it disturbs me oddly. This personage—whether he were Chinese or Japanese or some other barbarian is in much dispute among those who met him—arrived in Inverness about a month after the incident of the Ferguson boy and the faery-creature. He visited at least two dozen families, always arriving at night in a black carriage. He wore Western clothing, all in black, and spoke a kind of English that was of neither the upper nor the lower classes—an uninflected, almost mechanical English, the witnesses say.
He always requested directions to my church and then lingered a while to ask sly and seemingly pointless questions about myself my wife and my older brother, Bertrán. On taking his leave, this heathen in black always said, in the most peculiar way, “Evil to him who thinks evil.” The strangest part of this story is that, although he always asked how to reach my church, he never did arrive here, although these visits to neighbors occurred over a period of more than two months.
What is even stranger, however, is that, although everybody this Oriental visited saw his black carriage distinctly, nobody else ever saw such a carriage traveling these back roads in daytime or at night. It is as if he and the carriage materialized from nowhere before each visit, and then dematerialized afterward—although I know that remark may sound as if I am beginning to let my imagination run away with me.
[Incidentally, I would be most obliged to you if you could inform me if that mysterious sentence, “Evil to him who thinks evil,” has any meaning in white or black magick, besides being the motto of the Order of Saint George.]
To proceed: in the last six months, since about the time the spectral Oriental ceased prowling these parts, there have been reports of an enormous bat-winged creature, with glaring red eyes, seen near my church at night. I believe that, by now, the number of persons who allege to have seen this creature is about twenty. Certainly, one can argue or attempt to argue that, in the ambience created by Nessie’s appearances in the Loch, the experience of the Ferguson lad, plus the swarthy Oriental, a mood of hysteria is sweeping the countryside and people are becoming suggestible to rumor and mob psychology.
Alas, would that it were so! For I myself have seen the giant bat-creature—once, certainly, and on another occasion, possibly. The latter incident was really only a flapping of wings and a huge shadow—perhaps just an exceptionally large hawk. [But, on my word of honor, I have never seen or heard of a hawk of so vast a wingspan….]
| ACTION | SOUND |
| EXTERIOR. VEREYS FARMYARD: SUBJECTIVE SHOT. [VEREYS POINT OF VIEW] | |
| CAMERA tracks toward a Well. | Footsteps. Verey’s voice [over]: “The other occasion was much clearer, Since I had gone out with a lantern to the well.” |
| EXTERIOR. FARMYARD: SUBJECTIVE CLOSE-UP. [VEREYS POINT OF VIEW] | |
| Huge hawk-creature swoops toward camera. | Verey’s voice [over]: “And the Thing swooped down and flew within a few feet of my head.” |
I worry that even you will attribute one further detail to my imagination: but the fact is that I thought I heard it titter in a voice close to that of humanity.
If it were not for my love of these old Highland glens and hills, I think I would acquiesce to the increasing demands of my wife, Annie, and move to a more urban, less lonely place. As it is, even my older brother, Bertrán, a veteran of thiry years in the army and a man of iron courage, has begun to agree with Annie and has several times suggested we all leave this abominable place.
I beg you to remember us in your prayers.
Rev. C. Verey
Could a man be turned into a camel? The question which had seemed merely absurd two years earlier was now horrible to contemplate, without ceasing to be ridiculous. The evil “wee people” whose contact has the power to disrupt totally the normal functioning of the human brain, abolishing space and time as we know them … the Creature so many had seen in Loch Ness … a bat-winged monstrosity that tittered in a human-like voice … Sir John found himself re-reading Verey’s letter several times, with growing apprehension and disquiet. “The mind has both a rational and an irrational aspect,” Jones had said, long ago, and Sir John had seen enough of the reasonless denizens of Chapel Perilous to fear their power, to know that they could on occasion cross over into the material universe and disrupt its normal laws entirely.
Sir Walter Scott had written of these creatures in his famous Letters on Witchcraft, and Sir John found himself recalling, over and over, a phrase from Scott about “the crew that never rests.” Finally, he went to the library to look up the actual passage. Scott explained that “glamour” originally meant illusion, as every etymologist knows, and went on to discuss the abrupt way in which the glamour cast by these creatures could turn into sudden loathsome horror—as had perhaps happened to the poor Ferguson lad. Scott wrote:
The young knights and beautiful ladies showed them-selves [as the glamour faded] wrinkled and odious hags. The stately halls were turned into miserable damp caverns—all the delights of the Elfin Elysium vanished at once. In a word, their pleasures were showy but totally unsubstantial—their activity unceasing, but fruitless and unavailing—and their condemnation appears to have consisted in the necessity of maintaining the appearance of industry or enjoyment, though their toil was fruitless and their pleasures shadowy and unsubstantial. Hence poets have designated them as “the crew that never rests.” Besides the unceasing and useless bustle in which these spirits seemed to live, they had propensities unfavourable and distressing to mortals.
Sir John remembered his own first contact with the “crew that never rests.” Midway between dream and astral vision: the huge, incomprehensible machinery, the incessant muttering of nonsense phrases…. “Mulligan Milligan Hooligan Halligan” and all the rest. Cabala referred to them as the qliphothic entities—souls of those who had died insane; orthodox Christian theology simply called them demons; in Tibet they were known as Tulpas, and usually appeared in solid black garb like the mysterious “Orientar” who had gone about Inverness asking questions about the Verey household; to the American Indians, they were allies or avatars of Coyote, the prankster-god, or of the mysterious “people from the stars”; there seemed to be no part of the Earth in which they did not appear in horrified tales of malign humor, regarded as myth only by those who had never personally encountered them.
Sir John remembered suddenly that the very word “panic” is derived from the name of the Great God Pan; and that the ancients believed that any close encounter with Him or His cohort of satyrs and nymphs—the crew that never rests—was more likely to lead to madness than to ecstasy, or that the ecstasy could easily turn to madness.
The traditional old ballad “Thomas the Rhymer” came back to him, seeming not quaint at all but stealthily sinister:
And see ye not yon bonny road
That winds aboon the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland
Where you and I this night maun gae.
He remembered that William Blake, the poet, had soberly told friends of seeing a faery procession in his own garden once; that Sir Walter Scott seriously reported on a man he described as “a scholar and a gentleman” who insisted he had observed faery rings—circles of mushrooms where the weird folk were said to dance—and had seen imprints of small feet within them; that the folklorist Rev. S. Baring-Gould had sworn to an encounter, in 1838, in which “legions of dwarfs about two feet high” had circled his carriage and ran laughing alongside it for some distance, then vanished “into thin air” in the traditional manner; that as recently as 1907 Lady Archibald Campbell had reported a case of a man and wife, in Ireland, who had captured a “faery” and held it prisoner two weeks before it escaped.
Thinking, Do I dare, still, to consider all these cases as “hallucination”? and remembering the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, of similar reports from all ages and places: the Bigfoot of Canada, the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, the huge winged creatures of a thousand folk traditions—the vast dark company of unearthly beings (or the incredible variety of forms in which “the crew that never rests” can manifest to human consciousness, when the membrane between the visible and invisible worlds becomes temporarily ripped and They come prancing and dancing and slithering and tittering from their reality into ours)—remembering too his own experience when the most terrible of Them, the bisexual Baphomet, the Hideous God, had broken through to contact with him: Was that thunderous crash and that cracked mirror only a “coincidence,” or was it the tearing of the membrane, the opening of the door between the worlds?
Remembering, too, the great blind spot of the eighteenth century, the much-vaunted Age of Reason, when science, unable to explain meteorites, had dogmatically declared that there were no meteorites; and when meteorites continued to fall and were reported by farmers and Bishops and tradesmen and housewives and philosophers and mayors and thousands of independent witnesses, including even dissident scientists, the French Academy and the Royal Scientific Society blandly dismissed each report as hoax or hallucination; thinking, just as today the continuing activities of the crew that never rests, reported weekly from someplace or other in the daily press and investigated with painstaking care by the Society for Psychic Research, are also dismissed as hoaxes or hallucinations. Belief in Verey’s letter was impossible to resist: though the dwarf and the alleged “Oriental” in black and even the bat-winged Thing that tittered were all glamours, phantasms, illusions, yet the force, the malign intelligence, behind these phenomena was something humanity had confronted from before the dawn of history and could not, ever, escape.
Since his first researches into medieval magick, Sir John had vacillated between real belief, pretended-belief, real skepticism and pretended-skepticism. Now he no longer could resist simple uncomplicated belief. The Great God Pan was still alive, two thousand years after Christianity had correctly recognized and denounced Him as the devil; and his kith and kin were active all about us, even if they remained as invisible to educated opinion as meteorites to the intelligentsia of Voltaire’s age.
Q: Quote a scholarly source that at least tentatively supports the extreme views of Mr. Leek.
A: “In the myths of every race and clime we see the hallmarks of those extra-cosmic denizens that populate the pages of the Necronomicon. In the Himalayas the legend of the Abominable Snowman is by no means dead but continues to be resurrected by even the most prosaic members of mountaineering expeditions…. Sightings of the West Virginia Mothman—a brown humanoid endowed with wings—continue to be reported; sea serpents and monsters fill the oceans and lakes; UFO encounters have become an almost everyday occurrence.” Commentary by Robert Turner, The Necronomicon, Neville Spearman, Suffolk, 1978.