Mae Brussel, the world’s greatest single conspiracy buff, has insisted, over various underground radio stations, that virtually all the terrorist Left is a secret C.I.A. operation to discredit the rest of the Left. More recently, the U.S. Labor Party has taken up the same model and is accusing almost everybody in the Left of being a government agent working to discredit the Left. Although neither Mae Brussell nor the U.S.L.P. are any better at preparing an evidential case than the late Joseph McCarthy, the Watergate investigations revealed that the FBI’s “COINTELPRO” operation did involve agents provocateurs and attempts to divide the Left by inciting crime and spreading paranoia. Maybe all the paranoids are right, after all.
Maybe.
The Wilson family was living, like all Welfare families, in a slum apartment building, infested with roaches, and full of other social rejects. The black woman across the hall had an 8-year-old boy (illegitimate) who was dying of cancer. Every so often she would go off her head and start raving at the whole building, saying she wished the child would die and end the agony. The child, of course, heard this. Pity assaulted me; I wept.
A man on the second floor abruptly went schizo and began invading our apartment (and all the others) announcing, incoherently, that he was the Grand Master of the Sufi Order, or that the whole building was now a Zen monastery and he was the Abbot, or various other kinds of occult gibberish.
Once, the half-crazy woman across the hall threw this totally crazy man out of her apartment while he was raving in that fashion. He stood in the hall, between her apartment and ours, shouting that he was the Indian Ambassador to the U.N., and had come to Berkeley to feed starving American families. When the police finally came to take him away, he told them he was the leader of the Weather Underground. Pity tore at me with claws.
Then we discovered an old lady living in the hall closet. She was an old “crazy woman” well-known around Berkeley, who always lived in halls or parks. She wouldn’t apply to Welfare, to get enough money to pay rent somewhere, because she was sane enough to know they’d call her crazy. She was afraid they’d put her in a nuthouse.
The manager found her and threw her out. For a few nights, she camped in the bushes beside our building, then she moved on.
Pity and horror.
I am living in Gorki’s Lower Depths or some ghastly work of naturalistic fiction, I decided. The whole world has turned into a lesson in the futility of human hope. We’re all slowly going mad, from poverty and anxiety and mystery. Maybe my whole life was a hallucination; maybe I had never worked for Playboy and had 20 grand a year and eaten dinner with Hugh Hefner; maybe I had just imagined that. Maybe I had always been a Crazy Pauper in the Berkeley slums. It is an easy step from pity to self-pity.
The Crazy Pauper spent a whole day sitting in a chair, not writing, not talking to the family, not moving. Some might say I was catatonic.
At sunset, the Fool got up and went out on the porch and watched the sun sinking in the west, doing the Sufi heart-chakra exercise, forcing myself to love all beings. I came back to life.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
My book review desk at the San Francisco Phoenix the next day had a volume entitled The Day the Dollar Dies by somebody named Willard Cantelon. Flipping through it, I saw that it was about my old buddies, the Bavarian Illuminati.
I read Mr. Cantelon’s version of the Illuminati Conspiracy with some interest. It appears that the Illuminati are currently plotting to wreck the international financial system and cause the disruption or fall of all the strong governments in the world. When chaos is complete, contact with Higher Intelligences in outer space will be announced.
But, says Mr. Cantelon, these Higher Intelligences are actually Satan and his fallen angels, who will appear on Earth as superhuman and benign beings; the masses will accept them as saviors, not recognizing their Evil Nature; and then we are done for. Satan will institute One World Government and One World Religion — those twin bugaboos of the extreme Right — after which money will be abolished and a computerized credit system will come into effect everywhere.
Everybody will be tattooed on the forehead and wrist with a credit number, and every “purchase” will consist only in having the numbers scanned by computers placed in every store or bank. This is the key to a tyranny that can never be resisted, because any rebel will merely have his credit cut off, and will be unable to buy food, clothing or shelter.
All this, Mr. Cantelon assures us, is foretold in Revelations, chapter 13, 16-17:
He causeth all small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell save he that had the mark or the number.
I remembered the famous response of Robert Welch, chairman of the John Birch Society, when told that his conspiracy theories were fantastic: “Yes, but we are living in fantastic times.” I laughed out loud.
Only after weeks had passed did I begin to think that I had, rather absent-mindedly, passed through what mystics call “the dark night of the soul,” or “crossing the abyss.” Whatever one calls it, I reached a depth of despair and deliberately decided to love the world instead of pitying myself; and, afterwards, I was no longer afraid of anything.
It didn’t even bother me when San Francisco conspiracy buffs, looking at the same picture from a different angle, decided that Leary and I were really the ringleaders of the Illuminati and had masterminded the Kennedy and other assassinations. When the above-ground mouthpiece of the S.L.A., the Bay Area Research Collective, claimed I was Leary’s C.I.A. “babysitter,” I laughed again. When an anonymous bomb threat arrived the week after, the Fool was amused at his own amusement. Sufism had vindicated itself: the heart-chakra exercise works. “Perfect love casteth out fear.” I was beginning to emerge on the other side of Chapel Perilous.
Mystery Babalon
Crowleymas 1974 — October 12, often associated with an Italian navigator who introduced slavery to the New World and syphilis to the Old — was celebrated at our apartment house with weird and eldritch festivities. Arlen and I, representing the Discordian Society, together with Stephen upstairs (Reformed Druids of North America), Claire and Carol in another apartment (witches, connected with the New Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn), and the Great Wild Beast Furtherment Society (which is really Stephen and me and another neighbor named Charles), opened all our rooms to a Crowleymas Party and invited nearly 100 local wizards and mystics.
“There are always paranoid vibes at Crowleymas parties,” Isaac Bonewitz, of the Chasidic Druids of North America, likes to warn people, with an eerie chuckle.
In fact, Crowley has attracted the worst as well as the best elements in the occult world, and a self-declared “Crowleyan” is as likely to be a dangerous kook as a high adept.
The party was just starting when the Shaman was called to the phone, for a bitch of a conversation. My caller was a Dr. H. (not his real initial) who is a very gifted psychiatrist, rather fascinated with Leary and Crowley (and me). It seemed that he was having a bad acid trip, couldn’t get control of the anxiety, and wanted my help. The Shaman has a reputation for great healing and tranquilizing vibes in dealing with people on bad acid trips, but he had never done it over the phone before. Twenty minutes later, when Dr. H. was calmed and going off into a good trip, I felt absolutely drained.
The Wizard returned to the living room. Immediately, Tom (another alias) sat down next to me, laughed shrilly, cracked a silly joke, and said, “I think I may be going crazy again.” (He had been in a nut house for a few months about eight years before.) The Philosopher spent three hours, in the midst of the kind of noisy party you find only in Berkeley and only among hippies and witches, practicing psychotherapy without a license. Tom was convinced, finally, that he didn’t have to go crazy again, that he was the programmer of his own computer, and that it had only been a hallucination that made him think the computer was starting to program him.
The Wizard was now even more drained; and th
en Jacques Vallee arrived.
I had wanted to talk to Doctor Vallee for several months now and I immediately kidnapped him into a room which the other party-goers were not informed about. On the way, we spotted Hymenaeus Alpha (Grady McMurty), Caliph of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and his wife, Phylis. Tom, still giggling at inappropriate moments but no longer sure he was going mad, tagged along.
The Skeptic had heard Jacques Vallee talk at a conference on Science and Spirit, sponsored by the Theosophical Society, earlier in the year. He had taken a new approach to the UFO mystery and was systematically feeding all the reports of extraterrestrial contacts into a giant computer. The computer was programmed to look for various possible repeated patterns. Jacques said that the evidence emerging suggested to him that the UFOs weren’t extraterrestrial at all, but that they seemed to be intelligent systems intent on convincing us they were extraterrestrial.
Now the Skeptic started pumping Jacques about his evidence that they weren’t extraterrestrial. He started to explain that, analyzing the reports chronologically, it appeared that They (whoever or whatever they are) always strive to give the impression that they are something the society they are visiting can understand. In medieval sightings, he said, they called themselves angels; in the great 1902 flap in several states, one of the craft spoke to a West Virginia farmer and said they were an airship invented and flown from Kansas; in 1940s-1950s sightings, they often said they were from Venus; since Venus has been examined and seems incapable of supporting life, they now say they are from another star-system in this galaxy.
“Where do you think they come from?” I asked.
Doctor Vallee gave the Gallic form of the classic scientific Not-Speculating-Beyond-The-Data head-shake. “I can theorize, and theorize, endlessly,” he said, “but is it not better to just study the data more deeply and look for clues?”
“You must have some personal hunch,” I insisted.
He gave in gracefully. “They relate to space-time in ways for which we have, at present, no concepts,” he said. “They cannot explain to us because we are not ready to understand.”
I asked Grady McMurty if Aleister Crowley had ever said anything to him implying the extraterrestrial theory which Kenneth Grant, Outer Head of another Ordo Templi Orientis, implies in his accounts of Crowley’s contacts with Higher Intelligences.
“Some of the things Aleister said to me,” Grady replied carefully, “could be interpreted as hints pointing that way.” He went on to quote Crowley’s aphorisms about various of the standard entities contacted by Magick. The Abramelin spirits, for instance, need to be watched carefully. “They bite,” Aleister explained in his best deadpan am-I-kidding-or-not? style. The Enochian “angels,” on the other hand, don’t always have to be summoned. “When you’re ready, they come for you, ” Aleister said flatly.
(The Enochian entities were first contacted by Dr. John Dee in the early 17th Century. Dr. Dee, court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth and also an important mathematician, has been controversial from his own time to ours, some writers regarding him as a genius of the first rank and others as a clever lunatic. According to two interesting books. The World Stage and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, both by a most scrupulous historian, Dr. Francis Yates, Dee was almost certainly a prime mover in the “Illuminati” and “Rosicrucian Brotherhoods” of that time, which played a central role in the birth of modern science. The alleged UFOnaut from Uranus which communicated with the two Naval Intelligence officers gave a name, AFFA, which is a word in the “angelic” language used by the entities Dee contacted. It means Nothing. George Hunt Williamson also got some words in “angelic” from his Space Brothers, remember.)
The outstanding quality of UFO contactees, Jacques Vallee said at this point, was incoherence. “I now have grave reservations about all physical details they supply,” he said. “They are like people after an auto accident. All they know is that something very serious has happened to them.” Only the fact that so many cases involve other witnesses, who see something in the sky before the “contactee” has his-her strange experience, justifies the assumption that what happens is more than “subjective.”
“Largely,” Doctor Vallee summarized, “they come out of it with a new perspective on humanity. A religious perspective, in general terms. But all the details are contradictory and confusing.” He regarded green men, purple giant-men, physical craft with windows in them, etc., as falling into the category psychologists call “substitute memory,” always provided by the ingenious brain when the actual experience is too shocking to be classified.
I asked how many in the room had experienced the contact of what appeared to be Higher Intelligence. Grady and Phylis McMurty put up their hands, as did two young magicians from the Los Angeles area, and myself. Jacques Vallee, curiously, looked as if he might raise his hand, but then evidently changed his mind and did not. I said I inclined to believe the Higher Intelligences were extraterrestrial, and asked what the others thought.
Grady McMurty — Caliph of the Ordo Templi Orientis — said, in effect, that the theory of higher dimensions made more sense to him than the extraterrestrial theory in terms of actual space ships entering our biosphere.
The two Los Angeles magicians agreed.
Tom, who had been a witch for five years and hadn’t raised his hand when asked for contactee testimony, said that the Higher Intelligences are imbedded in our language and numbers, as the Cabalists think, and have no other kind of existence. He added that every time he tried to explain this he saw that people thought he was going schizophrenic and he began to fear that they might be right, so he preferred not to talk about it at all. Tom — who is a computer programmer by profession, a witch only by religion — later added a bit to this, saying that all that exists is information and coding; we only imagine we have bodies and live in space-time dimensions.
Doctor Vallee listened to all this with a bland smile, and did not seem to regard any of us as mad.
(A few days later, in discussion with the former Vacaville prison psychologist, Dr. Wesley Hiler, I asked him what he really thought of Dr. Leary’s extraterrestrial contacts. Specifically, since he didn’t regard Leary as crazy or hallucinating, what was happening when Leary thought he was receiving extraterrestrial communications? “Every man and woman who reaches the higher levels of spiritual and intellectual development,” Dr. Hiler said calmly, “feels the presence of a Higher Intelligence. Our theories are all unproven. Socrates called it his daemon. Others call it gods or angels. Leary calls it extraterrestrial. Maybe it’s just another part of our brain, a part we usually don’t use. Who knows?”)
Since everybody in the room at this point had either had the required experience, or was willing to speculate about it and study it objectively rather than merely banishing it with the label “hallucination,” I went into my rap about the parallels between Leary and Wilhelm Reich. “The attempt to destroy both Dr. Reich and Dr. Leary reached its most intense peak right after they reported their extraterrestrial contacts,” I said. “I keep having very weird theories about what that means . . .”
Grady McMurty nodded vigorously. “That’s the $64,000 question,” he said emphatically. “For years I’ve been asking Phylis and everybody else I know: why does the gnosis always get busted? Every single time the energy is raised and large-scale group illuminations are occurring, the local branch of the Inquisition kills it dead. Why, why, why?”
Nobody had any very conclusive ideas.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Grady said. “There’s war in Heaven. The Higher Intelligences, whoever they are, aren’t all playing on the same team. Some of them are trying to encourage our evolution to higher levels, and some of them want to keep us stuck just where we are. ”
According to Grady, some occult lodges are working with those nonhuman intelligences who want to accelerate human evolution, but some of the others are working with the intelligences who wish to keep us near an animal level of awareness.
This is
a standard idea in occult circles and it can safely be stated, without exaggeration, that every “school” or “lodge” of adepts that exists is regarded, by some of the others, as belonging to the Black Brotherhood of the evil path. Grady’s own Ordo Templi Orientis, indeed, has been accused of this more often than have most other occult lodges. I have personally maintained my good cheer and staved off paranoia, while moving among various occult groups as student or participant, by always adhering rigidly to the standard Anglo-Saxon legal maxim that every accused person must be regarded as innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. This obviously spares me a lot of worry, but the more guarded approach is very well argued by Isaac Bonewitz, the author of Real Magick. “Paranoid magicians outlive the others,” Isaac says.
Somehow the conversation drilled away from Grady’s concept of “war in Heaven.” Several times, Grady tried to steer us back there, but each time we wandered on to a different subject. Tom said later that he felt a presence in the room deliberately pushing us away from that topic . . .
Dr. H. — the psychiatrist whose bad acid-trip had started the Crowleymas party off so jumpily for me — dropped by the next day, to thank me for “talking him down” from his anxiety attack.
He also, it soon appeared, wanted to tell me about his accelerating experiences with magick. It had started over two years earlier, after an intensive seminar at Esalen. Dr. H. suddenly found that he could see “auras.” (The aura of the human body, known to shamans and witches since time immemorial, has been repeatedly rediscovered by scientists, most of whom were thereupon denounced as “cranks.” Franz Anton Mesmer called it “animal magnetism,” in the 16th century. In the 19th, Baron Reichenbach called it “OD.” In the 1920s, Gurvich named it “the mytogenic ray.” Wilhelm Reich rediscovered it in the 1930s, called it “orgone energy,” and was destroyed by AMA bigots who charged that he was hallucinating it. Kirlian photography has now demonstrated beyond all doubt that this aura exists.) Dr. H. soon found, further, that he could use the aura as a diagnostic tool in analyzing new patients. This experience, Leary’s books, and a lecture by me on Crowley’s magick, led him to further experiments.
Final Secret of the Illuminati Page 19