by Robert Irwin
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 possib
le 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.
Space and time are acknowledged by scientists to constitute a continuum. One can move backwards in space and therefore also in time. It is simpler to think forward, but that does not mean that it is correct, for those who travel forward in time are sleepwalking through life, moving from summer to autumn to winter, heading towards their death. Death, it is death which causes old age, sickness, mutilation, car crashes, drownings, ritual sacrifices. Finally, he who works backwards through time, has to face certain moral implications and, in concluding, the Master invited us to reflect once more on the ceremony on the hilltop, in which he not only gave a young woman life, but, in repossessing his seed, he rendered that woman a virgin for the first time, sealing her hymen and making her the inestimable gift of her innocence.
Once the Master has finished speaking, he hands over to Felton, who dictates to us the ritual procedures and responses for the forthcoming Consecration of the Virgin for transcription in our red notebooks. The dictation is hard going for some of the procedures are in Latin and these Felton has to spell out letter by letter. Then we are dismissed.
I was about to hurry up to my room when I was stopped by Alice,
‘Why do you and your hippy girlfriend always have to spoil everything? We practically never get the privilege of hearing the Master speak, but now when we do, you and that dolly bird have to stage one of your lovers’ tiffs.’
‘Alice, please. She’s not my girlfriend. That was the point.’
‘She seems to think that she is. Anyway, you are two of a kind. All style and no substance. You only went out with her because you thought that prettiness is important. Why do you men find brainlessness so attractive? I have no hesitation in telling you that I’m worth a hundred of her sort.’
With that Alice turned and stomped off. (Poor Alice.)
That was the weirdest lecture I ever attended. I have some difficulty getting my head round it, but I think it is a bit like the words of that Dylan song, ‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now’. ‘Eh ma I.’ Are we going to be taught to write backwards, read backwards, walk backwards? I sit up late into the night to write my diary and, when I have finished, I reread it anxiously looking for jokes. I don’t think there are any. My visit to Cosmic seems to me, if anything, rather sinister. I must learn to live in a world which has been leached clean of humour.
Not long after I had finished writing the above Laura came to me in my bedroom. My strict new teacher. I put it to her that this time round we should reverse roles. So then she became a predatory and tarty schoolmistress, while I was a clueless schoolboy, unaware of what she was after when she placed her hand on my flies and began to tug at the zip. Just a school medical inspection apparently. She was assuring me that it would not hurt as her mouth closed round the knob of my penis.
Later that night I suddenly snapped awake. Laura was no longer with me in the bed. I had been woken by a thought. The bloody creature with horseshoes on his feet had had Ron’s face. It took me a long time to get back to sleep.
Friday, June 9
I sat up so late writing my diary that I am a bit short of sleep today. I have to force myself to write in it, but I know that I have to and then, once I start writing, I find that it is difficult to stop and that is what I am afraid of. Then I find myself writing things which I do not really think at all. They are things which brother diary is thinking. The diary is my ‘brother’, but he is a poor substitute for a girlfriend.
Felton passed me coming out of breakfast and told me that I had been assigned to help Granville in the afternoon. Then he passed on down the corridor. So I only had the morning to do research on playground activities.
I suppose that I ought to be infuriated by the way I am being ordered around, but I actually take pleasure in it, for I now realise that, since I have given my oath and kissed the hand of the Master, it is really me who is imposing discipline on myself and consequently I take pride in being my own fierce taskmaster. Therefore, as instructed, I met Granville for lunch at Wheelers. Granville was in one of his dark moods when I arrived and at first I had to make all the conversation.
‘Talk to me,’ was what he said. ‘I’m fed up with having to do all the talking. It is time that you learned how to make conversation like a normal civilised person. Come on, I’m bored.’
With that he sat back scowling and waited for me to make my first conversational pass. I have often seen Granville St John-Jones leaning against a wall or sitting with his head resting on his cupped hands, looking sullen. Looking as if only the End of the World could relieve his hopeless boredom. The sullenness goes with his looks – the deep-socketed eyes, the thick lips and the dark, curling, gipsyish hair. For Granville, who is invariably sharp-suited and who wears a foulard scarf, the sulks are also a kind of fashion-accessory – a part of his style.
‘Come on, talk to me,’ he said again, but nothing could have been better calculated to make my mind go blank. There was nothing in my head that I wanted to talk about and I sat there, silent, flummoxed. Granville was impatient,
‘Oh tell me about that dippy girl who gatecrashed the Master’s lecture last night … I forget her name … Sally. What does she do? Where does she live? How did you meet?’
(Now I am a bit behind with my diary-writing and I am writing this after having talked to Cosmic on Sunday and after having attended to my bleeding foreskin. When Granville asked all these questions, I did not know what was behind the interrogation. I thought that it was just a product of his general obsession with sex and women. I know better now.)
Anyway, I told him the story of how I first met Sally, how I was drinking coffee in the Indica Bookshop, when I saw this golden-haired girl floating like an elf from customer to customer and whispering something to each of them. At last she came to me,
‘Do you think I’m pretty?’ (It was her question-of-the-week.)
I nodded emphatically.
‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘That makes 87 per cent so far,’ and she moved on, but I grabbed her arm.
‘Do you think that I am handsome?’
She sat down opposite me and set about studying my face. An hour and a half later, she was in my bed and examining the rest of my body.
I thought that Granville wanted to know about Sally because he knew that she did not like him. But more than that, he was genuinely curious about how my generation manages to get laid and plated so easily. Granville is eight years older than me. It is a crucial chronological gap. It means that, when he was my age, he was having to go through old-fashioned rituals of courting and seduction and sex was wrapped up in circumlocution. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was still banned and the mini-skirt not thought of. He ar
rived at the party too early and he knows it.
Granville, having found my tale of an easy lay unenticing, was discoursing (in his usual oblique way) on the excitement of gazing in a certain way at women who do not like him, in order to force them to go to bed with him. Almost the best blast there is for Granville is to feel a woman shudder underneath him and to know that in those shudders the pleasure of orgasm mingles with a self-reproaching revulsion. Only bedding a virgin is a better blast, for there is a kind of occult charge acquired from sleeping with virgins. Although I did not actually believe that Granville does have this occult power over women, I saw my opportunity,
‘Alice is a virgin. What is more, she does not like you. She told me that you were too frivolous and too sex-obsessed. I should think that it would be pretty rewarding to get her to go to bed with you.’ (I had in my mind’s eye the gleeful image of Alice’s myopic scowl melting under the Luciferan gaze of Granville.)
He was silent. I thought that he was offended because I had described him as frivolous.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It would be a challenge.’
‘Why not then?’
He looked patronisingly at me,
‘Who do you think is the virgin in Sunday’s ritual Consecration of the Virgin?’
‘Alice?!’
‘Yes, Alice is reserved for the Master.’
‘She will never do it.’
Granville smiled.
‘First the Master (and, here, have some more wine) then she will offer herself to you … ’
I did not hear what he said next, I was so stunned. It seems I am to be blooded. That was the real purpose of this lunch. To break it to me. I am to assist the Master and then, watched by every member of the Lodge, I am to have sex with Alice.
