the first two chapters of
ELMER CROWLEY
a katabasic nekyia

Weishaupt was stoned.... He imagined the shoggoth was a rabbit and said, "du hexen Hase," which has been preserved as an in-joke by Illuminati agents in Hollywood. It runs through the Bugs Bunny cartoons: "You wascal wabbit!"
--Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus Trilogy

Her firstborn son...was remarkable from the moment of his arrival. He bore on his body the three most important distinguishing marks of a Buddha. He was tongue-tied, and on the second day of his incarnation a surgeon cut the fraenum linguae. He had also the characteristic membrane, which necessitated an operation for phimosis some three lustres later. Lastly, he had upon the centre of his heart four hairs curling from left to right in the exact form of a Swastika.
--Aleister Crowley, Autohagiography

Beings entirely in Avichi are born and reborn without interruption.
--Mahatma Koot Hoomi, Letter to A. P. Sinnett

i .

It's been just two years and some months since my magickal child shot himself in the Berlin bunker. He enjoyed quite a romp through Poland and so forth after queefing out of my psychic vagina at an unguarded moment. I was but a lad, distracted by my father's death of tongue cancer, when Der future Fuhrer flopped from my left auditory meatus like a menstrual clot with incipient toothbrush mustache.

Or else he hasn't gone and assassinated himself at all. Maybe my pugnacious brain baby seeped into the bunker's floor drain, along with the hairy dregs of the whipped cream that constituted his sole earthly vice (apart from the syringes of methamphetamine). That's right: a U-boat was docked and waiting deep in the rapid transit tunnel (this is the real reason the subways were flooded), to whisk him away to the north pole, where he now gets to lounge around and behave like Vishnu's tenth avatar or a bodhisattva or something. Or is it the south pole?

I should ask the Chileans. They're the ones busily cooking up this dish of doctrines. Under better circumstances, idle curiosity might compel me to drop by Santiago and have a chat. I suppose it's too late in the geopolitical day to apply for a discreet travel allowance from MI-5. And I don't reckon remuneration would be forthcoming from the Office of Strategic Services in exchange for any intelligence gleaned among the gauchos.

When Esoteric Hitlerism got boring, I could take a run at the astounding Andes on the outskirts of town. Volcanoes and such. But today I'm far from taking runs at much of anything intransigent as a mountain. This particular body's no longer young. My sole consolation (apart from the syringes of heroin) is that it won't be getting any older.

No more time for transoceanic jaunts. I must navigate an even less solid element now.

ii .

So, let's sort this out, shall we?

My expiring eyeballs see no sevenfold Gnostic heavens corkscrewing upward. No series of Tibetan liminalities relieve this darkness with light, clear or smoke-colored. Something else materializes and looms up, rather more architectural. It appears the Egyptians came closer than anyone to getting it right.

The hierophants of the latter civilization had a way to deal with any wide-eyed Greeklings who might wander by. They took the quaint islanders to places of worship and wowed them with limestone monumentality. For my part, I was not reared in the popish confession (far from it), but I'm wise to hierophantic ways. At the big vicarage in Rome, practitioners of priestcraft point out hash marks on the floor that indicate where monotheism's other pretentious buildings would come to rest if Jehovah were to reach down and rattle them like dice inside the Basilica of Basilicas. Well, I can now report the existence of a hall that could warehouse several thousand shipping containers chock-full of charm bracelets from which Saint Peter's townhouse might dangle.

Here we have your pillars lathed from sentient opal, studded with your high-grade star stuff, rising to a vaulted ceiling twelve times higher than Orion's ithyphallus. Between the throbbing pillars we have your Everest-dwarfing judgement seats, row upon row, extending to a vanishing point in the deep reaches of this better than average example of the bricklayer's art. And on those thrones we see the Divine Kings. They're helmed in the expected flame, a dragon crest on one, another plumed with coruscating peacock eyes. Others boast beastie heads on their shoulders and animal suits on their bodies. They sit tight as Lincoln in his Memorial on that other Mall--if you'll forgive the intrusion of >Amurrkan imagery. (Not sure why that particular inferno just popped into my head.)

I wonder how dead communists are supposed to react to this splendiferousness. What sort of arrangements are made for defunct commissars and apparatchiks and proles and so forth when they're shunted here in their turn, as I assume everyone eventually is? Do they find it too terribly off-putting to consider the brimming Atlantics of blood and the swollen Pacifics of sweat that must have been wrung from gangs of demon-slaves in completing this construction project? Here is revealed the deeper truth beneath those famous words from the whiskery one himself:

Religion...is the soul of soulless conditions.

No doubt, Bolsheviks and their sort really are born congenitally deficient of the astral monad, just as they theorize, and they do return to the soil, to be reduced to their constituent minerals and duly recycled into socially useful tractor parts. Or maybe they get rammed as rivets into the I-beams of a Workers' Palace, complete with memorial to the war dead, Schumann's Traumerei weeping paradoxically on the public address system. In any case, they're spared from running this errand of mine, because my itinerary as outlined in the hieroglyphics of the funerary text is a mere figment of a slave state's leisured decadence.

Well, guess who's just made his grand entrance into this figment. None other than the most gargantuan magus of post-Renaissance times, and the most magickal Gargantua. After a lifetime of work (several lifetimes, in fact), it's not self-flattery to declare my Body of Light, my solar organism, rarefied and self-incandescent. I illumine my own path, I auto-spotlight and brim and glow with justified expectations of being hailed by my immortal kin.

Having just disembarked from the ultimate of his many life boats, The Master Therion returns from his pilgrimage, no longer a god in exile, but now an initiate whose coat of skin has been doffed for the final time. So, here I am, boys. This is your cue. You tall golden masters of Heaven's guild will now leap up from your comfy chairs, hands uplifted to be shaken in greeting.

Any time now...in this timeless place.