Satan Wants Me

by Robert Irwin

  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.

  In the end things grew awkward, as Crowley gave up dropping dark hints and asked Felton outright if he would become his disciple. Felton said that he needed time to think about it.

  ‘Time is what you shall have,’ said Crowley.

  In the barracks, a man lying on the bed next to Felton’s 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. The limericks were getting on Felton’s nerves. He had to decide whether to venture out into the winter blackout and have Gerald Yorke introduce him to Aleister Crowley. It was exactly the same choice as before. Except that this time it was completely different. The first time round it had been Felton, the dabbler, idly debating with himself whether it was worth wasting an evening visiting Crowley, the charlatan. This time Felton was having to make a choice that would govern the whole of the rest of his life. This time he knew that Crowley possessed real power. This time, if he walked out of the barracks and took the bus towards Hanover Square, Felton the dilettante would be dead forever and another man would take his place. As one of the Hassidim put it, ‘The soul teaches incessantly but it never repeats itself.’

  Felton took that bus. Everything went as before – up to the point when Crowley asked Felton if he wanted to commit himself to him. At this point Felton simply said, ‘yes’. Two weeks later he was inducted as a probationer in the Ordo Templi Orientis.

  That was Felton’s story and I rather enjoyed it. However, even assuming that it is a true story and not invented by him as some kind of teaching parable, I doubt if what happened that winter night in 1941 was really anything supernatural. I think that it may have been an unusually extended version of déjà vu and what Felton took to be his second visit was really his first and only visit with an underlying feeling of I-have-been-here-before. Bernard Hamilton’s Sociology of Anomalous Perception explains such sensations of false recognition as due to a mind’s mistakenly identifying social situations which are structurally congruent but not in fact identical.

  MEMO I must look at the endnotes of The Wasteland. The way Felton has described them, they sound distinctly psychedelic. And what about Crowley? He sounds like an ageing hippy.

  I think that was all that was said in my diary-session – oh yes, he also objected to my being “fucked off ” at being assigned to him, rather than Laura. He was going on about how the use of the word “fucking” should be restricted to acts of affection between two human beings. But when I told him that Laura had a reputation among those going to the Hermetic Wisdom lectures as a “sex teacher”, he laughed briefly.

  ‘Peter! Your frankness is refreshing! And I want you to be equally frank in your diary. Tell the truth and hold nothing back. Peter, dear boy, great things are promised for you. We are going to take you up to a high place and show you the world.’

  He seemed to be about to say more on this theme, but suddenly decided against it. Instead he continued with a homily about vivid writing. My diary had to succeed in making him see what I saw.

  Finally he told me that I was to arrive early next Tuesday evening and to bring my diary with me ready for inspection (and he of course would have more money ready for me).

  ‘Tell the truth and confess all, as if your life depended upon it. No. Forget that “as if”. Your life will depend upon it. Believe me.’

  As I rose to leave, he pressed a copy of a book into my hands.

  ‘Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater. He published it in 1821. He was, if you choose to think of him in that way, England’s first hippy. What I hope is that his little book will show you how it is possible to be “hip”,’ (he got his mouth round that word with difficulty) ‘and yet write good prose. Continue with your study of Magick in Theory and Practice, but read De Quincey as well.’

  It was a curious evening and I sat up late writing it all down. And now there is all this money under
my mattress. Still, I keep coming back to something that Sally said earlier in the week. ‘If Satanism really works, why is Dr Felton old, fat and living in Swiss Cottage?’

  Friday, May 19

  As I made my way to the school, I was thinking about Felton’s total failure to engage with the actual content of my diary and how his reading it for grammar and style was distinctly off-pissing. (He won’t like that last expression. Too bad.) Also off-pissing was the consideration that I do not think that I have learnt anything that I did not know before. It was as if he was merely a projection of my mind which was telling me things that I was aware of already. It then occurred to me, not for the first time that Felton and everybody I knew might be projections of my mind – as it were, the creations of my waking dream. I was thinking this when I ran into Robert Drapers on the bus on my way to St Joseph’s in the morning. He still affects a beatnik-black, roll-neck pullover and sandals without any socks. His hands were shaking and he was looking pretty seedy. Since I was feeling loaded, I bought him a late breakfast. He was in London for an interview at the School of Oriental African Studies where he hopes to do research on Islamic history. Also he is hustling for somewhere to live next year. He passed me a tin of shema – mouth tobacco – which he had scored in Algeria. The silver tin with its sinister oriental writing looks really pretty. But I did not think that shema and breakfast would be a good mix.

  Robert asked after Sally. I think he fancies her, but he has always been too shy to tell her. Also he asked after Michael and then he wanted to know about my research and, when I told him, he said that he thought that there could be serious problems with it and that there were dangers in my methodology. Also I told him about my becoming a probationer in the Black Book Lodge. He could not understand why I should want to do such a thing and I admit that I found it difficult to explain. However, roughly what I believe is this. I am nothing until I have committed myself to something. Until now I have been just window-shopping through life. My commitment to whatever it may be has to be total. Not only that, it has to be irrational. One cannot just shop around for an ideology. One has to embrace it totally. Only through complete commitment can one ever understand a thing. One is never more alive than when one is leaping off a cliff. But Robert said that I had got it all wrong and that one is definitely dead when one leaps off a cliff. That was him being wilfully obtuse simply in order to win the argument.

  He is a pretty irritating character. I told him about my latest theory that he and everybody I knew were bits of me which I had hived off in order to inhabit the cosmos which in truth consisted only of me. Robert looked at me with a big smile on his stupid face.

  ‘Oh, well done Peter!’ he said and taking my hand he shook it warmly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You have sussed it out at last! I was wondering how long it would take you. Yes, I and Sally and everybody else are just bits of your thoughts. We don’t exist when you are not thinking about us.’

  He was just doing this to freak me out, I think. However, he was most emphatic about it. The reason everybody I know talks and thinks the same way as me is that they are me. One of the reasons Robert is depressed is this business of when I am not thinking about him, him not existing. He said that it is horrible flickering in and out of being. The fucker! It is one of his freaky paranoia-gambits. I have known him pull this kind of mind-fucking game before.

  ‘You could make me do more interesting things you know,’ he said. ‘I would welcome that.’

  ‘You are just saying all this to hang me up.’

  ‘So you say. But actually, if you want to, you can make me say that I am not a projection of your mind.’

  ‘I want you to say that you are not a projection of my mind.’

  He shrugged,

  ‘OK, I’m not a projection of your mind, but I’m only saying that I am not because I am.’

  (FUCK!)

  As he prepared to leave, he looked back at me solemnly. ‘Please think of me as much as possible. I really enjoy being one of your thoughts.’

  ‘When shall I see you again?’

  ‘When you next feel the need to see me.’

  Anyway, then Robert had to go off and register at Senate House and I went on to my school and sat on the wall of the playground and watched the little children playing, feeling like a sexual pervert as I did so. From time to time, one of the little creatures would pause in their play and eye me curiously. What do children think they are doing when they play? What use do they think play is? Is their play, play in the sense that adult play is – like playing poker or croquet? I have no idea and, anyway, such questions are not strictly part of my thesis topic. My thesis is entitled ‘Aspects of Ritualised Behaviour in the Playground’, but, even as it is, Michael has warned me that my topic is too broad and that it will have to be narrowed down sooner or later.

  After the mid-morning playbreak, I went off to an espresso bar on the corner of the road and fleshed out my first batch of notes. Then I went back and took more notes on the lunchtime playbreak. Already I am beginning to feel like a proper sociologist, for I am ceasing to look on the children as human beings. They seem more like ants moving about on mysterious missions. Then again, from another point of view, the children can be seen as creations of intellectual fantasy. I was stiff and cold by the time the second break was over and I decided to head back to my pad and go over some of last year’s lecture notes. I also read a bit of Piaget about children’s minds, but I kept drifting off to think about Dr Felton. If he is keeping a diary, am I and my diary in it? And does he discuss my diary with Laura and Granville and do they record in their diaries what he writes about my diary in his diary? It is a vertiginous prospect.

  I rang Dad earlier this evening. The diagnosis is confirmed. Mum’s cancer is back and they are keeping her in hospital for more tests. I am spending the evening listening to the Stones and Jefferson Airplane. Guitars weep for me. It now occurs to me, as I turn over these pages, that an outsider reading them would get the impression that I am a social animal always going about and meeting people. It is not so. Only the record-player talks to me. Now I think about it I am annoyed that I forgot to ask Robert if I was dead.

  I tried stuffing a big pinch of shema in my gum, but I was only partially successful, so that the foul stuff was all over my mouth. I sat with it swilling around for as long as I possibly could, but in the end I just had to get rid of it, but, when I rose to go to the basin in order to spit it out, I found that I was too dizzy to stand. So I ended up retching over the floor in front of me. My head was all buzzy. I shall certainly try this one again. It could even be addictive.

  Memo: according to Mr Cosmic, Brian Jones has the Devil’s nipple. How does he know? Also Cosmic has made a hole in his scrotum, so that he can inflate it just before sex. Apparently sex with an inflated scrotum is a real gas …

  Saturday, May 20

  ‘Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro: trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad: darkness and lights: tempest and human faces: and at last with a sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed,– and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then – everlasting farewells! and with a sigh, such as the causes of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated – everlasting farewells! and again, yet again reverberated – everlasting farewells!

  ‘And I awoke in struggles, and said aloud – “I will sleep no more!”’

  Last night I dreamed that I was sleeping in the room that I was actually sleeping in and I dreamed that I awoke and there was my mother standing in the shadows. She looked horribly thin and she was pleading with me. But I could not hear what she was saying. The thought came to me that the cancer had eaten away her tongue. Then I really awoke. I was trembling all over and further sleep was out of the question. I reached for the copy of the book which Felton had pre
ssed upon me and I opened it at random and straightaway my eyes fell upon the passage which I have just transcribed. It is part of De Quincey’s description of an opium dream of listening to music. De Quincey as the first English hippy is just Felton’s little joke, I think, but it is truly eerie how that passage speaks to me – like an admonitory ghost. Shall I be haunted by dead men’s books? I hope not; De Quincey’s sentences, so long and feverish, are definitely uncool.

  I wandered up Portobello Road buying groceries. The girl in Lord Kitchener’s Valet smiled at me again. The trouble with diaries is that they are so full of ‘me’ and ‘I’. It is precisely me that I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be buying groceries. I want to be out of my skin. Probationer for Adepthood on the Occult Path I may be, but I still have to go out and buy milk, cornflakes, brussels sprouts, brown rice and so on. Perhaps one day I shall learn to do without food and learn to live on the energies in the street. On sunny days like this everything is so brilliant in Portobello Road, the exotic fruits, the West Indian women in headscarfs, the freaks in their gear, the girls in summer dresses (and it’s only May!) – but somewhere, just beyond the edge of my vision, a grey and emaciated woman is standing and waiting.