Fantastic Metropolis

And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

—John 8:32, The Bible, King James Version

Okay, first off, let us establish off the top of the bat that I went to the doctor today, and he both prescribed me a very nice drug and had them take a goodly amount of my blood for testing. Inasmuch as I have my suspicions involving a conspiracy among doctors to take human blood and use it to propagate an ancient clan of vampires who pretended to be gods in ancient Greece, I’m a little nervous, but let me tell you, all sorts of odd ideas are occurring to me right about now…

Like, for instance, World War II and its effect on the human mental landscape. Those of us who are semi-demented will remember the whole flap over the development and utilization of the Atomic Bomb as a device for creating what alchemists, qabbalists and some freaky semi-masonic orders call Primordial Matter, as well as destroying it. (In other words, since atoms are being split by the bomb, it means we have succeeded in fracturing the baseline of reality… effectively punching a hole in what is to allow what is not to become what is not… yet.) Of course, this comes from the decade that saw Aleister Crowley and his closest associates (men like Jack Whiteside Parsons) contacting what could be seen as one of John Keel’s ultraterrestrials in the desert not far from where the bomb would be first ignited in 1943 (and we must not forget how, for decades, Crowley was guided by advice granted him by Aiwass, a spirit or demiurge that he had contacted… did it lure him to the wastes?), and that’s not to mention the Philadelphia Experiment, or Himmler’s berserk quest to recreate the Teutonic Knights via breeding, sex magic, mass necromantic sacrifices of automated precision, and archaeological mummery of the highest order. The time from the rise of the Nazi Party to power till the death of Aleister Crowley is almost an orgy of strange attractions, unbelievable violence and the struggle between the life and death urges of humanity, and it never really ended. Decades of covert war followed, buoyed by the need to react to what had been an incarnation of the unthinkable.

This leads one to speculate: what makes a good magician? How does one manage to direct and assert the will in a way powerful enough to alter reality? Crowley, at least, seemed to think it required a near constant violation of taboo, a transgression of what many would consider proper behavior. Another requirement would seem to be open-mindedness… the ability to consider the unthinkable, to contemplate the unknowable and to take action when others would see no action to take. Therefore, let us consider what just might be the last magical organization founded in the 1940s.

Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

—Aleister Crowley, Liber AL vel Legis