Moonchild Odyssey
THE MAGUS
The Word that creates an Aeon
Teenaging in the Amsterdam of the Sixties. A sleepy well mannered town still bowled over from the war is in no time at all transformed into an anarchist’s dream by a new brand of revolutionaries, the Provos, wild boys and girls who provoke the authorities into disarray.
Master of Ceremonies is Robert Jasper Grootveld, who every Saturday night does his dance around a statue in the centre of town, a gift from the Hunter Tobacco company to the people of Amsterdam: A little bronze of a mischievous boy, chin up, hands on hips, challenging the world, ironically called ‘Het Lieverdje’, which translates into ‘ Little Darling’. Robert Jasper declares it ‘Magies Centrum’ and himself ‘Anti-Rook Magiër’: ‘Anti-Smoking Magician’.
Dressed up, face painted as Black Pete, the side kick of Santa Claus, he challenges the Consumer Society and its addiction to the ‘goodies’ it so unconsciously swallows, singing his ‘Ughe, Ughe, Ughe’ song: “Een Tevreden Roker is geen Onruststoker”: “A Satisfied Smoker is no Trouble Stirrer”
The verse works like the Word of a Magus. Nobody wants to be a ‘Satisfied Smoker’. Soon the whole of Amsterdam’s creative edge is participating in the weekly ruckus around the statue.
It is all ‘Happening’ – the term for the events – close to where the newspapers are printed. Het Lieverdje is right in front of the pubs where the journalists tend to congregate. From their jolly perspective the press reacts mostly positive. There is hate mail of course but publicity is publicity to Robert Jasper, for he has a message, even if tongue-in-cheek, satirising a prominent bible basher at the time who is predicting the return of Christ:
“Klaas will return.”
‘Sinterklaas’ – St Nicholas, Patron Saint of children – is a very important saint in European church history. In the old days the local tribes had their own gods and the conquering Roman Catholic Empire had been forced to incorporate a tribal deity to convert the natives. The first churches built in the townships of Northern Europe, though often renamed later, were mostly called Saint Nicholas Church. St. Nick being derived from a Pagan Patron of everything wild and adventurous: sailors, gamblers, harlots, and traders.
Robert Jasper at the time is unaware of his invocation of a Pagan God, but everyone with an inkling of originality – artists, students, every other tramp, mad, brilliant or both – is drawn to ‘Het Magies Centrum’ on a Saturday night. The crowd thickens by the week.
The authorities, compelled to do something, work themselves into a knot. The streetscape there is mediaeval. Curved canals and little alleyways form a labyrinth around ‘Het Spui’ – the location of the ‘Happenings’ – where many a tourist gets lost and many a boy in blue from out of town ends up in the same predicament. The pursued rascals turn a corner or two and are back at the back of the pursuers. Enraged, the defenders of the law react with unwise severity. Heads are bashed in front of flashing cameras.
Provo whizz kids respond with the smoke bomb, bringing colour and drama to the riots.
Another brainchild of Robert Jasper is the ‘marihuette game’. Nobody really knows what marihuana looks like in those days, least of all the two man narcotic brigade that monitors the Chinese opium dens. Early days indeed! Tobacco days. The Anti-Smoking Magician and his mates fabricate packets made up of stuff that vaguely resembles the feared narcotic. Whenever they see someone pull a packet of cigs out of one of the cigarette vending machines that adorn every other street corner, they run up to put one of their creations back in for the next customer. Confusion rules.
When Claus von Amsburg, the German who is to marry Queen-to-be Beatrix is riotously humoured as a ‘Klaas’ manifestation, the city is so much in chaos that at the wedding in 1966 which is one of the first events televised world wide, the smoke bombs go off, greying out and mystifying every screen in the civilised world.
Amsterdammers have always been notoriously tolerant towards the underdog and with many people being beaten and locked up for the wrong reasons, the police isn’t very popular for a while. When the abandoned milk factory at Leidseplein is taken over by squatters and dubbed the ‘Melkweg’ – ‘Milky Way’ – it is given over to the ‘Youth Culture’:
“Go on, smoke your dope if you must. Just stay off the streets.”
Other pleasure domes follow: Paradiso, Fantasio – places to get stoned out of your mind while the band is playing, poets recite their raves and girls dance naked in the bubbling colours of psychedelic light shows. Sounds and visuals mixing very nicely with the hash fumes that are as thick as the Oriental carpets on the walls.
Naked girls. No longer looked at possessively as strip-tease, like in pre-marihuana days, but admired and highly appreciated as glorious warriors for change.
From a town where the only ganja could be had from the odd Caribbean sailor at the Cotton Club, Amsterdam is changing into an alchemical laboratory with every conceivable drug in the cauldron and with plenty to share.
All to the tune of Pan’s Flute.
THE EMPRESS
Fundamental Formula of Universe is Love
Budding Teenager is exceptional in that at Thirteen he falls in love so deep that he will be looking at the world through two pairs of eyes for more than a decade. She is two years older, a head taller. He has to grow fast to catch up with her. She is strong, smart and highly opinionated, independent and definitely free of spirit, to have taken on someone as young, even if it is a spunky thing.
He is sweet and considerate as well, a good listener. They discuss everything incessantly for all that time, their chatter still echoing on somewhere.
To him society is there to go out and play the stock market but for her – with her supremely left wing parents – it is necessary to have an ethical attitude towards everything. They are lucky that the Dutch brand of revolutionaries has a lot of scope for playfulness and they find a blend of political correctness that is acceptable to both of them.
Their love-making centres around her orgasm.
Not that there isn’t any deceit, like going home at the permitted time to say goodnight to his parents and then sneak out of the window to hit the nightlife, doing his amphetamines hidden from his sweetheart. She on her part fakes the odd orgasm.
A fortunate side effect of the tidal wave of hashish and marihuana is that he drops the amphetamine which up to then had been more readily available and which, as we now know, wreaks much greater havoc on the body. The hashish, they enjoy together.
There are times however that getting stoned is all too literal: It is as if his very brains turn into stone and he can only sit there, waiting for the smoke to wear off. Heart racing, paralyzed by fear of dying or losing his orientation by going insane.
One day it seizes him when he is ‘straight’. In medical terms this is simply an anxiety attack but to him it feels like some Unfathomable Truth that will need to be addressed one day. It may temporarily back off but it won’t be going away altogether.
Studies Psychology. Informative as well as entertaining. We are talking ’68 here. Borders between students and administrative sections are thinly drawn and one fine day Young Provo finds himself smoking the big cigars of the Rector Magnificus on His Honour’s side of the mahogany.
Is not that radical though when it comes to taking LSD when it appears on the scene. Is keen but wary. Afraid to lose that precious orientation forever, he does his reading first. Timothy Leary’s stuff. He takes Leary’s words about set and setting to heart and makes sure to wait for the right moment. He could very well, like so many others, have tripped himself over the edge.
That’s why psychedelics do what they do when he finally does them.
His best friend is less hesitant. Ab has no deliberations hurling himself into the unknown; ego-free, a born Buddha. Throws himself out so far that he ends up in the clutches of the infamous Carmen, a heavy wench who has been around most of European bohemia. An addict herself, she has a passion for hooking kids on the needle and she has no problem in acquainting Ab with her favourite cocktail: opium and speed.
She has plenty more game. They live on the ‘Caladonia’, a notorious passenger ship that serves as living quarters for the more funky student population, moored in the harbour not far from downtown. Huge, with its hundreds of cabins, endless hallways, over several decks, it is a haven for everything that has run away from home, is running from the law, or is running around in circles, not knowing which drug to take. Also aboard is an American genius of chemistry who invents his own variations of LSD, to whom Ab takes a special liking.
Anxious Academic holds back and studies on for a master’s degree. Has the notion of having a date with madness one day. Needs that degree as a weapon.
His girl has become a beautiful woman. Tamara means ‘Beautiful’ in several languages and connotes with ‘Your Mother’ as well as ‘Tomorrow’, which makes sense considering the long future they are to have together. She makes their clothes. Extravagant, matching, they strike a vibrant picture, entertaining their friends in a two storey apartment in the heart of town, both having a space of their own. All that talk and communicating is paying off: True children of their day they are wide open to the winds of change.
By the end of the decade the town seems to be boiling over. They are part of that first wave that like elsewhere from hip cosmopolitan centres around the globe spills out into the country side. When Ab’s junk use is getting out of hand and he is struck with hepatitis his younger brother locates an old farm up in the North of Holland and their ‘inner circle’ moves up there with the idea of establishing a commune. How appealing for young and idealistic hearts to share space, work, knowledge, food, love and relationships.
Ab stays in the barn for a few months kicking his hard drug habit. Comes out one day, bright and jolly, takes the girl of his brother in his arms and when she gets pregnant there is no way of knowing who the father is. When they build a bed for the three of them, they impress the hell out of Apprentice Communard.
Having been with Tamara ever since being off his mother, he is not ready yet to face that most terrible of demons, jealousy. They return to town to earn the money for their own farm and work on sexual liberation a bit, both trying out a few others without breaking up.
When they finally settle, she is ready to have babies. He is not. Feels like he has hardly been born himself yet. He makes a short movie with help from some Aussie friends, called ‘Scarab’: a melodramatic little number which tries to express the concept of re-birth. He himself acts in it, playing two roles: One is dying – lots of sunsets, running around in fear, grabbing the earth, digging a grave – the other is being born, ecstatic, in tears. Set to music of the Third Ear Band’s ‘Alchemy’. He is obviously looking for some serious transformation.
Too restless to be growing vegetables and keeping the goats fenced in he prefers to laze around and stare at the horizon. Confides to Ab his deepest desire without much idea of what it entails: To become a magician. He had come across the recently published hagiography of Aleister Crowley. While being a little put off by his pomposity, he had been impressed by the ease with which the man had seemed to hop around the globe, a bit of inspiration for him just about to go on a journey himself.
He leaves his first lady in the care of the communal spirit and takes off to India.
DEATH
Exaltation of Solid Matter
Shoestring Traveler completely innocent in the ways of the world. So politically correct he can’t even allow himself to take a taxi. Try and step out of Bombay Airport in 1973 in clean jeans, white shirt, looking for a bus! In total shock from the horrors in the streetscape, he sits on the steps of his hotel for a few days completely stunned, not knowing what to do next until some streetwise Vietnam vet invites him up for a smoke. The world looks slightly more tolerable.
They embark on the hippy trail together, travel to Goa and rent a house.
The first good night of sleep there brings him an incredibly vivid and unforgettable dream: It is as if he is having a child, appearing to him within a sphere of blue light. He sees it as the child that Tamara didn’t have.
A month and a myriad of chillums later he is fully acclimatised, parts ways with the veteran and eases himself into the torrent of life that is the hustle and bustle of India.
The ambition to become a famous film director, or to become anything for that matter, disappears as snow before the sun, bursts into smithereens.
In those days before Postmodernity took hold, European Intellectuals still consider themselves to be very smart, thinking they know all there is to know. Things are still seen pretty much in Black and White. Even a free thinking hippy is still full of ideas of right and wrong, God or Devil. In India you don’t last long with that attitude. Death and decay are fully integrated in the daily fabric of life. Overwhelming beauty and biting misery go hand in hand. Everywhere you look are dark shining eyes full of light, in all possible expressions, from ecstatic to horrific, offering inspiration while scaring the shit out of you. Assaulted so by paradox, one either moves with it or gets back on the plane home.
The hegemony of duality gets a good beating in the land of the threesome: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva – Creator, Preserver, Destroyer.
He realises that he’s got to start from scratch and goes guru hunting. Meets some of the very first followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Their philosophy makes perfect sense and they seem to have a whole lot of fun but The Seeker is too vain an individualist to dissolve into an orange robe and a mala of the Master. On to Bangalore to visit Sai Baba the miracle man but he happens to be elsewhere. The Sri Aurobindo ashram in Madras is a bit too much on the square side.
He journeys to the Ganges, the heart of Indian spirituality and identifies more and more with the saddhus: the eccentric dudes that roam the countryside, their hair uncut, a bundle on their head. With only a bowl and chillum, they carry a staff, worshipping Shiva. Some are so far out they may well be gods.
Some smoke, some don’t. When they do, they first call out: “Bom-Boh-Leh”, hailing Shiva, inviting anyone within hearing distance to come and have a toke. A very appealing gesture indeed and totally acceptable to the community at large. The shop owner burns incense to link up with Lakshmi and her favours and is happy to give a little sustenance to the passing saddhu, knowing that it all returns to the same Ineffable Source behind the Pantheon.
Little Shiva gets higher and higher with a severe case of ‘Indiatitis’.
On to the Himalayas. Doesn’t get all that far by doing his groin in instead. Experiences those mighty peaks from a mat in the back of a hut, a camping place for passing sherpas. Feels humbled by those men and women who carry twice their size over those hills. Lays there lazily, dazzled by their faces, illuminated by the dancing flames of the fire, singing their songs, laughing their stories.
On the way back to civilisation he limps past a Tibetan refugee camp. The healer feels his pulse, rocking and chanting. Hands him over some home made herbal pills and smiles his remedy:
“No narcotics.”
So much for good advice!
While recovering in one of the backpackers paradises around Pokhara, into his life walks Vinhoo – a streetwise Indian with a difference. He’s been to Europe, has a fair idea of where the average traveller is up to and not wary at all to use every bit of advantage he has. The backpackers, on the illusive search for enlightenment, are easy target for his condescending wit. The Recovering Pilgrim is duly impressed by his eloquent charm. He has found his Guru. Vinhoo’s attitude to see hitting rock-bottom as heroic, programs him for years: When in Paris, only 10 francs in your pocket, what do you do? If you buy a bed you’ll be hungry, if you eat, you’ll want a bed. So you buy a bottle of vino, have a ball, and sleep it off on some cardboard.
This rave mostly being a ploy to make people spend money on him, he gets his Gullible Chela to most happily oblige. Having the money to get him to Australia and join his friends he made his movie with, he finds it necessary to go through it at a steady pace and spends it on an ongoing party with the charismatic con man.
Has always smoked but this is unheard of. Chillum after chillum, as soon as they wake up, throughout the day and night. Talking philosophy, jiving about, enrapturing themselves, taking the piss out of the tourists. This is what finally loosens him up. Holding on to material possessions is only for the little people. He chooses for the power of not having anything to lose, to learn to survive on street level, in the moment. Is turning into a saddhu himself.
It is a drastic and pertinent change. Is so convinced about gaining by giving it all away, that the ensuing optimism will carry him for years.
Stops writing to Tamara who he had been missing so dreadfully that he was writing her three epistles a week.
In Kathmandu they are joined by an American girl, and one night in the Monkey Temple when the time to drop acid has clearly arrived, he shares a ‘window pane’ with her.
It’s nice, liberating by doing the undarable but nothing like what is in store.
But then, it is only half a dose.
Nor does The Spendthrift go all the way. When so close to being broke as to be in danger of getting stuck, he bails out. Has not forgotten to look after himself either and when back in Amsterdam, having made the Journey to the East is loudly evident: silk pants, bracelets, rings on all fingers and a coral triangle with a tiger’s eye hanging off his earlobe.
THE PRIESTESS
Connection between the Father and the Son
He is too far gone to go back to Tamara, start a family. The pull of the city is irresistible.
His Vietnam vet has come to Amsterdam. They frequent a well known travellers haunt, ‘De Branderij’. Departure and arrival point of the Magic Bus. Alpha & Omega. Watering hole for those heavy dudes that drive the busloads of hippies to the East. Across Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, to most everybody’s destination, India and the Himalayas. Not always an easy ride, the place is a vineyard of wild stories. Patronage consists of a certain breed of druggies from a variety of nationalities, most of them involved in a concoction of licit and illicit pursuit. Even the harder drugs are there to be taken as part of the adventure. Seeing themselves as modern day heroes, risk taking is the name of the game. Knights and Damsels of the Round Table, with a Holy Grail ever so elusive. Coming from India where the best way to survive a three day train journey is by eating some opium, taking a bit of the powders up your nose is only a small step.
Meets Niké again. He has known her slightly in the days of the ‘Caladonia’ as the girlfriend of one of the wilder students who studied his books hidden in a comic strip and raced around on a motorbike on which he exchanged the temporal for the eternal before he was twenty. She always dressed outrageously in flimsy, silky little things. At parties midships she’d dance for hours, natural focal point for many a spaced out sailor on the Arcadian Waters. She has just come out of a traumatic relationship with a jazz rocker and keeps her chin up with the odd snort of ‘horse’.
Street Philosopher reckons he can handle her and she moves in with him. Having just come off his first girl he is still somewhat virginal, not quite rooted in his own sexuality. It is greatly relaxing to share some of the ‘brown sugar’ she is so fond of and it is here that he is introduced to the intricacies of kicking and kicking off.
It is 1975. Amsterdam is celebrating its 700th birthday. No wonder it is cooking.
Somewhere in April – Niké away on a trip to Paris to sell some acid – he wanders into the Melkweg and bumps into Alys. It is the night before a Sun eclipse. Alys has been a fellow student. She didn’t attend very often but was well known for her manic behaviour and drug use. In the days that he and Tamara were working on sexual liberation, he had actually ended up in her bed once in a while but had not been able to meet the look in her eyes: blue-green, of such intensity they were just too intimidating. He is more comfortable now. She is also just back from India: It is a known phenomenon, this bond created by both having made the Journey to the East.
They go to his place. She appears to be wearing a wig. When taking it off, it reveals a shaven head. Has just done a Buddhist course with a Tibetan Lama but hasn’t lost her penchant for drugs. When he shows her the two micro-dots that are waiting for the right occasion, she says:
“Let’s take ‘m.”
This time, no half measures.
Dweller at the Threshold lights a candle and some incense.
She has come back from Goa from where the authorities – for reasons of her ‘neglect’ – have sent her seven year old son back to Holland and into foster care. She is desperate to get him back. White Knight can’t but feel involved with her plight.
She tells him that her Buddhism has made her abolish sex from her life which suits him fine; is quite liberating actually, a bit of a pressure drop.
When the strong, strong acid hits them there is no possibility to love her physically but only her Buddha face to trip out on. To connect means to connect mentally.
With Alys’ main concern being the reunion with her son, his journey throughout the night becomes a struggle between a bigger and bigger need to love and help her in any way possible and an equivalent inability to trust her. Mortal battle of giants. Love and Fear at each others throat for dear life, he swirling in the maelstrom trying with all his might not to be torn asunder.
“Isn’t she an angry witch? How bad does she need an ally? Can’t she use me up before I know it?”
When finally forced to surrender and giving way to the love and compassion, not out of sexual or other desires but purely from the heart, it knocks him over. All polarity rushes back into itself and all becomes one in an all-encompassing love. Has heard the words before but they were empty until the actual experience: Marriage of Opposites. It feels as if a fountain is spouting unto the inside of his skull, nectar trickling down, triggering unimaginable pleasure points.
A Cosmic Orgasm. Ambrosia of the Gods. Life will never be the same.
He is completely off his rocker. A new born babe fully trusting and adoring his new mama.
In the morning they witness the Sun eclipse. They go out for a walk and he follows her like a young duck, his devotion unconditional.
They wander into ‘Au Bout du Monde’, the town’s esoteric bookshop. Scanning the book titles at this summit of imprint vulnerability he picks up Aleister Crowley’s ‘Book of Wisdom or Folly’. When opening it his eyes fall on the dedication: ‘Dedicated to my son 777’.
It is one of those realisations that come with complete certainty: From over the grave Crowley is speaking directly to him.
THE LOVERS
The Hermetic Marriage
For Alys nothing is too weird. Hers is a hell of an open mind. Mothering Crowley’s Son is the most natural thing in the world. She knows enough about Aleister to be aware that he used her name to express his feminine side. The Tarot and I Ching are her constant companions. And she certainly takes her drugs with religious fervour.
There is a school of thought that suggests that survival after death is not a given but is something to be accomplished. Most of ourselves is bound to dissolve back into the Great Brew, but something of soul/mind, if seriously groomed, may have a chance to pop back up somewhere. Crowley was nothing if not persevering, never failed to honour his motto: ‘Perdurabo’: ‘I will endure until the end’. Ample example in his diaries vouch for this extraordinary endurance: The long and arduous tasks involved in the Abramelin ritual, the endless in- and evocations in Paris or on the plains of China, constant performance of visualisation, preferably in the void of orgasm, his detailed documentation on dosage and effect when administering his brain-change agents. If there is any consciousness with the stamina to kick on again after the final journey, it has got to be his. He may have created a Moonchild after all. So it was an interesting idea for both him and Alys to play with for a while.
Soon the ‘Magickal Record of the Beast 666’ finds itself in their household. A hard cover version. Besides giving grandeur to sex and drugs and a fabulous insight into Aleister’s life style, excellent for cutting your powders on. That’s what they do for a while: getting high, laying the cards, throwing the I Ching, perceiving everything as an oracle and acting on it, enraptured in the giving arms of providence, surrounded by miracles. When you are open for chance things start to fall more and more into place. There is a Gnostic calendar that is popular in their circles to which they pin the daily events. It is working so well that when it is nearing Pentecost they are just about expecting the Holy Ghost.
Turns out it shows up in the form and delectable shape of Aimée. Her mother ‘found at a temple’ on an Indonesian island, her father an eccentric professor, she has the stride of an avant-garde temple dancer. Beautiful brown skin, china eyes, her hair in the wake of a rough tussle with the scissors. Hitching and sleeping around, eating junk food. The twinkle in her eye matches the grace of her bum so catchingly, his mad psychedelic love instantly blossoms into lust. They go up to stay at the farm for a while so it is both her and Alys that Tamara, who is living there, has to cope with.
By now he starts to see them as his ‘scarlet women’ catching up with him in their present incarnations. After all, there is an ‘Aimée’ in the ‘Magickal Record’.
Around the bed he makes for her she lights all the candles she can find. An extravagance that gets him right in the loins. Liberating as the gesture is, he lets it rip.
Back in town there is a phone call. It is Niké, from Paris:
“Hey, it’s taking me a while but I met this guy Amor. Having a good time.”
“Terrific, I met this girl Aimée. Having a good time too.”
“What! She’s not in my clothes, is she?”
Back the next day, no hard feelings. She goes to work on the little tramp, shapes up her hair oh so short, makes up her face, gives her the fanciest clothes to wear, grooms her splendid self and they set out for a night on the town.
In the Branderij one of his buddies gives him a huge magic mushroom. Supposedly from Mexico, but wherever from, more than likely drenched in acid the way it takes over.
They split it three ways and when they take off, Niké ends up drifting her own way.
Psychedelic Lover finds himself with Aimée in a trip situation that is somewhat of a reversal, a mirror event of that first initiation with Alys. While going through his crisis of rebirth, of opening up to her and all that she was, Alys – as she had told him afterwards – had gone through some horrendous apocalyptic visions, having a hard time keeping the world together, convinced that if she’d freak out, the whole world would. He had found that a little over the top but had accepted it as something that he would come to understand.
Aimée is in the city for the first time. When passing through the Fellinian scenes of the Red Light district someone puts some bags of garbage out. She looks at it in horror and starts running, screaming at the top of her voice. Assuming that the movement of the garbage disposal had looked like a monster to her as it had to him, and having recently become very aware of the extent to which people and things influence one another telepathically, he is caught up in a reality where his mind is running hers: That it had been his perception that had frightened her in the first place. The nightmare of an ambulance only too real, he has got to muster the strength to keep his own mind in check.
He runs after her and controlling his panic he gently holds her. She is babbling in French, has obviously slipped into a separate reality. An etheric being lost between worlds.
He manages to convey a certain calm. She relaxes and smiles.
It is her evident trust in him that puts him in Alys’ position of responsibility for the world’s freak out. Their realities seem to meet. She gives up her fears and starts dancing and singing: “Mon guide, mon guide”.
That’s what it feels like: Being her guide through limbo.
Having experienced his own surrender to Alys, he figures that the same thing is happening to her. Completely off the air, so vulnerable, so receptive, she does indeed seem to be directed by whatever is in his mind. When she approaches the side of a canal he can’t help but worry about her jumping in but to try and grab her would never work. She’d fulfill his expectation and jump, be ever just out of reach. All he can do – what he’s got to do – is to stop his thoughts in that direction and she’d move away from the water.
In the aftermath, retracing their bumpy ride, she confirms having felt an overpowering attraction to the water, to have wanted to merge with it.
They make the morning, make it home. Absolutely sure now that everything is connected, coincidences are not mere coincidences anymore. From that day on he sees every event as a ‘personal dealing of God with his soul’.
In the Hermetic Tradition, this is the Oath of a Master of the Temple.
On a domestic level this can easily lead to complications. Niké – very much her own star – moves out for the time being.
ART
The Arrow that Pierces the Rainbow
With Aimée it is possible to create the illusion of a continuous honeymoon. When running out of steam, magick, or money, he can just put her on a train to The Hague where her mother lives. When running into some dough he goes and picks her up for something romantic like a spin to Venice or other. Mostly they disco it up in his home town.
He is feeling pretty good about himself, is so certain that things will work out that they do in a most uncanny way. Granted, the medium in which his Holy Guardian Angel converses with him is a malleable one. It’s mostly just about making new connections. The way these connections take place however, is clearly inspired by more than mere chance encounter. He knows his statistics. Meeting the right person at the right time is so consistent it has to be pre-ordained. Confronted over and over again with hard core evidence of Metaphysical Interest in his personal well-being he can only accept it gracefully, seeing it as the result of Aleister’s diligent work in attracting that interest.
A lot of his confidence is drug induced. Aimée is very fond of cocaine. There is no lack of powders in town at this stage. The first heroin victims emerge in the street life scenery. They are no bother when on a high but when they can’t score, the need in their eyes is something to be truly dreaded. Powder Politics develop. Town gossip is hilarious. The coke heads – clubbers, arties, musos, dope dealers, models, everybody beautiful – look down on the poor creatures that only come out to score, go home to smack it up and nod off in their wave of bliss for the day. The more severe coke heroes though are soon so sleepless, strung out and stone cold paranoid that they reach for a downer. There is no downer like heroin and they find themselves sliding down in the same pit of addiction. All much encouraged by the rock music at the time. Lou Reed’s ‘Waiting for my man’, the Rolling Stones beckoning ‘Sister Morphine’ and ‘Cousin Cocaine’, for millions world wide a very stimulating background music to cut another line to.
The Alchemist practices his Art by mixing it up ‘properly’. For him it is more than mere indulgence. It is a transformation of world consciousness. Dealing with the phenomenon of addiction is dealing with one of the basic elements of our constitution.
It doesn’t take long to find out that using the brown sugar for more than a few weeks will have you definitely go through withdrawal. Even a few days will have you somewhat melancholic. As in Alchemy, balance is what it’s all about. The Juggler makes sure to give it a miss at times to see what it feels like on brown rice for a while.
Another great motivator to take the powders seriously is the all-seeing eye of uncle Aleister within him. Having battled with heroin most of his life, he died in spite of his oaths – though respectable enough at 72 and with his asthma the culprit no doubt – addicted. Cosmic Junkie is forewarned and leaves it alone for now. In fact he sees his struggle as a chance for Aleister’s Spirit to tackle his foe once more.
The hash however doesn’t get much of a break. His penchant for the smoke is actually what helps him to keep on top of the harder stuff. Coke and heroin users alike often give up the smoke. The former because it makes them paranoid – they rather drink – the latter have no use for it anymore, their journey has ended back in the womb. He decides that it is an achievement to be a Dedicated Pothead.
Pot isn’t addictive of course. You just want it all the time.
His identification with the Old Crow is just a bit of a plaything at the time. Someone to recognise himself in. Who doesn’t, being into sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and religion? He is there as an internal guru, someone to explain the miraculousness that is all but engulfing him.
Where else however, Rock’n Roller sometimes asks himself, would the Old Boy have ended up but in Amsterdam, the undoubted Magick Centre of the world at the time.
And when sniffing out the Book of the Law, lots of it is music to his ears. Even that which is not – often making him shudder in revulsion – makes him feel responsible for it, as if it is Aiwass himself who is egging him on to go out and proclaim. It is not too preposterous to feel the need for a ‘proper’ law. The main reason for people being in a mess is not being able to live out their own True Will. Things a junkie does to get a fix is utterly degrading.
His aim is to be a True Fool, not a clown on the merry-go-round. Reckons it is better to leave the scene, to expand the horizon. To break a habit means breaking away from the friends with the same habit.
Leaves the house to Alys and Aimée and takes the plane to the USA.
THE CHARIOT
Supernals descending on the energy of man
In the Book of the Law it says: ‘My number is 11, as all their numbers who are of us’
In his numerology book it is the number of his name. So is the sum of his passport number. His family name adds up to 22. The twenty-two paths on the Tree of Life. So totalling 33 he finds himself in Perfect God Form to travel the United States.
Nothing in the past to hold him back, unconcerned with what lays ahead, utterly in the here and now. Just him and his little bag on the Big Search, fully dedicated to the Great Work: The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.
America having somewhat of a hitch-hike tradition, this was the way to go. Nothing like the highway if you groove on coincidence. Six months of it from coast to coast and back.
It is the Bicentenary which may have made it the vintage year it was, doing nothing to temper his raging spiritual optimism. The cars that stop are always most suitable to where he is heading. The people that drive them feel like familiar friends with similar interests and things they are up to. More often than not they are just about to light up a reefer. It gets more mystical than ever. East meets West with its commercial exuberance. Whatever one’s thought, there is always a bill-board somewhere advertising something which expresses it immediately. He is filled with a continuous awareness of significance. An uninterrupted flow of places, names, numbers, altitudes, meetings, weather, concepts, occasions, all gelling into the meaning-making phantasmagoria that is the sizzling and crackling mind of the Explorer on his Magickal Mystery Tour.
To illustrate it with a silly and totally unprovable occasion of Occurrence: When in Reno – little Las Vegas – he enters a casino. Walking up to the roulette table he tells himself:
“Bet on 11 and put your win on 22. When you put that win on 33, you’ll probably break the bank.”
That last thought makes him hesitate and think. Who wants to break the bank? Meanwhile the ball hits 11. While busy being stunned, the ball drops into 22. Whether the roulette worked for him for a third time doesn’t matter. What matters is that winning or losing doesn’t make the faintest difference to him. What preoccupies him far more is what it all signifies. An inexplicable force is running through him. What is it telling him?
What the fuck is going on?
In awe and wonder he is trying to measure the magnitude of his star, what his position is.
Remember his favourite professor, Timothy Leary? When walking into someone’s living room in San Diego, Leary is on the television set, being released from San Diego jail just then. In the same old grin, jiving about dressed in white. Student of Psychology with Leary as his hero, he is thrilled to be so close to the great man on such a joyful occasion. Later that day he cuts his picture out of a newspaper to hang it on the wall. When doing so – symbolically – over the light switch, the lights go out, not only there but all over that part of San Diego. Too much electricity all at once? Surely their stars must be in some kind of alignment.
Back in New York on Washington Square two girls are reading in a book on the occult. He stops for a chat. Leafing through the book his eyes fall on the date of Crowley’s death. It is 49 days before the date of his birth. The 49 days of the Bardo Thodoll. He knows Crowley well enough to know that science is everything to him. If they are to prove that it is possible to experience a reincarnation consciously, it will have to be scientific. The net is surely closing in on him.
THE HIEROPHANT
Manifester of the Mystery
It’s not only because he knows that Crowley has lived there in his days that he likes Washington Square so much. It is New York at its most free and diverse. People who live in a totally different world like Harlem, the Bronx or what not, have taken the subway to emerge in the centre of town. What a little green patch can’t do! There are always several get-togethers and jam sessions going on, so gay, even the sun seems to be in a musical mood, dancing on the rapt faces of zonked tramps of all colours and ages, banging away on drums and empty beer cans.
Fast cats on race bikes whizz by, peddling their wares:
“Nickels and dimes, nickels and dimes, loose joints.”
It is where one day he is approached by another traveller who has spent most of his six months visa in an Indian reservation in New Mexico and for the way back to the East coast has hired a car that he subsequently stuffed filled to the hilt with great big boxes full of peyote buttons. He is broke, only needs a little money to buy a ticket home.
For the Castaneda Adept there is no way around this. The car changes hands.
He drives up to Cape Cod and rents a cabin to slice and dry the plants. Figures it’s the perfect psycho-active medicine to take home to his friends. A cure for the tendencies towards the addictive drugs they are so fatally into. He also knows that Crowley was very interested in peyote and has turned on quite a few of his luminary contemporaries.
It is a lot of buttons. Strings studded with slivers of the sacred cactus hanging out to dry span every angle in the cabin until they are brought down to a manageable volume.
Still utterly wrapped in hippy philosophy he keeps some fresh buttons in his pocket for on the plane, ready for consumption, assuming that some of his fellow travellers will also be keen to fly into the sunrise on the wings of Mescalito. No way. Turns out to be a whisky and sleeping pill mob. He is the only one willing to chew the horrible tasting stuff.
Takes him half the Atlantic to get it all down.
Going through customs in Brussels he is in such a state that he has an experience of that jewel in the crown of any aspiring magician: invisibility. While the other passengers are waiting to pick up their suitcases, he and his travel bag are awaited by about six officials. Knowing that peyote is free to be used religiously he doesn’t have the faintest feeling of doing something illegal. They don’t even notice him. It feels as if he passes them at knee height, like a kid. They just keep rapping to each other.
In town Mescalito doesn’t draw the expected enthusiasm either. A lot of his buddies are indeed on the downhill slide. The shit that comes with it is on the rise. For many – cheating their way around not to get sick – it has reached flood level: everybody knows you can’t trust a junkie.
There is the odd one that goes cold turkey once in a while, if only to clean out so as to be able to get high again, rather than just keeping him or herself from being sick. One of them is an old friend who arrives home at about the same time. Has been to South America, brought back a stack of coke and celebrates it by throwing a party, at the peak of which Mister Gullible is handed over half the stash with the idea of selling it on.
Not entirely his idea of being a Boddhisatva to be bringing enlightenment to the people in this way but what can you do?
Off his face from every drug under the sun, with this other dude who is going to be his partner in the operation, he is walking along the Overtoom in the direction of Leidseplein at 4 o’clock in the morning and hails a cab. The cab slows to stop but seeing the flute in his hand – another friendly gift of the evening – speeds off, obviously thinking it is a weapon. No doubt he is radioing the cops.
Initiation Time. The choice is to either slip into one of the lanes that run into the Vondelpark and hide the stash, if not themselves, or to keep walking the way of the Impeccable Warrior. He treats it as an ordeal to test his courage as a magician.
Two minutes later the white Volkswagen beetle of the law appears from the opposite direction. Two policemen get out and approach them very carefully. Amateur Crim tries to distract them by playing on the flute, teases them about the distrust of the taxi driver and with the speedball confidence with which Aleister wrote his autohagiography proceeds to swear at the general state of affairs in this town where the good citizen innocently cruising through the night is regarded as a criminal.
One of them nevertheless pokes his finger in the bulge of Dare-All’s jacket:
“What’s this?”
While reaching for the zipper he retorts defiantly:
“Why don’t you guys give us a lift to Leidseplein?”
That does it. They turn on their heels and take off.
The following weeks sees them snorting so much that they end up at the brink of hysteria. His partner has fits of crying for unknowable reasons; the more he snorts, the harder he cries. The Magician doesn’t do much better with fits of disgust for the commercial aspects of the affair. It is expensive merchandise. Cool pot heads turn into greed merchants to get their grubby hands on the White Lady. Angry with himself of course for snorting on way beyond the point it does him any good.
Coke does that to some people who have heaps of it: cutting line after line knowing you only hype yourself up. Aleister urgently acknowledges this in his diaries. In his days you picked up a few ounces from the chemist and retired to Cefalu. Here was a reminder of what it is like, to be sitting on a pile of the stuff.
The White Lady as Bitch.
The Peddler in Enlightenment can do without her at the moment and brings her back. His man is generous, doesn’t worry about her having lost a bit of weight.
There is still room for improvement where impeccability is concerned.
Also it is not for a drugged prophet to save the junkies.
He needs a quiet space.
THE HERMIT
Guiding the soul through the lower regions
Alys is by now steadily sliding down the slippery smack slope. Doesn’t even consider giving the sedative of sedatives a break. Doesn’t really see it as being hooked either. Has no qualms about it whatsoever. Just declares it to be her Will. She and Aimée have had a good time together that long hot summer but have since parted ways. Aimée has gone back to The Hague. The house has gone down the tube.
Tamara has followed their commune friends to the Pyrenees. Holland may have a charming countryside but living on a little farm on half an acre in the middle of a cow-studded paddock, with a vegie garden and a couple of goats, is hardly going bush. The mountains in the South of France had been beckoning and they have all moved up there. His old farm is unoccupied and the hermit retreats into his own corner of the universe for a face-to-face with the mysteries.
Straight horizons, ever moving skies, nobody there: the place to go and digest his bag of peyote. Even on a weekly basis it takes him a whole year to get through it.
It is not on the shore of Loch Ness but it must be close to the same latitude, the way the climate with its favoured mist-veils isolates one from the rest of humanity. The odd farmer is all one sees. Easily slips into the persona of the Laird of Boleskine, going through his Abramelin rituals.
Not that he is into practicing much ritual or anything. Sure, he says ‘Bom Shiva’ when lighting up a joint, burns incense when playing with his Tarot deck but is not too keen to actually frolic around with demons and such. If it is not Christian upbringing that makes him still expect Horrors of Evil to be unleashed upon him, there is certainly a worry about lacking the necessary discipline to tackle such matters. Identifies very much with Crowley’s remark of being the laziest man on three continents.
Being slack definitely is one of the Young Lairds more prominent weaknesses. Keeps his affair with the supernatural fairly one-sided. If It comes to him, fine. Has no problem with the Sun coming out when opening a bottle of wine, or that whenever turning on the radio it is a comment on what is on his mind at the time. When living in such a retreat, practically everything coming from the outside seems to be a communication from beyond.
The locals here greet you by pointing their forefinger to the sky as if saying:
“It’s all coming from up there, mister.”
That’s what it feels like. Less and less static on the straight line to the Almighty.
To explain all this supernatural attention, the idea that it is the fruit of Crowleys’s Diligence in Magick seems more and more convincing, grows more solid as the moons go by. Nobody to contradict him, an endless supply of peyote to feed it.
Another point of identification with the Old Crow – which they have in common with a number of the institutionalised – is the feeling of being on a mission. Is not only in it for the glamour, the smell of Aleister’s sex-life, his exotic travels. He has to go out and tell the world, no less. The voice of Aiwass is breathing down his neck, loud and clear:
“The Beast is alive and kicking. Time to go and do some proclaiming.”
Problem is that he is a perfectly good boy, is going out of his way to please people. Has not yet grasped that ‘to stamp on the weak’ is foremost meant for one’s own weaknesses and is aghast at that kind of language. He understands very well why Crowley is so widely detested. Dogged by guilt, a great deal of his energy is spent on whitewashing the nasty traits of the Prophet of the Aeon.
One can only spend so much time on cleaning one’s mirror. No use in being a drowning Narcissus. Time to move on and test his ‘reality’ in the real world.
THE EMPEROR
Activity of the strong man; impermanent
In the summer of 1978, South American Indians are due to have a Sun Festival which they only have once in every hundred years. The gathering is at an Inca tomb in Cusco, Peru.
This aspect of happening only once in a lifetime is, in his mind, decisively appealing. This is big. South America is pretty much en vogue in those days with its cheeky powder reaching every nook and cranny in the Western World. There is lots of dancing to the Latin beat. There is Carlos Castaneda and the lure of Carlito’s Jump.
If he is manifesting a conscious reincarnation, this is where to cross time and confront his destiny. Surely everyone else on the gold rush for enlightenment will be turning up. A reborn Aleister Crowley will just have to be there. If it isn’t himself he is bound to meet him there. They are propagating a Sun religion, aren’t they? How crazy can you get? He sells the farm and stacked with money he hops on a plane.
The festival is to be held over a weekend but he doesn’t arrive until Sunday morning and most visitors are already leaving. The climax of the festivities has been on the night before: a pretend sacrifice of a Llama, a few bits and pieces of abracadabra and that was it. Imagine a Sun festival on a Saturday! The tourist office must have gotten the better of it.
He climbs up to the tomb. When getting there it is late afternoon. He is the only one there.
He settles in to watch the Sun set.
Sits there until he is face to face with the full star blaze of the Andes. Veil after veil falls away and he comes to the horrific realisation that it is terribly lonely at the top.
It is going to be a long way down.
Enjoys the crisp air of Cusco for a while. Visits Maccu Piccu. On to Lake Titicaca where the Great White Brotherhood is supposed to have its headquarters. Hasn’t got the faintest idea of who or what they are but he cruises around the lake trying to catch the attention of the Brothers. Young Aleister, hanging out for the Sanctuary of the Gnosis.
This time there is no one from the Golden Dawn stepping forth, offering him initiation. It’s back to Castaneda’s Don Juan.
Meets a couple of freak brothers and they travel through Bolivia together: an Italian loaded with coke and a French Canadian who has a big block of Manali hash in his music box. The Prophet in Limbo modestly contributes a purple candle embellished with the golden face of the Sun around which they congregate while charging up.
When it’s time to part the Italian is short of money. Of course Mister Generosity helps him out. As a token of gratitude he is given a big chunk of the coke stash. Again he is saddled up with a quantity of a drug that is not really to his benefit. Now that another Crowley hasn’t shown up here, it is hard enough to decide whether to accept the office of Master Therion or forget the whole thing, to be stressed out by carrying a surplus of an illegal substance over that ruthless continent. It is tense enough scoring the local variety of your favourite herb to be going on a coke binge.
In Rio de Janeiro, everybody’s idea of a fun place, everything goes haywire. He has been drinking with one of the street hustlers. After partaking in a smoke, Ultimate Unwary has grown so warm towards the crook that he confides that yes, he is holding some of that – here as elsewhere – much desired nose candy. Just what is expected from the gringo in the earring and Spanish boots.
They arrange to meet in the hustler’s hotel later that night. Whether it is all right for one or two of his friends to be there.
“Sure” says Mister Cool.
On arrival in the hotel – the absolute dump of the neighbourhood – there are about half a dozen of his mates. One doesn’t want to be a spoilsport, so out come the goodies.
Out come their syringes. Oh, great!
“Do you mind if we shoot it up?”
They try to comfort him by saying not to worry about the police. They know the local chief, in fact he is the owner of the hotel.
“Is he just?”
Soon enough there’s a knock on the door. The big bully comes in, sits down and stares at his prey for half an hour.
The stomach of High Flyer feels as similar as it would, had he indeed jumped off Carlito’s precipice. He is one of those fried brains that is so susceptible to the Castaneda doctrine as to be greatly intrigued by Carlos’ and Pablito’s Jump and actually ponders about whatever happened to them.
He won’t be philosophising for a while.
He is not going to be seen as his beautiful self. He is going to be seen as a dope peddler. How big a fish is he and is he worth a catch?
After the chief’s exit he doesn’t wait long to bid his farewells. His hustler buddy is suddenly expelled from the hotel for not paying his bill and acts as if he is dependent on his new amigo. So in the end, Amigo gets rude and pisses him off.
Why not at the start, oh Aiwass! Has mentioned the name of his hotel, so he quickly packs up and with a cunning change of taxis, changes hotels.
However, the damage has been done: fear has seeped into his being.
The remedy – getting rid of the evidence – doesn’t help. One can’t just wash the White Lady down the sink, so he stays in that room and keeps at it until having absorbed all of her.
Rather than being kind, she lashes out. All terror breaks loose. Having had nothing but positive thoughts for years and seen their positive effects materialise like so many blessings, becoming afraid is the ultimate foe. Knowing the creative power of his thoughts, him being afraid is bound to have disaster in its wake.
Vicious cycle of the paranoid. Vicious!
THE TOWER
Emancipation from Organised Life
When finally stepping out of that hotel it is not only the Brazilian heat that hits him. Danger is all around him. Evidence means little in the course of justice on this exotic but corrupt continent. If they want him, they’ll take him. Strung out, the feeling of being in the middle of a blazing spotlight is all pervasive. It’s a small world anywhere but here the tapestry of druggies, jailbirds, police informers and other desperadoes is especially well knit. Only one bus station to get him out of town.
Taking the plane back to ‘democracy’ is out of the question. There is such a thing as honour. Continues his journey up the coast.
Spiritual Maniac does crazy things like going up the coast to Salvador with the idea of finding salvation. Instead a native tells him that the Pope has died, and with his special blend of Catholicism and Condomblé he explains that as no Pope reigns, the world is in the hands of demons.
Hands of Demons is indeed an apt expression for the clutches of the South American torture chambers.
To Fortaleza for some force but he is running away. The monster behind him can only grow.
Hangs on to the new Pope for dear life. When 33 days later the Pope with the friendly face dies under controversial circumstances, the gates of hell truly open. This is getting too personal. The number of the Pope’s 33 days in office is plainly an Astral Notice, meant to scare him into – or out of, for that matter – accepting the Mantle of Therion.
He is targeted on the etherial plane. Point Blank in the battle between Light and Dark.
His fear multiplies by itself. It is no longer the narcotic brigade that is after him. This is the Vatican, man! The eyes of the Black Brothers are on him. These are formidable forces. Every time that he is scared, he lets a flow of terror into the world.
He has arrived on a grand scale in that Realm of Cosmic Responsibility where Alys is such a champ. To regain his failing courage, to catch up on the march of time, he boats his way upstream the Amazon. It being the world’s largest river, in his unravelling mind it is an attempt to overcome his fears by going upstream as much of the world’s karma as possible.
It does give him a bit of a break. For a month there is nothing else to do but to slow down, lay in his hammock amidst the families of Amazonians who are such adepts of relaxation that they have a verb for ‘hammocking’.
In his ‘heart of darkness’, where Brazil, Bolivia and Peru meet is an airstrip. He manages to hitch a ride on a cargo plane and flies to Colombia sitting on a frozen fish catch.
Haiti will be his litmus test. Has read up on the Black Pearl of the Caribbean and knows about the people’s directness in relating to the spirit world. It is this directness which gives him the trust necessary for the surrender to his destiny. Free from the French colonisers for longer than the Americans have been out from under the British, the people have had a tendency to weed out any White People who bred amongst them and have developed a very strong African culture of which magic is the very core.
Voodoo ceremonies are rituals which regulate daily life. The houngan draws patterns on the floor of his temple invoking a certain ‘Loa’. Surrender to the Gods is what it’s all about.
It is October, Scorpio time. Time that Guede – God of death and rebirth – is worshipped.
“Hey, Daddy, fancy meeting you here.”
The whole community is present. The drummers take their drumming very seriously. It is their rhythm that is to be a bridge to the supernatural. The dancing – mostly by the women – blatantly expresses the movements of sexual intercourse. The atmosphere is whipped into a frenzy, a vehicle for the more eccentric of the congregation to go into a trance and be possessed by the intended deity.
Guede is worshipped with rum and big cigars. Every other day there is a ceremony somewhere. Spring Chicken – thinking he is Guede’s emissary himself – ends up drinking an awful lot of rum, nicely marinating himself as a gourmet dish for the spirit world.
One night he is invited to a ‘peristyle’ to be given some power or other. The houngan, master of funk, behind sunglasses – the hat, the cane, the superior smile – covers him in a black cloth, pours a few drops of liquid into his hand and gestures for him to drink it.
Without hesitation, mad with trust and Dutch courage, he slobbers it off his palm.
After that everything is blank.
He comes to in a hut, dawn creaking through the window, a mouse sniffing at his belt which lies broken on the floor. Gone are his passport, airline ticket and last hundred dollar note.
It also dawns in his head: This is the initiation of initiations: end of the road.
There is a glimmer of hope. Is it possible to survive as a tourist guide? He has been crazy enough to be accepted by the locals, surely! Daily life is run by the women at the age when the kids leave home. Are really getting into their own then, so strong; at least they hold the market place. Priestesses of dance by night.
The men full of laughter and challenges. The beat of the drum.
The cool, cool medicine man.
Spirit possession as a hobby.
He considers it to be his faith in them that makes one of his Haitian buddies come in with his papers and banknote, unless it is because it was only a lousy hundred bucks.
He is told that that power wasn’t meant to be consumed. It was meant to be put on his forehead. Is lucky to be alive.
En route to the States there is a stopover on the Bahamas. Here the monster hits hard. In this smuggler’s hotbed someone coming down from the booze, sweating, dirty, nervous, is an easy target. At the airport a desk girl returns him someone else’s ticket. The idea of being framed gives him such a fright that the journey’s fears accumulate, activating what is known by different names in different esoteric tongues, but in this case experienced as Carlito’s ‘plop’ sound, a hand width above the crown of the head. The ‘Double’ is released. Feels himself doubling in size and manages to protest with enough gravitas to straighten out whatever devious scheme it was that was being perpetrated on him.
Though having gotten his ticket back, the monster certainly isn’t beaten. It is with him on the plane in the form of the sleazy dude behind dark shades – the owner of the ticket. He starts running again. Sneaks unseen through an open door on Kennedy Airport, jumps on a bus into Manhattan, zig-zags on foot to Greenwich Village, checks in in a derelict hotel under another name. How far do the tentacles of the creature extend? He must have witnessed too much. The Logos of the Aeon has run into a criminal machine for whom a gun is but a tool.
Doesn’t the I Ching say to darken the light, for where there is light, darkness is naturally inclined to increase in magnitude?
Makes it to an old friend from ‘The Branderij’ but Paranoia reigns supreme. Can’t even trust him. Any minute the shot can go off that will blow him off the face of the earth. Reckons that during his black-out on Haiti an electrode has been implanted in his tissues: Ton Ton Macoute and CIA are of course totally in league with one another.
His mate, in an attempt at therapy, puts some headphones on him one night. Even the music is stalking him. It is a classical piece. He is convinced that his mind is being tapped by an army of lab technicians and the music composed accordingly, with the sole object of keeping him under control. Creative spirit fallen from grace, being vivisected by white coats. The pits!
That’s what you get for dabbling in Magick when you’re a kid.
Understands why it is written that the sorcerer descends deepest in hell.
Gets home with the tail between the legs, that’s for sure.
THE HANGED MAN
Annihilation of Self into the Beloved
His home isn’t the safe, peaceful kind of place it was any more either. It’s just familiar. Amsterdam is still friendly compared to most places in the world but it is at the brink of being over-cosmopolitanised. About every run away from all the known worlds has ended up here by now, and though of course endlessly interesting, one doesn’t ‘know’ the other person like in the days when everyone knew one another.
Though no longer the Perfect Fool, he still lands on his feet. Before his journey, he had committed an act so ruthless, that it was more in character with his Inner Mentor than with himself, and lo and behold, is it paying off. Aimée had come to see him occasionally during his retreat on the farm but away with the fairies as she is, they never manage more then a few days together. Stacked with the money from the farm, he wants to give it one more go before leaving for South America and books two tickets to Tunesia. If a few weeks in paradise wont get through to her, then that’s it. However, she is so impossible that he can’t bring himself to tell her. If there ever was a challenge to Do What Thou Wilt this is it. Two tickets in his hand, plane leaving in the morning, knowing this other girl that is interested in him, he puts all scruples aside, changes the ticket to her name, goes and gets her out of bed and gives her the surprise of her life.
It is one of the most rewarding things he ever did. They had a most marvelous time and she hasn’t forgotten him. She gives him her home, her arms, her heart. He is now broke and under normal circumstances would have had to wake up to his mundane self. However, his Patti who works in a popular restaurant, feeds his belly as well as his spirit.
On top of this she is also open to his story. He can dream on.
Her house is in the ‘Vierwindenstraat’ – ‘Four wind street’. Running into this Yankee just off the plane – the book still warm from the press – he is one of the first Europeans to be presented with Castaneda’s ‘Second Ring of Power’. Carlito goes flying, the four women apprentices of Don Juan – signifying the Four Winds – around him. What Young Brujo has experienced over the last few years has been very much a story of Alys, Niké, Aimée, and now Patti. Sorcerer apprentices in their own right, it is easy to see them as the Four Winds that have flown by his side. Affirming to himself his position as Nagual.
It is a lovely winter, overlooking the snow white canals, but the days of innocence are something of the past. The town’s drug addictions has in tow a pool of criminals. Friends and foe are sinking fast in a swamp of corruption. The eerie feeling of being watched has not disappeared altogether. The Monster is still at his heels. To get to the Vierwindenstraat there is a way of getting on a footpath with your bicycle, duck through a tunnel under the railway line, speed around a corner and be sure you haven’t been followed. It is not quite clear whether there is indeed something tangible after him or whether it is his own projection of an All-seeing Eye being aware of his every move.
Often, the friends one makes in one’s early twenties go a long way. As open for influence as one is, strong ties are formed. If he has a spiritual home, it moved with his friends up into the Pyrenees. Ab has been sending him notes and letters during his years of city slicking and globe trotting which, with their profound meanings at immaculate timings, were nothing less than signs and oracles along the path. Lines of poetry, a hexagram from I Ching, photos or telling sentences cut out from magazines, gems from Lennon or Dylan. Whatever it is, it is always spot on and soundly rings a bell. Instructions from the monk successfully retreated from the rat race, happy to be looking after the land, the kids, the animals. Invoking in him the love one has for a guru. He has started to wonder about Ab’s name being made up of the initials of Aleister’s best friend: Alan Bennett, one of the few men in his life that he could look up to.
When that idyllic winter with Patti has nibbled itself halfway into spring, it is time to go see Ab and the rest of the tribe.
They have located the remains of a ‘Mas’; a homestead tucked away in the fold of the foot hills and have created a paradise. Only an hour’s drive from the Mediterranean, it is high up enough for the peak of the ‘Canigou’ to be only a wing flap away. Spectacular country for a bunch of flat landers.
There are another few hundred alternatives scattered throughout the region, mainly from Paris. Some Brits, Belgians, Germans, Moroccans, a Turk who has teamed up with one of the dancing girls that graced the Psychedelic Revolution back in Amsterdam. Prades the weekly market and meeting place, besides from everybody going to everybody’s parties. Not a bad crowd.
At the Mas, whatever had been left of couple relations has now become extinct. Tamara who has had her babies with Ab’s youngest brother is actually strongly infatuated with the middle brother who is still attached to the woman whose first-born’s fatherhood he shares with Ab, who at her turn always had a bit of a soft spot for the Prodigal Son and is now at a stage where she is about to extend her sexuality beyond the bond she has with the fathers of her children.
The women are weaving, spend a lot of time together. They all have their own garden. Love as a word has no currency: Everything being directly related to survival, there is always something to do in which to express oneself in terms of one’s relationship to another. When particularly friendly disposed to someone, you can tell her by carrying the fertiliser to her field, or when the stone wall of a terrace caves in, you can spend a few days rocking it up as a token of your regard.
Getting up early. Planting and weeding as vocabulary. Life as ritual.
The idea is to live in the best possible environment for the children to grow up in. With so much space, little discipline is necessary and responsibilities for the obvious necessities are easy to explain. They are strong kids, like the thousands of others around the globe, flourishing on the same wavelength: The Crowned and Conquering Child on Its way.
The parallel with the Abbey of Thelema is easy to draw, albeit with the twist of half a century of woman emancipation and a somewhat timid Master Therion.
Though it is the weaving that brings in the money, the guts of the Mas is in the stables under the house. Back in the North of Holland they had been seriously vegetarian but here it is do as the Catalonians do. The Mas is not far below the snow line, trees won’t grow. It is mostly thyme bush and rosemary. Good goat country. About fifty of them are part of the household. In the morning they are let out of the stables so they can wander up the mountain until late afternoon when one of the men goes up to find them to herd them back to the straw. It’s mostly Ab who looks after them. Milks them, checks them for ticks, cares for their boils, helps them to deliver their little ones, and when their time comes, knocks them coolly on the head, ties the hind legs to a tree branch, a flick of a sharp knife, and with all the grace of the art undresses them.
The eating of the meat is a more complete experience with the drinking of the wine, and with all that goat cheese: ‘Ca donne soif’. Ab has developed a mighty thirst. The rough red is flowing freely.
Most every night – the others asleep – Ab and his Goatherd Apprentice keep drinking, playing tapes, making music, jotting down poetry, drawings, philosophising, throwing I Ching and having a marvelous time.
One day he lends his billy goat Abel out to the neighbours who gets bitten in the balls by a dog and has to retire. We get a new buck that summer: A great big white beautifully horned he-goat who comes with the name of Beelzebub. Trying to do some simple living but the message is not going away: Thelema is alive and though at Cefalu it turned into a bit of a bum trip, the Abbey is making a come back on the roof of Europe.
THE DEVIL
Leaping upon the Summits of Earth
Last Summer of the Seventies. Pretty apocalyptic days. Besides having grown up in the shadow of Dutch Hero, Hans finger-in-the-dyke Brinker, for a member of the Cold War generation, the Big Wave is always imminent.
The future dim, Sixties Optimism has become annoying. Apart from seriously trying to build up an existence in the mountains, one can only punk it up. Those aware of Magick tend not to divulge it. It is thought wiser to keep it to yourself, as if you’d lose power by sharing it. Or get busted. The mural on the door of ‘the Melkweg’ is a face with a finger to its lips.
In addition to the threat of war, there is Big Brother of whom anyone who ever had their head stuck out of the ordinary has some kind of concept. There seems to be little alternative for the world of ‘1984′. For some it has already arrived.
One of the things that helps the Amsterdammers and their guests to keep going, are the ‘Festival of Fools’. Every Summer there’s a few weeks of theatrical events that can occur anywhere, at anytime. An array of street performances, clowns from all over, musicians from everywhere, dancers from the galaxies. The greatest star, everybody would agree, is the brilliant, dazzling New Yorker, Django Edwards, whose act with the ‘Friends Roadshow’ is getting bigger and better every year. Wonderfully entertaining as they are, there is more to it. Within the funny lines and his outrageous behaviour is a wisdom that is a true tonic for many of the cosmopolitan locals. A mirror is held up: the best and the worst of the zeitgeist twinkles from the genius of the clown prophet. Sustenance for the somewhat tattered spirituality of the audience of the day. Song lines that keep the local heads above water during the long and dreary winters and just about ritualises their seasons.
Bruised Fool catches a ride up to town to see what’s going on that Summer.
No town like Amsterdam when you like walking. Everything is within walking distance. If you want to lay down and relax for a while, there’s always that nice big green patch, the Vondelpark. So it is no miracle to see him cruising through the park, but when walking into the stage area that is set up for the season, the play that is in progress certainly strikes him as such. Billboards and radios reflecting you is one thing, but a whole theatre group!
It is a play on the Beast. The stage is the Abbey of Thelema. There is Crowley in the flesh, a beautiful guy, head shaven, a pentagram painted on his forehead, surrounded by his women companions, wild-haired, half-dressed, in a state of delicious funk.
As the Stunned Believer saunters up to the stage, this dude comes on. Crowley and the women lead him through some raunchy ceremonies and give him a drink from a cup. He imagines that the cup is meant for him, thrilling him to the bone.
How in the world has this come about? How has imagination come out into reality to such a degree?
The Beast is expelled from Italy. The play ends in chaos. From the midst of this chaos the cup flies across the stage right into his hands. No kidding!
After the show one of the women comes around to clean up. He draws her attention with the cup, adding:
“Wouldn’t you like to see my magickal diary?”
“We are playing in the Melkweg tonight, come over.”
At night, seeing the entire show in its full glory enraptures him so, that when one of the women breaks out in an orgasmic cry, he cries out along with her, defying his usual shyness and honouring their name: ’Publick Spirit’.
He joins them backstage afterwards and asks:
“Who is the real Aleister?”
They – not all that publick – make the sign of the mural on the front door and put fingers to lips.
Gets friendly with ‘Aleister’, ‘Leah’, a few of the musicians, and invites them over to the place where he is staying. They get cozy and party on. Of course Beasty Boy lays his whole trip on them. They are not all that surprised. To be on the road with a show like that, you’ve got to be running on Occurrence. Started their tour in Manchester with the Hymn to Pan and a nearby warehouse had burst into flames. Anything could be happening to them performing in that magickal stronghold Amsterdam. They don’t even blink at the Reborn Aleister turning up, flesh and bones.
‘Someone cometh after him, whence I say not’.
It is evident what is next. The show is evolving. The play is being brought up to date with what is going on live, right there, right now. They are bringing an extremely radical message but with this handsome mob, excellent actors and actresses, their exquisite taste in funk, brought to the world stage in a clever way, it will make it clear that A.C.’s Magick is very much alive. It is manifesting in the actual appearance of his son 777 to elucidate on the Book of Revelation. Fear mongering is out. Someone has had the cheek to take on the biblical role of the Beast 666 for the days that the Roman Catholic Empire is going through the process of giving up the ghost. If they can show the world that ‘666’ is indeed the ‘number of a man’ and that ‘anyone with intelligence can work out who that man is’, they will be able to comfort the world with the Word that Apocalypse has peaked and that we have most of the shit behind us. The critical surgical incision has been made and with the initiatory toils of the ‘wickedest man in the world’ as primer, human consciousness is about to flower. Animal Nature Transcended, made Sacred. Though obviously the blood hasn’t stopped flowing yet, Judgement Day is formally over and we are well on our way to be our True Selves.
Magick is so alive, it is terribly erratic. This of course is due to the imperfection of the human condition, restriction still being one of the essential building blocks of the social fabric. For starters, Psychedelic Messiah has by no means worked out his androgyny, which is not good for a Crowley Impersonator. He is also too deferential to take centre stage. When it comes to the sleeping arrangements – perfect opportunity for a bit of bonding – he only manages to honour ‘Aleister’ by offering him the hammock.
Ragged Craftmanship. Lack of focused intent or other. They never get it together to actually team up. His glamorous troupe of new allies leave in the morning and before he knows it, they have gone back to England.
THE MOON
Gateway of Resurrection
In the Pyrenees Ab has been hitting the bottle harder than ever. By some form of osmosis it is the herd that has gotten sick with worms in the liver. When getting back there, they are just busy burying the queen of the herd. To dry Ab out a bit, a journey through the Sahara is decided on. So Ab, his brother, the wife, the kids, all go caravansarai.
Who is Newly Anointed Goatherd left with but Tamara. She has done the more sensible thing with her money from their farm and has built herself a beautiful dome shaped wood structure, a stone throw from the Mas. So it’s back to his long time companion for a while.
Nothing like a stint of hard work to slow the head down. Gets right into it. Mucking out the stables, empty wine bottles for treasure. Disinfecting everything in sight. Dosing the beasties with medicine. Soon they are picking up. He can stop digging graves.
Is slowly getting over his failures and paranoia by roaming the foot-hills, contemplating the multicoloured pack in the sunlight, Beelzebub having breezed through the ordeal, standing out in his fresh white splendour.
Storms in autumn can be a bit rough but once the snow has fallen, the white crystal earth is spanned by clear blue skies. Moving about hip deep in snow, bathing in prana, a truly invigorating winter. The goats have their off-spring, 33 of them. A satisfying achievement. By the time Ab gets back he is ready to move on and hopes that by curing the herd he has healed himself.
On one of the first nights back in town he checks out the Melkweg.
No way! Unbelievable! He bumps straight into ‘Leah’ from ‘Publick Spirit’. The posters are on the wall: ‘Moonchild’ by Aleister Crowley.
They are back, performing a play based on the book.
The unexpectedness of it! How is this even possible, what are the odds? Suddenly the air seems to be of a different charge. He is propelled into a realm where everything is in flux.
He can’t stop the paranoia coming back with a vengeance: “They have set up a trap.”
‘They’ of course are veiled and open for interpretation. As long as one lives in duality and has a concept of Evil, Dark Gods pop up, out for one’s destruction. It is impossible though that this has been premeditated by anyone, because the idea of the ride to town was only conceived just a few days ago. As long as one’s rational mind needs to have its say, this miracle stuff is sure to make you paranoid. He does his best to shake it off and through the petty fog of mistrust, isn’t it good to see them? Isn’t it a thrill to be part of this powerful event?
Nothing could be more gratifying than seeing those familiar characters come alive on stage in the glitter and glamour of their funky costumes. If anyone had worked hard in giving shape to his next incarnation and was entitled to meet himself there, it was Aleister Crowley, the Flagship of Western Esoterica. If there is such a thing as reincarnation and humanity is at the brink of piercing the veil that separates the subsequent lives in a reincarnational chain, first chance had to be for that individual that has made most antics to attract the challenge.
Consider Aleister’s continuous identification with Deity, astral travel, the strength of his imagination which had him make love with the mistress in one room, while playing blind chess with someone else in the other. His very idea of a Moonchild – consciously arranging an incarnation – is made flesh, now and here, amongst us.
Moonchild – alive and for the moment well – in the front row, blissing out to the max.
‘Abrahahabra. It shall be his child & that strangely’.
Even bliss of that magnitude necessarily subsides. In the aftermath, the dreaded dread commands attention for its cause.
They also seem to be careful and inform him that their next play will be on Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’. The world is indeed getting smaller and smaller. We can easily see ourselves in that zone of Berlin ’45. Amsterdam has become a bit of a war zone. Over the last decade the town has been engulfed. Wave after wave of any imaginable stranger has flowed over those dykes into the cauldron. High flyers of every nationality are living it up on the few pounds of hash or other they send home. Living it up in the shadow of the ever present possible bust. Germans, French, Italians, Brits, Irish, Scots and Welsh. Refugees from totalitarian regimes, dodging the army or what not. Little mafias from Portugal, South-Africa, the Eastblock and from practically all over the South-American continent, not to mention the big mafia. It is a favourite of New Yorkers calling it Little New York, having it for their playground. Every brand of freedom fighter has a hang-out here. Rote Armee, P.L.O., Basks, Iranians. Of course there’s the C.I.A, the Mossad, and every other self-respecting intelligence agency which is bound to have a few blokes here. Some nights they just all seem to be there. If the Melkweg is your favourite haunt, why wouldn’t it be theirs? Flooded so with Parano, your own mother is after you. What is this Dutch bloke and these English witches up to? Who is working for who? Who is who in the zoo?
‘Leah’ suggests: “Come with us to England.”
But it is said in a whisper. It feels as if they have got so much going against them. They are indeed in a terrible clash with the ‘Black Lodge’ – the very theme of the plot – doing what it can to prevent the creation of a ‘Moonchild’: The incarnation of a super consciousness. A human being free from Earth’s Gravity.
Am afraid he lost his footing. Too nervous, drank too much.
They leave without him. Once again the Beast is beat, effectively decapitated.
ADJUSTMENT
Equilibration of Opposites
No wonder to have fallen for someone who stresses to do your Will. Life constantly presents itself in all its glory and he keeps missing the boat.
‘To Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law’.
Unable to practice his own religion. What a failure.
‘Fear is failure and the forerunner of failure’.
His career is being drawn in failure.
‘Sin is restriction’.
Does he know restriction! To have squandered something this magnificent surely has emptied out his Metaphysical Assistance Account. It will take him a while to get over this one.
Alys now one of Amsterdam’s most notorious junkies has resorted to begging: covered in rags and boils, an embarrassment to run into.
Aimée is still spinning out in The Hague.
Niké has come across an old school friend and discovered that they have an identical scar somewhere. He’d been a grade up from her and an old crush flared up. One of the more friendly junks around town, he is so easy going that breaking the habit is the last thing on his mind. She’d be swimming in it.
Patti has found someone else to look after.
He lays low in a squat, surviving on a cleaners job. Piker can only drink wine and stare in the dark, not seeing any way to further his mission. Is so low as to wonder whether there is still a place in society for him, a way to get back in, safe, sane, undercover. Too late. Must be an unwanted subject by now. Sees life entirely in terms of Orwells ‘1984’.
‘The Eighties will cower before me & are abased’.
Weren’t they!
Something has surfaced that loosens up the gridlock somewhat. Intermission between this and his former existence hasn’t completed the 49 days of the Bardo Thodol. It was only 42 days. A week short. It could account for his immaturity but he has seen such immaculate timings in his life that it not being the full term can certainly help him pull the rug out from under the whole idea. On the other hand mother was in the cinema, watching ‘Les enfants du paradis’ when her waters broke. During labor she passed out. Born Again had to be dragged out, put in hot and cold water to make him breathe. If this wasn’t enough to give him trouble, when coming to – not being very religious at all – she burst out screaming: “God exists, God exists!” Had really seen the Old Man and was sent back to spread the word. Little wonder Baby Master has a Christ complex.
For now, 33rd year approaching, due for the cross, reckons it’s better to find one in nice scenery. Having heard that in ’82 the planets will line up and the Maitreya will reveal himself, he decides to leave it at that and goes back up to the Pyrenees.
Liberated as they are in their extended family, it has not been liberated enough. No matter how close the closeness between him and Ab, how many evenings they have been sharing their innermost, they never went and made love to his wife together. His brother could have stopped worrying about her being neglected by his boozer brother and could have turned himself more towards Tamara which is the one thing that could have made her happy; which in itself would have made everybody happy. However, they just didn’t get their act together. Whether because of jealousy, or because Some Dickhead didn’t want to get his pants wet, we can bet it is that damned restriction rearing its ugly head even here. Sum total of their karmas didn’t add up and put the dagger in the operation.
Ab’s wife had been ready for some extra-marital sex alright. By the time Mister Reluctant shows up she has started to sleep around with the less scrupulous goat herders in the vicinity. Ab is wilder than ever, his brother even more strained, and Tamara – in step with the emerging decade – is getting the economic hassles of the commune to become paramount.
Beelzebub has become unhandable. When snowed in that last winter Tamara had talked Goatherd into bringing him down to the hay instead of bringing the hay up to him. They had to drag him by the horns all the way. He has never forgiven them and keeps charging them. Having served his term as a stud, he meets his ultimate destiny: A hell of a royal roast.
It’s time for a change. Shepherd At Large finds a job with a nearby cattle boss. Is hired to keep three hundred cows on a stretch of mountain range and out of the villages. Cathar country. Alone, food brought up to his shack once a week, he can explore doing-by-doing-nothing till kingdom come. For nine months he just strolls about, skirting the slopes with his staff and two dogs.
The cows wander off in little groups. Lets them wander for days, then goes and looks for them to guide them back through magnificent forest, spectacular rock formations, over the glitter on sprinkling little streams straight from the source, in the ever solid presence of the snow-clad peaks of the Pyrenees.
Legs get stronger, mind clearer. Dreams about the sweethearts as well: running around in town, keeping them out of the traffic, guiding them from one green patch to another.
Really gets to know where they hang out. Best cowherd they have had in a long time. They want to pay him in calves to entice him to stay.
Time to hand in the staff.
Back to two legs again and Maitraya is going to speak over world-media in all tongues simultaneously. Better be around a television set. See what those planets are going to do.
Well, he didn’t show, unless it was the advent of the internet.
A major media event of the year is the publication of the international bestseller ‘The Holy Blood, The Holy Grail’. The Cathars are in the spotlight, alright. They have been hiding the Holy Grail up there. He has practically been sitting in it. The very blood of Jesus had arrived in Marseilles with Maria Magdalene and their off-spring. Their community had spread out into the Pyrenees. Within a few centuries a widespread knowledge of Kabalah and Hermetics flourished, everybody happily conversing with their Holy Guardian Angel. The Church had to do something about that and went on one of their major witch hunts, burning every heretic in sight. From then on the esoteric know-how goes underground and flows through history as a subterranean stream: The River of Arcadia. A clue as to where the Grail is hidden is in a 17-century painting of some shepherds around a Pyrenean tomb: ‘Les Bergers d’Arcadie’.
Shepherds of Arcadia.
He is infused with a kind of absolution. If you reach a certain height perhaps going underground is the way to go. It may not be time for the limelight yet. Present history still sees the heads of the brave ones rolling when they stick their neck out. Needs his head for a while longer. He still has a boy’s dream to fulfill. Has always wanted to go to Australia.
LUST
Vigour and the Rapture of Vigour
For someone so entangled in messianic tendencies there’s no place like Aussie land to get a trimming. Here you can do just about anything but be a tall poppy.
In many ways it is a pretty Thelemic society already. The bushranger still being a major role model, there is a natural respect for individuality. On the other hand the no-tall-poppy syndrome is taken so far that if you cross the road other than on a pedestrian crossing, it is quickly seen as arrogance and there’s a good chance that the approaching motorist will give full throttle. But basically it’s live and let live. No inherent class system, the balance of power is worked out as one goes along. ‘Give a bloke a chance’, then put him on the spot.
One can be quite taken aback by that first: “How are you going, mate?”
It’ll take the Overseas’ Visitor a while before being comfortable with that ‘mate’ and the variety in ways of saying it. Closeness with someone is measured by the extent you can give each other flak.
And not only the men. Unforgettable, the first time you hear one woman greet the other with:
“How ‘re ya going, ya old tart?”
Is this Love Under Will, or what?
Acclimatises in Sydney for a while. The friends who helped him make his ‘Scarab’ movie have become successful in the movie industry and their lovely house in Balmain is a regular back-drop to a host of outlandish characters. One of their visitors is on his way to Nimbin and he takes the ride.
Seeing that little town for the first time is a very pleasant surprise. There is not much more than a few streets and on main street all the facades are covered in psychedelic colours and motifs. It is like stepping onto another planet. A planet populated by hippies.
Finds himself a little hut a few miles out of town. It is facing the Nimbin Rocks. Lays in his hammock for a few days, awe struck at the stunning formation that from his perspective looks like the aftermath of a battle: Most prominently – in volcanic stone, reddish ochre, changing shades and colour according to the time of day – the perfectly shaped torso of a giant warrior rises sharply from the rolling green hills, resting a club on his broad shoulder. Another figure is stretched out on his side; only half of him visible, the other half lost in shrub, a cave for his eye, his head and shoulder in Inca relief: The fallen warrior. In between them a great big cone shape: The Lingam as venerated in Shiva temples.
Finds out about Aboriginal Sacred Sites. One is not supposed to sleep around those Rocks. They are Beings from the Dreamtime that one only comes to visit. Moves a bit further away, but keeps coming back. European Seeker face to face with the Dawn of Time.
The new settlers around here are as open to the Aboriginal spirit as one can be. The communal life style a fair attempt to refurbish the rubble of the crumbling Aeon of Osiris.
Cattle is not very popular here. Major concern is replanting the logged and eroding slopes which impresses him as one of the most honourable things you could be doing. Living so close to what is left of the rain forest gives you a strong solidarity with the tree.
Gets educated in building with bamboo.
The grass is terrific.
Apocalyptic Journeyman can drop a few of his worries, is charged with hope for the future. How could you not be, Aussie’s favourite saying being: “No worries mate. She’ll be right.”
It is 1983. It has been ten years since students and artists from Sydney and Melbourne held a festival in the shire. A great gathering of kindred spirits. Quite a number have stayed and started the phenomenal Tuntable Falls commune. Over the years more and more people have drifted into the area and built their existence in what is one of the largest volcanic rims in the world. So now, after a decade, the town is buzzing with ideas about how to mark the event and to evaluate what they’ve come up with so far. It will be a lifestyle celebration. Music, theatre and other performance on the theme of our time: Change. Invited are myth makers, dream weavers, imagineers and other shamanistics, to come and help shape the future.
It appears though that the Land Down Under is not completely unworried about the future: The gathering is seen as a focus of energy for a psychic quantum leap to avert the haunting spectre of Armageddon.
There is a new prime minister in the process of being elected. His name is Bob Hawke. The connection with Horus does not go unnoticed. Cornered again. Proclaimer has to accept that Thelema is still edging him on. He may be Down Under but the tapestry of the emerging New Aeon is unbroken.
Back to Sydney to find some actors and brainstormers to team up with. Browses around, locates an occult magazine and finds a guy who seems to be sharing his preoccupations. However, to just go and look him up is not his style. Meetings at this level are to happen spontaneously.
Spends some time in the library reading up on matters Thelemic. Tours the bookshops in pursuit of Aleister’s hagiography. To no avail, whether due to popularity or lack of it isn’t clear.
At one of the parties in Balmain a friend of his friends gets depressed, takes a load of pills and lands up in hospital. He accompanies his friend to check on her house and take care of her dogs. He spots the numberplate of her car which is TOF 666, TOF being Dutch slang for groovy. On a bookshelf is the sought-after hagiography. Something is cooking.
He pays her a visit as soon as she is back home to cheer her up and when it is time to go up to the festival she drives him up there, having a holiday on the way.
They travel to the Oueensland border where they plan to camp out. The only place in the vicinity where dogs are allowed is Hastings Point, namesake of the township where The Great Wild Beast cast his last skin. What is this supposed to mean? To put on the cloak of Mega Master or to let go of the Fucker once and for all?
For a few weeks it is just them living it up in a hedonist’s paradise. Sun, sea, sand and skin causing perpetual arousal.
When she drops him off in Nimbin they have a stroll in main street and see a message on a notice hoard:
“Nimbin is desperately in need of a spiritual guide with such and such qualities.” It is signed: “A.’. A.’.”
He is obviously not alone.
“Must be you” she says, “Go for it, mate.”
Has a dream before the start of the festival: Is walking on a dirt track under a full moon. Suddenly the moon bursts and shatters into pieces like an exploding mirror. Realises it’s his end. Feels his body heating up until it melts. There is no fear. Wakes up with a most powerful feeling of having died without panic.
FORTUNE
Attainment at the moment of being crushed
It is organised brilliantly. A large electrical stage and a small ‘crystal’ one. A camping area for people who come in tribes and one for individuals. Healing village for Yoga, massage and what not, along a delightful little creek where you can bathe with the platypus.
A fantastic space for the thousands who gather to celebrate. All wonderful people in their different stages of enlightenment with amazing talents, presence, strength and beauty.
What would the world need the appearance of a Moonchild for?
He doesn’t climb the stage with a message. Gets to know some of the locals and just goes about, absorbing the healing energies that are flowing all over the place.
Apparently it is on an Aboriginal sacred site. Burnum Burnum, an Aboriginal elder, opens the festival by welcoming us and draws attention to the clear sky, indicating there is plenty of goodwill. It remains so throughout the festival with one notable exception. On the second night there is a play on the Tarot. The director is none other than the guy in Sydney that had seemed to be a suitable partner to get together with. He is very excited to see what they will bring. The Tarot is as close to White Man Dreaming as you can get. However to his surprise his reaction to these foxy and elaborately costumed people is negative. How can this bombastic hocus-pocus compare with the pure spirituality of the Aboriginal. From behind the stage a thick layer of clouds appears and covers the evening sky within half an hour.
The next day he discusses his bewilderment with one of his new acquaintances. Could it have been his guilt for white man’s funk, the magician’s disdain for this guilt, or Aboriginal wizardry that had made those clouds materialise?
His mate pats the ground:
“Just relax with the earth. Just relax with the earth and look over your shoulder.”
There in the middle of the clear sky a small flock of clouds is gathering. He does relax and the clouds disperse, telling him that last night’s clouds could well have been of his ‘own’ making.
One of the days focuses on Landrights. Again Burnum Burnum gets on the stage. Speaks passionately for what seems hours. Explains how he is somewhat of a weirdo among his people, still trusting the whites, hoping for reconciliation.
Then a young Aboriginal man gets on and talks about his psychedelic experience which he sees as a key to inter-cultural understanding.
Then an old, old lady is helped to the microphone and sings. A voice so ethereal, sounds of such power that they pluck the strings of his psyche. Is totally bewitched. The actual words are unintelligible to him but the meaning of them which has been explained beforehand fully permeates him: The song is about a hunter gone hunting. He hasn’t returned for days, months, years. However, the tribe has never stopped waiting for his return. One day he will be back.
The enormous wave of emotion that wells up in him is a totally new experience. The lady – aunt Milly – is a Kadaichi woman, one of the last elders that grew up tribally and must have qualities that the Westerner has lost a long time ago. A love, concern and depth of care, unknown to a species that has evolved out of thousands of years of competition. The flow from her heart is from a source beyond history. Pure compassion so all-encompassing, it reaches out and utterly fulfills him, making him completely identify with the hunter: It is to him that her soothing song is directed. Her love and welcome are for him. The Tribe has been waiting for his return.
The Hunter has gone hunting so far, he has ended up on the Northern Hemisphere. Has seen the invention of the wheel, the amassing of wealth, the forming of armies. Crowley’s previous incarnations flash him by: He has been Priest to Pharaohs, Chinese Sage, Babylonian Temple Dancer, Persian Dervish, Pope in Europe and finally Count Cagliostro, Eliphas Levy, and the ‘Wanderer of the Waste’. Survived the Cold War and the Psychedelic Revolution, has gathered his knowledge and is bringing it back home.
The Serpent arriving at its own tail. Explorer of the Western Mind back in the tribe where he originated from. The reaches of his mind expand, throbbing and reverberating as a five thousand year consciousness is invaded by fifty thousand years of Dreaming. His people are awaiting him, keen to hear about his travels.
Is so elated that it clears the way for the most intense and mind shattering experience he ever had. Next speaks a man who is educated in white man’s way, well read, speaks ‘proper’ English and explains the intellectual, political side of landrights issues. It is a teacher with a very gentle, friendly face, but surely it is more than his lovable character that suddenly changes his face into that of the Time Traveller. Right in front of him the mellow beard is containing his own features. Never has had a hallucination before but there it is. Blinks his eyes and shakes his head but it is definitely there: All the photographs ever taken, every look in the mirror, all the seen and unseen images of his own face are projected in rapid succession, luminously, onto the teacher’s face as if it is a silver screen.
Must have lasted for about a minute. He himself is speaking to the tribe. White man with a black soul, reflected in the half white black man, relating his long journey through the Western World.
He has come home. Those Nimbin Rocks have surely worked for him. A load has slipped off his back. The whole idea of Hierarchy has crumbled into a Reception into The Tribe.
Aboriginal people from far and wide have always come here for healing. It is like being on another plane for a while. Is so high as to consider to throw his passport away and go bush.
After a while however, he comes down to a more accepted level of awareness. By the time his visa is about to run out, Survivor realises he’d better make it back to Europe.
THE STAR
Inexhaustible possibilities of existence
Alys has given it away. She has written a note that it was her own decision and has overdosed herself. Life as Ipsissimus had been untenable.
What had made her unique was her categorical refusal to do anything mundane, which she had taken so serious, she regularly had been institutionalised. Often these were her easiest times, when she could be as mad as she wanted to be.
If becoming Ipsissimus was indeed the major mistake in Crowley’s magickal career, it had been Alys who had donned his karma for it.
For The Magus something simply overwhelming happens. In his first week back home he visits some old friends. They happen to be in the midst of having a party. On the dance floor is a beautiful woman, long hair Shiva fashion a bundle on her head, red dot on forehead, dancing like Shakti herself. When they get introduced she turns out to be Australian. They hit it off immediately, shack up in one of the nicest squats in town and grow into a very easy going relationship with one another. She comes with many qualities. Has just traveled through India and passes on the Yoga that she has endeavoured to pick up, a very welcome gift. She is well read and makes him fill a gap in his reading: women writers.
Town is doubly pleasant showing it off to his Aussie girl. When she isn’t doing her dance and theatre classes they just cruise around. The Festival of Fools ’84 is planned to be the last one and they make the best of it.
In Autumn they hitch to the South of France for the harvest festivities at the ‘Mas’. She makes friends easily, impressed with the matriarchal ways.
Ab has lost his arm. One drunken night the car in which he was in the passenger seat, had run into a bridge which had ripped it off.
His sons bring the Returning Traveller up to his lair. He sits in front of an army tent as the terror of the region. Drinking hasn’t gotten any less since the accident. As gentle a man as he is, he has become even wilder and is excommunicated from his lady’s bedroom. He has been trying rehabilitation but has thrown away the artificial arm and is taking on the world with the left one.
His creativity hasn’t suffered though. Is working on an etching press. Next to it is a pile of etchings, paintings, poems, held down by a rock. When he picks up the rock, the wind takes some flying as if it does it all the time. Nonpossessive, even of his art.
The loss of Ab’s arm more than anything has made Rebirther want to give up the idea of reincarnation altogether. Has always felt that Ab would ‘give his right arm’. Now that he actually has, it paints a cruel picture. How vain to see the people around you as actors in your play. Does it match with your role in their life? It is hard enough to work that one out in our present existence to want to bring in former ones. He is planning to come to town for a while before the year is over.
Women writers weren’t the only ones he has missed out on. He finally discovers Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘Cosmic Trigger’ seven years after publication. How good to learn that such a brilliant man has also been seriously under Aleister’s spell. Seven years of unnecessary brain strain, unless the book had been waiting in the wings until Globetrotter had found out as much as possible by himself.
When you’re ready, it comes for you. And what ‘It’ is, is gloriously open for interpretation. What a superb case Wilson makes for multiple realities. A much appreciated stretch of the head. Miracle Man is not the only one who is showered in synchronicities. In fact, there is an extensive network of Crowley Synchs and it is not only deviates that are enthralled by him. Not many of the clever people have been able to get around him without at least giving him some thought. How heartening to hear about Tim Leary’s inspiration by old Aleister, seeing himself as Crowley’s successor in preparing the world for cosmic consciousness.
A whole mob of hip quantum physicists are finding words as plain as day to explain what an illiterate can only call miracles. We are no victims of the past. If we can see a bright future, the world will be a brighter place. And while activating unused parts of the brain, well, weirdness happens.
The Lone Rider gets a hell of a lift. Quite a relief to hear you are not the only Crowley Born-Again and apparently the lineage is in good hands.
However, thoughts and emotions may create our reality but some questions remain:
He has known people like Niké and Alys before even having heard of Crowley. When doing his search in the Sydney library he had discovered ‘Liber Nikh’, his book on the victory over drug addiction. If it is Alys who took on his mistake of becoming Ipsissimus, it must be Niké who has taken on the aftermath of his heroin addiction. Is it possible that a number of souls have been so impressed with the daring innovator that they have teamed up this time around to make up for his imperfections, are carrying out the legacy of his magickal acts and are cleaning up the debris from his deeds, misdeeds and impossible vows?
Teammate of Crowley Inc. has never felt such a need to communicate with a writer, and guess what? Within weeks it is advertised that in the beginning of the New Year, Robert Anton Wilson is coming to Amsterdam to give a lecture and seminar: ‘How to tell your friends from the apes’. He reckons R.A.W. could be interested in his part of the puzzle. When mentioning Crowley’s ‘Moonchild’ Wilson says that to his knowledge the operation has not been successfully performed to date. So he gets to work and writes a little booklet to be able to show him what he got so far.
THE SUN
Access to Solar Energy; sin and death abolished
It is the last full moon of ’84 when Niké throws herself in his time-space. She is on her way back to Beirut where of all places she has married and lives with her husband. They have met in Greece where she had been kicking the habit for the umpteenth time. He had swept her off her feet, kept her off the smack and since he is Lebanese, brought her into a war zone. She is thriving. The challenge as a free woman to be accepted by the veiled ones suits her fighting nature. Is back in Holland to have something corrected on her ovaries so she can have babies. It is clear that she is off the heroin and so really honours her name: ‘Nikh’ has won her victory.
Budding Boddhisatva experiences the beneficial effect on the universe. There’s been this graffiti popping up in town lately that had him a bit worried. It said that even Dionysus had become an addict. Seeing her as fierce and fiery as ever after all those years on the merry-go-round tells him they haven’t lost yet. Her fun and togetherness are such a thrill. How deeply satisfying to feel her again, warm and alive.
She says her husband needs her to keep him from being sterile.
Walk her home in the rain, our beaming faces open to the elements.
It is in the last days of that year with mythological proportions that Ab comes to town. All through the last decade there weren’t many people in their circles that had any conception of time after 1984 unless it was a horror driven nightmare in the claws of Big Brother. That’s why this year’s Festival of Fools had been planned to be the last one, ever since the end of the Seventies. They paint the town, having a ball. Completely open and upfront, no fear for the thought police.
The freedom with which Ab expresses himself makes him an instant success, the lost arm adding to his charm. He never holds back, knows no restrictions. Goes straight to the core and either embarrasses people or steals their heart forever. Unworried about the Eye of the Citizenry. A celebration of Will. Baby, they are exorcising ‘1984′!
Last day of the year they go and see the movie. Coming out of the theatre they hear exclamations of relief everywhere. People are glad reality is not that bad.
So time kept ticking and there is a New Year.
Not far into the new era, Wilson arrives to enlighten Amsterdam. The seminar is being held in the Kosmos which in the Sixties was a squat called Fantasio where people went on their acid trips to spin out on the freewheeling atmosphere and the light shows on the walls. It has become the coolest healing place: Yoga, T’ai chi, good books, macrobiotic food, a great sauna. R.A.W. is staying in the hotel next door. Conveniently it has a bar where His Fan Boy finds him socialising and drinking Belgian beer. They have a little chat and ‘Bob’ suggests to take the booklet up to his room to have a look at later. It is only a bewildered outline of his musings, extremely personal, only intelligible for someone who has written the ‘Cosmic Trigger’.
That Belgian beer is notorious. It is stronger than you think it is. Next morning on the way to the seminar they run into each other at the door. He only had the chance to read half of it but compliments the Dutchie on his English:
“Will you be publishing it?”
Considering R.A.W.’s subject matter, a lot of loonies must have handed him their stories. It has done the job though, has been a way of facing the music. With a story like his you are either stark raving mad or such hot shit that you have to assume a hunting party at your heels. Wouldn’t Wilson be under surveillance as well? By going to the doyen of conspiracy with his story he has put himself out in the open, exposed himself to Illuminati, C.I.A., The Black Brothers and who knows what else. It took courage and has made him stronger.
One of the participants in ‘How to tell your friends from the apes’ is Patti’s new boyfriend. He ends up with the booklet. He is another tripper and is delighted. He was in John Lilly’s entourage on a tour through Germany and is well and truly initiated in the use of ketamine, of which he still has a stash, no doubt the only one to have some in those days. Knowing that Crowley was such an ether freak he doesn’t want to keep His Heir from having a go at this new model of the anesthetic.
As everybody knows this kicks on Leary’s VIII-th neuro-circuit. This really is leaving the biological container. His is flat on its back, numb and motionless, scarf over closed eyes, vision in interstellar overdrive. Lessons in the ‘Art and Science of Godmanship’.
Returning to the body comes with the familiar rush of the stuff that one always is flooded with after an interdimensional experience, for which the closest word we have is love. From his unearthly view he is blissing out on mega love: love for the love of Patty and her boyfriend, for her love for him and his love for her and love for his own love for both of them. All at once. If ketamine gives us a foretaste of ourselves-in-the-future we certainly have something to look forward to.
After two years of him and his Aussie girl doing their thing it is time for her to go home. She wants to take him with her and they go through the immigration formalities.
She flies home a few months before his own departure. Coming back from bringing her to the airport, the media bring the news of the raid on Bagwhan Shree Rajneesh’s commune in Oregon, he himself being busted for immigration fraud. Seeing the picture of Bagwhan looking out at the world in prison clothes, the Imminent Immigrant is deeply touched. He has always thought that Shri Rasjneesh is pretty Crowleyan in his teachings. He is all about living out one’s true nature. If this involves drugs and super sex, go for it, as long as you base it on your Yoga and self discipline. Imagine a Westerner with the same message, let alone that effect on people, wouldn’t government have come down on him somewhat sooner? Veiled as it was in orange robe and guru worship of an exotic Indian Master, it has been a haven for the hundreds of thousands of hurt and damaged psyches who couldn’t hack the restrictions of the civilised ways of the West. His smile from the newspapers that day had to be a wink for a favoured rebel apprentice:
“You’ve got a job to do. It is time for the Western Tradition to catch up with itself.”
THE AEON
Lord of the Double Wand of Power
Funny thing about Occurrence is that it tends to cluster, to intensify around a certain time slot. On that very same day, heralding the last few months in his hometown, strolling along the flea-market at Waterlooplein, he finds himself chatting with Robert Jasper Grootveld, the larrikin of the Provo revolution, instigator of Amsterdams transformation in the 1960s.
Though having a few international and interdimensional heroes, if it comes to his local hero it has to be Robert Jasper. Has never talked to him before but here they are, rapping away like old mates.
They buy some beer, stop in in the coffee shop for some weed, go to the squat and don’t stop talking until the early hours. They take to each other warmly and this becomes a regular thing.
The squat looks out over the ‘Waag’ on Nieuwmarkt, a medieval, castle-like structure, close to the harbour, where the ships that sailed the seven seas, reentered the city. The ships moored beside it and their cargo of spices and what not was weighed and traded. An appropriate backdrop for their raves. Though his ‘Happenings’ around ‘Het Lieverdje’ had come straight from the heart, since then he had looked into St.Nicholas a bit deeper. He paints the picture of the gangster missionaries from Rome that boat their way up into The Netherlands, their boats filled with red wine. To prove their superiority they put their sharp axes to the Sacred Oak and chop it down. The Gods are silent. The local tribes are then presented with a chalice of the potent red, being told this is the blood of the Roman God. Only used to a light beer, they are easily convinced. But not too easily. It doesn’t take long for one of the boats to be captured and the missionaries to be disposed of. Sadly the ensuing drinking orgy leads to a slaughter frenzy amongst themselves. Alcohol has never been the best drug for tribal harmony.
His favourite story is about ‘Redbaert’, a leader of the tribes resisting the Romans. Just about to give in and be baptised he has one question:
“When I get to heaven, will my unbaptised ancestors be there?”
When the priest can’t confirm this, Redbaert kicks the whole caboodle over and takes up the sword again.
That’s Robert Jasper: The tribesman not to be conned but conquered nevertheless by the advent of the Roman Catholic Empire. Looking out over the Waag, surrounded by ‘coffee shops’, it is clear that funding didn’t end with dispatching wine boats to the North and that the life blood of Christ has kept on flowing for the last two millennia to secure the profits made from spices, coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco and presently the hashish.
These days Robert Jasper is bearing the flag for homegrown ‘Nederwiet’.
The two cosmics often continue their raves while going out on the town, both not very good at keeping their mouth shut. They hit the more cultured establishments where the old journalists and artistic relics from the Sixties are drinking. Jasper is easily recognised and the cause of many a wave of nostalgia. Many of their drinks are being paid for. More often than not the poor patrons are rewarded with a stream of abuse. He is still on a mission and lets you hear it. So radical, it has to offend the moderati.
The Departing Dutchie learns more about his heritage than ever before in those last few months with Jasper – European Aboriginal with more than a touch of the old blood – who makes it very clear that Europeans also had a Dreamtime before the Roman brainwashers tore it to shreds.
During one of their sessions they find a strong confirmation for their connection as Magi: When Robert Jasper was doing his routine around Het Lieverdje, he was living with a woman who has a house in the ‘Spuistraat’, a stone throw away from the statue. It is Niké’s mother. While getting his outrageous outfits together for his performances around ‘Het Magies Centrum’, he was playing with Niké the child.
THE UNIVERSE
Space/Time limited by element Earth
It turns out that back on her own turf his Aussie girl and her lover boy find themselves on different tracks. She wants to study and pursue a career. All the new settler wants is to find a piece of land and live on it. Plant trees, create a garden, live the life he has dreamed of after the Nimbin experience on the North Coast of N.S.W.
He starts from scratch with a bit of good karma coming his way. Back in the Seventies he had lent out his farm to a couple of passing hippies so she – an Australian – could have a home birth. Something women at the time were heavily into, considering the state of the obstetrical wards. Letting go of his retreat for a while had made him some lasting friends. The hippy has become a famous Aussie builder, is building a glamorous extravaganza around the Hawkesbury river and is in a position to offer the Penniless Immigrant a job as gardener. He sets up a humpy in a wonderful piece of bush and rolls up his sleeves.
There is a strong work ethic Down Under. To feel comfortable there it helps to do a stint of hard ‘yakka’. To be a digger. It is not without rewards. When seeing the classical Holden panel van for the first time it is enough to want to own one. Soon part of the humpy is moveable and cruises to Sydney or Newcastle for the weekends.
Ocker Probationar is getting the hang of the forty hour week. Is getting off on going to the local pub, dusty, in stubbies and work boots and ordering a schooner. Buying his beer by the carton.
There is a phenomenal shift in the level of his paranoia, doing something that anyone would agree on as being respectable. Paying tax does indeed make one feel like a decent citizen. And after eight hours of self torture there is definite bliss at knock-off. On top of all this he gets to learn about native plants.
After a while there is a message from his friends up North that there is a share in their community for sale. He will stick it out for a few years. The Eighties have gotten to him after all. Though not your typical yuppie, he is working and saving.
By the time he settles in the beautiful valley of which he now owns a share, he finds himself surrounded by a mandala of new friends. The only other single in the hood is a girl too young to consider her as a partner but they still end up shacking up. She may be young but is very strong. Her ways knock him over, she is pure and unadulterated Ocker stock with the twist of having an affection for the local ‘goldtop’ mushrooms. When it is mushroom season and time to trip together, she cooks them up expertly, plonks the brew in two mugs and sits back to relax with the newspapers. Always having to be on the ball, it is the closest to a meditative state that she knows of. He is thoroughly intrigued. For the sacred she has no need. As for ritual, not the slightest urge. She reckons magick is best left alone. Can only imagine a black magick, people being what they are. We are out there to win, aren’t we?
Her mother usually greets them with that typical Aussie saying:
“Are you winning?”
There is never a doubt in her action, does nothing but her will.
She won’t come his way. He will have to go hers and he decides to hang up his Magick Hat for a while.
What really wins him over is her excellence in relating to children. Several mums bring her their difficult toddlers to look after. Also it is her womb that dictates her love life. She is into it for getting pregnant and since they are growing their own food and with water springing forth from the mountain, he is not as worried about the impossible responsibility of being a parent as he used to be and lets go of his compulsive awareness of a woman’s cycle.
He loves her growing belly and the birth of their daughter is a most bonding experience.
Years go by, too busy being real Aussie to focus on his publick aspirations. No travels to explain his ‘hallucination’ on that Landrights day in Nimbin either. Is just looking after the patch that owns him, living life in an Aboriginal way, slowly but steadily transforming his bit of wild bush into the ultimate landscape.
But he does build a structure that is to be a new version of the old Abbey and no matter how deeply embroiled in Mother Earth, the head trip never quite leaves him.
In ’93 the Thelemic charge of that number has him suddenly in a panic. Reckons that of course the world is waiting for his part of the puzzle and even if it is not, it is still necessary to express himself. It is time to seriously sit down and document his odyssey.
Not long after starting the writing adventure he meets one of the organisers of the Nimbin Festival. A major piece of his own puzzle falls into place: During the preparations for the gathering, Aborigines from the local Bundjalung tribe for whom the festival grounds are sacred, had taken a dozen new settlers on a two week walkabout through the forest to try and reach the Aboriginal within them and told them that at the celebration, they wanted to conduct a Dreaming Ritual to re-energise the site. To repair the spirit of the land with the tribal energy of the celebrants. It has taken ten years to seep through: The most mind boggling experience of his life, the cathartic vision that had so dramatically shifted his attitudes on that very special day, had not just come from inside himself. Bundjalung wizardry had been employed to reach those white folk that were open to receive it.
It had been meant to be shared in all the hearts that journey to life’s beginnings.
’93 is also the Year of the Indigenous People. The high court has ruled that Aborigines who know the song lines of any crown land own that land. Australia has become a country where – at least in principal – the spiritual can overrule the material which makes it a very special place indeed. The acknowledgment of Aboriginal song lines does also imply a validation for the spiritual innuendos with which a new generation of hippy folk is coming of age. The Olde Esoteric Tradition is indeed catching up with itself. The candle has arrived from its journey through the last two windy decades and is setting the stage for an irrepressible flowering of Magick.
Not all hippy kids turned out perfect but some are even more beautiful than envisioned. The lucky ones who have a link with nature look particularly fabulous. Dreadlocked forest creatures in feathers, staff, amulets. Skins pierced, soaking up the elements. More often than not a Tarot deck as part of their few possessions.
Androgynous. Even tattoos, traditional bastion of machismo are no longer macho. It is wizards and witches, yin-yangs and other mystical symbols that grace their bodies.
Magick as a way of life. Dedication to serendipity.
The occult is no longer hidden. It is emblazoned in ink on flesh. Not only do they look tribal, the intimacy with which they hug each other is clearly a graduation from the awkward way in which their Sixties hippy parents gave one another a flower.
THE FOOL
Wanderer; blessed, innocent, inebriated, androgynous
It is the time of year that the luscious growth of the weeds is somewhat tempered. He can leave his patch for a few weeks and still recognise it when he gets back. He has a strong urge to feel the pulse of the nearest cosmopolis. To take a break from the smell of the forest for the fragrance of budding consciousness.
Sydney is not a bad one at all in this stretch of the millennium. There is something exciting about the solid pavement of the concrete jungle where several million souls have set up a pressure cooker. The people of this charged environment, affluent in the diversity of their origins, are bound to represent a relative quirk in the development of the human psyche.
At the weekend while the parents and grandparents in the suburbs – uprooted from all over the old world – mow the lawn around their new frontier of brick veneer, their offspring are congregating in the marketplace. Paddington Market in particular, most central, most cosmopolitan, displays a spectacle of new connections and it is towards here that the visitor naturally gravitates.
The European, recognising the gene-codes of the old countries blinks at the infinite variety of the interracial adventure we’re on. Nature in her most arduous splendour. Is that not her ultimate song, evolvement into more and more variety?
It shows in the freedom of fashions here. The overall style is fairly punk but mixed and mingled, enriched by every influence from under the Sun, who – it being Sydney – exhibits unfailing generosity over scantily clad bodies that seem to mostly have come out to show themselves off. Between all the bric-a-brac it is not hard to find something with which to adorn oneself. The Gothic touch is still en vogue, gelling nicely with the Pagan revival. Magickal symbols abound. The Pentagram is everywhere. But it really hits home that Some Idea’s time has come when he is presented with a stall actually selling shirts that feature the unspeakable Aleister Crowley: A print of his well known image as the young magician, crowned with the Egyptian Uraeus, holding the Stele of Revealing.
This can’t go unbought. Magick Hunter is soon purring over quality, softness, perfect length of sleeves. The colours are those of storm clouds at sunset. The label says ‘Made in Heaven’.
Bookshop day. Favourite of course, the little occult one, just off King’s Cross. Amidst the ordered chaos of the window display the Thoth Tarot Deck is leaning against a skull, nudging:
“Here, matey, isn’t it time to get yourself one of these again?”
The Traveller lost his deck seven years ago, shortly after arriving in Australia and happily so, not minding a break from its creator at all. After seven years there is not supposed to be a single cell the same in your body. He feels safe to go in and make the purchase.
Upon entering he overhears the owner having a conversation about a Crowley ‘space cadet’. Winking “that’s me” he browses through the stock which has several Crowley titles, amazed at his lightheartedness in picking up some and chatting about Crowleyanity as if chit chatting about the weather:
“Would you say there is quite a bit of interest in the subject, these days?”
“Oh yes, definitely.”
A little later, when in the Aquarian Bookshop which caters to the New Age, this dude hops in, hip, early twenties, pleasant looking, and asks for books on Crowley.
Old Hand is moved by tenderness for the lad’s innocence to want to be involved with the Beast. Could the boy be in for a much more intense association than he is bargaining for or has the general headspace of the new generation expanded so much that he can digest in a couple of months what would have taken his dad a decade or more?
Events clustering as to eventuate from more than mere chance, Space Ace is drawn to ride the wave of synchronicity and slips back into that familiar feeling of being Old Crow in his new incarnation, unnoticed, looking through the veil of time and space at one of his apprentices.
When it comes to go and check out the night life, he is told that what is new – as it is apparently mushrooming all over the major big cities of Western civilisation – is the opening of an S & M club: The Hellfire Club.
Stepping in is like stepping into a present day mythological realm. The power of the beat, the funk, stroboscopes flashing on jittering bodies of slickly dressed androgynites. Techno music with its lack of lyrics and melody providing a perfect frame for what is surely more ritual than performance. Here one truly relates. When seeing a woman leading another with chain and dog collar, it is clear that their love, trust and commitment goes a lot further and deeper than many a ‘democratic’ relationship. Often squably affairs, endless bickering in the search for compromise. Commendable in the Affairs of State perhaps but it tends to take the juice out of our passions and transcendence somewhat. To really get together it seems sensible to pass power around. What better games to play than freely changing roles from winner to loser, boss to follower. What better way to rid ourselves from our eternal obsession with the pecking order?
Nightclubber finds it all wonderfully Thelemic and is pleasantly but only mildly surprised to find out that the occasional Crowley night is held here. This here is ‘Love Under Will’ if you’ve ever seen it. Only within agreed upon boundaries can one unleash oneself and extend freedom into the unknown without causing harm.
How good to see the world’s biggest problem – the struggle for power – being grabbed by the scruff of the neck and solved then and there on that little stage where men and women are tying each other up with care, and tenderly, lovingly mock whip one another.
With our main hassle being acted out up there, it is not surprising to find the atmosphere extremely peaceful. No one is bothering anyone, very rare indeed for that time of the night in any other nightclub.
He must look pleased, as a girl approaches him and asks:
“Got some Ecstasy?”
Met with surprise, she explains:
“It’s your smile.”