Free Masks of the Illuminati by Robert A. Wilson

Hinterstoisser to Colin Wilson,
The Necronomicon
with commentaries, Neville Spearman Co., Suffolk, 1978.

    Sir John reflected on the “History Lection” for two days before deciding how much further he dared go. Then he wrote back to Jones and begged admission to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as a Probationer.
    And so he crossed the thrice-sealed door and passed over from being a student of occult history to being a tentative and nervous practitioner of occult arts, wherein he was soon to learn that we are in fact such stuff as dreams are made of, and that Sir Talis is inescapable.
    Sir John was initiated on the night of July 23, 1910—exactly 307 years to the day after the knighting of Sir Francis Bacon, the alleged Grandmaster of the Invisible College in Elizabethan England (according to Golden Dawn documents—which also claimed such illustrious members as Sir Richard Francis Burton, Paul Gauguin, Richard Wagner, King Ludwig of Bavaria, Wolfgang von Goethe, Adam Weishaupt, Dr. John Dee, Pope Alexander VI, Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus, Christian Rosenkreutz, Giordano Bruno, Jacques de Molay, Newton, Beethoven, Merlin, Rabelais, Vergil, Jesus, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Solomon, Osiris and Krishna, among others). About the initiation itself, Sir John, true to his Oath, never revealed any details, even on that night in Zürich when, with the
Föhn
witch-wind beating at the windows, he recounted his extraordinary adventures to James Joyce and Professor Albert Einstein. Some veils shall never be lifted; Babcock would not lift that particular veil.
        Three nights after the initiation, Sir John experienced it over again, in the form of another hermetic dream. He was being led, blindfolded, to the throne of the South where opens the window of the Silver Star in night’s roaman indigo.
    “Who comes here?” asked the Gordean, Sir Francis Bacon.
    “One who seeks the Light,” Sir John replied, according to the traditional Masonic formula explained to him before the ceremony.
    “Humankind cannot bear very much Light,” said Nightrix in a watery voice. “Look upon what little you domesticated mammals are presently prepared to receive.”
    There was a spouter inn the weib and Sir John found himself back again at the Tower Struck By Lightning. Sir Talis, a gorged hairyman, was counting out his honi. Sir Joan crept past ovaseer Peep parsing as somndreamist and found hirselves in a vast humming hive (decliner flying, mythra o vid: what a man dasn’t shame) where madmen struggled frantically to kill each other, cursing and screaming, “You will, whisker, you will!” and clutching daggers gats dirks goaters and broken bottle shards, uttering vowelth, muttering foulth, as all sank into dank, dark blood-red fetid moonslime. “Kid goaters!” they howled. “And that the Vril is strong!” A medieval scroll was unrolled, Indie, Norse, Russian, Irish, veryvery long but veryvery dutiful, saying:
DO NOT THROW BUTTS IN THE URINAL: FOR THEY ARE SUBTLE AND SWIFT TO ANGER
    Sed, the whole’s arpent of entry, a muddy murky leaky John, pressed cowrin throngs upon him, shrieking, “Fear the forgotten!”
    “These,” said Nud the Allmousey (Eutaenius Microstemmus) in eagulls clause, “are those who came this way without the Cup of Sympathy. Each imagines all the others to be terrifying demons and thinks he acts only in self-defense. Tragic, and ironic, is it not?”
    Sir John awoke with a start.
    “Suffering Christ!” he said, without any profane intent. Was that dream a vision of how humanity looked from the viewpoint of an Illuminated mind?
    “A real initiation never ends,” Jones had said cryptically, before the physical-plane initiation. Sir John understood: the dream, in its own language, was indeed a continuation of the initiation, but on another plane. Even the masks used in the actual ceremony were now, in the light of the dream’s clear message, an allegory, not a mere bit of theatrical mummery. The masks worn in ordinary