The illuminatus! trilogy (113 page)

The Rite of Shiva, as performed by Joe Malik during the SSS Black Mass, contains the central secret of all magick, very explicitly, yet most people can reread that section a dozen, or a hundred times, and never understand what the secret is. For instance, Miss Portinari was a typical Catholic
girl in every way—except for an unusual tendency to take Catholicism seriously—until she began menstruating and performing spiritual meditations every day.
*
One morning, during her meditation period, she visualized the Sacred Heart of Jesus with unusual clarity; immediately another image, distinctly shocking to her, came to mind with equal vividness. She recounted this experience to her confessor the next Saturday, and he warned her, gravely, that meditation was not healthy for a young girl, unless she intended to take the oath of seclusion and enter a convent. She had no intention of doing that, but rebelliously (and guiltily) continued her meditations anyway. The disturbing second image persisted whenever she thought of the Sacred Heart; she began to suspect that this was sent by the Devil to distract her from meditation.

One weekend, when she was home from convent school on vacation, her parents decided she was the right age to be introduced to Roman society. (Actually, they, like most well-off Italian families, had already chosen which daughter would be given to the church—and it wasn’t her. Hence, this early introduction to
la dolce vita.)
One of the outstanding ornaments of Rome at that time was the “eccentric international businessman” Mr. Hagbard Celine, and he was at the party to which Miss Portinari was taken that evening.

It was around eleven, and she had consumed perhaps a little too much Piper Heidseck, when she happened to find herself standing near a small group who were listening raptly to a story the strange Celine was telling. Miss Portinari wondered what this creature might be saying—he was reputedly even more cynical and materialistic than other international money-grubbers, and Miss Portinari was, at that time, the kind of conservative Catholic idealist who finds capitalists even more dreadful than socialists. She idly tuned in on his words; he was talking English, but she understood that language adequately.

“‘Son, son,’” Hagbbard recited, “‘with two beautiful women throwing themselves at you, why are you sitting alone in your room jacking off?’”

Miss Portinari blushed furiously and drank some more
champagne to conceal it. She hated the man already, knowing that she would surrender her virginity to him at the earliest opportunity; of such complexities are intellectual Catholic adolescents capable.

“And the boy replied,” Hagbard went on, “‘I guess you just answered your own question, Ma.’”

There was a shocked silence.

“The case is quite typical,” Hagbard added blandly, obviously finished. “Professor Freud recounts even more startling family dramas.”

“I don’t see …” a celebrated French auto racer began, frowning. Then he smiled. “Oh,” he said, “was the boy an American?”

Miss Portinari left the group perhaps a bit too hurriedly (she felt a few eyes following her) and quickly refilled her champagne glass.

A half-hour later she was standing on the veranda, trying to clear her head in the night air, when a shadow moved near her and Celine appeared amid a cloud of cigar smoke.

“The moon has a fat jaw tonight,” he said in Italian. “Looks like somebody punched her in the mouth.”

“Are you a poet in addition to your other accomplishments?” she asked coolly. “That sounds as if it might be American verse.”

He laughed—a clear peal, like a stallion whinnying. “Quite so,” he said. “I just came from Rapallo, where I was talking to America’s major poet of this century. How old are you?” he asked suddenly.

“Almost sixteen,” she said fumbling the words.

“Almost fifteen,” he corrected ungallantly.

“If it’s any affair of yours—”

“It might be,” he replied easily. “I need a girl your age for something I have in mind.”

“I can imagine. Something foul.”

He stepped further out of the shadows and closer. “Child,” he said, “are you religious?”

“I suppose you regard that as old-fashioned,” she replied, imagining his mouth on her breast and thinking of paintings of Mary nursing the Infant.

“At this point in history,” he said simply, “it’s the only thing that isn’t old-fashioned. What was your birthdate? Never mind—you must be a Virgo.”

“I am,” she said. (His teeth would bite her nipple, but
very gently. He would know enough to do that.) “But that is superstition, not religion.”

“I wish I could draw a precise line between religion, superstition, and science.” He smiled. “I find that they keep running together. You are Catholic, of course?” His persistence was maddening.

“I am too proud to believe an absurdity, and therefore I am not a Protestant,” she replied—immediately fearing that he would recognize the plagiarism.

“What symbol means the most to you?” he asked, with the blandness of a prosecuting attorney setting a trap.

“The cross,” she said quickly. She didn’t want him to know the truth.

“No.” He again corrected her ungallantly. “The Sacred Heart.”

Then she knew he was of Satan’s party.

“I must go,” she said.

“Meditate further on the Sacred Heart,” he said, his eyes blazing like a hypnotist’s (a cornball gimmick, he was thinking privately, but it might work). “Meditate on it deeply, child. You will find in it the essential of Catholicism —and the essential of all other religion.”

“I think you are mad,” she responded, leaving the veranda with undignified haste.

But two weeks later, during her morning meditation, she suddenly understood the Sacred Heart. At lunchtime she disappeared—leaving behind a note to the Mother Superior of the convent school and another note for her parents— and went in search of Hagbard. She had even more potential than he realized, and (as elsewhere recorded) within two years he abdicated in her favor. They never became lovers.
*

The importance of symbols—images—as the link between word and primordial energy demonstrates the unity between magick and yoga. Both magick and yoga—we reiterate—are methods of self-programming employing synchronistically connected chains of word, image, and bio-energy.

Thus, rationalists, who are all puritans, have never considered
the fact that disbelief in magick is found only in puritanical societies. The reason for this is simple: Puritans are incapable of guessing what magick is essentially all about. It can even be surely ventured that only those who have experienced true love, in the classic Albigensian or troubadour sense of that expression, are equipped to understand even the most clear-cut exposition of the mysteries.
*

The eye in the triangle; for instance, is not primarily a symbol of the Christian Trinity, as the gullible assume—except insofar as the Christian Trinity is itself a visual (or verbal) elaboration on a much older meaning. Nor is this symbol representative of the Eye of Osiris or even of the Eye of Horus, as some have ventured; it is venerated, for instance, among the Cao Dai sect in Vietnam, who never heard of Osiris or Horus. The eye’s meaning can be found quite simply by meditating on Tarot Trump XV, the Devil, which corresponds, on the Tree of Life, to the Hebrew letter
ayin
, the eye. The reader who realizes that “The Devil” is only a late rendering of the Great God Pan has already solved the mystery of the eye, and the triangle has its usual meaning. The two together are the union of
Yod
, the father, with
He
, the Mother, as in
Yod-He-Vau-He
, the holy unspeakable name of God.
Vau
, the Holy Ghost, is the result of their union, and final
He
is the divine ecstasy which follows. One might even venture that one who contemplates this key to the identities of Pan, the Devil, the Great Father, and the Great Mother will eventually come to a new, more complete understanding of the Christian Trinity itself, and especially of its most mysterious member,
Vau
, the elusive Holy Ghost.
*

The pentagram comes in two forms but always represents the fullest extension of the human psyche—the male human psyche in particular. The pentagram with one horn exalted is, quite naturally, associated with the right-hand path; and the two-horned pentagram with the left-hand path. (The Knights Templar, very appropriately, inscribed the head of
Baphomet, the goat-headed deity who was their equivalent of Pan or the Devil, within the left-handed pentagram in

such wise that each “horn” contained one of Baphomet’s horns.) It is to be observed that the traditionally sinister
*
left-hand pentagram contains an internal
pentagon
with one point
upward
, whereas the right-hand pentagram contains an internal
pentagon
with one point
downward;
this nicely illustrates the Law of Opposites.
^†
The pentagon in the Sacred Chao is tilted from the perpendicular so that it cannot be said to have any points directly upward or directly downward—or perhaps can be said to have 1 1/2 points up and 1 1/2 points down
^‡
—thereby illustrating the Reconciliation of Opposites.

All that can be said against the method of the left-hand
pentagram, without prejudice, is that this form of the sacrament is always destructive of the Holy Spirit, in a certain sense. It should be remembered that the right-hand pentagram method is also destructive in most cases, especially by those practitioners so roundly condemned in Chapter 14 of Joyce’s
Ulysses
—and this group is certainly the majority these days. In view of the ecological crisis, it might even be wise to encourage the left-hand method and discourage the right-hand method at this time, to balance the Sacred Numbers.

Very few readers of the
Golden Bough
have pierced Sir Prof. Dr. Frazer’s veil of euphemism and surmised the exact method used by Isis in restoring life to Osiris, although this is shown quite clearly in extant Egyptian frescoes. Those who are acquainted with this simple technique of resurrecting the dead (which is
at least partially
successful in
all
cases and totally successful in most) will have no trouble in skrying the esoteric connotations of the Sacred Chao—or of the Taoist yin-yang or the astrological sign of cancer. The method almost completely reverses that of the pentagrams, right or left, and it can even be said that in a certain sense it was not Osiris himself but his brother, Set, symbolically understood, who was the object of Isis’s magical workings.
In every case, without exception, a magical or mystical symbol always refers to one of the very few
*
variations of the same, very special variety of human sacrifice: the “one eye opening” or the “one hand clapping;” and this sacrifice cannot be partial—it must culminate in death if it is to be efficacious
. The literal-mindedness of the Saures, in the novel, caused them to become a menace to life on earth; the reader should bear this in mind. The sacrifice is not simple. It is a species of cowardice, epidemic in Anglo-Saxon nations for more than three centuries, which causes most who seek success in this field to stop short before the death of the victim.
Anything less than death—that is, complete oblivion—simply will not work
.
*
(One will find more
clarity on this crucial point in the poetry of John Donne than in most treatises alleging to explain the secrets of magick.)

A. YIN-YANG; B. SACRED CHAO; C. OUROBOROS, THE SERPENT EATING ITS OWN TAIL; D. ASTROLOGICAL SIGN OF CANCER; E. SWASTIKA; F. ROMAN CATHOLIC SACRED HEART; G. HEXAGRAM.

The symbolism of the swastika is quite adequately explained in Wilhelm Reich’s
Mass Psychology of Fascism
.

Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, is chiefly emblematic of the Mass of the Holy Ghost.
*

The Roman Catholic symbolism of the Sacred Heart is strikingly overt, especially to readers of Frazer and Payne-Knight. In essence, it is the same notion conveyed by the cartoonist’s conventional rendering of Cupid shooting his arrow into a red pulsating heart. This is the basic meaning of the Dying God and the Resurrection. The identification of Christ with the pelican who stabs its own heart with its beak (to feed its young) is an analogous rendering of the same motif. We repeat that it was only because the Saure family so misread these simple symbols that they became cruel and sadistic.