This was certainly ominous enough, and the context, when Sir John began skimming it, was even more foreboding:
Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.
Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities.
What more clear warning could there be against Lola Levine and the infamous Crowley and all those pseudo-mystics of this age who attempt to exalt sensuality as sacred and eroticism as holiness? But the Epistle continued, growing even more explicit and speaking directly to the temptations Sir John had experienced:
But, beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostle of our Lord Jesus Christ;
How that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts.
Every word was like a flame eating into Sir John’s conscience, revealing the horror of that which had almost seduced him. He wept with repentance and joy: he was saved. A direct communication had come, from the God of his Fathers, and Lola and her lying heresies were banished. He was free.
“Clouds without water,” he repeated to himself. “Sterile, dark, sinister—but empty. Lies, lies, all lies. I am free of them, free!”
In later years he was to remember that moment, wondering how he had been so blind. The real terrors were still ahead of him, and Jude “the Obscure” had, like many an oracle, prophesied more than could be understood until much time had passed and many strange events had transpired.
DE AURO RUBEO
It must be reiterated that, among the domesticated primates of Terra at this time, what they sonorously called the-Supreme-Virtue-of-not-poking-one’s-nose-into-the-affairs-of-the-authorities was still universally esteemed as the very pivot and fountainhead of what was, among them, known as living-in-accord-with-the-Divine-Plan-as-revealed-to-us-in-church-on-Sundays. Basic epistemological and ontological questions were never raised in “polite society,” that is, among those described by Galaetic Intelligence as so-objectively-hopeless-in-their-idiocy-as-to-be-subjectively-convinced-of-their-own-superiority-to-the-other-wild-and-domesticated-apes. This tragic and absurd condition, found on no other planet, however backward, in the Great Universe, was due entirely to the imprinting of their nervous systems by what are scientifically described in the Trans-Galactic Encyclopedia of Primate Psychology as chemically-bonded-reflex-arcs-causing-primate-perception-to-be-limited-to-“realities”-accidentally-present-at-moments-of-imprint-vulnerability, which is to say that in most cases, only that which caused adrenaline secretion was perceived as visible or tangible in their rudimentary brains. Science had already revealed to them, of course, that 99.99% of the physical universe was invisible to their senses, but they were not capable of deducing from that that an equal part of the mental and spiritual universes was also unperceived by them as they robotically proceeded about their mammalian business of survival, reproduction and nurturing of their cubs.
A MOST CURIOUS HISTORY TRUE STORY OF THE ROSY CROSS
From Abramelin of Araby came the Sacred Word unto Abraham the Jew, who was called to the sublime Task of the Illuminati, wherein he durst master every Detail of the Great Work, so that he might in due season accomplish it not only for himself, but for all Persons in those ages in which Darkness lay upon the West. As it is written: Suum Cuique. And Abraham did in good Time pass the Secret unto many who understood but In Part and, finally, unto our Master, Christian Rosenkreuz (or in the Tongue of the English, Christian Rosycross) who by the Grace of the Trinity did come at last to understand the Whole. Sis benedictus: in the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the All-Merciful.
Whom men call Giordano Bruno or The Nolan was a Magus of our Holy Order; and his Teaching was Heliocentricity, not merely in the material Sense for which the Black Brothers of Rome did seize him and cruelly Burn him at the Stake: but also in the spiritual sense, in that the Ego or Self known to Man is, like unto the Earth, not the center of consciousness but merely appeareth so by a species of Glamour or Delusion. And Bruno the Nolan taught all Men that hath the Wit to Read Between the Lines that the True Center of the Soul is like unto the Sun: a White Light from which cometh all Life on Earth: that is to say, all impressions upon the Ego.
Cagliostro hath names and forms innumerable, and we know not his true human Birth. But in many Lands and Times hath he appeared, under divers Names and Titles, and yet we may recognize him by his Teaching which was, is, and shall be, that conscious Thought is but Epiphenomena, the Noise of the Machine. Now Al-Chem-y meaneth the Egyptian Science, and the True Science of Egypt hath this for Fountainhead: we have in our House many substances which act directly upon the Blood, thereby befogging Vision, and we have in Nature many substances which act also directly upon the Blood, to correct Vision. He who hath Ears, let him Hear: de magno opere. In the Name of the Father and of the Mother and of the Son. Amen.
And in the Age of Science that came to Flower in the nineteenth century after the Magus of Nazareth, the true Order of the Rose Croix did go Underground, as a Seed that must be buried ere it Sprout: for it was nigh approaching Time to reveal the true Secret of the Cosmic Furnace and the Alchemical Heat unto all humanity. And great preparations were Made, in deep Secret, to prepare for the event. And many experiments were Performed, of which men know not yet, but one such Experiment was the creation in London City of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which the True Name was Comoedia Quae Pan Dictur.
EXPERIMENTS IN ASTRAL PROJECTION
The Alchemical Heat Increases
So, anyway, two years passed. Germany and France almost went to war over a gunboat in Morocco, but then an uneasy peace was negotiated at the last moment. The Chinese became a democratic republic. Amundsen reached the South Pole and excited the imagination of the world. Sir John, who more and more regarded himself as a Liberal, rejoiced when the House of Commons passed a bill granting Home Rule to the Irish, and then wrote an angry letter to the Times when the House of Lords voted it down. A Dane named Niels Bohr electrified the scientific community by suggesting that quantum discontinuities caused the interior of the atom to follow Rutherford’s model, similar to the solar system itself; and Sir John was amused that science was finally catching up with the traditional Hermetic teaching that “the things above are reflected in the things below.”
Sir John himself had become, in many respects, a new man under the slowly rising Alchemical heat of celibacy and magick. He advanced from Neophyte to Zelator, from Zelator to Practicus. He was trained in asana, A yogic contortion that twisted the body just as Cabala twisted the brain, and emerged with better health, better self-control and better humor than ever. He also learned pranayama, a special breathing technique which seemed to vanquish most negative emotions and kept him vaguely euphoric most of the time. His study of Cabala, under Jones’ merciless hounding, advanced to the point where it now seemed as natural to his mind as asana to his body; he could hardly remember how contorted and difficult both had seemed at first. And his journeys on the astral plane increasingly magnified his understanding of himself and others, even though he was still unsure much of the time whether these visions were real or imaginary.
He even saw Lola Levine at a concert one night and was neither frightened nor attracted, although he couldn’t help visualizing her thighs and garters.
Then, one day in Soho, he was browsing through the shelves of used bookstalls and found a volume entitled Clouds Without Water. At this point, he no longer believed in coincidences: he knew that what the ignorant call by that name are actually occult clues which can instruct the Adept in important spiritual matters, once he had deciphered their meaning. He picked up the book and began browsing.
One group of poems was entitled “The Alchemist,” and Sir John remembered, nostalgically, his premature sense of total enlightenment when he had deciphered I.N.R.I. as
the alchemical Igni Natura Renovatur Integra—the whole world is re-made by fire. Turning the pages, he stopped at the fifth poem and read:
the eternal spring, the elixir rare
That mage and sage have sought and uncomplaining
Never attained. We found it early where
The Gods find children.
Sir John stared at the book in mute astonishment. That could not possibly refer to the perversion his mind had shamefully read into it. After all, this was not a Black Magick grimoire, but only a collection of poems. He looked back at the title page:
CLOUDS WITHOUT WATER
Edited from a private MS.
by the
REV. C. VEREY
Society for the Propagation
of Religious Truth
Privately Printed
For Circulation Among Ministers of Religion
1909
Sir John felt chagrined. How silly of him to imagine Diabolism in a book put out by some Scottish Presbyterian. But what did those lines mean, then?
Sir John skimmed a few more pages at random. The whole series of poems seemed to be a glorification—virtually a sanctification—of adultery. This couldn’t be. Then he saw a footnote by the Rev. Verey:
Only a Latin dictionary can unveil the loathsome horror of this filthy word.
Sir John looked back to the word thus indirectly defined, or rather not defined at all, and found it was fellatrix. He blushed; but then he remembered again: “We found it early where the Gods find children.” Could such nameless things be printed?
In Sonnet VIII of the Alchemical sequence, he found the lines:
Now I have told you all the ingredients
That go to make the elixir for our shame
Already make the fumes their spired ascents;
The bubbles burst in tiny jets of flame
The elixir of shame, he knew, was in Satanic theology the Eucharist of Immortality; it was found only within the pudendum of a sexually ecstatic woman. This book was almost his early half-hallucinatory visions of the corrupt Lola Levine come back to haunt him in print. He turned to the Preface:
“Receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.”
So wrote the great apostle nearly two thousand years ago; and surely in these latter days, when Satan seems visibly loosed upon earth, the words have a special and dreadful significance even for us who—thanks he to God for His unspeakable mercy—are washed in the blood of the Lamb and freed from the chains of death and of hell.
Surely this terrible history is a true Sign of the Times. We walk in the last days, and all the abominations spoken of by the apostle are freely practised in our midst. Nay! they are even the boast and the defense of that spectre of evil, Socialism.
The awful drama which the unhappy wretch who penned these horrible utterances has to unfold is alas! too common. Its study may be useful to us as showing the logical outcome of Atheism and Free Love.
Well, that at least explained why the Rev. Verey had edited and commented upon this libertine volume, although it was still unclear if he truly understood what It was he was condemning. Certainly, if he thought these poems related in any way to “Atheism,” he had missed the target by a mile.
Sir John turned back to the section called “The Alchemist” and searched carefully to see if his speculation about the “elixir of shame” was correct. He found in Sonnet X:
This wine is sovereign against all complaints,
This is the wine the great king-angels use
Sheer nausea overcame him. If the elixir or wine was what he suspected, the vile secretions of the organs of shame, the great “king-angels” were not those of heaven but of hell. He read further in the same sonnet:
One drop of this raised Attis from the dead;
One drop of this, and slain Osiris stirs;
One drop of this; before young Horus fled
Thine ghosts, Typhon—this wine is mine and hers
Ye Gods that gave it! not in trickling gouts
But from the very fountain where ’tis drawn
Gushing in crystal jets and ruby spouts
From the authentic throne and shrine of dawn.
It was not just perversion that was being described; it was the deliberate use of loathsome Parisian vices for initiation into diabolism. Sir John skimmed some of the Rev. Verey’s footnotes rapidly:
Lingam—the Hindu God [!]—the male organ of generation.
Yoni—Its feminine equivalent. That the Poor Hindus should worship these shameful things! And we? Oh, how poor and inadequate is all our missionary effort! Let us send out more, and yet more, to our perishing brothers!
Doomisday—An affected archaism for the Day of Judgment. How can the writer dare to speak of this great day, on which he shall be damned forever? “For he that believeth not is condemned already.”
Blood-bought bastards—Christians! O Saviour! What didst Thou come to save?
Poor Rev. Verey obviously had no notion at all of what these poems were about. He regarded them as the anti-Christian fulminations of an Atheist, even a Socialist. He was too naïve to recognize the diabolism, the counter-theology that was actually being expressed.
Sir John looked back again at the Preface, and found no clue to the identity of the author of these vile versifications, except that he had died of “a loathsome disease.” Verey added:
I may perhaps be blamed for publishing, even in this limited measure, such filthy and blasphemous orgies of human speech [save the mark] but I am firmly resolved [and I believe that I have the blessing of God on my work] to awake my fellow-workers in the great vineyard to the facts of modern existence.
Sir John turned to another of the poems and the world seemed to spin with vertigo as he read:
So Lola! Lola! Lola! peals,
And Lola! Lola! Lola! echoes back,
Till Lola! Lola! Lola! reels
The world in a dance of woven white and black
Shimmering with clear gold greys as hell resounds
With Lola! Lola! Lola! and heaven responds
With Lola! Lola! Lola!—swounds
All light to clustered dazzling diamonds,
And Lola! Lola! Lola! rings
Ever and ever again on these inchaunted ears,
And Lola! Lola! Lola! swings
My soul across to those inchaunted spheres
Where Lola is God and priest and wafer and wine—
O Lola! Lola! Lola! mystic maiden o’ mine!
Could it be? Was Lola Levine the paramour who had lured this mad poet into vice and, beyond that, into diabolism? Skimming rapidly, Sir John found “Lola” in poem after poem, but never any last name. But in the very first sonnet he found in the closing line a Latin phrase that froze his blood:
Evoe! Iacche! consummatum est.
There it was—Evoe, one of the two most hidden names of God (which Sir John had good reason to remember was known to Lola Levine); Iacche, the vocative form of Iacchus, secret name of Dionysus, god of orgies; and consummatum est, last words of the Mass. But this mad poet could only refer to a Black Mass, not a Catholic Mass, in this foul context of Dionysian revelry, perversion and anti-Christian blasphemy. How simpleminded was the Rev. Verey to imagine that these poems merely recorded the destruction of a man drawn away from his lawful wife into an adulterous love affair, when they actually described the step-by-step initiation into the worship of the Horned God of sexual ecstasy—Panurgia, the god worshipped by the pagans before Christianity arose to unmask him (the God of This World) as Satan, adversary of the invisible True God, beyond the Stars.
Sir John purchased Clouds Without Water and took it home for study. This might be a most serious matter. If it were truly what he suspected, he would have to consult Jones for advice.
DE ARCONO NEFANDO
Memory remembers before remembering has memorized: remembers the unspeakable and forever unthinkable fact of the apotheosis [virtually the cynosure: a moment vivid as the terror in the
eyes of that fieldmouse so many years ago: knowing that such terror was the price of consciousness in Uncle Bentley’s universe, but with yet a sense of loathing and holding back from the ultimate revelation, the cataclysmic final horror of that detail so unthinkable as well as unspeakable that mind hesitates to advance toward recognition of it (remembering instead as in a continuous unrolling of time backwards, so that he saw himself picking Clouds Without Water from the bookstall, writing the angry letter to the Times about Home Rule for Ireland, opening the Bible to the Epistle of Jude and the stern warning against the mockers in the last time, the invasive spirit of Her writing through the pen in his hand, the revelation of Ingenio Numen Replendet Iacchi, the actual attack in which She appeared in succubus form to drain the Vril energy into Onan’s Sin Against Nature, the chanting of Pangenitor and Panphage, Pound’s story of poor Victor Neuberg turned into a camel, the thunderous crash that cracked the mirror as the material and astral universes intersected, the poetry reading at which She had first quoted “I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!”, the idiot gnomes chanting “No wife, no horse, no mustache,” the oath of celibacy taken three times under Jones’ relentless eyes, the first rising of the Vril at the comprehension of Igni Natura Renovatur Integra, the first meeting with Jones, the debate with McNaughton in the Historical Review, the horrid return of the ugly temptation to actually kill the mouse and have the experience of conscious Sin, Uncle Bentley’s death, the first sense of the caverns of trolls beneath Babcock Manor in boyhood fantasy, the penny-farthing bicycle) but holding back in this state still midway between dream and memory from that one detail, that epicentre of delirium and temptation actually longing to see and touch and kiss again that blue garter, those lascivious thighs, that unspeakable central mystery of creation through corruption.
Masks of the Illuminati Page 12
