GOLGOTHA

Or the rosy cross according to gray barker

“By the way,” he remarked in the automobile, “I take it that you do not mind giving me the Word of Rose Croix. Surprised, I exchanged the secrets of I.N.R.I. with him.“And now, Very Excellent and Perfect Prince,” he replied, “what follows is under this seal.”

Having survived my sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth crucifixions — of some nineteen I was ultimately to undergo — I ushered the surviving candidates from the Darkness of Golgotha into the Blood Red chamber where the assembled Knights and Dames awaited with varying degrees of solemnity and exhaustion.

The ceremony proceeded according to the old forms: branding, passwords, invocations, gestures heavy with borrowed antiquity and the accumulated theatrical dust of occult history. Some rites improve with age. Others merely acquire additional upholstery.

“Magick,” AC once wrote somewhere in essence if not precisely in wording, “is stored in the symbol.”

True enough perhaps, though by the third crucifixion of the evening one begins to suspect some of it is also stored in lower lumbar pain.

Those unfamiliar with quasi-symbolic crucifixion underestimate the role gravity plays in mystical aspiration. The absence of nails is small comfort after prolonged suspension. One eventually ceases contemplating divine mysteries and instead begins bargaining privately with one’s spine.

By the completion of the work my shoulders felt as though they had been redesigned by medieval engineers with a theological grudge.

Then came the Pool of Siloam.

Satirical baptism by 'stege the bapti

In practical terms, this proved to be our hosts’ backyard Jacuzzi somewhere beneath the enormous Oklahoma sky. Steam rose into the cold night air while initiates, officers, guests, and occult dignitaries drifted through the bubbling waters discussing qabalah, flying saucers, bad lodge politics, and where someone had left the ritual lance.

“Disrobe and join us, Sir,” said Dame Bierson with ceremonial gravity entirely unsuited to the surroundings, “that your blood may mingle with ours and enrich us.”

Under less surreal conditions this invitation might have produced hesitation. After four crucifixions in rapid succession it sounded perfectly reasonable.

I entered the waters gratefully. Naked came the stranger.

The juxtaposition struck me at once: moments earlier we had enacted cosmic tragedy in ritual darkness; now credulous ‘magicians’floated totally naked beneath the stars arguing about Aleister Crowley and whether chili should contain beans, but mostly whether my “holiness” rubbed off in the pool.

I reflected on my own initiation — years earlier, when I myself had stood as a candidate with my future mortal enemy, Lord Jim of Washerupupon that ole rugged cross.

This portion I shall slightly disguise — not from secrecy so much as mercy toward the living.

The initiator was laid out upon the horizontal cross in semi-symbolic suffering while the officers intoned their lines with funereal gravity. Upon his chest rested a large and impressively heavy Bible whose dimensions suggested it had originally been designed either for cathedral lecterns or frontier justice.

The symbolism, naturally, concerned the passage from one aeon to another, though the immediate practical effect appeared to involve restricting the poor man’s breathing.

At the appointed moment the initiator, in tones of ritual anguish, implored the candidate to remove this intolerable burden and replace it with the Book of the Law.

Thus the candidate — in this instance myself, younger, more solemn, and still capable of taking certain things almost entirely seriously — seized the hefty volume and cast it dramatically aside where it struck the floor with a noise somewhere between a cannon shot and a dropped suitcase full of bricks.

In its place I reverently laid Liber AL vel Legis upon his chest…only I didn't “cause LIBERAL was nowhere to be found.

As I stare into the face of Jim frantic searching sounds abound. Finally eleventy minutes later one is produced and the ceremony proceeds

Liber AL.

Liberal.

Well, more libertine, but y'all get my point, right?

Occultists cherish such puns with an affection exceeded only by English schoolboys and exhausted Freemasons.

I remember, however, that beneath the ritual seriousness there came a flicker of almost dangerous amusement. Not mockery exactly — the current running through the rite felt genuine enough — but awareness of the strange human theater through which even authentic mysteries insist upon manifesting themselves.

Gray Barker understood this better than Crowley ever did.

Crowley wished to stand upon Sinai hurling thunderbolts at posterity.

Barker sat quietly in a diner somewhere in West Virginia smiling faintly while reality unraveled itself at the edges.

One sought revelation.

The other understood that revelation often arrives wearing a cheap necktie and carrying a rubber mask.

That, perhaps, is why Barker’s world still feels inhabited while Crowley’s too often resembles a museum display maintained by anxious occult bureaucrats speaking in capital letters.

The real initiation did not occur when the book struck the floor.

Nor when Liber AL replaced it.

Nor even in the secret words exchanged afterward. Nor did the duck come down and give me a. Hundred dollars

It occurred later — in exhaustion, laughter, discomfort, absurdity, and the gradual realization that beneath all the theatrical debris something authentic had nevertheless brushed against the soul.

Something elusive.

Something slightly dangerous.

Something which, paradoxically, may require the farce in order to survive contact with the modern world. But -perhaps - better served not in the hands of “grocery clerks come to collect the bill”.

And so -flash forwarded again to Oklahoma City - the night concluded beneath the wheeling constellations of OK battered by crucifixions, purified by chlorine, and reflecting that initiation, like UFO encounters and Men in Black visitations, often hovers forever at the uncertain border between revelation and vaudeville.