MASTER OF THE TEMPLE
Eric Ericson
PROLOGUE
SAND DEVILS
In the North African desert, towards the end of the year 1909, Aleister Crowley invoked to his own destruction the evil force known to the ancient Egyptians as the god Set.
Crowley was a man obsessed by the need to find God. He had this from his parents but he turned away from their restrictive and fundamentalist Christianity to look for God elsewhere. He was convinced that their beliefs were wrong headed. Christianity, with its insistence on sin, guilt, penitence and damnation was in his view a crapulous creed, fit only for slaves. He enjoyed the pleasures of the world and of the body and had no time for a belief system which required him to regard himself as a miserable sinner.
Estranged from his pious mother, he lived in London after he left Cambridge University on money left to him in his father's will. He learned of the existence of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret group: of initiates, and he readily embraced their teaching as a pathway to God. His considerable intelligence soon absorbed their doctrines and ceremonies until, after a few years, he found them too slow for his eagerness, too timid in their explorations of the hidden world. He struck out boldly on his own, mingling with their very English methods a version of tantric sexual worship he had learned in India on a big game hunting expedition. He knew where he was heading - towards union with God. He could not foresee the manner of the union or its outcome.
With a disciple named Victor Neuburg, Crowley left Algiers and marched south towards the desert. At night they slept in any convenient; shelter or under the stars. They bought food as they went and carried it in rucksacks, living rough. Crowley was then thirty-four years old, a big framed man just starting to run to fat but still athletic. To accentuate his commanding appearance he shaved his head completely. His chela Neuburg was in his mid-twenties, not long out of university and with some claims to being a poet. He was a thin and small young man with a slightly twisted spine that made him carry one shoulder higher than the other and gave him an awkward walk.
On each day of their journey south the two men paused to explore one of the Aethyrs, a difficult and dangerous operation. The thirty Aethyrs, or Realms, were first discovered and described by Dr John Dee, a learned mathematician who became Court Astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I in the late sixteenth century. Dee was assisted in this work by Edward Kelly, a medium who had suffered the indignity of having his ears cut off by the public executioner for the crime of forgery. A description of the Aethyrs and the means of reaching them was compiled by Dr Dee in a work he called Liber Logaeth, printed after his death and still preserved in the library of the British Museum.
Dee wrote his work in a non-human language which he named Enochian, taught to him through Kelly by intelligences he believed to be angels. If by angels he meant messengers, then they were angels, but in no sense could they be regarded as angels as the Christian Church understands that term. Because of its complexity, Dee's work lay ignored for nearly three hundred years until the head of the Order of the Golden Dawn, an adept named Samuel Liddell Mathers, came across it in the British Museum and put his keen mind to work on it. While he was a member of the Order, Crowley studied Mather's translation and, determined to follow the unimaginable track which Dee had charted three centuries before.
The exploration of the Aethyrs is not a task to be undertaken lightly. The time and place must be propitious, without distractions, and the explorer must be in a suitably heightened state of mind. Crowley began in Mexico City in 1900; his mind ablaze after a ferocious session with a raddled whore.
To retrace the footsteps of Dr Dee the pilgrim does not start with the First Aethyr and continue to the Thirtieth, but with the Thirtieth, proceeding, backwards to the First. In Mexico City Crowley explored the Thirtieth and the TwentyNinth and found them of such interest that he made up his mind to continue: at some future time when circumstances looked right.
In the eleven years that passed from the day Crowley was accepted into the Order of the Golden Dawn to the day he stood with Victor Neuburg in the desert, he had hacked his way deeper and deeper into the hidden world, as if he were chopping his way through a jungle with a machete. His intellect, enthusiasm, energy and courage were formidable and they sustained him and kept him going even after he lost his way. On his journey he encountered concepts and entities, within and without, which would have reduced ,a lesser man to gibbering idiocy. But Crowley continued undaunted and, through his endeavours, attained a remarkable level of illumination. At a price. He developed a blazing. contempt for all morality and a total disregard for the rest of the human race. These were things to be used for his own purposes, nothing more.
In those eleven years he married Rose Kelly, a parson's daughter and sister of another member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Gerald Kelly the painter. Kelly eventually became President of the Royal Academy and was knighted for his services to art. Crowley sired two children by Rose;; took part in a disastrous attempt on Kangchenjunga, a then unclimbed mountain in the Himalayas; crossed South China with Rose and her first child on horseback and riverboat; received a vision in Cairo which he interpreted as God speaking directly to him; drove Rose into alcoholism by his flagrant promiscuity; experimented with homosexuality and became hooked on drugs. At thirty-four, with all this behind him, he felt that he was ready to attain union with God.
A hundred miles south of Algiers, Crowley and Neuburg left the oasis village of Bou Saada behind them and headed into the real wilderness. They were still working their way through the Aethyrs at the rate of one a day. At Mount Dalleh Addin, after exploring the Eleventh Aethyr, Crowley was inspired to make an offering of himself to a-god he believed to be the Pan of the ancient Greeks, though in this he was mistaken. Together he and Neuburg made a circle of stones on top of the barren hill, and in the centre they built an altar of stones and, sand. On this altar Crowley lay naked' and, while Neuburg sodomised him, prayed to Pan and dedicated the offering to him. The offering was himself and it was accepted, as he was shortly to discover. Fortified in spirit by what he had done, Crowley prepared the next day to explore 'the Tenth Aethyr.
In Dr Dee's account, the Tenth is called ZAX and it is an accursed place. Dee perceived the Aethyrs as dimensions of being, with strange geometries of their own. They have real existence, but not in our space or time. They are, in Dee's description, realms, and they are guarded against intruders from our space-time continuum.
When Crowley made his way into the Thirtieth in Mexico City, he found it to be an immense crystal cube surrounded by a sphere. He was challenged by four guardians in black robes but they were benign and admitted him into this fantastic non-place as soon as he satisfied them that he knew a word of sufficient power. They let him progress from the cube, which was the Watch Tower, into the sphere. But simple though the geometry of the Thirtieth might be Crowley saw there a fearful, vision of the destruction of all things, not unlike the Revelation of St John. Heaven and earth passed away and all things were confounded in destruction.
The Tenth, which he was now ready to tackle, has only one guardian and he is not easy to pass. Dr Dee recorded his name as Choronzon and said that he was a great devil.
Knowing this, Crowley and Neuburg took elaborate precautions. With the point of a dagger they traced in the sand a large circle inside a circle and between the two circumferences they wrote three holy names of God. This has always been the method used by those who call up unseen forces, the tradition being-that inside the circle they will be secure from the fury of the thing they summon to appear. The best and fullest details of how to construct a circle are given in a manuscript called the Key of Solomon the King. It was translated into English in 1888 by the head of the Order of the Golden Dawn and Crowley had studied it carefully. The Key of Solomon recommends that two squares be drawn about the circles, one outside the other, with their corners to the four points of the compass: At each of the outer corners of the squares; small circles should be drawn and, in each of these, another holy name of God inscribed - in the east EL, in the west YAH, in the south AGLA and in the north ADONAI Crowley dispensed with the squares and small circles, considering that his basic circle was sufficient. In this, as in other things, he was overly optimistic.
Outside the circle of protection but close to it, Crowley drew a triangle in the sand and along the sides of it he scratched with his dagger three more of the many names of God. This too is standard procedure. The force to be called up will materialise in the triangle and will be caged there by the holy names. Within the triangle he wrote in the sand the name Choronzon.
He had made Neuburg buy three live pigeons in the market-place of Bon Saada. One after the other, he slit their throats, holding each fluttering bird by the legs so that its blood ran down to soak into the sand within the triangle. During this act of butchery, he intoned a form of words based on the Key of Solomon.
`By these most holy names and the other names of power' which are written'' in the book of the heavens, I conjure thee, Pigeon, that thou assist me in this work. Almighty Adonai, be my aid so that this blood may have power and strength in all that I wish and in all that I shall demand.'
So far; all had been done in accordance with long established traditions, though the circle of protection could have been made stronger. Crowley's next actions were arrogant to the point of madness and brought their own retribution. He positioned Neuburg in the circle, where he could observe and record all that happened in safety. Then, wearing a thin .black robe from his rucksack, Crowley seated himself inside the triangle where he had spilt the blood and written the name Choronzon. He was risking attack in order to get past the guardian of the Tenth. From inside the black robe, the hood pulled over his face, he told Neuburg to begin.
Victor Neuburg started by performing the banishing rituals of the pentagram. That is, with the point of his dagger he traced' in the air at the four points of the compass - east, south, west and north-five-pointed stars to banish any evil or disturbing influence that might be in that place. The stars must be traced in a special way to be effective. With one point upwards, as Neuburg drew it, the five-pointed star is a symbol of man created in the image of God. The pentagrams of earth, air, fire, water and spirit, traced in the correct order and manner, - are judged sufficient to dispel any malign influences that may be lurking. On this great occasion Neuburg took the additional precaution of tracing a six-pointed star to the four quarters as well. This sign carries a wealth of meaning for the initiated. Seen as two interlocking triangles, one pointing down and one pointing up, it can mean on different levels the jewel in the lotus; the lingam in the yoni: god in man; spirit in flesh and many other potent concepts.
Neuburg then repeated his tracings in air, though in a different manner, and, these were the invoking pentagrams to summon good; influences to protect him in his circle. That done, he recited in a loud voice the Exorcism of Pope Honorius.
`O Lord, deliver me from hell's great fear and gloom ... '
Pope Honorius the Third started life as Cencio Savelli and was elected to the Throne of Peter in 1216. He was reputed to know more about the secret arts than ;any Vicar of Christ reasonably should,. After his death, Pope Innocent the Sixth caused to be burned in public a manuscript thought to have belonged to Honorius: a collection of rituals, invocations and instructions that could only be operated by an ordained priest. A copy survived and in 1629 it was printed as a book in Rome, in secret for fear of the Inquisition. Since then it has been printed in many countries under various titles, but usually as the Black Book of Honorius.
The form of Exorcism described in this book is a long prayer for the protection of the summoner of evil spirits against their malice. It was originally written in Latin but Crowley had translated it into English verse to make it more easily memorised by those unfamiliar with the language of scholars and churchmen. Certain at last that he was secure in body and soul, Victor Neuburg sat-down on the sand with his notebook and pencil, ready; to record in shorthand whatever might occur. What he expected was that Crowley would slide mentally into the Tenth Aethyr and describe what he saw there, while his body remained in the triangle. He had not been present in Mexico when Crowley visited the Thirtieth and saw its curious cube and sphere spatial relationship. Or, at the Twenty-Ninth, where a sky; spangled with golden stars arched over a flat green landscape. But he had recorded the description of the Twenty-Eighth to the Eleventh and was eager with anticipation.
Inside his bloody triangle, buttressed by the three names of God scratched in the dry earth, Crowley squatted, a shapeless bundle in his long black robe. With all his powers of concentration he pronounced the Call. In the Enochian language it begins:
`Madariatza das perifa ZAX cabisca micaolazoda saamire...'
But to memorise it would be beyond the powers of most men and Crowley used the English translation:
`O ye heavens that dwell in the Tenth Aire, ye are mighty in the parts of the earth and execute therein the judgment of the Highest. Unto you it is said: behold; the face of your God...'
The Call is a long one and in spite of its pious reference to God at the beginning, it becomes very threatening and dark in tone as it proceeds. It builds to a climax in which the Aires, or Aethyrs, are commanded:
`Open the mysteries of your creation and make us partakers of the undefiled knowledge.'
As the powerful vibrations of the Call rang through whatever impossible dimensions of non-being link this world to the Aethyrs, Crowley stared into a large golden topaz set into a wooden cross painted bright red. It was in the depths of the jewel, as in a mirror, that he caught his first glimpse of the Tenth and began to describe it to Neuburg. He found it hard to put into words, for the Tenth is a shapeless place, full of drifting and changing forms. And before he could resolve it clearly, the guardian of the Tenth peered at him from out of the topaz. Finding him unprotected in the triangle, the guardian slid into this world and took possession of Crowley; mind, soul and body. It spoke through him. Neuburg scribbled the words down; not yet alarmed because he did not realise what had happened.
When Dr John Dee first explored the Aethyrs and left directions for those who dared to follow him into these wild and dangerous, spaces, it was from his house in Mortlake by the river Thames in the then green and pleasant fields of Surrey. Even there, amidst the gentle English landscape, the guardian of the Tenth appeared to him as a mighty devil. In the desolate wastes of North Africa the guardian manifested himself as Set, the lord of darkness of the ancient Egyptians, the murderer of his brother Osiris. The Egyptians saw Set in the sand storm and the arid desert which kills travellers. They named him the spirit of drought and disease, of impotence and death.
Set had no real form of his own, being the essence of destruction and madness working through man and nature. The walls of Egyptian temples and tombs are covered with portraits of the great gods; their statues stand everywhere - Osiris the Good, who civilised men by teaching them the mysteries of agriculture when they were only Stone Age savages; his sister and wife Isis, mother of all living, who protected men and women in this world and the next; their mighty son Horus, glorious as a falcon soaring in the noonday sky. But the statues of Set were smashed: during the twenty-second dynasty when the once mighty Egyptian empire was crumbling into chaos and anarchy, nearly: three thousand years ago. His portraits were erased, his name scratched out of inscriptions, as if the Egyptians had come to realise the depths, of the evil overtaking them and tried to blot out all trace of it from their world.
In forgotten tombs some, representations of him survived; Before the prohibition on naming or depicting him, the early Egyptians had shown Set as a creature that has never existed on this earth a man-beast with a thin and curving snout, square jackal ears and a stiff, forked tail: That is, he had no shape of his own and could only be portrayed by parts of unclean animals stuck together.
In the possessed Crowley's naked body, his black robe ripped off and thrown away, Set reached out over the triangle that was supposed to contain him and clawed at Victor Neuburg. The names of God written along the sides of the triangle were not powerful enough to hold him. At the top of his voice - or rather, at the top of Crowley's voice - he. raved that he was the terror of darkness and the blackness of nights, the deafness of the adder and the tastelessness of stale water, the black fire of hatred not one but many things.'
Alarmed at last, Neuburg tried to banish the insane creature back to the Tenth Aethyr by reciting the holy names inscribed about his protective circle. He received an instant and daunting answer.
`I FEED UPON THE NAMES OF THE MOST HIGH, I CHURN THEM IN MY JAWS AND VOID THEM FROM MY FUNDAMENT
Neuburg was frightened, even as he jotted down the ravings of the guardian. Before the situation became any worse, he ritually commanded Set to depart to his own place, rising the correct formula of words he had been taught. Far from departing, Set broke into a torrent of obscenity and threw, sand from his triangle onto Neuburg's circle, breaking the barrier and creating a way through. Neuburg was still furiously scribbling in his notebook when Set, in Crowley's body, slithered into the circle and attacked him. Not manlike, with his hands, but beast fashion, trying to rip his throat out with his teeth.
In mortal fear Victor Neuburg gabbled out all the names of God he could remember, protecting his throat with one arm while he slashed at his assailant with his dagger. His life hung in the balance for some minutes but he defended himself with the desperation of fear. Eventually, at knife point, he drove the raging creature back into its triangle and quickly repaired his circle while Set screamed at him. That done, the nervous and, frail young, man found from somewhere inside himself the courage to start recording again the words of hatred roared across the desert:
`I have prevailed against the kingdom of the Father and befouled his beard I have prevailed against the kingdom of the Son. .. '
Victor Neuburg had won a mighty victory in preserving his life and sanity in the face of such malignity. It may be that as he, squatted on the sand recording in fast shorthand the blasphemous ranting, there passed through his mind the Egyptian legend that the god Horus had sought out Set in revenge for' the murder of his father Osiris. In their struggle Set blinded Horus in one eye by spitting venom into it, but Horus had finally overcome Set by snatching his testicles and ripping them off. In his extremity of terror, when Set had almost overwhelmed him, Neuburg had called upon Horus to aid him, using another of his many names.
In time the power of the pigeons blood that had been shed on the triangle was used up. The manifestation of Set faded away, leaving Crowley and Neuburg, both exhausted, facing each other across the sand.
Whatever Neuburg thought, Crowley was not at all sure that Set had left him. He insisted that before they rested they must purify the place with fire. They rooted about for whatever would burn and lit a fire over the patch of sand where the triangle had been. Later on, Crowley noted in his diary that in the Tenth Aethyr, 'there is neither beginning nor end, for it is all hotch-potch, because it is of the wicked on earth and, the damned in hell.'
From the time that Set manifested in Crowley and found, him to be one of his own, Crowley became a man possessed for the rest of his life, a monster of destruction, bodily and spiritual, his own and others. From that day on, no man or woman who had any close contact with him, escaped with sanity whole or life unwrecked. Disease, madness, ruin, drug addiction, murder, degradation, despair and suicide walked in his shadow until he died in a Hastings boarding house nearly forty years later, perplexed by his own life.
The sand devil had come at Crowley's bidding. Whether he came from the searing desert or the Tenth Aethyr or from the depths of Crowley's own unconscious mind is not a question worth considering, since all three are identical, but seen from different viewpoints. Crowley achieved his long sought union with God, but from error or malice he chose the wrong god. To initiates the god-forms are cosmic forces personified and to be made one with a god is to become a channel for a cosmic force: The force that poured through Crowley rolled across Europe and then across America like a tidal wave, sweeping many away to destruction, even today.
CHAPTER I
HANS-MARTIN FRICK
AT OSLO on a fine spring day, Jonathan Rawlings boarded a Scandinavian Airlines jet, bound for Stockholm. The only, English language newspaper he had been able to buy at the airport bookstall was the Daily Express, not the Financial Times he wanted. He took a window seat in the first class section of the plane, fastened his seat belt and skimmed through his newspaper while the cabin crew bustled passengers about, stowed their hand luggage for them and made sure they were strapped in. Jonathan was too experienced a traveller to require that kind of attention.
The newspaper reported that yet another British army patrol had been ambushed in Belfast, one soldier killed and two more injured. A widow of seventy-four had been raped and beaten in Doncaster. Ten more people had been executed in Iran by firing squad, eight for political offences and two for adultery.
The plane rolled out slowly to the end of the strip and wheeled to face down into the breeze. There was never anything of interest to look at in aeroplanes, Jonathan thought. Ahead of him were two rows of empty seats and then a blank bulkhead. Through the window he had a view of tarmac and green grass as far as the airport, perimeter. He turned back to the newspaper as the engines revved up to full scream and the plane launched itself down the runway.
The Israeli airforce had strafed a guerilla camp in retaliation for a grenade attack against a bus' in Tel Aviv.; The New York-police, were holding a man they believed to be a multiple murderer of homosexual adolescents. In Paris, a Middle East diplomat had been gunned down on the pavement outside a restaurant.
The SAS jet lifted off and slanted its nose upwards. Through the window Jonathan watched the ground below fall away sharply as the undercarriage rumbled up into its housing. The newspaper had lost whatever little interest it had for him. The only useful item he had found was towards the back pages-the value of the pound sterling against other currencies. That at least had some bearing on his journey. He discarded the newspaper with its catalogue of human hatred and suffering on the empty seat next to him, reflecting briefly on the complexity of endeavour that had gone into producing this printed comment on the state of the world. His black leather briefcase was stowed under the seat in front of him. He put; it on his knees and opened it, knowing that there was more advantage in the sheafs of business papers it contained than in the newspaper that day.. ,
The plane bumped a few times as it climbed up through wispy cloud to its cruising height. Then it was in clear spring sunshine and the seat belt sign went off.
From Oslo to Stockholm is a short flight, only about forty-five minutes when everything goes to schedule. An SAS stewardess leaned over the empty seat to ask Jonathan if he wanted a drink from the bar and smiled at him. She was tall and thin in her uniform; white shirt and blue-grey skirt, her face attractive in an angular way. She wore no makeup and her straw coloured hair was pulled back from her forehead and fastened at the nape of her neck. He ordered coffee, it being, only ten in the morning.
Most women smiled pleasantly when they talked to him, probably without even realising it. He was thirty-eight, all but; a few weeks, red haired and muscular, not particularly good looking but interesting. To the stewardess he was a man who travelled first class, wore a well made business suit and had an air of purpose. She brought the coffee and leaned further across the seat in front of him. In his mind's eye, Jonathan pictured her without her clothes. Long neck, prominent collar bones, small breasts, a dip below her rib cage to a flat belly and narrow hips above long, lean thighs. He put her age at twenty-six or seven.. As he thanked her he touched her wrist very lightly with his fingertips. Pale blue eyes stared for a moment into his and he recognised a look almost neurotic in its intensity. Women like that were precious to him. At another time he would have developed the acquaintance easily and confidently. But on that particular day he had too much else to think about.
Two topics vied for place in his mind, both of great importance to him;; one business and the other a personal concern. His business was a sales tour of the Scandinavian countries for the company he worked for, Dovedays Limited. To those not engaged in it, manufacturing industry appears to be one of the least interesting fields of human endeavour. To those in the higher reaches of it, this attitude is a cause of frequent surprise. Dovedays was in the food processing sector, more specifically it was one of the three largest biscuit making companies in Britain. Its sales that year were running at well over £100 million, equivalent to about a fifth of the total British output of biscuits. Jonathan looked through the sheaf of papers in his hand as he sipped coffee, knowing all the neatly typed figures by heart. The reason for-his trip was to improve upon those figures and the pressure to succeed was considerable. Not that his future was at stake in any way. Business to him was a game he intended to win, the product was immaterial, whether biscuits, baby carriages or buildings. The tokens in the game were pounds sterling, francs, marks, dollars, kroner any of the world's legitimate currencies. The rewards for winning the game were money, esteem and control of his own life.
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