Masks of the Illuminati

Sir John crossed the heavily fogged street, pushed open the door of M.M.M.: Occult and Mystical Books of All Ages, and once again entered Chapel Perilous, half-expecting to encounter real horned demons with forked tails.

Instead, there were a variety of quite ordinary English people browsing among the shelves. The books ranged from the sparkling-new to the shabby secondhand and seemed to cover a broad spectrum: signs divided the rows under such labels as TAOISM, BUDDHISM, VEDANTA, CABALA, SUFISM, THEOSOPHY, PSYCHIC RESEARCH, and so forth. Sir John appreciated to the full Jones’ remark about the absurdity of asking Scotland Yard to put such an establishment under surveillance in this land of liberty and this age of enlightenment.

TONIGHT AT 8

“The Soldier and the Hunchback”
a lecture on mysticism and rationalism
by Sir Aleister Crowley
free to all

This was illustrated by a photo of Crowley, his face totally expressionless, eyes locked directly on the camera and thus seeming to stare directly out at the viewer: but the eyes, like the face, revealed absolutely nothing. Even stranger, the face did not seem to be hiding anything, though it showed nothing: it was simply a face. Had Crowley put himself into some kind of highly concentrated trance when the photo was being taken? He was neither handsome nor ugly (although Sir John remembered that Crowley as a youth had been called the handsomest man in London) and might have been anywhere from forty to fifty. It was the face, Sir John realized, of a man who had perfect self-control.

Sir John looked at the title of the lecture: “The Soldier and the Hunchback.” If Verey was the hunchback, who was the soldier? Himself? Jones? Crowley? Or was he attributing too much prescience to Enemy Intelligence? The title might have no personal meaning at all.

One shelf was labeled ORDO TEMPLI ORIENTIS—the name of the clandestine Masonic order which owned this bookstore and required all members to sign three copies of that nihilistic Act of Faith beginning, “There is no God but Man.” Sir John examined this curiously: most of the material was in the form of pamphlets or old books by such authors as Karl Kellner, Adam Weishaupt, Leopold Engels, P. B. Randolph, Theodore Reuss—almost all of it in German—but there were also several books by Aleister Crowley himself.

Sir John picked out a Crowley volume entitled, with Brazen effrontery, The Book of Lies. Opening it, he found the title page:

THE BOOK OF LIES

WHICH IS ALSO FALSELY CALLED

BREAKS

THE WANDERINGS OR FALSIFICATIONS

OF THE ONE THOUGHT OF

FRATER PERDURABO

WHICH THOUGHT IS ITSELF

UNTRUE

Despite himself, Sir John grinned. This was a variation on the Empedoclean paradox in logic, which consists of the question: “Empedocles, the Cretan, says that everything Cretans say is a lie; is Empedocles telling the truth?” Of course, if Empedocles is telling the truth, then—since his statement “everything Cretans say is a lie” is the truth—he must also be lying. On the other hand, if Empedocles is lying, then everything Cretans say is not a lie, and he might be telling the truth. Crowley’s title page was even more deliberately perverse: if the book is “also falsely called Breaks,” then (because of the “also”) the original title is false, too, and it is not a book of lies at all. But, on the other hand, since it is the “falsifications … of the one thought … which is itself untrue,” it is the negation of the untrue and, therefore, true. Or was it?

Sir John turned to the first chapter and found it consisted of a single symbol, the question mark:

Well, compared with the title, that was at least brief. Sir John turned the page to the second chapter and found equal brevity:

Nothing is.
Nothing becomes.
Nothing is not.

The first two statements were the ultimate in nihilism; but the third sentence, carrying nihilism one step further, brought in the Empedoclean paradox again, for it contradicted itself. If “nothing is not,” then something is….

What else was in this remarkable tome? Sir John started flipping pages and abruptly found himself facing, at Chapter 77, a photograph of Lola Levine. It was captioned “L.A.Y.L.A.H.” The photo and the caption made up the entire chapter. Lola was seen from the waist up and was shamelessly naked, although as a concession to English morality her hair hung down to cover most of her breasts.

Sir John, on a hunch, counted cabalistically. Lamed was 30, plus Aleph is 1, plus Yod is 10, plus second Lamed is 30, plus second Aleph is 1 again, plus Hé is 5; total, 77, the number of the chapter. And Laylah was not just a loose transliteration of Lola; it was the Arabic word for “night.” And 77 was the value of the curious Hebrew word which meant either “courage” or “goat”: Oz. The simple photo and caption were saying, to the skilled Cabalist, that Lola was the priestess incarnating the Night of Pan, the dissolution of the ego into void….

Sir John decided to buy The Book of Lies; it would be interesting, and perhaps profitable, to gain further insight into the mind of the Enemy, however paradoxical and perverse might be its expressions. He approached the counter, and found with discomfort that the clerk seated there was Lola Levine herself. Since he had just been looking at a photo of her, naked from the waist up, he blushed and stammered as he said, “I’d like to buy this.”

“One pound six, sir,” Lola said, with no more flicker of expression than any other clerk. Sir John realized that it had been nearly three years since the one occasion on which they had met on the Earth-plane; she had no reason to remember him. Then, was it possible that all the astral visions in which she tormented and attempted to seduce him were the product of his own impure imagination? Or were those visions as real as they seemed, and was she merely a consummate actress and hypocrite? It was the metaphysical equivalent of the Empedoclean paradox.

A stout, elderly woman with a Cornish accent asked Lola, “I’m planning to stay for the lecture. Is it pronounced Crouly or Crowley?”

“It is pronounced Crowly,” said a voice from the door. “To remind you that I’m holy. But my enemies say Crouly, in wish to treat me foully.”

Sir John turned and saw Aleister Crowley, bowing politely to the Cornish woman as he completed his jingle. Crowley was a man of medium height, dressed in a conservative pinstripe suit jarringly offset by a gaudy blue scarf in place of the tie and with a green Borsalino hat worn at a rakish angle. It was the outfit an artist on the Left Bank might wear, to show that he had become successful; it was definitely eccentric for London.

The Cornish woman stared. “Are you really the Great Magician, as people say?”

“No,” said Crowley at once. “I am the most dedicated enemy of the Great Magician.” And he swept past imperiously.

The Cornish lady gasped. “What did he mean by that?” she asked nobody in particular.

Sir John understood, but wasted no time trying to explain. Crowley was heading for the lecture room and Sir John followed him closely, wanting a seat up front where he could observe the Master of the M.M.M. most closely. The paradox had been typical of Crowley’s style: he referred, obviously, to the Gnostic teaching that the sensory universe was a delusion, created by the Devil, to prevent humanity from seeing the Undivided Light of Divinity itself. A strange joke to come from a Satanist; but, of course, some Gnostics had taught that Jehovah, creator of the material universe, was the Devil, the Great Magician. The Bible begins with Beth, according to this teaching, because Beth is the letter of the Magician in the Tarot, the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations….

The lecture room was filling rapidly and Sir John scampered into a front-row seat. He noticed that Crowley had lowered his head and closed his eyes, obviously preparing himself for the lecture by some method of invocation or meditation. Behind him on the wall was a large silver star with an eye in its center, a symbol associated (Sir John knew) with both the goddess Isis and the Dog Star, Sirius.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” Crowley intoned suddenly, without raising his head. Then he looked about the room whimsically.

“It is traditional in the great Order which I humbly represent,” he went on, “to begin all ceremonies and lectures with that phrase. Like Shakespeare’s Ducdame, it is a great banishing ritual against fools, most of whom leave the room at once on hearing it uttered. Observing no stampede to the doors I can only wonder if a miracle is occurring tonight and I am speaking, for once, to an English audience that does not consist mostly of fools.”

“My topic tonight,” Crowley went on, “is the soldier and the hunchback. Those are poetic terms I regularly employ to designate the two most interesting punctuation marks in general use throughout Europe—the exclamation point and the question mark. Please do not look for profundities at this point. I call the exclamation point ‘the soldier’ only out of poetic whimsy, because it stands there, erect, like a soldier on guard duty. The question mark I call the ‘hunchback,’ similarly, only because of its shape. I repeat again: there is no profundity intended, yet.”

Sir John found himself thinking of the first two chapters of The Book of Lies, which said only “?” and “!”

The question mark or hunchback, Crowley went on, appeared in all the basic philosophical problems that haunt mankind: Why are we here? Who or what put us here? What if anything can we do about it? How do we get started? Where shall wisdom be found? Why was I born? Who am I? “Unless you are confronted with immediate survival problems, due to poverty or to the deliberate choice of an adventurous life, these hunchbacks will arise in your mind several times in an ordinary hour,” Crowley said. “They are generally pacified or banished by reciting the official answers of the tribe into which you were born, or simply deciding that they are unanswerable.” Some however, Crowley went on, cannot rest in either blind tradition or resigned agnosticism, and must seek answers for themselves, based on experience. Ordinary people, he said, are in a sense totally asleep and do not even know it; those who persist in asking the questions can be described as struggling toward wakefulness.

The soldier, or exclamation point, he continued, represents the moment of insight or intuition in which a question is answered, as in the expressions “Aha!” or “Eureka!”

“I now present you, gratis, two of the nastiest hunchbacks I know,” Crowley said, smiling wickedly. “These two are presented to every candidate who comes to our Order seeking the Light. Here they are:

“Number One: Why, of all the mystical and occult teachers in the world, did you come to me?

“That is all you need to know,” Crowley said. “I might as well leave the platform now, since, if you can answer those questions, you are already Illuminated; and if you cannot, you are such dunces that further words are wasted on you. But I will take mercy on you and give you the rest of the lecture, anyway.”

Crowley went on to define the state of modern philosophy (post-David Hume) as “an assembly of hunchbacks.” Everything has been called into question; every axiom has been challenged—“including Euclid’s geometry among modern mathematicians”; nothing is certain anymore. On all sides, Crowley said, we see only more hunchbacks—questions, questions, questions.

Traditional mysticism, Crowley continued, is a regiment of soldiers. The mystic, he said, having attained an “Aha!” or “Eureka!” experience—a sudden intuitive insight into the invisible reality behind the subjective deceptions of the senses—is apt to be so delighted with himself that he never asks another question and stops thinking entirely. Out of this error, Crowley warned, flows dogmatic religion, “a force almost as dangerous to true mysticism as it is to scientific or political freedom.”

The path of true Illumination, Crowley proceeded, walking to a blackboard at the right of the room, does not consist of one intuitive insight after another. It is not a parade of soldiers, “like this,” he said, writing on the board:

“Anybody in that state is an imbecile or a catatonic, however blissful his lunacy may be,” Crowley said sternly.

The true path of the Illuminati, Crowley stated more emphatically, is a series of soldiers and hunchbacks in ever-accelerating series, which he sketched as:

“To rest at any point, either in intuitive certainty or doubtful questioning,” he said flatly, “is to stagnate. Always seek the higher vision, whatever states of ecstatic insight you may have reached. Always ask the next harder question, whatever questions you may have answered. The Light you are seeking is quite correctly called ain soph auer in Cabala—the limitless light—and it has, quite literally, the characteristics mathematicians such as Cantor have demonstrated belong to Infinity. As the Upanishads say, ‘You can empty infinity from it, and infinity still remains.’ However deep your union with the Light, it can become deeper, whether you call it Christ or Buddha or Brahm or Pan. Since I am, thank God,” he said the last two words with great piety, “an Atheist, I prefer to call it Nothing—since anything we say about it is finite and limited, whereas it is infinite and unlimited.”

Crowley proceeded to discourse on the infinite with great detail, summarizing mathematical theories on the subject with remarkable erudition and felicity. “But all this,” he ended, “is not the true infinite. It is only what our little monkey-minds have been able to comprehend so far. Ask the next question. Seek the higher vision. That is the path that unites mysticism and rationalism, and transcends both of them. As a great Poet has written:

We place no reliance
On Virgin or Pigeon;
Our method is Science,
Our aim is Religion.

Those blessed words!” he said raptly. “Holy be the name of the sage who wrote them!”

At this point Sir John was far from sure whether he had been listening to the highest wisdom or the most pretentious mumbo jumbo he had ever heard. The Divine No-Thing was much like certain concepts in Buddhism and Taoism, but it was also a nice way of seeming to utter profundities while actually talking nonsense. But then, of course, Crowley’s whole point had been that anything said about infinity was itself Nothing in comparison with infinity itself….

With a start, Sir John realized that the lecture was over. The audience was applauding, somewhat tentatively, most of them as confused by what they had heard as Sir John himself.

“You may now,” Crowley said carelessly, “unburden yourselves of the thoughts with which you passed the time while pretending to listen attentively to me; but in accord with English decorum and the rituals of the public lecture, you must phrase these remarks in the form of questions.”

“What about Christ?” The speaker was a redfaced man with a walrus mustache; he seemed more irritated by what he had heard than the rest of the audience. “You didn’t say nuthin’ about Christ,” he added aggrievedly.

“A lamentable oversight,” Crowley said unctuously. “What about Christ, indeed? Personally, I hold the man blameless for the religion that has been foisted upon him posthumously. Next question—the lady in the back row?”

Sir John found himself wondering when Crowley would become aware of the Talisman and attempt to cajole him into surrendering it. With horror he realized that such overwhelming of his mind was possible: Crowley did possess charm, magnetism and charisma, like many servants of the Demon. What was it Pope had written about Vice? A creature of such hideous mein/That to be hated needs but be seen/But something something something/We first pity, then endure, then embrace…. “Many things are inevitable,” Crowley was saying. “The tides. The seasons. The fact that the questions after a lecture seldom have anything to do with the content of the lecture….” What do you seek? The Light. The limitless light: ain soph auer. And the darkness knew it not….

“Ah,” Crowley said. “That is a Significant Question.” Somehow he conveyed the mocking capitals by his intonation. “Such questions deserve to be answered with demonstrations, not with mere windy words. Laylah,” he called to the back of the room. “Could you bring the psychoboulometer?”

Lola approached the podium with something that looked hideously like a medieval thumb-screw.

“There is firstly conscious will,” Crowley was saying, looking directly at Sir John. “We all attempt to exercise this every day. ‘I will give up smoking.’ ‘I will be true to my wife.’ Ninety-nine times out of a hundred such resolutions fail, because they are in conflict with the force that really controls us, Unconscious Will, which cannot be frustrated. Indeed, even the profane psychologists have rediscovered what the mystics always knew: Unconscious Will, if prevented from acting, returns in the night to haunt our dreams. And sometimes it returns in the daytime, too, in the form of irrational behaviors which we cannot understand. Magick Will should not be confused with either of these, because it includes both and is greater than both. To perform an act of Magick Will is to achieve the Great Work, I might say. The holiest of all holy books says in this connection, ‘Thou hast no right but to do thy will.’ Alas, if you think you are doing your true Will, without magickal training, you are almost always deluding yourself…. But I am engaging in the windy verbiage I promised to avoid, and here is the implement of demonstration. Would anybody care to give us an exhibit of what they can accomplish by conscious Will?”

“I think I shall give it a try,” Sir John said, wondering at his own daring. “That’s only fair since I asked the question,” he added, feeling inane.

“Well, then, good! Come up here, sir,” Crowley said with a grin that was beginning to look a bit sinister to Sir John. “We have here,” he went on, holding the ugly thumb-screw so that everybody could get a good view, “one of the implements once used by the Dominican Order to enforce the religion which, as I said, has been foisted on Christ.” He set the torture device on the podium. “They used it as an instrument of torture, but we shall use it as a measure of Will.”

Sir John was now standing beside Crowley, looking uneasily at the thumb-screw. “Just insert your thumb, sir,” Crowley said easily.

“Just insert your thumb, down here,” Crowley went on blandly, “and then turn the handle which tightens the vise. The needle on the boulometer—my own addition to this toy—will register how far you are able to withstand pain by sheer Will; 10 is a good score, and 0 means you are a mere jellyfish. How far do you think you can go?”

Sir John felt every eye in the room upon him. He wanted to cry, “I am not such a fool as to torture myself for your amusement,” but—he was even more afraid of appearing a public coward. Is that why people go into armies? he asked himself grimly…. “Very well,” he said coldly, inserting his thumb.

And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.

And it was about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.

And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.

And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.

And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit; and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.

“You’ve only reached two in the boulometer,” Crowley said. “The audience will think you’re not trying, sir.”

“Damn you!” Sir John whispered, perspiration cold on his back. “I am done with this cruel joke. Let us see how much better your Magick Will can do!”

“Certainly,” Crowley said calmly. He inserted his thumb into the cruel mechanism, and began turning the vise with slow deliberation. Not a muscle moved in his face. (Sir John suspected that he had gone into a trance.) The needle on the boulometer crept slowly, accompanied by gasps from the audience, all the way to 10.

“That,” said Crowley gently, “might pass for an elementary demonstration of Magick Will.”

“It will also do,” Crowley said, “as an illustration of our thesis about the soldier and the hunchback. The first rule of our Magick is: never believe anything you hear and doubt most of what you see.” He turned the “psycho-boulometer” around, revealing that he had disengaged the screw and had been turning the handle without actually tightening the vise. There was an angry gasp.

“Oh,” Crowley said, “are you feeling cheated? Remember this, then: you are cheated the same way every time emotional turmoil or fixed ideas distort your perception of what is actually before your eyes. And remember to look for the hunchback behind every soldier.”

The audience began to file out, muttering and chattering as excitedly as a group of chimpanzees who had just found a mirror.

And then Sir John realized that Crowley had descended from the podium and was approaching him.

“Sir John Babcock,” Crowley said warmly, “did you ever hear the story of the man with a mongoose in his basket?”

At least, unlike Lola, Crowley wasn’t pretending not to recognize Sir John. “What mongoose?” Babcock asked carefully.

“It was on a train,” Crowley said. “This chap had a basket under his seat and another passenger asked him what was in it. ‘A mongoose,’ he said. ‘A mongoose!’ said the other. ‘What on earth do you want with a mongoose?’ ‘Well,’ said our hero, ‘my brother drinks a great deal more than is good for him, and sometimes he sees snakes. So I turn the mongoose on them.’ The other passenger was baffled by this logic. ‘But those are imaginary snakes!’ he exclaimed. ‘Aha!’ said our hero. ‘Do you think I don’t know that? But this is an imaginary mongoose!’”

“That’s the way it is with talismans,” Crowley said. “When a phantom climbs, the ghost of a ladder serves him. But do keep that pentacle in your vest if it makes you feel better. I must go now. We shall meet again.”

And Sir John stared as Crowley made his way to the back of the room, where he greeted Lola with a kiss. He whispered something; they both turned and looked back at Sir John; they waved cheerfully. And then they were gone.

DE ARTE ALCHEMICA

When Sir John arrived at Jones’ home in Soho, he recounted his experience at the M.M.M. bookstore in detail.

“Crowley did not attempt to cajole me into giving him the talisman,” he concluded with some asperity. “He treated it with total contempt.”

“The man does have an Iron Will,” Jones admitted, “but do not be deceived by his play-acting. Underneath, he knows we are on the counterattack now, and he must be afraid.”

Sir John asked with suffocating restraint, “Are you really quite sure of that?”

“We both need a good night’s sleep,” Jones said, as if ignoring the question. “I will show you to the guest room. Before retiring, meditate a bit on the Parable of the Imaginary Mongoose. It has many levels of meaning….”

In fact, Sir John found that he was too tired to reflect much on the Imaginary Mongoose when he was settled into his room. He slipped into sleep quickly and dreamed things he was unable to remember in the morning, although he awoke with a vague memory of Sir Talister Crowley and a giant mongoose pursuing him through Chapel Perilous.

After washing and dressing, Sir John remembered that he still had the copy of The Book of Lies he had purchased at M.M.M. He decided to try Bibliomancy-in-reverse and see what the Enemy had to offer in the way of an oracle. Opening at random, he found Chapter 50:

In the forest God met the Stag-beetle. “Hold!
  Worship me!” quoth God. “For I am the All-
  Great, All-Good, All-Wise…. The stars are
  but sparks from the forges of My smiths….”

“Yea, verily and Amen,” said the Stag-beetle,
“all this I do believe, and that devoutly.”

“Then why do you not worship Me?”

“Because I am real and you are only imaginary.”

But the leaves of the forest rustled with the
laughter of the wind.

Said Wind and Wood: “They neither of them know
anything!”

“Damn, blast and thunder!” Sir John exploded. The beetle denies God, but wind and wood deny the beetle also. It was the Imaginary Mongoose riddle again, on a more Empedoclean level.

Going down the stairs in search of breakfast, Sir John experimented with solipsism. Perhaps there are no gods or beetles—or perhaps the whole world is, as the Gnostics claimed, the Abyss of Hallucinations, the Devil’s Masquerade. But then we must consider David Hume’s argument: the same skepticism can be applied to the Self. Am I really here? Are only the egoless wind and wood real? If phantoms descend, do the ghosts of stairs serve them?

Dr. Johnson refuted that philosophy by kicking a rock. Sir John refuted it by remembering that he really was hungry. Eggs and muffins were real enough to be desirable at this hour, and his stomach was real enough to desire them.

“I thought we were going to keep him safe with the Liverpool Mangler,” he said, confused.

“Our plans have changed totally since I spoke to the Inner Head of the Order last night. Things are more serious than I realized,” Jones said. “All three of us are going together to see Mr. Aleister Crowley at his home, with a surprise for him.”

“Dear me, no,” Jones said mildly. “A real surprise this time. But eat first, Sir John; the muffins are delicious.”

Verey had been reading the same newspaper article Jones had shown Sir John the previous evening. “It is full of errors,” he complained. “Bobbie McMaster hasna’ been forty-three for a long time; he’s at least as old as I am. And that headless woman who haunts Geen Carrig is not new; she has been observed there for as many centuries as Anne Boleyn has been seen haunting the Tower of London. Why can reporters never get anything right?”

“I believe Bernard Shaw has explained that,” Jones said, adding lemon to his tea, Paris style. “In almost all other professions a man must be able to observe carefully and report accurately what he has seen. Those qualifications are unnecessary for journalists, however, since their job is to write sensational stories that sell newspapers. Hence, all the incompetents who are not capable of normal accuracy in observation or memory fail in most other professions and many of them eventually drift into journalism.”

“Aha!” said Sir John, who had often wondered why nothing in the papers was ever accurate. Of course: any chemist or grocer or ordinary man, asked to describe this breakfast, would report correctly that it consisted of eggs, ham and muffins, with tea. A journalist would report porridge, bacon and toast, with a sex orgy and a murder.

“Nessie” was real according to virtually all the residents of Inverness; “Nessie” was a myth according to “experts” who had never visited the scene.

“You know,” Sir John said to Jones, “I’ve noticed that you always refer to Crowley as ‘Mr.’, but the poster I saw last night gave him the title of ‘Sir’. Which is correct?”

“Crowley is a brewer’s son,” Jones said. “But the ‘Sir’ is legitimate according to his own peculiar lights. Back in the ’90s, when he was a singularly Romantic and adventuresome young man not yet corrupted by Black Magick, he joined the cause of the Carlists. Don Carlos personally knighted him.”

“But,” Sir John protested, “Don Carlos was only a pretender to the throne.”

“To you and me and the daily press, yes. Crowley still insists Don Carlos was the real monarch and Victoria the pretender. So, as I say, by his own lights, the title of Sir Aleister is quite correct.”

“Oh, most certainly,” Jones agreed, with a quiet smile. “But he is also brilliant and coldly rational, in his own way. He and I were friends once, many years ago, before our paths diverged, and I still say, for all his wickedness, Aleister Crowley had the potential to become the greatest of us all.” Jones sighed. “It is only the most exalted who can fall all the way to the lowest depths,” he added grimly.

“‘Lucifer, son of the morning, how art thou fallen,’” Verey quoted, with deep, rolling drama, as from the pulpit.

Like most clergymen, Verey had a Bible quotation for all occasions, Sir John reflected.

As Jones’ valet appeared to clear off the breakfast dishes, Sir John asked boldly, “Well, when do we go to beard the lion in his den? I hope it will not be as anti-climactic as last night.”

“Aye,” Verey said. “I look forward to the moment when that devil Aleister Crowley and I meet face to face.”

Sir John felt like one of the Three Musketeers setting off to do battle with Richelieu’s men.

“Crowley lives on Regent Street,” Jones said. “In fact, he has one of the finest homes there. His father was not merely a brewer, but a very successful brewer. We are going into one of the most respectable neighborhoods in London. Crowley publishes all his own works in the most expensive bindings and finest papers, and lives like an Oriental prince in every other way.”

They certainly made an odd group of Musketeers, Sir John reflected as they set out: Verey, aged and hunchbacked; Jones, stout and fortyish; only he himself, at twenty-eight, was young enough to qualify as a conventional hero of melodrama—and he was probably the most nervous of all.

Jones began reminiscing about Crowley as they walked. They had first met sixteen years earlier, in 1898, when Crowley was admitted to the original Golden Dawn as a Probationer. “He was a most impressive young man,” Jones said. “At twenty-three, he had already published several volumes of excellent poetry and had set some distinguished mountain climbing records in the Alps. He had majored in organic chemistry at Cambridge and I remember asking him why, since I saw nothing of the scientific temperament in him. I have never forgotten his answer. ‘My personality is entirely poetic, esthetic and Romantic,’ he said. ‘I needed some work in hard science to bring me down to earth,’ I thought it an astonishing example of self-insight and self-discipline in one so young.”

Jones went on to tell of Crowley’s rapid rise in the Golden Dawn. “I never saw a man with such a natural aptitude for Cabalistic Magick,” he said frankly. Then came the disaster of 1900, when the feud between William Butler Yeats and McGregor Mathers exploded into a dozen lesser feuds which split the Golden Dawn into factions which were never re-united. Jones lost track of Crowley for some years, although he heard of Crowley’s travels to study Yoga in the Far East and Sufism in North Africa. In 1902, Crowley and a German engineer, Oscar Eckenstein, succeeded in climbing higher on Chogo Ri in the Himalayas than any expedition before or since, reaching twenty-three thousand feet. In 1905, Crowley went to China, and when he returned he was a completely new man.

“I remember,” Jones said, “my naïve response when we met again in 1906. I found him so changed that I actually believed he was a totally Illuminated being, beyond any other Golden Dawn graduate. I asked him how he had achieved that, and he said simply, ‘I became a little child.’”

They were crossing Rupert Street and Jones smiled ironically. “My illusions about him did not last long,” he said. “That very same year he published the infamous Bhag-i-Muatur, which he claimed was a translation from the Persian. It was nothing of the sort. Crowley had always been a great admirer of the late Sir Richard Burton and was merely copying his hero, who had published the Hasidah—a blunt statement of Atheistic philosophy—as a translation from the Arabic, when it was actually his own work. The Bhag-i-Muatur, a title which translates as ‘The Scented Garden,’ was similarly Crowley’s own work disguised as a translation. It was, on the surface, an allegory about the Soul’s relationship to God. Actually, carefully read, it was a glorification of sodomy.” Shortly thereafter Crowley was divorced by his wife for adultery and began to live as shamelessly as Oscar Wilde before his trials, flaunting his numerous affairs, both heterosexual and homosexual, as if he took a special diabolical delight in shocking Christian sensibilities.

In the following years, Crowley divided his time between London, Paris and the North African deserts. In 1909, he staged a spectacle called “The Rites of Eleusis” at a London theater and aroused a storm of controversy. The “rites” began with a chorus informing the audience, Nietzschefashion, that “God is dead.” The following ceremony included ballet, music, ritual, poetry and the serving to the audience of an alleged “elixir of the gods” (which some later suspected contained a mind-altering drug) and ended with the announcement that a new God had been born, a “Lord of Force and Fire” Who would destroy Western civilization and create, out of its ruins, a new civilization based on the Rabelaisian slogan: “Do what thou wilt.”

Since 1910, Jones continued, Crowley had been the English leader of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a Berlin-based Masonic order which claimed to retain the primordial Masonic secrets in purer form than any other group. The Outer Head of the order, Jones said, was Theodore Reuss, an actor who was also an agent for the German secret police.

“Oh, indeed,” Jones said. “So does Army Intelligence. They watch Reuss carefully but never interfere with him, since his area of operations is restricted to spying on German exiles in England. He was for a long time an associate of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and their circle.”

Jones went on to speak of the links between the Ordo Templi Orientis and certain dervish orders in the Near East said to be connected with the Young Turks who had overturned the monarchy and introduced parliamentary democracy. Rasputin, the monk of strange hypnotic powers who seemed to have total control over the current Czar and his family, was also associated with the same dervish orders, Jones said, as was Colonel Dragutin Dimitryevic, head of Serbian Military Intelligence, who was simultaneously, under the code name “Apis,” a member of “Union or Death,” a Pan-Serbian secret revolutionary group. “Between Rasputin, the Young Turks and Colonel Dimitryevic,” Jones said, “the whole Near Eastern and Balkan situation has steadily grown more unstable, so that all the alliances between England, France, Germany and Russia are breaking down, each Great Power suspecting the others of plotting to use the increasingly volatile situation for its own profit—even though the Young Turks are ostensibly sworn to fight to the death to keep the Great Powers out of that area. Ever since the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway was built in ’96,” Jones went on, “some in our government have suspected Germany of intending to replace us in India, but now every major Power suspects every other Power of similar designs.”

“This grows deeper and darker as you proceed,” Sir John complained. “Are we dealing with a spiritual war between rival theologies or an economic war between rival commercial interests?”

Sir John looked up at Big Ben, towering in the distance, stone-solid, tangible, real. But Shakespeare’s words came back to him:

these our actors

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inhabit, shall dissolve

The Loch Ness monster and the Pan-Serbian Movement; bat-winged creatures that titter and the German secret police; incredible suicides and nameless perversions; worldwide assassinations and the secret history of Freemasonry; a murdered cat in a locked church and the Berlin-Baghdad railroad … Masks and masks-behind-the-masks. Sir John was no longer sure of anything. 358: the Serpent is the Messiah. I.N.R.I.: Jesus is Dionysus. HONI SOIT: The Order of the Garter was a secret witch-coven which had ruled Great Britain for five hundred years. Life itself was an Empedoclean paradox and David Hume was right: one cannot even prove, in logic, the existence of the ego itself. Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations.

“You are aware, of course, Sir John,” Jones went on, “that the Bavarian Illuminati, financed by the Rothschilds, secretly masterminded the revolutions which overthrew the old monarchist-feudal order and opened the way to the Tree’ market system in which monopolized Capital has come to dominate the modern world. The Illuminati, needless to say, had motives of their own: ‘There is no God but Man’ was their slogan before it was Crowley’s. In fact, the Ordo Templi Orientis, in its modern form, was created by amalgamating Leopold Engels’ revived Illuminati in 1888 with P. B. Randolph’s Hermetic Brotherhood of Light. Randolph, an American Negro, had started as a voodoo priest but received his advanced training from the same dervish order behind Rasputin and the Young Turks. Theodore Reuss, the Outer Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, we have reason to believe, was not just a spy on Marx and his group for the German military intelligence, but actually a double agent, spying on Germany for the Marxists. Crowley himself has certain links with Commander Marsden of our own Army Intelligence which I do not pretend to fathom. Isn’t it strange to think all of this goes back ultimately to Mansur-el-Hallaj, the dervish who was stoned to death by the orthodox Moslems in the ninth century for saying ‘I am the Truth and there is nothing within my turban but God’? Yet it was through Mansur’s disciples that the Knights Templar were initiated into the secret black rites of Tantric sex-magick….”

And Old Mother Hubbard really is Isis in disguise and the bone she is seeking is the phallus of Osiris, Sir John thought wildly. Everything imaginable is true in some sense: if I believe enough that I can fly, I will simply float off into the stratosphere….

“Arthur!” Verey cried, jolting Sir John out of these solipsistic reflections.

Jones and Babcock looked in the direction of the clergyman’s fixed stare. Across the street was a garden: Did a shadowy form move ambiguously therein, or was it just a tree swaying in the breeze?

“My God,” Verey whispered, almost staggering. “It’s my dead brother, Arthur!”

“It can’t be—you are confused,” Jones began to protest. The clergyman brushed him aside rudely.

“Arthur,” he repeated, “the monster who brought ruin on my whole family. And now he comes back from the grave itself to taunt me.” And he rushed across the street.

Sir John reached the opposite sidewalk first, as Verey dashed through the gate and entered the path between the high beds of exotic plants. The path turned abruptly and Verey was now running, about ten feet away, in a direction parallel to the street. He disappeared behind a large oak, as Sir John entered the garden and ran after him.

Taking the same turn as Verey, Sir John found the clergyman no longer in sight. He rushed to the next turn and confronted a tallish, black-bearded man in a Russian fur hat, busy trimming the hedges.

Jones arrived, panting. “What happened?” he asked. “It looked as if Verey just disappeared.”

Jones and Babcock exchanged mystified glances. Jones recovered first. “Who are you, sir?” he asked.

“I am Baron Nicholas Salmonovitch Zaharov,” said the stranger, “and this is my house behind us, and this is my garden, and I suspect both of you must have been drinking at an early hour if you imagine you saw someone come this way. I assure you nobody has passed me.”

… these our actors …

… are
melted into air, into thin air …

“At last,” said Albert Einstein, his pipe venting cloud-grey smoke. “Here is something we can really get our teeth into.”

James Joyce shifted into a different indifferent slouch in his chair. “We may find,” he muttered, “that we have bitten off more than we can chew.”

Einstein was rummaging about for a sheet of paper not covered with mathematical equations. “Baron Zaharov,” he muttered. “The light at the end of the tunnel. Aha!” He had found several sheafs of virgin foolscap. “Here,” he said to Babcock. “I want an exact diagram of the scene of this miracle.”

“We do not require an artist’s rendering,” Einstein said impatiently. “Sketch the scene as an engineer or an architect would, verstehen Sie? As a man would see it from above, if he were floating in the air.”

Einstein hovered over the drawing as it was made, asking questions, demanding details, until at last it emerged in full enough precision to satisfy him.

“So,” said Einstein softly, studying the diagram, “it is much as I suspected. Clever rascals….”

“I hope you know what you’re talking about,” Joyce intoned darkly from the corner where he slouched. “To me, in my unscientific ignorance, this is the most marvelous marvel in Sir John’s whole Arabian Nights adventure.”

Einstein smiled. “This Baron Zaharov,” he said to Babcock. “You certainly didn’t just bid him adieu at that point and accept his testimony at face value?”

Babcock mutely made a despairing gesture with his hands obscurely. “No,” he said, “but it was most difficult. At first he insisted on treating us both as drunk or demented, and Jones had to exercise great diplomacy to persuade him to take us seriously. Finally, he did grow more cooperative, although he still acted as though he were humoring us. Nobody is quite as imperious as a Russian nobleman, you know. But he allowed us to go over the terrain most carefully. The garden was in full flower on both sides of the path and could only be described as lush. There was no way Reverend Verey could have been pulled over the fence and dragged through the garden without crushing or badly mauling hundreds of plants, and yet none of the plants was disturbed at all.”

“Approximately three feet. The upper half of Verey’s body was clearly visible to me until he vanished behind the oak tree.”

“Varying heights—from one foot up to three or four feet. And none of them was trampled or disturbed in any way,” Babcock repeated.

“Of course,” Einstein said. “Now, carefully, Sir John, visualize the Reverend Verey and Baron Zaharov. What would you say were their respective heights?”

Sir John frowned thoughtfully. “Verey was quite short,” he said. “Not much above five feet, I would say. The Baron was at least my own height, I’d estimate—around five-eight, give or take a few inches. He was so overbearing in his manner that I seem to remember looking up at him as he spoke, but I am not perfectly sure he was actually that tall.”

Einstein nodded. “Rods and clocks,” he muttered under his breath. He turned his attention back to Babcock. “What happened after you and Jones were through inspecting the garden?”

“The Baron showed us back to the street, with some patronizing remark about people who take strong spirits in the morning. I was completely at sea by then, but Jones said, ‘I don’t trust that man. Let us see what we can learn about him next door.’”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Babcock said. “As soon as Jones spoke it occurred to me, also. I had been so shocked by the seeming dematerialization, and so intimidated by the Baron’s arrogant manner, that my mind had virtually ceased functioning for a while there. But, of course, if there were trickery involved, the Baron would have to be an accomplice.”

“Well, the house next door turned out to belong to Miss Isadora Duncan, the celebrated American dancer. Have either of you ever seen her dance?” Babcock asked, interrupting himself.

“I detest ballet,” Joyce said. “All that jumping about distracts one from the music.”

“I have never seen Miss Duncan, either,” Einstein confessed. “But, of course, everyone in Europe has heard of her. Is she as good as Pavlova, as some say?”

“Better,” Babcock said. “I saw her dance only once, around 1909, but I have never forgotten it. Of course, I disapprove of the libertine principles the lady has so brazenly proclaimed, but I admit she is one of the great artistes of our time. I was very disappointed that she was not at home. We did, however, speak at length to her secretary, another American named Miss Sturgis.”

“And what was Miss Sturgis able to tell you about Baron Zaharov?” Einstein asked.

“A great deal,” Babcock said with a weak smile, wearily. “More than we wished to hear, in fact. She detested the man violently.”

“Miss Sturgis described the Baron as a prude, a religious fanatic, and an officious busybody,” Sir John went on. “It seems that he once tried to organize a kind of moral crusade in the neighborhood, to have Miss Duncan ejected as—well, as the equivalent of a public prostitute. Failing in that, he continued to annoy the neighbors by sending them letters quoting the most controversial utterances in Miss Duncan’s writings, claiming she was a dangerous revolutionary. Miss Sturgis said that if it were not for his high position in the Russian Embassy, the neighbors might have organized a committee to have him thrown out.”

“Oh, a great deal,” Babcock said. “Zaharov attended services at an Eastern Orthodox church every morning, even though it was miles away and he had to arise at five A.M. to get there. He once tried to use his position at the embassy to bully a Russian-language bookstore to stop carrying the works of Count Tolstoy because Tolstoy had questioned the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. His uncle was a Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, in Moscow. He was suspicious of Roman Catholics and Jews, and regarded Protestants as little better than atheists. Miss Sturgis said, I remember, ‘After having him as a neighbor, I understand why Russia is such a backward country.’”

Einstein laughed. “Wunderbar!” he said. “Miss Sturgis’ testimony fits perfectly with my theory.”

“If the Baron were a man who got up at five in the morning to kill cats in churches,” Joyce said, “or if he admired and praised Miss Duncan’s revolutionary principles, then I might see him as a co-conspirator with our enigmatic Crowley. But as it is, he seems to be above suspicion.”

Einstein nodded. “But that is what I expected. When Babcock said Miss Sturgis regarded the Baron as detestable I feared that my hypothesis was falling apart. But as it is I am more sure than ever that I am on the right track. What happened next?” he asked Babcock.

“After we left the Duncan household, Jones said that Verey’s dematerialization had changed everything again, and that I must not accompany him to Crowley’s home; he would go alone. I protested, and we argued somewhat heatedly. Eventually, I was persuaded to allow him to go alone. I checked in at the Diogenes Club, where I often stay when I am in London, and waited….”

“I waited until nightfall,” Babcock said. “And then I could stand the uncertainty no more. I took a hansom cab to Jones’ home in Soho … and …”

“Let me tell you what you found,” Einstein said. “There was an ordinary English family living there, with open and honest faces, who swore solemnly they had never heard of a Mr. George Cecil Jones.”

“My God!” Babcock said, sitting up suddenly. “This is incredible! How did you know?”

“Guessing has nothing to do with scientific thinking,” Einstein said sharply. “Did you perchance also try to contact the Liverpool Mangler, as your last contact with Jones?”

“Yes,” Babcock said. “His room was totally empty. The landlady swore it hadn’t been rented for months.”

“I returned to the Diogenes Club and sat awake all night, thinking and wondering. In the morning I went to the London Main Post Office, to see if I could get any information about the renters of Post Office Box 718. That was my last remaining link with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. They told me there was no such box; the numbers only ran as high as 600. The Invisible College had become completely invisible again, it seems. As if the last four years were all a dream. An imaginary mongoose fighting imaginary snakes.” Sir John lapsed into silence, staring into space with the expression of one who has been driven to doubt all that he had ever taken for granted. There was a strained silence.

“I did,” Joyce replied somberly, “and I apologize, Sir John; that may be the most callous word I have ever spoken. But as an artist myself I was just carried away for a moment with admiration for the thoroughness, the elegance I might almost say, of your antagonists. They certainly did a complete job on you. It’s almost mathematical in its starkness, isn’t it, Professor? One fancies that they should have written ‘Q.E.D.’ on the bottom line.”

“The completeness of it,” Joyce repeated, adding: “… as the legendary Frenchman said after the earthquake. Imagine: even the post office box was fictitious. That’s a touch I appreciate.”

“But also elegant,” Joyce again repeated himself. “Do you know what their model was—even before they seized on Mr. Chambers’ King in Yellow for the theme of the book that drives people to self-destruction? It’s an old, old tale—one of the oldest in the world—and I have often reflected on it myself. The charm of this story, I have found, is that if you tell it to somebody they will immediately claim to have heard it, or read it, somewhere before, but they can never recall where …”

“The tale is this,” Joyce went on. “A man is in a strange city—or, in some more subtly unsettling versions, in a city that is very familiar to him, a city he thinks he knows. But he becomes lost and wanders into a neighborhood he has never seen before. It grows dark; he sees nobody to ask for directions. And then suddenly She is there—the most beautiful woman in the world. In some variations, She is carrying a pearl of great price, or some other fabulous jewel. In any event, She invites him into her home—as the Queen of the Faery invites the wandering Knight to cross her threshold in the medieval legends. He goes with Her, and all is bliss, and paradise, and the realization of all the dreams of Romance. Do either of you know the end of this immortal story, my friends?”

“Yes,” Einstein said softly. “You are right about this yarn—I do feel that I’ve heard it before, or read it, and I can’t remember where or when. He agrees to meet Her again the following day, at Her home. He returns at the appointed time; and there is no house there, only a vacant lot. Neighbors tell him there hasn’t been a house there in over a century.”

Babcock stared. “Yes,” he said. “I recall the tale now, myself. Only it seems that when I heard it, the whole neighborhood had vanished. The hero searches the city endlessly, but never finds that street again.”

Joyce smiled gently. “In some versions, he is an old man first seen wandering the city at night. After he tells his story, he goes on searching for the street that once was but is no more. Some people, I have found, even claim to know the man this adventure happened to. It is what Jung would call an archetypal vision. The doors to the magick world open once, and then close again, and you can never find your way back to the place they were. You see, Sir John? They have put you through a script that has existed as long as the human imagination. In your case, adapting the scenario to your own anxieties, the Witch-Queen, or Elf-Woman, or Goddess, or whatever one wants to call Her, was hostile and malign from the beginning; but otherwise they haven’t altered the classic pattern.”

“They,” Babcock repeated bitterly. “They. Do you, sir, still think They are merely human and that They accomplished all this by purely material means?”

Before Joyce could reply Einstein commented drily, “We shall come to that question in a few moments. But first, Sir John, is your story finished? I suspect some sort of climax is still waiting….”

Babcock rose and stretched. “Yes,” he said, beginning to pace, “there was a climax of sorts….”

“After the visit to the post office and the discovery that there was no Box 718, I went back to the Diogenes Club, half-convinced that I was mad. Before I could go to my room, the porter told me there was a gentleman waiting to see me in the smoking room. I must have walked in there like an automaton; I was in some strange mental state where it no longer mattered whether Jones or Verey had returned as miraculously as they had dematerialized, or if the Devil Himself were waiting for me. It was, God help me, Aleister Crowley.

“I could hardly speak; in fact, I could hardly feel anything—not even fear. ‘What do you want?’ I asked him. I was thinking of Scott’s words about everything produced by witches’ glamour being insubstantial as air.

“He spoke in a level, pleasant voice, without bravado or dramatics; anybody even a few feet away would think we were having a most ordinary conversation. He said, ‘Strange things happen when an imaginary mongoose fights imaginary snakes. It does not do to meddle with us. Some go mad and kill themselves. Some simply disappear. And some flee to the ends of the earth, without ever escaping. Our eyes will be on you forever, and we will finish you at our pleasure.’ He even smiled, as if he were praising my tie or something of that sort, then turned to leave.

“Then he faced me again. ‘Do you understand at last?’ he said very quietly. ‘Your God and your Jesus are dead. They no longer have any power to protect you or anyone else who calls on them for help. Our magick is now stronger, for the Old Ones have returned, and Man shall be free of guilt and sin. Pray to Jesus for help, if you must; it will help you no more than it helped Verey or Jones. Our hands will be at your throat forever, even if you see them not. We will come for you when you least expect it.’

“That was all,” Babcock said listlessly. “He was gone before I had fully recovered from his blasphemous words. I left England that night, traveling under an assumed name. I went to Arles, in southern France, and stayed at an inn. After a few days, I came back to my room after a visit to the local church and found an inverse crucifix hanging over my bed. I have been moving on, city to city, ever since then.”

Joyce rose and stretched the kinks out of his body, casting a grotesque spidery shadow on the wall behind him. “Well, Professor,” he asked, “are we living in the twentieth century or the thirteenth?”

Einstein studied carefully the dottle of his extinguished pipe. Under their drooped lids his eyes searched what the cold smell of the ash spoke not.

“Well,” he said finally, “I do not regard this matter as hopelessly obscure. There is quite a bit of light amid the engulfing darkness, don’t you think, Jeem?”

Joyce smiled wanly. “I have picked up a few rays of light,” he said carefully. “But they are small and fugitive and my darkness is still much greater. Shall I list the points that appear most cogent to me?”

“Nor to me,” Einstein added. “But I wonder if you have found the parts of the answer that are still beyond my comprehension…. However, imitating your style, I can list the points that have aided me in seeing through this malign little drama. There are eight in my case, as follows:

“I think that these points fairly well reveal what has actually been transpiring here,” he finished. “Do you understand what I am implying, Jeem?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” Joyce said. “In fact, I am more confused than I was before you gave us that list of allegedly helpful hints.”

“Most interesting,” Einstein mused. “We all see only that which we are trained to see…. Well, be that as it may, since you gave us your list first, could you explicate them for us before I get to my list?”

Joyce removed carefully his glasses, to polish them meticulously on a handkerchief. “I am now about seventy-five percent blind,” he said thoughtfully; finishing, he translated the glasses back to his nose. “Presto! The world is created again: I can see it.” Pull out his eyes: Apologize. “The world is created anew each time we change our focus or viewpoint,” he went on. “Let us change our focus for a moment and look at the beginning of all this, Clouds Without Water, through sharper glasses.” He paused.

“The author of Clouds Without Water is a singularly deep young man, as Gilbert and Sullivan said of a similar case,” Joyce went on. “He can say two things at once; even, in some places I have noticed, three things at once. For instance, consummatum est, the closing words of a sonnet Sir John has called to our attention, can refer [as previously noted] either to a Catholic Mass or to a Black Mass; but they can also refer to the completion of a sex act: foreplay, union, climax, consummation. But our author can even say four things at once: the mystical wine symbolism in the alchemical sequence, I note, may refer to the vaginal secretions of the poet’s paramour, as Sir John suspected; to the wine of the Mass; to the wine of a Black Mass; or even to the traditional use of Vine’ as a symbol of divine intoxication in Sufi authors such as Omar Khayyám. This is the Clue of the Quadrilateral Metaphor.

“So, I ask myself just how deep this singularly deep young man can really be. The tragic end of his saga is, to me, blatantly false and propagandistic. The number of adulterers in Europe may not exceed the sands of the Sahara, or the atoms in the galaxy, but it is certainly vast; and they do not automatically succumb to advanced, incurable syphilis in every case. Nor do they, if the disease is diagnosed, immediately commit suicide. They seek treatment, and if they are lucky and the disease is caught soon enough, they are even routinely cured. I do not say the sad end of Arthur Angus Verey is impossible, merely improbable. It has a moralistic, preachy sound, very much as if it were the work of the Reverend Charles Verey. This is the Tacked-On Tragedy I mentioned. But let me ask: Does such dual authorship sound in accord with your notions of human psychology, gentlemen?”

Einstein spoke first. “Go on,” he said. “You definitely seem to have the part of the puzzle that still eludes me.”

Babcock added, “I will certainly grant that Verey would hardly have published that book without such a harsh moralistic lesson at the end….”

Joyce rapped the floor with his walkingstick. “Point one carries,” he said. “Well, then, the old legal adage tells us, ‘Guilty in part, guilty in whole,’ which may or may not be true, but gives me a pretty thought, nonetheless. If the Reverend Charles Verey wrote the ending, could he have written the whole? All day a phrase from Dante has been running through my head: ed eran duo in uno, ed uno in duo. ‘They were two in one, and one in two.’ It describes Bertrán de Born, beheaded, in the Inferno. Think of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Frankenstein and his Monster, Faust and Mephistopheles….”

Einstein laughed. “Astonishing,” he said. “For the last two days I’ve been thinking of Faust and Mephistopheles, and of the great line Goethe gives to Faust: Zwei Seelen wohnen ach! in meiner Brust. My father used to tell me that was the most profound line in the play. ‘Two souls dwell, alas, within my breast.’”

“The extreme form of this dualism is the Split or Multiple Personality discussed in psychology texts,” Joyce went on. “But we are all prisms—split and multiple personalities, to some extent. We each have our hidden side, which Jung so poetically calls the Shadow. What would the Shadow of the Reverend Charles Verey be? The opposite of his public persona of Presbyterian righteousness, of course. It would be, in fact, very much like the alleged Arthur Angus Verey—libertine, sensualist, adulterer, blasphemer against Christ and the Church. I suggest, in short, that Clouds Without Water was written entirely by Reverend Charles Verey. To each ‘Thou shalt not’ of the public Reverend Charles Verey, the internal ‘Arthur’ cries, ‘I will!’ The Shadow, the Satanic ‘Arthur’ writes the lush voluptuous sonnets, lingering longingly on every lovely lewd licentious detail of a fantastic love affair with a gloriously wicked and totally desirable woman; the public Persona arranges that this book of wet dreams ends with ‘Arthur’ being destroyed for his sins and adds the running footnotes re-asserting traditional morality.

“Well, gentlemen,” Joyce asked, “does Point Two carry? Are the two souls in Clouds Without Water dwellers in one breast?”

Babcock shook his head dubiously. “It is possible in psychology,” he said. “But it is contradicted by the facts as we know them.”

“The facts as we know them,” Einstein said mildly, “have been distorted by a deliberate conspiracy to keep us from knowing the facts as they really are. Go ahead, Jeem.”

“We now have, in Clouds Without Water, a book such as I myself try to write,” Joyce said. “A multi-dimensional, multi-level, multi-meaningful book. A puzzle-book, one might say—and what could be more appropriate to our times, when all the best minds recognize increasingly that our existence is a profound puzzle? The reader is challenged, if he is intelligent enough to look beyond the mere surface, to ask what Clouds Without Water really is. Firstly, it could be what it appears to be and pretends to be: the account of an adultery that came to a bad end, with a running commentary by a clergyman underlining the ‘moral’ lesson that The Wages of Sin Are Death. Perfect for the British reading public. Or, secondly, it could be what Sir John has decoded: a manual of Tantric sex practices, showing how the permutations and variations on the erotic union between a man and a woman can be excruciatingly prolonged until ecstasy is exploded into oblivion, into egoless trance. Or, thirdly, it could be what I have said: the record of the split in the personality of a tormented Presbyterian puritan, dreaming of the deliciously wicked delights of coitus, fellatio and cunnilingus, and then punishing his Other Self for enjoying those dreams.”

“But which is it really?” Babcock exclaimed. “You are just adding to the mystery, not clarifying it—ignotium per ignotius!”

“It depends on the coordinate system of the rod,” Einstein said, amused, “and the coordinate system of the observer, and the relationship between their velocities.”

Babcock grimaced. “That doesn’t make sense to me,” he said. “Length is length, and that’s all there is to it.”

“That is not all there is to it,” Einstein said. “All our judgments in which length plays a role are judgments about instruments used to measure that length. And the readings of the instruments will depend on our velocity in relationship to the velocity of the thing being measured. Lorenz worked all this out mathematically but couldn’t believe it. I decided in 1904 to believe it and see where it led me. It led to solving all the puzzles that have bedeviled physics since the Michelson-Morley experiment. It led, in fact, to the simple conclusion that there is no length as a ding an sich, an objective entity, but only length₁ as read by instrument₁, length₂ as read by instrument₂, and so on. The same applies to time, I have also demonstrated.”

“But,” said Babcock, “this takes us outside sensory space and linear time entirely. It is Gnostic and Platonic.”

“In a sense,” Einstein granted. “The difference is that Plato left off at the point where I begin. He never connected his geometric archetypes with empirical sense-data. I have made that scientific connection. My theory explains experiments that can be explained in no other way.”

“Tell him about the rock and the train,” Joyce suggested languidly from his shadow.

“Oh, that is a type of relativity that has been known since Galileo,” Einstein said. “I have merely provided a contemporary illustration. Suppose you throw a rock from a train. In what path does it fall?”

Babcock looked uncertain. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “It seems to me it would fall in a straight line.”

“Ah,” said Einstein, “so it would—from your viewpoint inside the train. But if somebody else were in a field beside the railroad tracks, how would he see it fall?”

Babcock was silent. “Er,” he said finally, “I’m not sure about this, either, but I try to visualize it and I imagine he would see it fall in a curved path.”

“In the curve called a parabola,” Einstein corrected. “He would see it fall in a perfect parabola. Now, which is true? The viewpoint of the man on the train, or that of the man in the field?”

“I begin to catch your drift,” Babcock said. “Both are true, within the—what do you call it?—coordinate systems of the two observers.”

Joyce laughed. “All of this is unfamiliar to you,” he said to Babcock, “and yet you are learning rapidly. Do you know why that is? I shall tell you. Because your Cabala is based on the very same principles, although applied in that case to psychology rather than to physics. You are just learning a new aspect of what you actually already know.”

“What is Cabala?” Joyce asked Socratically. “Well, whatever else it is, from my viewpoint as an artist it is a method of multiple vision. To take an example from Sir John’s story, I.N.R.I., analyzed Cabalistically, no longer has simply a Christian meaning, but a Greek mythological meaning, an Egyptian meaning, an Alchemical meaning, a meaning within the symbolism of the Tarot cards, and so forth. These correspondences are not illogical but analogical. The Cabalist sees each symbol—Christ, Dionysus, Osiris, the Tarot cards and the rest—as meaningful in its own mythic context, just as Professor Einstein’s theory sees each measurement as true within its own coordinate system. And the Cabalist seeks, behind these diverse and contradictory symbols, the archetypal meaning which is in human psychology itself, as Dr. Jung has recently reminded us. Just as Professor Einstein looks beyond the diverse and contradictory instrument readings for the abstract mathematical relationships that translate one coordinate system into another.”

“Multiple vision,” Babcock repeated. “Yes. That does summarize Cabalism nicely.”

“Well, then,” Joyce said, “what is Clouds Without Water? Is it not a perfect example of Cabalistic thinking, a book which can, in fact, be read at least four ways, and possibly more, if we were to look at it more closely? Is it not a model of Cabalistic multiple meaning? And I note also that you told us it has exactly 114 sonnets. This is the Matter of the Enumeration of Sonnets. Now, I am no hermeticist myself, but I did spend some time in my youth listening to John Eglinton and George Russell and the other Dublin mystics, and even I know that 114 is an important Cabalistic number, is it not?”

“Yes,” Babcock said. “The tradition is that the Invisible College acts publicly for 114 years, then dissolves itself and remains passive for 114 years, then acts openly again for 114 years, and so on.”

“There is more to it than that,” Joyce said. “There is always more in Cabala. Eglinton or Russell—I forget which—once explained to me, as an example of the historical connection between Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, that the mysterious letters on Masonic buildings and documents, L.P.D., also equal 114 Cabalistically. Does my memory trick me?”

“No,” Babcock said, “Lamed is 30, Pe is 80, and Daleth is 4. Total: 114. The meaning is supposed to be Light, Pressure, Density and refers to the inner transformation of the Alchemical process.”

“It refers also to other things,” Joyce said. “The Grand Orient lodges before the French Revolution, from which Mr. Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis claims descent, explained L.P.D. as Lilia perdita destrue—‘trample the lily underfoot,’ the lily being the symbol of the Bourbons, the royal family of France against which this faction of Masonry has allegedly been waging war since the destruction of the Templars by Philip II. Once again, you see, the Cabalistic symbols mean different things on different levels of interpretation.”

Einstein re-lit his pipe. “So,” he said between puffs, “you have taken us a long way round, Jeem, but your conclusion is precisely what?”

“Clouds Without Water is the work of a very advanced Cabalist,” Joyce said. “And the Reverend Verey was never as ignorant of Cabala as he claimed. Proof: he knew that the 26 garters pendant on the Order of the Garter had a Cabalistic meaning and he prodded you, Sir John, until you remembered that 26 is the value of Yod Hé Vau Hé, the Holy Unspeakable Name of God. The Clue of the 26 Garters, Dr. Watson might call it.”

Joyce paused and then went on. “I don’t know how Verey murdered off his family, and I certainly don’t know why [but who can understand the workings of religious mania?], but I am morally certain that he did. The whole story of the book of horrors that drives people mad is entirely his invention, remember, and I have already indicated my reasons for thinking he purloined that idea from Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow. I call to mind another hunchback driven mad by religious fervor and sexual anxieties, Saint Paul, who once wrote a sentence that describes Verey perfectly: ‘I do not do that which I would, but that which is hateful to me.’ The split mirror again.”

Babcock’s face revealed a conflict of emotions. “You almost convince me. But your theory is only partial and still leaves very much unexplained….”

“It has been a heavy experience, this tale of yours,” Einstein said. “But Joyce has very nicely clarified the points on which I was myself still puzzled. With his contribution, I think I can now explain all of it, and banish the bogeys forever.”

Mileva Einstein appeared in the doorway, with a package in brown wrapping paper. “Albert,” she said, “a boy just delivered this for you.”

The three men exchanged glances. Einstein arose like a cat. “This is not totally unexpected,” he said, crossing the room.

Joyce and Babcock, sitting erect suddenly, watched tensely as Mileva left and Einstein carried the package to his desk.

“Oh, yes.” Einstein was amused. “The complete artistic finishing stroke. It has the return address of ‘M.M.M., 93 Jermyn Street, London, U.K.,’ even though it bears no postmark and was obviously never in the mails.” He began to tear the paper.

“For God’s sake!” Babcock cried. “Don’t! You can’t be absolutely sure of your theory, whatever it is. You may not be immune to the danger.”

“Oh, I’m not worried,” Einstein said, tearing and ripping until the book emerged. Then he began to laugh, a small chortle at first, and then louder and louder until his face was contorted and tears appeared in his eyes.

The laughter of hysterical madness? No: Einstein finally regained control and held the book up so Joyce and Babcock could see it. “Here it is, gentlemen,” he said, “the horror of horrors….”

“Mo … ther … go …” Joyce said slowly. “It fits together the fragments we heard.”

“And it’s all magick secrets in code!” Babcock cried. “Crowley wasn’t joking about that at all.”

“Yes, he was,” Einstein said. “This is the punch line to the joke.” He resumed his seat, wiping further tears of laughter from his owl-wide eyes with bunched knuckles helplessly.

“It’s a Divine Comedy,” Joyce gasped, also gurgling a laugh half-born far back in his throat. “We’ll all be hauled off to Dante’s Infirmary with the whooping laugh.”

“Am I to gather,” Babcock asked, not amused, “that I have been having my leg pulled all along?”

“Another paradox!” Babcock cried. “Is there no unequivocal yes or absolute no in any of this business?”

A paradox, a paradox,
A most ingenious paradox …

“For Christ’s sake!” Babcock said. “Let me in on the jest, gentlemen.”

Einstein nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “At this point I’m not at all sure I should explain to you; you might never forgive me. What do you think, Jeem?”

“I think,” Joyce said, “that this script has been so brilliantly constructed that it doesn’t matter how much you explain. The doorbell will ring again, before you are very far along, and the Author will provide the climax he intended from the beginning.”

“Yes,” Einstein said, “I suppose you are right. Well, then,” he addressed Babcock, “to at least begin an explanation …”

“When the doorbell rings the second time,” Joyce pronounced, “we undoubtedly shall all turn to pumpkins.”

“Before that happens,” Einstein said, “I think I do owe Sir John the rest of the explanation of what is going on here.”

Einstein concentrated for a moment. “Let us begin with basics. In the context of modern thought, that means with David Hume. In his discussion of miracles, Hume points out what argument is both totally satisfactory, and also totally necessary, to demonstrate the reality of an alleged miracle. That argument is, briefly, to be able to demonstrate that any other explanation of the event would itself be more miraculous than the alleged miracle itself. This is Hume’s equivalent of Occam’s Razor. For instance, if I were to claim that my dear wife, Milly, is floating around the kitchen two feet above the floor, you would in reason be justified in believing me only if it were even more miraculous that I, Albert Einstein, could tell a lie. Now, I treasure my reputation for integrity, but I do not think you would have any doubt in choosing which interpretation is more miraculous in that case—[a] that Milly really is flying around like a witch, or [b] that I am lying to you. No: there has never been a man of such supernatural honesty that it would strictly be more miraculous for him to lie than for his wife to levitate.

“This is ordinary common sense, as is everything in Hume. We never believe an incredible story of strange things in the sky or strange beings on the ground when only one man claims to be the witness. We begin to wonder a bit if there are several witnesses, but even then we skeptically seek evidence that some conspiracy may exist between them, or that drunkenness or some traumatic shock, such as explosion, might have caused them all to hallucinate.

“Now, let us apply this Razor of Hume’s to the Miracle of the Murdered Cat on the Altar. From whose testimony do we obtain this yarn? From that of Reverend Verey, and nobody else. Even the supporting detail about Mrs. Verey finding some of the evidence afterward is not her testimony [we have never met her] but part of Verey’s own yarn.

“So,” Einstein said, “on the basis of the logic of David Hume and the ordinary common sense of humankind, let us ask: Is it more miraculous that mysterious diabolists can walk through walls or that a most peculiar old man like Verey might be lying to us? The answer is obvious: it is less miraculous that Verey might lie. It is more miraculous that someone walked through solid walls. So, in reason, we must choose the less miraculous theory: Verey lied.”

“This does not at all clarify the greater mystery of the suicides,” Sir John said. “There we are not relying on Verey’s unsupported word. We have a newspaper story …” His voice trailed off.

“Yes?” Einstein said. “We have a newspaper story, or so it appears. Where did the newspaper story come from?”

“Not exactly,” said Einstein. “It came from the pocket of George Cecil Jones, who only told you it came from the Inverness Express-Journal. In this connection, I note also that Jones told you he sent his secretary out to buy ‘a copy’ of that newspaper. He did not say ‘two copies,’ and there is no reason, taking his story at face value, why he should have asked for two. And yet you pocketed the copy of the story he gave you, and Verey was reading another copy at breakfast the next morning. This is the Marvelous Multiplication I mentioned. It does not make sense; so, again, somebody is lying to us. Now, we have several people here associated with publications of various sorts. Reverend Verey and the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth published Clouds Without Water, at least, and possibly other works even more curious. Jones and/or his associates publish instruction manuals for Golden Dawn students. Crowley publishes his own books, we have been informed. Certainly, among these three most mysterious mystery-mongers it would be easy to produce what looked like a story cut from a newspaper?”

“My God,” Babcock said. “But I actually heard Verey talking to Inspector McIntosh of the Inverness police about the suicides…. I mean …”

“Yes,” Einstein said, “you see it already, do you not? You heard Verey talking to somebody at some Inverness number, and you assumed that he had actually called an Inspector at the Inverness police. Again, is it more miraculous to believe in these incredible suicides, brought on”—he smiled whimsically—“by Mother Goose—as we are now supposed to believe—or is it more miraculous to assume that Verey and a confederate in Inverness performed a charade with the telephone? Again, I think, the answer is obvious: the latter is less miraculous.”

“It all sounds so plausible,” Babcock said. “Yet I find it hard to believe that Jones and Verey and Crowley were conspiring together all through this….”

“I also found that hard at first,” Einstein said, “until you described your telephone conversation with Jones the morning you met Verey. Jones said, and the words struck me intensely, ‘Be careful, Sir John; remember that a man with Verey’s hunched back is a rather conspicuous figure.’ Now, I asked myself: How on earth did he know that Verey was a hunchback? He had allegedly never met the man. Well, I said, maybe Sir John told him and neglected to mention that while recounting the conversation to us. Then I remembered, Sir John, that you said Verey was at your side all through that telephone call. You are much too well mannered to say, ‘Oh, by the way, he’s a hunchback,’ while the hunchback stands beside you. So, then, how the devil did Jones know? This is the Casual Telepathy, if we believe it. I do not believe it.

“The obvious alternative is that Jones and Verey were working together all along. Verey tells you, first by mail and then in person, a series of frightening tales well calculated to fill you with dread, and Jones produces the alleged ‘newspaper’ clipping that seemingly confirms these yarns.”

Einstein paused to re-light his pipe. “To proceed,” he said, “if Jones and Verey are co-conspirators, we begin to clear away some of the other dark mysteries in this most mysterious business. For instance, I believe that coincidences can multiply at an astonishing rate—especially in the perceptual coordinate system of a man trained to look for them, regarding them as occult signals or omens. But your tale, Sir John, has altogether too many coincidences for any sane universe. I refer in particular to the insistent and terrifying way that details from your dreams and astral visions—the latter of which you must permit me to consider a species of half-waking dreams—come to life in the real world as your involvement with Verey and his problems increases. So I ask myself: How could these Superabundant Coincidences have been accomplished?

“There is only one answer,” Einstein said. “One man had access to your ‘Magick Diary.’ One man looked at it every month, as you have told us, to guide you in your spiritual progress. One man, George Cecil Jones, could have collaborated with Verey in creating the impression that these dream-terrors were manifesting in the physical universe. George Cecil Jones, who somehow knew Verey was a hunchback when he allegedly had never met him.”

“Let us return to the newspaper clipping,” Einstein continued. “I think that without that clipping, you would eventually have begun to notice that you had only Verey’s word for this whole story, patently borrowed from the Gothic horror school of fiction in general and Arthur Machen and Robert W. Chambers in particular. The newspaper clipping, then, was planned all along, like the conversation with ‘Inspector McIntosh,’ to prevent such suspicions from entering your head.”

“But,” Babcock said, “as reasonable as all this sounds, I still find it hard to believe that a Christian clergyman like Verey—even if he had the multiple split personality suggested by Mr. Joyce—could collaborate with so vile a creature as Crowley.”

Einstein grinned. “Let us look into that a bit. Joyce has suggested that ‘Arthur Angus Verey’ never existed, that Charles Verey wrote the whole of Clouds Without Water. Let us turn that around, and try the alternative. Suppose ‘Charles Verey’ never existed and the whole book was written by ‘Arthur Angus Verey.’”

“No,” Einstein said. “To be parsimonious in our conceptualizing, you met and received letters from a man who alleged he was named Charles Verey. A man with a hunchback, which is so striking a feature that it generally captures the attention entirely. Very few people, I believe, could describe a hunchback accurately: they would remember the hunch so centrally that the other features would be vague, quickly forgotten. One other fact about ‘Verey’ did stick with you, however, and you mentioned it several times. I refer to his paleness. I was particularly struck when you stated that, at first glance, he seemed as pale as an actor made up for a death scene. This is the Over-Defined Image, and it suggests theatrics. I started to think: why, with a hunchback and some makeup, I could come into this room and ask for Professor Einstein and the two of you would tell me that Professor Einstein was out.”

“The Cabalistic style!” Joyce cried. “My God, why didn’t I see it sooner! Of course! The style is the same. The real author of Clouds Without Water—both the ‘Arthur Verey’ poems and the ‘Charles Verey’ sermonettes tacked on—is Aleister Crowley.”

“Aleister Crowley, the son of a very rich brewer,” Einstein said, “and therefore capable, like many rich Englishmen, of keeping a flat in London and a fine old home in Scotland, too. Perhaps in Inverness? I think investigation would quickly reveal that such was the case.”

“And the phone number would be Inverness-418,” Joyce said, “the number ‘Verey’ called when he spoke to the alleged ‘Inspector McIntosh.’ In fact, it was Crowley disguised as the imaginary Verey, calling his own home and staging a scene to impress Sir John.”

“We can go further than that,” Einstein said. “Yesterday, we heard that the Laird of Boleskine was in Switzerland to climb mountains. We know that Crowley is a mountain-climber and now we have an Extra Mountain-Climber. Let us hypothesize that the two are Cabalistically One. And recall that the ‘devil’ Sir John saw on Bahnhofstrasse last night appeared after the arrival of this Laird of Boleskine. The package delivered tonight also suggests that Crowley is in the neighborhood. I suggest, therefore, that Crowley not only has a home in Inverness, but somehow acquired, or bestowed upon himself, a title to go with the home, and is the Laird of Boleskine. And that the ‘Reverend Charles Verey’ and the ‘Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth’ are entirely his creations.”

“You were deceived by masters at that art,” Einstein said gently. “The author of The Book of Lies is a genius in the trade of mystification.”

“But one thing is still unclear,” Joyce said. “Why does Mr. George Cecil Jones fit into this?”

“It has stared us in the face all along,” Einstein said. “Crowley has played perfectly fair—mostly, I suppose, because he is as much fascinated by lies that look like truth as he is by truth that looks like lies. At the very beginning, the first Golden Dawn lesson warned Sir John that Crowley, among others, was running a Golden Dawn order. The fact that Crowley and his particular Golden Dawn group were violently denounced is a misdirection typical of his sense of humor as we have come to know it. Sir John was always in Crowley’s branch of the Golden Dawn. Mr. Jones is perhaps Crowley’s second-in-command, or at least a high officer of that lodge. They have been initiating Sir John all along according to the oldest form of initiation known to anthropologists: the ordeal by terror. The Rite of Passage. It is just an enormous extension of the simpler drama staged by Crowley with his so-called ‘psychoboulometer,’ and it is even coded into the I.N.R.I. sequence Sir John was given for meditation at the beginning: the ritual of death and rebirth.”

“I could make a recording just as impressive with the aid of a few professional actors,” Einstein finished simply.

“We come now,” Joyce prompted again, “to the Miracle on Regent Street. Are we to believe that Baron Zaharov is also a co-conspirator, and that his Eastern Orthodox piety is another masquerade?”

“Well,” Einstein said, “it is certainly peculiar for an anti-Semite whose government has been distributing the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and who allegedly has an uncle high in the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, to have as a middle name Salmonovitch. Jeem, tell Sir John the equivalent of that in English.”

“Solomonson,” Joyce said. “My God, I missed that at first. It would mean that the Baron’s father was a Jew.”

“An improbability in that government and unbelievable in that church at this time,” Einstein said. “The Clue of the Impossible Name. Crowley has been fair with us again, bestowing the hint that allows us to see behind the masquerade if we are intelligent enough.”

“Miss Sturgis, as secretary to the notorious Isadora Duncan,” Einstein said, “obviously travels in circles that would be called bohemian, avant-garde or revolutionary, yes? It is not hard to imagine some relationship, romantic or otherwise, between her and Crowley.”

“Well,” Babcock said, “if Baron Zaharov is not a real Russian nobleman, who or what is he?”

“Oh,” said Einstein, “I think it is fairly clear that he must be Aleister Crowley again, in another masquerade.”

“But the height differences between Crowley, Verey and Zaharov,” Joyce complained. “How was all that managed?”

“Crowley is a man of medium height, Sir John informs us. With a fake hunchback and the crouch to accompany it, he could easily appear four or five inches shorter.” Einstein stood up and walked a few steps hunched over in the manner of those with curvature of the spine. “Observe: Do I not seem several inches shorter?”

“That is totally convincing,” Joyce said. “The other is not so easy to comprehend, however. Anybody can scrunch over and look a bit shorter, but how does one look a bit taller?”

“Remember that Sir John only saw Crowley, as Crowley, once,” Einstein said. “Recall, also, that Crowley was not present in that garden, as himself, to provide any comparisons. Sir John saw a very short man go into the garden and then encountered there a man who seemed quite a bit taller than that. A man whose height he could not remember exactly because, as he told us, the ‘Baron’s’ manner was so overbearing he seemed perhaps taller than he was. We always remember very powerful, overwhelming, angry men as taller than they are—it is some sort of mammalian instinct which equates superior size with superiority in the herd. The large Russian fur hat, of course, also added to the ‘Baron’s’ apparent size. Relativity of Dimensions.

“So, then, if ‘Verey’ and the ‘Baron’ were both Aleister Crowley, there was no need for the garden to be disturbed. No person, and no masquerade props, needed to travel horizontally through the garden at all. The transformation was almost certainly managed vertically. The accessories of the Zaharov personality—chiefly the black beard, the fur hat and an overcoat—were hanging down, behind the oak tree, on a strong elastic band such as spiritualist mediums and stage magicians often use. Crowley-as-Verey dashes into the garden, grabs those props, attaches the Verey props—suit with clerical collar and hunchback built in—and unhooks the elastic band from the fence post to which it was presumably fixed. It is immediately yanked upward with the Verey props to a perch I would imagine would be high above the ordinary line of vision.

“I would also imagine,” Einstein concluded, “that the house was actually unrented at the time. The ‘Baron’ never existed aside from the brief charade in the garden and the tales Miss Sturgis recited.”

Babcock shook his head wearily. “There may be no miracles in this business,” he said grimly, “but there certainly was deviltry.”

“Was there?” Joyce said. “I don’t think you have seen to the bottom of it yet. The professor has neatly answered how and what and who and whichway and all the physical details, but the question of why is still unclear. I think I begin to perceive the why, the psychology of initiation by terror, and I suspect that the last act of the drama is still to come. If Crowley with one hand manages the ‘good’ Cabalists, through his lieutenant Jones, and Crowley with the other hand manages the ‘bad’ Cabalists, the lesson of the masquerade seems fairly obvious to me. After all, what did the ‘bad’ Cabalists do except dramatize and bring into full consciousness the problems that were already indicated by your dreams, Sir John?”

“I have trained myself not to judge but to understand,” Joyce said. “If you will listen to me for just a moment, about your sexual phobias, for instance….”

“I am already familiar with your libertine opinions,” Sir John said stiffly, “and I am sure they would be received with approbation by Crowley. But I know the difference between right and wrong, thank God.”

“You know the difference between right and wrong,” he repeated finally. “Man, why did you need Initiation—by the Golden Dawn, or by anybody else? You are a genius, a sage, a giant among men. You have solved the problem which philosophers have been debating since antiquity—the mystery about which no two nations or tribes have ever agreed, and no two men or women have ever agreed, and no intelligent person has ever agreed totally with himself from one day to the next. You know the difference between right and wrong. I am overawed. I swoon. I figuratively kiss your feet.”

“Jeem,” Einstein said softly, “there is no need to be so sarcastic. Most young men are just as naïve as Sir John.”

But Joyce had talked himself into boldness. He arose again and began pacing the room with nervous energy.

“All my life,” he said, as much to himself as to Sir John, “I have been teaching myself to observe accurately and nonjudgmentally. That is [I believe the professor would agree with me] the prerequisite of all scientific endeavor. It is also the prerequisitive of the type of literature I wish to write. Now—listen to me, Sir John—this drama through which Jones and Crowley have led you is a perfect example of how easy it is to deceive oneself. There was nothing in the whole adventure that did not exist in your fantasies first; Jones merely arranged to have those fantasies objectified, and you are missing the whole point if you do not comprehend that the source of everything that happened was your own fears and prejudices, just as the purpose of everything was to induce you to see through those fears and prejudices. I am no mystic myself, but it is obvious that this Golden Dawn contraption is a very complicated way of teaching people to see as the scientist sees, or as my type of artist sees—without filtering everything through a lens of moral and emotional prejudices.”

“There is a difference,” Sir John said coolly, “between prejudice and principles.”

“Yes,” Joyce replied. “Other people have prejudices; but I have principles. Just as other people are stubborn but I am firm, other people are egotists but I merely have self-respect, other people are drunks but I only like a drop now and then. Shall I conjugate a few more phrases like that? Other people are peculiar, but I am exotic. Other people are naïve and gullible, but I have retained a certain childish innocence. Other people are too clever by half, but I have learned to express myself with elegance. Other people are sensualists, but I am a Romantic. Other people are paranoid, but I am merely careful. Other people are pigheaded fools, but I am merely a little set in my ways.”

Sir John smiled and held up a hand. “Enough,” he said. “Your point is well taken. Of course, I still have prejudices and—I suppose—I do tend to rationalize them, like most people. But do you propose to convince me that there is really nothing Satanic about the depraved sexuality of Crowley and his cohorts?”

“The worship of sex,” Joyce said calmly, “is, to an objective observer, no more absurd than any other form of worship. It is, if one can trust Thomas Wright’s History of the Worship of the Generative Organs, Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough and other standard references on ethnology, the earliest of all human religions. It was once the most widespread form of worship; it still exists within Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam; it has left traces even within Christianity—”

“On cue,” Joyce commented. “Has the rascal been hiding in your garden listening to us all evening, Professor?”

All three men fixed their eyes on the doorway, which was soon filled by Mileva and a middle-aged, well-dressed man with a cheery smile, holding a bottle of champagne.