Satan Wants Me

by Robert Irwin

  Sally made a few snuffly and whimpering noises before drifting off. I stayed awake to write this – my diary. All this on a student grant! Life is really too much! And that really is exactly what student grants should be for – learning about life. Thanks very much Social Science Research Council!

  Monday, May 15

  This morning I decided that it was time to bite on the bullet and talk to Sally about how she should stop wearing tights. I was trying to sell her this notion on the basis that it would be easier for her to do her standing-up peeing that way. However, she was not fooled, as she is perfectly aware that I prefer her wearing stockings and suspenders. God knows, the miniskirt is the greatest thing invented this century. Breathtakingly simple, but still a great invention. Surely Mary Quant must be in the running for the Nobel Prize? The mini is like the Veil in the Temple of Mystery, but a Mystery which is easily penetrated. The big trouble with the mini though is that now some women have started wearing tights, so that that entrancing gap between the stocking top and the line of the panties has been abolished. Sally was not too happy about renouncing tights, but since she is my chick she has to dress for me. As I explained to her, the clothes women wear are in a more profound sense men’s clothes, since they are chosen to please men. It is men who like dresses. (However men’s clothes are just men’s clothes as men dress to please themselves.)

  Anyway after lingering in bed a bit, so I could watch Sally put on a suspender-belt, stockings and a body-hugging jersey mini-dress, I went round to St Joseph’s with a letter of introduction from Michael and arranged to start observing there tomorrow. Graffiti on the school wall: ‘Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down’. All this sociological observing of the school playground could be a bit draggy. As I see it, doing research is just a way of not working – of putting off getting a job. I just can’t get my head round work. The idea of doing a set pattern of actions or else one does not get enough money to eat is just so weird. I don’t know how people manage work.

  Tried to score an LP. Almost bought Are You Experienced, but didn’t. Nobody seems to be producing decent music these days. This diary-keeping is freaky, but what’s the point of it? Read more Crowley. A lot of that man’s stuff reads like a joke.

  Tuesday, May 16

  When I woke up this morning I decided that I was dead. I can’t remember how I died or what my previous existence was like, but that is sort of the point. London is the Spectral City in the Afterlife. There can be no other explanation for the strangeness of London and its grey lifelessness. At every hour the big red buses ferry more crowds of the newly dead into the City of Shadows. Sally and I and the rest of us are spirits who have to hover about in this deceitful place until we wake up to full consciousness of our true state and we manage to shed any lingering attachment to our former mode of existence. Aye, and what then? I resolve to be on the lookout for those tiny clues which will prove to me that I am indeed dead. MEMO: investigate the possibility that my dreams may contain confused memories of my previous existence.

  Corpse or not, I had my research to do so I went off and sat on a wall and started observing the children in the playground of St Joseph’s. I can’t get my head round where those kids are at. The social world of children is a truly weird scene. Took lots of notes anyway.

  Dear Diary, in the evening I went up to the Lodge and attended my first Black Mass! Grooved on the robes and incense and the sprinkling of cockerel’s blood. I was gazing hard at the shadows in the corner of the room, because I thought the spirit, Aiwass, was due to make an appearance, but apparently not. Tried to detect the auras of my fellow celebrants and failed there too – unless that faint phosphene-like glow is really some kind of spiritual emanation, rather than some kind of optical malfunction. It is so hard to be sure about supernatural matters. According to Mr Cosmic, there is a powerful Evil Spirit going about on the astral disguised as God. It is impossible for someone who has only normal human faculties to penetrate the disguise. Which reminds me, when Sally asked Cosmic what was the most horrific thing he could imagine, he said that it was to be reincarnated over and over again for all eternity as a slug. If the Evil Spirit who is impersonating God succeeds in taking over completely, that will probably actually happen to Cosmic and, come to think of it, I will end up having sex with someone who is middle-aged. At least I won’t have to do the razor-studded banister as well – or will I?

  Before celebration of the Mass, we new entrants all had our horoscopes cast by Laura. (She’s the old bag who is the Lodge’s specialist astrologer.) Laura gave me a very peculiar look. Mine was very significant apparently. Partly it was the particular day that I was born, my being Sagittarius and, more precisely, it was the fact that Venus was in Virgo at the hour I was born. Felton and Granville came over and clucked over my birth-chart. Felton said that my birthday was my destiny, whatever that means.

  ‘And your destiny has brought you to us,’ Felton continued. ‘It may well be that you are the man we have been waiting for all these years.’

  He wouldn’t say anything more. But wow man! It was like I was the Messiah or something. I have always rather fancied being the Messiah. Why shouldn’t He be me after all? It could be that I have just temporarily forgotten my true nature. Yet I can’t both be the Messiah and be dead. I shall have to keep looking for clues in order to decide which I am. On the other hand, it is very plausible that the Black Book Lodge feeds this spiel about special destiny to every gullible new entrant.

  However I’m slightly fucked off to learn that Mr Cosmic, Ron and Alice have all been assigned to Laura, while I have Dr Felton as my guide during the probationary period. After the rituals were concluded I asked Alice if I could buy her a drink in the pub at the end of the road. She said no, she wasn’t thirsty. I said it wasn’t a matter of thirst, and that I was making a sociable gesture. She said yes, that was what she had thought, but she wasn’t interested in sociable gestures. She was only interested in discovering the ultimate truth about the nature of existence. Then, seeing me look a bit hurt, she added that it was nothing personal, but she had no time to waste on being friendly and she could see from my clothes and hair that I was not a serious person. Jeezus, it’s not even as if Alice is attractive or anything. She has long frizzy hair and scowls a lot. I think the reason she is interested in the ultimate nature of existence is that she looks so awful. There has to be an explanation.

  Wednesday, May 17

  Awoke quite early but lay in bed for ages listening to Aftermath and thinking. Most people in films and books are attractive looking. But in real life, most people, the people I see on buses, are actually pretty ugly. The norm is ugliness – which is fine for Cosmic. He says that he actually prefers ugly girlfriends, since they are more natural, less glossy. (Of course, it may also be that ugly girls are readier to settle for Cosmic’s small penis.) But for me, Sally represents the absolute minimum standard of beauty I am prepared to put up with. Last year, just before I met him, Cosmic was going about in the streets and stopping women to take their photos and, only when he had got his pictures, did he explain that he was photographing them because they were so fascinatingly ugly. Most of them were pretty pissed off to hear this, but incredibly he did actually go to bed with a few of them.

  Can’t stop listening to Aftermath. It really blows my mind. LPs are my spirit-guides on the journey of life. Cosmic was saying last week that the Stones are heavily into Satanism. Maybe, but I can’t see them fitting into the scene at the Lodge. Had thesis supervision with Michael. He was as hung-up as ever and he kept on and on about how important it was to organise one’s material. Finished reading Berger and Luckman’s Social Construction of Reality. It’s obsessive. If I could grok half of what the Stones are on about, I wouldn’t be fucking around with all this sociology crap. Sally rang – a long draggy call. She was going on and on about what I had told her about the Lodge and how dangerous it is. Tonight her question was whether I thought sexual pleasure was greater for a man than a woman.


  Also she wanted to know if I really was going to submit my diary to inspection by the Satanists tomorrow? And, if so, had I put all the stuff in it about our freaky sex, drug-taking and fantasies about the Devil? I told her natch. If it’s too much for them, then that’s their hang-up. They have to take me as they find me, since, as far as I am concerned, they are on probation, not me. If they are too straight and stodgy to take me as I am, I have plenty of other things to try – like the Process, or Divine Light, or Ouspenskyism, or that witches’ coven in Islington, or Scientology, or Esalen. I’m easy – except that, if I am going to stick with the Black Book Lodge, I would definitely like to see some demons. I have noticed that lots of young men go into occult groups in the hope of meeting and pulling birds, but with me it’s demons I am hoping to encounter.

  Thursday, May 18

  In the morning read stuff in the Senate House library. Over lunch with Sally argued about the Lodge. We walked over to LSE to hear some of the speakers at the sit-in. After writing these lines I went over to the Lodge. I was expecting to take part in a path-working. Instead, I was summoned in to Dr Felton’s study and he made me produce my diary. He, having intoned the ritual, ‘Love is the Law, Love under the Will’, took my notebook from me and then sat back in his chair to read it. It was really weird to watch him getting paler and paler. He was hissing with rage. I thought that all the sex and drugs stuff was getting up his nose.

  Felton’s eyes slitted and then closed. When he spoke it was in a kind of noisy whisper:

  ‘You were commanded to write a diary. You were not asked to keep a scrappy mess of notes about your remarkably uninteresting days. Peter, you have seriously disappointed me – so much so that I now wonder if we should have accepted you as a probationer. You are a university graduate, yet what you have written here is the sort of stuff a schoolboy or a housewife might write – as if it were the bare and paltry record of matches won by the house team or of shirts successfully washed.’

  The eyes opened again. Then one of Felton’s fat fingers descended on an entry in the notebook.

  ‘ “Sally rang – a long draggy call. She was going on and on about what I had told her about the Lodge and how dangerous it is.” You were asked to write a diary and writing involves the construction of connected sentences. I can make nothing of a lot of scrappy jottings delivered in a style which, I imagine, is favoured by your sociology supervisor. “Sally rang.” But she is not a bell. One should much prefer “Sally telephoned”. And you have your tenses mixed. It should be “what I had told her about the Lodge and how dangerous it was”. Also, because of the way you have constructed that sentence, it is ambiguous whether it is the Lodge which is dangerous, or, alternatively, what you have told her about the Lodge that constitutes the menace. Most readers would guess the former reading to be correct, but I am inclined to think that it is what you have told her about the Lodge that is really dangerous.’

  I scowled and nodded, but Felton had not finished with the diary. It was all like the above – totally pedantic and completely blind to the content (even though I would have thought the latter was quite interesting). I cannot be bothered to record it all, but, among other things, he objected to my use of ‘draggy’. He said it was just a modish bit of jargon which concealed my real attitude to what Sally was saying on the phone. He was going on and on about words like ‘draggy’ and ‘grok’ and contractions like ‘don’t’ and ‘isn’t’.

  I cut him short,

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! This is not where it’s at.’

  And I got up to leave. However, the dog, startled by my sudden movement or disturbed by my anger, barked. Felton has a remarkably evil-tempered black labrador called Boy. It lay across the door with its ears pinned back, as if ready to go for my throat. I hesitated.

  ‘I’m not a school kid and I haven’t signed up for a correspondence course,’ I said. ‘Show me a demon or something. Prove to me that the world is not as it seems. Otherwise the Lodge is wasting my time. Show me a demon now, this evening, or I’m walking out of here and I’m not coming back.’

  A slow smile spread across Felton’s face. Was he going to show me a demon? Had I made a wish the granting of which I should speedily repent? Was I indeed ready for a demon?

  ‘I shall show you something better,’ said Felton. ‘Give me a hand with this, would you?’

  I helped him lug a small tin trunk from the fireplace to his desk. He unlocked it and, with the air of a magician pulling off his most spectacular trick, he showed me what was inside. It was full of money. He counted out a wad of five-pound notes and passed twenty of them over to me.

  ‘This is for you,’ he said. ‘Each time you come to my study to have your diary inspected, you will receive a hundred pounds.’

  ‘You aren’t going to show me a demon?’

  ‘Why should I? It is not necessary, is it?’

  I was silent, but he was insistent, ‘It is not necessary, is it?’

  ‘No it is not necessary,’ I said as I picked up the money.

  ‘At last you have learned something. Now let us see what more we can learn from your diary.’

  The finger moved on over the pages and Felton mouthed more of my lines with theatrical distaste.

  ‘“If I could only understand the half of what the Stones are on about, then I wouldn’t be fucking around with all this sociology crap.”’

  He looked up.

  ‘I take it that the Stones are a group of Rock-and-Roll musicians?’

  ‘Well, Rock-and-Roll’s kind of died the death now. They’re more of a rock band with a background in rhythm and blues -’

  The fat hands waved me to silence. I was happy enough to be silent. I was thinking about the money in my hand and only half listening to him going on about not using ‘fucking’ as an intensifier.

  At length, sensing perhaps that I was not really paying attention, Felton put my diary down and started to play with the figurines of Egyptian gods and goddesses which he kept on the desk in front of him: ibis-headed Thoth, hawk-headed Horus, lion-headed Sekhmet, Sobek the crocodile, dwarfish Bes, Seth the storm god and other monstrous figures whose names I did not know. He had apparently forgotten my presence as the gods and goddesses moved under his fingers and seemed to commune with one another. I sat watching and feeling pretty fucked off – but no, I had better rephrase that. I was experiencing a degree of emotional turmoil. I had imagined that, when I received initiation at the hands of the Master, I should then walk through fire, control elementals, cross thresholds of consciousness and hold converse with the larvae. Above all, I should become the master of my soul and the guarantor of its eternity. Instead, it seemed that I was to get a solid grounding in grammar and English usage. I might have done better to just stick with the LSE. But then there was the money … Had I sold my immortal soul for a couple of hundred pounds a week? Wasn’t I supposed to sign something in blood? How does one sell a soul? I had never really been sure I had a soul to sell in the first place. But, if I had one, perhaps I should aim to get a better price for it, like all the beautiful women I could possibly desire …

  ‘What do you think a diary is for?’ said Felton at last.

  ‘I don’t know what it’s for. I never understood why people keep diaries and I wouldn’t be keeping one now, if the Master hadn’t ordered me to.’

  ‘Come, come. Think. What might a diary be for?’

  ‘I really don’t know, but I suppose it might become a record of my spiritual progress along the Path – always assuming that I make any – and an account of all the weird magical things that might happen to me. But surely, what matters is what I say, not how I say it?’

  Felton was impatient with my answer.

  ‘Don’t whine about it, Peter. Write your diary and as you write it, you will find that you are changed by the mere act of writing it – of finding words for what you have done and it may be that, as you write your diary, you will find other beings writing things there too. As Crowley observed, “Magic
is a disease of language.” We all here at the Lodge keep diaries. Adepts are obliged to keep a record, not just of the magical workings, but also of the context in which they take place. The keeping of a diary is, or should be, a training in the art of memory, and memory is the most powerful tool of the adept, for we carry out our operations with words and those words have to be memorised. But do not think that a diary is a mere record, for, as you make progress and begin to traverse the land of shadows, there will be times when your diary is your only companion. There will be times, indeed, when your diary will seem to you like your demon brother.’

  This was more like it. I would have liked to have learned more about shadow-lands and demon brothers, but Felton returned to hacking away at my awful prose. He particularly objected to my calling Tuesday’s ritual a ‘Black Mass’.

  ‘A Black Mass is an act of Devil worship. Tuesday’s operation, however, was an invocation to Aiwass, a way, that is, of strengthening the higher elements within us that correspond to Aiwass. The Lodge does not conduct Black Masses and it never has. If you want a Black Mass, you must turn to the pages of Dennis Wheatley’s novels, for I suspect that the Black Mass has only ever existed in the pages of pulp fiction. A real man of power has no need to have horned demons parading across his drawing room. The resort to spell-making is a sign of weakness, not of strength.’

  Maybe, but surely it was fun to summon up horned demons? What else was the point of magic? But could Felton read my thoughts?

  ‘Your wanting to see a demon reminds me of something which happened to me when I was young.’ As he said this, he put my diary down and began to reminisce. It was quite a long story that he told and, obviously, I cannot remember it word for word, but roughly it ran like this.

  Although Felton was born in Egypt, when war broke out he came to England and enlisted. After some initial training at Catterick, he was transferred to the Chelsea Barracks and he spent much of the war in London. At this time, he was dabbling in the occult. He was at pains to stress that it was just dabbling. Like so many of his generation, he was obsessed by T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. The poem’s esoterically learned endnotes directed Felton’s first fumbling researches into tarot cards, the writings of Hermann Hesse, Buddhist philosophy and ancient English fertility rituals. Felton used the tarot pack to tell fortunes – it was his parlour trick. He spent his leaves frequenting seances, being instructed in yogic breathing and that sort of thing. Nothing serious. Then at the headquarters of the London Buddhist Association, he met a man called Gerald Yorke who was serious and who offered him the chance to meet Aleister Crowley. This was in the winter of 1941. Gerald would be waiting to introduce him to Crowley at the great magician’s flat in Hanover Square.