Masks of the Illuminati (33 page)

“Anybody in that state is an imbecile or a catatonic, however blissful his lunacy may be,” Crowley said sternly.

The true path of the Illuminati, Crowley stated more emphatically, is a series of soldiers and hunchbacks in ever-accelerating series, which he sketched as:

“To rest at any point, either in intuitive certainty or doubtful questioning,” he said flatly, “is to stagnate. Always seek the higher vision, whatever states of ecstatic insight you may have reached. Always ask the next harder question, whatever questions you may have answered. The Light you are seeking is quite correctly called
ain soph auer
in Cabala—the limitless light—and it has, quite literally, the characteristics mathematicians such as Cantor have demonstrated belong to Infinity. As the
Upanishads
say, ‘You can empty infinity from it, and infinity still remains.’ However deep your union with the Light, it can become deeper, whether you call it Christ or Buddha or Brahm or Pan. Since I am,
thank God,”
he said the last two words with great piety, “an Atheist, I prefer to call it Nothing—since anything we say about it is finite and limited, whereas it is infinite and unlimited.”

Crowley proceeded to discourse on the infinite with great detail, summarizing mathematical theories on the subject with remarkable erudition and felicity. “But all this,” he ended, “is not the true infinite. It is only what
our little monkey-minds have been able to comprehend so far. Ask the
next
question. Seek the
higher
vision. That is the path that unites mysticism and rationalism, and transcends both of them. As a great Poet has written:

Those blessed words!” he said raptly. “Holy be the name of the sage who wrote them!”

At this point Sir John was far from sure whether he had been listening to the highest wisdom or the most pretentious mumbo jumbo he had ever heard. The Divine No-Thing was much like certain concepts in Buddhism and Taoism, but it was also a nice way of seeming to utter profundities while actually talking nonsense. But then, of course, Crowley’s whole point had been that anything said about infinity was itself Nothing in comparison with infinity itself….

With a start, Sir John realized that the lecture was over. The audience was applauding, somewhat tentatively, most of them as confused by what they had heard as Sir John himself.

“You may now,” Crowley said carelessly, “unburden yourselves of the thoughts with which you passed the time while pretending to listen attentively to me; but in accord with English decorum and the rituals of the public lecture, you must phrase these remarks in the form of questions.”

There was a nervous laugh.

“What about Christ?” The speaker was a redfaced man with a walrus mustache; he seemed more irritated by what he had heard than the rest of the audience. “You didn’t say
nuthin’
about Christ,” he added aggrievedly.

“A lamentable oversight,” Crowley said unctuously. “What about Christ, indeed? Personally, I hold the man blameless for the religion that has been foisted upon him posthumously. Next question—the lady in the back row?”

“Is socialism inevitable?”

Sir John found himself wondering when Crowley would become aware of the Talisman and attempt to cajole him into surrendering it. With horror he realized that such overwhelming of his mind was possible: Crowley did possess charm, magnetism and charisma, like many servants of the Demon. What was it Pope had written about Vice? A creature of such hideous mein/That to be hated needs but be seen/But something something something/We first pity, then endure, then embrace…. “Many things are inevitable,” Crowley was saying. “The tides. The seasons. The fact that the questions after a lecture seldom have anything to do with the content of the lecture….” What do you seek? The Light. The limitless light:
ain soph auer
. And the darkness knew it not….

“What about the Magick Will?” Sir John asked suddenly, during a pause.

“Ah,” Crowley said. “That is a Significant Question.” Somehow he conveyed the mocking capitals by his intonation. “Such questions deserve to be answered with demonstrations, not with mere windy words. Laylah,” he called to the back of the room. “Could you bring the psychoboulometer?”

Lola approached the podium with something that looked hideously like a medieval thumb-screw.

“There is firstly conscious will,” Crowley was saying, looking directly at Sir John. “We all attempt to exercise this every day.
‘I will give up smoking.’
‘I will be true to my wife.’
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred such resolutions fail, because they are in conflict with the force that really controls us, Unconscious Will, which cannot be frustrated. Indeed, even the profane psychologists have
rediscovered what the mystics always knew: Unconscious Will, if prevented from acting, returns in the night to haunt our dreams. And sometimes it returns in the daytime, too, in the form of irrational behaviors which we cannot understand. Magick Will should not be confused with either of these, because it includes both and is greater than both. To perform an act of Magick Will is to achieve the Great Work, I might say. The holiest of all holy books says in this connection, ‘Thou hast no right but to do thy will.’ Alas, if you think you are doing your true Will, without magickal training, you are almost always deluding yourself…. But I am engaging in the windy verbiage I promised to avoid, and here is the implement of demonstration. Would anybody care to give us an exhibit of what they can accomplish by conscious Will?”

“I think I shall give it a try,” Sir John said, wondering at his own daring. “That’s only fair since I asked the question,” he added, feeling inane.

“Well, then, good! Come up here, sir,” Crowley said with a grin that was beginning to look a bit sinister to Sir John. “We have here,” he went on, holding the ugly thumb-screw so that everybody could get a good view, “one of the implements once used by the Dominican Order to enforce the religion which, as I said, has been foisted on Christ.” He set the torture device on the podium. “They used it as an instrument of torture, but we shall use it as a measure of Will.”

Sir John was now standing beside Crowley, looking uneasily at the thumb-screw. “Just insert your thumb, sir,” Crowley said easily.

“What???” Sir John could hardly believe his ears.

“Just insert your thumb, down here,” Crowley went on blandly, “and then turn the handle which tightens the vise. The needle on the boulometer—my own addition to this toy—will register how far you are able to withstand pain by sheer Will; 10 is a good score, and 0 means
you are a mere jellyfish. How far do you think you can go?”

Sir John felt every eye in the room upon him. He wanted to cry, “I am not such a fool as to torture myself for your amusement,” but—he was even more afraid of appearing a public coward.
Is that why people go into armies?
he asked himself grimly…. “Very well,” he said coldly, inserting his thumb.

“You’ve only reached two in the boulometer,” Crowley said. “The audience will think you’re not trying, sir.”

“Damn you!” Sir John whispered, perspiration cold on his back. “I am done with this cruel joke. Let us see how much better your Magick Will can do!”

“Certainly,” Crowley said calmly. He inserted his thumb into the cruel mechanism, and began turning the vise with slow deliberation. Not a muscle moved in his face. (Sir John suspected that he had gone into a trance.) The
needle on the boulometer crept slowly, accompanied by gasps from the audience, all the way to 10.

“That,” said Crowley gently, “might pass for an elementary demonstration of Magick Will.”

There was a burst of spontaneous applause.

“It will also do,” Crowley said, “as an illustration of our thesis about the soldier and the hunchback. The first rule of our Magick is: never believe anything you hear and doubt most of what you see.” He turned the “psycho-boulometer” around, revealing that he had disengaged the screw and had been turning the handle without actually tightening the vise. There was an angry gasp.

“Oh,” Crowley said, “are you feeling cheated? Remember this, then: you are cheated the same way every time emotional turmoil or fixed ideas distort your perception of what is actually before your eyes. And remember to look for the hunchback behind every soldier.”

The audience began to file out, muttering and chattering as excitedly as a group of chimpanzees who had just found a mirror.

And then Sir John realized that Crowley had descended from the podium and was approaching him.

“Sir John Babcock,” Crowley said warmly, “did you ever hear the story of the man with a mongoose in his basket?”

At least, unlike Lola, Crowley wasn’t pretending not to recognize Sir John. “What mongoose?” Babcock asked carefully.

“It was on a train,” Crowley said. “This chap had a basket under his seat and another passenger asked him what was in it. ‘A mongoose,’ he said. ‘A mongoose!’ said the other. ‘What on earth do you want with a mongoose?’ ‘Well,’ said our hero, ‘my brother drinks a great deal more than is good for him, and sometimes he sees snakes. So I turn the mongoose on them.’ The other passenger was baffled by this logic. ‘But those are
imaginary
snakes!’ he
exclaimed. ‘Aha!’ said our hero. ‘Do you think I don’t know that? But this is an imaginary mongoose!’”

Sir John laughed nervously.

“That’s the way it is with talismans,” Crowley said. “When a phantom climbs, the ghost of a ladder serves him. But do keep that pentacle in your vest if it makes you feel better. I must go now. We shall meet again.”

And Sir John stared as Crowley made his way to the back of the room, where he greeted Lola with a kiss. He whispered something; they both turned and looked back at Sir John; they waved cheerfully. And then they were gone.

When Sir John arrived at Jones’ home in Soho, he recounted his experience at the M.M.M. bookstore in detail.

“Crowley did not attempt to cajole me into giving him the talisman,” he concluded with some asperity. “He treated it with total contempt.”

“The man does have an Iron Will,” Jones admitted, “but do not be deceived by his play-acting. Underneath, he knows we are on the counterattack now, and he must be afraid.”

Sir John asked with suffocating restraint, “Are you really quite sure of that?”

“We both need a good night’s sleep,” Jones said, as if ignoring the question. “I will show you to the guest room. Before retiring, meditate a bit on the Parable of the Imaginary Mongoose. It has many levels of meaning….”

In fact, Sir John found that he was too tired to reflect much on the Imaginary Mongoose when he was settled into his room. He slipped into sleep quickly and dreamed things he was unable to remember in the morning, although
he awoke with a vague memory of Sir Talister Crowley and a giant mongoose pursuing him through Chapel Perilous.

After washing and dressing, Sir John remembered that he still had the copy of
The Book of Lies
he had purchased at M.M.M. He decided to try Bibliomancy-in-reverse and see what the Enemy had to offer in the way of an oracle. Opening at random, he found Chapter 50:

“Damn, blast and thunder!” Sir John exploded. The beetle denies God, but wind and wood deny the beetle also. It was the Imaginary Mongoose riddle again, on a more Empedoclean level.

Going down the stairs in search of breakfast, Sir John experimented with solipsism. Perhaps there are no gods or beetles—or perhaps the whole world is, as the Gnostics claimed, the Abyss of Hallucinations, the Devil’s Masquerade. But then we must consider David Hume’s argument: the same skepticism can be applied to the Self. Am
I
really here? Are only the egoless wind and wood real? If phantoms descend, do the ghosts of stairs serve them?