Masks of the Illuminati

by Robert A. Wilson

  Kenneth Campbell of 201 Paul Street proved to be, as Jones had promised, formidable. He stood somewhere around six and a half feet tall and must have weighed twenty stone. A large poster on his wall showed him, grimacing horribly, under the caption THE LIVERPOOL MANGLER. One did not need the talents of Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Campbell was a wrestler.

  “It’s a kip what feeds me,” Campbell said, recognizing Babcock as a gentleman. “Not very hoity-toity, I’ll admit, but what prawce dignity when the belly’s empty, eh, mate?”

  Prawce, Babcock decoded, was Liverpoolese for price.

  “Wrestling was regarded as an accomplishment every gentleman should master in the Athens of Socrates,” he said reassuringly.

  “Socrates?” Campbell was delighted. “Wasn’t he the bloke what drank the poison to show the bleedin’ bastards they couldn’t frighten him? Begging your pardon, Reverend.”

  Babcock could not bear to look at Verey’s face. “Socrates was indeed a very brave man,” he said evasively.

  “Brave?” Campbell shook his head. “I was in Her Majesty’s Army during the Boer Uprising,” he said. “I know all abaht bravery, guv’nor. It isn’t bravery when you sits yourself down and drinks poison to prove a point. Could you do it? Could I do it? Could the bravest manjack in the army do it? Not on your bleeding life [beg your pardon, Reverend]. That ain’t bravery. That’s something else.”

  A philosophical wrestler, Babcock thought; but what other sort of wrestler would Jones know? Another of us? There was no point in asking. “What is it that Socrates had that goes beyond bravery?” he inquired instead.

  “I dunno,” the wrestler said. “I guess it’s the state beyond humanity, the Next Step that Jones is always talking abaht.”

  “Socrates was a heathen,” Verey said suddenly. “He was unfaithful to his wife both with another woman and with Alcibiades, with whom he had unnatural relations. He may have been brave and wise, but he is most certainly burning in Hell right now.”

  The wrestler’s face fell. “Don’t be too strict, Vicar,” he said, looking hurt. “None of us is perfect.”

  Fortunately, Jones arrived just then and Babcock was spared the ordeal of listening to Socrates’ morals debated by a naïve giant and a self-righteous hunchback.

  “Ah, Kenneth, my man,” Jones beamed, taking the wrestler’s hand in a grip Babcock did not recognize. “You are looking splendid!”

  The grip was not used in the Golden Dawn; Babcock surmised it was a Scottish Rite grip.

  “I have another five good years, maybe,” the giant said modestly. “Then, if I haven’t earned enough to buy a shop or a pub, it’s back to the army for the likes of me.”

  “Back to the army?” Jones said. “I think not. I have never understood how you came through one war alive; an enemy needs to be nearly blind to miss a target your size. We could never allow you to come to that pass again. Remember the widow’s son.”

  The last phrase confirmed Sir John’s guess; it was the formula describing all charitable activities of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite Freemasons. Probably Jones, like Robert Wentworth Little, founder of the Golden Dawn, had been in the Ancient and Accepted Lodge originally, as Campbell still obviously was.

  “Reverend Verey,” Jones was saying, shaking the clergyman’s hand warmly and clapping him on the shoulder, “I cannot express how deeply I sympathize with you in this time of grief. I can assure you that I, and the Order I represent, will see to it that no further tragedies occur, and that the villains responsible for your grief will receive a just punishment for their crimes.”

  “It is in God’s hands,” Verey said woodenly, regressing back into the emotionless emptiness of the typical shock reaction. It comes in waves, Babcock thought, remembering his own grief when his parents died.

  “God’s hands? That will not do,” Jones said sharply, staring into the clergyman’s eyes in a way Babcock had never seen before. “We are God’s hands,” Jones went on, solemnly, “and we have been set here in this world to execute His righteousness. Else is our religion mere theatrics.”

  Verey turned away, obviously fighting back tears. “God forgive me,” he said, “that I, an ordained clergyman, should need to be reminded of that.”

  Jones softened his tone. “You will not need to be reminded again,” he said. “You will not doubt again, nor will you despair.” He turned the clergyman around, gently, and stared into his eyes again. “You know I speak truth,” he said.

  “Yes,” Verey said. “My God, who are you?”

  “An ordinary man,” Jones said. “But one trained, a little, in certain arts of healing. For instance”—he touched Verey’s forehead—“I can feel the anguish draining away from you right now. You will not again despair of the goodness of God or ask Job’s questions. In a short while, you will rest.”

  The Brother of the Rosy Cross, Babcock remembered, is permitted to perform healings in emergencies, although in all other ways he must hide his superhuman status from the humans among whom he walks.

  Jones moved his hand to Verey’s chest. “Yes,” he said, “your breathing is much better now. Your heart chakra is less agitated. We humans are God’s hands, and He acts through us, if we allow Him,” he repeated. He grasped Verey’s shoulders and ran his hands swiftly down the clergyman’s arms, ending by grasping both hands warmly. “You have suffered much, but now you can rest. Remember: ‘For He is like a refiner’s fire.’”

  Sir John re-experienced his excitement every time he had heard Handel’s setting of that Biblical verse; it had always been his favorite part of The Messiah. The Vril energy was flowing through him, as when he first translated I.N.R.I, as “the world is remade by fire”; and he could see the energy was flowing in Verey, also.

  “You will sleep very soon now,” Jones added softly.

  And in a few moments Verey did announce that he wished to lie down. The Liverpool Mangler ushered the old hunchback to a bedroom and returned, awed.

  “Out lahk a baby,” he said. “Every time I see you do that, guv’nor, it fair gives me the shakes.”

  “With seven years of concentrated effort you could do it as quickly and efficiently,” Jones said.

  “Was it Mesmerism?” Babcock asked.

  “Yes,” Jones said. “A much more efficient system than the hypnotism invented by Mesmer’s ignorant nineteenth-century imitators, although, as I said, it takes longer to learn.”

  “Gor,” said the Liverpool Mangler, “was Mesmer in the Craft, too?”

  “In a Grand Orient lodge,” Jones said.

  Babcock was stunned. “But my researches have led me to believe the Grand Orient lodges were infiltrated by the atheistic Bavarian Illuminati and are still allied with the Ordo Templi Orientis!”

  “It does get rather complicated,” Jones admitted. “The names mean nothing. You must remember that in addition to the Golden Dawn there are several dozen groups in Europe claiming to be carrying on the work of the original Rose Croix college. And that half the Masonic lodges in England itself do not recognize the other half as legitimate. And, for that matter, the Golden Dawn itself has several competitors using the same name, run by A. E. Waite and Michael Brodie-Innes and others, including the one headed by that scoundrel Crowley himself.”

  Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice once said….

  “I begin to perceive,” Sir John said carefully, “that in joining an occult lodge one does not know what one is joining….”

  “The names mean nothing,” Jones repeated. “By their fruits shall ye know them.”

  “Well, yes,” Sir John said, “but …”

  “Now is not the time to re-examine the history of the Invisible College and its offshoots and counterfeits,” Jones said. “I have a task for you this evening, and there is work I must see to myself. Let us leave poor Verey here, under the protection of the Liverpool Mangler, and be on our way. The king is castled and now is the time for a gambit of our own.”

  So Sir John found himself out on t
he street and ushered into a hansom cab before he could quite grasp the acceleration of events.

  “I had my secretary fetch me a copy of the Inverness Express-Journal this afternoon,” Jones said, over the horse’s hoofbeats. “Here, take a look at this before we talk further.”

  Sir John took the newspaper clipping Jones extended and read:

  THE CASE OF THE CONSTANT SUICIDES

  Terror Stalks Loch Ness;

  Police Baffled

  INVERNESS, APRIL 23, 1914—Inspector James McIntosh of the Inverness Police Force is facing a mystery more terrible than anything in the tales of Poe or Conan Doyle….

  Sir John skimmed the rest of the news story quickly.

  “Do you see what this means?” Jones asked. “By tomorrow this story will be picked up by every London newspaper; mark my words. It may become the biggest horror-scare since Jack the Ripper was prowling the East End. Continental papers will have it by next week.”

  “Is that bad or good?” Babcock asked, pocketing the story.

  Jones was exasperated. “It’s the very worst thing that could happen,” he said with grinding patience. “You should understand by now that human belief-systems determine human experience. Why do you think the Invisible College remains Invisible? Why do you suppose we don’t perform miracles on every street corner and convert the multitudes? Don’t you realize that the philosophy of materialism is the best thing that ever happened to Europe?”

  “You are talking in paradoxes,” Sir John complained, noticing that the fog outside was beginning to thicken. The clip-clop of the horse’s hooves seemed to be carrying them into a realm more mysterious than any of his dreams or astral visions of Chapel Perilous.

  Jones sighed. “Have you noticed,” he asked patiently, “what happens when a haunted-house story appears in the press? Five more haunted houses are reported, from other parts of the country, within a week. You could not astrally project until you began to believe you could. Cabala was nonsense, until you began to believe it was sense. Why do you think Buddha said, ‘All that we are is the result of all that we have thought’? Do you know why we drum it into every Probationer’s skull that ‘Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure’? Short of a perfectly Illuminated being, all of us see and experience only what we are prepared to see and experience. A newspaper story like this, once it gets picked up and repeated, will open thousands—hundreds of thousands—to similar invasions by the powers of darkness. Every person who reads about events like these is more likely, to a slight degree, to become open to attack by them. Books on such subjects are poison. Why, man, we not only refuse to combat the spread of materialism and atheism; we have positively encouraged them!”

  “Encouraged them?” Sir John was aghast.

  “Of course!” Jones cried. “The ancient Mysteries were closed to all but a small elite, as you know. That was not aristocratic snobbery but pragmatic wisdom. The less the average man or woman knows about such things, the better for them. Only those who have been specially trained, intellectually and morally, can deal with these Forces safely.”

  Sir John mulled this over for a few minutes.

  “You think this view unliberal,” Jones said. “But consider the happy results. The uneducated masses have a simple faith, which protects them in most cases from invasions like this horror at Loch Ness. The equally automatized morons turned out in platoons by the universities have a simple skepticism, which also protects them. It is satisfactory all around, and the best accommodation to the age of science possible until human nature is transformed. The ordinary person, if he leaves both faith and skepticism behind and begins to experiment in this area—as you have—would be insane in six months without very careful guidance of the sort I attempt to give you.”

  “Yes,” Sir John said. “It is against Liberal principles, but you are right. I would never have gotten safely through some of the astral experiments on my own. It is best that the ordinary man and woman do not probe much into such matters.”

  “Faith for the uneducated fools, skepticism for the half-educated fools,” Jones said. “So it must be, until all are ready for the encounter with Him who we call the Holy Guardian Angel—who is, as I reminded Verey back there, like a refiner’s fire.”

  Once again, as four years earlier, the horse’s hooves seemed to Sir John to carry the cadence of the Alchemical poem:

  Don’t believe the human eye

  In sunlight or in shade

  The puppet show of sight and sense

  Is the Devil’s Masquerade

  The Invisible World seemed much more real to him, at that moment, than the material world half-hidden in the London fog.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “I am going to confer with the Inner Head of the Invisible College of the Rosy Cross, for the first time in seven years,” Jones said. “On the way I am dropping you at the M.M.M. bookstore on Jermyn Street.”

  “What?”

  Jones smiled thinly. “Yes,” he said, “it is time that you really looked inside Chapel Perilous. You will be quite safe, I assure you, and that fact will strike consternation into the hearts of the Enemy.”

  I knew it would come to this, Sir John thought.

  “Look,” Jones said, producing a most singular object from his overcoat pocket. Sir John felt the light flashing all over the cab’s interior before he could quite focus on the object itself.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “A pentacle, similar to those used in all magical invocations,” Jones said. “This one happens to be charged with the entire concentrated spiritual power of the forty-five hundred years of our Order—for we are far older than you guessed, even in the most daring passages of your books. It is also constructed according to special optical principles.”

  Sir John found that he could not, however hard he tried, see the pentacle clearly.

  “Is it like the vault of Christian Rosycross?” he asked.

  “It is the vault,” Jones said. “That is to say, it is an exact miniature. The reason the light within the vault is said to be ‘blinding’ is that each single facet—and there are thousands of facets, even in this miniature—is complementary to the colors next to it, in accord with strict optical and geometric laws. The light is reflected, diffracted and split into myriad prisms in a way no other structure can duplicate. It is the very model of the Cabalistic universe, wherein each part contains and reflects every other part—an analogy of the Undivided Light. Beautiful, is it not? Yet it is but a model, a partial rendering of the divine effulgence you will some day experience when you attain to what we very inadequately call the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.”

  Sir John found that he was hallucinating mildly. “It is like ether,” he said, “or some exotic drug like hasheesh….”

  “It will not do to stare into it too long on first encounter,” Jones said. “Take it. Put it within your vest pocket, over the heart. You will experience no fear, and will be in no danger, while the talisman is on your person.”

  Sir John took the seemingly self-effulgent talisman and felt a distinct tingle as he placed it within his vest.

  “By George,” he said. “I can really feel it. I’m ready to face the Devil himself.”

  “You will be called on for nothing so melodramatic,” Jones said. “You are, in fact, merely going to sit through a lecture by Mr. Aleister Crowley. If I know that man, he will be aware of the pentacle from the moment you enter. After the lecture, he will almost certainly approach you and attempt, by some ruse or other, to obtain the pentacle with your consent. Neither he nor anyone else can take it from you without your consent, you see. Resist his blandishments and rejoin me at my own home within two hours. That is all.”

  “Just that? To what purpose?”

  “You will learn that by experience better than I could explain it in the few moments we have left,” Jones said. “What is about to transpire will astonish you, and is the second purpose of this task. You will find
Mr. Crowley very unlike your mental picture of the villain behind all these horrors. That is important for you to learn at this stage: the reality of the enemy camp as distinct from your fearful imaginings about it. Do you understand?”

  I must walk this lonesome valley

  I must walk it all alone

  “Yes,” Sir John said. “A true initiation never ends.” And he smiled.

  Jones smiled in return. “You will do, lad,” he said. “I have never had more confidence in a student, in all my years.”

  “Jermyn Street,” said the driver, leaning down. “The number is 93, gents, and here it is.”

  PART FOUR

  Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations…. This Abyss is also called “Hell” or “The Many” … [or] … “Consciousness” or “The Universe”….

  —Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

  Sir John crossed the heavily fogged street, pushed open the door of M.M.M.: Occult and Mystical Books of All Ages, and once again entered Chapel Perilous, half-expecting to encounter real horned demons with forked tails.

  Instead, there were a variety of quite ordinary English people browsing among the shelves. The books ranged from the sparkling-new to the shabby secondhand and seemed to cover a broad spectrum: signs divided the rows under such labels as TAOISM, BUDDHISM, VEDANTA, CABALA, SUFISM, THEOSOPHY, PSYCHIC RESEARCH, and so forth. Sir John appreciated to the full Jones’ remark about the absurdity of asking Scotland Yard to put such an establishment under surveillance in this land of liberty and this age of enlightenment.

  A large poster announced:

  TONIGHT AT 8

  “The Soldier and the Hunchback”