Satan Wants Me (20 page)

‘Of course, humour is supposed to be a good thing. That is an article of English, middle-class faith. In reality humour is an obstacle to thought. For example, it is evident from what you have written here that you are disturbed by Sally’s description of you as “evil”. Your clowning pretence that you are involved with a group of Satanists who worship and promote evil has actually prevented you from thinking clearly about what Sally might mean by the word “evil” and what evil really might be. As you describe her, it seems that Sally is not interested in thinking about evil. She is using the woolly and ill-defined concept either as a term to abuse you with, or to manipulate you by. We in the Lodge, on the other hand, have been trying to make you think about evil – and good – and to understand both the commonplace morality and the higher morality that lies beyond. Sally’s notion of evil is embedded in a morass of unexamined notions about humanity and human morality. On the plane we are moving to, there is no place for the sickly deceptions of self-sacrifice and consensual morality. Evil and, for that matter good, must in the end both be overridden by the imperative of love. In the dark lands you are about to enter the only ones who laugh are the exultant.’

The matter seems closed, but then, a few minutes later, he is sighing heavily,

‘That blasted sense of humour has wrecked what should have been an entirely serious exercise with Laura on Sunday night and turned it into just a laugh and “good fuck”. Yet what is at stake is terribly serious – But I forgot … I shall no longer be instructing you in the occult arts of the kiss. It has been decided that Laura should take over this part of your instruction. Your lessons with her will normally take place late on Tuesday and Thursday nights.’

My face split open in such an enormous grin, that I thought my head might split apart like a melon which has been slashed by a machete. Felton was presenting this latest development as a mere matter of administrative redeployment, but he did not look at all pleased. He busied himself with my deplorable prose and bad attitudes. How serious everything was, but I would only know just how serious when I earned their trust. All the usual stuff.

I was vaguely aware that I ought to have been arguing with him, but I just sat there smiling. Everything made me happy. Listening to all this high-flown talk made me happier than anything. Even when he started talking about my mother’s death, or rather my account of hearing about my mother’s death, it did not faze me, for it seemed to me that life and death were, after all, part of a continuous flow – part of the transcendent vision which is love. Kissing Laura was going to be such a buzz and yet it was being imposed on me as work!

‘You are still being selective in what you record,’ Felton was insisting. ‘You are still holding back, particularly with regard to your emotional response to your mother’s death. Your diary is your brother. Trust your brother! If not, you will carry the corpse of your mother on your back forever. You must let brother diary share the burden.’

I thought I knew exactly what he meant and I smiled back. It seemed to me that I was being terribly benign and so was Felton. There was this enormous feeling of benignity which even the dog was feeling, I could see that he was benignly smiling too. If only we could always understand one another like we were all understanding one another now. Then Felton broke another piece of amazing news,

‘However, I do detect encouraging signs of a different kind of voice in the diary. It is clear that something is stirring within you … The necessary energies are being generated. I have been consulting with the Master and we have agreed that you should be raised to the rank of zelator on Sunday, after the ritual of The Consecration of the Virgin.’

A zelator! So Cosmic was right! I know that I am not supposed to use exclamation marks, but how can I not use an exclamation mark at such a prospect? And some more exclamation marks! A zelator! A man of power! The first real step on the occult ladder!

Seeing my big grin, Felton spoke more coldly,

‘Frankly I am not really sure that you are ready for it. However, there is not much time. And, to come to present matters, though there is quite a lot more in your diary that I should like to go over with you, it is now time for the lecture. You had better hurry.’

I hurry downstairs to find that I am first in the room. This evening’s lecture is a closed one, for initiates only. Tonight’s lecture is special, a rare event, for the Master is to give the talk, which is on ‘Thinking Backwards’. Laura enters, followed by her pupils, Cosmic and Alice. I notice that Alice is looking rather strange – yet even more intense than usual. Then Granville comes in and takes his accustomed seat at the back of the room.

The Master, Robert Kelley, enters and advances to the lectern. He always moves slowly, as if it were painful for him to move, but yet as if it is still possible for him to surmount that pain through the sheer power of his will. Both the pain and the power come to him from whatever happened at the Cairo Working – so Granville told me. Once he has reached the lectern, the Master stands there silent a while, gazing at each of us individually. Alice trembles with concentration as she gazes back up at him.

‘Love is the Law. Love under the Will.’

At last the Master speaks. He does so without any notes and the first thing he tells us is that he does not want us to take any notes either, but he wants us to memorise as much as possible of his lecture and to reproduce it later in our diaries. The training of the memory is of the first importance for the initiate, for the pursuit of memory is basic to thinking in reverse. Diary-keeping can serve as a basic exercise in helping to think one’s days backwards. As Crowley observes in
Magick in Theory and Practice
, thinking backwards is an aspect of
Dharana
, which is control of thought. According to Crowley, by learning to remember backwards and suppress the more easily accessible thoughts, we ‘strike deeper strata – memories of childhood reawaken. Still deeper lies a class of thoughts whose origin puzzles us. Some of these apparently belong to former incarnations.’ In such a manner, Crowley was able to remember that in a previous incarnation he had been the great French Magus, Eliphas Levi, who once summoned up the spirit of Apollonius of Tyana. In point of fact, Crowley was born just six months after the death of Eliphas Levi, and, as a general rule, the ego of a dead person usually seeks to be reincarnated in a six-month old foetus.

Abruptly now, the Master changes tack.

‘I want you to close your eyes, as you would in a pathworking. Now picture yourself by a waterfall at the end of an autumnal afternoon. You are at peace, for I am with you. A fiery red sun is rising in the west, taking, as it does so, its light from the beams of your eyes. The water at the foot of the rocks in the distance foams briefly and descends to water before shooting up the rock face in a great vertical column. However, you have joined me in standing over a pool at some distance from this commotion and we have been watching over the pool’s placid surface and waiting. At length, our waiting brings results, as you see, first, a large rippling circle forms on the surface, before diminishing rapidly in a smaller series of circles, and from the centre of these circles a sharp chiselled flintstone is ejected and this flint travels in a perfect parabola to settle in my hand. You now tread backwards with sure-footed steps away from the water and ascend the hill behind you. Flint in hand and also walking backwards, I follow you.

‘At the top of the hill we turn to contemplate the corpse clad in rags that lies stretched out before us on the great sacrificial stone slab. The corpse’s neck has been slashed in crude, bloody strokes. But we look on this ugly sight with serenity for I carry the magic stone which alone can heal the wound in the throat. My robes seem to fall off me, as in a complicated series of gestures, I strip. You see me advance naked towards the corpse and slice repeatedly at the wounds on the throat and, as I do so, the blood lifts off the corpse’s skin and rags. The blood gathers itself and streams back into the veins, reanimating the twitching body. The skin also heals itself behind the passage of the wonder-working stone from the water. The corpse, but it is no longer a corpse, screams, for I have given the woman her voice back. Now you come forward to help me by pinioning the woman’s arms behind her head. I enter between her legs and, having done so, seek repeatedly to withdraw in a decelerating rhythm of withdrawal and thrust. A cry of rapture from the new-made virgin and the joy of the exultant … ’

‘Peter, wake up! Open your eyes! Wake up and look at me!’

It is Sally’s voice calling me to wake. I do not want to leave the hilltop and the ceremony of the consecration of the virgin, for I am like one who still clings to heavy dope-soaked, sleep. Even so, I can longer hear the Master’s guiding voice and Sally is very insistent. Reluctantly, I open my eyes.

She is standing at the door behind the Master. God knows how long she has been in the room. She is barefoot. (She likes to go barefoot quite a lot.) She looks so pretty. She reminds me of a ‘sweet-cream lady’ from that song by the Box Tops. Pretty and afraid, she is appealing to me for protection.

‘Come away with me, Peter. Stop listening to all this perverted rubbish. I have come to take you away. Cosmic, please, you can come too.’

The Master wheels slowly round to contemplate the intruder. He has never met Sally and does not know who she is.

‘Young lady, you are trespassing on a private meeting. I would like you to leave now.’

‘I am not going. This is an open lecture.’

‘You are mistaken. It is a closed meeting at which you are not welcome.’

‘You hear that, Peter? I am not welcome. Whose side are you on? It used to be you and me against the world. Come on, you can just walk out with me.’

I sit there, saying nothing and doing nothing, acutely conscious that everybody’s eyes are upon me. The whole scene seems completely unreal. Sally seems to shake in the incenseladen air, like she is a trippy hallucination. What I am thinking is that, if eternal recurrence is true, then this precise scene will repeat itself trillions of years from now. I really am a bit too stoned to go with Sally this time, but I think that next time I probably will, as she is quite seductive … But she, seeing that I am not making any effort to rise and join her, is becoming angry. Normally she is ice-pale, but now she is flushed. She is a beautiful fiery angel, but such beauty, in the present context, is a dangerous distraction. I really need to know how to think backwards through time. I need the wisdom of the Master. And there is something else wrong with Sally …

‘You are vile! You are, all of you, witches!’ she cries out. ‘You are being brainwashed. But you can just walk out, if only you will listen to me. It’s now or never. Peter, in the name of your dead mother and for the sake of your father, will you not leave these hideous people. For the sake of me, if you ever loved me … ’

The Master smiles and, ignoring her, addresses me,

‘What shall be done about this young woman?’

The Master is counting on me. I have to speak. I am aware of a fatuous grin on my face as I do so.

‘Sally, it’s all right. You’ve made your point. Please go now.’

Sally is breathing in great gulps, now at a loss for words. Cosmic sits with his head in his hands. (I blame Cosmic for this ghastly scene, for he must have mentioned something to Sally last week about this evening’s meeting. Also, I wish that he had not got me so stoned.) Only Granville has the will to do anything. He rises and advances on Sally and reaches out to take her arm. He mutters something about helping to see her off the premises. She looks at him distraught. She will have nothing of his proffered aid and she eludes his grasp. Her head swivels weirdly until her eyes are once more fixed on me.

‘Peter, help! Help me someone! I’m going to the police. You are brainwashers. Black filth. Perverts. Pederasts. Satanists. Crooks.’

I am not moving and, seeing this, she shrieks in despair. She claws the air, as if she sought to snatch more insults from it. Then it is over very quickly. Grieves, alerted by the shrieking, enters. Together, he and Granville each take one of her arms and they give her a courteous version of the bum’s rush out of Horapollo House. The whole episode was like a kind of hallucination …

The Master, unruffled, straightaway resumes his talk. However, we do not return to the encounter with the newly-made virgin on the hilltop. Instead, with eyes open we listen to the Master explain how by thinking backwards we may understand the way in which the world actually works. I try to concentrate as hard as possible, but Sally’s interruption was unsettling and I find I am shaking. What the Master is saying is now quite hard to understand and I am distracted by thoughts of Sally so slender and helplessly appealing, weeping for her lost love. However, I pick up as much as possible of the Master’s words and I hope that I am accurately summarising them in these pages.

The initiated master seeks to control the chaotic entropy of the future. In order for things to be the way that they are now, they will have to be a certain particular way in the future and the initiated one will draw on his memories of the future in order to predict the past. Why is the universe the way that we see it? If any one of its fundamental physical laws were to be altered, even fractionally, we would not be there to see the universe that we find ourselves in. In this way then there is a sense in which our existence has caused the universe to exist. To bring the matter down to a microcosmic level, and to take an example which is easier to understand, if my father had not met my mother, then I would not be here, but I am here. Therefore my present existence has caused their past meeting. Or, to take an even more homely example, it is a commonly observed psychological phenomenon that one sets an alarm clock to go off at a certain set time, but then one finds oneself regularly waking up, say, five minutes before the alarm clock goes off. The conclusion is inescapable, the alarm-clock’s ringing in the future has caused one to wake in advance of it. So it is that a skilled sorcerer may make a spell to change something in the past. Obviously, if the unknown thing in the past had not already changed, then he would not be able to make the spell.