Marijuana, of course, also puts you on the fifth circuit — right-brain rapture — but only temporarily. It was one of Crowley’s secret teachings, only passed on verbally to promising students, that the combination marijuana + tantra was the key to rapid mutation into a permanent Rapture Circuit.
Graphic above: Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast 666.
It occurred to me that I finally had the secret of the Illuminati. They were not the fantasy of right-wing paranoids. “The Illuminati” was one of the names of an underground mystical movement using sexual yoga in the Western world. The veils of obscurity and mystery around such figures as Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Cagliostro, the original Rosicrucians (17th century), Crowley himself, and various other key figures in the “conspiracy,” had nothing to do with politics or plots to take over the world. It was a screen to protect them from persecution by the Holy Inquisition in earlier centuries and from puritanical policemen in our time.
This historical pattern of persecution and cover-up has confused the transmission considerably. Some of the groups called “The Illuminati” at one time or another have not had this particular secret in their mind-programming syllabus. Some groups not called “The Illuminati” have had it, to confuse matters further (e.g., the Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, to which Hieronymus Bosch belonged and which greatly influenced his paintings, had the secret, as did some but not all of the Rosicrucian and Freemasonic orders). I have done what I could to clear up the historical picture in another book.27
The Crowleyan system, very briefly, is a synthesis of three elements:
1. Western occultism. The secret “illuminated” teaching out of 19th century Rosicrucianism, possibly going back through Renaissance magick societies, medieval witchcraft, the Knights Templar, European Sufis, etc., to Gnosticism, and thence back possibly to the Eleusinian Mysteries and Egyptian cults. Basically, as Crowley says, this method consists of dangerous “physiological experiments” — using ritual, sometimes drugs, sometimes sex, to jolt the nervous system into “higher” functioning (new neurological circuits).
2. Eastern yoga, including meditation plus physical exercises to make meditation easier and more natural. Another system of activating higher circuits.
3. Modern scientific method. Crowley taught total skepticism about all results obtained, the keeping of careful objective records of each “experiment,” and detached philosophical analysis after each stage of increased awareness.
It is this synthesis of Eastern and Western occult traditions with modern scientific method that is probably Crowley’s major achievement. His notorious anti-Christian philosophy — a blend of Nietzschean Supermanism and anarcho-fascist Darwinism — is quite distinct from his methodology. Whether you like that philosophy or not (and the Libertarian does not), you can still use the methodology of research Crowley devised.
A Discordian signal from Aldous Huxley, deceased
As Shea and I went on working on Illuminatus, the Materialist began his first experiments with Crowley’s techniques of mutating consciousness.
In one experiment, I banned the use of the word “I” from my conversation for one week. Mad Aleister recommends what Skinner later called “negative reinforcement” in cases of relapse; he violently slashed his arm with a razor every time he slipped and said “I.” Your less hardy narrator substituted a less heroic control: I bit my thumb, hard, at each slip. By about the fourth day, I had a very sore thumb and an even more painful ego. The subjectivity and self-centeredness of normal human consciousness was hideously obvious to me. By the seventh day I had entered an altered state of consciousness and regarded ego as something of an inconvenient fiction.
In another experiment, the Shaman bought a deck of Tarot cards, announced that he was psychic, and started giving divinations. This rapidly forced me to use portions of my brain normally not used, and I became aware of neurological functions growing in a quite astonishing manner. Of course, I was here running head-first into the brick wall of my own ingrained Skepticism and it was two years before anything happened of a really dramatic nature. Meanwhile, I became alert to all sorts of signals previously invisible; my empathy with others was becoming intensified. I also learned a great deal about how easy it is to deceive those who want to believe; and this showed how easily I might be deceived if I wanted to believe.
The Shaman also experimented extensively with Crowley’s method of achieving and transcending religious visions. This is based on Hindu bhakti yoga and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, with a typically Crowleyan difference. In bhakti yoga, you form a love-bond with a particular divinity, dedicate every waking moment to Him (or Her) and invoke that Divine Being by every method possible, especially vivid visual imagination. Loyola’s method is similar, except that you have no choice about which Divinity to invoke. Crowley’s twist is to carry this through until you experience a real manifestation of the God (a “Contact” in UFO jargon), and then immediately stop, and start over with a different god. After you have run through three or four divinities in this manner, you will understand Nasrudin’s Donkey (the neuro-programmer) and you will be increasingly skeptical about everybody’s reality-maps, including your own.
Other Crowley exercises the author tried are not described here, because they are too dangerous for ordinary or casual experimenters. Crowley always insisted that nobody should try his more advanced techniques without (a) being in excellent health, (b) being competent in at least one athletic skill, (c) being able to conduct experiments accurately in at least one science, (d) having a general knowledge of several sciences, (e) being able to pass an examination in formal logic and (f) being able to pass an examination in the history of philosophy, including Idealism, Materialism, Rationalism, Spiritualism, Comparative Theology, etc. Without that kind of general knowledge and the self-confidence and independence of thought produced by such study, magick investigation will merely blow your mind. As Brad Steiger has said, the lunatic asylums are full of people who naively set out to study the occult before they had any real competence in dealing with the ordinary.
The first results of the author’s Crowleyan experiments were a vast increase in his already abundant skepticism — to the point where he was skeptical at last even of skepticism itself — and an ability to achieve ecstasy and contact mysterious “entities” without psychedelic drugs.
Coincidences-in-23 also began to multiply more rapidly than the National Debt. For instance, my first meeting with Malaclypse the Younger (Greg Hill), creator of the great Principia Discordia, occurred on April 23, and, while we were discussing this, a glazier who was repairing a broken window in the apartment presented his bill. The bill was numbered 05675 (5+ 6 + 7 + 5 = 23) and the price was $7.88 (7 + 8 +8 = 23). In commemoration of that Triple Whammy, we rearranged the chronology to have Illuminatus begin on April 23.
The 23s accumulated faster. For the first time, the Shaman began to wonder: was this all the metaprogrammer (selective perception) or was there an element of PK (psychokinesis) about it? Was one unconsciously making it happen, the way a “poltergeist child” makes furniture fly around? One couldn’t yet take the second hypothesis seriously, but the fact that one was capable of wondering about it indicated the direction the experiments were taking.
Then came the Huxley synchro-mesh.
I was reading Laura Archera Huxley’s This Timeless Moment and came to the last chapter, concerning Laura’s attempts to communicate with Aldous after his death. About that possibility I was (and still am) a rather hardened cynic; I know too much about how mediums operate. In this case, Laura got her results from Keith Milton Rinehart, a medium who has performed credibly in scientific tests. Rinehart said to Laura that Aldous wanted to transmit “classic evidence of survival,” which in parapsychology means something that could not be explained by the alternative theory of ESP — i.e., Rinehart reading Laura’s mind. After a time, he announced that he had a signal: Laura should go to Aldous’ private study, which she seldom entered,
and there pick up the fifth book on a certain shelf, which she had not read. Rinehart said that the message was on page 17, line 23.
The Numerologist sat up straight when he read that.
Laura got the book, and indeed it was one that she hadn’t read — a collection of essays on modern writers. On page 17, line 23, she found:
Aldous Huxley does not surprise us in this admirable communication in which paradox and erudition in the poetic sense and the sense of humor are interlaced in such an efficacious form.28
The Net or the Network?
I must admit that some eerie thoughts went through my head on reading that exquisitely worded sentence, somehow transmitted through Keith Milton Rinehart in his attempt to pick up a signal from the dead Aldous Huxley.
Among other things, the Shaman wondered for a crazy moment if the whole 23 enigma might not be a world-wide astral plot by Aldous and other humorous sages to produce cumulative evidence over decades that they were, indeed, alive-though-dead and still communicating with us.
The resolute anti-Spiritualist need not bail out at this point, or throw the book away; after all, it was only a passing thought.
And the 23 Mystery was to get much more mysterious a few years later, as we shall see.
Meanwhile, the complexity of the synchronicity mesh (Jano Watts’s “Net”) was gradually dawning on me. Aldous Huxley’s first book on psychedelics, through conservative historian Russell Kirk’s review of it, originally got me interested in chemical neuro-programming. Aldous was a personal friend of Jano and Alan Watts, and of Tim Leary. Aldous died on the same day as John F. Kennedy. Kerry Thornley, widely believed among Garrisonite conspiracy buffs to be “the second Oswald,” named his son Aldous Wilson Thornley — after Aldous and me. And Aldous had originally been turned on to peyote by Aleister Crowley in 1929.29
Crowley, remember, styled himself Epopt of the Illuminati. His magazine, Equinox, bore the masthead on each issue: “A Journal of Scientific Illuminism.”
The synchronized Net began to look even more like a conscious Network when I read Alan Watts’s autobiography in 1975 and discovered that he had been initiated into a magickal order, using Crowley-style sex-yoga, way back in the 1930s. Alan describes his initiator as “a rascal-guru in the tradition of Crowley and Gurdjieff,” and gives his name as Mitrinovic.30
After the initiation. Watts became an Episcopal priest for a while, and did a great deal to re-introduce exotic ritual (magickal . . .?) elements into the ceremonies, so much so that he was occasionally criticized for it. Later, he left the Church and became a leading popularizer of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Gnostic Christianity. He turned me on to Zen in 1957, to Leary in 1964, to Crowley in 1971.
“I am not a Guru or a philosopher or even a teacher,” he told me earnestly on one occasion. “I am merely an entertainer.”
One wonders whom Alan was entertaining? And was he part of a Net of coincidence or a Network of adepts?
And who was the mysterious Mitrinovic who initiated Alan? Was he a Sufi or one of the Illuminati — or are the Illuminati merely the European branch of the Sufis?
The latter theory — that the Illuminati are Sufis — is claimed as historical fact by Sufi author Idries Shah.31
Indeed, Shah goes further and says that the Illuminati were originally a Sufi sect who discovered the Secret of Secrets coded into the famous lamp-and-light verse in the Koran, which they interpret symbolically. The verse reads:
Allah is the Light of the heavens and earth. His Light is resembled by a lamp within a niche. The lamp is within a crystal, like a shining star. [Italics added.]
Aleister Crowley referred to the Illuminati also as the Argentum Astrum, or (Order of the) Silver Star. We will soon find reasons to think we can identify the star that is referred to in both cases.
The Lady of Guadalupe
In 1971, I quit my job at Playboy because doing the same thing, every day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, is a damned bore, no matter how interesting the work intrinsically is. After five years, even at $20,000 per, you will become a zombie if you don’t seek adventure and change.
The only reason most people remain in the same jobs, the same towns, the same belief-systems, year after year, decade after decade, is, of course, that cultural conditioning, in every tribe, is a process of gradually narrowing your tunnel-reality. The way to stay young (comparatively; until the longevity Pill is discovered) is to make a quantum jump every so often and land yourself in a new reality-matrix.
I jumped from the Bunny Empire to San Miguel de Allende, a town in the mountains north of Mexico City which has been declared a national monument by the government and is deliberately kept as it was at the time of the 1810 Revolution.
Of course, one could not escape the Illuminati. I soon found that Father Hidalgo, who started the 1810 rebellion in San Miguel, was both a Mason and a Jesuit — the Church had not outlawed Masonry at that time — and had decorated many churches around the area with the Eye-in-the-Triangle design.
I got interested in Father Hidalgo, who liked to quote the heretic, Voltaire, and who used the slogan, “Viva Nuestra Senora Guadalupe y mueron gubernacion mala” (Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe and death to bad government!). The Lady of Guadalupe is officially believed to be the Virgin Mary, of course, but many skeptical archaeologists regard Her as an old Aztec sky-goddess in very slight disguise (just as Saint Brigit is the old Celtic goddess, Brigit, in disguise). She has more miracles to Her credit than any other BVM manifestation; Jacques Vallee has found numerous parallels between Her and the modern UFOnaut Space Lady who has appeared to many child Contactees in recent years. Most recently, in the 1920s, an anarchist attempted to destroy the “miraculous” painting of Her in Her basilica outside Mexico City by throwing a bomb at the painting. Everything around the painting was damaged, but the painting “miraculously” survived. Or so the Church claims.
At this point, the Shaman had a good “astral” contact going with Nuit, the Egyptian goddess of the stars, using Crowley’s methods of invocation (and following Crowley’s injunction not to attribute “objective reality or philosophical validity” to any communication so received). He did not know, yet, that Nuit was especially related to Sirius by the Egyptians, but he did know, from Frazer and other anthropologists as well as from Carl Jung’s books, that Nuit and the BVM were the same archetype under two different names. He began addressing Her as Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe and trying to tune in to Father Hidalgo’s relationship with Her.
She informed the questing Shaman, on one astral trip, that She had cured him of polio in his childhood.
Checking back with his mother, the Skeptic discovered that indeed his mother had made special devotions to the Virgin at that time, to achieve his cure. Officially, of course, he was not cured by these medieval and superstitious offerings; but the truth is even more amusing than that. I was cured by the Sister Kenny method — which at the time was being denounced as witchcraft and delusion by the American Medical Association. My parents had by “luck” or coincidence found a doctor who believed in and used the Sister Kenny technique . . .*
~•~
* Most of the children who had polio in the 1930s, like the author, and were not treated by the Kenny method but by orthodox A.M.A. therapy, are still crippled. I am quite mobile and need a cane only occasionally.
~•~
Meanwhile, Tim Leary’s struggle to stay out of jail, which had begun when G. Gordon Liddy first busted him in 1964, had finally come to its inevitable end. Dr. Leary was placed in a cage on January 27, 1970. Nine months later — a few weeks before his fiftieth birthday, and already a grandfather — Timothy justified his “youth-culture” image by an athletic climb across a fifty-foot cable over the prison wall to freedom. He left behind a pious note to the prison staff:
In the name of the Father and the Mother and the Holy Ghost — Oh, Guards — I leave now for freedom. I pray that you will free yourselves. To hold man captive is a crime against humanity and a
sin against God. Oh, guards, you are criminals and sinners. Cut it loose. Be free. Amen.
Within a few months, Tim was again imprisoned, by the Black Panther Party in Algiers. A second escape brought him to Switzerland, and a new imprisonment. The search for freedom was beginning to look barren. But, then, under a propaganda campaign by American intellectuals, led by playwright Arthur Miller and poet Allen Ginsberg, the Swiss government released Timothy, allowed him to remain in their territory, and refused to extradite him back to his cage in the California Archipelago. He was the first scientist since Kropotkin to make such a stylish escape from tyranny and still remain at large.
We were still in Mexico at the time, and I was writing two books under contract to Playboy Press. The whole family celebrated — in spite of Nixon and Kent State and Cambodia and everything, Tim Leary was free and there seemed to be some hope for this backward planet.
The Shaman’s whole family had now become involved in yoga and magick; weirdness was commonplace. One day during the Mexican sojourn, the author was meditating and two of his daughters walked through the room without seeing him. We were all quite struck by this, at the time, although I do not think I was literally invisible (as some of Crowley’s disciples claimed occasionally happened to him during heavy meditation). Rather, I feel fairly sure that what happened was merely that I was so silent, externally and internally, that I was as easy to ignore as a chair. I was not giving off a human vibration.
More puzzling was an incident involving my youngest daughter, Luna — who had always seemed, from birth onward, to have more intuition, ESP and strange powers than all the rest of us together. Luna was meditating in a room with our son, Graham, and our second-oldest daughter, Jyoti. Suddenly there was a thump which jarred Graham and Jyoti out of their trances. Luna, who had been on the right of them, was suddenly on the left. Naturally, they entered the belief-system that Luna had levitated, or teleported herself.
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