J.M.:
And here's still another version of the origin of the Illuminati, from the Cabalist Eliphas Levi (The History of Magic by Eliphas Levi, Borden Publishing Company, Los Angeles, 1963, page 65). He says there were two Zoroasters, a true one who taught white "right hand" magic and a false one who taught black "left hand" magic. He goes on:
To the false Zoroaster must be referred the cultus of material fire and that impious doctrine of divine dualism which produced at a later period the monstrous Gnosis of Manes and the false principles of spurious Masonry. The Zoroaster in question was the father of that materialized Magic which led to the massacre of the Magi and brought their true doctrine at first into proscription and then oblivion. Ever inspired by the spirit of truth, the Church was forced to condemn- under the names of Magic, Manicheanism, Illuminism and Masonry- all that was in kinship, remote or approximate, with the primitive profanation of the mysteries. One signal example is the history of the Knights Templar, which has been misunderstood to this day.
Levi does not elucidate that last sentence; it is interesting, however, that Nesta Webster (see memo 13) also traced the Illuminati to the Knights Templar, whereas Daraul and most other sources track them Eastward to the Hashishim. Is all this making me paranoid? I'm beginning to get the impression that the evidence has not only been hidden in obscure books but also made confusing and contradictory to discourage the researcher…
Pat
Scrawled on the bottom of this memo was a series of jottings in the same masculine hand (Malik's, Saul guessed) that had jotted the baboon reference on memo 12. The jottings said:
Check on Order of DeMolay
Eleven-fold DeMolay Cross. Eleven intersections, therefore 22 lines. The 22 Atus of Tahuti? Why not 237?
TARO = TORA = TROA = ATOR = ROTA!?????
Abdul Alhazred = A:.A:.??!
"Oh, Christ," Barney groaned. "Oh, Mary and Joseph. Oh, shit. We'll end up either become mystics or going crazy before this case is over. If there's any difference."
"The Order of DeMolay is a Masonic society for boys," Saul commented helpfully. "I don't know what the Atus of Tahuti are, but that sounds Egyptian. Taro, usually spelled t-a-r-o-t, is the deck of cards Gypsy fortune tellers use- and the word 'Gypsy' means Egyptian. Tora is the Law, in Hebrew. We keep coming back to something that has roots in both Jewish mysticism and Egyptian magic…"
"The Knights Templar were kicked out of the church," Barney said, "for trying to combine Christian and Moslem ideas. Last year, my brother- the Jesuit- gave a lecture about how modern ideas are just old heresies from the Middle Ages warmed over. I had to go for politeness' sake. I remember something else he said about the Templars. They were engaged in what he called 'unnatural sex acts.' In other words, they were faggots. Do you get the impression that all these groups related to the Illuminati are all male? Maybe the big secret they're hiding so fanatically is that they're all some vast worldwide homosexual plot. I've heard show-biz people complain about what they call the 'homintern,' a homo organization that tries to keep all the best jobs for other fruits. How does that sound?"
"It sounds plausible," Saul said ironically. "But it also sounds plausible to say the Illuminati is a Jewish conspiracy, a Catholic conspiracy, a Masonic conspiracy, a communist conspiracy, a banker's conspiracy, and I suppose we'll eventually find evidence to suggest it's an interplanetary scheme masterminded from Mars or Venus. Don't you see, Barney? Whatever they're really up to, they keep creating masks so all sorts of scapegoat groups will get the blame for being the 'real' Illuminati." He shook his head dismally. "They're smart enough to know they can't operate indefinitely without a few people eventually realizing something's there, so they've taken that into account and arranged for an inquisitive outsider to get all sorts of wrong ideas about who they are."
"They're dogs," Muldoon said. "Intelligent talking dogs from the dog star, Sirius. They came here and ate Malik. Just like they ate that guy in Kansas City, except that time they didn't get to finish the job." He turned back and read from memo 8: "'… with his throat torn as if by the talons of some enormous beast. No animal was reported missing from any of the local zoos.'" He grinned. "Lord God, I'm almost ready to believe it."
"They're werewolves." Saul answered, grinning also. "The pentagon is the symbol of the werewolf. Look at the Late Late Show some tune."
"That's the pentagram, not the pentagon." Barney lit a cigarette, adding. "This is really getting on our nerves, isn't it?"
Saul looked up wearily and glanced around the apartment almost as if he were looking for its absent owner. "Joseph Malik," he said aloud, "what can of worms have you opened? And how far back does it go?"
WE SHALL NOT
WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED
In fact, for Joseph Malik the beginning was several years earlier, in a medley of teargas, hymn singing, billy clubs, and obscenity, all of which were provoked by the imminent nomination for President of a man named Hubert Horatio Humphrey. It began in Lincoln Park on the night of August 25, 1968, while Joe was waiting to be teargassed. He did not know then that anything was beginning; he was only conscious, in an acid, gut-sour way, of what was ending: his own faith in the Democratic party.
He was sitting with the Concerned Clergymen under the cross they had erected. He was thinking, bitterly, that they should have erected a tombstone instead. It should have said: Here lies the New Deal.
Here lies the belief that all Evil is on the other side, among the reactionaries and Ku Kluxers. Here lies twenty years of the hopes and dreams and sweat and blood of Joseph Wendall Malik. Here lies American Liberalism, clubbed to death by Chicago's heroic peace officers.
"They're coming," a voice near him said suddenly. The Concerned Clergymen immediately began singing, "We shall not be moved."
"We'll be moved, all right," a dry sardonic, W.C. Fields voice said quietly. "When the teargas hits, we'll be moved." Joe recognized the speaker: it was novelist William Burroughs with his usual poker face, utterly without anger or contempt or indignation or hope or faith or any emotion Joe could understand. But he sat there, making his own protest against Hubert Horatio Humphrey by placing his body in front of Chicago's police, for reasons Joe could not understand.
How, Joe wondered, can a man have courage without faith, without belief? Burroughs believed in nothing, and yet there he sat stubborn as Luther. Joe had always had faith in something-Roman Catholicism, long ago, then Trotskyism at college, then for nearly two decades mainstream liberalism (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, "Vital Center") and now, with that dead, he was trying desperately to summon up faith in the motley crowd of dope-and-as-trology-obsessed Yippies, Black Maoists, old-line hardcore pacifists, and arrogantly dogmatic SDS kids who had come to Chicago to protest a rigged convention and were being beaten and brutalized unspeakably for it.
Alien Ginsberg- sitting amid a huddle of Yippies off to the right- began chanting again, as he had all evening: "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare…" Ginsberg believed; he believed in everything- in democracy, in socialism, in communism, in anarchism, in Ezra Pound's idealistic variety of fascist economics, in Buckminster Fuller's technological Utopia, in D. H. Lawrence's return to preindustrial pastoralism, and in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Voodoo, astrology magic; but, above all, in the natural goodness of man.
The natural goodness of man… Joe hadn't fully believed in that, since Buchenwald was revealed to the world in 1944, when he was seventeen.
"KILL! KILL! KILL!" came the chant of the police,-exactly like the night before, the same neolithic scream of rage that signaled the beginning of the first massacre. They were coming, clubs in hand, spraying the teargas before them. "KILL! KILL! KILL!"
Auschwitz, U.S.A., Joe thought, sickened. If they had been issued Zyklon B along with the teargas and Mace, they would be using it just as happily.
Slowly, the Concerned Clergymen came to their feet, holding dampened handkerchiefs to their faces. Unarmed and helpless, they prepared to hold their ground as long as possible before the inevitable retreat. A moral victory, Joe thought bitterly: All we ever achieve are moral victories. The immoral brutes win the real victories.
"All hail Discordia," said a voice among the clergymen- a bearded young man named Simon, who had been arguing in favor of anarchism against some SDS Maoists earlier in the day.
And that was the last sentence Joe Malik remembered clearly, for it was gas and clubs and screams and blood from then on. He had no way of guessing, at the time, that hearing that sentence was the most important thing that happened to him in Lincoln Park.
(Harry Coin curls his long body into a knot of tension, resting on his elbows and sighting the Remington rifle carefully, as the motorcade passes the Book Depository and heads toward his perch on the triple underpass. He could see Bernard Barker from the CIA down on the grassy knoll. If he carried this off right, they promised him more jobs; it would be the end of petty crime for him, the beginning of big-time money. In a way he was sorry: Kennedy seemed like a nice enough young fellow-Harry would like to make it with both him and that hot-looking wife of his at the same tune- but money talks and sentiment is only for fools. He released the bolt action, ignoring the sudden barking of a dog, and took aim- just as the three shots resounded from the grassy knoll.
"Jesus Motherfuckin' Christ," he said; and then he caught the glint of the rifle in the Book Depository window. Great God Almighty, how the fuck many of us are there here?" he cried out, scampering to his feet and starting to run.)
It was almost a year after being clubbed-June 22, 1969-that Joe returned to Chicago, to witness another rigged convention, to suffer further disillusionment, to meet Simon once more and to hear the mysterious phrase "All hail Discordia" again.
The convention this time was the last ever held by the Students for a Democratic Society, and from the first hour after it opened, Joe realized that the Progressive Labor faction had stacked all the cards in advance. It was the Democratic party all over again- and it would have been equally bloody if the PL boys had their own police force to "deal with" the dissenters known then as RYM-I and RYM-II. Lacking that factor, the smoldering violence remained purely verbal, but when it was all over another part of Joe Malik was dead and his faith in the natural goodness of man was eroded still further. And so he found himself, aimlessly searching for something that was not totally corrupt, attending the Anarchist Caucus at the old Wobbly Hall on North Halsted Street.
Joe knew nothing about anarchism, except that several famous anarchists-Parsons and Spies of Chicago's Hay-market riot in 1888, Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts, and the Wobbly's own poet-laureate, Joe Hill- had been executed for murders which they apparently hadn't really committed. Beyond that, anarchists wanted to abolish government- a proposition so evidently absurd that Joe had never bothered to read any of their theoretical or polemical works. Now, however, eating the maggoty meat of his growing disillusionment with every conventional approach to politics, he began to listen to the Wobblies and other anarchists with acute curiosity. After all, the words of his favorite fictional hero, "When you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true."
The anarchists, Joe found, were not going to quit SDS-"We'll stay in and do some righteous ass-kicking," one of them said, to the applause and cheers of the others.
Beyond that, however, they seemed to be in a welter of ideological disagreement. Gradually, he began to identify the conflicting positions expressed: the individualist-anarchists, who sounded like right-wing Republicans (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); the anarcho-syndicalists and Wobblies, who sounded like Marxists (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); the anarcho-pacifists, who sounded like Gandhi and Martin Luther King (except that they wanted to get rid of all functions of government); and a group who were dubbed, rather affectionately, "the Crazies"-whose position was utterly unintelligible. Simon was among the Crazies.
In a speech that Joe followed only with difficulty, Simon declared that "cultural revolution" was more important than political revolution; that Bugs Bunny should be adopted as the symbol of anarchists everywhere; that Hoffman's discovery of LSD in 1943 was a manifestation of direct intervention by God in human affairs; that the nomination of the boar hog Pigasus for President of the United States by the Yippies had been the most "transcendentally lucid" political act of the twentieth century; and that "mass orgies of pot-smoking and fucking, on every street-corner" was the most practical next step in liberating the world from tyranny. He also urged deep study of the tarot, "to fight the real enemy with their own weapons," whatever that meant. He was launching into a peroration about the mystic significance of the number 23- pointing out that 2 plus 3 equals 5, the pentad within which the Devil can be invoked "as for example in a pentacle or at the Pentagon building in Washington," while 2 divided by 3 equals 0.666, "the Number of The Beast, according to that freaked-out Revelation of Saint John the Mushroom-head," that 23 itself was present esoterically "because of its conspicuous exoteric absence" in the number series represented by the Wobbly Hall address, which was 2422 North Halsted- and that the dates of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, November 22 and 24, also had a conspicuous 23 absent in between them- when he finally was shouted down, the conversation returned to a more mundane level.
Half in whimsy and half in despair, Joe decided to perform one of his chronic acts of faith and convince himself, at least for a while, that there was some kind of meaning in Simon's ramblings. His equally chronic skepticism, he knew, would soon enough reassert itself.
"What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crises," Simon had said, "and insanity is the only viable alternative." That was a paradox worth some kind of consideration.
"About that 23," Joe said, approaching Simon tentatively after the meeting broke up.
"It's everywhere," was the instant reply. "I just started to scratch the surface. All the great anarchists died on the 23rd day of some month or other-Sacco and Vanzetti on August 23, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow on May 23, Dutch on October 23-and Vince Coll was 23 years old when he was shot on 23rd Street-and even though John Dillinger died on the 22nd of July, if you look it up, like I did, in Toland's book, The Dillinger Days, you'll find he couldn't get away from the 23 Principle, because 23 other people died that night in Chicago, too, all from heat prostration. 'Nova heat moving in,' dig? And the world began on October 23, in 4004 B.C., according to Bishop Usher, and the Hungarian Revolution started on October 23, too, and Harpo Marx was born on November 23, and-"
There was more of it, much more, and Joe patiently listened to all of it, determined to continue his experiment in applied schizophrenia at least for this one evening. They retired to a nearby restaurant, the Seminary, on Fullerton Street, and Simon rambled on, over beers, proceeding to the mystic significance of the letter W-23rd in the alphabet- and its presence in the words "woman" and "womb" as well as in the shape of the feminine breasts and spread-eagle legs of the copulating female. He even found some mystic meaning in the W in Washington, but was strangely evasive about explicating this.
"So, you see," Simon was explaining when the restaurant was starting to close, "the whole key to liberation is magic. Anarchism remains tied to politics, and remains a form of death like all other politics, until it breaks free from the defined 'reality' of capitalist society and creates its own reality. A pig for President. Acid in the water supply. Fucking in the streets. Making the totally impossible become the eternally possible. Reality is thermoplastic, not thermosetting, you know: I mean you can reprogram it much more than people realize. The hex hoax- original sin, logical positivism, those restriction and constriction myths- all that's based on a thermosetting reality. Christ, man, there are limits, of course- nobody is nutty enough to deny that-but the limits are nowhere near as rigid as we've been taught to believe. It's much closer to the truth to say there are no practical limits at all and reality is whatever people decide to make it. But we've been on one restriction kick after another for a couple thousand years now, the world's longest head-trip, and it takes real negative entropy to shake up the foundations. This isn't shit; I've got a degree in mathematics, man."
"I studied engineering myself, a long time ago." Joe said. "I realize that part of what you say is true…"
"It's all true. The land belongs to the landlords, right now, because of magic. People worship the deeds in the government offices, and they won't dare move onto a square of ground if one of the deeds says somebody else owns it. It's a head-trip, a kind of magic, and you need the opposite magic to lift the curse. You need shock elements to break up and disorganize the chains of command in the brain, the 'mind-forg'd manacles' that Blake wrote about. That's the unpredictable elements, dads: the erratic, the erotic, the Eristic. Tim Leary said it: 'People have to go out of their minds before they can come to their senses.' They can't feel and touch and smell the real earth, man, as long as the manacles in the cortex tell them it belongs to somebody else. If you don't want to call it magic, call it counter-conditioning, but the principle is the same. Breaking up the trip society laid on us and starting our own trip. Bringing back old realities that are supposed to be dead. Creating new realities. Astrology, demons, lifting poetry off of the written page into the acts of your daily life. Surrealism, dig? Antonin Artaud and Andre Breton put it in a nutshell in the First Surrealist Manifesto: 'total transformation of mind, and all that resembles it.' They knew all about the Illuminated Lodge, founded in Munich in 1923, and that it controlled Wall Street and Hitler and Stalin, through witchcraft. We gotta get into witchcraft ourselves to undo the hex they've cast on everybody's mind. All hail Discordia! Do you read me?"
When they finally parted, and Joe headed back for his hotel, the spell ended. I've been listening to a spaced-out acid-head all night, Joe thought in his cab headed south toward the Loop, and almost managing to believe him. If I keep on with this little experiment, I will believe him. And that's how insanity always begins: you find reality unbearable and start manufacturing a fantasy alternative. With an effort of will, he forced himself back into his usual framework; no matter how cruel reality was, Joe Malik would face it and would not follow the Yippies and Crazies in the joy ride to Cloud Cuckoo Land.
But when he arrived at his hotel door, and noticed for the first time that he had Room 23, he had to fight the impulse to call Simon on the phone and tell him about the latest invasion of surrealism into the real world.
And he lay awake in his bed for hours remembering 23s that had occurred in his own life… and wondering about the origin of that mysterious bit of 1929 slang, "23 Skidoo…"
After being lost for an hour in Hitler's old neighborhood, Clark Kent and His Supermen finally found Ludwigstrasse and got out of Munich. "About forty miles and we'll be in Ingolstadt," Kent-Mohammed-Pearson said. "At last," one of the Supermen groaned. Just then a tiny Volkswagen inched past their VW bus, like an infant running ahead of its mother, and Kent looked bemused. "Did you check out that cat at the wheel? I saw him once before, and never forgot it because he was acting so weird. It was in Mexico City. Funny seeing him again, halfway around the world and umpteen years later." "Go catch him," another Superman commented. "With the AMA and the Trashers and other heavy groups we're going to get buried alive. Let's make sure that at least he knows we were in Ingolstadt for this gig."
JUST LIKE A TREE THAT'S STANDING BY THE WAAAAA-AATER
The morning after the Wobbly meeting Simon telephoned Joe.
"Listen," he asked, "do you have to fly back to New York today? Can you possibly stay over a night? I've got something I'd like you to see. It's time we started reaching people in your generation and really showing you instead of just telling you. Are you game?"
And Joe Malik-ex-Trotskyist, ex-engineering student, ex-liberal, ex-Catholic-heard himself saying, "Yes." And heard a louder voice, unspeaking, uttering a more profound "yes" deep inside himself. He was game- for astrology, for IChing, for LSD, for demons, for whatever Simon had to offer as an alternative to the world of sane and rational men who were sanely and rationally plotting their course toward what could only be the annihilation of the planet.
(WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED)
"God is dead," the priest chanted.
"God is dead," the congregation repeated in chorus.
"God is dead: we are all absolutely free," the priest intoned more rhythmically.
"God is dead," the congregation picked up the almost hypnotic beat, "we are all absolutely free."
Joe shifted nervously in his chair. The blasphemy was exhilarating, but also strangely disturbing. He wondered how much fear of Hell still lingered in the back corridors of his skull, left over from his Catholic boyhood.
They were in an elegant apartment, high above Lake Shore Drive-"We always meet here," Simon had explained, "because of the acrostic significance of the street name"-and the sounds of the automobile traffic far below mingled strangely with the preparations for what Joe already guessed was a black Mass.
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," the priest chanted.
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," Joe repeated with the rest of the congregation.
The priest- who was the only one who had not removed his clothes before the beginning of the ceremony- was a slightly red-faced middle-aged man in a Roman collar, and part of Joe's discomfort derived from the fact that he looked so much like every Catholic priest he had known in his childhood, It had not helped matters that he had given his name, when Simon introduced Joe to him, as "Padre Pederastia"-which he pronounced with a very campy inflection, looking flirtatiously directly in Joe's eyes.
The congregation divided, in Joe's mind, into two easily distinguishable groups: poor full-time hippies, from the Old Town area, and rich part-time hippies, from Lake Shore Drive itself and, no doubt, also from the local advertising agencies on Michigan Avenue. There were only eleven of them, however, including Joe, and Padre Pederastia made twelve- where was the traditional thirteenth?
"Prepare the pentad," Padre Pederastia commanded.
Simon and a rather good-looking young female, both quite unselfconscious in their nakedness, arose and left the group, walking toward the door which Joe had assumed led to the bedroom area. They stopped to take some chalk from a table on which hashish and sandal-wood incense were burning in a goats-head taper, then squatted to draw a large pentagon on the blood-red rug. A triangle was then added to each side of the pentagon, forming a star- the special kind of star, Joe knew, which was known as pentagram, symbol of werewolves and also of demons. He found himself remembering the corny old poem from the Lon Chancy, Jr., movies, but it suddenly didn't sound like kitsch anymore:
Even a man who is pure of heart
And says his prayers by night
Can turn to a wolf when the wolf bane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright
"I-O," the priest chanted raptly.
"I-O," the chorus came.
"I-O, E-O, Evoe," the chant rose weirdly.
"I-O, E-O, Evoe," the rhythmic reply came in cadence.
Joe felt a strange, ashy, acrid taste gathering in his mouth, and a coldness creeping into his toes and fingers. The air, too, seemed suddenly greasy and unpleasantly, mucidly moist.
"I-O, E-O, Evoe, HE!" the priest screamed, in fear or in ecstasy.
"I-O, E-O, Evoe, HEr Joe heard himself joining the others. Was it imagination, or were all their voices subtly changing, in a bestial and pongoid fashion?
"Ol sonuf vaoresaji," the priest said, more softly.'
"Ol sonuf vaoresaji," they chorused.
"It is accomplished," the priest said. "We may pass the Guardian."
The congregation arose and moved toward the door. Each person, Joe noticed, was careful to step into the pentagram and pause there a moment gathering strength before actually approaching the door. When it was his turn, he discovered why. The carving on the door, which had seemed merely obscene and ghoulish from across the room, was more disturbing when you were closer to it. It was not easy- to convince yourself that those eyes were just a trick of trompe I'oeil. The mind insisted on feeling that they very definitely looked at you, not affectionately, as you passed.
This-thing-was the Guardian which had to be pacified before they could enter the next room.
Joe's fingers and toes were definitely freezing, and auto-suggestion didn't seem a very plausible explanation. He seriously wondered about the possibility of frostbite. But then he stepped into the pentagram and the cold suddenly decreased, the eyes of the Guardian were less menacing, and a feeling of renewed energy flowed through his body, such as he had experienced in a sensitivity-training session after he had been cajoled by the leader into unleashing a great deal of pent-up anxiety and rage by kicking, screaming, weeping, and cursing.
He passed the Guardian easily and entered the room where the real action would occur.
It was as if he had left the twentieth century. The furnishings and the very architecture were Hebraic, Arabic, and medieval European, all mixed together in a most disorienting way, and entirely unrelieved by any trace of the modern or functional.
A black-draped altar stood in the center, and upon it lay the thirteenth member of the coven. She was a woman with red hair and green eyes- the traits which Satan supposedly relished most in mortal females. (There had been a time, Joe remembered, when any woman having those features was automatically suspected of witchcraft.) She was, of course, naked, and her body would be the medium through which this strange sacrament would be attempted.
What am I doing here? Joe thought frantically. Why don't 1 leave these lunatics and get back to the world I know, the world where all the horrors are, after all, merely human?
But he knew the answer.
He could not- literally could not -attempt to pass the Guardian until all those present gave their consent.
Padre Pederastia was speaking. "This part of the ceremony," he said, camping outrageously, "is very distasteful to me, as you all know. If only Our Father Below would allow us to substitute a boy on the altar when I'm officiating -but, alas, He is, as we all know, very rigid about such things. As usual, therefore, I will ask the newest member to take my place for this rite."
Joe knew, from the Malleus malificarum and other grimoires, what the rite was, and he was both excited and frightened.
He approached the altar nervously, noting the others forming a pentagon around the nude woman and himself. She had a lovely body with large breasts and fine nipples, but he was still too nervous to become aroused physically.
Padre Pederastia handed him the Host. "I stole this from the church myself," he whispered. "You can be sure it is fully consecrated and completely potent. You know what to do?"
Joe nodded, unable to meet the priest's lascivious eyes.
He took the Host and spat upon it quickly.
The greasiness and electrically charged quality of the air seemed to increase sharply. The light seemed harsher, like the glint of a sword, just as schizophrenics often described light as a hostile or destructive force.
He stepped forward and placed the Host upon the thighs of the Bride of Satan.
Immediately, she moaned softly, as if the simple touch were more erotic than one momentary contact could possibly be. Her legs spread voluptuously and the middle of the Host crumpled as it sunk slightly into her red pubic hair. The effect was, at once, powerful; her whole body shuddered and the Host was drawn farther into her obviously moist cunt. Using his ringer, Joe pushed it the rest of the way in, and she began breathing in a hoarse staccato rhythm.
Joe Malik knelt to complete the rite. He felt like a fool and a pervert; he had never performed oral sex, or any kind of sex, in front of an audience before. He wasn't even turned on erotically. He went ahead just to find out if there was any real magic in this revolting lunacy.
As soon as his tongue entered her, she began heaving and he knew her first orgasm would arrive rapidly. His penis finally began swelling; he began licking the Host caressingly. Inside his temple, a drum seemed to be beating hollowly; he hardly noticed it when she came. His senses spun and he licked more, aware only that she flowed more heavily and thickly than any woman he had known. He put his thumb in her anus, and his middle finger in her vagina, keeping his tongue in the clitoral area, doing it up right- this was the technique occultists call the Rite of Shiva. (Irreverently, he remembered that swingers call it the One-Man Band.) He felt an unusual electrical quality in her pubic hair and was aware of a heaviness and tension in his penis more powerful than he had ever known in his life, but all else was drowned out by the drumming in his head, the cunt-taste, cunt-smell, cunt-warmth… She was Ishtar, Aphrodite, Venus; the experience was so intense he began to feel a real religious dimension to it. Hadn't some nineteenth century anthropologist argued that cunt-worship was the earliest religion? He didn't even know this woman and yet he had an emotion beyond love: true reverence. Trippy, as Simon would say.
How many times she came, he never knew; he came himself, without once touching his penis, when the Host was finally dissolved.
He staggered back dizzily, and the air now seemed as resistant to motion as brackish water.
"Yogge Sothothe Neblod Zin," the priest began chanting. "By Ashtoreth, by Pan Pangenitor, by the Yellow Sign, by the gifts I have made and the powers I have purchased, by He Who Is Not to Be Named, by Rabban and by Azathoth, by Samma-El, by Amon and Ra, vente, vente, Lucifer, lux fiat!"
Joe never saw it: he felt it- and it was like chemical Mace, blinding and numbing him at once.
"Come not in that form!" the priest screamed. "By Jesu Elohim and the Powers that You fear, I command thee: come not in that form! Yod He Vah He-come not in that form."
One of the women began weeping in fear.
"Quiet, you fool," Simon shouted at her. "Don't give it more Power."
"Your tongue is bound, until I release it," the priest said to her- but the distraction of his attention had its cost; Joe felt It growing in potency again, and so did the others, judging from their sudden involuntary gasps.
"Come not in that form!" the priest shouted. "By the Cross of Gold, and by the Rose of Ruby, and by Mary's Son, I command and demand it of thee: come not in that form! By thy Master, Chronzon! By Pangenitor and Panphage, come not in that form!"
There was a hiss, like air pouring into a vacuum, and the atmosphere began to clear- but it also dropped abruptly in temperature.
MASTER, CALL NO MORE UPON THOSE NAMES. I MEANT NOT TO ALARM THEE.
The Voice was the most shocking experience of the night for Joe. It was oily, flattering, obscenely humble, but there was still within it a secret strength that revealed all too well that the priest's power over it, however obtained, was temporary, that both of them knew it, and that the price of that power was something it longed to collect
"Come not in that form either," said the priest, more stern and more confident. "Ye know full well that such tones and manners are also intended to frighten, and I like not such jokes. Come in this form which thou habitually wearest in thy current earthly activities, or I shall banish thee back to that realm of which you like not to imagine. I command. I command. I command." There was nothing campy about the Padre now.
It was just a room again- an odd, medieval, mideastern room, but just a room. The figure that stood among them could not have looked less like a demon.
"OK," it said in a pleasant American voice, "we don't have to get touchy and hostile with each other over a little theatrics, do we? Just tell me what sort of business 'transaction you went and dragged me here for, and I'm sure we can work out all the details in a down-home, businesslike, cards-on-the-table fashion, with no hard feelings and mutual satisfaction all around."
It looked like Billy Graham.
("The Kennedys? Martin Luther King? You are fantastically naive still, George. It goes back much, much farther." Hagbard was relaxing with some Alamout Black hash, after the Battle of Atlantis. "Look at the pictures of Woodrow Wilson in his last months: The haggard look, the vague eyes, and, in fact, symptoms of a certain slow-acting and undetectable poison. They slipped it to him at Versailles. Or look into the Lincoln caper. Who opposed the greenback plan- the closest thing to flaxscript America ever had? Stanton the banker. Who ordered all roads out of Washington closed, except one? Stanton the banker. And Booth went straight for that road. Who got ahold of Booth's diary afterward? Stanton the banker. And turned it over to the Archives with seventeen pages missing? Stanton the banker. George, you have so much to learn about real history…")
The Reverend William Helmer, religious columnist for Confrontation, stared at the telegram. Joe Malik was supposed to be in Chicago covering the SDS convention; what was he doing in Providence, Rhode Island, and what was he involved in that could provoke such an extraordinary communication? Helmer reread the telegram carefully:
Drop next month's column. Will pay large bonus for prompt answers to these questions. First, trace all movements of Reverend Billy Graham during last week and find out if he could possibly have gotten to Chicago surreptitiously. Second, send me a list of reliable books on Satanism and witchcraft in the modern world. Tell nobody else on the magazine about this. Wire me c/o Jerry Mallory, Hotel Benefit, Providence, Rhode Island. P.S. find out where The John Dillinger Died for You Society has its headquarters. Joe Malik.
Those SDS kids must have turned him on with acid, Helmer decided. Well, he was still the boss, and he paid nice bonuses when he was pleased. Helmer reached for the phone.
(Howard, the dolphin, was singing a very satirical song about sharks, as he swam to meet the Lief Erikson at Peos.)
James Walking Bear had no great love for palefaces most of the time, but he had just dropped six peyote buttons before this Professor Mallory arrived and he was feeling benevolent and forgiving. After all, the Road Chief once said at a very sacred midsummer peyote festival that the line about forgiving those who trespass against us had a special meaning for Indians. Only when we all forgave the whites, he had said, would our hearts be totally pure, and when our hearts were pure the Curse would be lifted- the white men would cease to trespass, go home to Europe, and vex one another instead of persecuting us. James tried to forgive the professor for being white and found, as usual, that peyote made forgiveness easier.
"Billie Freschette?" he said. "Hell, she died back in sixty-eight."
"I know that," the professor said. "What I'm looking for is any photographs she may have left."
Sure. James knew what kind of photographs.
"You mean ones that had Dillinger in them?"
"Yes, she was his mistress, virtually his common-law wife, for a long time, and-"
"No soap. You're years too late. Reporters bought up everything she had that showed even the back of Dillinger's head, way back, long before she came here to the reservation to die."
"Well, did you know her?"
"Sure." James was careful not be spiteful and didn't add: all Menominee Indians know one another, in a way you whites can't understand "knowing."
"Did she ever converse about Dillinger?"
"Of course. Old women always talk about their dead men. Always say the same thing, too: never was another man as good as him. Except when they say there never was another man as bad as him. They only say that when they're drunk, though."
The paleface kept turning colors, the way people do when you're on peyote. Now he looked almost like an Indian. That made it easier to talk to him.
"Did she ever say anything about John's attitude toward the Masons?"
Why shouldn't people turn colors? All the trouble in world came from the fact that they usually stayed the same color. James nodded profoundly. As usual, peyote had brought him a big Truth. If whites and blacks and Indians were turning colors all the time, there wouldn't be any hate in the world, because nobody would know which people to hate.
"I said, did she ever mention John's attitude toward the Masons?"
"Oh. Oh, yes. Funny you should ask that." The man had a halo around his head now, and James wondered what that meant. Every time he took peyote alone things like that would happen, and he'd end up wishing there were a Road Chief or some other priest around to explain these signs properly. But what about the Masons? Oh, yes. "Billie said the Masons were the only people John Dillinger really hated. He said they railroaded him to prison the first time, and they owned all the banks, so he was getting even by robbing them."
The professor's mouth dropped open in surprise and delight- and James thought it was kind of funny to see that, especially with the halo turning from pink to blue to pink to blue to pink again at the same time.
("A big mouth, a tiny brain/He only thinks of blood and pain," Howard sang.)
Notes found by a TWA stewardess in a seat vacated by a Mr. "John Mason" after a Madison, Wisconsin, to Mexico City flight June 29, 1969: one week after the last SDS convention of all time:
"We only robbed from the banks what the banks robbed from the people"-Dillinger, Crown Point Jail, 1934. Could have come from any anarchist text.
Lucifer- bringer of light.
Weishaupt's "illumination" amp; Voltaire's "enlightenment": from the Latin "lux" meaning light.
Christianity all in 3s (Trinity, etc.) Buddhism in 4s. Illuminism in 5s. A progression?
Hopi teaching: all men have 4 souls now, but in future will have 5 souls. Find an anthropologist for more data on this.
Who decided the Pentagon building should have that particular shape?
"Kick out the Jams"??? Cross-check.
"Adam," the first man; "Weis," to know; "haupt," chief or leader. "The first man to be a leader of those who know." Assumed name from the beginning?
lok-Sotot in Pnakotic manuscripts. Cd. be Yog-Sothoth?
D.E.A.T.H.-Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn. Does Pynchon know?
Must get Simon to explain the Yellow Sign and the Aklo chants. Might need protection.
C. says the h. neophobe type outnumbers us 1000-to-l. If so, all this is hopeless.
What gets me is how much has been out in the open for so long. Not just in Lovecraft, Joyce, Melville, etc., or in the Bugs Bunny cartoons but in scholarly works that pretend to explain. Anybody who wants to go to the trouble can find out, for instance, that the "secret' of the Eleusinian Mysteries was the words whispered to the novice after he got the magic mushroom: "Osiris is a black God!" Five words (of course!) but no historian, archeologist, anthropologist, folklorist, etc. has understood. Or, those who did understand, didn't care to admit it. Can I trust C.? For that matter, can I trust Simon?
This matter of Tlaloc should convince me, one way or the other.
("He only thinks of blood and slaughter/The shark should live on land not water.")
("To hell with the shark and all his kin/And fight like hell when you see his fin.")
When Joe Malik got off the plane at Los Angeles International Airport, Simon was waiting for him.
"We'll talk in your car," Joe said briefly.
The car, being Simon's, was naturally a psychedelic Volkswagen. "Well?" he asked as they drove out of the airport onto Central Avenue.
"It all checks out," Joe said with an odd calm. "It did rain blue cats when they dug up Tlaloc. Mexico City has had unusual and unseasonable rains ever since. The missing tooth was on the right, and the corpse at the Biograph Theatre had a missing tooth on the left. Billy Graham couldn't have gotten to Chicago by any normal means, so that was either the best damned makeup job in the history of show business and plastic surgery or I witnessed a genuine miracle. And all the rest of it, the law of Fives and all. I'm sold. I no longer claim membership in the liberal intellectual guild. You behold in me a horrible example of creeping mysticism."
"Ready to try acid?"
"Yes," Joe said. "I'm ready to try acid. I only regret that I have but one mind to lose for my Shivadarshana."
"Right on! First, though, you'll meet him. I'll drive right to his bungalow- it's not far from here." Simon began humming as he drove; Joe recognized the tune as the Fugs' "Rameses II Is Dead, My Love."
They drove for a while in silence, and Joe finally asked, "How old is… our little group… exactly?"
"Since 1888." Simon said. "That's when Rhodes horned in and they 'kicked out the Jams,' like I told you in Chicago after the Sabbath."
"And Karl Marx?"
"A schmuck. A dupe. A nebbish from the word Go." Simon made an abrupt turn. "Here we are at his house. The greatest headache they had since Harry Houdini knocked out their spiritualist fronts." He grinned. "How do you think you'll feel talking to a dead man?"
"Weird," Joe said, "but I've felt weird for the last week and a half."
Simon parked the car and held the door open. "Just think," he said. "Hoover sitting there every day with the death-mask on his desk, and half-suspecting, deep down in his bones, how we suckered him."
They crossed the yard of the small, modest bungalow. "What a front, eh?" Simon chuckled. He knocked.
A little old man- he was five foot seven exactly, Joe remembered from the FBI files- opened the door.
"Here's our new recruit," Simon said simply.
"Come in," John Dillinger said, "and tell me how an asshole egghead like you can help us beat the shit out of those motherfucking Illuminati cocksuckers."
("They fill their books with obscene words, claiming that this is realism," Smiling Jim shouted to the KCUF assembly. "It's not my idea of realism. I don't know anybody who talks in that gutter language they call realism. And they describe every possible perversion, acts against nature that are so outrageous I wouldn't sully this audiences' ears by even mentioning their medical names. Some of them even glorify the criminal and the anarchist. I'd like to see one of these hacks come up to me and look me in the eye and say, 'I didn't do it for money. I was honestly trying to tell a good, honest story that would teach people something of value.' They couldn't say that. The lie would stick in their throats. Who can doubt where they get their orders from? What person in this audience needs to be told what group is behind this overflowing sewer of smut and filth?")
"May storms and rains and typhoons beat them," Howard sang on. "May Great Cthulhu rise and eat them"
"I got into the JAMs in Michigan City Prison," Dillinger, much relaxed and less arrogant, was saying as he, Simon, and Joe sat in his living room drinking Black Russians.
"And Hoover knew, from the beginning?" Joe asked.
"Of course. I wanted the bastard to know- him and every other high-ranking Mason and Rosicrucian and Illuminati front-man in the country." The old man laughed harshly; except for his unmistakable eyes, which still held the strange blend of irony and intensity that Joe had noted in the 1930s photos, he was indistinguishable from any other elderly fellow who had come to California to enjoy his last years in the sun. "The first bank job I pulled off, in Daleville, Indiana, I used the line that I always repeated: 'Lie down on the floor and keep calm.' Hoover couldn't miss it. That's been the motto of the JAMs ever since Diogenes the Cynic. He knew no ordinary bank robber would be quoting an obscure Greek philosopher. The reason I repeated it on every heist was just to rub it in and let him know I was taunting him."
"But going back to Michigan City Prison…" Joe prompted, sipping his drink.
"Pierpont was the one who initiated me. He'd been with the JAMs for years by then. I was just a kid, you know- in my early twenties- rand I had only pulled one job, a real botch. I couldn't understand why I got such a stiff sentence, after the D.A. promised me clemency if I'd plead guilty, and I was kind of bitter. But old Harry Pierpont saw my potential.
"At first I thought he was just another big-house faggot, when he started tracking me around and asking me all sorts of personal questions. But he was what I wanted to become -a successful bank-robber -so I played along. To tell you the truth, I was so horny it wouldn't have mattered if he was a faggot. You have no idea how horny a man gets in prison. That's why Baby-Face Nelson and a lot of other guys preferred to die rather than go back to the big house again. Hell, if you haven't been there, you can't understand. You just don't know what being horny is.
"Well, anyway, after a lot of bull about Jesus and Jehovah and the Bible and all that, Harry just asked me point-blank one day in the prison yard: 'Do you think it's possible there might be a true religion?' I was about to say, 'Bullshit- like there might be an honest cop,' but something stopped me. I realized he was dead serious, and a lot might depend on my answer. So I was cautious. I said, 'If there is, I haven't heard about it.' And he just came back, real quiet, 'Most people haven't.'
"It was a couple of days afterward that he brought the subject up again. Then, he went right on with it, showed me the Sacred Chao and everything. It took my breath away." The old man's voice trailed off, as he sank into silent memories.
"And it really does go back to Babylon?" Joe prompted.
"I'm not much of an intellectual," Dillinger replied. "Action is my arena. Let Simon tell you that part."
Simon was eager to leap into the breach. "The basic book to confirm our tradition," he said, "is The Seven Tablets of Creation, which is dated at about 2500 B.C. the time of Sargon. It describes how Tiamat and Apsu, the first gods, were coexisting in Mummu, the primordial chaos. Von Junzt, in his Unausprechlichen Kulten, tells how the Justified Ancients of Mummu originated, just about the time the Seven Tablets were inscribed. You see, under Sargon, the chief deity was Marduk. I mean, that was what the high priests gave out to the public- in private, of course, they worshipped lok-Sotot, who became the Yog-Sothoth of the Necronomicon. But maybe I'm going too fast. Getting back to the official religion of Marduk, it was based on usury. The priests monopolized the medium of exchange and were able to extract interest for lending it. They also monopolized the land, and extracted tribute for renting it. It was the beginning of what we laughingly call civilization, which has always rested on rent and interest. The old Babylonian con.
"The official story was that Mummu was dead, killed in the war between the gods. When the first anarchist group arose, they called themselves Justified Ancients of Mummu. Like Lao-Tse and the Taoists in China, they wanted to get rid of usury and monopoly and all the other pigshit of civilization and go back to a natural way of life. So, grok, they took the supposedly dead god, Mummu, and claimed he was still alive and was actually stronger than all the other gods. They had a good argument 'Look around,' they'd say, "what do you see most of? Chaos, right? Therefore, the god of Chaos is the strongest god, and is still alive.'
"Of course, we got our ass whipped good. We were just no match for the Illuminati in those days. Didn't have a clue, about how they performed their 'miracles,' for instance. So we got our asses whipped again, in Greece, when the JAMs got started again, as part of the Cynic movement. By the tune the whole thing was happening again in Rome- usury and monopoly and the whole bag of tricks- the truce took place. The Justified Ancients became part of the Illuminati, a special group still keeping our own name, but taking orders from the Five. We thought we'd humanize them, like the anarchists who stayed in SDS after last year. And so it went until 1888. Then Cecil Rhodes started the Circle of Initiates and the big schism occurred. Every meeting would have a faction of Rhodes boys carrying signs that said 'Kick out the JAMs!' It was the parting of the ways. They just didn't trust us- or maybe they were afraid of being humanized.
"But we had learned a lot by our long participation in the Illuminati conspiracy, and now we know how to fight them with their own weapons."
"Fuck their weapons," Dillinger interrupted. "I like to fight them with my weapons."
"You are behind the big unsolved bank robberies of the last few years-"
"Sure. Just in the planning, though. I'm too old to vault over tellers' cages and carry on like I did back in the thirties."
"John is also fighting on another front," Simon interjected.
Dillinger laughed. "Yes," he said. "I'm the president of Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Inc. You've seen them- 'If it's not an LBJP it's NOT an L.P.'?
"Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus?" Joe exclaimed. "My God, you put out the best rock in the country! The only rock a man my age can listen to without wincing."
"Thanks," Dillinger said modestly. "Actually, the Illuminati own the companies that put out most of the rock. We started Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus to counterattack. We were ignoring that front until they got the MC-5 to cut a disc called 'Kick Out The Jams' just to taunt us with old, bitter memories. So we came back with our own releases, and the next thing I knew I was making bales of money from it. We've also fed information, through third parties, to Christian Crusade in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so they could expose some of what the Illuminati are doing in the rock field. You've seen the Christian Crusade publications-Rhythm, Riots and Revolution, and Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, and so forth?"
"Yes," Joe said absently. "I thought it was nut literature. It's so hard," he added, "to grasp the whole picture."
"You'll get used to it," Simon smiled. "It just takes awhile to sink in."
"Who really did shoot John Kennedy?" Joe asked.
"I'm sorry," Dillinger said. "You're only a private in our army right now. Not cleared for that kind of information yet. I'll just tell you this much: his initials are H.C.-so don't trust anybody with those initials, no matter where or how you meet him."
"He's being fair," Simon told Joe. "You'll appreciate it later."
"And advancement is rapid," Dillinger added, "and the rewards are beyond your present understanding."
"Give him a hint, John," Simon suggested with an anticipatory grin. "Tell him how you got out of Crown Point Jail."
"I've read two versions of that," Joe said. "Most of the sources claim you carved a fake gun out of balsa wood and dyed it black with your shoe polish. Toland's book says that you made that story up and leaked it out to protect the man who really managed the break for you -a federal judge that you bribed to smuggle in a real gun. Which was it?"
"Neither," Dillinger said. "Crown Point was known as the 'escape-proof jail' before I crashed out of it, and, believe me, it deserved the name. Do you want to know how I did it? I walked through the walls. Listen…"
HARE KRISHNA HARE HARE
The sun beat down on the town of Daleville on July 17, 1933, like a rain of fire.
Motoring down the main street, John Dillinger felt the perspiration on his neck. Although he had been paroled three weeks earlier, he was still pale from his nine years in prison, and the sunlight was cruel on his almost albino-tinted skin.
I'm going to have to walk through that door all by myself, he thought. All alone.
And fighting every kind of fear and guilt that has been beaten into me from childhood on.
'The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology," Pierpont had said. "Remember that. We've got the Second Law of Thermodynamics on our side. Chaos steadily increases, all over the universe. All 'law and order' is a kind of temporary accident."
But I've got to walk through that door all alone. The Secret of the Five depends on it. This time it's my turn to be the goat.
Pierpont and Van Meter and the others were still back in Michigan City Prison. It was all in his hands-being the first one paroled, he had to raise the money to finance the jail-break that would get the others out. Then, having proved himself, he would be taught the JAM "miracles."
The bank suddenly loomed before him. Too suddenly. His heart skipped a beat.
Then, calmly, he drove his Chevrolet coupe over to the curb and parked.
I should have prepared better. This car should be souped-up like the ones Clyde Barrow uses. Well, I'll know that the next time.
He left his hands on the steering wheel and squeezed, hard. He took a deep breath and repeated the Formula: "23 Skidoo."
It helped a little- but he still wanted to get the hell out of there. He wanted to drive straight back to his father's farm in Mooresville and find a job and learn all the straight things again, how to kiss a boss's ass and how to look the parole officer straight in the eye and be like everybody else.
But everybody else was an Illuminati puppet and didn't know it. He did know it and was going to liberate himself.
Hell, that's what a younger John Dillinger thought back in 1924-except that he hadn't known about the Illuminati or the JAMs, then- but he was trying to liberate himself, in his own way, when he held up that grocer. And what did it lead to? Nine years of misery and monotony and almost going mad with horniness in a stinking cell.
It'll be nine years more if I fuck up today.
"The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology."
He got out of the car and forced his feet and legs to move and he walked straight for the bank door.
"Fuck it," he said, "23 Skidoo."
He walked through the do or-and then he did the thing the bank tellers remembered after and told the police. He reached up and adjusted his straw hat to the most dapper and debonair angle- and he grinned.
"All right, this is a stick-up," he said clearly, taking out his pistol. "Everybody lie down on the floor and keep calm. None of you will get hurt."
"Oh, God," a female teller gasped, "don't shoot. Please don't shoot."
"Don't worry, honey," John Dillinger said easily, "I don't want to hurt anybody. Just open the vault."
LIKE A TREE THAT'S PLANTED BV THE WATER
"That afternoon," the old man said, "I met Calvin Coolidge in the woods near my father's farm at Mooresville. I gave him the haul -twenty thousand dollars- and it went into the JAM treasury. He gave me twenty tons of hempscript."
"Calvin Coolidge?" Joe Malik exclaimed.
"Well, of course, I knew it wasn't really Calvin Coolidge. But that was the form he chose to appear in. Who or what he really is, I haven't learned yet."
"You met him in Chicago," Simon added gleefully. "He appeared as Billy Graham that time."
"You mean the Dev-"
"Satan," Simon said simply "is just another of the innumerable masks he wears. Behind the mask is a man and behind the man is another mask. It's all a matter of merging multiverses, remember? Don't look for an Ultimate Reality. There isn't any."
"Then this person- this being-" Joe protested, "really is supernatural-"
"Supernatural, schmupernatural," Simon grimaced. "You're still like the people in that mathematical parable about Flatland. You can only think in categories of right and left, and I'm talking about up and down, so you say 'supernatural.' There is no 'supernatural'; there are just more dimensions than you are accustomed to, that's all. If you were living in Flatland and I stepped out of your plane into a plane at a different angle, it would look to you as if I vanished 'into thin air.' Somebody looking down from our three-dimensional viewpoint would see me going off at a tangent from you, and would wonder why you were acting so distressed and surprised about it."
"But the flash of light-"
"It's an energy transformation," Simon explained patiently. "Look, the reason you can only think three-dimensionally is because there are only three directions in cubical space. That's why the Illuminati- and some of the kids they've allowed to become partially illuminized lately- refer to ordinary science as 'square.' The basic energy-vector coordinates of Universe are five-dimensional -of course- and can best be visualized in terms of the five sides of the Illuminati Pyramid of Egypt."
"Five sides?" Joe objected. "It only has four."
"You're ignoring the bottom."
"Oh. Go on."
"Energy is always triangular, not cubical. Bucky Fuller has a line on this, by the way: he's the first one outside the Illuminati to discover it independently. The basic energy transformation we're concerned with is the one Fuller hasn't discovered yet, although he's said he's looking for it- the one that ties Mind into the matter-energy continuum. The pyramid is the key. You take a man in the lotus position and draw lines from his pineal gland- the Third Eye, as the Buddhists call it- to his two knees, and from each knee to the other, and this is what you get…" Simon sketched rapidly in his notepad and passed it over to Joe:
"When the Pineal Eye opens -after fear is conquered; that is, after your first Bad Trip- you can control the energy field entirely," Simon went on. "An Irish Illuminatus of the ninth century, Scotus Ergina, put it very simply- in five words, of course -when he said Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt: 'All things that are, are lights.' Einstein also put it into five symbols when he wrote e = mc2?. The actual transformation doesn't require atomic reactors and all that jazz, once you learn how to control the mind vectors, but it always lets off one hell of a flash of light, as John can tell you."
"Damn near blinded me and knocked me on my ass, that first time in the woods," Dillinger agreed. "But I was sure glad to know the trick. I was never afraid of being arrested after that, 'cause I could always walk out of any jail they put me in. That's why the Feds decided to kill me, you know. It was embarrassing to always find me wandering around loose again a few days after they locked me up. You know the background to the Biograph Theatre scam- they killed three guys in Chicago, without giving them a chance to surrender, because they thought I was one of them. Well, those three were all wanted in New York for armed robbery, so nobody criticized the cops much for that caper. But then up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, they shot three very respectable businessmen, and one of them went and died, and Hoover's Heroes caught all sorts of crap from the newspapers. So I knew where it was at; I could never again surrender and walk away a few days later. We had to produce a body for them." The old man looked suddenly sad. "There was one possibility that we hated to think about… But, luckily it didn't come to that. The gimmick we finally worked out was perfect."
"And everything really follows the Fives' law?" Joe asked.
"More than you guess," Dillinger remarked blandly.
"Even when you're dealing with social fields," Simon added. "We've run studies of cultures where the Illuminati were not in control, and they still follow Weishaupt's five-stage pattern: Verwirrung, zweitracht, Unordnung, Beamtenherrschaft and Grummet. That is: chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and aftermath. America right now is between the fourth and fifth stages. Or you might say that the older generation is mostly in Beamtenherrschaft and the younger generation is moving into Grummet rapidly."
Joe took another stiff drink and shook his head. "But why do they leave so much of it out in the open? I mean, not merely the really shocking things you told me about the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but putting the pyramid on the dollar bill where everybody sees it almost every day-"
"Hell," Simon said, "look what Beethoven did when Weishaupt illuminated him. Went right home and wrote the Fifth Symphony. You know how it begins: da-da-da-DUM. Morse code for V-the Roman numeral for five. Right out in the open, as you say. It amuses the devil out of them to confirm their low opinion of the rest of humanity by putting things up front like that and watching how almost everybody misses it. Of course, if somebody doesn't miss something, they recruit him right away. Look at Genesis: 'lux fiat' -right on the first page. They do it all the time. The Pentagon Building. '23 Skidoo.' The lyrics of rock songs like 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'- how obvious can you get? Melville was one of the most outrageous of the bunch; the very first sentence of Moby Dick tells you he's a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah, but you cant find a single Melville scholar who has followed up that lead- in spite of Ahab being a truncated anagram of Sabbah. He even tells you, again and again, directly and indirectly, that Moby Dick and Leviathan are the same creature, and that Moby Dick is often seen at the same time in two different parts of the world, but not one reader in a million groks what he's hinting at. There's a whole chapter on whiteness and why white is really more terrifying than black; all the critics miss the point"
" 'Osiris is a black god,' " Joe quoted.
"Right on! You're going to advance fast," Simon said enthusiastically. "In fact, J think it's time for you to get off the verbal level and really confront your own 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' -your own lady Isis."
"Yes," Dillinger said. "The Leif Erikson is laying offshore near California right now; Hagbard is running some hashish to the students at Berkeley. He's got a new black chick in his crew who plays the Lucy role extremely well. We'll have him send her ashore for the Rite. I suggest that you two drive up to the Norton Lodge in Frisco and I'll arrange for her to meet you there."
"I don't like dealing with Hagbard," Simon said. "He's a right-wing nut, and so is his whole gang."
"He's one of the best allies we have against the Illuminati," Dillinger said. "Besides, I want to exchange some hempscript for some of his flaxscript. Right now, the Mad Dog bunch won't accept anything but flaxscript -they think Nixon is really going to knock the bottom out of the hemp market. And you know what they do with Federal Reserve notes. Every time they get one, they burn it. Instant demurrage, they call it."
"Puerile," Simon pronounced. "It will take decades to undermine the Fed that way."
"Well," Dillinger said, "Those are the kinds of people we have to deal with. The JAMs can't do it all alone, you know."
"Sure," Simon shrugged. "But it bugs me." He stood up and put his drink on the table.
"Let's go," he said to Joe. "You're going to be illuminized."
Dillinger accompanied them to the door, then leaned close to Joe and said, "A word of advice about the Rite."
"Yes?"
Dillinger lowered his voice. "Lie down on the floor and keep calm," he said, and his old, impudent grin flashed wickedly.
Joe stood there looking at the mocking bandit, and it seemed to him a freeze and a frieze in time: a moment that would linger, as another stage of illumination, forever in his mind. Sister Cecilia, back in Resurrection School, spoke out of the abyss of memory: "Stand in the corner, Joseph Malik!" And he remembered too, the chalk that he crumbled slowly between his fingers, the feeling of needing to urinate, the long wait, and then Father Volpe entering the classroom, his voice like thunder: "Where is he? Where is the boy who dared to disagree with the good Sister that God sent to instruct him?" And the other children, led out of the classroom and across the street to the church to pray for his soul, while the priest harangued him: "Do you know how hot hell is? Do you know how hot the worst part of hell is? That's where they send people who have the good fortune to be born into the church and then rebel against it, misled by Pride of Intellect." And five years later, those two faces came back: the priest, angry and dogmatic, demanding obedience, and the bandit, sardonic, encouraging cynicism, and Joe understood that he might someday have to kill Hagbard Celine. But more years had to pass, and the Fernando Poo incident had to pass, and Joe had to plan the bombing of his own magazine with Tobias Knight before he knew that he would, in fact, kill Celine without compunction if it were necessary…
But on March 31, in that year of fruition for all the Illuminati's plans, while the President of the United States went on the air to threaten "all-out thermonuclear heck," a young lady named Concepcion Galore lay nude on a bed in the Hotel Durrutti in Santa Isobel and said, "It's a lloigor."
"What's a lloigor?" asked her companion, an Englishman named Fission Chips, who had been born on Hiroshima Day and named by a father who cared more for physics than for the humanities.
The room was in the luxury suite of the Hotel Durrutti, which meant that it was decorated in abominable Spanish-Moorish decor, the sheets were changed daily (to a less luxurious suite), the cockroaches were minimal, and the plumbing sometimes worked. Concepcion contemplated the bullfight mural on the opposite wall, Manolete turning an elegant Veronica on an unconvincingly drawn bull, and said thoughtfully, "Oh, a lloigor is a god of the black people. The natives. A very bad god."
Chips glanced at the statue again and said, more to himself than to the peasant girl, "Looks vaguely like Tlaloc in Mexico City, crossed with one of those Polynesian Cthulhu tikis."
"The Starry Wisdom people are very interested in these statues," Concepcion said, just to be making conversation, since it was obvious that Chips wasn't going to be ready to prong her again for at least another half hour.
"Indeed?" Chips said, equally bored. "Who are the Starry Wisdom people?"
"A church. Down on Tequilla y Mota Street. What used to be Lumumba Street and was Franco Street when I was a girl. Funny church." The girl frowned, thinking about them. "When I worked in the telegraph office I was always seeing their telegrams. All in code. And never to another church. Always to banks all over Europe and North and South America."
"You don't say," drawled Chips, no longer bored but trying to sound casual; his code number in British Intelligence was, of course, 00005. "Why are they interested in these statues?" He was thinking that statues, properly hollowed out, could transport heroin; he was already sure that Starry Wisdom was a front for BUGGER.
(In 1933, at Harvard, Professor Tochus told his Psychology 101 class, "Now, the child feels frightened and inferior, according to Adler, because he is, in fact, physically smaller and weaker than the adult. Thus, he knows he has no chance of successful rebellion, but nevertheless he dreams about it. This is the origin of the Oedipus Complex in Adler's system: not sex, but the will to power itself. The class will readily see the influence of Neitzsche…" Robert Putney Drake, glancing around the room, was quite sure that most of the students would not readily see anything; and Tochus himself didn't really' see either. The child, Drake had decided-it was the cornerstone of his own system of psychology -was not brainwashed by sentimentality, religion, ethics, and other bullshit. The child saw clearly that, in every relationship, there is a dominant party and a submissive party. And the child, in its quite correct egotism, determined to become the dominant party. It was that simple; except, of course, that the brainwashing takes effect eventually in most cases and, by about this time, the college years, most of them were ready to become robots and accept the submissive role. Professor Tochus droned on; and Drake, serene in his lack of superego, continued to dream of how he would seize the dominant role… In New York, Arthur Flegenheimer, Drake's psychic twin, stood before seventeen robed figures, one wearing a goats-head mask, and repeated, "I will forever hele, always conceal, never reveal, any art or arts, part or parts…")
You look like a robot, Joe Malik says in a warped room in a skewered time in San Francisco. I mean, you move and walk like a robot.
Hold onto that, Mr. Wabbit, says a bearded young man with a saturnine smile. Some trippers see themselves as robots. Others see the guide as a robot. Hold that perspective. Is it a hallucination, or is a recognition of something we usually black out?
Wait, Joe says. Part of you is like a robot. But part of you is alive, like a growing thing, a tree or a plant……
The young man continues to smile, his face drifting above his body toward the mandala painted on the ceiling. Well? he asks. Do you think that might be a good poetic shorthand: that part of me is mechanical, like a robot, and part of me is organic, like a rosebush? And what's the difference between the mechanical and the organic? Isn't a rosebush a kind of machine used by the DNA code to produce more rosebushes?
No, Joe says. Everything is mechanical, but people are different. A cat has a grace that we've lost, or partly lost.
How do you think we've lost it?
And Joe sees the face of Father Volpe and hears the voice screaming about submission…
The SAC bases await the presidential order to take off for Fernando Poo, Atlanta Hope addresses a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, protesting the gutless appeasement of the comsymp administration in not threatening to bomb Moscow and Peking the same time as Santa Isobel, the Premier of Russia rereads his speech nervously as the TV cameras are set up in his office ("and, in socialist solidarity with the freedom-loving people of Fernando Poo"), the Chairman of the Chinese Communist party, having found the thought of Chairman Mao of little avail, throws the IChing sticks and looks dismally at Hexagram 23, and 99 percent of the peoples of the world wait for their leaders to tell them what to do; but in Santa Isobel itself, three locked doors across the suite from the now-sleeping Concepcion, Fission Chips says angrily into his shortwave,
"Repeat none. Not one Russian or Chinese anywhere on the bloody island. I don't care what Washington says. I'm telling you what I have seen. Now, about the BUGGER heroin ring here-"
"Sign off," the submarine tells him. "HQ is not interested in BUGGER or heroin right now."
"Damn and blast!" Chips stares at the shortwave set. That bloody well tore it. He would just have to proceed on his own, and show those armchair agents back in London, especially that smug W., how little they actually knew about the real problem in Fernando Poo and the world.
Storming, he charged back to the bedroom. I'll just get dressed, he thought furiously, including my smoke bombs and Luger and laser ray, and toddle over to this Starry Wisdom church and see what I can nose out. But when he tore open the bedroom door he stopped, momentarily stunned. Concepcion still lay in the bed but she was no longer sleeping. Her throat was neatly cut and a curious dagger with a flame design on it stuck into the pillow beside her.
"Damn, blast and thunder!" cried 00005. "Now that absolutely does tear it. Every time I find a good piece of ass those fuckers from BUGGER come along and shaft her!"
Ten minutes later, the GO signal came from the White House, a fleet of SAC bombers headed for Santa Isobel with hydrogen bombs, and Fission Chips, fully dressed, toddled over to the Starry Wisdom church where he encountered, not BUGGER, but something on an entirely different plane.