Sir John’s immediate response was a most cautious letter back to Mr. (George Cecil) Jones, asking very tactfully just how much Mr. Jones actually knew of the surviving lodge of Cabalistic Freemasons in London, who alleged descent from the Invisible College of the Rosy Cross (founded by the Sufi sage, Abramelin of Araby, and passed on by him through Abraham the Jew to Christian Rosenkreuz, who lies buried in the Cave of the Illuminati, which was somewhere in the Alps according to Sir John’s research, whatever that Scotch dog McNaughton might say).
The reply, within a week’s time, was a cautious letter that invited Sir John to have dinner with Jones sometime when visiting London, so that the matter might be discussed at suitable length with appropriate intimacy.
Sir John wrote back at once that he would be in London the following Thursday.
The next week was rainy and wet at Babcock Manor; Sir John didn’t go outdoors, and spent most of his time in his library poring over his first editions of Hermetic and Rosicrucian pamphlets from long ago, and puzzling once again upon the enigmatic writings of those he suspected of being part of the underground tradition of Cabalistic magick. He re-read The Alchemical Marriage of Christian Rosycross, with its strange medley of Christian and Egyptian allegorical figures, the Enochian fragments which Dr. John Dee had received from an allegedly superhuman being in the age of Elizabeth I, the sly and cryptic Triumphant Beast of Giordano Bruno, the writings of Bacon and Ludvig Prinn and Paracelsus. Again and again he encountered overt or coded references to that damnably mysterious Invisible College, composed of Illuminated men and women—Secret Chiefs—which allegedly governs all the world behind the scenes; and again and again he asked himself if he dared to believe it.
Sir John dreamed of the meeting with Jones in vivid detail no less than three times before the week passed. In each dream, Jones was dressed as a medieval wizard, with pointed hat and robes bearing the Order of Saint George with strange astrological glyphs, and he always led Sir John up a dark hill toward a crumbling Gothic building of indeterminate character midway between abbey and castle. This eldritch edifice was, of course (as Sir John knew even in the dreams), a blend of various illustrations he had seen depicting Chapel Perilous of the Grail legend or the Dark Tower to which Childe Roland came. Inside, according to occult lore, was everything he feared; and yet only by passing this test could he achieve the Rosicrucian goals—the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixer of Life, the Medicine of Metals, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness. In each case, he awoke with a start of fright as the door of the Chapel was opened for him and he heard within a humming as of a myriad of monstrous bees.
Once he dreamed of Dr. John Dee himself, court astrologer to Elizabeth, greatest mathematician of his time, constant associate of spirits and angels according to his own claims; and Dee was offering him “the solace berry,” a magical fruit that conferred immortality. “Take ye and eat from the tree Swifty ate,” Dee said, but the fruit smelled of excrement and was foul to the sight and touch and when Sir John tried to refuse it, a second figure, female and shockingly naked but with a cow’s head, appeared beside Dee, saying solemnly, “Ignatz never really injures,” as they were all suddenly standing again at the door of a vast insectoid Chapel Perilous. Sir John awoke in a sweat.
All the legends warned him that only the brave and the pure of heart may survive the journey through Chapel Perilous; and this was hardly encouraging, since like most introspective young men Sir John had much insight into his own fears but woefully little realization of the fears of others, thereby wrongly suspecting himself of being atypically timid and cowardly; while in the purity-of-heart department he knew that he distinctly left a great deal to be desired: there were fantasies that were decidedly unchaste, although he nearly always managed to stop such imaginings before the worst and most nameless details were actually visualized in all their lewd and sinful seductiveness. Even when he was caught up in the bestial tug of these animalistic desires, and the details of certain unmentionable items formed with total and compulsive clarity in his mind, he did not allow himself to linger voluptuously on the fantasy of actually fondling or intimately manipulating those particular items, desirable and monstrous and unspeakable as they were. If it could in truth be said that he did lapse on occasion, certainly he resisted successfully nearly all of the time such fantasies arose, and yet the guilt of those few, rare, hardly typical lapses did weigh heavily upon his conscience and seemed now to be a distinct bar against such a bicameral creature as himself entering the precincts of Chapel Perilous.
And that was all mythology, anyway: charming to dream about, but one would be mad to get involved with people who believed (or claimed) that they hopped over to Chapel Perilous and back as easily as one might buzz over to the tobacconist….
On Wednesday, Sir John could bear the loneliness of suspenseful indecision no longer. He summoned Dorn, the Babcock gamekeeper, and had a carriage fetched to drive him the three miles to the Greystoke estate, where he paid a casual family visit to his uncle, Viscount Greystoke, a greying but iron-muscled man of seemingly inexhaustible pragmatic wisdom—the richest and least eccentric of all the Babcock-Greystoke families, according to general opinion. After the usual small talk, Sir John finally framed his question.
“Do you believe, sir, that there are secret orders or lodges or fraternities that have survived over the centuries, transmitting certain kinds of occult or mystical knowledge which is normally unavailable to the human mind?”
Old Greystoke pondered for about thirty seconds. “No,” he said finally. “If there were, I would most certainly have heard about it.”
Sir John rode the three miles home in deep thought. Age and Wisdom had spoken, but what was the point of youth if it did not entitle you to disregard Age and Wisdom? The next morning he arose early and took the train to London. Sir John trusted his own scholarship: such lodges did exist, and the only way to test their claims of superior wisdom was to meet with them and find out for oneself what they really had to offer, besides the corrupted Hebraic passwords and absurd hand-grips of other Masonic orders.
There was an American newspaper in the railway carriage: a curiosity in itself, and it was open to a page of comic strips, an art form Sir John had never been able to fathom. He glanced at it idly and found that one sequence involved a malicious mouse named Ignatz who was always throwing bricks at a cat named Krazy. It was totally insane, and worse yet, the cat enjoyed being hit with the bricks, sighing contentedly as each missile bounced off her head, “Li’l dollink, always fetful.” That was evidently some debased American-Jewish dialect for “Little darling, always faithful.” Sir John shuddered. The whole thing was not funny at all; it was a bare-faced exploitation of the perversion named sadism. Or was it masochism? Or was it both? A gloomy omen, in any case….
This was entirely typical of the larval mentations of the domesticated hominids of Terra in those primitive ages. Crude sonic signals produced by the laryngeal muscles made up their speech-units which programmed all cortical cogitation into the grid provided by the local grammar, which they naïvely called logic or common sense. Beneath this typically primate confusion of signals with sources and maps with territories, a great deal of the hominid nervous system was genetically determined, like the closely related chimpanzee nervous system and the more distantly related cow nervous system, and hence operated on autopilot. The programs of territoriality, status hierarchy, pack-bonding, etc., functioned mechanically as Evolutionary Relative Successes since they served well enough for the ordinary mammal in ordinary mammalian affairs. Modes of status-domination, erotic signaling and rudimentary (subject-predicate) causal “thinking” were imprinted as mechanically as the territorial reflexes of baboons or the mating dances of peacocks. Since primate behavior only changes under the impact of new technology (Gilhooley’s First Law), the primitive “Industrial Revolution” already beginning had caused enough shock and confusion to liberate a few minds from mechanical repetition of this imprinted circuitry (Shock and confusi
on are the only techniques that loosen imprints in primates: Gilhooley’s Second Law), and a certain wistful speculative quality had entered the gene pool, leading within less than seventy years to the mutations involved in Space Migration and Life Extension; but of all this young Babcock was unaware. He couldn’t even imagine that in his own lifetime a man would fly the Atlantic.
Sir John arrived in London before noon, and decided to prepare for the meeting with Jones by spending the afternoon researching old Masonic materials in the British Museum.
In an Elizabethan alchemical pamphlet he found, by sheer coincidence, a long allegorical poem that strangely disturbed him, considering that he was bent upon contact with alleged manipulators of occult power. One stanza in particular haunted him as he rode by hansom across town to Simpson’s Café Divan, where he and Jones had agreed to meet. The very clops of the horse’s hooves seemed to carry the refrain:
Don’t believe the human eye
In sunlight or in shade
The puppet show of sight and sense
Is the Devil’s Masquerade
Passing the Savoy Theatre, Sir John saw that the D’Oyly Carte company was again doing Patience. He remembered, with some cheer, Bunthorne’s song:
If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep
for me,
Why what a singularly deep young man this deep
young man must he!
That mocking jingle was a refreshing breath of skepticism and British common sense, Sir John thought. When he entered Simpson’s, he was prepared to confront the enigmatic Mr. Jones without trepidation.
Mr. George Cecil Jones was stout, amiable and proved to have impeccable taste in wines. He was also reassuringly normal, wore no wizards hat and spoke of his children with great fondness; better still, he was an industrial chemist by profession and not at all the misty-eyed believer type who might be leading Sir John up the garden path into Cloud-Cuckoo Land. You couldn’t help liking and trusting him.
Jones appeared to be about forty, but was free of condescension toward Sir John’s youth; nor was he overtly impressed by Sir John’s title. A plain blunt Englishman with a bedrock of sound sense and decency, Sir John concluded—and yet it did take him a long time to open up even a little about the Invisible College.
“You must understand, Sir John, that these affairs are circled about with ferocious Oaths of Secrecy and dreadful pledges of silence,” Jones confided eventually. “All of that appears quite pointless in this free and enlightened age—pardon my irony—but it is part of the tradition, dating back to the days of the Inquisition, when it was, of course, even more necessary.”
Sir John, with the bluntness of youth, decided to answer this with a somewhat probing question. “Am I to take it, sir, that you are yourself bound by such an Oath?”
“Oh, God and Aunt Agnes,” Jones said, more amused than offended, “one simply doesn’t ask that on a first meeting. Consider the patience of the fisherman rather than the rapacity of the journalist if you would open the door to the Arcanum of Arcana.”
And he proceeded to attack his filet mignon with unabashed vigor, as if that equivocation were not tantamount to an admission. Sir John understood: he was being tested; his exact status on the evolutionary ladder was being estimated.
“Have you read my book on Cabala?” he asked next, trying a more circuitous approach. “Or merely the debate in the Historical Journal?”
“Oh, I’ve read your book,” Jones said. “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. There is nothing more poignant and gallant, on this planet, than a young man writing passionately about Cabala without any real experience of its mysteries.”
Sir John felt the needleprick in Jones’ words, but answered merely, “At that point, I was not concerned with personal experience, but merely with setting right the historical record.”
“But now,” Jones asked, “you are interested in personal experience?”
“Perhaps,” Sir John said carelessly, feeling Byronic and brave. “Mostly, I am concerned with proving my thesis that such groups have survived over the centuries—proving it so thoroughly that even that blockheaded mule in Edinburgh will have to admit I’m right!”
Jones nodded. “Wishing to prove oneself right is the usual motive for scholarship,” he said mildly. “But this group I mentioned has no interest in setting the historical record straight, or in advertising themselves. Do y’see, Sir John, that they really don’t care what the world at large thinks, or what the pompous asses in the universities think, either? They have entirely different interests.”
Sir John found himself half-believing that he was dining with a member of the same Invisible College that published the first Rosicrucian pamphlets of 1619 and 1623. He proceeded with great delicacy.
“In your letter,” he said, “you spoke of this group very carefully in the past tense. I believe your exact words were, ‘There has even been a lodge of true adepts continuing the hidden heritage right here in London, in this decade.’ How many years, exactly, has it been since the lodge existed?”
“It broke apart exactly ten years ago, in 1900.”
“And what was it called?”
“The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.”
Sir John exhaled deeply and took another sip of wine. “You are becoming less indirect in your answers,” he said happily. “I take that as a good sign. Let me advance to the main point in one step, then. Is it possible that the Order did not entirely break apart a decade ago?”
“Many things are possible,” Jones said, lighting a cigar and signaling for more wine. “Before we go any further, let me show you a simple document which every member of this Order must sign, and swear to, with the most horrible Oaths. Just glance it over for a minute, Sir John.” And he passed from his inner pocket a simple sheet of ordinary letterpaper, typed with a most usual office typewriter.
Sir John looked at this strange document with some care.
I [fill in name] do solemnly invoke He Whom the Winds Fear, the Supreme Lord of the Universe, by the Mason word [given to candidate before ritual] and swear that I, as a member of the Body of Christ, from this day forward will seek the Knowledge and Conversation of Mine Holy Guardian Angel, whereby I may acquire the Secret Knowledge to transcend mere humanity and be one with the Highest Intelligence; and if I ever use this Sacred Knowledge for monetary gain in any manner, or to do harm to any human being, may I be accursed and damned; may my throat be cut, my eyes be burned out and my corpse thrown into the sea; may I be hated and despised by all intellectual beings, both men and angels, throughout all eternity. I swear. I swear. I swear.
“Rather strangely worded,” Sir John commented uneasily. Wee sleekit cowrin timorous beastie … always fetful …
“That’s the First-Degree Oath, for admission as a student,” Jones said. “The higher Oaths are much stronger stuff, I had better warn you.”
Sir John decided to put fear behind him.
“I would sign such an Oath with fervent assent,” he said boldly, surrendering his spiritual virginity long before he would have the courage to surrender the virginity of his body.
“That is most interesting,” Jones said affably, retrieving the paper and folding it back into his pocket. “I will speak to certain people. You may hear from us in a fortnight or so.”
And the rest of the evening, which was brief, Jones spoke only of his beloved children and his equally beloved occupation of industrial chemistry. There was nothing in the slightest occult or extraordinary about him at all. To some extent, he was even dull; and yet Sir John left him feeling vaguely as if he had been talking to one of H. G. Wells’ moon-men carefully disguised as a human being, which was nonsense, of course. But what was there about Jones that left that kind of after-impression?
On the train home, by the most implausible of coincidences—he wasn’t even sure he was in the same compartment—he again found an American newspaper and, stranger still, there was that sadistic mouse and the masochistic cat agai
n: “Li’l dollink, always fetful.”
After four years of training in the Golden Dawn, Sir John felt exactly like that bizarre cat, and when Joyce and Einstein offered to help him on Bahnhofstrasse, he giggled inanely and said, “Li’l dollink, always fetful.”
Preparatory to anything else, Einstein brushed the bulk of the dank barfloor sawdust off Sir John’s expensive but now untidy suit and handed him his Bond Street hat and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion, which he very badly needed. Sir John was not exactly wandering mentally (aside from inscrutable remarks in New York Yiddish) but more than a little unsteady physically and upon his expressed desire for coffee or some brainstem stimulant less mind-fogging than whiskey Joyce suggested right off the bat that he, Babcock, accompany him, Joyce, to his (Joyce’s) lodgings, just a stone’s-throw away from the very spot where they presently stood (or occasionally staggered) on Bahnhofstrasse. This proposal being accepted with alacrity and with much verbose gratitude, the three set off on foot in the hot windswept night since it was considered an improbability verging on the tales of the Brothers Grimm to hope to encounter a carriage for hire at that hour, à propos of which Joyce remarked significantly, “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”
And Babcock, not wishing to appear illiterate responded, “Falstaff, is it not?”
“Yes,” Joyce said. “Henry IV, Part One.” And they both looked at each other anew, finding some mysterious or at least emotionally gratifying bond in a shared acquaintance with the immortal Bard, although only Joyce reflected further that midnight was very much later to Falstaff in his sunrise-sundown agricultural economy than to himself and Babcock in this industrial age—Babcock being occupied with the more prosaic question of just how late it really was, and if they had actually heard the chimes at midnight, how long ago would that have been? —but neither topic was verbalized aloud at that point, all three men proceeding in silence for a while as they were none of them at exactly what you would call their sparkling best or in their keenest wits, Einstein being uncertain about chimes at midnight and little dollinks, Joyce being fogged over by enough beer to float the local navy if the overly tidy Swiss had a hypothetical navy, and Babcock being half-frightened out of his skin, but they did eventually attempt to converse in amiable or at least civil fashion, not at first very successfully inasmuch as both Joyce and Babcock were as nervous as a pair of strange sharks being quite aware on each side of the historical and temperamental abyss between the Anglo-Saxon and Hibernian mentalities. It was therefore doubly unfortunate that Babcock’s first attempt to open the door between their worlds was of an almost baboonlike clumsiness.
Masks of the Illuminati Page 4