In celebration of 50 years.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Letter to a Young Enforcer
§1.
Inevitably you will have arrived here bearing certain preconceptions, certain received ideas – we dare even to say it: certain prejudices – regarding the content of our work. These received ideas may, within limits, be accurate; however they may also be inaccurate, also within limits. It is appropriate therefore, ahead of your commencing to train at our many-historied Office, that a clarity is brought to you concerning what it is that we do, and why.
§2.
Let us immediately dispense with the most prevalent notions regarding our Office, notions which though partially true foreclose in their half-truth a clear understanding of what it is they ostend to represent. You will have heard that our business is tendentiously called Enforcement, and that by this term what is meant is a host of activities centred on the use of coercive force. Such activities include but are not limited to the enforcement of material and immaterial debt remediation, the preservation of property rights according to contract, and the retrieval and prosecution of designates for Sealing. Now this is partially true, as we have established. It is true in the sense that there is a subordinate element of our Office which is aptly named the Department of Enforcement, and whose duties are, to a great measure, exhausted by the description supra. It is however false in the sense that this element is but one – a disproportionately prominent element by dint of the nature of its activities – which stands among a larger array of elements, others of which possess duties entirely outside the scope of what is understood by Enforcement. The part must not be mistaken for the whole: for it is only in relation to the whole that we may understand the precise role and nature of the part.
§3.
Then what is the whole, you ask? Let us dispense with another prevalent notion. You will have heard that the task of our Office in general is that of maintaining a strict obscurity, an occultation of certain aspects of reality from the secular society at large. It is therefore our duty to apply both prophylactic, deterrent, and curative methods to such instances in which such esoteric secrets might be exposed to wider audiences than they ought ever be exposed to. In the event of an accidental and unforeseen exposure it becomes our duty to destroy evidence, erase memories, and as cleanly as possibly suture closed the smooth fabric of secular, worldly, material reality such that what is immaterial held behind that fabric does not escape. You will have heard that our task is so defined. Is this the case in actuality? Again, it is a partial truth. It is true that our duties are inclusive of those which in antiquity were incumbent upon all who partook of mystery. As in the ancient cult of Isis, or Cybele, or the theurgists of the Orient or how many others: it is only in passing through the many tiers of initiation that Man becomes privy to the truly esoteric truth. There is no royal road to science; there is no special dispensation, only the certain propensity imbued in one's character at birth. And initiation is a hard path, the very hardest on this Earth. Vanishingly few today have the substance of spirit to enter into even the first tier, let alone the heights beyond. To break the confidence of the initiatory closure was in ancient times, and is now, a grave breach punishable by death. Not merely because the circle of initiation must, of necessity, be a closed circle, but also because the truths enclosed by these circles are of a nature so rarefied and arcane that, for those uninitiated and by dint of their spiritual dearth unable to be initiated, taking hold of them can be extremely damaging. It is therefore, to a degree, out of a certain compassion that we work to conceal.
§4.
Yet this is, as we have said, only a partial truth. It is partial because as heretofore formulated it does not grasp the essential character of our working toward the end described. If we are to simplify things greatly, we may say that the secular world, the worldly world, the world of matter that is ruled by a total logic of its own enclosure and dwelt in by men who partake of that logic, is to a remarkable degree self-suturing. It is this, in the present tense, and has become increasingly so over the past two or three hundred years at an accelerated pace. The mentality of those who are subordinate to the secular things are by dint of that subordination profoundly uninterested in what is profound. They do not care for the esoteric, for what is esoteric has no place in the logic that is closed around them as if in iron. They will ignore it, for there is no profit in it; they ignore it even if it appears right in front of their faces. You may walk into the most crowded street of our metropolis – let us say, Piccadilly – and expose to the yet unknowing world the most subtle of arcana, the power borne of the Great Art, and the men of logic who look upon you will see nothing, nothing but a conjuring-trick, an amusement for simpletons. Else they will write it off as inexplicable and therefore pointless, irrelevant to speculate upon. Should one or two take an interest, should some spark of will to gnosis be found inherent in them, this is nothing more than a trifle. Their experience may trouble them later, may haunt them, but in time the character of the secular mass, the mob, will crush them – else it will find them mad, and lock them away for good. This is the character of the secular world taken into the subjective realm, that is to say, the secular mentality. In this way we may say that our duties in the area of concealment properly so-called – though they do indeed exist, and there are occasions in which we are called to conceal, to erase, to hide – are somewhat less arduous than they may appear. By the secular world's own nature this work is mostly done for us.
§5.
You will have heard that we are called nettoyeurs by some. This appellation, once derogatory, originated in the days when the Francophones had a good majority here in London; though they retain a plurality, their position is not what it once was. The word nettoyeur means 'cleaner' in a thoroughly mundane sense, and it was, one supposes, to allude to the character of our duties which suggests by analogy those of a cleaner: namely that we, as it were, 'clean up' messes that have been made by others, that we eliminate their traces and return the environs to an unmolested status. We have said it was once derogatory; it has by now rather been adopted with a certain affection, and there is a reason why. Allow yourself to investigate the origin of this word, nettoyeur, and you shall discover ultimately its roots in the great tree of the Romance languages, that is to say, the Latin adjective nitidus, meaning something that shines, glitters, is radiant and bright, that betrays a handsome sheen. We find this amply appropriate to the actual content of our work. It is not true that what we do in the service of preserving the esoteric should be understood as an obscuring, as the artificial creation of gaps, areas of shade in the world-image of secular knowledge. Rather more often what we do is precisely the opposite. We create not gaps but abundances. We create radiances that attract, as a light in the dark attracts insects.
§6.
Let us amend the picture we drew above of the secular world as a kind of coherent fabric which sutures itself when torn. Let us instead allow that this fabric is, in some parts, folded, wrinkled, that it contains narrow interstices which do not admit themselves to the public expanse of acknowledged reality. These are the essentially private realities of small groups of secular individuals. It is not wholly true, as we intimated supra, that the secular mass will always crush any heterogeneity within itself. The human will to higher immaterial knowledge, though almost always lacking the spiritual refinement needed to attain it, has only been imperfectly exterminated by the logic closed in iron of the secular world. The mentality can exist that demands respite from the world of logic, and seeks it in the private realm, the fold of the communal fabric, twisted around the figure of some unselfish teacher before which they can humble and abase and divest themselves of the anxiety of their ignorance. You will have heard in the ceaseless discourse of the secular collectivity the ever-present spectre of what is called spirituality, of celebrity figures with names from the recent past such as Krishnamurti and Crowley and Gurdjieff and Blavatskaya, of popular astrology, spurious theosophy, notional 'Satanism', 'magick' spelt with a 'k', fashions for chemically-induced enlightenment, and so forth. This spirituality frequently bears a superficial resemblance to the initiatory circles of the esoteric which existed centuries ago. They indeed seem frequently to be a confused regurgitation of prior elements, flotsam and jetsam of what was in the past exposed – however accidentally – of the hidden tradition, assembled into things rich and strange, uncanny and captivating forms. Those who are drawn to these captivating radiances are almost always, but not entirely always, spiritually bereft, entirely dead to the immaterial, though they as it were retain some of the bodily and mental organs by which such immaterial contact might have been mediated and for that reason, instinctively, have some animal impulse to seek out what scrap of a pathway to gnosis they can scrape from the iron logic of the secular world. They are those that are unable to neutralise this element in their mentality, and therefore seek shelter together in some fold of the fabric of the public reality: for one of them alone will be found a madman, but many together make, in their minds, something like a faith or a congregation. In precisely the same way the notion of madness 'captures' these errant individuals in the name of the secular society, these errant collectives are 'captured' by charismatic figures around whom the public continuum of reality twists into a distinct private region. We for this reason refer to this kind of arrangement as an apparatus of capture.
§7.
Yes, they are ours. Not all, but most, and almost all that are not ours are the creations of similar Offices within the other great branches of our Association. We have produced them in various ways, by means of our own devising. We have produced them, these folk: these sheikhs and gurus of the logical age, these notionally 'secret societies', 'black lodges' or 'new religious movements', faiths at once like and wholly unlike the older edifices, which fill the incomplete hearts of men who have failed to wholly make a god of logic. We ourselves began this work in earnest in the seventeenth century, the other branches perhaps even earlier. We have grown increasingly efficient at it since that time. It is not necessary for us in general to hide the evidence of esoteric knowledge and practice, for the secular realm of logic will do this for us or make it otherwise unnecessary. It rather remains to us, to the nettoyeurs that we are, to clean up the irrational remains of that rational realm, to assemble for them bright radiances and thereby draw them in, lighted with false fire. We create the apparatuses of capture: with them, we capture masses – rich or poor, white or black, nameless or celebrity, it matters not – and gather together their mostly-futile strivings for gnosis for our purposes. What purposes? It has ever served four: first, as a shield from and misdirection for our opponents, chiefly the Papists and their hegemonising Christ-cult. Second, it has served to discover on those very rare cases some instances of real spiritual talent. In such instances the apparatus of capture has landed a great catch indeed, and the matter is taken into the hands of our superiors who appraise it and see what should be done. Third, it serves as an immanent mechanism for gathering information beneath the systems of dissemination which traverse and constitute the smooth space of the secular public. Fourth, in certain limited cases it serves as a faculty by which a measure of control can be effected over the ruling strata of the secular world – just as, ages ago, initiates of the esoteric had the ear of princes. So too do they now.
§8.
Do we therefore regard ourselves as great liars and fabricators of false traditions? No. This is a misidentification of what it is that we do. What is the great task of our Office if not the jealous guarding, the fatherly protection, the motherly nurturing of the esoteric like a precious, delicate egg of a near-extinct bird of paradise? Nothing. And what is it that shields the esoteric? What guards it from the secular world, from that realm of logic which can only be damaged by its treasures? Precisely the exoteric: the sphere of publicly-declared knowledge which reveals only that which is allowable and useful to be revealed, and which in its operation can divide for us the truth-seeker bearing spirit and will to seek it from the great mass of the laymen. Not falsehood, but expediency.
§9.
Now this work of ours is not without its dangers. This has ever been the case. It demands much of those who engage in it. It demands immense patience, attention to detail, total mastery of mechanisms for the command and control of secular beings. One must attain a great competence in these areas; this will be the content of your training. Yet even having attained such competence the danger is not wholly eliminated. The specialisation, delegation, and systematic order of our hierarchy – of Bailiffs, Reeves, Sheriffs, High Reeves, and above all Mm. Baltmerroy, the Prefect of the Office whose limbs and organs we all members are – serves to ensure that our work is conducted in such a way that even moments of individual error or incompetence, within limits, can be readily corrected, and their adverse effects mitigated. There is less that can be done about moments of what may be termed excessive competence – that is to say, of those who take too well, as it were, to the performance of our functions, or rather than saying 'too well' we should say they undertake their tasks with a certain blinkered view, a lack of perspective. It can be that in our work we find ourselves in positions of – we shall not say power, exactly – but of great privilege borne of our technical control of secular beings. This is true whether our control is exercised indirectly or directly. Perhaps there is a notional 'spiritual leader' who we command, and whose flock we thereby command, through indirect mechanisms. Or perhaps in some cases – and this can become necessary in instances where fine control is required – we ourselves are obliged to assume, in private, the guise of these notional Masters or Teachers, and we disguise ourselves to this end. In either case it can occur, when one of us is charged with that management, confined as it were to outposts deep within the secular world, entirely remote from the esoteric society properly so-called, stubbornly for what may be years on end continuing to effect some measure of control over the useless mass of secular natives – it can occur, let us say, that one's nerves go wrong. One loses the right proportion of things. The warp and weft of the exoteric that we weave can prove so beguiling that even we ourselves may be caught up in it.
§10.
I speak now in my own capacity. I would contribute here, I would here adduce, an anecdote from my own experience. I relate to you now the unfortunate case of a man who was at one time one of our most distinguished colleagues, considered one of the 'old hands' of the North American continent, by all accounts a brilliant though difficult fellow who for and by his flaws perished in agony and ignominy. Laurent Arthur Bas was his name. Born 1926, died 1979. Third son to the sixteenth patriarch of the great family Bas, which has its roots in Brittany. You may see in that very description something adequate to the initial dimensions of the problem – and consequently the altogether nearly inevitable conclusion. For the majority of those lineages that pass as inheritance the esoteric faculty, the birth of a single child of spiritual capability is all that is required. A second child may still have some use, for instance to be married off for contingent political reasons. But a third is frequently quite purposeless or accidental. In the great families the whole organic unity of the family is so thoroughly built around the esoteric that there is only a small possibility of their exit from that unity to a life in the exoteric, that is, secular, world. The third-plus child will often have, if not exceptional, then still some spiritual capacity, and this cannot be merely tossed aside; it must like all that is esoteric be jealously guarded. A use must be found. That use is our Office, the jealous guards themselves. They are submitted to us, these children, to our school at Inver Brass – which you will soon come to know yourself – and under our direction are trained in our methods and purposes. This is suitable to our purposes as it is suitable to the families' purposes – they often find it useful to have a man in our Office who is connected by blood, as it can amply assist in certain matters – and for these reasons duly occurred in the case of young Bas in the early 1940s. He proved quite able. In 1949 he was appointed Bailiff; in 1955, Reeve Errant; in 1960 he transferred to the Annexe in Montréal; in 1964 he became a Reeve Territorial working in the main in the American state of California. I do not wish to unduly burden this narrative with irrelevant minutiae, so I shall pass over a lot of his work for us. Suffice it to say that he accomplished a great deal there in the late 1960s and 1970s, and was duly recognised for it. I myself cannot claim to have known Bas well, or indeed at all for the most of it. He was spoken of now and then when I was coming up in the 1970s, and this is how I came to be aware of him, as a name lashed to a certain reputation. A brilliant worker but difficult to work with. A perfectionist, with all that that entailed. I quote: “A gloomy character, yet not without a deep streak of arrogance.” It is not my place to speak for the veracity of these opinions of Bas, but these were these things one tended to know, for a given value of 'know', about him prior to meeting the man; these were the received ideas, and as received ideas are wont to be it is likely that they were only partially true. As I said I did not know Bas in life, not really, so I cannot comment in this regard. There is but one area of his life that I can readily comment upon, and that is its end. I alone of all the world am uniquely qualified to tell you about the death of Laurent Bas, for I was the only one to witness it.
§11.
In 1979 I was still a Reeve Errant, which is to say a Reeve who moves hither and thither, wherever the Office needs him to be, not yet granted any specific responsibilities which anchor him to a particular region. In the summer of that year I was on leave in Montréal, having returned from handling some rather tedious and unsavoury business in the Arctic which need not be described herein. I spent some idle days surveying various museums for vestiges of the pioneer fur traders, a historical stage which had somehow intrigued me since boyhood, but soon there was aught left to do there and I was very much anxious to return to London for want of a mission. I made this known, perhaps a little too loudly, and for my sins I was, near the end of my leave, summoned by the Sheriff. I knew what was coming, of course; he was not a subtle man. The post was held at that time by Brandeis, who is now deceased, and he made his quarters in a rather lightless and unfriendly building near the Old Port on the Saint-Lawrence which you may some day have the pleasure of visiting. The Sheriff called me in because he had heard, and you must think of him, Brandeis, in this liquorice-thick Danish accent, as emphasising beyond all good purpose these words, that I wanted a mission. Naturally I let that enunciation hang in the air for ten seconds or so before I leaned in on the chair and cleared my throat and said, yes, certainly sir, what have you to offer? And what he had to offer was, on the face of it, as he assumed and as I assumed then, quite a menial task, a task that would under other circumstances have been given to a Bailiff but which, in view of my, as it were, impatience, could potentially make itself available in the appropriate way. Bas, the notorious Bas, who was one of the Reeves Territorial under Montréal's purview, had failed to submit a report on some or other inquiry by the appointed date. The content of the report, in any case irrelevant to this narrative, was nothing special, really a routine sort of thing, and equally routine was Bas failing to deliver them on time. It was, as Brandeis somewhat wryly explained to me, in his own experience, far quicker and more effective to send someone out to physically wrest the document from Bas' fingers than to keep pestering him remotely until it finally did arrive. This errand, as it were, was to be my task. I did not at all resent it. After the hoarfrost and midnight sun of the high Arctic, I considered a venture south, however brief, to California in the summer quite agreeable. I changed to a new working persona, an American passport. I caught a flight to Vancouver the same day. From there I caught another; I filed aboard and slept my way down the Pacific coast to Los Angeles.
§12.
Now you must understand that by 1979 Bas' career was in something of a difficult pass. He had several times turned down promotions; had he not, he could very well have made High Reeve. But he refused for reasons of his own. He seemed to think of himself as a territorial beast, tied to that region, grounded in it, and thereby unable to part with it – or put another way, he held the region as his possession, and kept it jealously, opposing bitterly the efforts of any other to interfere with it. This stubbornness of Bas had induced tensions between him and his superiors, tensions which had mounted and at last come to a head the previous year. This is the lengthy and complicated matter of the People's Temple and the Reverend Jones. It is not necessary that I explain to you this matter in its fullest extent. It suffices to convey these points. First that this was an apparatus of capture which, though it had not been created by Bas, came to be under the influence and control of Bas to some degree, and which had various useful properties in his estimation. Second that in 1975 the High Reeves' audit of North America came to the conclusion that the apparatus was performing inefficiently and posed several unacknowledged liabilities, and they ordered Bas to dismantle it – a course of action with which he vehemently disagreed, but which he ultimately did carry out. The manner in which he carried this out, in the year 1978, was by any estimation quite dramatic and though in keeping with the letter of his instructions might in some respects have fallen short of the spirit. It was artfully done but not elegantly done, and elegance is a conceptual virtue in the eyes of our superiors. This is to say that there were allegations raised, internally, that he had deliberately engineered such a violent and suicidal end to the Jones phenomenon out of spite towards London. These allegations, curiously enough, Bas resented and opposed far, far more bitterly than he did the initial instructions of the High Reeves; in early 1979 he had submitted in his defence, putatively – he had of course not actually been accused of any misconduct at all, nothing formally articulated at any rate – a very long memorandum which later became known as the Bas Telegram. It cannot be adequately summarised here. I recommend you find it in the archives and read it yourself. It is really a marvel, beautiful peroration, in which Bas first of all defended his handling of situation in Guyana – arguing very convincingly for the logical necessity of his approach, that the apparatus of capture as it had been constituted ab initio, even long before he came to appropriate it, could only have terminated itself in this way – and secondly set out his particular vision of the particular task of our office. I remember a phrase from that part: “Insofar as the secular continuum encloses us we must appear, to its natives, in the aspect of Gods.” That kind of thing. It was thus a few months after all that that I was dispatched to see him, that I came to Los Angeles – of all places – to chase down an errant document. I had been instructed by Brandeis that I would find Bas at a private house deep in the Ojai Valley to the north of the city proper, where he, or rather one of his working personas, had resided for many years now. To the road this place presented very little picture, a concealed driveway behind a small copse up in the hills past Ojai. I approached on foot, stepped neatly through the bounded field – it naturally recognised me as a colleague of its master – and was soon at the door of the house that the notorious Bas lived in. This house, by the way, no longer stands. But it was then some kind of theoretical epitome of glass-and-concrete modernism, a thing with tubular-steel furniture and a rock garden in preference to plants. Very white, I recall. White was its dominant colour, white and grey and a slight portion of silver. I knocked at the door and no-one answered. I waited five minutes. Someone did answer, but it was not Bas. The door opened, shakily, to reveal a blonde woman with extremely dilated pupils. Evidence I would hazard of some kind of substance usage though of what I do not care to speculate. I recognised her – from the information I had been given by Brandeis – as a known associate of the working persona which owned this house. I introduced myself and asked her if Bas was in. She stared at me, as if trying to calculate how far away I was, and then huskily replied that Bas – rather, the persona's name, of course – was in Houston, he'd been in Houston for weeks now and she'd no idea when he was getting back. I asked her why Bas was in Houston. She said she had no idea. Then she closed the door.
§13.
Naturally I broke in, rendered the woman unconscious, and proceeded to look around the house. I was, strictly speaking, not after Bas himself but merely a document presumed to be in his possession. The house was luxurious in a somewhat sterile way and did not much give the impression of being occupied. There was little art here and there, bronze sculptures at the stairwell and so forth. I noticed a circular swimming pool out the back, upon the surface of which leaves were scattered, abandoned, like dead insects on a mirror. Upstairs I found a study, which seemed more promising. I neutralised its bounded field and stepped inside. It was a small but well-appointed space, and its walls were mainly covered by filing cabinets. On top of and around the cabinets were displayed photographs, nature scenes, all coastlines: rocky outcroppings and deep, turbulent waters. No indication where they were taken. Most of the filing cabinets were uninteresting in their contents – ledgers, account books, invoices, that sort of thing. One element stood out to me, though I could not discern its purpose. He had in one cabinet a set of very thick scrapbooks, of the kind used to collect newspaper clippings. In fact this was exactly what Bas had done. In those bulging volumes were meticulously assembled years of newspaper articles, mainly from California papers but some international, concerned with the American moon landings. In the later ones one flipped through and even saw photographs reproduced, the monochrome surface of the Earth's rocky satellite contrasted against pitch-black space. Men in spacesuits milling around. The Earth itself seen from a quarter of a million kilometres away. This collection, though impressive, did not seem to serve any obvious function. I replaced it in the cabinet and searched the desk. This proved more productive. I did not find the document I sought, though I checked and double-checked quite observantly, but I did find a number of other things. I found the contact details of a man named Maitland which placed him in Houston, Texas; this I thought to be perhaps useful and made a copy to take with me. In connection with this name 'Maitland' I found several written references to the phrase 'Ashram Chandra' abbreviated as Ash.Ch. in the fluid, scrawling penmanship of Bas. Finally I found typed drafts of his communications to Montréal. I found in a great stack tied up with string the full draft of the Bas Telegram, with his handwritten corrections and all. I stood there in his office for a moment, caught in the silence of dying afternoon, and I flipped idly through the draft – the final copy of which I had already read – observing how Bas, the notorious Bas, had ceaselessly revised and reworked his words until, stretched to the breaking point, they had no choice but to admit under torture precisely what he wanted them to say and nothing else. On the last page, which was empty of typescript, Bas had written in a far larger and more exaggerated hand the words “Exterminate them all!”
§14.
I woke up the woman and questioned her for a while. It was a very tiresome and elliptically-worded discourse, not because she seemed to desire to conceal any information – even had she I would have been able to compel her otherwise – but rather simply because her own understanding of the facts was in all important respects elliptical. She was a writer, I gathered. Some kind of writer. She called herself a 'Scholar of Tradition' in which one could, as it were, positively hear the capital letters, and to which only a light smile is apt response. She spoke at length, in very convoluted fashion, of Bas – or rather the name under which she knew Bas – as if he were an epochal sage, a genius, a man of brilliant and profound inspiration, et cetera. I asked her again if she knew where he was, and again she said Houston. I asked her why he was in Houston, and this time I compelled her to tell the truth. She said he was there to meet with his initiates, and that from Houston they would be all travel to a third location where they would commence upon, I quote, a 'profound working'. A working, I asked, what is a working? And she looked at me in a very condescending way, or tried to, through some kind of barbiturate haze, and said, oh, it is ritual magick, my child. I see, I said. It is the Perfection of the True Will, she said. You understand. Very much this kind of discourse. I asked her about the name Maitland, which she did not recognise. I asked her about the name Ashram Chandra, which she did. Ah, yes, she said, that is the Circle. The Circle, well, I asked her, what is the Circle? And she said that Bas was toiling in secret to beckon the Silver Spirit of the Moon, and that new Aeon of Sophia would be borne from his union with it – so on and so forth. All the compulsion to truth in the world could not have extracted from her anything more than this ceaseless, rambling prattle. Eventually I had reached a point of diminishing returns. I erased her recollection of the conversation, put her back to sleep, and left. Back to the airport I went; I found a payphone and called Brandeis. I explained the situation, such as it was. He sounded irritated but not at all surprised that Bas would be making things difficult, as it was apparently rather characteristic of him that he would be deeply involved with controlling his capture apparatuses at times when the higher-ups wanted to make contact, though – he added – it did seem excessive even for Bas that he would feel the need to go all the way to Texas to avoid them. Brandeis informed me that the report was, alas, urgently wanted in London, and if Bas had been in Houston for the last few weeks then he almost certainly had it with him there, so I would just have to go to Houston and get it from him. This blackguard, Brandeis said before he hung up, is going to make us chase him to the other end of the continent. I can just feel it.
§15.
So I flew out to Houston. The heat there was blistering, the whole urban expanse crushed under the unrelenting mass of summer luminance. I must say it almost made me pine for the Arctic. The first order of business, or rather to say the only real lead I had to go on, was finding Maitland. Having his address in my possession I rather foolishly presumed that this would be a simple task – as simple as I doubtless had assumed finding Bas would be when I first set out. This assumption was not borne out in actuality. Certainly I found the Maitland residence easily enough: an aggressively ordinary two-level suburban home done up in some latter-day synthesis of the Spanish colonial style, with no distinguishing features. The problem which presented itself was, naturally, that the Maitland paterfamilias referred to in Bas' notes, a certain Daniel Maitland, was not there. Where was he? This was a question of some interest not only to myself. My preliminary observations of the Maitland home revealed a certain irregularity, namely a pair of unmarked police vehicles parked in the driveway of the house opposite. With some effort I was able to isolate one of the police officers inside his vehicle. I entered the car, sat next to him, and again began the routine but necessary work of compelling him to answer my questions. His case was admittedly much more straightforward than that I had endured with the woman in Ojai. I asked him what their business was with the Maitland house, and he told me that he'd been posted to keep watch on the place by the FBI. I asked him why that was. He told me that the FBI was in town investigating a serious theft that had recently taken place at Maitland's employer, in which Maitland himself was the prime suspect. He had fled, destination unknown, but in view of the remote but non-zero possibility that he would return home at some point it was considered necessary to keep an eye on things. I asked him who employed Maitland, and he told me it was NASA. Johnson Space Center, just down the road.
§16.
It became necessary then to establish Maitland's connection to Bas, or rather to Bas' working personas, though I had a certain idea of it already. I was able to infiltrate the house while the daughter of the family was attending school, and thereby isolate Maitland's wife for questioning. In this way I learned many of the facts of the situation. Maitland, who trained as a geologist in the 1950s, originally hailed from the Ojai area himself and still had family living there. He had been hired out of USGS by NASA in 1966 to consult on the early unmanned lunar probes, then later sat on the committee responsible for selecting landing sites for the Apollo missions. Since 1973 he had held a senior position at JSC overseeing the storage and preservation of regolith brought back from the surface of the Moon. Despite living and working in Texas he travelled to California several times a year, staying with his family in Ojai while he spoke, consulted, or attended meetings at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. It was on one of these occasions, around 1976, that Bas made contact with him, and later with his wife, under the aspect of a notional 'Circle' – Ashram Chandra – a society, as it were, or a manner of lodge, which in a fairly woolly Eastern-influenced hermetic vein pretended to a cosmology in which the dualistic relation of Sun and Moon was understood as the fundamental substance of reality self-similar on all levels, and that by working in secret to restore the occluded 'moon-consciousness' the present Aeon, characterised by an unbalanced and unsustainable excess of 'sun-consciousness', would be brought to an end, and a new Aeon of universal wisdom, virtue, radiant compassion would arrive, et cetera. I make it sound ridiculous; it is ridiculous. But in the disclosure of it given me by Maitland's wife one could feel something of a great elaboration that had gone into it, a laughing, perverse creativity, a mind that delighted in making mazes, labyrinths of thought which captured one and did not let them go. And I realised that this was the genius of Laurent Bas at work: that behind the gloomy, neurotic, prideful figure cast by his reputation there was still something of the child at play, the child he must have once been, long ago, on the vast Atlantic-facing beaches of Brittany.
§17.
Mrs. Maitland spoke to me quite candidly about her initiation into this Circle, though she had not reached the rank her husband had, and conveyed to me with no blush in cheek that she intended to have their daughter similarly initiated when she came of age. I asked her what she thought about the crime her husband had committed, and she replied that it was in the service of a working and therefore, on the whole, a right action to take, and in any case it was a mere theft, and no-one was hurt by it. Bas – Bas' working persona – had been here a month ago, he had ordered it, and when it was done he and Maitland and a handful of select others brought over from California had left for the site where the working would be conducted. I asked her where this was; she told me, truthfully, that she did not know, because she was not sufficiently initiated, and the knowledge had rightly been kept from her so that she could not even accidentally divulge it to the police. Now, you understand, when I spoke about all this to Brandeis later on, he observed that for reasons one could readily speculate upon the aerospace sector, the rocketry sector, in California but also elsewhere, exhibited a high propensity for capture by one or another apparatus. Jack Parsons was a name he mentioned – sort of the founding father of American rocketry in the 1930s and 1940s, simultaneously wholly subsumed into the Crowley-OTO apparatus. That was under Bas' predecessors, and in a limited respect one could claim that what he had done here with Maitland and his wife was not wholly dissimilar. But it was sloppy, so sloppy. That there was a crime being investigated by secular authorities at all was demonstrative of an extreme sloppiness and shameful lack of professionalism on the part of Bas; had he been conducting this properly, according to good practice, he would have subordinated the institutions involved such that no crime would have ever been registered to exist. That was a bad sign. All the same I did need to find him. Maitland's wife was ignorant of her husband's location, but there were other things I could question besides her. I appropriated several of Maitland's possessions from his home – a belt-buckle, a shirt button, a formal sock – and contrived to begin tracing him by contagion. He had departed less than two weeks ago, so there was a good chance it would work, and it did work in the end. After an hour of experimentation I had established a firm bearing. Maitland was to the east-south-east, in the range of the low hundreds of kilometres. I informed Brandeis of this by phone, and he wasted no time in bemoaning how ridiculous this all was, that Bas was making us run all over the place for a report he could have sent in weeks ago, and that there would definitely be an official reprimand in the works. I asked if it was not more meriting reprimand that Bas had apparently been operating a capture apparatus without reporting it, to which Brandeis replied, well, yes, that was one of the things that should have been in the report. In any case it had to be retrieved, though it was at this stage looking increasingly unlikely that he had even written it. I was to consider its retrieval my aim for the time being; Brandeis would send someone else down to Houston to survey this Maitland-FBI situation and see if anything needed to be cleaned up. For me there was nothing to do but follow the vector.
§18.
In the early morning of the next day I drove over the state line into Louisiana and followed the highway as far as Lake Charles. My triangulation of Maitland had established his location about twenty miles to the south. Hereafter was a traversal through the bayou country, the brackish wetland embracing the Gulf of Mexico, through roads hemmed with tall grass baked yellow by the sun. I came to a place with tall trees, tangled vines. I came to a place where the road, at great length, terminated in the dirt path that led to the foot of a house. Now this was a construction of some antiquity, sturdy angled beams steeped in decades of sun and moisture, and though it showed some external signs of neglect it was in no way abandoned. Two cars were parked near the entrance, some days of summer leaves and bird guano resting on their surfaces. I left my own car and stepped into the heat, the mosquitoes and the scent of rot. I entered the house, scarcely cooler or less rotten. Everything in there was destroyed. Utterly ruined, corpsed, not a piece of furniture left unsplintered, as if while doing their utmost to preserve the outer facade, the shell, someone had meticulously set themselves to the task of obliterating the interior. I passed through. I stepped onto the rear verandah and looked out at what had probably once been a back garden of sorts, a space between the house and a turbid waterway some fifty metres distant. This space had been cleared and turned over to flattened dirt. There was a large sigil that had been drawn in this space, outlined in some white powdered substance that was thickly spread on the soil in lines that formed a six-pointed star by two overlapping triangles. At five of the extreme points of this star were corpses in an advanced state of decay, some days' worth of maggots having done much to hollow the guts from their blackened cadavers. One of them had been Maitland.
§19.
Now Bas was there too, of course. At the sixth and most distant point of the star he was standing, quite naked, facing away from me and carrying in his hand a .357 revolver and it seemed strongly to me then, as it were, how much of a decrepit old man he looked like. He was shorter than I had expected, limping, staggering, shifting weight from foot to foot, and he was totally white – I mean he had coloured his body, his hair, entirely, in the manner of an Indian ascetic, with a sheer-white substance, indeed – as I came to guess – the same white matter that had been used to draw the sigil on the ground. A kind of chalk or crushed stone. Utterly bone-white, all of him, and there above the soil he looked like a ghost risen – exhaled from the earth, you know. I called out to him, I said, Bas, and he turned on one foot and held out his arm aiming the gun at me. And he held it there for a moment, a few seconds, until he looked more closely, and lowered it, having, I suppose, decided against it. He repeated the name, Bas, as if it was something foreign. And he sighed then, and called out to me, asking – in a hoarse voice, not much more than a whisper – if I was after the report. He did not wait for an answer, and continued, saying that of course I must be. And he told me, with a rather vague gesture, that it was in the house, somewhere, and that I should take it and go away.
§20.
He was quite insane. This was the official conclusion, which ensued from the report I myself wrote some time afterward. He was a solipsist; that is perhaps the word. If there was any doubt of this it was laid to rest by the report I at last retrieved from him. I read it. Few did, in the end, but I did, in full, in the airport lounge later on when I was waiting for my flight back to Canada. He was, really, quite insane. Though often now I am not so sure. What was it, in the end, that happened to him? It is not altogether unlikely that he became so entranced by the apparatuses he wove that he was, ultimately, captured by them himself. That he was, as it were, an architect entombed in his own labyrinth. That the task of maintaining his working persona, of pretending to believe, became too difficult to distinguish from believing in fact, from knowing. But this too is an incomplete answer. It submits sufficient but not necessary conditions. I read his report. It was not at all what it had been intended to be, a merely routine appraisal submitted to his superiors. It had in his possession rather bloated into something vast and apologetic, self-consciousness feeding on itself. It began with a vast, disordered listing of countless wrongs, slights, insults – real or imagined – that he had endured, starting from the earliest age of his remembrance and continuing to the present. He had, he argued, endured the most wretched cognisance of himself – as one who is not only captured but knows himself to be captured. For what, he argued – what is our Office? What is our Office, our hierarchies, our schools of training, but a single vast apparatus to capture the incomplete souls made accidents of the process of reproducing the esoteric society? What is it but a great artificial snare to capture the frustration and despair of those who are unable to live in the secular world, who are born, as it were, partway initiated, yet by nature and by birth barred from ascending, from the pursuit of wisdom, from tasting the subtle fruits of gnosis? Yes, this was his lot, more painful than any of the secular. And from it – he fell quite naturally into a private reality, where the cosmology of his own invention opened the macrocosm to his knowing. He fell into it as if in a delirium, a state of fugue, and in that delirium carried along with him all the subordinates to the apparatus built around himself like the shell of a mollusc: Maitland, his wife, the rest. And he brought them at last to the culmination, the great working of their aim. And there was nothing there, a sheer hollow, a sham. It was nothing, it would never have worked. It was a pure lie. He had not even the wherewithal to fake it. And he saw at the moment of – no, the moment after climax, when in the bemused expressions of the other five at the sigil in that area of darkness in the bayou began to surface, in the aftermath, and when in seeing those expressions he saw that they saw the lie that was in him. And he could not stand it. And he killed them all, to spare himself the recognition – the recognition which could be only delayed, delayed until my own arrival, the arrival of another shard however dispersed of that esoteric society which stuck in him like a needle in the eye, which pained him in its cold, its clear, its brutal reminder that it was not for him, none of it was for him, that the path of gnosis was not for him and never was and never would be and never could be and he was, if nothing else, to remain here, cutting his hands mending the barbed-wire fence betwixt the exoteric and esoteric, for ever, until he died. And quite reasonably, in this logic, he said to himself, the minute he saw me, why not nothing instead? And he told me to go inside and go away, and didn't wait for me to go inside and go away, but rather instead quite casually took the .357 and put it in his mouth and drove a bullet through the back of his skull.
§21.
I reported all this to Brandeis later, back in the same office I had left days ago; he was chewing his pencil and thumbing through the pages of Bas' report while listening to me. At least he gave a signal that I should stop, he'd heard enough. He neatly picked up the report and put its pages in order and passed it to one side of his desk. And he shrugged, a great bear-like shrug of great shoulders, and said to me that, well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, Bas was an erratic case. He was to be removed from his position at any rate after last year; now he has saved London the trouble. A reliable man to the end. And Brandeis said to me, you know, it was a jolly good thing you managed for us up north last month. I think it's high time you were moved up to Reeve Territorial. There is a vacancy now in California, after all. What say you that I should put in a good word for you in that direction next I'm in London?
And what did I say to that? Naturally, I said to him: of course, sir, thank you very much. I'd gladly appreciate that. Naturally. That is what I said.
Just as you will one day, if you know yourself as one of our Office.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Hymn of Ragnarok
