Part Two of this strange document urges all truth-seekers to practice Crowleyan sex-yoga: "Concentrate all force and being in Our Lady Babalon. Light a single light on her altar, saying Flame is our Lady; flame is her hair. I am flame." Etc. [As an interesting aside here, Parsons was killed in a horrible fiery accident involving mercury fulminate in his Holy Rocket Science Lab -B:.B:.] Babalon, in Crowley's Tarot, is The Star, which Kenneth Grant says is Sirius.

Grady McMurty, an old friend of Crowley and Parsons, and currently Caliph of the Ordo Templi Orientis in the United States, has kindly placed in my hands various manuscripts of O.T.O. private publications during the 1940s. In one of them Parsons states his devotion to the shamanistic / psychedelic quest in poetic terms that might have seemed extreme even to Crowley. The poem begins:

I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
...marijuana, morphine and cocaine,
I never know sadness but only a madness
...that burns at the heart and the brain.
I see each charwoman, ecstatic, inhuman,
...angelic, demonic, divine.
Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon
...that brims with ambrosial wine.

This was printed in the February 21, 1943 issue of The Oriflamme, journal of the O.T.O., two months before Hofmann discovered LSD.

Parsons died in a laboratory accident in 1949. According to Kenneth Grant, Parsons' last year was devoted to the attempt, with a mistress, to conceive a moonchild -- an entity magickally separated from earth-influence at the instant of conception and from then on dedicated to higher, outer-space influences. (Crowley describes this operation in his novel, Moonchild. To my knowledge, it has not been successfully performed to date.)

Jack Parsons' life, midway between Crowley's and Leary's, was a testament to the faith: it is time to get off this planet. For his countless contributions to aerospace science, Parsons is honored by having a crater on the moon named after him [and certain Pasadena JPL insiders refer to their place of employment only half-jokingly as "Jack Parsons' Lab" as opposed to "Jet Propulsion Lab." -B:.B:.].

The footsteps of the Illuminati

One day, browsing in a bookstore, I came upon Gurdjieff: Making a New World, by J.G. Bennett. Guess my state of mind when I came upon the following passage:

After Gurdjieff died I was asked by some of the old pupils to write a commentary on Beelzebub. When I had written a few chapters and sent them around for comment, almost all agreed that it would be a mistake to publish them. If Gurdjieff had intended his meaning to be readily accessible to every reader, he would have written the book differently. He himself used to listen to chapters read aloud and if he found the key passages taken too easily -- and therefore almost inevitably too superficially -- he would rewrite them in order, as he put it, to "bury the dog deeper." When people corrected him and said he surely meant "bury the bone deeper," he would turn on them and say it was not "bones" but the "dog" that you have to find. The dog is Sirius the dog star, which stands for the spirit of wisdom in the Zoroastrian tradition.

Sirius again. "Coincidence," says the Skeptic, one more time. Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson, the book in question, concerns extraterrestrial Higher Intelligences who intervene repeatedly on Earth to accelerate evolution here. But, of course, that's just a story...

Or is it?

J.G. Bennett, in another book on the Gurdjieff teachings called Is There Life on Earth?, claims that Gurdjieff was initiated into a mystic society, unnamed, which began in Babylon around 4500 B.C. Grant also traces the Crowley tradition back to Egypt and Babylon around that time.

"Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence," mutters the Skeptic; but is there a growing uncertainty in his voice?

Wait. There's a lot more to come. In July 1975, I published an article about all this in Gnostica, an occult newspaper. A few weeks later, I received a letter from Edward Gardiner of the Detroit Film Collective. Mr. Gardiner wrote that he attended the Fourth International Festival of Yoga and Esoteric Sciences in Dallas. Dr. Douglas Baker, in a lecture, said that Sirius is the Ajna center of a galactic being and our sun is the Heart center. Our planetary evolution depends on raising the energy from the Heart (our sun) to the Ajna (Sirius).

Dr. Baker represents the Theosophical Society, founded by Madame H.P. Blavatsky, based on alleged transmissions from a Secret Chief named Koot Hoomi. That Gurdjieff was educated by the Sufis is now generally accepted. Crowley was directed by a Secret Chief named Aiwass. I would estimate that about 90 per cent of the occult groups in the Western world today are wholly or partially derivative from Blavatsky or Gurdjieff or Crowley, who together make up the indispensable Big Three of 20th century occultism. And now we have all three of them tied in, one way or another, with Sirius.

Of course, if shamans of any school are going to develop delusions about stars, they are likely to pick Sirius, which is the brightest star in the sky and hard to ignore. It is also in the constellation of the Dog, "man's best friend."

Nevertheless, such is the repressed gullibility of even the most hardened Skeptic, I have found myself wondering once or twice about new meanings in the ancient Zen riddle, "Does a dog have the Buddha-nature?" And, on rereading Joyce's Ulysses for the first time in several years, the Metaprogrammer was struck by the Black Mass in which the souls of all the saved chant "Gooooooooooooood" while all the souls of the damned chant "Doooooooooooooog."

This palindrome (God-Dog) also appears in The Book of the Law, remember, in the question, "Is a god to live in a dog?" My fantasy leaped and I asked myself why Joyce set Ulysses in spring 1904, the same time that Crowley was receiving The Book of the Law. (19 + 04 = 23 ... )

The same palindrome, again, appears in Chapter One of Dr. Leary's High Priest, published in 1968. The chapter is titled "Godsdog."

Coincidence? Synchronicity? Higher Intelligence?

Then Brian Hanlon, San Francisco UFOlogist, called my attention to a book called Other Tongues, Other Flesh, by George Hunt Williamson.

Williamson, an early 1950s Contactee, claims to have met some flying saucerites from Sirius. He prints vast huge chunks of their language -- the "other tongues" in his title -- and I found that a few of the words were almost identical with some words in the "angelic" language used by Dr. John Dee, Aleister Crowley and other magi of the Illuminati tradition. For instance, Williamson transcribes one of the words he received as leshtal, Crowley has "lashtal." This is more striking when we remember the two Naval officers who got "affa" (nothing) from the same "angelic" language.

Williamson also informs us that the Sirians have been in contact with Earth for "several thousand years" and that their allies here use as insignia the Eye of Horus -- the origin of the Illuminati eye-in-triangle design."

Like every other Contactee, Williamson may, of course, be suspected of hallucinating or just of being a damned liar. Even the most hard-headed skeptics, however, must be a bit puzzled if we ask a few questions at this point, such as: what are the chances of Williamson, either as a hallucinator or as a hoaxer, picking up words in the "angelic" language, known only to advanced students of Cabala? Well, maybe he could have read a bit of Cabala in his time; sure. But what are the chances, by coincidence or whatever, that two Naval Intelligence officers of high security rating should also, in a separate Contact, get a word in the same language? How could Williamson have known that Crowley was in any way connected with Sirius in 1953, when he wrote his book, since Kenneth Grant was the first to link Crowley and Sirius, in 1973? Was it only by coincidence of lucky guessing that Williamson picked the eye-in-the-triangle (used by Crowley and the Illuminati) as the alleged symbol of the secret society in contact with Sirius? Was it only another coincidence that that symbol was used by Adam Weishaupt and Thomas Jefferson? And is it another coincidence that Dr. Baker, the Theosophist, should declare Sirius "the third eye" of a cosmic being?

When Illuminatus was being written (1969-1971), I had no interest in Sirius at all and no delusions about contact with extraterrestrials. But we now find that both the number 23 and the eye-in-the-triangle motif -- the two most mysterious enigmas in that novel -- have a long history of linkage with the Illuminati-Sirius mystery. I didn't know that when working on Illuminatus -- but evidently something that is part of my mind or in communication with my mind did know it.