Free Masks of the Illuminati by Robert A. Wilson Page A

life are psychological, not cardboard, but nonetheless serve to hide each from his fellows; Society is the Devil’s Masquerade.
    When Sir John met next with Jones at the latter’s home in Soho, the dreams of the Dark Tower were discussed at length and Sir John proudly exhibited his decoding of their symbolism, especially the allegory of the masks.
    “True enough,” Jones said. “But it is also a rule of our Order that nobody in it ever knows personally any more than one other member. The masks used in initiations help enforce that rule.”
    “And what, pray, is the purpose of that?”
    “Mars is the patron god of all societies,” Jones said grimly. “Competition smashed the first Golden Dawn lodge in London. Everybody
knew
everybody, so we all fell into transcendental egotism—‘my Illumination is higher than your Illumination,’ that sort of thing—and the Devil of Disputation drove us apart. We don’t repeat any of our mistakes, Sir John. From here on, except for very special emergencies, perhaps, you will meet nobody else in the lodge but myself, until somebody higher up replaces me as your teacher. If we don’t know one another, we can’t fall into rivalries.”
    This radical decentralization was a double-edged device, Sir John soon realized. Not only was he spared the waste of time and energy that might have been spent wondering if he were progressing faster or slower than another student, but the mystery created by this lack of sociability had a subtle and new effect on all his perceptions of other human beings.
    At first, he would merely wonder, if somebody made a remark that seemed more insightful than usual, “Could it be … is he one of us, too?” Was Shakespeare in the Invisible College? The head waiter at Claridge’s?
Just how many members were there?
It was impossible to get a literal answer out of Jones about this. “The question itself implies a Probationer’s ignorance about the true nature of Space and Time,” was all Jones would contribute on that subject. Sir John began to wonder, every time he read the familiar newspaper yarn about a person rescued from danger by a Mysterious Stranger who immediately vanished without accepting thanks or leaving his name. “Another of us?” Sir John would speculate romantically, seeing the protective hand of the Great White Brotherhood everywhere. Of course, as a Cambridge graduate, he had imbibed, at least by osmosis, something of modern skeptical scholarship, and he knew all this might be mere infatuation with a wonderful myth.
    But, on the other hand, one could not expect to be provided with special spectacles allowing the members of the Invisible College to see each other, could one?
    And the enigma of hermetic societies was more subtle than that, Sir John was to discover. The Golden Dawn, after all, was allegedly continuing the unbroken tradition of the original Invisible College of the Rosy Cross, whose members “wore the garb and adapted the manners” of the country in which they resided. Sir John soon found that even the most inane remarks or offensive behavior would trigger the same question:
“Another
of us?” How many Adepts might there be, traveling about in the guise of ordinary humanity, carefully hiding their advanced state behind a masquerade of socially normal stupidity or conformity? Jesus allowed Himself to be spat upon, whipped, mocked and crucified; the Golden Dawn literature made it abundantly clear that a true Adept might play any role or suffer any humiliation in order to accomplishhis or her special Work: The Fool may be The Magus in disguise.
    Sir John was simultaneously devouring tons of mystical literature from all nations and all ages, dumped on him ten volumes at a time by Jones. Written examinations once a month determined that he understood, at least verbally, what he read.
    “But I am a Christian,” Sir John protested once.
    “Nor do we wish to make you any more or less than that,” Jones replied. “But to