It was that winter that he discovered a rare book in one of the stores downtown, a worn black volume kept under glass. Its cover showed no title or author; instead it bore a thin line drawing of an Egyptian eye at the center of a triangle that radiated shafts of light. There was something about its spare design, its aura of secrecy and contraband, that made him walk around the store for a few minutes, pretending to browse, until at last he brought himself to ask the man behind the counter for a closer look.
It was called The Sephiroth, though there was no author mentioned anywhere. He found the title on the frontispiece, above three symbols and an invocation to an Egyptian god called Horus. What followed was a kind of mock sermon, written in biblical cadences, laced with odd, sometimes contemptuous asides to the reader. A good deal of its initial attraction was this anonymous voice, propounding its information through a scrim of knowing, private humor.
Thy Will Be Done! The proposition is bald, even basic — as bracing as the gusts of Flatus, or as boring as last week’s beans: Thy Will Be Done! For who shall chooseth, if not the hand that grasps? And who shall see, if not the eye that yearns? Think of one thing only, O heedful one, as ye walketh the wide way: Thy Will Be Done! For is not thy yearning like unto a column of jasper, or the rich scent of hyssop? Is it not as the darkest jewel of Hamman, or the farthest star over Nor? Nay, it is as the lust of the goat, the blood of doves, the fire in the virgin’s loins! For who shall chooseth, if not thine own hand? And how shalt thou see, if not through thine own eye?
It was not just the words but the austerity of their presentation — the book’s dilapidated binding, its ugly type, all of it reminiscent of a student dissertation. It was destined for only the smallest clique of readers, its boastful voice muted by the fact of its utter obscurity. There was a faintly intimidating allure in its symbols and diagrams, the feeling that just by looking at the figures — the pentacle, the zodiac, the tarot, the sephiroth — he was exposing himself to secrets. There was the sense that the author or authors, unnamed and so impossible to imagine, could somehow guess that he was looking at it, not only the book in general but the specific copy he held in his hands.
He bought it for twelve dollars, a fortune in 1944, when even the bus schedules bore the words “Don’t waste timetables; paper is a vital war material.” The man at the counter told him casually, almost skeptically, that the author was a drug addict and famous satanist. He knew before he’d even got it home that he had at last stumbled upon the secret door into that parallel world he had always hoped was there.
According to The Sephiroth, the world was a shifting fabric of reality and dream. There were people who without knowing it took on the attributes of certain mythological figures or gods. This could make them purposeful and bold, like Prometheus or Cain, or could render them passive and wounded, like Vulcan, the archetype of the artist. There were cold, solitary spirits like the huntress Diana, and tricksters like Hermes and Pan, and communers with the dead, like Hecate and Persephone. There were stern, paternal figures, like Shiva or the risen Christ, and there were law-abiding slaves like Mary or Job. You had little choice as to which of these spirits inhabited you personally. Indeed, most people spent their whole lives in a futile effort to become someone they were not meant to be: powerful when they were born weak, wise when they were born to take commands. All unhappiness stemmed from just this misperception: the failure to know one’s true nature or the obstinate refusal to embrace it. Your date of birth, the letters of your name, the color of your eyes, the lines on the palms of your hands — everything in the world was encrypted with the secret and conflicting information that determined the kind of life you were meant to lead.
There were a few rare souls who saw through to this pattern in things and could change it according to their wills. These people were called magi, bringers of the age of Horus, the old Egyptian sun god, who would put an end to the submissive, feminine sway of Isis and the prohibitive, masculine sway of Osiris. They were the children of Lucifer, the bringer of light, who signified the end of all opposites and dualities.
Male and female, self and other, reality and dream. At the meeting point of these opposites was a zone of energy and pain where the spirit of Lucifer burned in isolation. It was the wild chaos of orgasm, the music of war, the entranced stupor of hallucination. Only a few could even perceive this zone. To penetrate it was to negate any difference between good and evil, life and death, desire and fear.
He kept reading The Sephiroth even when he could no longer think about its words with any acuity. He kept looking at it even when he knew it was not going to give him any more Pleasure, but only fatigue and hollowness. It was something he had to keep struggling with, like his body, even when its mystery was no longer interesting but blurred and tangled and exasperating.
He had a dream one night of a mob chasing after him: the soldiers from the newsreels, the students at his high school, the cruising men on the piers, all of them chasing him down, tearing at his clothes. They forced him to the pavement and began to kick him and scratch his face. When he woke up, he was unable to recognize his bedroom for a moment. Then, as always, the pictures of gods and heroes on his walls appeared to regard him with a solemn, knowing complicity. For a moment, they were more real than he was — they were the hidden movers inside him. It was in this way that he had his first visceral understanding of what was meant by the word “magick.”
For a brief period that fall, a boy named Ted Drake had attended his school. He was a tall, hawk-nosed kid who in some misguided effort to make a place for himself would pick fights in the parking lot. Kenneth had seen him in the hall one day with a dark cut over his eye and a broken hand wrapped in bandages and tape. He wore work clothes: chinos and thin cotton shirts and black engineer’s boots. A few weeks after school had started, he stole a car and forged some checks and tried to run away from home, after which they sent him to a juvenile detention facility outside Sacramento.
According to The Sephiroth, there was a difference between the “self” and the “soul.” The self was a set of conventions, an outer garment that the soul was forced to weave out of its various encounters with the world. It was in the delinquent Ted Drake that Kenneth saw his real soul, the true essence hidden inside him. He saw that to be true to that soul — to escape the fraud of his self — he had to somehow find a way to live inside Ted Drake’s skin.
He had something like this in mind when he entered the small rotunda at Palisades Park where they housed the camera obscura, a dark box fixed with a lens that took in images of the park outside. It was a concrete room with a white table at its center. On this table, the camera projected a surprisingly sharp rendering of the palm trees and the pathways and the beach beyond its walls, an image you could rotate by means of a large metal wheel. It was the kind of place (like the pier, or certain bars downtown) that you knew about if you were someone like Kenneth.