"Strange," Joe said. "Dr. Iggy, in the San Francisco JAM cabal, explained it to me differently."
"What would you expect?" Hagbard replied. "No two who know, know the same in their knowing. By the way, why haven't you told me that you're sure those gorillas back there were just men I dressed up in gorilla suits?"
"I'm becoming more gullible," Joe said.
"Too bad," Hagbard told him sadly. "They really were men in gorilla suits. I was testing how easily you could be bamboozled, and you flunked."
"Now, wait a minute. They smelled like gorillas. That was no fake. You're putting me on now."
"That's right," Hagbard agreed. "I wanted to see if you'd trust your own senses or the word of a Natural-Born Leader and Guru like me. You trusted your own senses, and you pass. My put-ons are not just jokes, friend. The hardest thing for a man with dominance genes and piratical heredity like me is to avoid becoming a goddam authority figure. I need all the feedback and information I can get- from men, women, children, gorillas, dolphins, computers, any conscious entity- but nobody contradicts an Authority, you know. Communication is possible only between equals: that's the first theorem of social cybernetics- and the whole basis of anarchism- and I have to keep knocking down people's dependence on me or I'll become a fucking Big Daddy and won't get accurate communication anymore. If the pig-headed Illuminati and their Aneristic imitators in all the governments, corporations, universities and armies of the world understood that simple principle, they'd occasionally find out what's actually going on and stop screwing up every project they start. I am Freeman Hagbard Celine and I am not anybody's bloody leader. As soon as you fully understand that I'm your equal, and that my shit stinks just like yours, and that I need a lay every few.days or I get grouchy and make dumb decisions, and that there is One more trustworthy than all the Buddhas and sages but you have to find him for yourself, then you'll begin to understand what the Legion of Dynamic Discord is all about."
"One more trustworthy than all the Buddhas and sages…?" Joe repeated, finding himself most confused when he had been closest to total comprehension a second earlier.
"To receive light you must be receptive," Hagbard said curtly. "Work that one out for yourself. Meanwhile, take this back to New York and chew on it a bit." And he presented Joe with a book entitled Never Whistle While You're Pissing: A Guide to Self-Liberation, by Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H.
Joe read the book carefully in the following weeks- while Pat Walsh, in Confrontation's research department, checked out every assertion about the Illuminati that Joe had picked up from Hagbard, Simon, Dillinger and Dr. Ignotius-but, although some of the book was brilliant, much was obscure, and he found no clue to the One more trustworthy than all Buddhas. Then, one night high on Alamout Black hashish, he started working on it with expanded and intensified consciousness. Malaclypse the Elder? No, he was wise, and somewhat benevolent in a fey sort of style, but certainly not trustworthy. Simon? For all his youth and nuttiness, he had moments of incredible perception, but he was almost certainly less enlightened than Hagbard. Dillinger? Dr. Ignotius? The mysterious Malaclypse the Younger, who had disappeared, leaving behind only the inscrutable Principia Discordia?
Christ, Joe thought, what a male chauvinist I am! Why didn't I think of Stella? The old joke came back to him… "Did you see God?" "Yes, and she's black." Of course. Hadn't Stella presided over his initiation, in Dr. Iggy's chapel? Hadn't Hagbard said she would preside over George Dorn's initiation, when George was ready? Of course.
Joe always remembered that moment of ecstasy and certainty: it taught him a lot about the use and misuse of drugs and why the Illuminati went wrong. For the unconscious, which always tries to turn every good lay into a mother figure, had contaminated the insight which his supraconscious had almost given him. It was many months later, just before the Fernando Poo crisis, that he finally discovered beyond all doubt the One who was more trustworthy than all Buddhas and all sages.
Do-da, do-da, do-da-do-da-DAY…
(And Semper Cuni Linctus, the very night that he reamed his subaltern for taking native superstitions seriously, passed an olive garden and saw the Seventeen… and with them was the Eighteenth, the one they had crucified the Friday before. Magna Mater, he swore, creeping closer, am I losing my mind? The Eighteenth, whatshisname, the preacher, had set up a wheel and was distributing cards to them. Now, he turned the wheel and called out the number at which it stopped. The centurion watched, in growing amazement, as the process was repeated several times, and the cards were marked each time the wheel stopped. Finally, the big one, Simon, shouted "Bingo!" The scion of the noble Linctus family turned and fled… Behind him, the luminous figure said, "Do this in commemoration of me."
"I thought we were supposed to do the bread and wine bit in commemoration of you?" Simon objected.
"Do both," the ghostly one said. "The bread and wine is too symbolic and arcane for some folks. This one is what will bring in the mob. You see, fellows, if you want to bring the Movement to the people, you have to start from where the people are at. You, Luke, don't write that down. This is part of the secret teachings.")
Slurp, slurp… Camp-town ladies sing this song.…
(But how do you account for a man like Drake? one of Carl Jung's guests asked at the Sunday afternoon Kaffeeklatsch where the strange young American had inspired so much speculation. Jung sucked on 'his pipe thoughtfully- wondering, actually, how he could ever cure his associates of treating him like a guru- and answered finally, "A fine mind strikes on an idea like the arrow hitting bull's-eye. The Americans have not yet produced such a mind, because they are too assertive, too outgoing. They land on an idea, even an important idea, like one of their fullbacks making a tackle. Hence, they always crumple or cripple it. Drake has such a mind. He has learned everything about power- more than Adler knows, for all his obsession on the subject- but he has not learned the important thing. That is, of course, how to avoid power. What he needs, and will probably never achieve, is religious humility. Impossible in his country, where even the introverts are extroverted most of the time.")
It was a famous novelist, who was later to win the Nobel Prize, who actually gave Drake his first lead on what the Mafia always called il Segreto. They had been talking about Joyce and his unfortunate daughter, and the novelist mentioned Joyce's attempts to convince himself that she wasn't really schizophrenic. "He told Jung, 'After all, I do the same sorts of things with language myself.' Do you know what Jung, that old Chinese sage disguised as a psychiatrist, answered? 'You are diving, but she is sinking.' Incisive, of course; and yet, all of us who write anything that goes below the surface of naturalism can understand Joyce's skepticism. We never know for sure whether we're diving or just sinking."
That reminded Drake of his thesis, and he went and got the last words of Mr. Arthur Flegenheimer, a.k.a. Dutch Schultz, from his bureau. He handed the sheets to the novelist and asked, "Would you say the author of this was diving or sinking?"
The novelist read slowly, with increasing absorption, and finally looked up to regard Drake with extremely curious eyes. "Is it a translation from the French?" he asked.
"No," Drake said. "The author was an American."
"So it's not poor Artaud. I thought it might be. He's been around the bend, as the English say, since he went to Mexico. I understand he's currently working on some quite remarkable astrological charts involving Chancellor Hitler." The novelist lapsed into silence, and then asked, "What do you regard as the most interesting line in this?"
" 'A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim,' " Drake quoted, since that was the line that bothered him most.
"Oh, that boy imagery is all personal, just repressed«homosexuality, quite ordinary," the novelist said impatiently. " 'I was in the can and the boy came at me.' I think the author hurt the boy in some way. All the references are tinged with more than normal homosexual guilt."
My God, Drake thought, Vince Coll. He was young enough to seem like a boy to Schul
tz. The Dutchman thought Coil's ghost was shooting at him in that John in Newark.
"I would imagine the author killed himself, or is in a mental hospital by now," the novelist went on thoughtfully.
"He's dead," Drake said grudgingly. "But I won't give you any more clues. It's fascinating to see how well you're doing on your own."
"This is the interesting line," the novelist said. "Or three lines rather. 'I would hear it, the Circuit Court would hear it, and the Supreme Court might hear it. If that ain't the payoff. Please crack down on the Chinaman's friends and Hitler's commander.' You swear this author was American?"
"Well, he came of German ancestry," Drake said, thinking of Jung's theory of genetic memory. "But Chancellor Hitler would hate to admit it. His people were not Aryan."
"He was Jewish?" the novelist exclaimed.
"What's so surprising about that?"
"Only that scarcely two or three people in the whole world, outside the inner circle of the Nazi Party, would understand what was meant by the Chinaman and Hitler's commander. This author must have delved very deeply into occult literature- things like Eliphas Levi, or Ludvig Prinn, or some of the most closely guarded Rosicrucian secrets, and then made a perfectly amazing guess in the right direction."
"What in the world are you talking about?"
The novelist looked at Drake for a long time, then said, "I hate to even discuss it. Some things are too vile. Some books, as your Mr. Poe said, should not allow themselves to be read. Even I have coded things in my most famous work, which is admired for all the wrong reasons. In my search for the mystical, I have learned things I would rather forget, and the real goal of Herr Hitler is one of those things. But you must tell me: who was this remarkable author?"
("He just called me," Luciano told Maldonado, "and I got this much at least: he's not a shakedown artist. He's aiming big, and he's big already himself. I'm getting my lawyer out of bed, to run down all the best Boston families, and find one with a son who shows signs of having the old larceny in his heart. I bet it's a banking family. I can hear money in a voice, and he has it.")
Drake was persistent, and finally the novelist said, "As you know, I refuse to live in Germany because of what is happening there. Nevertheless, it is my home, and I do hear things. If I try to explain, you must get your mind out of the arena of ordinary politics. When I say Hitler does have a Master, that doesn't mean he is a front man in the pedestrian political sense." The novelist paused. "How can I present the picture so you will understand it? You are not German… How can you understand a people of whom it has been said, truthfully, that they have one foot in their own land and one foot in Thule? Have you even heard of Thule? That's the German name for the fabulous kingdom the Greeks called Atlantis. Whether this kingdom ever existed is immaterial; the belief in it has existed since the dawn of history and beliefs motivate actions. In fact, you cannot understand a man's actions unless you understand his beliefs."
The novelist paused again, and then began talking about the Golden Dawn Society in England in the 1890s. "Strange things were written by the members. Algernon Blackwood, for instance, wrote of intelligent beings who preexisted mankind on earth. Can you take such a concept seriously? Can you think about Black-wood's warnings, of his guarded phrases, such as, 'Of such great powers or beings there may conceivably be a survival, of which poetry and legend alone caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds'? Or, Arthur Machen, who wrote of the 'miracles of Mons' during the Great War, describing the angels, as they were called, and published this two days before the soldiers at the scene sent back reports of the incident. Machen was in the Golden Dawn, and he left it to rejoin the Catholic Church, warning, 'There are sacraments of Evil as well as of Good.' William Butler Yeats was a member, too, and you must certainly know his remarkable lines, 'What rough beast/ Its hour come round at last/ Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?' And the Golden Dawn was just the outer portal of the Mysteries. The things that Crowley learned after leaving the Golden Dawn and joining the Ordo Templi Orientis… Hitler suppressed both the Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis, you know. He belonged to the Vril Society himself, where the really extraterrestrial secrets are kept…"
"You seem to be having a hard time getting to the point," Drake said.
"Some things need to be approached in hints, even in allegories. You have taken mescaline with Klee and his friends, and spent the night seeing the Great Visions. Do I need to remind you that reality is not a one-level affair?"
"Very well," Drake said. "Behind the Golden Dawn and the OTO and the Vril Society is a hidden group of real Initiates. There was a German branch of the Golden Dawn, and Hitler was a member. You want me to understand that to treat these sacraments of Evil and these beings from Atlantis as no more than fictions would be to oversimplify; is that right?"
"The Golden Dawn was founded by a German woman, carrying on a tradition that was already a hundred years old in Bavaria. As for these powers or beings from Thule, they do not exist in the sense that bricks and beefsteak exist, either. The physicist, by manipulating these fantastic electrons- which, I remind you, have to be imagined as moving from one place to another without passing through any intervening space like a fairy or a ghost- produces real phenomena, visible to the senses. Say, then, that by manipulating these beings or powers from Thule, certain men are able to produce effects that can also be seen and experienced."
"What was the Golden Dawn?" Drake asked, absorbed. "How did it begin?"
"It's very old, more than medieval. The modern organization began in 1776, with a man who quit the Jesuits because he thought he was an atheist, until his researches into Eastern history had surprising results…"
(It's him! Hitler screamed, He has come for me! And then, as Herman Rauschning recorded, "he lapsed into gibberish." The boss himself, Dutch Schultz moaned, Oh, mama, I can't go through with it. Please. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Take to the sword. Shut up. You got a big mouth.)
We've got two real possibilities, Lepke's lawyer reported. But one of them is Boston Irish and what you described was the old original Boston accent. The second one is probably your man, then. His name is Robert Putney Drake.
Standing before the house on Benefit Street, Drake could see, across the town, the peak of Sentinel Hill and the old deserted church that had harbored the Starry Wisdom Sect in the 1870s. He turned back to the door and raised the old Georgian knocker (remembering: Lillibridge the reporter and Blake the painter had both died investigating that sect), then rapped smartly three times.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, pale, gaunt, cadaverous, opened the door. "Mr. Drake?" he asked genially.
"It was good of you to see me," Drake said.
"Nonsense," Lovecraft replied, ushering him into the Colonial hallway. "Any admirer of my poor tales is always welcome here. They are so few that I could have them all here on a single day without straining my aunt's dinner budget."
He may be one of the most important men alive, Drake thought, and he doesn't really suspect.
("He left Boston by train this morning," the soldier reported to Maldonado and Lepke. "He was going to Providence, Rhode Island.")
"Of course, I have no hesitation in discussing it," Lovecraft said after he and Drake were settled in the old book-lined study and Mrs. Gamhill had served them tea. "Whatever your friend in Zurich may feel, I am and always have been a strict materialist."
"But you have been in touch with these people?"
"Oh, certainly, and an absurd lot they are, all of them. It began after I published a story called 'Dagon' in, let me see, 1919. I had been reading the Bible and the description of the Philistine sea god, Dagon, reminded me of sea serpent legends and of the reconstructions of dinosaurs by paleontologists. And the notion came to me: suppose Dagon were real, not a god, but simply a long-lived being vaguely related to the great saurians. Simply a story, to entertain those who enjoy the weird and Gothic in literature. You can't
imagine my astonishment when various occult groups began contacting me, asking which group I belonged to and which side I was on. They were all terribly put out when I made perfectly clear that I didn't believe any such rubbish."
"But," Drake asked perplexed, "why did you pick up more and more of these hidden occult teachings and incorporate them in your later stories?"
"I am an artist," Lovecraft said, "a mediocre artist, I fear- and don't contradict me. I value honesty above all the other virtues. I would like to believe in the supernatural, in a world of social justice and in my own possession of genius. But reason commands that I accept the facts: the world is made of blind matter, the wicked and brutal always have and always will trample on the weak and innocent, and I have a very microscopic capacity to create a small range of esthetic effects, all macabre and limited in their appeal to a very special audience. Nevertheless, I would that things were otherwise. Hence, although a conservative, I support certain social legislation that might improve the conditions of the poor, and, although a poor writer, I try to elevate the status of my own wretched prose. Vampires and ghosts and werewolves are worn out; they provoke chuckles rather than terror. Thus, when I began to learn of the old lore, after 'Dagon' was published, I began to use it in my stories. You can't imagine the hours I have spent with those old volumes at Miskatonic, wading through tons of trash- Alhazred and Levi and Von Juntzt were all mental cases, you know- to sift out the notions that were unfamiliar enough to cause a genuine shock, and a real shudder, in my readers."
"And you've never received threats from any of these occult groups for mentioning lok Sotot or Cthulhu outright in your stories?"
The Illuminatus! Trilogy Page 36