Masks of the Illuminati (16 page)

He felt soiled and polluted.

His mind was still racing with Lola’s implanted heresies.

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

“The Devil can quote
all
the world’s Scriptures,” Sir John muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edited from a private MS.
by the
REV. C. VEREY

Society for the Propagation
of Religious Truth

Privately Printed

For Circulation Among Ministers of Religion

1909

Sir John felt chagrined. How silly of him to imagine Diabolism in a book put out by some Scottish Presbyterian. But what did those lines mean, then?

Sir John skimmed a few more pages at random. The whole series of poems seemed to be a glorification—virtually a sanctification—of adultery. This couldn’t be. Then he saw a footnote by the Rev. Verey:

Sir John looked back to the word thus indirectly defined, or rather not defined at all, and found it was
fellatrix
. He blushed; but then he remembered again: “We found it
early
where the Gods find children.”
Could such nameless things be printed?

In Sonnet VIII of the Alchemical sequence, he found the lines:

The elixir of shame, he knew, was in Satanic theology the Eucharist of Immortality; it was found only within the pudendum of a sexually ecstatic woman. This book was almost his early half-hallucinatory visions of the corrupt Lola Levine come back to haunt him in print. He turned to the Preface: