Masks of the Illuminati (14 page)

This much at least science can pronounce with mathematical certainty: within the testicles of Viscount Greystoke that night of June 26, 1914, did reside exactly one-sixteenth (0.0625) of the genetic information that formed the neurogenetic template of Sir John Babcock, while within the testicles of Viscount Greystoke’s cousin, Giacomo Celine, was precisely one-fourth (0.25) of the gentetic information of Hagbard Celine, who more than sixty years later was going to inform the grandnephew of Sir John’s gamekeeper that there is no enemy anywhere.

From the greatest horrors irony is seldom entirely absent, as if to remind us that there is in truth no such thing as motiveless or mindless malignity. Thus, the crack in Sir John’s mirror inspired him, subtly and indirectly, to begin
to accommodate himself somewhat to the twentieth century, but at the same time the hellish terrors of earlier centuries more insidiously gathered about him. The crack was only moderately disquieting at first—although he could not look into it without imagining he saw, in the distorted image of himself created by the jagged glass, some depressing and menacing symbol of the dark side of the Vril force which had attacked him through the weak spot opened up by his susceptibility to the voluptuous yearnings aroused, perhaps deliberately, by the enigmatic Lola and her brazenly casual allusions to the rhythm of the act of copulation and the red cobra of desire. He was haunted by an uncomfortable idea, although he tried to shake it off; it would be foolish certainly to accept it, on no better evidence than the coincidence of a bad dream and an earth tremor—yet the insidiously disturbing concept continued to grow in his mind: he had perhaps encountered a real witch, and the medieval world he had so long studied was seemingly coming to life around him.

The bedroom itself was now insidiously depressing to him, because of the cracked mirror and its eldritch bicameral images, yet he was also subtly uncomfortable elsewhere about the huge old house, also: something distasteful and disquieting, almost a sense of decay and morbidity, appeared to permeate the very air; something nameless and vague, a mere adumbration of new presences and possibilities, probably only his own overactive imagination, and yet something that seemed autochthonous, virtually antediluvian, furtively suggestive of hideous secrets of forgotten times and deeds that were against Nature and against Scripture. The invasion of even the furniture with this inchoate omnipresence was bewildering, if one was able to compare, in the light of the different atmosphere before the Dark Force (as he came to call it), the previous ubiquity throughout Babcock Manor of commonsense normalcy.

Sir John embarked upon a campaign to banish the whole perishing business by refurbishing, not merely the cursed mirror, but the whole of Babcock Manor, and soon had the place swarming with tradespeople and laborers in a huge project of modernization, including even the installation of electricity in every room. It required many months, but finally Babcock Manor had been fully adapted to the twentieth century. The malign humor of the hideous forces unleashed against Sir John meanwhile proceeded to produce, as this superficial adaptation to the present was feverishly afoot throughout the manor, a growing invasion of his inner life by the most hellish and dismal of ancient terrors.

Sir John continued to dream often of Chapel Perilous and once he found himself in a huge dungeon beneath the earth, where crowds of sullen and stupid persons argued and debated violently. “We shall have gno gods!” shouted some. But others shouted back, “We shall have gnu gods!” And weenie gothor thick haggard were poor. “There is no Chapel, there is no Grail, it is all a child’s fantasy,” muttered a liddel bho poop, yet veni verits, surd Alice war bear, flogging thor-talis behind them. “The tree o vus, the size of us, the weight of us,” sang an Erring Go BRA in groinblancorange, but a triune pentagonal octupus explained,
posing as somadust. “These are those who started on the Path without the Wand of Intuition. They have arrived, but they do not know it. They have Is so they no can see. Honey to them, pansy meals. Does a BRA shith in the woods?”

When Sir John wrote this dream into his Magickal Diary, he added the comment:

A few nights later he allowed himself to be cajoled into a bridge game at Viscount Greystoke’s, although that was precisely the sort of idiot pastime he generally despised. He barely endured the early part of the evening—there was much brandy, many cigars, and altogether too much talk about fox-hunting, a sport he despised as inhumane and barbaric. It was with great effort that he refrained from quoting the infamous Wilde’s description of that bloody recreation as “the uneatable pursued by the unspeakable.” Then, around ten, a strange thing happened: he suddenly remembered that the ordinary playing-card deck was derived from the Tarot. The spades were the Wands of Intuition, the hearts the Cups of Sympathy, the clubs the Swords of Reason, the diamonds the Pentacles of Valor: and the structure of the deck corresponded astrologically to fire signs, water signs, air signs and earth signs: 52 weeks in 4 seasons, 52 cards in 4 suits. But if Cabalistic signs were everywhere, the divine essence was also everywhere, and he remembered again that there were no places or times where the visible and invisible worlds did not meet and mingle: he saw the Buddha in everyone, again. The rest of the evening he was so intensely
conscious that he seemed to himself to have been half-asleep all his life by comparison; he won trump after trump. The euphoria was with him for nearly a day and a half after, and then gave way to a vague anxiety again when he remembered that many forms of lunacy begin with such excited states of mentation in which every incident and event seems charged with more than human meaning.

In London two days later Sir John met the bombastic American, Ezekiel (or Ezra) Pound—perhaps by accident—at the British Museum. Pound was carrying a Chinese-English dictionary and a batch of notebooks labeled “Fenol-losa MS.” and was effusively cordial. They amicably agreed to step out for a bite of lunch together.

“Yeats is progressing nicely, under
my
influence,” Pound pronounced grandly, over fish and chips. “He’s coming out of that Celtic fog and beginning to write
modern
poetry.” Sir John found this self-importance hilarious, but managed to keep a straight face. He tactfully changed the subject.

“Why are you so preoccupied by Chinese verse forms?” he asked in his most diffident manner.

“Chinese,” Pound pronounced, “will be as important to the twentieth century as Greek was to the Renaissance. And he went on for twenty minutes on that topic, before Sir John was able to interpolate a remark again.

“Who was that young lady reciting Captain Fuller?” he asked, knowing that an evil impulse was driving him.

Pound looked up sharply. “She says her name is Lola Levine and she comes from France,” he replied. “I doubt it. Her French is worse than mine.”

“She sounded Australian …” Sir John said.

“Exactly,” Pound agreed. “A young lady one should not trust too much. Have you heard of Aleister Crowley?” he asked.

Sir John remembered the name—one of the leaders of a
renegade Golden Dawn faction said to have turned in the direction of Diabolism. “Vaguely,” he said.

“Well, whatever you’ve heard is probably unfavorable and you’re just being English and tactful in not mentioning it,” Pound said with a piercing glance. “Don’t get too interested in Lola Levine, if you want any advice from me, Sir John. She is said to be, or to have been, one of Crowley’s countless mistresses. Terrible things happen to people who get involved with Crowley, or his friends or mistresses. Have you heard of Victor Neuberg?”

“A young poet … I’m afraid I haven’t read any of his work.”

“Victor Neuberg got very involved with Crowley a few years ago,” Pound said. “He is now recovering, slowly and painfully, from a complete nervous and mental breakdown.”

“A mental breakdown,” Sir John repeated. “You mean …”

“That’s what the doctors call it,” Pound said somberly. “Neuberg believes he is under siege by demons.”

“Oh,” Sir John said, “how ghastly.”

“Yes,” Pound answered with a level stare. “That’s the sort of thing that happens to people who get too close to Crowley and Lola Levine and their circle. Neuberg even claims Crowley once turned him into a camel.”

“Into a
camel?”
Sir John exclaimed.

“Well,” Pound said, “I suppose it would be more traditional to turn him into a toad, but Crowley by all accounts has a singularly eccentric sense of humor.”

“Do you believe Neuberg really did turn into a camel?” Sir John asked, wondering just what Pound’s attitude toward all this really was.

“Hellfire, no!” Pound laughed scornfully. “But I do believe that if you get mixed up with a gang like that, and really get into yoga and meditation and group sex and drugs and howling invocations at Sirius, you’ll damned soon end up believing whatever the other lunatics in the group believe.”

On that note, the lunch ended and they parted. Sir John found himself wondering if he was ready, yet, to believe in the metamorphosis of a human being into a camel. The idea seemed to belong not to the true tradition of mysticism as he had come to know it through the Golden Dawn, but to the realm of folklore, witchcraft and old-wives’ tales: and yet the disquieting thought remained, trailing him about like an unpaid usurer,
Something happened to poor Neuberg, something that the alienists are perhaps not ready yet to understand or heal
. If we are such stuff as dreams are made of, these eldritch forces which Macbeth so evocatively calls “night’s black agents” are as powerful as anything in the masquerade of social life with its timid decorums and deceptions; and thinking also,
There is Cabalistic logic in it:
the camel corresponds to the Hebrew letter
gimmel
, which corresponds to the Masked Priestess in the Tarot, the guide across the Abyss of Hallucinations to the undivided light of Pure Illumination.

It was only another accident, of course—only another coincidence—but Sir John actually encountered Lola Le-vine in Rupert Street later that afternoon. There was no mistaking that dark brown hair, those strange brown eyes, that enticingly voluptuous figure to unhood the cobra of desire. By the grace of God, she didn’t notice him and he passed by quickly, hardly thinking of her petticoats and garters and those things.

That evening, however, he encountered her again, in a much more
outré
manner. He was performing his fourth exercise in astral projection for the day, according to the instructions in the Golden Dawn manual, and, for the third time since he had begun the practice, he achieved a state of mind where it almost believed it was real.

[“It seemed real,” he had told Jones after the first such experience, “but I cannot be sure. I think I am perhaps just deceiving myself and it is imagination.”

[“Pray do not let that bother you,” Jones had replied. “It always
begins
as imagination….”]

This time, Sir John, eyes tightly closed, was imagining his astral mind rising out of his body, looking down at the whole room—his physical body included—from some eerie vantage point near the ceiling, and beginning, again, to almost believe his imagination. Following instructions, he projected higher, above the earth, looking down at his estate from a great height, and then, projecting higher, looking down at England and parts of Europe. With a colossal effort, he projected higher and saw the blinding white light of the sun (behind the Earth at this hour) and the planets Mercury, Venus and Mars. It was going so well that he projected out of the solar system entirely and approached the realms of
Yesod
, the first astral plane.

And there it was, just as described in the Cabalistic books of many centuries: the two pillars of Night and Day, the masked Priestess seated on the throne: Shekinah, the embodied Glory of Jehovah.

“Who dares to approach this realm?” She asked, Her voice strangely familiar. (Or was he imagining all this? Was this practice just a trick to contact the unconscious by “dreaming” while still partly conscious?)

“I am one who seeks the Light,” Sir John answered, according to formula.

“You have turned your back on the Light,” She answered sharply, Her brown eyes seeming to shine or glow in an odd manner. “You have rejected Me and banded together with the Black Brothers who hate and despise My creation. Infernal nochts; rocks intangible.”

“No, no,” Sir John said, frantically reminding himself of the First Teaching
[“Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure”]
. I have never rejected You.”

“You have rejected the female, My representatives on Earth, and the act of joy and love which is My Sacrament. You can never pass this Gate until you conquer your
fear of Woman.
Fear is failure and the forerunner of failure
.

Sir John recognized Her voice at last: it was the voice of Lola Le vine. Desperately, he plunged backward toward Earth, remembering to try to calm himself: when one is blinded by panic, the teachings said, one might not be able to find one’s way back to the Earth-body. In total funk, he briefly found himself in one of the alchemical planes, where a White Eagle, a Red Lion, a Golden Unicorn and Sir Talischlange pursued him through a magickal wood and the trees chanted rhythmically, “Pangenitor, Panphage, Pangenitor, Panphage, Pangenitor, Panphage …” Lola’s voice sang in antichorus, “lo Pan! Io Pan Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!” Then, somehow, he was whirling down, down, through endless darkness, to the White Light of the sun again, the spinning Earth-globe, England, his own estate, and the bedroom in which he found himself seated, sweating, with his heart beating wildly.