THE EYE-ON-THE-PYRAMID
A biological breakthrough will force a new militancy, a new crusade. "Make the world safe for Immortality," will be the cry.
–segerberg, The Immortality Factor
On May 1, 1976, Cagliostro and Norma were in Mexico City on a vacation. At lunch she held up a twenty-centavo piece and said, "Isn't that the same as the design on back of the dollar?"
"It's Masonic," he said. "The Mexican and American revolutionaries were both predominantly Freemasons."
"What does it mean, anyway-an eye floating above a pyramid?"
He started to explain about the Third Eye and the pineal gland, and then noticed that she wasn't listening.
"They're waiting for you," she said in a mediumismic voice.
John Disk, in 1984, read Cagliostro's notes on the next three days very carefully:
"I refused to believe it. I put her to every possible test, whenever the voice spoke. Looking for evidence of autosuggestion and self-hypnosis, I found evidence of autosuggestion and self-hypnosis-naturally! I also found seventeen things I couldn't explain. Most central was the fact that the message, when I finally encouraged her, came in Enochian, a language which nobody understands since all we possess are the nineteen fragments received by Dee and Kelly in the seventeenth century. Yet she gave me nineteen new fragments, and translated them, and the grammar and vocabulary are consistent with the Dee-Kelly scryings. Even if she had studied the Dee and Kelly fragments (which she swears she hasn't), concocting new sentences in that unknown language would be beyond the power of any human brain or even of any known computer…"
The nineteen fragments of Enochian, translated by Norma in the same trance in which the fragments arrived, became the nineteen chapters of The Aquarian Gospel. Crane wrote in the introduction:
"It is impossible to doubt that these are the communications of a superior intelligence. If the reader is, as I am [thank God!], an atheist, the identity of that intelligence will pose severe mysteries. Is it interplanetary-or interstellar? A being leaping across Time from some more advanced future, or past [Atlantis]? Does it come from dimensions tangent to, but not identical with, our own? I propose no answer to these questions, but I am sure that this intelligence, or others like it, sent the messages which founded the great religions of the past, and that such communications are the foundation of the belief in beings called 'gods.'…"
Norma was killed in an automobile accident the day the book was published."What further proof do we need," a prominent clergyman wrote in his syndicated newspaper column, "that this foul and obscene 'revelation' comes from a source not divine, but diabolical?"
Crane's first-and only-failure to escape from a challenge box occurred one month later.
The eye operation came later that year. "I can save one," the doctor told him, "but not both."
"A blind magician is worse off than a deaf musician, and I'm not Beethoven," Crane said simply. "Do the best you can."
He retained the sight of one eye.
"Much as we are inclined to sympathize," the New York Daily News editorialized, "we do admit to a strong feeling that there is divine retribution in the tragedies befalling drug-cultist Cagliostro 'the Great.' "
The Aquarian Gospel was burned by a citizens' group in Cicero, Illinois, that week.
"These powers, whoever and whatever they are," Crane wrote-in unpublished notes which John Disk read years later, weeping- "are determined that I abandon all else and become no more than the servant who carries their message. To this end, they are taking away from me, one by one, all the things I love. Or, perhaps, I am merely in the terminal stages of a long-brewing paranoid psychosis?"
Hugh Crane celebrated his fourteenth birthday in 1938 by climbing into the bed of the family's black maid, Sophie Hage, who introduced him to Voudon.
The group in Harlem at that time actually combined elements of Voudon and Masonry. Since Voudon was already a blend of European witchcraft and African magic, and Masonry is a mixture of elements from Rosicrucian mysticism and French revolutionary free thought, there were actually four traditions involved, and the Rite of Initiation was unique. Borrowed from the third degree of Masonry, it replaced Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum with the Grand Zombi, and, since marijuana was involved, the ordeal became as real as in those days when candidates knew they would be killed if they failed.
In a dark cellar on 110th Street, the Grand Zombi demanded, "Reveal the Secret Word or I will kill you. Reveal the Secret Word and give up your quest for Truth and Power."
Hugh, repeating the formula taught him, replied, "Kill me if you must, but I will search again for Truth and Power as soon as I am reborn."
The Grand Zombi, black face above a black robe, raised his sword. "Do you fear me now, mortal?" he screamed.
"I have eternity to work in," Hugh replied, according to rote. "Why should I fear?"
"Then die!" screamed the Zombi-the part of the Rite which had not been explained to the candidate in advance- and Hugh felt the sword cross his neck and saw the blood spurting.
He also saw the bulb which the Zombi squeezed to make the blood spurt out of the end of the sword.
And he understood the manufacture of reality and power completely.
TRANSFORMATION
DECEMBER 24, 1983:
Marvin Gardens was awake again; the downers hadn't fully taken the edge off the coke excitation.
He had turned the radio on, but the only thing worth listening to was Handel's Messiah-the fourth time he had caught parts of it this week-and they were in the middle of "He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." Not quite what he needed at this hour, with the early morning Manhattan permeation of suicides and accidental overdoses skulking in the shadows. He wished they would get on to the Hallelujah Chorus.
Marvin found a book he'd never finished-The Autobiography of Cagliostro the Great. He opened at random and started reading:
"Get a a job," my father said. Turning back, I saw the beggar falling to the ground, obviously fainting from starvation, but when he landed I knew, from his limpness, that it was more than a faint: that he was dead.
It has sometimes occurred to me that there is a parallel here to the famous experience of the Buddha, who, like myself, had the misfortune to be born rich and only discovered what life is like for most people when he encountered a beggar and a corpse. Is this parallel an accident? I am not sure: I cannot say when I was elected, or drafted, to receive the Aquarian message, the great affirmation that "All is joy," in contrast to the Buddha's equally true, equally false, but now obsolete "All is sorrow."
We never see what is in front of our eyes. My father did not see what happened inside me when that beggar died; I have brought men and women to the edge of the Vision, by various tactics, and they, afraid to see it, ran off to psychiatrists.
"It's really very simple to remember the order of the ten planets," Blake Williams explained to Natalie."Just memorize the sentence 'Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts Mayonnaise or Glue.' Got it?"
"Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts Mayonnaise or Glue," Natalie repeated dubiously.
"That's all," Williams said proudly. "You just use the initial letter of each word as a mnemonic, and you've got all ten planets. Mercury Venus Earth Mars the asteroids Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto Mickey and Goofy."
"Wow!" said Natalie. "Disneyland in the skies."
"Who the hell was that?" Carol Christmas asked breathlessly, as the triangle finally faded. "Sure didn't look like a loa to me," she added, frowning thoughtfully.
"It was Simon Moon," Joe Malik said, also somewhat breathless. "I knew him in another universe… or another novel… or something…"
Carol stared at him. "You wigging?" she asked bluntly.
"No," Joe said. "I think I'm beginning to understand the trap we're all caught in, and how to get out of it."
DAMNANT QUOD NON INTELLIGUNT
God told John Disk to kill Cagliostro the Great.
It was that simple; after all, who would dare to disobey the Voice of God Himself?
God had been talking to Disk for nearly a year now. The Voice had been rather faint at first, and John even thought it was the Devil for a while, because it kept telling him he was damned. It said he was damned because he sinned sometimes when he was asleep. It said many silly and blasphemous things, but John realized later that those weirdities had been the Devil trying to jam and confuse the communication, for when the Voice became strong and constant, there was no doubt at all that it was God.
It told John that he had been especially selected because of his virtue and purity, and it never mentioned what happened sometimes when he was asleep. It told him he was the only twenty-three-year-old male virgin in Unistat, the last true Christian not perverted by Pussycat and the Sexual Revolution and Black Magic. It told him he had earned much merit in Heaven for his selfless activities on behalf of the antiabortion movement in the 1970s and White Heroes Opposing Red Extremism since then.
It really loved John, and it never stopped telling him he was the most important man on the planet because he had been Selected.
At first it didn't tell him what he had been Selected for; but every time he read a news story about some new blasphemy by Cagliostro the Great, the Voice of God would say, "This man must be stopped."
It was only toward the end of November that the Voice became increasingly explicit and said directly that he, John Disk, had been Selected to terminate the foul existence of the infamous devil-worshiper Cagliostro. Even then the Voice was almost drowned out by the voice of Rhoda Chief, the Scarlet Woman of Rock, chanting, "Hickory dickory dock, I'd like to suck your cock," and other diabolical voices howling "no wife, no horse, no mustache" and "sit down when you want to pee" and other nonsense like that. The Devil was trying very hard to keep Disk from hearing and believing the Word of God; he wanted Disk to think he was going crazy. But the Voice of God got louder and more powerful and drowned out the others, and nobody who heard it, Disk knew, could ever doubt that a Voice so wise and powerful was anything else but that of the Lord God Himself.
John made sure, of course. He spent a whole night praying, beating his back with a bundle of wet, stinging cords, just like he'd read in a book about the saints from the public library on Forty-second Street. He kept saying, "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner." At dawn Jesus appeared, with a halo, and told him exactly how to find a pawn shop where he could buy a gun without the legal impediment of acquiring a permit. Then He turned into a huge red triangle, through which the impassive face of a lion stared at John, and then it was all mirrors and blue smoke until he actually found the pawn shop and got the pistol.
The Devil was determined to protect his servant, Cagliostro, so John found the mirrors and smoke increasingly getting in his way in the following days. He would be on his way to Theology class at Fordham when suddenly all around would be thousands of hippies of all nations and a voice would be singing
This is the dawning
of the Age of Bavaria
or he would be in a yellow submarine floating over a gigantic submerged pyramid or he would turn on the religious channel on the wall TV (the only one not full of smut and filth these days) and find Linda Lovelace doing That Disgusting Thing to somebody named Marvin Gardens. But he continued to pray, and more and more The Voice of God would drown out all these nets and snares of Satan.
Finally, on the morning of December 24, the Voice of God told him to go to Central Park West, where Cagliostro was living, and wait on the street. The Voice told him that as a reward he would be allowed to sit at the left hand of the Father in Heaven-Jesus would keep the right hand but the Holy Spirit was being demoted to an auxiliary rank with the Virgin, so that he, John Disk, could be given the third highest position in all Paradise.
When he got to the School Book Depository and walked toward the box seat in the Ford Theatre, sex mutilators and cattle educators howled at him and he realized that the Devil was still trying to deceive him and he prayed harder and harder until it was clear that he was really on Central Park West and the man walking toward him, taking a morning constitutional, was the diabolical Cagliostro, a chameleon on a mirror, and the class of all classes that were similar to it, but he prayed and got the pistol out of his pocket, almost seeing the Grand Zombi and his sword, breathing harder now because the Devil was trying so hard to confuse him, and the interviewer wanted to know which monk Vlad impaled.
John Disk held the gun in a trembling hand and looked into Cagliostro's icy eyes.
"Oy, have you picked the wrong Black Magician," Cagliostro said in a stage-Yiddish accent.
John Disk fired five times into the heart.
The gate of Chinatown opened.
MASS LANDING
Justin Case was released from the flying saucer in the middle of Central Park. He was still rather befoozled mentally and unsteady on his feet, so he staggered to the nearest bench and sat quietly, watching them take off.
His wristwatch said 7:15-which seemed plausible.
"It is the morning of December 24," he said aloud. "Tomorrow is Christmas." It seemed necessary, somehow, to get the simple things cleared up first of all, before dealing with the Mysteries.
Things like this didn't happen to New York music critics. They happened to farmers in Iowa or fishermen in Arkansas, or other such unsophisticated types, and, besides, they were hallucinations.
Justin watched the flying saucer disappear across the sky, reminding himself that it was a hallucination.
But still their words rang in his ears:
"It is time for your species to join the Galactic Community."
Justin finally got his mind and legs and various organs working together well enough to walk. He headed for Central Park West, hoping to find a cab.
At Fifty-eighth Street he saw a newsstand. The headlines glared at him like Tibetan demons:
WORLDWIDE UFO FLAP
Mass Landings Reported
And in a corner the inevitable surrealist tag line to such a night:
Mayor of Chicago Arrested
Sodomy with Boar Hog Alleged
As Justin stared at those remarkable messages, he heard five rapid pistol shots.
From somewhere nearby music drifted toward him. He found himself absently putting the words to the melody:
He knows when you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness' sake
He hastily bought a newspaper and hailed a cab. He was going to go right home and, for the first time in his life, break his rule against drinking in the morning.
When he was drunk enough to stop trembling, it would be time to decide whether to report his experience or let those who had already talked take all the heat.
CROWN POINT
Crown Point Jail, in Indiana, was called "the escape-proof jail," when John Dillinger was brought there in May 1934. On the day Dillinger destroyed that name by escaping, an out-of-work vaudeville magician was begging in Central Park, New York. One thought burned in this man's head- With a little luck, I could have been a second Houdini- and that was what he was thinking as he fought the hunger cramps and laid his spiel on Tom Crane.
When he felt the ground move in that big wobble of uncertainty, he remembered suddenly the ever-branching Tree of Life as memories of Adam Weishaupt and Mohammed and insects and trees flooded through him, a million balloons bursting inside him and outside him at once, each balloon releasing a twinkle of light, each light part of the infinite ladder of light, and he was watching himself die, in horror and ecstasy, through the eyes of a little boy.
How did my karma ever land me here? he thought as he died, and the boy heard him thinking.
THE ELEPHANT
ANNALS OF GENERAL PSYCHIATRY,
MAY 1984:
In short, the wave of delusion, mania, and hallucination that occurred over the Christmas-New Year's holidays last year can only be attributed to the paradoxical nature of the unconscious. Where previous mass hysterias ha
ve occurred (e.g., the end-of-the-world manias of the Middle Ages, the Orson Welles Martian invasion broadcast of 1938) the cause was, obviously, the tensions, stresses, and fears of those times. This latest eruption, coming in the midst of a time of progress, optimism, and rising expectations, can only be explained by Freud's great discovery that opposites are equal to the prelogical unconscious mind [ambivalence principle]. In other words, high hopes, like high anxieties, can unleash the dreaming mind into the waking state…
–A. Besetzung, M.D.
ANNALS OF GENERAL PSYCHIATRY,
JUNE 1984:
The categories of hallucination or delusion do not fully cover the phenomenon-which to some slight extent is still continuing…
The Mayor of Chicago "hallucinated" the beautiful "Princess Isis from Venus" who seduced him, in his fantasy life, but the witnesses at the stockyard insist that he was sodomizing a quite real hog at the time…
Mars is as inhospitable to life as Venus, but a prominent music critic has told this author, in private, of an abduction by little green Martians out of 1930s science fiction, but this obviously hallucinatory experience does not help us understand how the man was transported from his apartment on Twenty-third Street to the middle of Central Park, where he heard the shots of a murder that never occurred…
One of the blind men cured by the Virgin of Perth Amboy had been examined at Johns Hopkins just one week earlier, where the optic nerve was found to be irreparably dead, so that this is not a matter of hysterical blindness cured by hysterical faith, but of real blindness cured by hysterical faith…
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