Masks of the Illuminati (11 page)

If the I.N.R.I, riddle concerned the transcendence of time, the practice of astral projection seemed to aim at the abolition of space. The trick, Sir John soon perceived, was to be in two places at once. Since that was manifestly impossible in reason, the only way to achieve it was to go beyond reason, to deliberately cultivate a type of faith bordering on religious mania. Sir John’s initial attempts were grotesque failures.

Even after three weeks of practice four times a day, the best Babcock achieved was a transportation to the innards of some incredibly complex machine with a million or more moving parts, each tended by a blue puppet and a red dwarf moving jerkily, mechanical-style, all of them talking to themselves as they worked at their incomprehensible tasks. “Mulligan Milligan Hooligan Halligan,” they muttered. “Magick tragick music mystic!” they shrieked. “Simple Simon Semper Semen,” they giggled. “Barter carter darter farter!” they howled. “Sir Lion, Sir Loin, Sir Talis, Sir Qualis,” they gibbered. With a shudder Sir John came back into his body into his chair into his room into Euclidean space, realizing that he had dozed off when he thought he was beginning to project into the astral.

“Do not let such nonsense bother you,” Jones said when Sir John showed him the Diary entry of this experience. “One can hear the same gibberish at any Revival meeting or Spiritualist séance. You have just opened a door into another of the traps in Chapel Perilous. That is the realm of those who enter the Path without the Sword of Reason. If you reflect back, you will remember hearing the same idiocy just before falling asleep many nights.”

“Yes,” Sir John said. “Does everybody?”

“Certainly. The mind has both a rational and an irrational side,” Jones said kindly. “To remain totally rational is to become half a human. To allow the irrational to overwhelm you is to succumb to religious mania or the disease called hysteria by alienists. The Great Work consists of yoking the rational and irrational together in a harmony that transcends both. Until that is achieved, you may expect more nonsense to float up from the irrational regions. Ignore it, do not fear it, and concentrate on the Work.”

In the following weeks Sir John found the astral realm and the dreamworld increasingly blending into each other, and increasingly hard to disentangle from waking reality. He heard many messages like: “Hickory dickory dock, we’ve got you by the cock,” “The void, the zero, the nought, the Almighty,” “No wife, no horse, no mustache,” “A weary weary song and a blurry blurry bottleful,” “For blood and wine are red,” “Yoni to those pensive males,” and, several times, “Babcock’s going crazy, Babcock’s going crazy, Babcock’s going crazy …”

For relaxation, Sir John took to browsing in contemporary poetry, mindful of the Golden Dawn teaching that during training any extraneous reading should be limited to matter of a spiritually uplifting nature. He began to study the mystical Irish poet, William Butler Yeats.

The question “Another of us?” came back to him again and again, as he read poem after poem, and this time he
had confidence enough to answer it with a definite “yes.” There was no mistaking it; the poetry of Yeats was replete with oblique references to the Golden Dawn teachings and initiatory ceremonies.

And then, by the wildest of coincidences—Sir John was less and less inclined to believe in coincidences by now—he was invited to a small private reading at which Yeats and a few other poets were going to declaim some of the more recent works. Sir John accepted, feeling vaguely guilty; but then, he reminded himself, he was only forbidden to associate with other
known
members of the Order, and he did not, literally,
know
Yeats was a member, after all, since that was only a deduction, almost a guess, on his part.

A small devilish voice told him, “It’s not a guess; you
do
know.” But he put that aside. The chance to meet another member of the Order—a famous one, and one who, judging from the poetry, had been in the Order for at least a decade and was hence presumably quite advanced—was really irresistible. Sir John went to the reading, even though it was in the godforsaken suburb of Kensington, which was said to be even more infested with Hindus, Hebrews, Americans and other undesirables than Soho itself.

Indeed, the host turned out to be an American, of the most unbearable sort. His accent was nearly indecipherable—Sir John remembered the degenerate Oscar Wilde’s really choice aphorism: “The English and the Americans have everything in common but their language.” This unusual host was, like all Americans, bombastically sure of himself on all matters, especially (in his case) literature and the arts in general. His family name was Pound and his first name was one of those Hebraic titles that many Yankees seemed to favor—Ezekiel or Ezra or Jeremiah or something equally Old Testament. He had untidy red hair, a wild red beard, stood well over six feet and boomed
when he talked, like all Americans. No article of clothing he wore seemed to match any other article of his apparel; whether this was due to poverty, eccentricity or both, Sir John could not quite decide.

Even the handsome Yeats himself was, if not unkempt, far from ideal in sartorial splendor, Sir John also noted; but Yeats was serene where Pound was frantic, tolerant where Pound was dogmatic and gentle where Pound was rough.

The readings were exceedingly miscellaneous. Pound read some amazingly short and unrhymed poems unlike anything Sir John had ever heard and then a very strange translation of “The Seafarer,” in which he had somehow managed, in modern English, to include as many alliterative consonants and guttural assonances as the Anglo-Saxon original. A shy young lady named Hilda-something read some equally short pieces which sounded like very literal translations from the ancient Greek. Then, at last, Yeats began chanting and keening in his distinctive way, and Sir John finally heard something that sounded like real poetry to him. He almost wept with emotion at the lines:

Afterward, the bombastic Pound served some of the strongest coffee Sir John had ever tasted, and led everybody into a lively discussion about what they had heard. English poetry, Pound said violently, was “trapped in the Miltonic trance,” which he sarcastically caricatured as “whakty-whakty-whakty-whakty-boom! boom! whakty-whakty-whakty-boom! boom!” Experiments such as Hilda’s imitations of the ancient Greeks, Yeats’ recreation of Bardic forms of old Ireland and his own adaptions from the Chinese were necessary to enlarge the scope and range of
verse, said this upstart. Several people immediately began protesting, and it seemed that Miltonic sonority and iambic pentameter were to them as important as the Monarchy to a Conservative.

“It appears to me,” said a young lady named Lola, whose accent seemed Australian, “that poetry is invocation. If it does not
invoke
, then no matter what style it employs, it is not poetry.”

“Invocation,” Pound cried, “belongs in churches. Poetry should present a precise image, in the fewest possible words, so that reading it is like being hit by an April breeze. That’s what leaves an impression in the mind. Invocation and repetition are all blather that detracts from the red-hot intensity of the poetic flash itself, which only lasts a moment.”

“Oh, come, Ezra,” Yeats protested mildly. “Repetitious rhythm is the essence of the act of love, which poetry is always, consciously or unconsciously, trying to simulate.”

Before Pound could reply, the young lady named Lola brazenly replied, without a blush, “Exactly the point, Mr. Yeats. Do you know what I consider the greatest modern poem? Captain Fuller’s ‘Treasure House.’ Do you know it?” And she quoted:

Sir John started violently and almost dropped his coffee cup. Once again the question “Another of us?” had an
immediately affirmative answer.
Evoe
and
IAO
, according to Golden Dawn teachings, were two of the most secret Gnostic names to invoke divinity. He looked at Lola with astonishment, both because of these esoteric names she had quoted so casually and because nice young ladies simply did
not
speak so openly of the rhythm of the act of love. But she was looking at Yeats, awaiting a response, and her face was simply open and innocent; Sir John could not quite catch her eye.

“Captain Fuller certainly has his great moments,” Yeats said, with equal innocence, as if he were not aware that two of the most secret words of Power in occultism were being casually quoted in public. “However, while a few stanzas of that are fine, the whole poem does grow a bit wearisome after three hundred stanzas. There I must agree with Ezra that brevity would have been better.”

“Who—who is this Captain Fuller?” Sir John asked, trying also to sound casual.

“A great authority on military strategy, I’m told,” Pound said. “Lately, he has taken to writing quite a bit of mystical verse of that sort, all of it too damned long-winded and rhetorical for my taste.”

But Sir John was remembering, his pulses racing: “O thou red cobra of desire that art unhooded by the hands of maidens! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!” The phallic double meaning was too overt to ignore, especially in the context of Yeats’ remark about the rhythm of poetry being the rhythm of Eros. Was Lola, then, involved with one of the forbidden, lefthand lodges (“Cults of the Shadow,” Jones called them) that had split from the Golden Dawn and gone off in the direction of diabolism? He looked at her again and this time he did catch her eye, but what he read there was a most enigmatic humor. Was it friendly, mocking or dangerously malign? Or was his imagination merely fevered by the fact that he was under a two-year Oath of celibacy and yet knew, for the first time,
a sensual yearning strong enough to conquer both his timidity with women and the stern Victorian ethics instilled in him by his family? Was this attraction strong enough, he thought in fear, to conquer his Oath? He turned his eyes to the other side of the room, feeling a rush of blood to the face, and found himself suddenly engulfed in suspicious thoughts. Yeats, obviously, was a member of the Golden Dawn. How many others at this poetry reading were, also? Could this whole evening be a test of his Oath? He could not bring himself to look in Lola’s direction again, and he left the party as soon as politeness allowed.

But that night he dreamed of Lola raising her skirt to fix her garter and she caught him looking, cawing thanes, and he was scared wild (prosing zombie-dish) pursued by a faster boog, Sid, theol bardot of sneakery. There were hatenotes and featherfurgolems and potions burning boiled-est; Sir Joan, intrepid, nerveless, rapacious, idiotic, stumbled past the beehive pearlous. And the sun begin to rus, and oh up he ris, and he was all rose up, loinharted, up there so eye and moisty, baba cock of the morn, between them two toughies, for the romanz did tromp him, garther forgiven, the achtnotes hurling bricks. “Hate and be gored,” sagd Shut and he saw, he was, he saw, he was, the Hideous God, Baphomet, hir dugs hanging limp, hir bigcock standing stern, under the inverse pentacle of the Tempters.

Sir John screamed as he sat up in bed with a thunderous crash shaking the room.

“Are you all right, sir?” It was the voice of Wildeblood, the butler, outside the door.

“Did you hear it, too?” Sir John asked. “I thought it was a dream …”

“It must have been an earth tremor, sir. Can I help you, sir?”

“No,” Sir John said. “I’m quite all right, Wildeblood.”

Looking across the room, he could see that the mirror
was smashed. The
poltergeist
effect: typical of the onset of astral invasions. He reminded himself of the primary Golden Dawn teachings: not to give way to fear whatever happened, and not to jump to conclusions. Wildeblood was probably right; it was only an earth tremor.

But he could not sleep again until dawn; for he had seen the face of Baphomet, the Hideous God, and he knew that his journey into Chapel Perilous was no longer confined to dream alone. The earth had literally shaken beneath him; the astral and the physical were interacting. It was “probably only an earth tremor,” but it was connected, psychically, with the real opening of the door between the visible and invisible worlds.