Masks of the Illuminati (30 page)

“‘Evil to him who evil thinks of it,’” Verey translated. “It’s still a strange story. And why do the Masons wear a garter in their initiations?”

“My God, man, we must be on our way!” Sir John exclaimed. “We can’t stand here discussing the obscure points of medieval history—”

In a few moments they had made their way around the winepress and out the door into a shaded grove circled on all sides by great oaks. Within the grove, beside the cottage, stood only a ghost-white marble Aphrodite.

“Heathen statues,” muttered Verey, but this time he seemed more to be talking to himself than to be accusing the Babcock family.

The walk through the woods was invigorating, after the underground passage and the idiotic but disturbing conversation in the winepress. For a while there, the clergyman had seemed almost demented; or was Sir John merely overly sensitive about great-grandfather’s eccentricities? A hidden grove dedicated to wine and Aphrodite … the rumors about connections with the libertine Hellfire Club … a taint in the blood … blue garters … white stains …

Verey kept a good pace, despite his age; but Scottish Highlanders are notorious for longevity, even fathering children at advanced ages. If only they were not so inclined to telling, with so much ghoulish relish, tales of ghosts and witches “and things that gae bump i’ the night.” But, of course, that was probably because they experienced more of these things in their cold, dank dark Northern nights. The Rationalist, scorning these simple, rugged people as superstitious, without having lived among them and shared the experiences which gave rise to those eldritch tales, was as naïvely chauvinistic as the narrow Englishman who regards all Frenchmen as immoral or all Italians as treacherous.

And then remembering that the motto of the Hellfire Club had been “Do what thou wilt,” from Rabelais, and their blasphemous ikon or idol, at the deserted abbey Sir Francis Dashwood had purchased for their orgies, was a giant phallus inscribed “Saviour of the World.” That very ikon, in fact, had been printed as frontispiece to the lascivious “Essay on Woman” clandestinely printed by John Wilkes under the salacious
nom de plume
“Pego Borewell”: Wilkes had been expelled from the House of Lords when his authorship of that pamphlet, and his membership in the Hellfire Club, had been exposed by the Earl of Sandwich, himself a former member who had resigned when some horrible Thing (an
orang-utan
unleashed as a practical joke, Wilkes later claimed) bit him during a Black Mass. All of which was regarded as comical, if unsavory, by most historians; and yet Sir John began to wonder about possible links between that strange cabal and the contemporary Grand Orient lodges of French Masonry, where strange occult and revolutionary doctrines were preached and the mysterious Count Cagliostro was a Grand Master. Were all of these, like the sinister Illuminati of Bavaria, part of the black underground tradition now incarnate in the Ordo Templi Orientis?

“I heard that story explained once,” Verey said suddenly.

The trees were so thick in here that it was heavily shadowed even now, at midday.
O dark, dark amid the blaze of noon
, Sir John quoted to himself. “What story?” he asked absently.

“The story about King Edward III and the Countess of Salisbury, man,” Verey said impatiently. “I don’t know if it’s true, mind you, but what I heard was that the blue garter was the insignia of a Queen of the Witches in those days. The king, by placing the garter on his own thigh, was telling everybody that they would have to denounce him to the Inquisition if they dared to denounce her. He may have saved her life. That’s the meaning of ‘Evil to him who thinks evil of it.’”

It was an unpleasant subject to be discussing with a grieving and somewhat deranged hunchback in such a dark forest. The
selva oscura
, Sir John thought. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said irritably, “unless the King himself were a male witch, or warlock. Is the point of the story to make us wonder if the British monarchy itself might be infested with witchery and diabolism?”

“I dinna’ know,” Verey said. “The man who told me this did have some queer notions about the knightly orders of Europe. I gather that he believed the Order of the Garter was the hidden inner circle that governs Freemasonry. Do you happen to know why Masons use garters in their initiations?”

Something flapped by overhead with a sound as if of bat’s wings. But bats did not fly in the daytime, Sir John reminded himself.

“The history of Freemasonry is very complicated,” he said. “I have written a book about it,
The Secret Chiefs
, and can only claim to have solved about a third of the important historical mysteries. It is true that the King is the head of the Order of the Gar Gar Garter and the Prince of Wales is always made a 33° Freemason, but
there is nothing sin sin sinister about it, I assure you. The patron of the Order is Saint George, not Satan.”

“Of course,” Verey said apologetically. “I did say, did I not, that the man who told me all this had many queer notions? He even said the 26 gold garters dependent from the collar had something to do with the Mason Word, but I never understood that. It had something to do with the Jewish Cabala, I believe.”

26: Sir John remembered:
Yod
= 10;
Hé
= 5;
Vau
= 6; second
Hé
= 5. Total: 26. YHVH, the Holy Unspeakable Name of God—now, due to the hideous M.M.M., inextricably linked in his mind with suicide and madness. And hidden in the numerology of the Order of the Garter.

The bat-winged thing moved overhead again. It must be an ordinary bird. Bats did not fly at noon. And “stone should not walk in the twilight.” Where had he read that?

“It is a queer business all around,” Verey muttered. “Men in garters. Secret meetings. No women admitted. Was the whole Order of Knights Templar of Jerusalem not convicted of the unnatural sin of sodomy?”

“Dash it all!” Babcock burst out. “You have it all confused, Reverend. You are mixing up true mystical Masonry with all its perversions and counterfeits.”

The wood seemed to be growing darker all the time. The bat wings flapped again.

“I know nothing of such matters,” Verey said humbly. “I am merely reporting the opinions of a man I admitted was possessed of odd notions. Secret societies do arouse much speculation, you know. Everybody asks: If they have nothing to hide, why are they secret?”

The more the senile old fool apologized, the more offensive he became. Sir John turned to issue a final crushing retort but then saw the paleness of Verey’s face and the lines of pain around his eyes and mouth. The old man had suffered much and deserved great tolerance. Besides, the true Brother of the Rose Croix was patient and infinitely
compassionate toward those ignorant of the mysteries. Sir John said nothing and trudged on.

The bat-flapping receded behind them. Probably it had only been an ordinary bird, magnified by imagination and suggestion.

Then a clearing emerged and the towers of Greystoke were visible in the distance.

“There it is,” Sir John exclaimed, once again thrilled by a sense of adolescent adventure. “Our doorway to escape and to our own surprise counter-attack.”

Q: Cite a contemporary historian, with sufficient brevity to avoid litigation about copyrights, in re: the Countess of Salisbury and the Order of the Garter.

A: “Though the story may be apocryphal, there may be a substratum of truth in it. The confusion of the Countess was not from shock to her modesty—it took more than a dropped garter to shock a lady of the fourteenth century—but the possession of that garter proved that she was not only a member of the Old Religion but that she held the highest place in it…. It is remarkable that the King’s mantle, as Chief of the Order, was powdered over with one hundred and sixty-eight garters which, with his own garter worn on the leg, makes 169, or thirteen times thirteen—
i.e
., thirteen covens.” Dr. Margaret Murray,
The God of the Witches
.

Q: Cite, again without exceeding the legal limitations of Fair Usage, another supporting source.

A: “Thus, as we have seen, the Plantagenet [and so traditionally ‘pagan’] King threw away all pretence, and declared himself openly for the Old Religion, establishing a double-coven ‘Brains Trust’—the Order of the Garter—to ‘mastermind’ the return to what Edward and the Fair Maid of Kent, his ‘witch’ Plantagenet cousin, considered to be the True Faith…. The Tudors, too, may not escape suspicion of having belonged to what was evidently
the ‘family religion’ of the British Royal Family.” Michael Harrison,
The Roots of Witchcraft
.

    Kenneth Campbell of 201 Paul Street proved to be, as Jones had promised, formidable. He stood somewhere around six and a half feet tall and must have weighed twenty stone. A large poster on his wall showed him, grimacing horribly, under the caption THE LIVERPOOL MANGLER. One did not need the talents of Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Campbell was a wrestler.

“It’s a kip what feeds me,” Campbell said, recognizing Babcock as a gentleman. “Not very hoity-toity, I’ll admit, but what prawce dignity when the belly’s empty, eh, mate?”

Prawce
, Babcock decoded, was Liverpoolese for
price
.

“Wrestling was regarded as an accomplishment every gentleman should master in the Athens of Socrates,” he said reassuringly.

“Socrates?” Campbell was delighted. “Wasn’t he the bloke what drank the poison to show the bleedin’ bastards they couldn’t frighten him? Begging your pardon, Reverend.”

Babcock could not bear to look at Verey’s face. “Socrates was indeed a very brave man,” he said evasively.

“Brave?” Campbell shook his head. “I was in Her Majesty’s Army during the Boer Uprising,” he said. “I know
all abaht
bravery, guv’nor. It isn’t bravery when you sits yourself down and drinks poison to prove a point. Could you do it? Could I do it? Could the bravest manjack in the army do it? Not on your bleeding life [beg your pardon, Reverend]. That ain’t bravery. That’s something else.”

A philosophical wrestler, Babcock thought; but what other sort of wrestler would Jones know?
Another of us?
There was no point in asking. “What is it that Socrates had that goes beyond bravery?” he inquired instead.

“I dunno,” the wrestler said. “I guess it’s the state
beyond humanity, the Next Step that Jones is always talking abaht.”

“Socrates was a heathen,” Verey said suddenly. “He was unfaithful to his wife both with another woman and with Alcibiades, with whom he had unnatural relations. He may have been brave and wise, but he is most certainly burning in Hell right now.”

The wrestler’s face fell. “Don’t be too strict, Vicar,” he said, looking hurt. “None of us is perfect.”

Fortunately, Jones arrived just then and Babcock was spared the ordeal of listening to Socrates’ morals debated by a naïve giant and a self-righteous hunchback.

“Ah, Kenneth, my man,” Jones beamed, taking the wrestler’s hand in a grip Babcock did not recognize. “You are looking splendid!”

The grip was not used in the Golden Dawn; Babcock surmised it was a Scottish Rite grip.

“I have another five good years, maybe,” the giant said modestly. “Then, if I haven’t earned enough to buy a shop or a pub, it’s back to the army for the likes of me.”

“Back to the army?” Jones said. “I think not. I have never understood how you came through one war alive; an enemy needs to be nearly blind to miss a target your size. We could never allow you to come to that pass again. Remember the widow’s son.”

The last phrase confirmed Sir John’s guess; it was the formula describing all charitable activities of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite Freemasons. Probably Jones, like Robert Wentworth Little, founder of the Golden Dawn, had been in the Ancient and Accepted Lodge originally, as Campbell still obviously was.

“Reverend Verey,” Jones was saying, shaking the clergyman’s hand warmly and clapping him on the shoulder, “I cannot express how deeply I sympathize with you in this time of grief. I can assure you that I, and the Order I represent, will see to it that no further tragedies occur,
and that the villains responsible for your grief will receive a just punishment for their crimes.”

“It is in God’s hands,” Verey said woodenly, regressing back into the emotionless emptiness of the typical shock reaction. It comes in waves, Babcock thought, remembering his own grief when his parents died.

“God’s hands? That will not do,” Jones said sharply, staring into the clergyman’s eyes in a way Babcock had never seen before. “We
are
God’s hands,” Jones went on, solemnly, “and we have been set here in this world to execute His righteousness. Else is our religion mere theatrics.”

Verey turned away, obviously fighting back tears. “God forgive me,” he said, “that I, an ordained clergyman, should need to be reminded of that.”

Jones softened his tone. “You will not need to be reminded again,” he said. “You will not doubt again, nor will you despair.” He turned the clergyman around, gently, and stared into his eyes again. “You know I speak truth,” he said.

“Yes,” Verey said. “My God, who are you?”

“An ordinary man,” Jones said. “But one trained, a little, in certain arts of healing. For instance”—he touched Verey’s forehead—“I can feel the anguish draining away from you right now. You will not again despair of the goodness of God or ask Job’s questions. In a short while, you will rest.”

The Brother of the Rosy Cross, Babcock remembered, is permitted to perform healings in emergencies, although in all other ways he must hide his superhuman status from the humans among whom he walks.

Jones moved his hand to Verey’s chest. “Yes,” he said, “your breathing is much better now. Your heart
chakra
is less agitated. We humans are God’s hands, and He acts through us, if we allow Him,” he repeated. He grasped Verey’s shoulders and ran his hands swiftly down the
clergyman’s arms, ending by grasping both hands warmly. “You have suffered much, but now you can rest. Remember: ‘For He is like a refiner’s fire.’”

Sir John re-experienced his excitement every time he had heard Handel’s setting of that Biblical verse; it had always been his favorite part of
The Messiah
. The Vril energy was flowing through him, as when he first translated I.N.R.I, as “the world is remade by fire”; and he could see the energy was flowing in Verey, also.