Masks of the Illuminati (10 page)

Hand, fish, head, hand …

Old man, death, newborn babe, old man …

I.N.R.I., Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

Chronos, god of Time (and destruction); Hades, lord of the dead; Apollo, god of the Dawn Sun; Chronos, damn it again …

The mental ordeal went on. And on. And on.

Sir John tried Gematria, which is the Cabalistic method of taking the numerical value of a mystery-word and relating it to all other Hebrew words having the same number.
Yod
was 10,
nun
was 50,
resh
was 200, second
yod
was 10 again. Total: 270. He plunged for days into his Hebrew
dictionary and found only one example:
, levers or bars.

Another blank wall.

The next night he awoke from a dream of buzzing goblins in honey-suits with the sentence clear in his head:
I Never Risk Inquiry
. He was sure this was a most profound revelation and hastily scribbled it down in his bedside notepad. In the morning he read it again and could only laugh.

But an hour later, in his library, a most peculiar accident occurred. He was reaching for his Hebrew dictionary again, looking for at least a second word with the value 270, when another book somehow got dislodged and fell at his feet. He bent to pick it up and found it was a seventeenth-century alchemical treatise, opened
at page 270
. Coincidence? The first paragraph began:

The translation leaped into Sir John’s mind in a blinding flash:
All of nature is renewed by fire
.

An old man, death and rebirth—Time, Death and Resurrection—Crucifixion and Redemption—the Lord of Time, the Lord of the Underworld and the Golden Dawn.
All of nature is renewed by fire
. The Greek and Christian symbols flowed together and merged with the Tarot cards. Sir John’s gropings toward a new theory of evolution, midway between his father’s Lamarckian heresies and Uncle Bentley’s Darwinian othodoxy, became agonizingly concrete as he experienced the struggle out of the caves, the raiding nomads who swept down from the deserts, the snows, the storms, the plagues, the pain, the constant death, death, death. And the onward struggle: the birth toward true consciousness, flickering dimly in all, blazing into fiery illumination occasionally. It was the cosmic birth experience relived and relived and relived until the agony and the joy became mingled and inseparable. He was the single cell swimming in the amniotic ocean, remembering the searing ecstasy of his creation: the tenderness of the first moments at the tit: the caves of Trolls he had imagined becoming real as dark archaic forces moved all about him: swimming in the hot sun, at peace: and then the terror and the horror of life again: the hunger and the violence and the lunacy: the victims of the Inquisition screaming for centuries on the torture racks of insane Faith: the devils and demons unleashed from the fantasy of terrified minds into the experience of millions: people in solitary confinement: soldiers with their arms and legs and genitals burned off: children beaten and whipped and starved: death on the operating table under the scalpel of drunken and sadistic doctors: while the carnivals and dances go on, the blind merry ones oblivious to all the agony of their brothers and sisters in the hell of man’s inhumanity to life: mothers weeping over stillborn infants: the horror in the mouse’s eye as it knew itself trapped: gigantic halls
of enormous godly statues of peace and wisdom: eternity of mountains and oceans: the undying trees talking silently forever: carrying the cross up the hill, accepting the burden, willing to take all the pain and all the agony forever, to redeem at last the blind struggle and complete the planetary birth. Yes: the Vril was moving in him, the alchemical heat was rising: he saw far, far beyond the tiny cell called John Babcock and was one with the billions of years of the single organism that was Terra.

Was it a minute or a thousand years? Sir John didn’t know; he merely knew that he and the whole world of his perception was remade by fire.

“Here is my answer,” Sir John said steadily.

Jones took the Magickal Diary Babcock handed him and read slowly the latest page:

“There is no right answer,” Jones said. They were dining, this time, at Claridge’s, and Jones had brought along a very small pamphlet instead of the usual stack of fat old books. “Or, I might as well have said, there are many right answers. Someday, not in the near future, we shall have a very profound philosophical discussion about that, but for the present it shall suffice to say that your answer is right for you, at this stage of your training.”

“But,” Sir John said, feeling deflated, “I felt it, even before I understood it. The Vril energy, flowing through me as it flows through all things. The continuous process of destruction and recreation—the world remade by the
fire of the Holy Spirit. I
felt
it,” he repeated, a bit lamely.

George Cecil Jones sighed profoundly. “You have taken your first step,” he said sadly, “but you don’t even know yet in which direction to walk. Pray contain your self-congratulations and, for God’s sake, really apply yourself to the exercises in this little pamphlet. We have scheduled your initiation as a Neophyte for next month sometime, but if you do not perform these exercises rigorously, at least four times a day, until then, it will be a false initiation—a hollow shell, a mere play-acting. Do not delude yourself that you have arrived before you have even learned how to travel.”

Sir John glanced at the pamphlet, which was titled:

His mood sank further. “So I am to practice getting out of my body now,” he said uneasily.

Jones drank some claret neatly. “Just so,” he replied calmly. “And most of the time you feel like a perfect damned fool. And you will suspect, once again, that we are a band of plausible madmen leading you to some metaphysical Bedlam. But do the exercises, record the results after each experiment, continue to show me your Magick Diary monthly for criticism and advice—and have patience, dear boy; patience! There is one further matter I must mention at this time. It will be necessary, I am afraid, for you to take an Oath of celibacy for the duration of the next two years. Will you accept that condition, or will you drop out of the Great Work, instead? Once taken, you understand, the oath is binding and will bring down terrible punishments if violated in any manner.”

Sir John controlled his features with difficulty. “I remain
pledged to the Great Work,” he said firmly. “I will endure any trials that are necessasry.”

“I must ask you three times. Are you quite sure of yourself in this matter?”

“I am.” Sir John did not hesitate this time.

“And I ask you the third time. Will you be bound by this Oath of celibacy for two full years and not attempt any mental reservations or sophistries to evade or circumvent it if it becomes onerous?”

“I will be bound,” Sir John said firmly.

Jones looked at his empty plate with seemingly great interest, as if searching for archaeological clues as to its age. “Celibacy, to be spiritually effective,” he said mildly, quietly, “must be total. No … um … solitary vices may be allowed to console one for the absence of womankind.”

Sir John felt the separate tension in each muscle of his face, thinking first:
The blood is rushing to my cheeks and I’m blushing like an imbecile schoolchild
. And then:
No, the blood is draining from my face and I look like the pale criminal in the dock
, not daring to look up at that moment lest Jones should also have looked up from his own seemingly obsessive scrutiny of his empty plate, and half-afraid also that Jones might be so advanced an Adept that reading minds was as easy for him as reading the label on a champagne bottle; yet hyper-conscious again, as in the first rising of the alchemical heat, the first sense of the Rosy Crucifixion implied in the cryptogram I.N.R.I., aware of his own awareness and afraid of his own fear: once again confronting the foreboding of insanity that had plagued him since the first timid sins of puberty, so that in a kind of hysterical paralysis he felt time itself might have slowed and, wondering if paranoia was descending upon him, thinking
I heard it
, and,
No, I only imagined it
—for it seemed that somebody at a nearby table had said distinctly, almost mockingly, the name of that which was most intimately connected with his most shameful secret.
But maybe the voice had only been mentioning Carter’s, another restaurant.

“I—I—” Sir John found he could not speak.

Jones drank another sip of wine. “Two years,” he said calmly, as if not noticing Sir John’s nervousness, “is not so terribly long a time, you will find. And you will discover that matters astral become increasingly easy as you place matters carnal away from you. I have confidence in you, Sir John,” he ended with abrupt warmth, patting the younger man’s shoulder for emphasis.

And Sir John returned home for two weeks, to practice astral projection, feeling most of the time (as Jones had warned him) like a perfect damned fool.