666 is intended as a novel of invocation, a summoning of the magus Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), Prophet of the New Aeon. Crowley's circumference transected Everywhere, but his centre was Nowhere - like God, as he sometimes pointed out. He was/is the leaping prankster of the quantum age.
So the book will operate as a channel for all his brawling sub-personalities - ecstatic mystic, exultant blasphemer, enthusiastic pornographer, romantic poet, sceptical philosopher, merry prankster, Western warlock, Eastern sage, heroin addict, doting father, absent father, English gentleman, Scots laird, Russian count, Egyptian prince, gung-ho explorer and mountaineer, litigant, sadistic bully, courtly raconteur and wit , manic self- publicist, and (notoriously) pan-sexual orgiast and psychenaut.
For the Great Beast 666 was the self-proclaimed vehicle of daemonic energies that would propel the twentieth century through an apocalypse of Force and Fire, towards millenic melt-down. Inspired by his holy guardian angel Aiwass, he preached the Law of Thelema - "Do what Thou Wilt - Love is the Law" - but what. ultimately, was his True Will? Or his true Love?
Certainly Crowley's path took him into strange orbits, around such bizarre mentors as McGregor Mathers (1854-1918), co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and architect of the occult revival, whom Crowley eventually "smote with demons". Yet Mathers and the reclusive Allan Bennett enabled him to fuse a synthesis of Western and Eastern esoteric systems. He became the charismatic guru figure for his own circle of disciples,like the poet Victor Neuberg, whose experiences with Crowley in the deserts of Algeria and the hotels of Paris haunted him for the rest of his life.
While other occultists hid in the shadows, Crowley, through his publications, public rituals and lawsuits, became a focus for extreme vilification or adoration. Many partners, notably Leah Hirsig, his most important Scarlet Woman, were burnt out by his sinister radiance, while some of his brightest disciples, like the mathematician Norman Mudd and the American rocket- fuel scientist Jack Parsons, destroyed themselves.
666 explores those stories, but spirals back constantly to the enigma of Crowley, his paradoxical teachings, his impossible behaviour, the cosmic grandeur of his visions, the petty minutiae of his delusions. Recognising that there are many possible Crowleys (eight biographies, innumerable memoires, plus AC's self-mythologising Autohagiography plus his poetry and fiction plus his huge corpus of magickal writings and records) the author of 666, while acknowledging the verifiable facts, feels free to speculate, extrapolate, and fabulate madly - as Crowley did, all his life.
It is almost noon. Soon he must write the words. Rose, sweet angry Rose, his Ouarda, his lovely filthy writhing bitch, has told him that the words of Horus are waiting for him and he shall be their scribe. He, Edward Alexander Aleister Crowley, who is Frater Perdurabo, Count Svareff, Prince Choia Khan, will endure the scribe's ordeal, that the words of the God shall endure, whatever they are, whoever the bloody hell he is.
He informed the manager that he was Prince Choia Khan on a royal progress with the Lady Ouarda, in the hope that luxuries and honours would be showered on them, like a bathroom stocked with rare unguents to anoint Ouarda's mystic rose... that all-devouring void which is her rapacious sex..
His mind shimmers, bubbles and settles in the Cairo heat, as he notes the scanty furnishing, the faded walls, the threadbare carpet. It is almost immaterial. He has been spartan, in a torn tent in a blizzard twenty thousand feet up on the spine of the Himalayas, he will endure the fusty bedroom of this tourist apartment. His temple is Everywhere, his altar is Nowhere. He hath laid down his robes and jewels. At the zenith, take up thy pen and write.
It is the 8th of April, 1904 - according to the sad befuddled Christian calendar, the era vulgaris acknowledged by mere bank clerks and tradesmen and Camberwell vicars, like his inane father-in-law. They cannot share his gnosis. For the New Aeon is imminent, a new calculus of history that swells and loops outside their petty reckonings. For they shall drown in its abundance, the curse of his blessings -
His mind is breaking up again. Rose is crooning to him, out there in the living room. Or is the young crone crooning to her unborn foetus, his star seed? This honeymoon, from Egypt to Ceylon and now back, on some fatal whim, to Egypt again has been a long debauch, a demented sexual fugue that began with a random improvisation, marriage as a practical joke. Applause and wild laughter. So he is An Holy Fool, sayeth the Tarot. Even in his twenty-ninth year. It is more than ever imperative to find an authentic contact. And now Rose is moaning again and again.
"It is all about the Child." Tremulous and keening, the vowels painfully distorted. What is happening to Rose, the vessel of his fierce love? But he must resist sentiment and weakness, he must stay here in the Temple to take up his pen at the stroke of midday, and commence the great work.
For the commandment has been undeniable. When first he'd tried routine invocations with Rose, he'd expected nothing, she'd had little training in scrying, didn't know her astral correspondences or her Egyptian deities. He'd closed his ear to her drunken murmur about a messenger of the Gods. "He who is waiting is Horus."
At last she'd dragged him to the Boulak Museum, her heels clattering as she rushed between the dusty cases to the very end of the gallery, to gesture breathlessly at the Stele of Revealing, displaying Horus as Ra- Hoor-Khuit. Of course, it was Exhibit 666, his Beastly number, as dear Mother used to say. A coincidental joke, a jape of Thoth.
So,on March 20, he'd invoked Horus, exactly as Rose had insisted, an absurd irregular rite, at midday, robed, at the open window, sunlight glaring off the domes and minarets of adjacent mosques, his voice cracking hoarsely as the Names of Power drifted away into the bright windy noon. The brazen bowl was swirling with fresh bull's blood. The sword was naked on the altar. Yea I have done evil. I bow my neck before Thee. Come Thou forth and dwell in me. And every scourge and spell of God the Vast One may be THOU! And as his tongue wrestled with the barbarous Names, Rose/Ouarda his Seeress uttered, in deep orgasmic breaths The Equinox of the Gods has come!
And now Rose is standing on the threshold, her robe torn, holding before her a bottle of Haig's Blended Highland Malt Whisky. Her full breasts will swell with the milk of their star child, his sperm has moistened her inner thigh to form a particle of sun-god-stuff, you can stuff your roasted Sunday god! She gropes for his Swan fountain-pen. And places it reverently in his hand, as if it were his sacred phallus.
There are sheets of paper before him, 8 x 10 inches = 80 = 8 + 0 = 8 which is the number of the Eighth Sephiroth Hod, abode of Hermes/Thoth/Mercurius, who is god of messengers/scribes/liars. Crowley fangles these connections automatically, like a telephonic exchange. This is the result of years of training, his Golden Dawn initiations. Which are only a preparation for this moment. He will meet his Secret Chief, his Holy Guardian Angel, his envoy of Horus. Rose's red lips are already mouthing his name Aiwass...Aiwass...Aiwass
The clocks of the Cairo Imperial Bank strike noon. Crowley raises his right hand. Whatever thy right hand findeth to do...
Nothing happens. Crowley stares at his clenched fingers, his whitening knuckles, the terrifying white virgin infinity of the sheet. Nothing doing... He is just a clumsy dying organism, clutching at a stylus of invisibility.
Yet he senses the room is slowly clouded by a starry haze, a veil of dark galactic mist. Perhaps the mundane geometry of the Temple gradually warps around the Scribe. He is in a tightening corner...
Then the pen circles over the paper, spiralling down to meet the page in a sudden dark slash of ink, a wild seismographic scrawl that falls into claws, hooks, glyphs which the Scribe barely recognises as latin letters, English words, but they're unstoppable , the point of his pen has started moving into a dark void and he can't stop trembling. And he realises he is already hearing the Voice, its deep vibrant murmur steadily increasing in volume.
This Voice - of Aiwass - emanates from his left, and he half-turns, struggling to listen more carefully, to ensure he catches every Word. For this is the Book of the Law.
It was Master Alick's turn to read the Holy Word of the Lord and all the faces around the dining room table were hovering above him expectantly. His mighty Papa who had saved the souls of so many poor working men, his horrid Mama whose eyes and belly bulged, bearded Miss Arkell who ruled him with the Rod of Aaron, and all the servants and maids. They were all Brethren, even the ladies. He didn't see why.
He swayed slightly, his reflection swimming in the polished oak, and he struggled to hold his finger steady on the word. Genesis 5, Verse 15. Was this the right place? Mama sighed impatiently. His father gave him an encouraging nod.
"The Lord is always with you, Alick. Be not afraid."
But he wasn't afraid of the words. Indeed, he loved their form and sound, he wanted his eye to linger on their shape before his tongue savoured the syllables, like little particles of pearly illuminated flesh.
"And MAHALALEL lived sixty and five years and begat JARED; and MAHALALEL lived after he beget JARED eight hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters; and all the days of MAHALALEL were eight hundred ninety and five years; and he died..."
Father raised his hand, and Alick's voice faded. He would have gladly continued his battle with those great words, their recalcitrant letters. Jared was hard. That sticky letter R. Yet Mahalalel was a mighty name. Like Enoch, Methusalah, Mizraim, Gomorrah. Now his stupid Governess would continue this breakfast rite. But Father was restraining her with a stern glance, for the Holy Spirit was about to testify within him.
"And he died. Yes, even the great patriarchs, the all-begetters, who lived far beyond our mere three-score years and ten, who might have thought they were immortal upon this earth, God took them, even in the midst of the generations. And we shall not know the day nor the hour. So fear him and make ready, brothers and sisters, get right with the Lord..."
Everyone stared intently at their Bibles. Alick knew Father had used his special voice, a huge brazen tongue forged for market squares and street corners. The rattle of glass died away in the wooden room. His father nodded at Miss Arkell, and she read clumsily of Enoch and Lamech and Noah and Japhet, but Alick was no longer listening.
For Alick had lived a mere five years. Would he "beget"? How was he "begotten"? It was a deep mystery. Perhaps there was no time to find out, the Lord was already gathering his dark thunder over the green fields around Leamington and the white peacocks of Warwick Castle and all the turrets of England, the World, the Universe...
And Sister Grace lived five hours. And she died, only a few breakfasts later, a curious Mongolian doll swaddled in lace, laid out for the family in a cot in the dining room, while his mother's desperate whimper filtered down from her bedroom, a forbidden zone. He hadn't wanted to see that baby, it was a horrible dead thing, he couldn't help it and (surely) it wasn't his fault. He wouldn't weep, he would pray strongly, which Father said was the manly thing.
The Sabbaths came and went. Like the weeks and the months and years they were indistinguishable. Except one bath-time, when Alick was filled with filth and fire. He was caught red handed by his mother. "F-f-filthy little beast!" All the servants must have heard his shame. It was sore so he fondled it, in desperation, to soothe the awkward itch. Phimosis Doctor Gull called it. There was grave talk of an Operation. Yet it was surely his own hot purple thing.
"Baby Jesus doesn't like it, " whispered Miss Arkell, who smelt of the Holy Ghost, an odour of old bread.
One day he asked if he could have new shoes. "No need , Alick. The Lord is advancing daily..." Would He be drawn in a chariot of furious flame? Surely He would allow the righteous to walk their right of way, to the ice-hard crystal gates of penitence...
For he had to accompany his father and the other Plymouth Brethren on those long footsore walks across Leamington, handing out the tracts of salvation. "It is to sow the seed of the Lord, Alick. You must be strong for His work." For a few minutes they'd left him alone on the footpath overlooking Leamington Weir, and he'd gazed into the flux, watching the translucent flesh of the water rip itself apart while the drifting branches on the surface of the waters were rent asunder like false arks. The frothy crest of the spume never stopped crashing over the edge into the chasm, abysm, spasm of darkness..
Of course, it was pure perception, he didn't have the words then, not for decades. So much was undifferentiated.
But Child Crowley persisted in his observations, often in grimacing silence. He preferred to learn empirically, despite the warnings of his elders. Example: he enjoyed plunging into nettlebeds, because the subsequent discomforts and disfigurements related to mighty words like torment, torture, tribulation, key weapons in the Lord God's arsenal.
The family moved to Redhill in 1883 and for a period the Lord's ways were straightened out, for Alick now had private tutors who taught him history, geography, Latin and arithmetic. His knowledge of the universe could be formulated precisely. He could calculate that the world had been created in 4004 BC, and articulate the secret ancient tongue of scholars and gentlemen,and memorise every king and queen of England up to triumphant Victoria, and point to every scarlet-shaded outpost of Empire on the wallchart. And he knew exactly how the Crowley family was going to be saved and raised among the Elect, not by the observances of corrupted priestcraft nor even by good works, but by the sheer cubic capacity of their faith.
When he started boarding at the Reverend Champney's school in Cambridge, his enthusiastic goodness was not contested. He won prizes for Religious Knowledge and Classics, he wrote pious verses, he joined a sort of band of chaps who were going about to speak to other chaps about their souls.
Intermittently there were seaside holidays and jolly old pranks with fireworks and it was indeed beastly Alick who put castor oil in the tea urn at a morning meeting when the Brethren gathered to break bread together, and instead broke the silence with furious wind, but he was only helping the Lord to chastise the Elect and keep them alerted to the perils of Satanic pomp, he was still a warrior of God. Edward and Emily Crowley believed that with God's help they could expel the customary demons from their little monster.
Until, in Alec's eleventh year, everything mutated. For he was summoned by telegram from school in Cambridge and alighted hours later from the train at Redhill, to be hurried to The Grange, where a special prayer meeting was in progress. As he entered the door of the dining room he scanned the table for his papa's tall figure, for the resonance of that oak-hearted voice which filled meeting halls and tabernacles.
But Edward Crowley was huddled in a bath-chair and his lips chewed clumsily through some psalm or other, and under the mutton-chop whiskers his handsome cheeks were swollen, as if with some alien lumpish cud, so his speech was barely intelligible, a thick mumble.
Emily Crowley stared accusingly at the dishevelled schoolboy in cap and blazer. Perhaps one of his own sins, some sin he hadn't yet fully understood, had struck down Papa with the curse of dumbness. He was desperate to find out what ailed his father, but even he dare not disrupt the rites of the meeting. For over an hour he had to witness his father's painful efforts to pray.
Later he stood before Mama in the drawing room, and learned the Will of the Lord. His father had developed something in his mouth called cancer, like Job's boils, but upon the tongue, and it was a sore affliction. They must trust the new electro-homeopathic treatment, and perhaps even an Operation, and above all the power of prayer. For did not the Lord bless the latter end of Job more than his beginning?
Edward Crowley died, despite Emily's pious expectations, in Anno Domini 1887, almost a year later. Alick, twisting in his narrow bed in the dormitory at Champney's, had dreamed it all the night before, that blackened tongue drooling over bloodless lips, Papa's blank choked stare at the perplexity of death; and it came to pass, a slow funerary sequence of plumed hearse and pallbearers, moving repeatedly for months across his inner vision like like a magic lantern shadow-show. The Father was dead, no longer to be feared, but the Son was still bound upon the futile Cross of Suffering.
As benumbed Alick walked like a moon-faced ghost through the daily regimen of Champney's - the incessant prayer meetings, the smelly mission to the Cambridge slums, the Reverend Champney's protracted sermons and beatings - a process of transmutation began. Perhaps it started when smug Glascott Minor (or the pharisee Page) came forward in Assembly and accused him of drinking, or when he was alleged to have led burlesque prayer meetings in the playground, or, worst of all, to have "corrupted" young Chamberlain.
At first Alick protested he didn't understand what he was accused of, he pleaded ignorance of the untouchable organs of corruption. For surely he was holy Crowley, even in his Fall.
"And, Sir, I would never betray the memory of dearest Papa by blaspheming against the Holy Ghost," he told the Headmaster, who sniffed the stale air of the empty classroom as if it were a sulphurous emission from the depths of his pupil's rotten entrails. Alick's protestation was in itself considered blasphemous and for weeks he was forbidden to speak to other pupils, placed on a bread and water diet, barred from lessons, and forced to tramp around the playground in all weathers. He must confess to something or be expelled.
Every day, on the long winter march around the grounds, while his kidneys ached from divine beatings, he was voting with his feet against King Jesus, Champney, Uncle Tom, his mother Emily and all the other God-fearing idiots who had confined him to this hellish circle. Trample them unto the filth of the earth. He might as well seek out the authentic Sin against the Holy Ghost, the truly Unspeakable.
He had some idea what it might be. There was a boy in the year above who was allegedly infinite in all corruptions, a sallow grinning sloe-eyed creature whose silent sign language in Assembly had hinted at terrible secrets, with strange couplings and kneadings of finger, thumb and fist...
During the long nights the top-form brutes invaded . Alick, still anxious and uncertain, could hear the scuffles, the protests, and the screaming.
This surely was one of the four fine sins crying to heaven for vengeance, but Alick, at the far end of the dorm, turned over and decided to feign sleep after all. It was no idyll of manly pagan love from some forbidden page of The Greek Anthology, merely a confused herd in rut. They might as well have been oafing around on the rugby pitch. And Tattersall of the tousled locks was no Satanic angel.
Yet Alick couldn't ignore a curious tremor in his "soul" (that strange cloudy spherical object he found so hard to visualise) and the beginning of a painful twinge between his thighs, the phenomenon that overcame him whenever he intoned, under his breath, those wonderful Revelations about the Great Whore of Babylon. How would it be to submit unto her Fornications? Because then you'd somehow become her...
Hugh Fleming was pulling back his blanket. The beefy boy was already kneading his swelling pectorals, yelling something like "roly-poly- Crowley, they used to call him holy..." Someone else was trying to force his face into the pillow.
"It's all right, Crowley, you don't have to be all pi with us, we know what you're really like. Give us a crack and you can have a ride on young Tattersall! Or else we'll tell Champney that you did anyway, just for a jape!"
So he served and came unto Tattersall as an angel with a flaming sword. Like Noah he was debagged in drunkeness of the senses, and they saw that he was naked. The abasement was delicious, he could let go of yet another skin, an Alick becoming an Alice in Dirtland, there was no difference down there, although he'd heard that doing with ( or to) a wicked woman it was even better ( or worse) and everything hurt with amazing clarity.
A few weeks later, in the Headmaster's study, all was confusion. Alick stood stiffly, cap in hand, feeling dazed, disembodied, shocked and exhilarated by his own imminent disintegration.
"I am choosing to withdraw my nephew for reasons of health, and health alone, " announced simian Uncle Tom, rubbing his palms anxiously. "As you well know, Mr. Champney, I do not believe in sparing the rod. As founder of the Children's Scripture Union, I am well acquainted with the sins of boyhood. But with a boy like Alick, who lacks the physical fibre for manly punishment, there is no point in pursuing justice for some minor transgression, month after month, until he develops a condition of the kidneys, which is the contention of our good doctor. My dear sister is most anxious that he should now rest. As for these extraordinary allegations of mutual nocturnal pollutions, no nephew of mine would dare lower himself -
"Mr.Bishop, he has confessed..."
"With respect, reverend sir, he has not confessed, he has merely come forward, as others have come forward, to recount the shameful, disgraceful deeds of those others who molested him - what were their names again, Alick, their names, come now!"
"Tattersall, Fleming, Blackledge, Gibson, and Chamberlain..." Alick intoned the names by rote now, he'd grown accustomed to routine duplicity. Indeed the shocking revelation of his accomplice's identities only enriched the perversity of their acts. He was surely glorifying them.
"They named him, Mr. Bishop. As a willing participant, I assure you. He willed that bestial vileness upon himself. And that is why he shall be cast into the outer darkness!" Suddenly Champney was on his feet, shouting, his thick features reddening. "There is not a school in the land that will take him, sir!"
The tutors - there were a rapid succession of them - were mostly a po- faced lot, but they gave him a solid grounding in languages and encouraged his flair for algebra. The new household in Streatham that his mother had set up, with her odious brother Tom in loco parentis, was otherwise an intellectual morgue. Poor Mr. Witherspoon, fresh from Greats at Cambridge, was nearly fired in his first week for reading Coleridge aloud after dinner. Mama Emily objected vociferously to the un-Scriptural way the Ancient Mariner had blessed the sea-serpents. Alick was permitted to read Walter Scott and Dickens, but the adventures of G. A. Henty's heroes were too rudely boisterous and were barely tolerated; while scandalous Zola and yellow-back novels were strictly for the water-closet.
But every summer there was fishing in the loch at Forsinard (where he nearly drowned the Rev. Fothergill), or golf at St. Andrews , or rock- climbing amid the gloomy barren pinnacles around the Welsh lakes. Here he felt proud in his isolation, a wanderer in the wasteland. He began to write poetry, to loosen the girders of his soul, to revel in the mysterious voluptousness of words.
He was also developing a contradictory passion - for the experimental method, for testing propositions in the most literal way. "A cat has nine lives," said Mother, with solemn fatuity, in the course of some inconsequential chatter with Uncle Tom. So Alec caught a vicious-looking tom in the wasteground behind Streatham Station, and dragged it back in a sack, telling himself he was determined to test its extra endowment of the life-force. The books of Moses were full of such blood-sacrifices. But this was in the cause of pure empiricism.
For humanitarian reasons he intended to begin with rat-poison, but he could scarcely force the pellets between its rabid teeth, and even then, they didn't seem to work, so he tried strangulation, taking a firm grip upon the scrawny neck and trying to affix a leather bootlace, but now the cat was screeching and scratching and shitting all over him and the stone flags of the pantry, even as he desperately bludgeoned its head with a claw-hammer. It was so horribly full of furry demonic life.
He had to kill it now, if only to destroy all the nausea and self-hatred that was slithering around inside him. which he suddenly envisaged as the tangled viscera of some bestial hybrid of Mother, Uncle Tom, the chaps at Champney's, all hellishly and greasily compacted; and then he shut that little black hatch in his head.
So instantly he was a brand-new person again , a pure vivisectory intellect who quickly finished the stinky bloody mess with a basin of water and a gas-jet, just to make sure. He buried the wreckage in the garden, at night. Yet even then its dark energies didn't seem fully discharged. The hideous ball of fluff and pulp struggled through his dreams for weeks afterwards.
The other great experiment of this period was alchemical, a work of fire, the transformation of pastes and powders into dazzling stellar explosions and furious serpents of flame. Up in his attic laboratory at Polwarth Rd he had set up retorts and pestles, for mastering Roscoe's Rudiments of Chemistry on his own initiative had been a triumphant progress through the elements, an exhilarating discovery that the material world could be broken up and recombined at the will of the operator. Unlike the creative processes of Genesis, an experiment could be repeated or subtly varied. If salpetre, sulphur, and various nitrates and phosphates were combined and ignited, the great creation could also be a grand destruction.
For the fifth of November, 1891, he had determined to outblast all his companions at the local day school (he'd just started part-time schooling again, as a preparation for sending him to public school) and had devised a superb landmine - a ten pound jar filled with compressed strata of gunpowder, star-shells and a compound of sugar and chlorate of potash, especially mixed at his insistence by Cook. The boys and their parents huddling around the bonfire cheered as Alick leaned forward with a taper to light the skyrocket which warned of the impending detonation of the mine.
The rocket-tube, mounted in a bottle resting on the lid of the mine, hissed and spluttered, emitting plumes of sparks, a spray of stars. He almost thought of an angel's cock...
His rocket rose a few inches - until the tail snagged on some obstruction in the bottleneck. The rocket hung there, a suspended torch, jetting its fiery exhaust across the surface of the mine.
Alick calmly observed a tongue of flame darting along the main fuse. Then a hot gritty wind seared across his forehead and lips and hands; and he seemed to have been inexplicably transported from his command post to a heap of earth on the far side of the bonfire. The silence was deafening. Perhaps this was a punitive fire from Heaven.
He tried to tell people he needed to wash his sticky face - but he was already entering an overwhelming darkness.
His face remained totally bandaged for several weeks, and eventually, as the burns healed, dozens of particles of gravel were removed from his jaw,cheeks, forehead and eyebrows. The pain was often excruciating and everyone reminded him he was very lucky to have kept his eyesight; yet throughout his convalescence he was energised by the knowledge of the alarm and terror he had caused. The blast in the night had rattled windows across Streatham, yet he had survived, tasting the hot acrid breath of Death, like a creature in a poem.
One Sunday morning in his sixteenth year he opened the legs of the parlour maiden on the sacrificial altar of his mother's bed.
She wasn't the first female he'd known carnally, for there had been impudent Ethel from that seaside concert party - how he'd foamed into her, like champagne, that salty spring night under the pier at Torquay. He was so grateful for Archie Douglas, his favourite tutor, for getting him drunk like a normal fellow for the first time, even if their pleasure trip to Devon cost the poor chap his job. Mealy-mouthed Uncle Tom,desperate to stay in control, had not even dared to itemise the sins. Alick had merely been "led astray..."
The relected feel of Ethel's bared belly already excited him. But with the little girl from the chorus the preliminaries had been hurried, the fiery spray had peaked too early, he tried too hard to control the current, he wasn't yet a man of power.
Here and now he, bold Alexander Crowley, was in control, letting his fingers stray as they willed. This was a deliberate act of empowerment, fornication in hot blood upon the Sabbath while Uncle Tom and Mama Emily prayed to their bumbling god. Since her arrival in the household last month, the new girl had been marked out as his chosen hand-maiden of lust.
Plump Charlotte fumbled with her blouse and giggled and flushed, for this was such dangerous territory, and he was moving faster, this young master, fingering beneath her skirts towards her tufty whatsit. The quilt was cold beneath her buttocks. Of course she'd frig her eager young gentleman, give him a little bit of light-fingered how's-yer- father, flash her drawers for the quality folk - ta-rah-rah-boom-de-ay! - but a girl needed more time to think, and not here, surely, in the mistress's very own holy room, for it was the rich what begot the pleasure but the poor...
But there was no stopping the fierce glare in his eyes. She gasped as he entered her. This snorting bucking Beast was riding high for an apocalyptic transgression. He was sixteen years old but he would live for ever and his number was truly six hundred and sixty-six, they'd be telling him all those years that he was the Beast who had the number which was the number of a man and now the horny head of the mannish boy was in there doing it.
"And there was given to him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies..."
He could fuck his little slave and serve the skivvy, all at once, and his hard new cock was forcing her on and on and on. He pinched her buttocks hard in an abstraction of ecstasy as he pulsed and shuddered.
Later, in his exhaustion, he pressed his face into her white lace petticoats. He smiled, indifferent to her tears and bewilderment, as he wiped his cock on Mama's pillowcase. He had somehow made his first magical affirmation.
A side street adjoining the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, 1892: kiosks, green railings, rusty urinals, afternoon sunlight, drifting autumn leaves from the park. Old men played boule at the corner of the square, cursing the cyclists.
One of the cyclists skirting their game was a tall imperious man with a long face, a prominent nose and a moustache, wearing full Highland tartan with kilt and dagger. He dismounted with difficulty, and wheeled the cycle across the pavement, weaving between the frock-coats and parasols, around the marble-topped tables of the sidewalk cafe. Le Patron shook his head, for his thin gorgon of a wife was muttering about Monsieur Mathers, the Scottish wizard who subsisted on vegetable soup,il est fou ne c'est pas? But today this difficult customer was mercifully ignoring everybody.
Samuel Liddell McGregor Nathers, also known as Comte de Glenstrae, Imperator and Heirophant of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, stopped in the centre of the square. Despite his athletic stride and military bearing he was coughing and wheezing with his chronic asthma.
The dusty wind created tiny whirling vortices of dead leaves. The air was composed of stinging specks of light.
So - Monsieur Mathers was on the square. He held the frame of his bicycle as if it were an exotic weapon. He glanced round, breathing hard, tugging at the high neck of his tunic.
This was the culmination of a quest, an earthing of his martial magnetism, the climax of his grand strategy. Everything had led up to this - hungry days of the eighties, poring over the Qabala or the Sacred Book of Abramelin in the British Museum, and then those nights in the shabby room at King's Cross divining with ring and disc, during hand-to- mouth survival as occasional clerk or fencing-master or boxing partner, prior to the long evenings arguing with Willie Yeats, and then brief glory as Librarian cataloguing entomology and missionaries' journals amid the glassed shabtis and shamanic masks of Horniman's Museum in Forest Hill - until foolish Miss Horniman had challenged his praeternatural authority. He, who in the service of the Secret Chiefs had clothed himself with the heiroglyphs of Thoth as if with a garment...
For this he and dear Moina had kept themselves pure and free of all sexual connection, even in marriage. The ultimate validity of his new Order, the very pyramid of his being, now balanced on the fulcrum of this encounter with the Secret Chiefs.
Last night in the apartment he and Moina, his dear Soror Vestigia. spent exhausting hours in divination, following the cyclical swing of the ring over the wooden disc inscribed with Hebrew. Later his head throbbed, bloody mucus ran from his mouth. But they had the correct translation. So here he was at the appointed time and place.
The warrior waited, totally oblivious to the cries of children chasing a hoop, or the hostile cluck of an old nun.
The square fell quiet for a moment. Birdsong - and a block away the life of the Bois de Boulogne droned on. Very faintly, a brass band played the overture to Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld.
Just off the centre, under the golden-green trees, there was a tiny public garden with florid cast-iron railings, a few shrubs, a circle of worn grass. Mathers suddenly knew that this was where They would manifest. Like a man sleep-walking he wheeled his cycle into the zone and rested it against a seat on the edge of the grass circle.
And They were there, even as his gaze turned - three figures, vague at first as pillars of smoke, stationary at intervals of one hundred and twenty degrees, along the circumference of his awareness. They were brightening fast, composed of millions of dancing motes of energy, particles of light.
A few metres away, the cafe life of la belle epoque tinkled away. The boulevardiers tried to ignore the rising wind. Mathers could still taste whisky on his breath but his back was rigid with attention. He was a walking flame. These fiery forms were a test. He had to stand his ground.
The three figures converged on him. They settled for a second into the cowled and hooded forms he'd been anticipating - monkish adepts obscured in the throng of Parisian street-life - then threw back their hoods.
The figure nearest him was a short burly man with a tonsure, a rosy complexion and a thick black beard. He carried a lamp - chalice- shaped, ornate with serpents and sphinxes, supporting nine flames.
Mathers had seen the lamp in a treatise, his hand reached for it involuntarily - but a current of numbing force seized his arm. Mathers whispered his motto: God is my Strength; the Sword is my Companion; Royal is my Tribe. For he recognised the man. As the occult scholar Eliphas Levi. Who had died in 1875.
Levi nodded mournfully, like an old country priest hearing confession. Mathers felt the blood throbbing coldly in his head. His formulae died on his lips. He fell on one knee.
The second figure. long and white, wore a red Cross, carried four red roses and a black book, just as the legend promised. And Mathers had already schemed of wearing these accoutrements, he had coloured dreams of lying thus in a coffin, in the wooden Vault that he and Soror Vestigia would design for the Order at Thavies Inn, Holborn; for there, in the glow of the new electric lanterns, he would enact the resurrection of this figure, Christian Rosenkreutz, his Father Rosicross, to conclude the initiation of Candidates for the Grade of Adeptus Major 5=6.
Despite his difficulty in breathing and the pain in his chest, Mathers was exultant, was the Mithraic campaigner once again. The vision was surely the affirmative message of the Chiefs. He and Woodman and Westcott had founded the Outer Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888.It had been a tricky business. There were secrets he could not reveal yet. But now he, Frater S.R.M.D, could lead the elect into the new Order, the Inner Order. The current of vibrant power, the very agony in all his limbs, was confirmation enough.
Mathers glanced from black father to white father. Because of a sonorous roaring in his ears, the actual words of Rosicross were inaudible, and Levi was laying a trembling hand on his shoulder, but no matter, he was on the right path, the third person of this Trinity would resolve the Secrets. The street, the trees, the ghostly solemn gendarmes were drained of all colour. They were blind to the swirl of his flashing colours.
But the tallest Hermetic figure, bearded with flowing hair, had no colour at all. Its presence was mercurial vitality itself, fluid, dazzling, for it was messenger, shape-changer, image maker, transforming agent of magick.
This figure spoke with a dream-like velocity, so that Mathers could only follow it as image gliding through image, living glyphs of light, a direct image-transfer to Mathers' deep consciousness, imprinting him with nothing he wanted to know, everything he needed to learn: perils ahead,unrelenting penury, prattling sodality intrigues,masked treacheries, all the schisms, fissions, and shambling caricatures of the Order; - and death.
There was more: global war and the cranked-up monsters of reason, chanting war-games of Belial and Amaimon, such great and terrible grimoire captains, with their mutant metals of Pluto, so warm and heavy, and the expanding blast zone of the prophecy took in Choronzon, Lord of Dispersion. Here in Malkuth we would be shaken to the Foundation.
Mathers' mind was a compressed syllable of thunder, he could take no more, the pressure of these presences was overwhelming him with an aweful knowledge, the bitter secret:
"There is no Knowledge then - No Golden Dawn - all will be chaos and infinite darkness - the Gods are dust? -"
Dim image of respectable heads turning at cafe tables, but the kneeling Scot was only murmuring hoarse obscurities before an audience of pigeons,business as usual.
Mathers could only see the three Chiefs now, everything else was a smoky foam, volcanic scum, falling lava. He could only hold fast, focus the burning blade of his mind.
So the process of ultimate gnosis - not merely through his time, but bifurcating throughout all its branches - would include all knowledge of death and pain, any old shite and blood madness, - which, like the debris of a dwindling star, surely fuelled the light - in a pang of cosmic rebirth?
The Imperator of the Golden Dawn entered a tide of blackness.
There was a small fluster in the square. The Scotsman had collapsed. Le Patron scratched his blue chin and grumbled to the world at large. Probably excess of whisky, absinthe - or worse. These foreign devils of Bohemians from the Boulevard St Michel were always fasting themselves for the latest fad. Ether. Morphine. Hashish. What a banquet...
But he could carry on clearing tables. Three gentlemen had conveniently appeared, of distinguished appearance, academicians perhaps, two in frock coats and top hats, although one looked more like a priest, it was hard to tell in this curious chiaroscuro of dust and dappled light. The tallest had a white beard and a gleaming monocle which slipped from his eye-socket as he stooped over the fallen man. They helped Mathers to the seat. When the boss looked up again, the three men had gone, but Mathers was sitting upright,eyes closed, breathing heavily, blood and mucus streaming from his nose.
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