Free Sway by Zachary Lazar Page B

looking
     at it, not only the book in general but the specific copy he held in his hands.
    He bought it for twelve dollars, a fortune in 1944, when even the bus schedules bore the words “Don’t waste timetables; paper
     is a vital war material.” The man at the counter told him casually, almost skeptically, that the author was a drug addict
     and famous satanist. He knew before he’d even got it home that he had at last stumbled upon the secret door into that parallel
     world he had always hoped was there.
    According to
The Sephiroth,
the world was a shifting fabric of reality and dream. There were people who without knowing it took on the attributes of
     certain mythological figures or gods. This could make them purposeful and bold, like Prometheus or Cain, or could render them
     passive and wounded, like Vulcan, the archetype of the artist. There were cold, solitary spirits like the huntress Diana,
     and tricksters like Hermes and Pan, and communers with the dead, like Hecate and Persephone. There were stern, paternal figures,
     like Shiva or the risen Christ, and there were law-abiding slaves like Mary or Job. You had little choice as to which of these
     spirits inhabited you personally. Indeed, most people spent their whole lives in a futile effort to become someone they were
     not meant to be: powerful when they were born weak, wise when they were born to take commands. All unhappiness stemmed from
     just this misperception: the failure to know one’s true nature or the obstinate refusal to embrace it. Your date of birth,
     the letters of your name, the color of your eyes, the lines on the palms of your hands — everything in the world was encrypted
     with the secret and conflicting information that determined the kind of life you were meant to lead.
    There were a few rare souls who saw through to this pattern in things and could change it according to their wills. These
     people were called magi, bringers of the age of Horus, the old Egyptian sun god, who would put an end to the submissive, feminine
     sway of Isis and the prohibitive, masculine sway of Osiris. They were the children of Lucifer, the bringer of light, who signified
     the end of all opposites and dualities.
    Male and female, self and other, reality and dream. At the meeting point of these opposites was a zone of energy and pain
     where the spirit of Lucifer burned in isolation. It was the wild chaos of orgasm, the music of war, the entranced stupor of
     hallucination. Only a few could even perceive this zone. To penetrate it was to negate any difference between good and evil,
     life and death, desire and fear.
    He kept reading
The Sephiroth
even when he could no longer think about its words with any acuity. He kept looking at it even when he knew it was not going
     to give him any more Pleasure, but only fatigue and hollowness. It was something he had to keep struggling with, like his
     body, even when its mystery was no longer interesting but blurred and tangled and exasperating.
    He had a dream one night of a mob chasing after him: the soldiers from the newsreels, the students at his high school, the
     cruising men on the piers, all of them chasing him down, tearing at his clothes. They forced him to the pavement and began
     to kick him and scratch his face. When he woke up, he was unable to recognize his bedroom for a moment. Then, as always, the
     pictures of gods and heroes on his walls appeared to regard him with a solemn, knowing complicity. For a moment, they were
     more real than he was — they were the hidden movers inside him. It was in this way that he had his first visceral understanding
     of what was meant by the word “magick.”
    For a brief period that fall, a boy named Ted Drake had attended his school. He was a tall, hawk-nosed kid who in some misguided
     effort to make a place for himself would pick fights in the parking lot. Kenneth had seen him in the hall one day with a dark
     cut over his eye and a broken hand wrapped in