Masks of the Illuminati

by Robert A. Wilson

  Sir John felt every eye in the room upon him. He wanted to cry, “I am not such a fool as to torture myself for your amusement,” but—he was even more afraid of appearing a public coward. Is that why people go into armies? he asked himself grimly…. “Very well,” he said coldly, inserting his thumb.

  And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.

  And it was about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.

  And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.

  And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.

  And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit; and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.

  “You’ve only reached two in the boulometer,” Crowley said. “The audience will think you’re not trying, sir.”

  “Damn you!” Sir John whispered, perspiration cold on his back. “I am done with this cruel joke. Let us see how much better your Magick Will can do!”

  “Certainly,” Crowley said calmly. He inserted his thumb into the cruel mechanism, and began turning the vise with slow deliberation. Not a muscle moved in his face. (Sir John suspected that he had gone into a trance.) The needle on the boulometer crept slowly, accompanied by gasps from the audience, all the way to 10.

  “That,” said Crowley gently, “might pass for an elementary demonstration of Magick Will.”

  There was a burst of spontaneous applause.

  “It will also do,” Crowley said, “as an illustration of our thesis about the soldier and the hunchback. The first rule of our Magick is: never believe anything you hear and doubt most of what you see.” He turned the “psycho-boulometer” around, revealing that he had disengaged the screw and had been turning the handle without actually tightening the vise. There was an angry gasp.

  “Oh,” Crowley said, “are you feeling cheated? Remember this, then: you are cheated the same way every time emotional turmoil or fixed ideas distort your perception of what is actually before your eyes. And remember to look for the hunchback behind every soldier.”

  The audience began to file out, muttering and chattering as excitedly as a group of chimpanzees who had just found a mirror.

  And then Sir John realized that Crowley had descended from the podium and was approaching him.

  “Sir John Babcock,” Crowley said warmly, “did you ever hear the story of the man with a mongoose in his basket?”

  At least, unlike Lola, Crowley wasn’t pretending not to recognize Sir John. “What mongoose?” Babcock asked carefully.

  “It was on a train,” Crowley said. “This chap had a basket under his seat and another passenger asked him what was in it. ‘A mongoose,’ he said. ‘A mongoose!’ said the other. ‘What on earth do you want with a mongoose?’ ‘Well,’ said our hero, ‘my brother drinks a great deal more than is good for him, and sometimes he sees snakes. So I turn the mongoose on them.’ The other passenger was baffled by this logic. ‘But those are imaginary snakes!’ he exclaimed. ‘Aha!’ said our hero. ‘Do you think I don’t know that? But this is an imaginary mongoose!’”

  Sir John laughed nervously.

  “That’s the way it is with talismans,” Crowley said. “When a phantom climbs, the ghost of a ladder serves him. But do keep that pentacle in your vest if it makes you feel better. I must go now. We shall meet again.”

  And Sir John stared as Crowley made his way to the back of the room, where he greeted Lola with a kiss. He whispered something; they both turned and looked back at Sir John; they waved cheerfully. And then they were gone.

  DE ARTE ALCHEMICA

  When Sir John arrived at Jones’ home in Soho, he recounted his experience at the M.M.M. bookstore in detail.

  “Crowley did not attempt to cajole me into giving him the talisman,” he concluded with some asperity. “He treated it with total contempt.”

  “The man does have an Iron Will,” Jones admitted, “but do not be deceived by his play-acting. Underneath, he knows we are on the counterattack now, and he must be afraid.”

  Sir John asked with suffocating restraint, “Are you really quite sure of that?”

  “We both need a good night’s sleep,” Jones said, as if ignoring the question. “I will show you to the guest room. Before retiring, meditate a bit on the Parable of the Imaginary Mongoose. It has many levels of meaning….”

  In fact, Sir John found that he was too tired to reflect much on the Imaginary Mongoose when he was settled into his room. He slipped into sleep quickly and dreamed things he was unable to remember in the morning, although he awoke with a vague memory of Sir Talister Crowley and a giant mongoose pursuing him through Chapel Perilous.

  After washing and dressing, Sir John remembered that he still had the copy of The Book of Lies he had purchased at M.M.M. He decided to try Bibliomancy-in-reverse and see what the Enemy had to offer in the way of an oracle. Opening at random, he found Chapter 50:

  In the forest God met the Stag-beetle. “Hold!

  Worship me!” quoth God. “For I am the All-

  Great, All-Good, All-Wise…. The stars are

  but sparks from the forges of My smiths….”

  “Yea, verily and Amen,” said the Stag-beetle,

  “all this I do believe, and that devoutly.”

  “Then why do you not worship Me?”

  “Because I am real and you are only imaginary.”

  But the leaves of the forest rustled with the

  laughter of the wind.

  Said Wind and Wood: “They neither of them know

  anything!”

  “Damn, blast and thunder!” Sir John exploded. The beetle denies God, but wind and wood deny the beetle also. It was the Imaginary Mongoose riddle again, on a more Empedoclean level.

  Going down the stairs in search of breakfast, Sir John experimented with solipsism. Perhaps there are no gods or beetles—or perhaps the whole world is, as the Gnostics claimed, the Abyss of Hallucinations, the Devil’s Masquerade. But then we must consider David Hume’s argument: the same skepticism can be applied to the Self. Am I really here? Are only the egoless wind and wood real? If phantoms descend, do the ghosts of stairs serve them?

  Dr. Johnson refuted that philosophy by kicking a rock. Sir John refuted it by remembering that he really was hungry. Eggs and muffins were real enough to be desirable at this hour, and his stomach was real enough to desire them.

  To his astonishment he found Jones eating breakfast with the Rev. Verey.

  “I thought we were going to keep him safe with the Liverpool Mangler,” he said, confused.

  “Our plans have changed totally since I spoke to the Inner Head of the Order last night. Things are more serious than I realized,” Jones said. “All three of us are going together to see Mr. Aleister Crowley at his home, with a surprise for him.”

  Sir John sat down. “Not another talisman?” he asked ironically.

  “Dear me, no,” Jones said mildly. “A real surprise this time. But eat first, Sir John; the muffins are delicious.”

  Sir John allowed it to go at that for a while; he was indeed ravenously hungry.

  Verey had been reading the same newspaper article Jones had shown Sir John the previous evening. “It is full of errors,” he complained. “Bobbie McMaster hasna’ been forty-three for a long time; he’s at least as old as I am. And that headless woman who haunts Geen Carrig is not new; she has been observed there for as many centuries as Anne Boleyn has been seen haunting the Tower of London. Why can reporters never get anything right?”

  “I believe Bernard Shaw has explained that,” Jones said, adding lemon to his tea, Paris style. “In almost all other professions a man must be able to observe caref
ully and report accurately what he has seen. Those qualifications are unnecessary for journalists, however, since their job is to write sensational stories that sell newspapers. Hence, all the incompetents who are not capable of normal accuracy in observation or memory fail in most other professions and many of them eventually drift into journalism.”

  “Aha!” said Sir John, who had often wondered why nothing in the papers was ever accurate. Of course: any chemist or grocer or ordinary man, asked to describe this breakfast, would report correctly that it consisted of eggs, ham and muffins, with tea. A journalist would report porridge, bacon and toast, with a sex orgy and a murder.

  Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations….

  “Nessie” was real according to virtually all the residents of Inverness; “Nessie” was a myth according to “experts” who had never visited the scene.

  “You know,” Sir John said to Jones, “I’ve noticed that you always refer to Crowley as ‘Mr.’, but the poster I saw last night gave him the title of ‘Sir’. Which is correct?”

  “Crowley is a brewer’s son,” Jones said. “But the ‘Sir’ is legitimate according to his own peculiar lights. Back in the ’90s, when he was a singularly Romantic and adventuresome young man not yet corrupted by Black Magick, he joined the cause of the Carlists. Don Carlos personally knighted him.”

  “But,” Sir John protested, “Don Carlos was only a pretender to the throne.”

  “To you and me and the daily press, yes. Crowley still insists Don Carlos was the real monarch and Victoria the pretender. So, as I say, by his own lights, the title of Sir Aleister is quite correct.”

  “The man is daft,” Verey said. “I swear to it.”

  “Oh, most certainly,” Jones agreed, with a quiet smile. “But he is also brilliant and coldly rational, in his own way. He and I were friends once, many years ago, before our paths diverged, and I still say, for all his wickedness, Aleister Crowley had the potential to become the greatest of us all.” Jones sighed. “It is only the most exalted who can fall all the way to the lowest depths,” he added grimly.

  “‘Lucifer, son of the morning, how art thou fallen,’” Verey quoted, with deep, rolling drama, as from the pulpit.

  Like most clergymen, Verey had a Bible quotation for all occasions, Sir John reflected.

  As Jones’ valet appeared to clear off the breakfast dishes, Sir John asked boldly, “Well, when do we go to beard the lion in his den? I hope it will not be as anti-climactic as last night.”

  “I think we may leave straightaway,” Jones said with the calm of an Adept.

  “Aye,” Verey said. “I look forward to the moment when that devil Aleister Crowley and I meet face to face.”

  Sir John felt like one of the Three Musketeers setting off to do battle with Richelieu’s men.

  “Crowley lives on Regent Street,” Jones said. “In fact, he has one of the finest homes there. His father was not merely a brewer, but a very successful brewer. We are going into one of the most respectable neighborhoods in London. Crowley publishes all his own works in the most expensive bindings and finest papers, and lives like an Oriental prince in every other way.”

  “Shall we walk or take a hansom?” Sir John asked.

  “I should think a brisk walk would do us all good,” Jones replied.

  They certainly made an odd group of Musketeers, Sir John reflected as they set out: Verey, aged and hunchbacked; Jones, stout and fortyish; only he himself, at twenty-eight, was young enough to qualify as a conventional hero of melodrama—and he was probably the most nervous of all.

  Jones began reminiscing about Crowley as they walked. They had first met sixteen years earlier, in 1898, when Crowley was admitted to the original Golden Dawn as a Probationer. “He was a most impressive young man,” Jones said. “At twenty-three, he had already published several volumes of excellent poetry and had set some distinguished mountain climbing records in the Alps. He had majored in organic chemistry at Cambridge and I remember asking him why, since I saw nothing of the scientific temperament in him. I have never forgotten his answer. ‘My personality is entirely poetic, esthetic and Romantic,’ he said. ‘I needed some work in hard science to bring me down to earth,’ I thought it an astonishing example of self-insight and self-discipline in one so young.”

  Jones went on to tell of Crowley’s rapid rise in the Golden Dawn. “I never saw a man with such a natural aptitude for Cabalistic Magick,” he said frankly. Then came the disaster of 1900, when the feud between William Butler Yeats and McGregor Mathers exploded into a dozen lesser feuds which split the Golden Dawn into factions which were never re-united. Jones lost track of Crowley for some years, although he heard of Crowley’s travels to study Yoga in the Far East and Sufism in North Africa. In 1902, Crowley and a German engineer, Oscar Eckenstein, succeeded in climbing higher on Chogo Ri in the Himalayas than any expedition before or since, reaching twenty-three thousand feet. In 1905, Crowley went to China, and when he returned he was a completely new man.

  “I remember,” Jones said, “my naïve response when we met again in 1906. I found him so changed that I actually believed he was a totally Illuminated being, beyond any other Golden Dawn graduate. I asked him how he had achieved that, and he said simply, ‘I became a little child.’”

  They were crossing Rupert Street and Jones smiled ironically. “My illusions about him did not last long,” he said. “That very same year he published the infamous Bhag-i-Muatur, which he claimed was a translation from the Persian. It was nothing of the sort. Crowley had always been a great admirer of the late Sir Richard Burton and was merely copying his hero, who had published the Hasidah—a blunt statement of Atheistic philosophy—as a translation from the Arabic, when it was actually his own work. The Bhag-i-Muatur, a title which translates as ‘The Scented Garden,’ was similarly Crowley’s own work disguised as a translation. It was, on the surface, an allegory about the Soul’s relationship to God. Actually, carefully read, it was a glorification of sodomy.” Shortly thereafter Crowley was divorced by his wife for adultery and began to live as shamelessly as Oscar Wilde before his trials, flaunting his numerous affairs, both heterosexual and homosexual, as if he took a special diabolical delight in shocking Christian sensibilities.

  In the following years, Crowley divided his time between London, Paris and the North African deserts. In 1909, he staged a spectacle called “The Rites of Eleusis” at a London theater and aroused a storm of controversy. The “rites” began with a chorus informing the audience, Nietzschefashion, that “God is dead.” The following ceremony included ballet, music, ritual, poetry and the serving to the audience of an alleged “elixir of the gods” (which some later suspected contained a mind-altering drug) and ended with the announcement that a new God had been born, a “Lord of Force and Fire” Who would destroy Western civilization and create, out of its ruins, a new civilization based on the Rabelaisian slogan: “Do what thou wilt.”

  “The man is daft,” Verey repeated, with cold fury.

  Since 1910, Jones continued, Crowley had been the English leader of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a Berlin-based Masonic order which claimed to retain the primordial Masonic secrets in purer form than any other group. The Outer Head of the order, Jones said, was Theodore Reuss, an actor who was also an agent for the German secret police.

  “Does Scotland Yard know this?” Sir John exclaimed.

  “Oh, indeed,” Jones said. “So does Army Intelligence. They watch Reuss carefully but never interfere with him, since his area of operations is restricted to spying on German exiles in England. He was for a long time an associate of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and their circle.”

  Jones went on to speak of the links between the Ordo Templi Orientis and certain dervish orders in the Near East said to be connected with the Young Turks who had overturned the monarchy and introduced parliamentary democracy. Rasputin, the monk of strange hypnotic powers who seemed to have total control over the current Czar and his family, was al
so associated with the same dervish orders, Jones said, as was Colonel Dragutin Dimitryevic, head of Serbian Military Intelligence, who was simultaneously, under the code name “Apis,” a member of “Union or Death,” a Pan-Serbian secret revolutionary group. “Between Rasputin, the Young Turks and Colonel Dimitryevic,” Jones said, “the whole Near Eastern and Balkan situation has steadily grown more unstable, so that all the alliances between England, France, Germany and Russia are breaking down, each Great Power suspecting the others of plotting to use the increasingly volatile situation for its own profit—even though the Young Turks are ostensibly sworn to fight to the death to keep the Great Powers out of that area. Ever since the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway was built in ’96,” Jones went on, “some in our government have suspected Germany of intending to replace us in India, but now every major Power suspects every other Power of similar designs.”

  “This grows deeper and darker as you proceed,” Sir John complained. “Are we dealing with a spiritual war between rival theologies or an economic war between rival commercial interests?”

  “We are talking about Total War,” Jones said somberly.

  Sir John looked up at Big Ben, towering in the distance, stone-solid, tangible, real. But Shakespeare’s words came back to him:

  these our actors

  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

  Are melted into air, into thin air:

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inhabit, shall dissolve

  The Loch Ness monster and the Pan-Serbian Movement; bat-winged creatures that titter and the German secret police; incredible suicides and nameless perversions; worldwide assassinations and the secret history of Freemasonry; a murdered cat in a locked church and the Berlin-Baghdad railroad … Masks and masks-behind-the-masks. Sir John was no longer sure of anything. 358: the Serpent is the Messiah. I.N.R.I.: Jesus is Dionysus. HONI SOIT: The Order of the Garter was a secret witch-coven which had ruled Great Britain for five hundred years. Life itself was an Empedoclean paradox and David Hume was right: one cannot even prove, in logic, the existence of the ego itself. Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations.