Masks of the Illuminati (15 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Were you able to ward her off successfully?”

“I tried,” Sir John said weakly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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