The curtain falls and violent percussion instruments and sirens create a din as the audience leaves.
(For the curious, the whole text of this play can be found in Antonin Artaud, Collected Works, Vol. II. Calder and Boyars: London, 1971.)
Artaud went “insane” about ten years after writing this play, and spent the World War II years in a mental hospital. After the war ended, he regained his “sanity” and lived his final years in Paris as a hero to the young intelligentsia, who regarded him as a prophet. The people who were allegedly “sane” during the years of Artaud’s hospitalization spent most of their time trying to blow up as much as possible of the civilized world.
The Dark Companion
On July 23, 1976 — the third anniversary of my original Sirius experience — I made an attempt to duplicate the effect, which is certainly interesting and suggestive, however one explains it. This time I did a formal invocation of Hadit, the Intelligence identified with Sirius in Crowley’s symbology, using all the paraphernalia of ceremonial magick. I was assisted by Isaac Bonewits, author of Real Magick, and Charles Hixson, a computer programmer with an interest in Cabala.
Neither Isaac nor Charles experienced anything out of the ordinary. I got into a high, spaced-out “mystical” state, but with no objective phenomena immediately forthcoming, even though I had focused my energy on producing some sort of objective effect.
The next week, however. Time magazine ran a full-page review of Temple’s The Sirius Mystery. I found this, quite simply, infuriating: it was so easy to see it as an answer to my ritual, and it was equally easy to dismiss it as a “mere coincidence.” Somewhere, I seemed to hear a mocking laugh and a cryptic whisper, “We’re going to keep you guessing a while longer.”
Another full-page item that week, alas, was even more suggestive and even less conclusive. Rolling Stone had a display ad for a new rock group called Rameses, which came from Germany and featured a singer named Winifred. That was weird by itself, because in the novel Illuminatus, The Illuminati turn out to be run by a German rock group (called not Rameses but the American Medical Association) featuring a singer named Winifred. What was really provocative, however, was that this group was being promoted in this country by Annuit Coeptis records and the ad featured the eye-on-the-pyramid design which we have seen so many times linked with the Illuminati and with Sirius.
Several readers of Illuminatus actually cut the ad out of Rolling Stone and sent it to me, asking how I had “managed” this trick. I told them it was magick.
Saul-Paul Sirag has suggested recently, perhaps with some whimsy, that the SMI2LE scenario will eventually, as science works on the theory of interstellar propulsion, result serendipitously in time-travel. Some time in the 1990s, he told me, some of us will be involved in the first experiments on a time-machine. Like all prototypes, this will have some bugs in it, and it will create, unintentionally, a series of wrinkles or weirdnesses in the time-flow, which rolling backwards will create the “occult” events which drew so many of us into the Starseed scenario in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Higher Intelligence behind all this is, then, literally ourselves-in-the-future.
Was all that Sirius material just a red herring then? Oddly enough, perhaps not; perhaps, if we are to have time-travel, Sirius will be intimately involved in it. Astronomer A.T. Lawton and journalist Jack Stonely, in their book CETI, point out that rotating Black Holes, produced by collapsing neutron stars, would theoretically make fine time-machines. The closest dwarf star we might use for this purpose, they point out, is the Dark Companion of Sirius.95
This reminds me that Osiris, the Dark Companion of Sirius in Egyptian mythology, was the God of Resurrection and of Eternal Life. I cannot help recalling a Hermetic treatise quoted by Temple which says that the Dark Rite of Osiris (granting Immortality) will not be fully understood until we “pursue the stars unto the heights.” As Temple remarks, that does seem to mean going out there in spaceships.
The Dark Rite of Osiris (granting Immortality) will only be understood when we pursue the gods to their home in the Stars.
Via Dolorosa
In September 1976, I was teaching a seminar on these ideas with physicists Sirag and Sarfatti, psychologist Jean Millay and mathematician Michael Mohle. Jean Millay, in the course of her presentation of bio-feedback instruments, demonstrated how to harmonize the brain-waves of all the participants. When we entered the alpha state simultaneously, I recognized it at once; it was the state in which I find myself whenever my ESP suddenly kicks into action. I wondered if I would get a flash of that sort, and immediately it told me that my son, Graham, would die soon.
Everybody who gets involved in parapsychology at all eventually realizes, with some anxiety, that you are likely to get that kind of precognition at any time. I threw myself, by concentration methods learned from Crowley, into a high-energy state and banished fear and anxiety.
Then, superstitiously, and feeling that I was finally succumbing to the gullibility I have seen capture many occult investigators, I set out on a course of rituals, in the following weeks, to protect Graham. Since I was aware that, according to magick theory, this might only deflect the calamity slightly, I included rituals to protect the rest of my family also.
I also prayed, for the first time in my adult life, for the strength to bear it, if I could not deflect it.
On October 2, Luna — she who had perhaps levitated once, and who had most certainly taught me much about the Wheel of Karma — came to my room while I was writing and asked me to recommend a novel for her to review for a class at school. While we were discussing this, I was suddenly moved to say to her, “I’m awfully busy these days and we hardly ever talk together. I hope you know I love you as much as ever.”
She gave me that wonderful Clear Light smile of hers, and said, “Of course I know that.”
That was our last conversation, and I will always be grateful for the impulse that led me to tell her one last time how much I love her.
On October 3, Luna was beaten to death at the store where she was working after school, in the course of a burglary.
I was sleeping (taking a very uncharacteristic afternoon nap) when Officer Butler, a Berkeley policeman, came to the door and asked to speak to both my wife and myself. It has occurred to me that, because I never nap in the afternoons normally, my unconscious might have known and was preparing me with extra rest.
“It’s about your daughter, Luna,” the. officer said. “Please sit down.”
We sat down.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He was black and had the most pained eyes I have ever seen. “Your daughter is dead.”
“Oh, God, no,” I said, starting to weep and thinking how trite my words were: the Author who writes is always watching the human who lives, in my case. Horribly, I empathized totally with Officer Butler’s pity and embarrassment; I had lived this scene many times, 20 years ago, when I was an ambulance attendant and medical orderly. But in those cases I had played the role of the pitying and embarrassed witness to the grief of a suddenly bereaved family; now, abruptly and unbelievably, I was on the other side of the drama.
The next hour is very vague. I remember telling Arlen, “We were very, very lucky to have that Clear Light shining within our family for 15 years. We must never stop being grateful for that, even in our grief.” I was thinking of Oscar Ichazo’s luminous remark that “nobody is truly sane until he feels gratitude to the whole universe,” and beginning to understand what Oscar meant.
I remember sitting in the living room, talking very rationally with Graham, my son, and Karuna, my oldest daughter, and thinking, “Hell, grief isn’t so bad. I’ll get through this”; and a minute later I was sobbing uncontrollably again.
Late in the evening, I realized fully with total horror that this was going to be worse, much worse, than any other bereavement I have known. Having lost my father, my brother and my best friend in the last few years, I thought I was acquainted with grief and could distance myself from
it by the Crowley techniques of breaking any emotional compulsion. But this was of a different order of hellishness than other griefs: losing parents or brothers or friends just does not compare with losing a child you have adored since infancy. I am going to suffer as I have never suffered before, I thought, almost in awe; and I remembered Tim Leary’s gallantry in prison and determined to bear my pain as well as he had borne his.
Then the phone rang and my dear friend, cyberneticist Michael McNeil asked me, gently, if we had considered cryonic preservation for Luna’s body, in the hope that future science would be able to resurrect her.
I was off Welfare by then, and earning decent cash regularly from my writing, but it was impossible. “We don’t have that kind of money,” I said.
“We can raise it,” Michael said. “Paul Segall and all the people at the Bay Area Cryonics Society will donate their labor free. I’ve got pledges for enough money to cover the first year’s expenses . . .”
“Pledges? Who?” I said stupidly.
“People who appreciate your writings on longevity and immortality, and want to help you now.”
I was stunned. It seemed to me that my writings were still, even with the success of Illuminatus, known only to small coteries in places like Texas and Missouri. By national standards, I was still very much an unknown.
“Hold on,” I said, and went to talk to Arlen. It was an excruciating moment. We had both felt that cryonic preservation was impossible on our income, and we were trying to accept the death of Luna with all the stoicism and forbearance we could muster. Would it be an unnecessary cruelty to ask Arlen to consider the long-range hope of resurrection?
Within a few seconds, after I had stumbled through an explanation, Arlen said, “Yes. Even if it doesn’t work for Luna, every cryonic suspension contributes to scientific knowledge. Somebody, some day, will benefit.”
“Oh, my darling,” I said, beginning to weep again. Like Luna, Arlen was teaching me one more time how to stop the Wheel of Karma, how to take bad energy and turn it into good energy before passing it on.
The next day was a melodrama, since Luna had not died naturally and we were creating a precedent: nobody, anywhere, had ever before tried to cryonically preserve a murder victim. Michael McNeil and Dr. Segall consulted a lawyer before confronting the coroner and the D.A. directly; one false move and we might have lost the gamble, snared in bureaucratic red tape and police business-as-usual. Fortunately, the coroner turned out to be a most broad-minded man and was immediately captured by the idea of the cryonic gamble. *
~•~
* Prof. R.C.W. Ettinger has written a detailed mathematical proof of the obvious: however you calculate the odds on cryonic preservation, and whatever way you estimate scientific advances, you come out with a chance above zero. Burial or cremation give you a chance of exactly zero.
~•~
Then, when all was going well, the next blow fell. Paul Segall called to inform me, haltingly, that Luna’s body had decomposed so far between the murder and the time she was found that cryonic preservation seemed virtually pointless.
“I suggest preservation of the brain,” he said.
I understood at once: that gave us two chances that were thinkable at this time (brain transplant and/or cloning), and who-knows-how-many other scientific alternatives in the future that we cannot imagine now.
“Do it,” I said.
And so Luna Wilson, who tried to paint the Clear Light and was the kindest child I have ever known, became the first murder victim to go on a cryonic time-trip to possible resuscitation. We are the first family in history to attempt to cancel the God-like power which every murderer takes into his hands when he decides to terminate life. Understanding fully the implications of what we were doing, I knew the answer to those who would ask me, as they did in later months, “Do you still oppose capital punishment?” The reply is, of course, that I oppose it more vehemently than ever. I have made a basic choice for life and against death and my whole psychology has changed in the process. If I still remember that all realities are neurological constructs and relative to the observer, I am nonetheless committed now to one reality above all alternatives: the reality of Jesus and Buddha, in which reverence for life is the supreme imperative.
I found myself remembering, over and over, the famous lines from Macbeth:
Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord’s annointed temple
These lines had puzzled me once, in high school; Duncan was murdered in his bedroom, not in a church. Later, of course, I learned that Shakespeare was employing the medieval metaphor that the body is the temple of the soul. In that metaphor, all murder is sacrilegious: for the body is the Lord’s dwelling and to kill it is to dispossess God, a bit, from the universe.
Sacrifice cattle, little and big: after, a child.
And I recalled poor John Keel when the bridge collapsed, killing one hundred Godlings, most of them asleep and not aware of their Godliness: “The lousy bastards have done it again. They knew this was going to happen.”
Luna was so beautiful that she could tell macho adolescent hoods to stop shoplifting because stealing makes more bad Karma, and they would stop. Even the cops loved her.
And how many fathers and mothers, in this cruelly insane century, have wept over murdered children as Arlen and I wept that night, and the next day, and many days.
Most sacrilegious murder . . .
The most elegant formulation of Bell’s Theorem, Saul-Paul Sirag was telling me the other day, is that there is no true separation anywhere. “Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
When the king of Wu sent Confucius into exile, many disciples followed the philosopher, but in later years one of them said he wished he could see his home again. “How is it far,” Confucius asked, “if you can think of it?”
Those words ran through Ezra Pound’s mind in the death-cells at Pisa, where he watched a man hanged every morning and waited to learn if he, too, would be sentenced to death. The words of Confucius appear, both in Chinese and English, in The Pisan Cantos, which Pound wrote in those horrible months, usually associated with the images of the diamond that is not destroyed in the avalanche and the “rose in the steel-dust,” the visible form created by an invisible magnetic field.
How is it far, if you can think of it?
The police caught the killer in a few days. He was a Sioux Indian, well-known around Berkeley, given to threats of suicide, constant alcoholism and grandiose claims that he would do something “great” for his people some day. I suppose, in his mind, he was getting even for Wounded Knee when he beat my daughter to death. The guys who dropped the napalm on the Vietnamese children thought they were protecting their homes from the barbarian hordes of “gooks.” Gurdjieff used to say. “Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness and decency on a planet of sleeping people?” And during the first World War, he said. “Of course, if they were to wake up, they’d throw down their guns and go home to their wives and families.”
In the following week, I often found myself in a room, going somewhere, without knowing how I had gotten there, or what I was looking for. I would think, almost with humor, “Oh, yes, you’re in Shock.”
I spent hours sitting on the sundeck, looking down over the cities of Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco and Daly City, and musing on the Zen paradox that every man, woman, and child down there thought they were as important as me, and they were all correct. I tried to write down or write out some of my feelings on the fourth day, but all I typed was “The murder of my child is no worse than the murder of anybody’s child; it only seems worse to the Ego.”
Meanwhile, literally hundreds of people came by, to express their own grief or to contribute to expenses. Over 100 merchants of Telegraph Avenue, where Luna was especially known and loved, contributed generously, without being asked.
Tim Leary offered to cancel his lecture tour and come stay with us for a week, to help. I told him that it was m
ore important to spread the SMI2LE message; but he called frequently on the phone thereafter to offer words of help to each of us in the family. One day he sent a telegram saying:
YOU ARE SURROUNDED BY A NETWORK OF
LOVE AND GRATITUDE. WE ARE ALL WITH
YOU AND SUPPORT YOU.
A network of love . . . the phrase struck me hard; after all, I had spent at least ten years asking if the occult matrix in which I was embroiled was a conscious Network or just a quantum Net of synchronicity. A network of love was what the Christians mean by the Communion of Saints, the Buddhists by the Sangha, occultists by the Secret Chiefs, Gurdjieff by the Conscious Circle of Humanity.
The Berkeley Barb called and asked if I could pick out a few of Luna’s poems for a memorial page they were doing. (Over and over, that first week, I was to be astonished to find how many people outside the family realized what I had thought only we knew: how special Luna was, how rare and loving . . .)
Going through Luna’s notebook, I picked out five poems to send to the Barb. Among them was
The Network
Look into a telescope
to see what I can
see:
baffled by the sight of
constellations
watching me.
I was overwhelmed by the coincidence-synchronicity with Leary’s telegram (YOU ARE SUPPORTED BY A NETWORK OF LOVE . . .) and my long years of speculation about the Net or the Network. I took a new imprint, Tim would say; I entered a belief system in which the Network of Love was not one hypothesis among many but an omnipresent Reality.
Once my eyes were truly open to it, the Network was everywhere, in every tree, every flower, in the sky itself, and the golden merry light that had been Luna was part of it. Once, such is the power of Will and Imagination, She spoke to me and said “Foot doot.” That had been among Her first spoken words and we had heard it daily for about a year, in 1963; it meant “fruit juice,” which She always preferred to milk.
Final Secret of the Illuminati Page 26