Behind The Veil
The long-awaited next instalment, in which the supernatural duo are sent to France.
Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. (Eliphaz Levi, Introduction to Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual , translated from the French by Arthur Edward Waite)
This episode's warning to potentially traduced, libelled and misrepresented practitioners of religion or related processes: this time it's the Freemasons, OK? you have been warned and the author reserves his right not to enter into any correspondence.
The Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, Paris, 1834.
"The verdict, under God, is pronounced and final." said the grave-faced canon lawyer who was chairing the clerestory court. "After having heard the evidence and examined the conscience of the accused, we find the case guilty on all counts. Deacon Alphonse Louis Constant is guilty of the sin of intellectual pride, in that he challenged the teachings of Mother Church constantly and without humility. He did not repent nor confess the sin and remains obdurate in his heresy. The court has also found Deacon Alphonse Louis Constant guilty of the sin of fornication. We have taken into acount he has not yet submitted to the final vows of priesthood, or the sentence would be sterner. But there is no recourse open to us save expulsion from the seminary." The church lawyer paused to allow the sigh of horror to run round the assembled student priests, summoned here to witness the punishment meted out to one of their own who had wlfully transgressed. All eyes were on the defendent, who stood before the clerestory tribunal, looking defiantly at the lawyer, his head held high and eyes firmly blazing. Otherwise, he was in the simple robes of a seminary deacon, a monastic robe tied at the waist in a white cord.
"Have you anything to say?"
Constant, tall, bulky, twenty-four years old, glared at the judge and nodded.
"I accept the sentence." he said, in a loud unafraid voice. "But I would like to request the court..." he paused for a moment. "Excommunicate me! It will make it so much easier to pursue a new direction if I am purged of the luggage of a religion which is immaterial to me..."
"Get him out of here!"" Two burly seminary porters hastened to obey, gripping the new-minted heretic by the arms and hustling him away. Despite the indignity, he grinned.
A friend from the seminary was able to see him off at the door.
"So where will you go, Alphonse?" the friend asked, anxiously. "The Church is closed to you now."
"I have already started writing pamphlets for money." Constant remarked, shrugging. "That was how they caught me. They liked neither the ideas nor that I was being paid for them. There is an editor out there who will print my ideas and pay me for them. Now I can bill myself as a defrocked priest, notoreity will add to my price. I will not starve!"
The student priest smiled uncertainly.
"Go with God, Alphonse."
Alphonse Constant smiled serenely.
"Oh, I intend to. Don't worry about that." The student priest watched his former friend until he was out of sight, in the throng of Parisians along the Rue Cassette.
1848. The St Lazare prison. Paris.
Alphonse Constant was pushed out of the prison door into its bleak outer courtyard, with the miserable stunted trees and the milling,aimless, mass of wives and relatives of internees who were awaiting news, or petitioning for visiting rights. Heads had looked up in expectation as the prison's Judas door creaked open and fixed on him, then fallen away in dissappointment realising he wasn't the released prisoner they wanted to see.
Constant hitched up his poor bag of possessions, then made his way through the crowd to the outer gate. In this year of revolutions, there was simply no prison room for all the arrested revolutionaries to be processed. A mere author of scurrilous pamphlets read by few was small fry, and could safely be discharged to free space in a cell.
He smiled a grim smile. L'Evangile du Peuple1 (1) and Le Testament de la Liberté had landed him in here as seditious, revolutionary and possibly blasphemous tracts. La Mère de Dieu was, in the eyes of the church authorities, even worse. But he'd been released in a so called amnesty, provoked partly by the need to appear merciful and partly by the fact the prisons were bursting at the seams.
Constant, a big bear of a man, bearded, balding and with piercing eyes, walked on through Paris to see about getting a bed for the night somewhere. Pamphlet writing was a steady living, but it was beginning to bore him. Maybe it was time to start practicing some of the ideas coming to him concerning a new religion, one that bypassed the teetering structures of Christianity and one where anyone could receive the gnosis directly, according to their wisdom and abilities. He was sure such believers existed in the world. But given the vindictive nature of the Church, they would not seek publicity. Where to find them?
1853. England.
At least the English truly respected freedom of conscience and freedom of thought, reflected Alphonse Constant. He relaxed in the comfortable armchair in his host's library, and carried on reading about the secret doctrine underlying Christianity, the idea of the Society of the Rose Cross. Marvelling that they had heard nothing at all of this in the seminary, the former candidate for priesthood read on, enthralled. More pieces of the jigsaw were falling into place.
The idea that there was an unbroken continuity of true religion, true worship, true gnosis, coming down to us in an unbroken line from the makers of the Pyramids and the architect of Solomon's Temple, preserved by organisations as varied as the Knights Templar, the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians... Constant's head was dizzy with the possibilities.
His Lordship had been more than generous with support, resources and time. Constant was against the aristocracy on general terms. But even he had to reflect that some aristos, men blessed with an independent income that took away the need for work and which freed up their time for study and contemplation, were far more likely than the common worker to be part of that unbroken chain of wisdom. Not every aristo is an empty-headed frivulous fop, Alphonse. The best of them are true servants of the gnosis and merit our true unforced honour.
And Milord Lytton had been assidious and spared no expense in his research, Constant had to admit. One of the purposes His Lordship was using it for was undoubtedly frivolous, but Constant was a writer himself and was currently making a living as the London correspondent of a Parisian daily paper. He understood the compulsion of the imaginative man, to write and to communicate ideas via words on paper.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, baronet, Tory MP, aesthete, intellectual, poet, playwright and novelist, was equally drawn to the big bear-like Frenchman, tonsured and heavily bearded. Their friendship would last a lifetime and take several surprising turns.(2) The author of Pelham, The Last Days of Pompeii , Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes and Harold, the Last of the Saxons, among other things, already had a growing literary reputation. His esoteric interest, especially in Rosicrucianism, informed several of his works. The novel Zanoni3(3) was especially blatant as a manifesto for his maturing occult ideas, which he was keen to discuss with Alphonse Constant.
Bulwer-Lytton would have been gratified, and in one case perhaps horrified, to realise how many long-term seeds his writings planted, with consequences echoing well into the twentieth century. But for now, in the autumn of 1853 with a London fog closing in, he is content to discuss mysteries over a brandy with the strange but congenial French journalist, who was once an unfrocked priest.
Paris, winter 1867.
"Apparently, it's down here somewhere, Crowley." the Angel said. (4) He and the demon had been recalled from North America by their respective sides to locate, identify and assess an occult threat. At Crowley's instigation, they had rented suites at the smartest hotel in town, charging them to expenses, on the grounds that if he'd been put to inconvenience, Hell was bloody well going to going to foot the bill. For both of them, if necessary.
Crowley sniffed the psychic atmosphere. " Là-bas." he murmured, in confirmation. "I haven't sensed it this strongly since the humans started worshipping Moloch, Angel!"
He paused in the grim narrow little alley. This was a part of Paris that was on the list for demolition and rebuilding: the last of Hausmann's civic improvements designed to create broad boulevards impossible to barricade against the appointed forces of law and order. Narrow twisting passages like this, the old Paris, had been too easy for rebels and revolutionaries to defend in 1848. They offered too much scope for unpleasant surprises and anyway served as lodging for unpleasant and unwholesome things. And besides, Hausmann's vision looked prettier and more spacious, it ws impossible to deny. You would not hear of depraved things like... devil-worship... going on in those parts of town that had been gentrified and cleansed of the unreliable and feckless poor.
A dank winter mist coalesced around the legs of Angel and Demon. Rats chittered and scurried in the dark. The Angel's face set in a grim line as he wrapped his opera cloak closely about him. Low chanting could be heard coming from somewhere in the distance. A bat swooped low, attracted by a presence it could not identify but which it sensed it wanted to be close to. The Angel shuddered and brushed it away. Crowley shook his head and made a chittering noise. The bat obediently came to his wrist and hung inverted from it, like a Satanic version of falconry.
"Tell them I'm on the case." Crowley said to it. "Myself and a... fellow agent... are about to enter the premises. I'll write a report later. Got that?"
The bat chittered and flew off.
"Messenger bats." Crowley explained. "Not very bright. But Below's latest idea to improve communications. It'll have seen you in the alley but it'll have taken you to be kosher, as you're with me. It won't look any further."
"well, let's get down there, then. Get it over with." said Aziriphale, decisively. They moved slowly and carefully towards the source of the chanting. A Judas window in a door opened to them. The face of a typical doorkeeper, not very bright but radiating the bloody-minded determination to keep you locked out all night if needs be, appeared. He cleared his throat.
"Without the temple of light..." he intoned. Then he stopped, and looked expectantly at Crowley.
"Oh God, one of those." sighed the demon. The doorkeeper shook his head.
"Nice try, friend, but wrong!"
"Give us a clue, then!" Aziraphile said, eapsperated. The doorman shook his head, grinning at their discomfort. Crowley, more worldly wise than the Angel, proffered a ten-franc note. The doorman looked speculatively at it. Then shook his head.
"Nah, mate. Let you in without the password and Mr Levi, the High and Ineffable Grand Wossname, he'll whip the old consecrated sacrificial knife out and they'll be garters, won't they?"
"We're expected." the Angel said, shortly. With extreme reluctance, another ten franc note appeared.
"In fact, they're calling us now" said Crowley, curtly. "Well, me, anyway."
"Nice try, friend, but the Devil uually manifests himself right in the Temple, dun'e, and he don't usually come knocking on the bloody door for admission. I mean, me, I'd know!" the doorman said, taking the two ten-franc notes.
"No. It's the other side that knocks at the door and waits for admission." the Angel said, lips pursed to invisibility. (5)
"Whereas the people I represent might just kick the door in..."
The doorman paused.
"Tell you what I'll do, gents. You both looks like the sort of gentleman of quality what Mr Levi, the wise and ineffable Grand Wossname, likes to see in his Temple. But I can't go letting you in, not if you don't know the password. So here's what I'll do. I sez to you, right, "Without the Temple of Light..." then I stops. Then you comes back with the response "Then I am only whale-shit." Then I sez again "Which without the Light of Illumination" and stops. Then you conclude with "Is that thing which sinks lower than anything else in God's creation." Then I lets you in."
"You're making it up!" Crowley accused him. The doorkeeper grinned,
"Well, mr Levi did say all this is new and I should use my own initiative." he said. " Delegation, he called it. I'm quite proud of it myself!"
"I've had enough of this." Crowley decided. He focused...
And a few minutes later was retrieving his ten francs back from a catatonic wide-eyed doorman.
"Were the maggots really necessary, Crowley?" the angel asked, fastidiously brushing something off his sleeve.
"No, but you've got to keep in practice." replied the Demon. "Want your money back?"
Aziraphile tucked the ten francs away in the Doorman's top pocket, and implanted a command to him to forget.
And so they entered the Temple of Light. They passed seperate changing rooms for men and women.
"They're not naked in there, are they?" asked the Angel, anxiously.
"They wear robes, as I understand it." said Crowley, shrugging. "It's hard to wear badges of rank on naked bodies. How would you know who's a Lord High Ippsissimus of the Abyss and who's a Neophyte if you didn't? Hard for these people to tell their Art from their Elbirez at the best of times!"
Ever since Freemasonry had emerged in the late seventeenth century, pretending it stood in unbroken line to the secrets of the builders of Solomon's Temple, Crowley had seen all the possibilities for spreading sin that it represented and had cheerfully encouraged the movement. Groups of the emerging middle classes gathering together in secret to play at spirituality, pat each other on the backs, self-select new members, to encourage each other in the belief that they were somehow better than the rest of the human race, and to plot in secret and manipulate things in their favour. What was there for a demon not to like? Crowley had devised silly handshakes that to his astonishment had caught on, and had also hit on the whole rolling-up-the-trouser-leg business because he, Crowley, liked seeing self-important lawyers and merchants and politicians choosing to look ridiculous of their own free will. As well as vanity, pride, avarice, greed and looking ridiculous inside the Masonic Hall, Crowley also relished the suspicion and mistrust aroused outside the Temple, among those who would never be invited to join (women of all classes and men of the less socially advantaged sort.) Outside, people mistrusted the Freemasons, sensing they were being screwed, robbed and swindled by a bunch of self-selecting bastards who had got together to scratch each other's backs , help each other climb the greasy pole, and get off scot-free in court, at everyone else's expense.
Crowley, a 33º Grand Descended Master Of The Scotch Bonnet Rite With Thistle,(6), had been given a Depreciation for Freemasonry. Hell had been very pleased.
This was all very well, but again, Crowley had under-estimated the ability of the human race to think and be imaginatively creative. Freemasonry spread and evolved and schismed. The Grand European Lodges of France and Germany became engines of political dissent. And Crowley had been appalled afterwards to discover a French nobleman, the Duc d'Orleans, had hijacked the French lodge to destabilise the country to the -point where he could depose his cousin and become Louis XVII. Only by the end of the eighteenth century, France needed little destabilising. Orleanist meddling combined with economic woes saw the wrong people taking over the French revolution. It had only ever been intended to be a bloodless coup with one King replacing another. The nobility would have benefited most and concessions would have trickled down to the embryonic middle class, the bourgeouisie. But when the price of bread went up tenfold and the peasants and workers realised they had muscle to flex, it all went wrong for Orleans. The peasants had not been taken into account – they were expected to be docile and bovine and take what their betters deemed good for them.
And in Italy, Freemasonry hybridised with other groups. Cosa Nostra. I Carbonieri. The virtues of silence, vows of obedience, a strict heirarchy and a culture of self-help blended with the Italian concept of family and obedience to a patriarchal figure. Something new emerged in Italy. And it was to win further demerits and depreciations for Crowley.
And then there were the ones who thought deeply and strove to remove even the last shreds of lip-service to Christianity that remained in Freemasonry. There had been the defrocked priest in Bavaria, Adam Weishaupt. And now it was the self-proclaimed defrocked priest in France, Alphonse Constant. Aziraphile had checked. Constant had only ever been kicked out of training for the priesthood after "theological disagreements". He was still a Catholic and could accept the Sacraments as he chose. Only he wasn't calling himself Alphonse Constant these days.
"Amen, malo a nos libera sed, tentationem in inducas nos ne et. Nostris debitoribus dimittimus nos et sicutnostra debita nobis dimitte et..."
Sweating in the thick red gown and horned cap, Eliphaz Levi intoned the words of the service. He had heard that witches of old had cursed by reciting the Bible backwards, this being deliberate inversion and as music to the ears of Satan. He had changed his name from the Christian names his parents had given him, and which a dying Church had baptised onto him. He had thought long and hard about it. He had realised that the pentad, five syllables, split up three-then-two, was the most memorable. The rhythm of the name, the way it was almost sung a well as spoken, made it stick in the mind.
Eliphaz Levi. El-i-phaz Le-vi. In Hebrew, said to be the language of the Angels. The Leader and Teacher. He concentrated on the rhythm of the Latin words. If the deliberate blasphemy did not draw a Demon to the sanctuary, it scarcely mattered. The show and the pantomime was good for the congregants. Lord Lytton looked part horrified and part entranced, which should bring in some more of his money. And if a demon were to show, it wiuld be the icing on the cake...
"...hodie nobis da quotidianum nostrum panem. Terra in et caelo in sicut, tua voluntas Fiat."
Levi saw, or rather sensed, the two new peope entering the Temple. That fool on the door let them in. He would have words later.
" tuum regnum adveniat. Tuum nomen sanctificetur, caelis in es qui, noster Pater! Fiat! Fiat! FIAT!"
The two newcomers were in street clothes. They strode unflinchingly forward, the black-clad one unceremoniously pushing a celebrant aside as he did so.
Crowley noted the pentagram inside the circle, and shook his head. He faced the red-robed high Priest and stared at him.
Levi, slightly un-nerved, had the sense to csrry on speaking Latin.
"How did you enter the Temple?" he demanded. "How did you get in? Quo Vadis?"
Crowley grinned and took his time answering. To the thirteen congregrants, it would have sounded like part of the Ritual.
"My associate here is an Angel of the Presence." he said. And then he strode forwards and Changed again. The congregation screamed. Somebody retched.
"Fool! Do not give it more power!" shouted Levi. Meanwhile, the thing that was also Crowley oozed towards the altar.
"As for me!" it said, "Just think of me as the Lurker at the Threshold. Your doorkeeper saw the good sense of letting me in!"
He beckoned Levi forward. "Do feel free to carry on." he invited the High Priest, in a whisper. "We'll play the game, we'll go when you banish us."
Levi took a deep breath. Fortunately, the celebrants seemed inclined to mistake his fear for anger.
"Foul fiend, hearken! I confine thee to this circle that ye may not leave its bounds nor may ye leave until thou art banished..."
Anthony Crowley stood before them, now an indeterminate figure in black, pointing at Levi and beckoning him closer. He summoned up the appearance of flame around hom, partly to awe and partly to obscure his figure more. They'd seen a glimpse of Dark Crowley, maggots and all; this was a Manifestation he did sparingly because of the effect the maggots had on a Savile Row suit. Now just seeing a huge indeterminiate dark shape wreathed in flickering frame should really get to their petty French bourgeouise imaginations...
Crowley folded his arms and grinned at the effect he was having. This was fun. He heard the Angel say, testily, "Don't ask me. I'm only here as an observer. Look, if he gets out of hand, I tell him off. That's all I can promise. Normally he listens when I rebuke him. Now I'll just stand over here and observe, shall I?"
"Why have I been summoned?" Crowley demanded, putting Satanic harmonics into his voice. He heard the Angel tut. He looked over. Aziraphile was in deep conversation with a couple of robed celebrants, reassuring them they were in no real danger.
"You've all seen the cartoons, yes? The ones where somebody has got a little demon on one shoulder appealing to his bad side, and a little angel on the other shoulder whispering into the ear of his good side? Well, we're the original Angel and the Demon, on opposite shoulders of the whole human race..."
"Vous etes anglais, monsieur l'Ange?"
"What?" Aziraphile was taken aback.
"Well, you speak French like an Englishman..."
And so Crowley attended his first Black Mass. He felt completely at home and wondered how to spread this new devil-worshipping sort of religious expresion. Below would be gratified. Several monstrous egos in the lowest levels needed continual stoking, for one thing. It would draw more human souls down to a different sort of afterlife. And given the lurid stuff he'd been told in the briefings, apart from the maggots, nothing gross had happened: no animal sacrifice, and certainly no...
"I just hope there isn't going to be a naked orgy afterwards." the Angel said, primly.
"Mais non, monsieur l'Ange!" said a shocked French voice, "That is not seemly!"
"They do that sort of thing in the maisons closées." said another French voice. "For sensation. We are respectable seekers after truth!"
Aziraphile reminded himself that even in France, Victorian morality prevailed. (Although Levi heard the comment about nudity and orgies and thought "Hmmmm." )
There will be more!
(1) "The Gospel of the People"
(2) One of the ironies is that this aesthete, a boy who had hated boarding school because of its emphasis on hated sport, lived at Craven Cottage, Fulham, an estate where what had once been his house was pulled down about fifty years later to make way for Fulham FC's football stadium. A discreet blue plaque on the wall of the football club commemorates the association with one of England's minor literary greats.
Zanoni deals with the Immortals, the Eternals, beings who have been in the world since the beginning, one of whom is prepared to sacrifice his immortality for love of a mortal woman. "It so chanced that some years ago, in my younger days, whether of authorship or life, I felt the desire to make myself acquainted with the true origins and tenets of the singular sect known by the name of Rosicrucians."
(4) A later novel dramatising Eliphas Levi's occult temple and its rituals was called "La Bas" - "Down There". This was largely a melodramatic farrago about the Black Mass and its effect on the human soul. The tale of a young man trying to rescue his love from the grip of an occult temple, only to fall into its clutches himself, is believed to have influenced Dennis Wheatley to write the Devil Rides Out.
(5) Ref. Holman Hunt's classic portrayal of Christ in the painting The Light of the World, where Jesus, like any other good supernatural entity, has to wait at the door for permission to enter.
(6) He had reasoned that he should be able to pull rank on just about everyone in Freemasonry, and had had the robes and apron made up specially. Scotch Bonnets are a very potent form of chili and Crowley decreed their use in the corresponding ordeal for postulants to the rank. And the Scotch Bonnet Rite is, believe me, an ordeal .