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Authors: Robert A. Wilson
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Finnegan and Faunycohen begot Heroman and Hairy Moon bigot Sir Talis and Surd Alice begott begad Roy O’Range Yellagroin and Roy O’Range Yallagroin begat the little Blowindianviolated Engine That Could.” He lapsed into nearly Russian idioms.
“Is that not a rather large thing to expect us to begin upon?” Sir John asked, hearing himself talking, waking to the morning sun.
Sitting up, he found he was still half-dreaming or talking to himself internally. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” his or somebody’s voice was saying. Shakespeare, of course:
The Tempest
. A great line, often quoted, but what did it mean when you stopped to think about it? What did
The Tempest
mean, for that matter? If Prosperois Shakespeare himself, as all the scholars claim, why is Prospero a magician rather than a poet? Why does he associate with faeries, elves, the monster Caliban and all the assembly of the occult?
And “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.” What is that line doing in
Lear
, where it has nothing to do with the plot at all? Was Shakespeare part of the Invisible College?
Sir John ate a larger breakfast than usual and took a long walk afterward, reaffirming the solidity of matter and the reality of earth, sky and trees. He did not dread being known as a Romantic, but he had no intent of becoming a damned fool.
When he returned home and sat down to read the London
Times
, he found that Stolypin, the Russian premier, had been murdered, the latest in the brutal assassinations that had made the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth seem a prelude to rising worldwide anarchy. He tried to remember his parents and his own feelings at the time of their deaths and found only a dull pain in the place where memory should be. If there was such a thing as higher wisdom or higher knowledge, Sir John felt that the human race very badly needed it. Life, to ordinary wisdom and ordinary knowledge, appeared no more than a singularly pointless and brutal jest. “Off with their heads! Off with their heads!” God seemed to be gibbering most of the time, like the Red Queen in
Alice
. Does He really kill us for His sport?
Sir John spent the next two weeks re-reading and meditating on the classic Rosicrucian pamphlets of the seventeenth century. Everything Jones had so prosaically illustrated was there: the Brother of the Invisible College of the Rosy Cross will “dress in the garb” of the country where he resides and “adapt all its customs”; although forever pledged to the Invisible College, he will manifestno overt sign to the world, except that he might heal the sick, taking no money for that service.
At the exact termination of the fortnight, Sir John received a small package in the mail from P. O. Box 718, Main Post Office, London. Inside was a small pamphlet entitled “History Lection.” Authorship was given as:
Hermetic Order of the G∴D∴
Sir John’s heart leaped; he knew that those pyramidal dots represented, in occult symbology, an order possessing the original Mason Word, admittedly lost to all other Freemasonic orders. He recalled from the anonymous
Muses Threnody
of 1648:
For we be brethren of the Rosy Cross
We have the Mason Word and second sight
Things for to come we can see aright
With trembling fingers, Sir John opened the pamphlet and began to read the secret history of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In 1875, it said, a great fire destroyed Freemasons’ Hall in London. Robert Wentworth Little—a writer whose books on Masonry were familiar to Sir John—found some long-forgotten documents, while rescuing important charters and other items of value from the flames. These mysterious papers were in a cipher unknown to Little or any other London Freemasons of the time. By dint of continuous, meticulous effort and perseverance, Little eventually solved the cipher, decoded the documents, then found himself in possession of the secrets of the Invisible
“Is that not a rather large thing to expect us to begin upon?” Sir John asked, hearing himself talking, waking to the morning sun.
Sitting up, he found he was still half-dreaming or talking to himself internally. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” his or somebody’s voice was saying. Shakespeare, of course:
The Tempest
. A great line, often quoted, but what did it mean when you stopped to think about it? What did
The Tempest
mean, for that matter? If Prosperois Shakespeare himself, as all the scholars claim, why is Prospero a magician rather than a poet? Why does he associate with faeries, elves, the monster Caliban and all the assembly of the occult?
And “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.” What is that line doing in
Lear
, where it has nothing to do with the plot at all? Was Shakespeare part of the Invisible College?
Sir John ate a larger breakfast than usual and took a long walk afterward, reaffirming the solidity of matter and the reality of earth, sky and trees. He did not dread being known as a Romantic, but he had no intent of becoming a damned fool.
When he returned home and sat down to read the London
Times
, he found that Stolypin, the Russian premier, had been murdered, the latest in the brutal assassinations that had made the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth seem a prelude to rising worldwide anarchy. He tried to remember his parents and his own feelings at the time of their deaths and found only a dull pain in the place where memory should be. If there was such a thing as higher wisdom or higher knowledge, Sir John felt that the human race very badly needed it. Life, to ordinary wisdom and ordinary knowledge, appeared no more than a singularly pointless and brutal jest. “Off with their heads! Off with their heads!” God seemed to be gibbering most of the time, like the Red Queen in
Alice
. Does He really kill us for His sport?
Sir John spent the next two weeks re-reading and meditating on the classic Rosicrucian pamphlets of the seventeenth century. Everything Jones had so prosaically illustrated was there: the Brother of the Invisible College of the Rosy Cross will “dress in the garb” of the country where he resides and “adapt all its customs”; although forever pledged to the Invisible College, he will manifestno overt sign to the world, except that he might heal the sick, taking no money for that service.
At the exact termination of the fortnight, Sir John received a small package in the mail from P. O. Box 718, Main Post Office, London. Inside was a small pamphlet entitled “History Lection.” Authorship was given as:
Hermetic Order of the G∴D∴
Sir John’s heart leaped; he knew that those pyramidal dots represented, in occult symbology, an order possessing the original Mason Word, admittedly lost to all other Freemasonic orders. He recalled from the anonymous
Muses Threnody
of 1648:
For we be brethren of the Rosy Cross
We have the Mason Word and second sight
Things for to come we can see aright
With trembling fingers, Sir John opened the pamphlet and began to read the secret history of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In 1875, it said, a great fire destroyed Freemasons’ Hall in London. Robert Wentworth Little—a writer whose books on Masonry were familiar to Sir John—found some long-forgotten documents, while rescuing important charters and other items of value from the flames. These mysterious papers were in a cipher unknown to Little or any other London Freemasons of the time. By dint of continuous, meticulous effort and perseverance, Little eventually solved the cipher, decoded the documents, then found himself in possession of the secrets of the Invisible
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