Masks of the Illuminati (13 page)

It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the weird and unscientific thinking typical in different ways of both Joyce and Babcock was entirely alien to Professor Einstein’s well-disciplined mentations. A black camel beneath a horned moon might be an omen of almost anything and everything to either Joyce or Babcock, but it was a domesticated mammal conjunct to the burned-out satellite of a type-G star to science.

As he listened intently to Sir John Babcock’s wondrous tale, Einstein occasionally allowed a quiet smile to break upon his lips—the reflex of an evolutionary past in which furry ancestors similarly bared their teeth at the sight of food; but it was the meat of pure thought that inspired the typical anthropoid grin in this case, the marvelous (albeit blind) processes of evolution have produced a brain, in advanced human beings such as Einstein, capable of hungering and thirsting after Truth itself.

Science, it cannot be too often repeated, deals with actual readings of actual instruments, while permitting only the most economical descriptions of the phenomenon recorded. It is permissible, of course, to posit certain
gedankenexperiments
(thought experiments), thereby deducing from known laws the necessary consequences of hypothetical situations. Within an interstellar elevator, for
instance, the gravitational equations of Sir Isaac Newton will appear to be obeyed, as indicated by all instruments, thereby leading physicists within the elevator to posit the Newtonian explanation of their observations. To a physicist
outside
the elevator, however, the same data will be explained by the law of inertia. This line of thought had been amusing and perplexing Professor Einstein for some time now, but he determined to set it aside and concentrate his analytical powers upon the Gothic novel in which Sir John Babcock evidently lived and in which occult forces were more prevalent than scientific laws.

There is, he began to see, a principle of neurological relativism, as well as of physical relativism. Just as he became a new Albert Einstein by rejecting his citizenship and the God of his people, Sir John had changed his nervous system by these so-called occult exercises.

Yes: my two observers trying to measure a moving rod while they are themselves moving at differing velocities. That is the relativism of the instrument. But take, let us say, a man who is a Russian vegetarian pacifist and a woman who is an Italian Catholic conservative, each trying to understand Sir John’s story. None of it will mean the same to both of them. That is the relativism of consciousness, of the nervous system itself.

But the nervous system,
mein Gott
, is the instrument which reads all other instruments.

So, then: precisely as my physicists in the elevator can never tell, from within the elevator, whether the downward force is gravity or inertia, so, too, no two persons can tell, from within their nervous systems, what presumed external source provides the signals they receive. Which is why, of course, the atheist and the occultist can argue forever, without either ever convincing the other. We are trapped, trapped, trapped by our ideas, forever in the position of the five blind men and the elephant. The rules of our neurological chess game determine the form
or context with which we frame each new signal. The player on the other side, as Huxley said, is hidden from us.

But all the guilt in those dreams: Can it be due to that mouse incident? Why does the mouse from the comic strip keep coming back? The whole problem belongs more to Freud than to physics, really.

Zwei seelen wohnen:
Papa’s favorite lines. “So deep, Albert, every word from the heart of a great man.”

Poor Papa! Always worried that I was mentally defective because I wasn’t like the other boys. Because? Well, I wasn’t. Because I was wondering what it feels like to be a photon: How many years ago was that?

In meiner Brust
. “So deep, Albert …”

Fifteen, I was: that would be 1879 plus fifteen, same year I renounced my German nationality, ninety-four it would be then, 1894. Around the time I read about the Bell case in the American Supreme Court. Capitalist
schweinerei:
ever since 1872 (that would be … um … seven years before I was born) fighting over who owned the electrons. Seven plus fifteen is twenty-three; twenty-three years, then, Alexander Graham Bell and his competitors squabbling over the patent. Owning electrons,
mein Gott
. All my years in the patent office. Tedium of avarice. As if anyone could
own
a law of nature.
Königen, kirchen, dummheit und schweinerei
.

But the apes still seek money, bonds, patents. Mammalian predators. Maybe on the wrong planet I was born? Only hope for humanity: heap all the currencies, bonds and shares in one lovely garbage heap and ignite them.
Walpurgisnacht
. “So deep, Albert.” Yes: and let the masses dance around the flames to celebrate their liberation from age-old tyranny. The phoenix of freedom rising.

Or maybe it is genetically fixed. Predation and hierarchy date from the vertebrates. Perhaps I
am
on the wrong planet born.
Biedermeier
, they called me in school.
Biedermeier:
too stupid to lie.

In French that would be Pierrot le Fou. In English? Simple Simon. No: more like Honest John.
Biedermeier
Einstein.

Zwei Seelen wohnen ach! in meiner Brust
. Must mean something. If it were Hegel, I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always.

Uncle Jacob ridiculing the kosher laws. Well, Mama never kept a kosher kitchen, really. A house of heretics, we were. But only Uncle Jacob was an outspoken atheist. That for me was good, like the years in the Catholic school. To be born a Jew with an atheist uncle and go to a Catholic school: it opens the brain-cells. Diversity of signals.

Yes: the more conflicting signals received, the bigger we must make our world picture to account for them. People have little minds because every nation, every church and almost every family restricts the signals. So that speed of travel increasing (with also speed of communication increasing) means that everybody will receive more conflicting signals. Force the primates to get smarter, maybe. Impossible to keep a small Italian Catholic mind after meeting many, many German Protestants. The Englishman back from India is no longer 100 percent bloody English. Yes. Travel and communication will accelerate more in this century, so people will have to become smarter.

If war doesn’t throw us back to the Dark Ages.

Neat, that. But pacifism more basic than socialism, it must be. If we do not put an end to war, there will be little civilization left to socialize. But try to tell that to the socialists, God help you. If the chips are down they are German or French first and socialist later. When the shooting stops. And:

Very neat, too. Coming on to look more like curvature in the new equations. Non-Euclidean, converging. Geodesies. Not to be seen or experienced but known through the mathematics.
Nicht aus dem Sinn
.

Faster and faster communication, so every Ivan, Hans and Juan gets like me a mixture of Catholic, Jewish and atheist signals, or some equivalent jumble: force them to think and choose.

Zwei Seelen wohnen
… Yes. The two types of consciousness, which Freud now calls conscious and unconscious, are the two souls Goethe was speaking of. Sir John’s Golden Dawn is a neurological game in which the unconscious soul, called the astral body by them, is made conscious.

But even Freud does not understand the relativity of the instrument, of the nervous system itself. We three here in this room—Joyce, Sir John and myself—are existing in three different neurological realities, just exactly as my space-voyagers at different velocities exist in different spacetime realities.

The shadow-show of sight and sense: relativity of the instrument.
Nur der Wahnsinnige is sich absolut sicher
.

I wonder if any of the psychologists has discovered this yet.

It does not, of course, make a
pfennig
of difference if this Golden Dawn contraption can trace itself back to the Rosy Cross of the Middle Ages, to Adam, or even to the first amoeba. Nor does it matter if Mr. Robert Wentworth Little invented the whole “tradition” out of hot air and forged ciphers in the collaboration with the enigmatic Fräulein Sprengel. The significant objective fact on which scientific attention must focus is that by joining this organization
our friend Babcock has involved himself with a secretive order engaged in projects of which he knows actually nothing, although he assumes much. Too much, in fact. As we all do, every day.

The obvious absurdity of Newton’s
hypotheses non fingo:
actually, it is impossible not to theorize. The velocity of nerve transmissions in the brain is such that we can never disentangle perception from conceptualization. It is even a concept that I am presently speaking to human beings. Joyce and Babcock might both be automatons passing themselves off as humans, or I might be hallucinating. And who but Poincaré and Mach understand that fully, in their bones? We live, as Joyce says, in a web of symbolic constructs made by our brains. The
Herrdoktorprofessors
cannot understand my paper on relativity of space-time, for instance, because they think “length” is a fact, not a concept of our brains.

And this, too: when I renounced my citizenship in Milan nearly seventeen years ago, it was what the depth psychologists now call a rebirth experience: I re-defined and re-discovered myself. As when I discarded the God of my fathers. Perhaps both were necessary before I could re-define and re-discover space and time. Renunciation of the old must precede discovery of the new.

So: behind all this mumbo jumbo, that is basically, structurally, what Sir John is describing: a process whereby an orphaned boy adrift in this world with too much money is discovering a new way of defining and perceiving himself. And also, of course, his world. As I re-defined the world after re-defining myself. A chess game of the mind.

But what are the rules of this game and how did it bring him to the state of terror in which he now exists? And who or what is the player on the other side? That is what I first must grasp: the rules of this strange mind-game called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

I must ask not, How does it feel to be a photon?, like
Biedermeier
Einstein two decades ago in 1894, but, in this case: How does it feel to be a sorcerer’s apprentice?

Ye first Furbish Lousewart a retainer of great green Grey stoke Manor was. Of great green Grey stoke Manor was he a retainer, and yea a foundling they found him fearful nigh unto death but brief hours after bloody born from mother’s womb was he. A bastard born was that fair foundling, Furbish Lousewart.

Of his lineage, fair Furbish’s, ’tis said that planted in his mother’s belly was he by ye curate of Weems, a man most mountainous in girth that some did dub Round John or ye Holy Hog of St. Hubert’s, which is because that St. Hubert’s was ye church of Weems wherein as curate he did fare. Of fair Furbish’s mother, in troth, ’tis said she was a nun who did later for sin sensual atone by pious pilgrimage to Thomas’ tomb whereat she told a tale full fabulous to one Geoff. Chaucer who in verse the same tale did tell in his book of which all know. Some say also that model was she for ye pretty Prioress in the gypsy cards called Tarot, which card was later dubbed ye Female Pope and now ye High Priestess is yclept.

Lord Greystoke named the foundling bairn Furbish Lousewart because ye tyke so couth and dainty looked when they in mean manger found him. Furbish Lousewart was as dainty a name as leman could in Merrie England have in those days, it being the vernacular for
herba pedicularis
, a flower full fair in ye snapdragon family that no wight could name a bloom eke fairer ne bonnier.

Furbish Lousewart grew to mighty manhood, a fellow of cautels yet of mickle mirth, see ye here: for he three bold
sons (legitimate) did father and seven bairns of assorted sexes (illegitimate) and then, alas, did die a death most dire in Holy Crusade against the swarthy Saracens that did hold the Holy Land by force of sword. All the world is saying yet that he (F. Lousewart) did impress posterity more through his besotted lechery than through fidelity to the holy bed of Christian marriage, for the Rt. Hon. Mr. Justice P. J. Farmer who does dabble much in genealogy and such antiquarian matters hath said on many occasions (in the hearing of many that do bear good reputation) that the only Greystoke to survive that Crusade was as it were but a pseudo-Greystoke, being seed of Lady Greystoke’s lewd liaison with the aforesaid rascal, Furbish. If this be true, then the noble Greystoke line (that were Papishes but are now, folk say, good Anglicans) are actually of bastardly and plebeian origin. ’Tis a merry tale if true, all agree.