Authors: Jonathan Aycliffe
I skimmed the surface of it all like a skater who fears thin ice and a plunge into deep, ice-cold waters. Most of the books I read were trite, poorly executed, badly written, and repetitive. I had to remind myself daily that I was not there to sit in judgement, but to understand.
By the end of December I persuaded myself that I had read as much as I needed. I knew my way, stumblingly but accurately enough, across this unfamiliar terrain: sufficient to hold my own in conversations, to formulate my first, faltering questions, to grasp, with some effort, the answers I might be given. I made my first contact with some of the city’s esoteric groups, restricting myself to the more popular and mainstream among them.
I reasoned – and was in due course proved correct – that direct contact with magical or Satanic groups might be difficult to establish. These were people who either had something to hide or fancied they did – they would not rush out of the shadows to be interviewed by the first passer-by. But I had read enough about the occult underworld to know that groups shaded into one another, as did beliefs and practices. Those who practised magic or demonism today had in all likelihood started out attending meetings of much milder associations, with Subud or Theosophy or Rosicrucianism, or one of the circles devoted to the teachings of Ouspensky or Gurdjieff.
A sociologist is not a journalist and cannot afford to work like one. Where the journalist can write a prize-winning article on the basis of a single visit or half a dozen interviews, and is free to offend or misrepresent since he need never return again, the sociologist needs to tread warily. He may have to spend months gradually getting to know the people whose behaviour and beliefs he is researching, winning their confidence, discarding first impressions, inspiring revelations of their deeper feelings and convictions. It is delicate work, calling for human understanding as much as scientific detachment.
So it was that most evenings found me in damp, ill-heated rooms or rented halls, listening to talks on Atlantis, the Himalayan Masters, Hermetic lore, or alchemy. The speakers were surprisingly varied. Many belonged to an earlier generation, itself the heir of late Victorian occultism. Intense, shabby or a little overdressed, their speech full of archaisms, they presided over gatherings of the long-term faithful. Dust filled the rooms in which they spoke, old rooms lined with shelves of arcane books with unreadable titles. I would pass into a half-sleep as their voices droned on about astral bodies or the lost continent of Lemuria.
Others were much younger, a new generation of enthusiasts, more interested in morphic resonance or corn circles than the tired fantasies of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant. It was among them, I thought, that I would make my first contacts with the people I most wanted to meet. I listened carefully, biding my time, gaining their trust, waiting to see who talked most of the magical arts, who hinted at things they might say if they chose to but which they thought it best to conceal. I told no one I was a university researcher, knowing the suspicion it might provoke; instead, I let people believe I was a mature student in the Classics department. Later, when some of them knew me better and trusted me, I might reveal the truth.
During the days, I continued my studies in the library. By February, my life was divided between it and the rooms where I attended my almost nightly lectures. I visited the university very seldom, to pick up mail and remind Fergusson that I was still alive. My reading habits changed. I had covered enough of the general literature to get by in discussions and the chit-chat that inevitably followed the meetings I attended, but I was still largely ignorant of the world I hoped to penetrate.
I found all the books I could on magic, beginning with Eliphas Lévi’s
Dogme et rituel de la haute magie
and sundry works of Aleister Crowley, before going on to Ficino and Dee. Dark mysteries, arcane secrets, and page after page of gibberish. I found it wearying work, ploughing through it all, not in search of truth or power, but as a means of fashioning a mask for myself.
But a mask is only a mask, and if it is tied on with string, so much the more visible. I needed something more than the names of authors I had read, and jargon I had mastered. In the middle of April, I started to practise some of the rites prescribed in the books of ritual magic I had read so far. I chalked circles and pentagrams on my bare floorboards, lit candles, recited incantations in Latin, Greek, Old French, Middle English, and languages I did not even recognize.
At first I felt ridiculous, but as time passed and I grew familiar with the rituals, I began to find them curiously relaxing, almost hypnotic. That in itself was interesting, and I determined to consult someone in the psychology department. It might be possible to explain involvement in occultism by a need for ritual and the psychological comforts it could bring. I understood nothing then. I was still a child.
Spring passed, and summer. The musty, book-lined rooms grew a little warmer, the dust thickened on the shelves and was visible in sudden, unexpected shafts of sunlight that seemed to come from a different world. I had no time for anything but work, I wanted nothing but to wrap myself in it as a shield against the pain that dogged me, ready at any moment to hurl itself on my back and pull me to the ground.
I did, however, make a couple of friends. In late August, I started a series of seminars for staff and postgraduate students at New College, the Church of Scotland seminary off The Mound. They were organized by a lecturer of roughly my own age called Iain Gillespie. Although he was an ordained minister, he preferred academic work to running a parish, and I quickly found him to be open-minded and genuinely interested in my research.
He came with me to some meetings of the Theosophists and Rosicrucians, and I lent him some of my books. A few of his more fundamentalist colleagues had warned him of what they considered the growing peril of satanic child abuse, and he was keen to find out what he could for himself.
‘I don’t believe most of those stories,’ I told him after a seminar in which the subject had been raised. ‘I’ve seen no real evidence that what is involved is more than childish imagination. Your evangelical friends need satanic abuse in order to confirm their belief that the devil is at work in the world today. Since I don’t believe in a devil, I find it hard to credit the stories they put about.’
‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe in a devil either, at least not one with horns and a tail. But I do believe in evil. There are evil men, evil actions, even evil places. I think you should take care where you go and who you talk to.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I assured him. ‘These people are sad, not evil.’
He brought me home for dinner several times, and introduced me to his wife, Harriet. They lived in Dean Village, in a modern flat overlooking the Water of Leith. As I had expected, they were both regular churchgoers, but I found them disinclined to preach or question. I made my own agnosticism clear to Harriet early on, and that was almost the last that was ever said on the subject.
Harriet taught English at the Mary Erskine school, one of the city’s three Merchant Company academies, a short drive from Dean Village, at the other end of Ravelston Dykes. We discovered a mutual love of Hardy and a common distaste for much modern literature. She knew no Gaelic, and I found myself promising one evening after we had eaten that I would teach her a little, so she might read some of the fine poetry my father had read to me from my childhood onwards.
In September, I started to spend an increasing amount of time with one group in particular, the Fraternity of the Old Path. They owned a house in Ainslie Place, a delightful oval of Georgian dwellings in the New Town, donated around the turn of the century by a leading devotee. Small in number though they were, they proved in many ways the most interesting of the many groups I studied. They held a set of doctrines centred round the belief that true knowledge had been lost after the fall of Rome and that gnosis could only be obtained today through the performance of elaborate rituals loosely based on what was known of the ancient Greek and Egyptian mysteries. By performing the rites in the correct frame of mind and with due attentiveness, the acolyte might hope to reach a state of divine ecstasy in which gnosis would be poured into him like wine into an empty vessel. They needed neither drugs nor sex to attain union with their higher selves – or so they claimed.
They permitted me to attend many of their ceremonies, ceremonies which, in all honesty, I found to be no more than ragged pantomimes based on a limited familiarity with the rites they sought to imitate. Greek and Latin words and phrases were mixed indiscriminately and with little accuracy; early Egyptian divinities were invoked alongside foreign importations of the Ptolemaic period; costumes fashioned from pictures in popular books of Egyptology made the rites seem not unlike scenes from an amateur operatic society’s production of Aida; and broad Scottish accents called incongruously on dead gods of the desert and the starry wastes of Thebes.
Yet there was a terrible seriousness in their voices and an assumed dignity in their long-rehearsed movements that transcended all the tawdriness and inarticulate striving after grace. Like their originals in the dim candlelit temples of Isis or Mithras – or so I imagine – they somehow achieved an elevation, a discarding of the everyday self and the putting on of new robes in a new consciousness. At times, the discordant jangling of cymbals and the taut repetition of muffled drums gave way to a muted harmony that embraced all present. And I sensed that, for some of them at least, the mysteries of Horus might be no more than a vestibule leading to a vast hall occupied by older and darker gods.
There was another attraction for me in the Fraternity of the Old Path: their extensive library of books on the occult. By the late spring, I found the resources of the National Library yielding less and less to whet my growing appetite for esoteric reading matter. Indeed, I had begun to suspect that the library staff were reluctant or for some reason unable to provide me with many of the volumes I needed. In particular, certain older texts, works on magic dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were declared unavailable or subject to severe restrictions. I would be told that a binding was loose, or the paper fragile, or the volume missing, presumed stolen.
I began to frequent second-hand and antiquarian bookshops in the hope of tracking down a few items I needed to consult on a regular basis, works like Walker’s
Spiritual & Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella
and Waite’s
Real History of the Rosicrucians.
From time to time I would stumble across something of interest, but the occult sections of these shops were dispiriting jumbles, their shelves crammed for the most part full of naïve popularizations and sensational books on the ‘mysteries of the universe’. Once, I found a copy of Scott’s translation of Ficino’s Latin translation of the
Corpus Hermeticum.
But I could never track down anything published earlier than the nineteenth century, though I looked hard enough. I never even bothered to travel to shops in London, where such treasures might be easier to come by, for I knew without asking that they would be well outside my price range.
When I explained the situation to the Fraternity’s librarian, a white-haired Pole called Jurczyk, he agreed at once to let me have free access to any books that might be of use to me, provided I read them on the premises. I guessed that he was only too delighted to have a serious enquirer making use of his precious but virtually unread collection. He gave me a key and detailed instructions about lights, heating, and locking up. I began to spend my days at Ainslie Place. Sometimes I would read from morning until late at night. No one ever disturbed me there; it was a dim, quiet room in an empty house. I had as much solitude as I wanted. There were days on end when I didn’t speak to a soul. I would go from my rooms in Canongate directly to Ainslie Place and shut myself up there in that little library. There was sunlight through the streets all summer, but I saw little of it. The darkness had begun to fold itself about me. I had my books; they were all I wanted.
As autumn came on and the days shortened, I grew a little uneasy in the library at night. It was often dark when I left, the streets not quite deserted, but hushed. The sound of my footsteps would carry long distances in the silence. I would hurry home to my little fire and go to bed uneasy. At the beginning of October I started to have bad dreams. They would waken me in the middle of the night, but I could never remember what it was that had frightened me. All that remained when I woke was the sound of a sibilant voice whispering in my ears, as though someone had been bending down beside my pillow. Someone I should not like to have set eyes upon.
It was late in November when matters began to take a more sinister turn. I arrived at the Fraternity’s headquarters one Friday night, later than usual. It was about nine o’clock, and I knew no one would be about. I had been occupied all day with a group of Iain’s students, to whom I had been invited to explain the nature and direction of my researches. A meal had followed, together with some close questioning from Iain’s head of department, the Reverend Professor Craigie. He wanted to see me again the following day in order to pursue several important questions I had been unable to answer to his satisfaction, and I had no choice but to go there and dig more deeply into some volumes I knew I would find in the Fraternity library.
The Fraternity’s rooms occupied two floors of a three- storey building. The ground floor was occupied by a large and a small meeting room, a small kitchen, a bathroom, and a storage room where the regalia and other ritual equipment were kept. Upstairs were the office, the guest room, where visitors were allowed to stay for one or two nights, and the library, which had been created from three smaller rooms.
The second floor was empty. It had previously been rented from the Fraternity by the Misses Frazer, spinster members of the group almost since its inception. They had, so Mr Jurczyk told me, died at a greatly advanced age a year or so earlier, within three days of one another. The Fraternity had not yet got round to finding new tenants.