by Robert Irwin
The Hell’s Angels veered off towards Richmond. The tramp was a tramp. Asmodeus was not the proprietor of a joke-shop in Wandsworth. I knew that I was being paranoid, but knowing that I was paranoid did not stop me from continuing to be paranoid. I took Sally’s hand and I walked on, but I walked on …
‘Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head:
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.’
Beyond Wandsworth we found that the roads bifurcated and bifurcated again and again and again, endlessly ramifying. It is the methedrine which is working on the psychic geography of London in such a manner that it makes every crossroad the nexus of possibilities and choices. One road leads to life. The other leads to death. A third leads to death-in-life. And yet another leads to a post office. Horapollo House nestles in the centre of a rapidly expanding and proliferating maze called London. I see the roads shoot out in front of us, and, as they do so, tendril-like smaller shoots of side roads begin to uncurl and weave their way along the ground. We wove and rewove conversational themes in just the same way as the roads and paths unravelled under our feet. Together we could conjure up a subject, digress from it, then digress from that digression, then return from the digression from a digression and link it directly to the main theme before returning to the first digression. Stuff like that is really easy on speed.
The wind was rising from the east so that garbage was blowing down the road in front of us, as if it was guiding us on our way. But were we getting anywhere? At that stage of our pilgrimage, I was not so sure. It is perfectly possible that there are drugs which make time run backwards, for time is, after all, nothing more than a mental construct, and, if a drug can alter my mind, then it can alter my experience of time too. It was the mock Sherpa in Abdullah’s Paradise Garden who sold me the magic beans that had made our escape from the dark heart of London possible – in appearance at least. But suppose he was an agent of the Lodge, and what Sally and I have taken in the Hole in the Wall is really a kind of homing drug which takes you back to wherever you started from? For although we were walking and talking terribly fast, it still seemed to me that we had not got anywhere yet.
Fired up by speed, I tried for the umpteenth time to explain to Sally about my research on ‘Inter-group dynamics and peer-group reinforcement in a North-London coven of sorcerers’; how what would be seen as mad in the outside world comes to be taken for granted inside such a closed in-group, thanks to peer-group reinforcement; how the Master could be seen as the perfect incarnation of the Weberian notion of a charismatic leader, who is in the process of institutionalising his personal qualities; how magical assumptions can function effectively as the underpinning of social interactions; how, (using terminology pioneered by Ferdinand Tönnies), Lodge members had constituted themselves as an organic community, a Gemeinschaft, in contradistinction to the external world, which was perceived as more mechanical and utilitarian and thus constituted a Gesellschaft; how Lodge members have effectively adopted the watchwords ‘Evil be thou my good’ as a kind of group-marker. In the end, my thesis is about group folly and how people come to believe the unbelievable, but as a sociologist my aim is to take this sort of craziness out of the domain of intellectual psychology and give it a social context. Finally, over the last week or so, I have sensed that the buzz in the Lodge seemed to be building towards some kind of event with millennial associations. I wish I could have stayed in Horapollo House just that little bit longer in order to get a clearer idea of what it was that the senior Adepts were expecting to happen.
Explaining all this took some time, as there were quite a lot of digressions and at one point we even got back onto the topic of Marmite. I cannot remember how. Oh yes, I can. I was talking about the sociology of occult elites and how Bulwer Lytton’s Victorian occult science-fiction novel, The Coming Race, provides a paradigmatic model of such an elite in the society of the Vril-ya supermen, and how ‘Vril’ was then borrowed by the inventors of the beef-essence drink, Bovril. Sally immediately accused me of preferring Bovril to Marmite because of the former’s occultist associations. Sally went on to argue that I was being taken over by occultist ideas. She thought that studying magic was not really any different from being a magician, because most of what magicians do is just study magic. Additionally, she thinks that people come to resemble whatever they are studying, so that sinologists behave like mandarins, entomologists resemble insects and I talked and behaved like a magus. I deny all this. I actually prefer the taste of Bovril to Marmite. The only thing of interest for me in the Lodge is the way it functions socially as a closed in-group. Sally insisted I was evading the truth about myself. Anyway, at least both of us see eye to eye on Horlicks, which we agree is terrible. As I say, digressions like this are easy on speed.
While all this was being argued over, the countryside began to appear in patches between the ribbons of houses. Street-lamps disappeared and we stumbled on through the moonless night. At some point in the night Donovan’s ‘Mad John’ number stopped playing in my head, to be replaced by Canned Heat’s ‘Amphetamine Annie’. We ought to have slowed down or even stopped, but this was impossible, for it was as if Sally and I had each donned a pair of red shoes, the magic ones which make you want to dance forever until you die. Our feet were horribly blistered by now, but we had to keep on walking. Besides, Sally was determined that we had to get beyond the range of the Lodge’s vibes. There was still a bad feel here at the beginning of suburbia. The bushes by the road kept rustling and, when the occasional car passed and caught us in its headlights, then we caught half-glimpses of what looked like little white faces peeping over the bushes. Faces but with bits missing. I have noticed before that intense fatigue can give one a hallucinatory kind of peripheral vision. Sally, on the other hand, said that the rustlings and the half-faces were materialisations of the Lodge’s vibes.
Sally thinks that Julian was driven to his death by bad vibes. However, I do not believe in vibes. I have never seen a vibe and Sally has never managed to explain to me how such a thing could be produced or transmitted. No, Julian’s suicide (assuming it was a suicide) was not produced by mysterious hate-waves travelling out from Swiss Cottage on some kind of ether. Nor was it just some bizarrely, gratuitous act. It has to be understood in sociological terms. The concept of voodoo death is familiar to anthropologists and sociologists and Marcel Mauss, in particular, worked on the subject of deaths willed or suggested by the collectivity. It seems that the individual ego is very fragile – so fragile that it is only sustained by the collectivity which forms the ego’s environment. In ordinary cases, the sustaining collectivity would include the individual’s family and the business in which he or she worked, but Julian’s collectivity was really just the Lodge. Only systems of social interaction keep people alive. They are as important as the air people breathe – in a sense they are the air which people breathe.
Sally thought about this.
‘I suppose going out with Maud has to be understood in sociological terms too?’
‘Indeed, yes – well, not precisely sociological … It has to be understood more in an anthropological framework. My seduction of Maud and presentation of her to the Master would have functioned as a kind of rite de passage, which would probably have given me full access to all the Lodge’s secrets.’
‘Fuck that,’ muttered Sally.
Then we stopped talking for a bit and, without any discussion, we left the road and headed into a wood. Fucking on speed in the middle of a wood at night, we felt like rutting ferrets, completely part of the natural world, our cries mingling with those of the hunting beasts. Then we covered ourselves in leaves and lay there talking, until it was light enough for me to think of writing. Then, since I would not talk to her, Sally had to dance. As I write, she is covered in leaves and weaving about, trying to get the trees to dance
with her. Shall I compare her to a summer’s day? No, I’m tired of comparing things to things. She is bathed in the ghostly soap of pale sunlight. Actually her skin is a bit yellow and she is looking a bit seedy.
In the last month or so, I have written and spoken so much about the non-existent playground and its sociologically interesting but non-existent children, that I am almost coming to believe in its and their existence and the invisible threatens to become visible. I really ought to get the true story of the last couple of months down in writing, or I will end up believing the bogus account given in my diary. The trouble is that there is so much to get down: my secret visits to my dying mother; the weekend spent with my parents instead of at an invented sociological conference in Leeds; my secret meetings with Sally; Sally’s presence at the funeral; getting the advice of the Baptist minister about Satanist cults; the staging of Sally’s irruption into a Lodge meeting; Michael’s intense engagement in my research; the pleasures of constructing totally fictional days spent at a wholly imaginary school; the revulsion at all the boring occultist crap I had to listen to. I know that I ought to make detailed records of all of it. The trouble is that right now I am beginning to slow down a bit. Besides Sally is impatient and wants to move on. So I will put down my pen.
I have resumed writing in the evening, but, to go back to the morning, we two foot-soldiers of the Apocalypse walked for hours under a grey hazy sun through woods, fields, farms and the occasional housing estates. To walk in daylight was less exciting, but it still felt quite good. Because our feet were blistered and our mouths dry, our walk felt like a kind of shriving. There is yet time for us to be redeemed, for we are young and all our life together is before us. Cold but sweating, we were on a penitential pilgrimage away from the City of Sorcerers.
Sally had been thinking that we would walk to the sea and that we would perform a kind of purificatory baptism in its waves – and then maybe have an ice-cream- but by late afternoon, I noticed that we were moving incredibly slooowwwlllyyy. And we were nowhere near the sea. The sun was beginning to set as we entered Farnham. Stepping into this Surrey town felt like stumbling across a time-warp. It is a place which does not groove. We have left the 60s and are back safe in the 50s. No one can find us here. We have booked ourselves into a room above the pub for the night. All the local yokels in the bar looked at us as if we were itinerant lepers. It was just like that stock scene in horror films, where the people mutter and turn away. Maybe there will be a hippy lynching tonight??
Well anyway, now I can get back to writing my diary again, but I have to say that I do not feel so great any more. There seems to be a layer of dust on my face. There is dust over everything. My mouth tastes like a corroded industrial vat. My skin under the dust is yellowish. I am still terribly cold. Earlier I thought that we might freeze under the sun’s rays. My fixed smile is the only part of me that is drug-free. I am crumpled up in the fist of God. As I sit here writing, I notice that my writing hand (dear old Pyewhacket!) is moving in time to the silent song in my head. It is a slow song, Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’.
I keep looking at my wrist to see how late it is. There is of course no watch there now, but my vision has become so precise that I reckon I can tell the time, by the growth of the hairs on my wrist. It is more natural that way. I know it is late. Sally is now moody. She keeps saying things like, ‘The Lodge sussed you out all right’ and ‘Are you sure that you have got enough material for your thesis on ritual rape and murder, or do you need to go back and get some more?’ and ‘You think you’re so fucking clever, but when is it ever going to be safe for us to return to London?’ We are both very, very tired, and we should not argue, but the drug still runs too strongly to let us sleep. For all that talk, for all those millions of words, I was never moved to tell her how I had read Granville’s account of his magical seduction of her, nor about how Granville and I had participated in the ritual cursing of her.
I lie sleepless beside Sally and fantasise about the future that I have forever renounced … In it I put down my gold-tooled, leather-bound grimoire and walk from my dressing chamber back into the bedroom. She (I think her name is Annabel) looks up at me with startled doe-eyes. She is bending over a regency striped-divan to remove a straw hat with white floral decoration out of its hatbox. Platinum and sapphire earrings frame Annabel’s perfect face. She is dressed for Glyndebourne in matching blue linen coat, shift dress, and blue suede shoes. I need her help with my gold cufflinks. She drops her hat and immediately comes over to assist. She has to, for my mastery of the Gaze and, indeed, all the conjurations in Magick in Theory and Practice gives me power over her and over any woman. The chauffeur is waiting for us, but before setting out for the opera, we take a little time torturing the little girl we keep in chains in the basement … Well, the Devil has taken me up to a high place and shown me the world, but I have walked away from him.
Sunday, August 6th
This morning I spent ages watching a hare sitting like a sentinel on my front doorstep. Then suddenly – God knows how – it sensed my presence and in a series of bounds it had vanished into the woods. It is five or six weeks since I wrote anything in this book and it is already getting hard to remember how freaky things were. I have arranged to have my student-grant paid into the bank in Castle Street. We have rented a cottage on the edge of some woods. Sally grooves on playing at houses. We have this pretend commuter-husband game going. Towards the end of breakfast I look up from my copy of Rolling Stone, or whatever, and say that I really must hurry or I will miss my train and be late in at the office. Sally dithers about, looking for an umbrella and running a clothes-brush over my T shirt. Then she kisses me goodbye on the front doorstep and I go round and creep in through the back door and set to writing up my notes on group dynamics within a North London group of Satanists and all that load of shit.
Once I came down from speed, I put my diary away, thinking that I never wanted to see its hateful black volumes again. The strain of keeping such a record had been a massive drag. For me, writing down what I had done every day was a counter-instinctual thing, rather like trying to remember my dreams in the morning. As I say, these things just do not want to be remembered. I never sat down to write my diary without feelings of dread and aversion rising within me – except, that is, for when I was on speed, of course. It seemed to me that it was as if I was trying to support two people within one weak and skinny body. There was the Peter who did things and there was the other Peter who wrote about what was done and told lies about it. Nevertheless, in the last few days I have had to consult my diaries in order to supplement my research notes. Looking at old diaries is rather fascinating. It is like the unstopping of so many bottles of time past. Anyway, it is getting a bit boring here. So I have decided to resume diary-writing, but this time my book will not be any kind of Satanist’s logbook. Instead I am going to use the diary, as Thoreau did, in order to get in close touch with nature. I am going to train myself to open my eyes to the world around me. Henry Thoreau, the American anarchist, lived like a hermit in the wilderness and wrote a two-million-word diary in thirty-seven notebooks and when he had no diary to hand he wrote on birch bark. That kind of diary-keeping will purge me of the urban sickness and of the evil memories of Horapollo House. A spirit of the wild, I will fade into the Surrey woods. It is easy to be good in the country.
This place could be any place. The Beatles might have described Farnham,
‘On the corner is a banker with a motor car … dum de dum.
There beneath the blue suburban skies … dum de dum de dum
A pretty nurse is … ’
‘A pretty nurse is’ doing something or other. The trouble is I cannot remember the lyrics properly. ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’ are just two of the casualties of my flight from London. It will take me years to replace all the records I had to abandon in Horapollo House. Sally got Patsy to send on her record-player and other stuff by rail. Everything arrived OK – this despit
e Patsy reporting that Sally’s room had been done over. Nothing seems to have been taken however. Also, talking to Dad on the phone, I learn that some odd people have been lurking about his house in Cambridge, pretending to be census takers, gas-board officials or whatever. Anyway, there is no way that the Black Book Lodge is going to suss out where we are shacked up, and, to get back to the main point, for the time being I am pretty much restricted to Sally’s music which means an exceedingly heavy diet of Donovan. So far, the only records I have bought are the Pink Floyd’s ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and a replacement copy of ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ by Jefferson Airplane.
We are deep in commuter-land here. Going up West Street I rub shoulders with sharp-suited young men whose greatest ambition in life is to be admitted to the local Junior Chamber of Commerce and there are women in scarves, and there are dog-walkers, market-gardeners and the odd yob who has not heard that the days of the rocker are over. Sally and I get our highs from reading the Farnham Herald. Yet the town is not quite as straight as I thought it was at first. I spotted a couple of heads trying to buy records in W.H. Smith a few days ago, but they were so obviously stoned and giggling so much that they could not quite manage the transaction and had to leave empty-handed. We sort of smiled at each other as we passed in the door. From Farnham to Findhorn, from Formentara to Katmandu, the hippy brotherhood constitutes an international freemasonry, a brotherhood of heads across the sea.
