It was around eleven, and she had consumed perhaps a little too much Piper Heidseck, when she happened to find herself standing near a small group who were listening rapt-ly to a story the strange Celine was telling. Miss Portinari wondered what this creature might be saying-he was reputedly even more cynical and materialistic than other international money-grubbers, and Miss Portinari was, at that time, the kind of conservative Catholic idealist who finds capitalists even more dreadful than socialists. She idly tuned in on his words; he was talking English, but she understood that language adequately.
" 'Son, son,'" Hagbbard recited, " 'with two beautiful women throwing themselves at you, why are you sitting alone in your room jacking off?'"
Miss Portinari blushed furiously and drank some more champagne to conceal it. She hated the man already, knowing that she would surrender her virginity to him at the earliest opportunity; of such complexities are intellectual Catholic adolescents capable.
"And the boy replied," Hagbard went on, " 'I guess you just answered your own question, Ma.' "
There was a shocked silence.
"The case is quite typical," Hagbard added blandly, obviously finished. "Professor Freud recounts even more startling family dramas."
"I don't see…" a celebrated French auto racer began, frowning. Then he smiled. "Oh," he said, "was the boy an American?"
Miss Portinari left the group perhaps a bit too hurriedly (she felt a few eyes following her) and quickly refilled her champagne glass.
A half-hour later she was standing on the veranda, trying to clear her head in the night air, when a shadow moved near her and Celine appeared amid a cloud of cigar smoke.
"The moon has a fat jaw tonight," he said in Italian. "Looks like somebody punched her in the mouth."
"Are you a poet in addition to your other accomplishments?" she asked coolly. "That sounds as if it might be American verse."
He laughed- a clear peal, like a stallion whinnying. "Quite so," he said. "I just came from Rapallo, where I was talking to America's major poet of this century. How old are you?" he asked suddenly.
"Almost sixteen," she said fumbling the words.
"Almost fifteen," he corrected ungallantly.
"If it's any affair of yours-"
"It might be," he replied easily. "I need a girl your age for something I have in mind."
"I can imagine. Something foul."
He stepped further out of the shadows and closer. "Child," he said, "are you religious?"
"I suppose you regard that as old-fashioned," she replied, imagining his mouth on her breast and thinking of paintings of Mary nursing the Infant.
"At this point in history," he said simply, "it's the only thing that isn't old-fashioned. What was your birthdate? Never mind- you must be a Virgo."
"I am," she said. (His teeth would bite her nipple, but very gently. He would know enough to do that.) "But that is superstition, not religion."
"I wish I could draw a precise line between religion, superstition, and science." He smiled. "I find that they keep running together. You are Catholic, of course?" His persistence was maddening.
"I am too proud to believe an absurdity, and therefore I am not a Protestant," she replied- immediately fearing that he would recognize the plagiarism.
"What symbol means the most to you?" he asked, with the blandness of a prosecuting attorney setting a trap.
"The cross," she said quickly. She didn't want him to know the truth.
"No." He again corrected her ungallantly. "The Sacred Heart."
Then she knew he was of Satan's party.
"I must go," she said.
"Meditate further on the Sacred Heart," he said, his eyes blazing like a hypnotist's (a cornball gimmick, he was thinking privately, but it might work). "Meditate on it deeply, child. You will find in it the essential of Catholicism - and the essential of all other religion."
"I think you are mad," she responded, leaving the veranda with undignified haste.
But two weeks later, during her morning meditation, she suddenly understood the Sacred Heart. At lunchtime she disappeared-leaving behind a note to the Mother Superior of the convent school and another note for her parents- and went in search of Hagbard. She had even more potential than he realized, and (as elsewhere recorded) within two years he abdicated in her favor. They never became lovers.*
*They were quite good friends, though, and he did fuck her occasionally.
The importance of symbols- images- as the link between word and primordial energy demonstrates the unity between magick and yoga. Both magick and yoga- we reiterate-are methods of self-programming employing synchronistically connected chains of word, image, and bio-energy.
Thus, rationalists, who are all puritans, have never considered the fact that disbelief in magick is found only in puritanical societies. The reason for this is simple: Puritans are incapable of guessing what magick is essentially all about. It can even be surely ventured that only those who have experienced true love, in the classic Albigensian or troubadour sense of that expression, are equipped to understand even the most clear-cut exposition of the mysteries.*
The eye in the triangle; for instance, is not primarily a symbol of the Christian Trinity, as the gullible assume- except insofar as the Christian Trinity is itself a visual (or verbal) elaboration on a much older meaning. Nor is this symbol representative of the Eye of Osiris or even of the Eye of Horus, as some have ventured; it is venerated, for instance, among the Cao Dai sect in Vietnam, who never heard of Osiris or Horus. The eye's meaning can be found quite simply by meditating on Tarot Trump XV, the Devil, which corresponds, on the Tree of Life, to the Hebrew letter ayin, the eye. The reader who realizes that "The Devil" is only a late rendering of the Great God Pan has already solved the mystery of the eye, and the triangle has its usual meaning. The two together are the union of Yod, the father, with He, the Mother, as in Yod-He-Vau-He, the holy unspeakable name of God. Vau, the Holy Ghost, is the result of their union, and final He is the divine ecstasy which follows. One might even venture that one who contemplates this key to the identities of Pan, the Devil, the Great Father, and the Great Mother will eventually come to a new, more complete understanding of the Christian Trinity itself, and especially of its most mysterious member, Vau, the elusive Holy Ghost.**
* This book has stated it as clearly as possible in a number of places, but some readers are still wondering what we are holding back.
** This being has more in common with the ordinary nocturnal visitor, sometimes called a "ghost," than is immediately evident to the uninitiated. Cf. the well-documented association of poltergeist disturbances with adolescents.
????
???? Left-hand PentagramRight-hand Pentagram
???? (two horns exalted)(one horn exalted)
The pentagram comes in two forms but always represents the fullest extension of the human psyche- the male human psyche in particular. The pentagram with one horn exalted is, quite naturally, associated with the right-hand path; and the two-horned pentagram with the left-hand path. (The Knights Templar, very appropriately, inscribed the head of Baphomet, the goat-headed deity who was their equivalent of Pan or the Devil, within the left-handed pentagram in such wise that each "horn" contained one of Baphomet's horns.) It is to be observed that the traditionally sinister* left-hand pentagram contains an internal pentagon with one point upward, whereas the right-hand pentagram contains an internal pentagon with one point downward; this nicely illustrates the Law of Opposites.** The pentagon in the Sacred Chao is tilted from the perpendicular so that it cannot be said to have any points directly upward or directly downward-or perhaps can be said to have 1 ? points up and 1 ? points down***- thereby illustrating the Reconciliation of Opposites. All that can be said against the method of the left-hand pentagram, without prejudice, is that this form of the sacrament is always destructive of the Holy Spirit, in a certain sense. It should be remembered that the right-hand pentagram method is also destructive in most cases, especially by those practitioners so roundly condemned in Chapter 14 of Joyce's Ulysses-and this group is certainly the majority these days. In view of the ecological crisis, it might even be wise to encourage the left-hand method and discourage the right-hand method at this time, to balance the Sacred Numbers.