Masks of the Illuminati

by Robert A. Wilson

  “Then he faced me again. ‘Do you understand at last?’ he said very quietly. ‘Your God and your Jesus are dead. They no longer have any power to protect you or anyone else who calls on them for help. Our magick is now stronger, for the Old Ones have returned, and Man shall be free of guilt and sin. Pray to Jesus for help, if you must; it will help you no more than it helped Verey or Jones. Our hands will be at your throat forever, even if you see them not. We will come for you when you least expect it.’

  “That was all,” Babcock said listlessly. “He was gone before I had fully recovered from his blasphemous words. I left England that night, traveling under an assumed name. I went to Arles, in southern France, and stayed at an inn. After a few days, I came back to my room after a visit to the local church and found an inverse crucifix hanging over my bed. I have been moving on, city to city, ever since then.”

  Joyce rose and stretched the kinks out of his body, casting a grotesque spidery shadow on the wall behind him. “Well, Professor,” he asked, “are we living in the twentieth century or the thirteenth?”

  The Föhn whistled at the window.

  Einstein studied carefully the dottle of his extinguished pipe. Under their drooped lids his eyes searched what the cold smell of the ash spoke not.

  “Well,” he said finally, “I do not regard this matter as hopelessly obscure. There is quite a bit of light amid the engulfing darkness, don’t you think, Jeem?”

  Joyce smiled wanly. “I have picked up a few rays of light,” he said carefully. “But they are small and fugitive and my darkness is still much greater. Shall I list the points that appear most cogent to me?”

  “By all means,” Einstein urged.

  “There are four,” Joyce said. “I might title them as follows:

  The Clue of the Quadrilateral Metaphor;

  The Matter of the Tacked-on Tragedy;

  The Matter of the Enumeration of Sonnets;

  The Clue of the 26 Garters.

  “Does that suggest anything to either of you?” he concluded impassively.

  “Not to me,” Babcock said, baffled.

  “Nor to me,” Einstein added. “But I wonder if you have found the parts of the answer that are still beyond my comprehension…. However, imitating your style, I can list the points that have aided me in seeing through this malign little drama. There are eight in my case, as follows:

  The Razor of David Hume;

  The Matter of the Marvelous Multiplication;

  The Incident of Casual Telepathy;

  The Matter of the Superabundant Coincidences;

  The Clue of the Over-Defined Image;

  The Mystery of the Extra Mountain-Climber;

  The Clue of the Impossible Name;

  The Matter of the Relativity of Dimensions.

  “I think that these points fairly well reveal what has actually been transpiring here,” he finished. “Do you understand what I am implying, Jeem?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” Joyce said. “In fact, I am more confused than I was before you gave us that list of allegedly helpful hints.”

  “Most interesting,” Einstein mused. “We all see only that which we are trained to see…. Well, be that as it may, since you gave us your list first, could you explicate them for us before I get to my list?”

  Joyce removed carefully his glasses, to polish them meticulously on a handkerchief. “I am now about seventy-five percent blind,” he said thoughtfully; finishing, he translated the glasses back to his nose. “Presto! The world is created again: I can see it.” Pull out his eyes: Apologize. “The world is created anew each time we change our focus or viewpoint,” he went on. “Let us change our focus for a moment and look at the beginning of all this, Clouds Without Water, through sharper glasses.” He paused.

  “Yes?” Babcock prodded.

  “The author of Clouds Without Water is a singularly deep young man, as Gilbert and Sullivan said of a similar case,” Joyce went on. “He can say two things at once; even, in some places I have noticed, three things at once. For instance, consummatum est, the closing words of a sonnet Sir John has called to our attention, can refer [as previously noted] either to a Catholic Mass or to a Black Mass; but they can also refer to the completion of a sex act: foreplay, union, climax, consummation. But our author can even say four things at once: the mystical wine symbolism in the alchemical sequence, I note, may refer to the vaginal secretions of the poet’s paramour, as Sir John suspected; to the wine of the Mass; to the wine of a Black Mass; or even to the traditional use of Vine’ as a symbol of divine intoxication in Sufi authors such as Omar Khayyám. This is the Clue of the Quadrilateral Metaphor.

  “So, I ask myself just how deep this singularly deep young man can really be. The tragic end of his saga is, to me, blatantly false and propagandistic. The number of adulterers in Europe may not exceed the sands of the Sahara, or the atoms in the galaxy, but it is certainly vast; and they do not automatically succumb to advanced, incurable syphilis in every case. Nor do they, if the disease is diagnosed, immediately commit suicide. They seek treatment, and if they are lucky and the disease is caught soon enough, they are even routinely cured. I do not say the sad end of Arthur Angus Verey is impossible, merely improbable. It has a moralistic, preachy sound, very much as if it were the work of the Reverend Charles Verey. This is the Tacked-On Tragedy I mentioned. But let me ask: Does such dual authorship sound in accord with your notions of human psychology, gentlemen?”

  Einstein spoke first. “Go on,” he said. “You definitely seem to have the part of the puzzle that still eludes me.”

  Babcock added, “I will certainly grant that Verey would hardly have published that book without such a harsh moralistic lesson at the end….”

  Joyce rapped the floor with his walkingstick. “Point one carries,” he said. “Well, then, the old legal adage tells us, ‘Guilty in part, guilty in whole,’ which may or may not be true, but gives me a pretty thought, nonetheless. If the Reverend Charles Verey wrote the ending, could he have written the whole? All day a phrase from Dante has been running through my head: ed eran duo in uno, ed uno in duo. ‘They were two in one, and one in two.’ It describes Bertrán de Born, beheaded, in the Inferno. Think of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Frankenstein and his Monster, Faust and Mephistopheles….”

  Einstein laughed. “Astonishing,” he said. “For the last two days I’ve been thinking of Faust and Mephistopheles, and of the great line Goethe gives to Faust: Zwei Seelen wohnen ach! in meiner Brust. My father used to tell me that was the most profound line in the play. ‘Two souls dwell, alas, within my breast.’”

  “The extreme form of this dualism is the Split or Multiple Personality discussed in psychology texts,” Joyce went on. “But we are all prisms—split and multiple personalities, to some extent. We each have our hidden side, which Jung so poetically calls the Shadow. What would the Shadow of the Reverend Charles Verey be? The opposite of his public persona of Presbyterian righteousness, of course. It would be, in fact, very much like the alleged Arthur Angus Verey—libertine, sensualist, adulterer, blasphemer against Christ and the Church. I suggest, in short, that Clouds Without Water was written entirely by Reverend Charles Verey. To each ‘Thou shalt not’ of the public Reverend Charles Verey, the internal ‘Arthur’ cries, ‘I will!’ The Shadow, the Satanic ‘Arthur’ writes the lush voluptuous sonnets, lingering longingly on every lovely lewd licentious detail of a fantastic love affair with a gloriously wicked and totally desirable woman; the public Persona arranges that this book of wet dreams ends with ‘Arthur’ being destroyed for his sins and adds the running footnotes re-asserting traditional morality.

  “Well, gentlemen,” Joyce asked, “does Point Two carry? Are the two souls in Clouds Without Water dwellers in one breast?”

  Babcock shook his head dubiously. “It is possible in psychology,” he said. “But it is contradicted by the facts as we know them.”

  “The facts as we know them,” Einstein said mildly, “have been distorted b
y a deliberate conspiracy to keep us from knowing the facts as they really are. Go ahead, Jeem.”

  “We now have, in Clouds Without Water, a book such as I myself try to write,” Joyce said. “A multi-dimensional, multi-level, multi-meaningful book. A puzzle-book, one might say—and what could be more appropriate to our times, when all the best minds recognize increasingly that our existence is a profound puzzle? The reader is challenged, if he is intelligent enough to look beyond the mere surface, to ask what Clouds Without Water really is. Firstly, it could be what it appears to be and pretends to be: the account of an adultery that came to a bad end, with a running commentary by a clergyman underlining the ‘moral’ lesson that The Wages of Sin Are Death. Perfect for the British reading public. Or, secondly, it could be what Sir John has decoded: a manual of Tantric sex practices, showing how the permutations and variations on the erotic union between a man and a woman can be excruciatingly prolonged until ecstasy is exploded into oblivion, into egoless trance. Or, thirdly, it could be what I have said: the record of the split in the personality of a tormented Presbyterian puritan, dreaming of the deliciously wicked delights of coitus, fellatio and cunnilingus, and then punishing his Other Self for enjoying those dreams.”

  “But which is it really?” Babcock exclaimed. “You are just adding to the mystery, not clarifying it—ignotium per ignotius!”

  “What is the Veal’ length of a rod, Professor?” Joyce asked.

  “It depends on the coordinate system of the rod,” Einstein said, amused, “and the coordinate system of the observer, and the relationship between their velocities.”

  Babcock grimaced. “That doesn’t make sense to me,” he said. “Length is length, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “That is not all there is to it,” Einstein said. “All our judgments in which length plays a role are judgments about instruments used to measure that length. And the readings of the instruments will depend on our velocity in relationship to the velocity of the thing being measured. Lorenz worked all this out mathematically but couldn’t believe it. I decided in 1904 to believe it and see where it led me. It led to solving all the puzzles that have bedeviled physics since the Michelson-Morley experiment. It led, in fact, to the simple conclusion that there is no length as a ding an sich, an objective entity, but only length1 as read by instrument1, length2 as read by instrument2, and so on. The same applies to time, I have also demonstrated.”

  “But,” said Babcock, “this takes us outside sensory space and linear time entirely. It is Gnostic and Platonic.”

  “In a sense,” Einstein granted. “The difference is that Plato left off at the point where I begin. He never connected his geometric archetypes with empirical sense-data. I have made that scientific connection. My theory explains experiments that can be explained in no other way.”

  “Tell him about the rock and the train,” Joyce suggested languidly from his shadow.

  “Oh, that is a type of relativity that has been known since Galileo,” Einstein said. “I have merely provided a contemporary illustration. Suppose you throw a rock from a train. In what path does it fall?”

  Babcock looked uncertain. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “It seems to me it would fall in a straight line.”

  “Ah,” said Einstein, “so it would—from your viewpoint inside the train. But if somebody else were in a field beside the railroad tracks, how would he see it fall?”

  Babcock was silent. “Er,” he said finally, “I’m not sure about this, either, but I try to visualize it and I imagine he would see it fall in a curved path.”

  “In the curve called a parabola,” Einstein corrected. “He would see it fall in a perfect parabola. Now, which is true? The viewpoint of the man on the train, or that of the man in the field?”

  “I begin to catch your drift,” Babcock said. “Both are true, within the—what do you call it?—coordinate systems of the two observers.”

  Joyce laughed. “All of this is unfamiliar to you,” he said to Babcock, “and yet you are learning rapidly. Do you know why that is? I shall tell you. Because your Cabala is based on the very same principles, although applied in that case to psychology rather than to physics. You are just learning a new aspect of what you actually already know.”

  Einstein raised an eyebrow. “So I am a Cabalist?” he asked, amused.

  “What is Cabala?” Joyce asked Socratically. “Well, whatever else it is, from my viewpoint as an artist it is a method of multiple vision. To take an example from Sir John’s story, I.N.R.I., analyzed Cabalistically, no longer has simply a Christian meaning, but a Greek mythological meaning, an Egyptian meaning, an Alchemical meaning, a meaning within the symbolism of the Tarot cards, and so forth. These correspondences are not illogical but analogical. The Cabalist sees each symbol—Christ, Dionysus, Osiris, the Tarot cards and the rest—as meaningful in its own mythic context, just as Professor Einstein’s theory sees each measurement as true within its own coordinate system. And the Cabalist seeks, behind these diverse and contradictory symbols, the archetypal meaning which is in human psychology itself, as Dr. Jung has recently reminded us. Just as Professor Einstein looks beyond the diverse and contradictory instrument readings for the abstract mathematical relationships that translate one coordinate system into another.”

  “Multiple vision,” Babcock repeated. “Yes. That does summarize Cabalism nicely.”

  “Well, then,” Joyce said, “what is Clouds Without Water? Is it not a perfect example of Cabalistic thinking, a book which can, in fact, be read at least four ways, and possibly more, if we were to look at it more closely? Is it not a model of Cabalistic multiple meaning? And I note also that you told us it has exactly 114 sonnets. This is the Matter of the Enumeration of Sonnets. Now, I am no hermeticist myself, but I did spend some time in my youth listening to John Eglinton and George Russell and the other Dublin mystics, and even I know that 114 is an important Cabalistic number, is it not?”

  “Yes,” Babcock said. “The tradition is that the Invisible College acts publicly for 114 years, then dissolves itself and remains passive for 114 years, then acts openly again for 114 years, and so on.”

  “There is more to it than that,” Joyce said. “There is always more in Cabala. Eglinton or Russell—I forget which—once explained to me, as an example of the historical connection between Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, that the mysterious letters on Masonic buildings and documents, L.P.D., also equal 114 Cabalistically. Does my memory trick me?”

  “No,” Babcock said, “Lamed is 30, Pe is 80, and Daleth is 4. Total: 114. The meaning is supposed to be Light, Pressure, Density and refers to the inner transformation of the Alchemical process.”

  “It refers also to other things,” Joyce said. “The Grand Orient lodges before the French Revolution, from which Mr. Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis claims descent, explained L.P.D. as Lilia perdita destrue—‘trample the lily underfoot,’ the lily being the symbol of the Bourbons, the royal family of France against which this faction of Masonry has allegedly been waging war since the destruction of the Templars by Philip II. Once again, you see, the Cabalistic symbols mean different things on different levels of interpretation.”

  Einstein re-lit his pipe. “So,” he said between puffs, “you have taken us a long way round, Jeem, but your conclusion is precisely what?”

  “Clouds Without Water is the work of a very advanced Cabalist,” Joyce said. “And the Reverend Verey was never as ignorant of Cabala as he claimed. Proof: he knew that the 26 garters pendant on the Order of the Garter had a Cabalistic meaning and he prodded you, Sir John, until you remembered that 26 is the value of Yod Hé Vau Hé, the Holy Unspeakable Name of God. The Clue of the 26 Garters, Dr. Watson might call it.”

  Joyce paused and then went on. “I don’t know how Verey murdered off his family, and I certainly don’t know why [but who can understand the workings of religious mania?], but I am morally certain that he did. The whole story of the book of horrors that drives people mad is entir
ely his invention, remember, and I have already indicated my reasons for thinking he purloined that idea from Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow. I call to mind another hunchback driven mad by religious fervor and sexual anxieties, Saint Paul, who once wrote a sentence that describes Verey perfectly: ‘I do not do that which I would, but that which is hateful to me.’ The split mirror again.”

  Babcock’s face revealed a conflict of emotions. “You almost convince me. But your theory is only partial and still leaves very much unexplained….”

  The doorbell rang. All three men started slightly.

  “It has been a heavy experience, this tale of yours,” Einstein said. “But Joyce has very nicely clarified the points on which I was myself still puzzled. With his contribution, I think I can now explain all of it, and banish the bogeys forever.”

  Mileva Einstein appeared in the doorway, with a package in brown wrapping paper. “Albert,” she said, “a boy just delivered this for you.”

  The three men exchanged glances. Einstein arose like a cat. “This is not totally unexpected,” he said, crossing the room.

  Joyce and Babcock, sitting erect suddenly, watched tensely as Mileva left and Einstein carried the package to his desk.

  “Is it …” Babcock stammered.

  “Oh, yes.” Einstein was amused. “The complete artistic finishing stroke. It has the return address of ‘M.M.M., 93 Jermyn Street, London, U.K.,’ even though it bears no postmark and was obviously never in the mails.” He began to tear the paper.