Masks of the Illuminati (21 page)

Q: Quote a scholarly source that at least tentatively supports the extreme views of Mr. Leek.

A: “In the myths of every race and clime we see the hallmarks of those extra-cosmic denizens that populate the pages of the
Necronomicon
. In the Himalayas the legend of the Abominable Snowman is by no means dead but continues to be resurrected by even the most prosaic members of mountaineering expeditions…. Sightings of the West Virginia Mothman—a brown humanoid endowed with wings—continue to be reported; sea serpents and monsters fill the oceans and lakes; UFO encounters have become an almost everyday occurrence.” Commentary by Robert Turner,
The Necronomicon
, Neville Spearman, Suffolk, 1978.

PART THREE

Our Lord had no doubts as to the reality of demonic possession; why should we?

—Rev. Charles Verey,
Clouds Without Water

The Bible speaks of “the dragon … and his angels” [Revelations, 12:7], indicating that along with Lucifer, myriads of angels also chose to deny the authority of God…. Watch out, they are dangerous, vicious and deadly. They want you under their control and they will pay any price to get you!

—Rev. Billy Graham,
Angels: God’s Secret Messengers

If God is all, how can I be evil?

—Charlie Manson

It was the afternoon of the following day, June 27, and the
Föhn
had not yet ceased to suffocate Zürich in its dank embrace. Thrice the stifling wind had faltered, almost subsided: thrice it had resumed, hot and foul as ever: people’s tempers were growing short.

Einstein, Joyce and Babcock were together again, this time in Einstein’s study, having agreed to meet there at three. The professor was the most chipper of the trio, being recuperated from the long night with the aid of only a few hours’ sleep and the intellectual stimulation of teaching his noon physics class. Joyce was still somewhat hung over, and looked it. Babcock, after drowsing fitfully on a divan in Joyce’s sitting room for most of the morning, was only a little less desperate than the previous night.

“Well, Jeem,” Einstein began, “what do you make of our friend’s remarkable adventures, speaking honestly?”

“Speaking honestly?” Joyce repeated. “I begin to ask myself whether that is possible.”

Einstein said nothing; but his glance mutely invited Joyce to continue.

“Once,” Joyce said thoughtfully, “a fair named Araby came to Dublin. I was perhaps ten at the time and devouring all sorts of romantic literature about the mysterious East, the secrets of the Sufis, the magick of the Dervishes,
Aladdin and Ali Baba and much more of that sort. Can you imagine what the word ‘Araby’ connoted to me? My eagerness and excitement as the day of the fair approached were of the same order as my emotions, a few years later, when I nerved myself to enter the Red Light District and seek a prostitute for the first time. I thought a whole new world would open before me, a world of magick and wonder. What I found, of course, was an ordinary touring carnival, intended to amuse morons and empty the pockets of fools.”

Babcock looked confused by this speech; Einstein was solemn. The silence stretched out until Joyce spoke again.

“Mr. William Butler Yeats and his friends,” Joyce said simply, “live in Araby. It is real to them. More real than their servants, certainly. We go forth each day into the world of experience but we do not go mentally naked like Adam in Eden. We bring certain fixed ideas along whether we go to the corner pub, to a fair called Araby, or to the South Pole with Amundsen, I dare say. If a pickpocket enters this room he will see pockets to be picked; if Socrates were to be ushered in by the fair Mileva”—he bowed chivalrously toward the kitchen, where Mrs. Einstein could be heard puttering—“Socrates would see minds to be probed with annoying questions. If Mr. Yeats were here, he would see mere material shadows of the Eternal Spiritual Ideas known as Science,” indicating Einstein, “Art,” indicating himself ironically, “and Mysticism,” indicating Sir John. “
I
see three people with different life histories,” he concluded abruptly.

“All of which,” Einstein asked drily, “is your way of saying that the Golden Dawn people seem no more mad to you than anybody else?”

“I am saying,” Joyce replied, “that I can see the world as Yeats and the occultists do—as a spiritual adventure full of Omens and Symbols. I can also see it, if I choose, as the Jesuits taught me to see it in youth: as a vale of tears
and a web of sin. Or I can see it as a Homeric epic, or a depressing naturalistic novel by Zola. I am interested in seeing all of its facets.”

Sir John leaned forward, suddenly interested. “I think I begin to understand you a bit,” he said. “You are saying that I am living in a Gothic novel, while you prefer to live in a Zola novel.”

“Not that at all,” Joyce said. “The Zola school is one-dimensional. I am seeking multi-dimensional vision. I wish to see deeply into Gothic novels, Zola novels and all other masquerades, and then beyond them.”

“Fascinating,” said Einstein. “Fascinating.”

The other two looked at him expectantly.

“Your parable of Araby,” Einstein said to Joyce, “reminds me curiously of a parable of my own. Imagine that we three are physicists seated here in this room. Unknown to us, this room is actually an elevator—a lift, Sir John—which is rising rapidly through outer space. Since we do not imagine that we are inside an elevator, but are educated in physics and curious about our environment, we begin to conduct experiments. We find that objects dropped from our hands fall to the floor. We find further that if the objects are thrown horizontally instead of dropped, they also fall, but in a parabola. We find, in fact, that as we experiment and write the simplest possible mathematical equations to describe our observations, we can derive the whole Newtonian theory of gravity. We decide that beneath this box in which we find ourselves is a planet which ‘draws’ objects to it.”

“Is that true?” Joyce asked, startled. “It is more wonderful than anything you have told me of your theories thus far.”

“I am in the process of proving it,” Einstein said, “in a paper I’m writing. Now, it so happens that one physicist in the room, or the elevator, by some strange process of creative reorganization of sense-data—perhaps akin to these
mind-bending Cabalistic experiments of the Golden Dawn people—has made the leap to another way of thinking. He conceives of the room as an elevator and imagines the cable and the machinery that is rapidly drawing us upward. He sits down and performs his own experiments and writes his own equations. He derives eventually the whole theory of inertia as found in classical mechanics. There is no planet beneath us at all, he decides.

“Now,” Einstein said, “we are in the predicament that the doors are locked and we cannot get out of the room. How do we determine who has the correct explanation of the lawful phenomena that we observe—those who attribute them to gravity [a planet
beneath
us], or the one who attributes them to inertia [a cable
above
us, pulling us through free zero-gravity space]?”

“Oh, I say,” Babcock murmured, “that
is
a bit of poser, isn’t it?”

“Both are correct, in a sense,” Joyce said firmly. “If both systems of equations will describe our situation, there is no reason to prefer one over the other, except esthetic preference. Within the terms of the problem we can never see the planet beneath us or the cable above us. You set us up for the wrong answer by telling the situation from the point of view of the man outside.”

“Precisely,” Einstein said. “Any coordinate system acts like the room I was talking about, and if there is an outside observer we cannot scientifically know it. From inside the room—inside any coordinate system—there is no way of saying whether gravity or inertia is the true explanation of the phenomena we observe. It is the same with Sir John’s narrative—that is to say, it is either a random series of odd coincidences and Freudian dream symbols, given a totally artificial meaning by Sir John’s occult beliefs, or it is a series of real occult Omens, depending on the interpretation of the observer.”

“Precisely,” Joyce said. “I can do as well as Sir John, in
the department of odd coincidences. For instance, my first teaching job was at a school on Vico Road in Dublin. More recently, in Trieste, I have had to walk the Via Giambattista Vico twice a day, to go to and from the home of one of my language students. Then I had a student who was fascinated by Vico’s theory of the cycle in history. Naturally, I became interested in the life and philosophy of Vico after all that, and I found numerous parallels with my own life and thought, so that now everything I write is influenced by Vico. You may interpret this sequence in whatever way you choose. Either,
Unum
, the gods arranged for me to encounter Vico’s name over and over in order to influence my writing; or,
Duum
, it was mere coincidence, and I gave it meaning by taking it seriously. There is no way of proving either hypothesis to the man who insists on seeing it the other way.”

“Not quite,” Einstein said sharply. “When it becomes possible to choose between two theories, we should choose the one that best accords with the facts. Or, we should develop a higher-order theory that reconciles the differences between the two conflicting interpretations—as I am trying to do with this gravity and inertia conundrum. Without such creative effort to make our concepts square with our percepts, our thought is just an exercise in wish fulfillment.”

A skeptical noise from Babcock caused Einstein to look at him expectantly.

“Surprising as it may be,” Babcock said wearily, “I agree with all you gentlemen have said. One of the first lessons I learned in the Golden Dawn is that perception depends on the mind of the observer, just as what is revealed through a lens depends on the angle of refraction. Your reminding me of
that
is a work of supererogation and does not at all relieve the fundamental terror of my position as one under attack by black magicians who have already shown their capacity to unhinge the minds of three people and drive them to suicide.”

“Well, as to that,” Einstein said mildly, “you are certainly a man with dangerous enemies, we all agree. What remains to be determined is whether they can actually manipulate the physical universe with their, um, magick, or whether they are merely superlatively clever at manipulating the minds of the human beings on whom they prey. In that connection, we would both be most interested to hear the rest of your story.”

“Yes,” Joyce said. “I certainly want you to get on with it. I have already formed a tentative hypothesis about what is actually afoot here—behind all the masques and masquerades—and I would be most intrigued to learn whether that theory will mesh with the subsequent facts.”

“Very well,” said Sir John. “To proceed, then.”

And, as the
Föhn
wind continued to batter the window, he told Joyce and Einstein a tale that confounded all their expectations.

Sir John found Verey’s letter about the bat-winged creature so disturbing that he determined to learn all he could about the enigmatic Aleister Crowley—the man described by Jones as the leader of a false Golden Dawn lodge dedicated to licentiousness and black magick; the lover of Lola Levine, according to Ezekiel (or Ezra or Jeremiah) Pound; the wizard who had perhaps once turned Victor Neuberg into a camel; and, in Sir John’s growing suspicions, the human channel through which the crew that never rests had been set loose upon the Verey family.

He began at the British Museum, uneasily recalling the dream in which he had encountered Karl Marx there and heard a confusing history of Freemasonry all muddled together with the assassination of Julius Caesar.

Reviews of Current Literature
for the past decade revealed
that Crowley was the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, every one of which had received uncommonly mixed reviews. The critic in
The Listener
did not seem at all to be able to make up his mind about one of Crowley’s volumes,
The Sword of Song
, describing it as “fearless,” “serious and intrepid” and “increasingly repellent” in a single paragraph.
The Seeker
was more charitable: “Crowley has been reproached in some thoughtless or malicious quarters…. It is undoubtedly no easy task to follow the royal bird in his dazzling flight”; while
The Clarion
frankly gave up in despair: “We must confess that our intelligence is not equal to the task.” The
Cambridge Review
was simply furious at another Crowley volume, complaining that it was “obscene,” “revolting” and a “monstrosity” that “demands an emphatic protest from lovers of literature and decency.” The
Arboath Herald
, like the
Clarion
, surrendered to despair, designating Crowley’s verse as “so clever one finds some of it utterly unintelligible.”
The Atheist
, on the other hand, grudgingly praised Crowley while denouncing him: “Far as we are from admiring his dreamy romanticism, yet his staunch denial of the supernatural, the divine, the mystical must command our respect”; but, paradoxically, the
Prophetic Mercury
found the same verses hopeful for the opposite reason, saying, “The ever-present sense of God in the mind of the poet leads us to the prayerful hope that one day he may be enlightened.” Again the
Yorkshire Post
was simply aghast: “Mr. Crowley’s poetry, if such it may be called, is not serious”; but the
Literary Guide
was rhapsodic: “A masterpiece of learning and satire.”