Satan Wants Me (3 page)

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.

Felton casually agreed. Of course, he would be delighted to meet the notorious ‘Great Beast’. But when the appointed day came round, he was not so sure. Did he really want to spend one of his precious evenings making polite conversation to a bufferish old charlatan? If, by any remote chance, Crowley was not a charlatan, then he would be a genuinely dangerous person to meet, but surely he was a charlatan? So what would be the point? Besides, it was damned cold outside and there was snow on the ground. Felton vividly remembered debating with himself in the barracks. A man lying on the next bed was laying out a hand of patience. At the far end of the room a group were trading bawdy limericks as they applied blanco to their webbing and used matches to melt boot-polish, so as to get a better shine. In the end, Felton decided to go. The limericks were grating on him and, if nothing else, his having met Crowley would give him something to talk about at parties.

But it was a bleak wait for a bus in the blackout and he almost despaired and turned back to the warm barrack room. It was Gerald who let him into the apartment-block in Hanover Square and led him up to the presence of the Master. Crowley did not rise from his armchair to greet Felton. Indeed he did not at first seem to register his visitor’s presence. He just sat there wheezing asthmatically and muttering to himself. Obese and jowly, Crowley was in his sixties when Felton met him. Crowley was to die on December 1st 1947. (‘Under the sign of Sagittarius,’ Felton added pointlessly.) Although Crowley at first appeared the prisoner of his own memories and reflections, Gerald drew him into conversation bit by bit and got him to acknowledge Felton’s presence. Crowley with a glass in his hand proved to be an animated host and set out to charm Felton with first tales from his youth and then a learned commentary on the true significance of the tarot.

Where was this going? I was thinking that it was all a bit like one of those articles in
The Reader’s Digest
, entitled, ‘The Most Memorable Character I Ever Met.’ But suddenly Felton looked hard at me.

‘You remind me of Crowley.’

I shrugged. I did not think that it was flattering to be compared to a wheezing, fat, old Satanist.

But Felton apparently did. He was insistent,

‘You are a lot like him. It is nothing obvious. But there is something about your eyes. There is an admirable hardness there … but of course you are much prettier than he was.’

With this Felton returned to his recollections. I was not reassured by Felton’s last observation. Are these diary-sessions and packets of money supposed to lead on to something which has got nothing to do with the esoteric? Anyway Felton’s recollections … Gradually, Crowley’s conversational animation had abated. Having muttered something about having to visit the bathroom, with difficulty he heaved himself out of the armchair and shuffled out of the room. Once Crowley was out of the door, Gerald nimbly leapt up and watered the decanter of wine that was on the table between them. The old man was giving himself another fix of heroin, he confided. Felton should be flattered. It meant that Crowley wanted to keep going and make an impression on his visitor.

When Crowley reappeared, he was a little pale, but conversationally reanimated. Not long afterwards, Gerald pleaded another appointment and left them talking. Crowley had moved on to telling Felton about the Ordo Templi Orientis and its secret work in the world. It became obvious that Crowley wanted Felton to commit himself to him and to ask to become an initiate of the Ordo Templi Orientis. This was perhaps flattering. Nevertheless, from the dark hints that Crowley kept dropping, it was clear that probationership in the Order was a serious commitment, with various attendant ordeals and hours of special study. Felton had enjoyed dabbling in esoteric matters, but he had no intention of letting it take over his whole life. There was music and poetry and probably university studies to be taken up when he should be demobilised. And besides, charming though Crowley was, it was not clear that he had anything more than a fund of interesting stories to offer. Moreover, Felton thought of himself as a free spirit. It was surely not in his nature to become anyone’s disciple.