Masks of the Illuminati

by Robert A. Wilson

  In French that would be Pierrot le Fou. In English? Simple Simon. No: more like Honest John. Biedermeier Einstein.

  Zwei Seelen wohnen ach! in meiner Brust. Must mean something. If it were Hegel, I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always.

  Uncle Jacob ridiculing the kosher laws. Well, Mama never kept a kosher kitchen, really. A house of heretics, we were. But only Uncle Jacob was an outspoken atheist. That for me was good, like the years in the Catholic school. To be born a Jew with an atheist uncle and go to a Catholic school: it opens the brain-cells. Diversity of signals.

  Yes: the more conflicting signals received, the bigger we must make our world picture to account for them. People have little minds because every nation, every church and almost every family restricts the signals. So that speed of travel increasing (with also speed of communication increasing) means that everybody will receive more conflicting signals. Force the primates to get smarter, maybe. Impossible to keep a small Italian Catholic mind after meeting many, many German Protestants. The Englishman back from India is no longer 100 percent bloody English. Yes. Travel and communication will accelerate more in this century, so people will have to become smarter.

  If war doesn’t throw us back to the Dark Ages.

  Neat, that. But pacifism more basic than socialism, it must be. If we do not put an end to war, there will be little civilization left to socialize. But try to tell that to the socialists, God help you. If the chips are down they are German or French first and socialist later. When the shooting stops. And:

  Very neat, too. Coming on to look more like curvature in the new equations. Non-Euclidean, converging. Geodesies. Not to be seen or experienced but known through the mathematics. Nicht aus dem Sinn.

  Faster and faster communication, so every Ivan, Hans and Juan gets like me a mixture of Catholic, Jewish and atheist signals, or some equivalent jumble: force them to think and choose.

  Zwei Seelen wohnen … Yes. The two types of consciousness, which Freud now calls conscious and unconscious, are the two souls Goethe was speaking of. Sir John’s Golden Dawn is a neurological game in which the unconscious soul, called the astral body by them, is made conscious.

  But even Freud does not understand the relativity of the instrument, of the nervous system itself. We three here in this room—Joyce, Sir John and myself—are existing in three different neurological realities, just exactly as my space-voyagers at different velocities exist in different spacetime realities.

  The shadow-show of sight and sense: relativity of the instrument. Nur der Wahnsinnige is sich absolut sicher.

  I wonder if any of the psychologists has discovered this yet.

  It does not, of course, make a pfennig of difference if this Golden Dawn contraption can trace itself back to the Rosy Cross of the Middle Ages, to Adam, or even to the first amoeba. Nor does it matter if Mr. Robert Wentworth Little invented the whole “tradition” out of hot air and forged ciphers in the collaboration with the enigmatic Fräulein Sprengel. The significant objective fact on which scientific attention must focus is that by joining this organization our friend Babcock has involved himself with a secretive order engaged in projects of which he knows actually nothing, although he assumes much. Too much, in fact. As we all do, every day.

  The obvious absurdity of Newton’s hypotheses non fingo: actually, it is impossible not to theorize. The velocity of nerve transmissions in the brain is such that we can never disentangle perception from conceptualization. It is even a concept that I am presently speaking to human beings. Joyce and Babcock might both be automatons passing themselves off as humans, or I might be hallucinating. And who but Poincaré and Mach understand that fully, in their bones? We live, as Joyce says, in a web of symbolic constructs made by our brains. The Herrdoktorprofessors cannot understand my paper on relativity of space-time, for instance, because they think “length” is a fact, not a concept of our brains.

  And this, too: when I renounced my citizenship in Milan nearly seventeen years ago, it was what the depth psychologists now call a rebirth experience: I re-defined and re-discovered myself. As when I discarded the God of my fathers. Perhaps both were necessary before I could re-define and re-discover space and time. Renunciation of the old must precede discovery of the new.

  So: behind all this mumbo jumbo, that is basically, structurally, what Sir John is describing: a process whereby an orphaned boy adrift in this world with too much money is discovering a new way of defining and perceiving himself. And also, of course, his world. As I re-defined the world after re-defining myself. A chess game of the mind.

  But what are the rules of this game and how did it bring him to the state of terror in which he now exists? And who or what is the player on the other side? That is what I first must grasp: the rules of this strange mind-game called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

  I must ask not, How does it feel to be a photon?, like Biedermeier Einstein two decades ago in 1894, but, in this case: How does it feel to be a sorcerer’s apprentice?

  YE GENETIC ARCHIVES

  Ye first Furbish Lousewart a retainer of great green Grey stoke Manor was. Of great green Grey stoke Manor was he a retainer, and yea a foundling they found him fearful nigh unto death but brief hours after bloody born from mother’s womb was he. A bastard born was that fair foundling, Furbish Lousewart.

  Of his lineage, fair Furbish’s, ’tis said that planted in his mother’s belly was he by ye curate of Weems, a man most mountainous in girth that some did dub Round John or ye Holy Hog of St. Hubert’s, which is because that St. Hubert’s was ye church of Weems wherein as curate he did fare. Of fair Furbish’s mother, in troth, ’tis said she was a nun who did later for sin sensual atone by pious pilgrimage to Thomas’ tomb whereat she told a tale full fabulous to one Geoff. Chaucer who in verse the same tale did tell in his book of which all know. Some say also that model was she for ye pretty Prioress in the gypsy cards called Tarot, which card was later dubbed ye Female Pope and now ye High Priestess is yclept.

  Lord Greystoke named the foundling bairn Furbish Lousewart because ye tyke so couth and dainty looked when they in mean manger found him. Furbish Lousewart was as dainty a name as leman could in Merrie England have in those days, it being the vernacular for herba pedicularis, a flower full fair in ye snapdragon family that no wight could name a bloom eke fairer ne bonnier.

  Furbish Lousewart grew to mighty manhood, a fellow of cautels yet of mickle mirth, see ye here: for he three bold sons (legitimate) did father and seven bairns of assorted sexes (illegitimate) and then, alas, did die a death most dire in Holy Crusade against the swarthy Saracens that did hold the Holy Land by force of sword. All the world is saying yet that he (F. Lousewart) did impress posterity more through his besotted lechery than through fidelity to the holy bed of Christian marriage, for the Rt. Hon. Mr. Justice P. J. Farmer who does dabble much in genealogy and such antiquarian matters hath said on many occasions (in the hearing of many that do bear good reputation) that the only Greystoke to survive that Crusade was as it were but a pseudo-Greystoke, being seed of Lady Greystoke’s lewd liaison with the aforesaid rascal, Furbish. If this be true, then the noble Greystoke line (that were Papishes but are now, folk say, good Anglicans) are actually of bastardly and plebeian origin. ’Tis a merry tale if true, all agree.

  This much at least science can pronounce with mathematical certainty: within the testicles of Viscount Greystoke that night of June 26, 1914, did reside exactly one-sixteenth (0.0625) of the genetic information that formed the neurogenetic template of Sir John Babcock, while within the testicles of Viscount Greystoke’s cousin, Giacomo Celine, was precisely one-fourth (0.25) of the gentetic information of Hagbard Celine, who more than sixty years later was going to inform the grandnephew of Sir John’s gamekeeper that there is no enemy anywhere.

  DE SOMNIIS VESTIMENTA HORRORIS

  From the greatest horrors irony is seldom entirely absent, as if to remind us that there is in truth no such thing as motiveless
or mindless malignity. Thus, the crack in Sir John’s mirror inspired him, subtly and indirectly, to begin to accommodate himself somewhat to the twentieth century, but at the same time the hellish terrors of earlier centuries more insidiously gathered about him. The crack was only moderately disquieting at first—although he could not look into it without imagining he saw, in the distorted image of himself created by the jagged glass, some depressing and menacing symbol of the dark side of the Vril force which had attacked him through the weak spot opened up by his susceptibility to the voluptuous yearnings aroused, perhaps deliberately, by the enigmatic Lola and her brazenly casual allusions to the rhythm of the act of copulation and the red cobra of desire. He was haunted by an uncomfortable idea, although he tried to shake it off; it would be foolish certainly to accept it, on no better evidence than the coincidence of a bad dream and an earth tremor—yet the insidiously disturbing concept continued to grow in his mind: he had perhaps encountered a real witch, and the medieval world he had so long studied was seemingly coming to life around him.

  The bedroom itself was now insidiously depressing to him, because of the cracked mirror and its eldritch bicameral images, yet he was also subtly uncomfortable elsewhere about the huge old house, also: something distasteful and disquieting, almost a sense of decay and morbidity, appeared to permeate the very air; something nameless and vague, a mere adumbration of new presences and possibilities, probably only his own overactive imagination, and yet something that seemed autochthonous, virtually antediluvian, furtively suggestive of hideous secrets of forgotten times and deeds that were against Nature and against Scripture. The invasion of even the furniture with this inchoate omnipresence was bewildering, if one was able to compare, in the light of the different atmosphere before the Dark Force (as he came to call it), the previous ubiquity throughout Babcock Manor of commonsense normalcy.

  ACTION SOUND

  EXTERIOR. BABCOCK MANOR. LONG SHOT.

  The house almost lost in a panorama of dark trees and twilight shadows. Voodoo drums.

  EXTERIOR. BABCOCK MANOR. MEDIUM SHOT.

  The house, dark and looming. The pennyfarthing bicycle in front of the entrance. Voodoo drums.

  Sir John embarked upon a campaign to banish the whole perishing business by refurbishing, not merely the cursed mirror, but the whole of Babcock Manor, and soon had the place swarming with tradespeople and laborers in a huge project of modernization, including even the installation of electricity in every room. It required many months, but finally Babcock Manor had been fully adapted to the twentieth century. The malign humor of the hideous forces unleashed against Sir John meanwhile proceeded to produce, as this superficial adaptation to the present was feverishly afoot throughout the manor, a growing invasion of his inner life by the most hellish and dismal of ancient terrors.

  Sir John continued to dream often of Chapel Perilous and once he found himself in a huge dungeon beneath the earth, where crowds of sullen and stupid persons argued and debated violently. “We shall have gno gods!” shouted some. But others shouted back, “We shall have gnu gods!” And weenie gothor thick haggard were poor. “There is no Chapel, there is no Grail, it is all a child’s fantasy,” muttered a liddel bho poop, yet veni verits, surd Alice war bear, flogging thor-talis behind them. “The tree o vus, the size of us, the weight of us,” sang an Erring Go BRA in groinblancorange, but a triune pentagonal octupus explained, posing as somadust. “These are those who started on the Path without the Wand of Intuition. They have arrived, but they do not know it. They have Is so they no can see. Honey to them, pansy meals. Does a BRA shith in the woods?”

  When Sir John wrote this dream into his Magickal Diary, he added the comment:

  For some reason I do not fully comprehend, I awoke with the conviction that Shakespeare was indeed an initiate of the Rose Croix. I feel closer and closer to grasping what he meant in saying that we are “such stuff as dreams are made of.”

  A few nights later he allowed himself to be cajoled into a bridge game at Viscount Greystoke’s, although that was precisely the sort of idiot pastime he generally despised. He barely endured the early part of the evening—there was much brandy, many cigars, and altogether too much talk about fox-hunting, a sport he despised as inhumane and barbaric. It was with great effort that he refrained from quoting the infamous Wilde’s description of that bloody recreation as “the uneatable pursued by the unspeakable.” Then, around ten, a strange thing happened: he suddenly remembered that the ordinary playing-card deck was derived from the Tarot. The spades were the Wands of Intuition, the hearts the Cups of Sympathy, the clubs the Swords of Reason, the diamonds the Pentacles of Valor: and the structure of the deck corresponded astrologically to fire signs, water signs, air signs and earth signs: 52 weeks in 4 seasons, 52 cards in 4 suits. But if Cabalistic signs were everywhere, the divine essence was also everywhere, and he remembered again that there were no places or times where the visible and invisible worlds did not meet and mingle: he saw the Buddha in everyone, again. The rest of the evening he was so intensely conscious that he seemed to himself to have been half-asleep all his life by comparison; he won trump after trump. The euphoria was with him for nearly a day and a half after, and then gave way to a vague anxiety again when he remembered that many forms of lunacy begin with such excited states of mentation in which every incident and event seems charged with more than human meaning.

  In London two days later Sir John met the bombastic American, Ezekiel (or Ezra) Pound—perhaps by accident—at the British Museum. Pound was carrying a Chinese-English dictionary and a batch of notebooks labeled “Fenol-losa MS.” and was effusively cordial. They amicably agreed to step out for a bite of lunch together.

  “Yeats is progressing nicely, under my influence,” Pound pronounced grandly, over fish and chips. “He’s coming out of that Celtic fog and beginning to write modern poetry.” Sir John found this self-importance hilarious, but managed to keep a straight face. He tactfully changed the subject.

  “Why are you so preoccupied by Chinese verse forms?” he asked in his most diffident manner.

  “Chinese,” Pound pronounced, “will be as important to the twentieth century as Greek was to the Renaissance. And he went on for twenty minutes on that topic, before Sir John was able to interpolate a remark again.

  “Who was that young lady reciting Captain Fuller?” he asked, knowing that an evil impulse was driving him.

  Pound looked up sharply. “She says her name is Lola Levine and she comes from France,” he replied. “I doubt it. Her French is worse than mine.”

  “She sounded Australian …” Sir John said.

  “Exactly,” Pound agreed. “A young lady one should not trust too much. Have you heard of Aleister Crowley?” he asked.

  Sir John remembered the name—one of the leaders of a renegade Golden Dawn faction said to have turned in the direction of Diabolism. “Vaguely,” he said.

  “Well, whatever you’ve heard is probably unfavorable and you’re just being English and tactful in not mentioning it,” Pound said with a piercing glance. “Don’t get too interested in Lola Levine, if you want any advice from me, Sir John. She is said to be, or to have been, one of Crowley’s countless mistresses. Terrible things happen to people who get involved with Crowley, or his friends or mistresses. Have you heard of Victor Neuberg?”

  “A young poet … I’m afraid I haven’t read any of his work.”

  “Victor Neuberg got very involved with Crowley a few years ago,” Pound said. “He is now recovering, slowly and painfully, from a complete nervous and mental breakdown.”

  “A mental breakdown,” Sir John repeated. “You mean …”

  “That’s what the doctors call it,” Pound said somberly. “Neuberg believes he is under siege by demons.”

  “Oh,” Sir John said, “how ghastly.”

  “Yes,” Pound answered with a level stare. “That’s the sort of thing that happens to people who get too close to Crowley and Lola Levine and their circle. Neu
berg even claims Crowley once turned him into a camel.”

  “Into a camel?” Sir John exclaimed.

  “Well,” Pound said, “I suppose it would be more traditional to turn him into a toad, but Crowley by all accounts has a singularly eccentric sense of humor.”

  “Do you believe Neuberg really did turn into a camel?” Sir John asked, wondering just what Pound’s attitude toward all this really was.

  “Hellfire, no!” Pound laughed scornfully. “But I do believe that if you get mixed up with a gang like that, and really get into yoga and meditation and group sex and drugs and howling invocations at Sirius, you’ll damned soon end up believing whatever the other lunatics in the group believe.”

  On that note, the lunch ended and they parted. Sir John found himself wondering if he was ready, yet, to believe in the metamorphosis of a human being into a camel. The idea seemed to belong not to the true tradition of mysticism as he had come to know it through the Golden Dawn, but to the realm of folklore, witchcraft and old-wives’ tales: and yet the disquieting thought remained, trailing him about like an unpaid usurer, Something happened to poor Neuberg, something that the alienists are perhaps not ready yet to understand or heal. If we are such stuff as dreams are made of, these eldritch forces which Macbeth so evocatively calls “night’s black agents” are as powerful as anything in the masquerade of social life with its timid decorums and deceptions; and thinking also, There is Cabalistic logic in it: the camel corresponds to the Hebrew letter gimmel, which corresponds to the Masked Priestess in the Tarot, the guide across the Abyss of Hallucinations to the undivided light of Pure Illumination.

  It was only another accident, of course—only another coincidence—but Sir John actually encountered Lola Le-vine in Rupert Street later that afternoon. There was no mistaking that dark brown hair, those strange brown eyes, that enticingly voluptuous figure to unhood the cobra of desire. By the grace of God, she didn’t notice him and he passed by quickly, hardly thinking of her petticoats and garters and those things.