"You've had it," his lawyer told him. "As an officer of the court, I can't tell you what I really think. An unethical attorney, were he here, would frankly advise you and Norma to get the hell out of the country."
But a change came over Unistat when Hubert Humphrey, the new President, withdrew all the troops from Vietnam and began granting amnesty to political prisoners. Cagliostro and Norma, in the midst of the return to liberalism, received suspended sentences for the acid, and he was not tried with the Chicago Nine for conspiring the convention riots. The IRS raided their bank account for the tax money instead of prosecuting them, and, by 1970, he was listed as one of ten top money-makers in show biz. His escapes were, the American Society of Magicians announced in an award, better than Houdini's; his habit of explaining each "miracle" after the performance only built up crowd interest for the next challenge.
BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Sput Sputnik was sleeping alone at last. Visions of dollar signs danced in his head as he dreamed of a miniature sled full of barrels of beer. She nu it, he had it, Ra Hoor cooed it, right jolly old selves, but overall there was a smell of fried onions, because of janes chains gains clanking up and down again.
Sput turned in the bed, moaning slightly, as the brains danes chains came clanking back and forth again.
And there was a Russian spy named Igor Beeforshot, and there was Minor Boulevard and Major Strasse, because every Pershing comes to Cricks, but the chains mains pains were clanking in and out again.
Hoor's looking for you, cad! It was a wide house, a mason blanc, a cozy bianca, but still there were cranes cranes cranes flapping overhead again. So he sput the roavin ovamor and
He was abruptly awake, in the dark, still hearing the chains. Something was bumping and thumping at his door, something that seemed to be dragging chains behind it.
Sput was not into the S-M scene, and everybody in the mansion knew better than to come banging at his door when he was asleep. But still the thumping and the bumping and the chain-rattling continued.
He was wide awake now, and he knew it was no dream.
Something eldritch and unholy, right out of Gothic fiction, was banging at his bedroom door.
And then, for the first time in his life, he actually heard an eerie laugh, just like in the books, and It was actually coming through the door, walking right through solid wood, a greenish oldish spectral chain-rattling Thing.
"Jesus Nelly!" Sput gasped. This sort of goings-on only happened in books, not in real life.
"Sput Sputnik," came the hollow voice (right out of an echo chamber, he thought).
"Yes?" he breathed, wondering if his hairs were standing on end, too, in orthodox fashion.
"Sput Sputnik," said the Presence, "I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."
THE EYE-ON-THE-PYRAMID
A biological breakthrough will force a new militancy, a new crusade. "Make the world safe for Immortality," will be the cry.
–segerberg, The Immortality Factor
On May 1, 1976, Cagliostro and Norma were in Mexico City on a vacation. At lunch she held up a twenty-centavo piece and said, "Isn't that the same as the design on back of the dollar?"
"It's Masonic," he said. "The Mexican and American revolutionaries were both predominantly Freemasons."
"What does it mean, anyway-an eye floating above a pyramid?"
He started to explain about the Third Eye and the pineal gland, and then noticed that she wasn't listening.
"They're waiting for you," she said in a mediumismic voice.
John Disk, in 1984, read Cagliostro's notes on the next three days very carefully:
"I refused to believe it. I put her to every possible test, whenever the voice spoke. Looking for evidence of autosuggestion and self-hypnosis, I found evidence of autosuggestion and self-hypnosis-naturally! I also found seventeen things I couldn't explain. Most central was the fact that the message, when I finally encouraged her, came in Enochian, a language which nobody understands since all we possess are the nineteen fragments received by Dee and Kelly in the seventeenth century. Yet she gave me nineteen new fragments, and translated them, and the grammar and vocabulary are consistent with the Dee-Kelly scryings. Even if she had studied the Dee and Kelly fragments (which she swears she hasn't), concocting new sentences in that unknown language would be beyond the power of any human brain or even of any known computer…"
The nineteen fragments of Enochian, translated by Norma in the same trance in which the fragments arrived, became the nineteen chapters of The Aquarian Gospel. Crane wrote in the introduction:
"It is impossible to doubt that these are the communications of a superior intelligence. If the reader is, as I am [thank God!], an atheist, the identity of that intelligence will pose severe mysteries. Is it interplanetary-or interstellar? A being leaping across Time from some more advanced future, or past [Atlantis]? Does it come from dimensions tangent to, but not identical with, our own? I propose no answer to these questions, but I am sure that this intelligence, or others like it, sent the messages which founded the great religions of the past, and that such communications are the foundation of the belief in beings called 'gods.'…"
Norma was killed in an automobile accident the day the book was published."What further proof do we need," a prominent clergyman wrote in his syndicated newspaper column, "that this foul and obscene 'revelation' comes from a source not divine, but diabolical?"
Crane's first-and only-failure to escape from a challenge box occurred one month later.
The eye operation came later that year. "I can save one," the doctor told him, "but not both."
"A blind magician is worse off than a deaf musician, and I'm not Beethoven," Crane said simply. "Do the best you can."
He retained the sight of one eye.
"Much as we are inclined to sympathize," the New York Daily News editorialized, "we do admit to a strong feeling that there is divine retribution in the tragedies befalling drug-cultist Cagliostro 'the Great.' "
The Aquarian Gospel was burned by a citizens' group in Cicero, Illinois, that week.
"These powers, whoever and whatever they are," Crane wrote-in unpublished notes which John Disk read years later, weeping- "are determined that I abandon all else and become no more than the servant who carries their message. To this end, they are taking away from me, one by one, all the things I love. Or, perhaps, I am merely in the terminal stages of a long-brewing paranoid psychosis?"
Hugh Crane celebrated his fourteenth birthday in 1938 by climbing into the bed of the family's black maid, Sophie Hage, who introduced him to Voudon.
The group in Harlem at that time actually combined elements of Voudon and Masonry. Since Voudon was already a blend of European witchcraft and African magic, and Masonry is a mixture of elements from Rosicrucian mysticism and French revolutionary free thought, there were actually four traditions involved, and the Rite of Initiation was unique. Borrowed from the third degree of Masonry, it replaced Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum with the Grand Zombi, and, since marijuana was involved, the ordeal became as real as in those days when candidates knew they would be killed if they failed.
In a dark cellar on 110th Street, the Grand Zombi demanded, "Reveal the Secret Word or I will kill you. Reveal the Secret Word and give up your quest for Truth and Power."
Hugh, repeating the formula taught him, replied, "Kill me if you must, but I will search again for Truth and Power as soon as I am reborn."